Thammasat University students are cordially invited to participate in a free online public lecture about The Aristocracy of Talent: how meritocracy made the modern world.
The event will be held on Thursday, 14 October starting at 7pm Bangkok time.
It is hosted by the London School of Economics (LSE) Department of Government and the LSE School of Public Policy.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes many books about different aspects of meritocracy.
Meritocracy is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are given to individuals on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class.
Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examinations or demonstrated achievement.
The speaker will be Dr. Adrian Wooldridge, a journalist who earned a doctorate in history from Oxford University.
The TU Library owns books coauthored by Dr. Woolridge.
The chair for the event will be Professor Andrés Velasco, a Chilean economist who is currently the Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy. The TU Library also owns books coauthored by Professor Velasco.
The event announcement explains:
Meritocracy: the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their status at birth. For much of history this was a revolutionary thought, but by the end of the twentieth century it had become the world’s ruling ideology. How did this happen, and why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left?
Join us for this talk by Adrian Wooldridge about his latest book, in which he traces the history of meritocracy forged by the politicians and officials who introduced the revolutionary principle of open competition, the psychologists who devised methods for measuring natural mental abilities and the educationalists who built ladders of educational opportunity. He looks outside western cultures and shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocractic system. Wooldridge also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we should call for its renewal.
TU students may access Dr. Woolridge’s latest book, The Aristocracy of Talent: how meritocracy made the modern world, through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
The flaws in the system of meritocracy have become widely analyzed in recent years. In Singapore, for example, meritocracy is seen as one of the official guiding principles for domestic public policy formulation, placing emphasis on academic credentials as objective measures of merit.
But under this system, an elite class is being created from a narrow segment of the population. Singapore has a growing level of tutoring for children, and top tutors are often paid better than school teachers.
People from lower income families do not have the same advantages as those from privileged upbringings, so the meritocracy system is weighted in the favor of those who already enjoy wealth.
Meritocracy has been accused of sustaining an unfair and unequal social system.
People who benefit the most from meritocracy and are rewarded for supposedy having merit may have enjoyed unfair advantages from the start.
A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you
Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life—money, power, jobs, university admission—should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.
Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.
Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.
This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck (2016), the US economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.
According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad…
Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour. The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)