Re: IHT therapy

[Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>]

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OK. To focus on what I think are two bogus concepts, 'equality of birth' 
and 'meritocracy', let's cut away all the things that play to my side of 
the argument, the messy factors of luck and the unpredictability involved 
in most financial decisions. Let's set it that hard work and talent for 
the jobs being offered really do, in our ideal society, decide how far you 
climb and how well you do - which I take to be meritocratic?

All money is taken by the state at death, and an equal amount given to 
adults upon reaching the age of majority, to do what they want with.

As far as wealth goes, consider the values for talent and hard-work. There 
will be four types of citizen:

Some people are bad with money, and lazy, so never accumulate very much.

Some people are bad with money, but work hard, so accumulate a bit.

Some people are talented money-makers, but lazy, so make a moderate 
amount.

Some people are talented money-makers, and work hard, so accumulate a 
large amount.

Meritocracy never, ever, ever leads to equality. As a term it comes from 
'The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033' by Michael Young. It's a satire, a 
term of abuse for some very poor thinking and nasty rhetoric. The whole 
point of Young's novel was that you can value-laden the term as much as 
you want (of course everyone's for 'merit', aren't they? You'd be mad not 
to be), but you always end up just as unfairly selecting people for 
success by a set of arbitrary criteria (arrogantly defined as 'merit'). It 
used to be family, schooling and hard work that were the unfair ordering 
criteria for society. Unfair advantage + effort to realise potential = end 
position. In the ideal society above, it's talent for making money, and 
hard work. Unfair advantage + effort = end position. It's just as unfair, 
since the talent to make money is no more fairly distributed across a 
society's infants than rich families were 100 years ago.

There's a long history in politics of saying 'society ought to be ordered 
according to the quality X', where X just happens to be the quality the 
author is strongest in. Meritocracy rewards the ability to do exams, pass 
assessments, succeed in a public or private workplace. These are distinct 
traits that some people have, and many people do not. No wonder it's often 
put forward by financially-beleaguered graduates, but it isn't any fairer 
than any other artificially selected criterion. It's just selecting a 
slightly different minority to sit at the top of the tree.

To make a meritocracy *fair*, you would have to engineer equal talents for 
everyone. Otherwise those lucky enough to be born with the talents you 
test for in your exams and qualifications, or those selected for by the 
conditions in your economic market, succeed; and those unlucky enough to 
have to make do without those talents do not. It is quite arbitrary which 
of those groups you fall into, though. Everyone has some talents, but only 
some talents are called 'merit' by those setting the tests. Last time I 
checked, the ability to write policy documents got you a lot further than 
being a good fisherman. But at least fishermen don't claim some sort of 
moral superiority for their natural talents the way that meritocracy does.

Of course the natural response is 'but writing policy documents adds more 
to society', or is intrinsically more meritful. To which I would have to 
say, having read quite a lot of the damn paperwork, give me a good, 
freshly-caught fish any day of the week. We're caught in an avalanche of 
policy documents, but a good fish will feed a hungry family. I'll wrap it 
in a policy document.

So if you've bought into the testing, assessment and control of a 
'merit'-ocratic system, you have only two choices to attempt to salvage 
some sort of non-delusional fairness: let the social marketplace select 
the talents that will decide who gets a greater share of resources (our 
contemporary one values the talent for making money, looking good, being 
thin...) - which is hardly any different from simply saying 'we're a 
laissez-faire social economy', so you have to drop any pretence of 
meritocracy; or set up exams to test for all talents and artificially 
boost the returns for effort-realised talents that the market does not 
naturally value (bookishness, introspection, philosophical ability would 
all be things our current market places low values on). If you do the 
latter, you're going to have to close the borders as people with talents 
valued much higher by the markets in other countries are going to want to 
leave, or will at least stop working so hard.

Really. Being born good-looking, or having money-making talent, is just as 
unfair as being given money by your parents. They are all unearnt, unfair, 
unequal boosts to your ability to command resources in the social economy. 
You cannot have equality of birth in any system where certain abilities 
result in more resources than others (such as... er... Earth). And you 
cannot have a meritocracy - it's conceptually mendacious.

It's unpleasant, because I can see the attractions of these theories. But 
they cannot be achieved. Not even close. We need to move on to another 
idea...

Rab.


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