How Faith in Meritocracy Undermines Meritocracy

I spent some time this morning involved in another debate at Ethics Alarms, once again arguing that it might be wrong to tell people who are struggling to find employment that their problems can only be the result of their being stupid, or lazy, or just plain not knowing how to look for a job.  Yet precisely those kinds of accusations continue to fly freely in the commentary of people who have no idea what the conditions on the ground are like for young people today.  People like Jack Marshall have no qualms about casting aspersions on the character of bright, earnest, committed, hardworking people, because as far as the accusers are concerned, if you’d done things right you would have gotten what you wanted.

It’s not as though such people – generally middle-aged and middle class – start out with the conviction that their younger and poorer targets are good for nothing, and then construct the meritocratic myth as an explanation for why.  Quite the opposite; they believe so firmly in the perfection of the system through which kids acquire training and education and employment prospects that it only allows one explanation for most people’s failure.  That’s the very problem with their view.  If you are to convince them that an unemployed law school graduate is unemployed by no fault of his own, you must first compel them to abandon their entire way of perceiving American society.

People who are currently in their forties or fifties and have attained middle class status came up through a much different reality than what is faced by young adults in the twenty-first century.  So it is with every generation.  The trends, experiences, and rules of one can’t be expected to apply to the next.  That doesn’t stop anybody from judging the present as if they were interpreting the past.

Yet obviously there are some things about the circumstances surrounding today’s graduates that are wildly different from the situation that was faced by graduates twenty or thirty years ago.  For one thing, there’s a goddamn lot more of them.  For another, they’re carrying a staggeringly higher average debt load.  Obviously, the current global economic crisis is of issue, as well.  Add to that that between then and now, the overall structure of the economy has been transformed, with the death of manufacturing industries, the consolidation of corporate ownership into fewer and fewer hands, and so forth.

Whether the United States has ever possessed a true meritocracy is up for debate, but even if it has, amidst all those changes it can’t rationally be asserted that the same merits today gain the same outcomes that they would have a generation or two prior.  In fact, most people seem to acknowledge this.  There’s little doubt that the Bachelor’s degree has been devalued by its ubiquity, and it seems like this is common knowledge.  Yet that doesn’t stop the accusations of laziness and stupidity from being thrown at unemployed graduates either.

I’ve tended to think that such accusations are just insulting and oblivious to the reality faced by many people like myself today.  But having given the perspective of people like Jack Marshall more thought today, I think it quite possible that negative attitudes towards struggling graduates are much more than that.  They may actually be indicative of a significant part of the reason why all the nation’s unemployed lawyers face so much hardship in the modern job market.

It’s worth considering with what kind of people I and other bright, yet invisible job seekers are applying.  Who is in charge of corporate human resources today if not middle-aged, middle class individuals who came up through life in a time when college degrees were rare and valuable, and the world prosperous for people who held them?  I dare say that most of these people have perspectives like that of Jack Marshall.  I’m sure that most of them believe that today’s America is a perfect meritocracy, because that’s what it was when they were kids, and as far as their concerned that ‘s all that it ever was or ever could be.

That perspective can’t be undermined by anything, no matter how many over-educated applicants come slinking to their offices in pursuit of entry level jobs outside of their chosen fields.  Based on all the anecdotal evidence I’ve come across, certainly including depressingly much of my own, these people are almost universally turned away.  I had long supposed that the reasons for this are that employers expect such people to want too much money, not take an interest in the job, and leave as soon as something better comes along.

I still see it that way, but with new and potentially meaningful nuance.  Low-level employers are probably right when they assume that NYU grads, or engineers, or lawyers who apply with them aren’t pursuing what they want.  If American society is a meritocracy, then intelligent, talented, qualified individuals who pursue what they want get what they want.  Individuals who believe this and are in a position to hire an overqualified applicant won’t accept that the application is the result of them being genuinely short on options.  Instead, they will assume that something must be wrong.

I shudder to think how many people have been shut out from gainful employment because of the reasoning that says, “With this person’s background, either he’s too unmotivated to apply for a job in his field, or his despicable character prevents him from being a good employee anywhere.”  It’s not a malicious sentiment.  Quite the contrary, it’s perfectly altruistic; it emphasizes that if the person is good he will find his way to the better job that suits him, and need never waste his time on something that he doesn’t want to do, is overqualified for, and will not make enough money doing.

On some level, I’ve always recognized that about my situation.  I’ve gotten the sense that many of the people who slip my resume soundlessly into the trash imagine that I’ll be fine, that I didn’t need their job, that the right alternative will be just around the corner if I’m willing to look for it.  It simply isn’t the case.  There are times when bright men and women have to settle for less.  There are times when talents have to be misplaced just to get oneself out of an awful situation.  You can’t recognize that if you believe that America is, always has been, and always will be a pure meritocracy.  And yet you have to recognize it if you’re in a position to help people by hiring them into just such a situation.

Young people’s fates are held now by people who cannot recognize that which they must recognize in order to handle those fates properly.  In this way, faith in meritocracy undermines meritocracy.

Mitt Romney's Delusion of Meritocracy

I always find myself inching towards a breaking point in my patience for political double-talk when I hear someone who has benefited from extraordinary material and social advantages preaching about the evils of “entitlement society” and how they undercut the meritocracy in which we are supposedly now living. And so it is with Mitt Romney’s stump speech. Much of his campaign rhetoric has sought to paint him as the ideological opposite to an Obama presidency that advances entitlement and discourages hard work and education.

You may disagree with the effectiveness of Democratic policies, but it seems asinine to fail to acknowledge that the initiatives of people like President Obama are precisely aimed at providing opportunities for work and education to all Americans. But Mitt Romney apparently identifies these efforts as aspects of “a society where government takes from some and gives to others; tries to make everybody the same.”

Nobody who isn’t a robot strives to make everybody the same. No Democrats that I know of think that is either possible or desirable. The goal is to prevent an unfair disparity in the opportunities that are available to different kinds of people from cradle to grave. And I suppose that only a person who has never been on the bottom half of that divide, or who has forgotten what it was like, would fail to understand that.

As such a person, Romney says:

“I believe in something I'll call an opportunity society, a merit society where people, based upon their education and their hard work and their risk-taking, are able to earn rewards.”

And looking closely at those words, I see a significant indication of the inability of people like Mitt Romney to so much as perceive the effects of existent inequality. I believe that virtually everybody shares the ideal of a society in which hard work and education lead a person to success and prosperity. It just happens that those of us who have put forth earnest and constant efforts, and obtained the fullest education available to us have found the reality to be far from that ideal.

Meanwhile, people who have never wanted for anything tend to believe that they were competing on a level playing field and that their own hard work and education and risk-taking provided them with the fruits that they have enjoyed throughout life. But that phrase “risk-taking” points to the cognitive dissonance implicit in believing both that personal investment is foundational and that preexisting advantages are irrelevant.

If risk-taking is part of a trifecta of personal behaviors that define an individual’s success, it requires some rather fuzzy logic to conclude that everybody has an equal shot at earning the rewards that Romney speaks of. Taking a risk for the sake of success means gambling with resources, and if you don’t have sufficient resources to start with, the prospect of taking a material risk means either venturing less for the sake of a more modest reward or pursuing the irrational course of action by putting more on the table than you can afford to pay should the risk fail.

After all, the term “risk” presupposes the possibility of failure. That’s well and good if your father was the CEO of American Motors by the time you were seven, and you therefore have the means to cover your losses. But if you were born working class, have the support only of working class people, or of no one at all, and are starting your education, career, and all else from scratch, a risk that fails can doom your life. If you’re on the bottom, you can work harder than anyone you know, and educate yourself to the utmost, but if you’re not presented with an actual opportunity to ascend, the bottom is where you stay.

Romney evidently thinks that hard work and education are not enough, and that risk-taking is the third requirement of meritocracy, and perhaps the very thing that creates those opportunities for ascent. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” they say. Fine, but what if you have nothing to venture – nothing, that is, but your hard work and education? It seems to me that the only response to such a person’s hardship that still maintains a belief in meritocracy is to fault them for either choosing not to gamble more than they own or for gambling so much and losing.

But in point of fact, I think the actual response to such people is to avoid looking down the cracks through which they’ve fallen, and to simply pretend that they never existed.