The Rhetorical Power of Meritocracy

It's always been messaging

I’ve pared back my podcast listening a lot of late, mostly due to scheduling changes that mean I’m spending less time in the car or walking places with earbuds, but partly out of just general exhaustion with… [gestures vaguely at, you know, everything] all this. I do still make a point to catch Josh Barro’s new(-ish) Very Serious podcast, though, because I really like Barro as an interviewer, and he tends to have interesting people on as guests. These have been pretty reliable even as I’ve gotten a little tired of the format more generally.

The most recent episode features old-school blogger Tyler Cowen promoting his new book on identifying and hiring talented people (the book is Talent, co-written with Daniel Gross). This was a little more nakedly promotional than a lot of Barro’s other podcasts have been— Cowen is clearly doing the virtual book tour, because he’s popped up doing similar things in several other newsletters and podcasts I follow. I’m not sure I entirely buy what he’s selling (I definitely haven’t rushed out to buy the book), and because I’m a slightly terrible person I found his accent a little distracting, but it was more interesting than I expected going in, so good on him (and Barro).

Discussions of hiring issues tend to divide between two poles, neither of which I find all that compelling. On one side, you have very broad, statistical kinds of arguments about demographics and diversity and fairness, which tend toward the legalistic and stress the use of consistent procedures for every hire. On the other, you have a focus on picking out truly exceptional individuals for key roles as a way of maximizing productivity according to some measure or another, and thus emphasizes more flexible and tailored processes for identifying unique geniuses. Cowen is libertarian-ish, so tends toward the latter in a way that I tend to think skips too lightly over the part where you need to hire and retain a bunch of boring, reliable people to implement the plans your “creatives” dream up.

What was striking to me, though, was how effectively Cowen used the rhetoric of meritocracy, even with that focus that I found a bit off. He always cast the hiring process in terms of matching talents to jobs, so that everybody is in the place where they can do their best work. There was also an initial conversation about diversity that I thought smartly deployed the ideal of meritocracy, saying that for decades we were losing out on productivity by excluding large chunks of the population from that search for the best people through racist and sexist approaches to hiring. That’s a powerfully effective framing of his general approach, which carries through even when I think some of the emphasis is a bit off.

This was also very striking because of the contrast with ideas more common in the left-leaning world where I spend most of my time, where discussions particularly around diversity issues in selective processes like hiring and admissions seem to default to actively disparaging the whole idea of meritocracy. There’s a whole line of argument that’s founded on the idea that objective measurement of quality is simply impossible, and that all selective systems are inherently biased. Given that, the argument goes, we shouldn’t worry about whether hiring criteria are “fair” but should embrace policies that explicitly target a particular make-up of the population being selected.

I struggled to write that summary paragraph in a way that doesn’t come off as uncharitable (and honestly, I’m not sure I’ve succeeded), because I think there’s a kind of fundamental incoherence to a lot of this line. A lot of people who are eager to denounce the idea of objective measurement criteria, also tend to have very definitive ideas about who should and should not be hired or admitted that seem to suggest the existence of some fairly concrete ranking. And the most effective justification for the use of hiring preferences for particular groups fall back on the rhetoric of “fairness” in a historical sense— we need to do this to correct past injustices— in a way that again doesn’t seem terribly coherent, philosophically.

So, in the end, I keep ending up with something close to the maximally uncharitable summary of the argument, namely “All selective systems are inherently biased, so they might as well be biased in a way that I find congenial.” And it’s really remarkable how rhetorically unappealing that is, especially compared to Cowen’s rhetoric of meritocracy.

I feel like this is a relatively recent change, for values of “relatively recent” that go back a decade or two. That is, there was a time when the argument for the importance of emphasizing diversity in hiring was much closer to Cowen’s talk about the damage that comes from excluding categories of people from a search for “the best.” That many of the people who were historically excluded for reasons or racism and sexism were, in fact, better at what they did than the people who were actually hired or admitted in their place.

And, you know, I liked that line of rhetoric a whole lot better than what’s become common now, possibly because I’m a physical scientist by training and inclination, and thus tend to have more faith in the idea of measuring things. I absolutely agree that what we had in the past was not a “true” meritocracy where hiring and admissions were based only on objective criteria that identified the best of the best. Those selective systems were subject to all manner of distortions and biases both implicit and explicit, to the detriment of everyone, but particularly those (mostly women and people of color) who were the targets of those biases. I’m probably even on board with the idea that a system that’s truly without bias is impossible.

At the same time, though, the power of the idea of meritocracy (in the colloquial positive sense; I’m aware that the term originated in a satirical dystopian work that was intended to give it the opposite connotation, but sometimes language is weird) is not so much as an actual existing thing but as an aspirational ideal. It’s a lot like “democracy” in that sense— while tedious pedants pointing out that our system of government is not a true democracy are right in a technical sense, they miss the importance of it as an ideal to strive for, and the rhetorical power of that ideal.

There’s a kind of gut appeal to “we want to select the very best people” that’s really powerful. Cowen’s use of it in the frame of matching talents to jobs is particularly deft, helping to blunt a bit of the negative aspects of not being selected— you might not have been the best person for the job you didn’t get, but it holds out the hope that you will be for some other job that’s matched to your personality and skill set. Ceding that to folks on the political right(-ish) seems to me to be a real loss.

---

Having written this, I will now do the potentially unwise thing of hitting “Publish” then going on a bike ride for an hour or so. If you want to see whether this blows up in my face, here’s a button:

If you’d like to contribute to it blowing up in my face, I’ll leave the comments open: