Speaking at Princeton, Ben Bernanke takes a look at meritocracy:

The concept of success leads me to consider so-called meritocracies and their implications. We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate–these are the folks who reap the largest rewards.

He overdoes the determinism there, to put it mildly (as he does the contribution of such “luck” to success), but the idea that there can be fairness in any “absolute sense” is not only a stretch, but sinister.

As is usual when I hear this sort of talk, Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron came to mind.

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General…

Bernanke went on to argue:

The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.

The only way?

To believe that meritocracy (even in a far more perfectly realized form) is the acme of fairness is a mistake, but its critics need to recall that old defense of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried”. Applying a similar argument to meritocracy works rather better than Bernanke’s hopelessly hesitant suggestion that it “may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives.”

In any event, the key “fairness” problem coming our way is only tangentially connected to the flaws of meritocracy. Technology is skewing—and will further skew—the distribution of income in a way that is leaving large numbers of people, including, increasingly, highly educated people, on the wrong side of the earnings divide. That may or not be “fair” but it is not a recipe for social peace.

Speaking of Vonnegut and all this, I bought his Player Piano (1952) the other day. I haven’t read it yet, but here are the opening lines:

Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts.
In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois river, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live.

Couldn’t happen here, of course.