Meritocracy and Its Critics

My mother was born in a tiny, forgotten village in Galicia, in northwestern Spain. She spent her childhood in this almost completely cutoff place, helping to tend the cattle, harvesting the crops, and attending to other farm chores. In the middle of the last century, her village had none of the facilities most cities enjoy: showers, agricultural technology, teachers or doctors, and opportunities to prosper. No doubt the villagers were happy, but there was more to the world beyond that beautiful isolated valley. No one there received any education until my grandfather, a military man who came to the village from the big city of Seville, decided to set up a school there and teach everyone to read and write and to learn the basics of primary education. When my mother was born, the village had already begun to change forever. My grandfather’s initiative changed everything.

Thanks to this initiative, both my mother and her siblings, as well as many other children of that era, received an education and later prospered in the high schools of the surrounding towns, competing on equal terms with children from urban environments. My mother went on to become a professor of psychopedagogy at the University of La Coruña, where she worked all her life until she retired. Almost everyone who left that humble village with the hope of forging a future ended up occupying important jobs and making a great leap in their standard of living.

Meritocracy—and my grandfather’s audacity and generosity—changed his academic and economic level, his place of residence, his social environment, and his aspirations in life. Another thing happened, too: My mother met my father on that journey to the city, and thus made it possible for my siblings and me to be here now.

My mother’s case is one of millions of examples of how meritocracy works as a social elevator and contributes to improving the corpus of talent and skills of society as a whole. That is, it contributes to the common good. Obviously, there will be students who will reach the minimum and others who will not. The alternative is much worse. Equalizing people downward, lowering standards, and worrying excessively about avoiding student frustration is to treat youths as immature people, undermining their push to give the best of themselves. It impoverishes them and, in the long run, impoverishes society as a whole.

The term “meritocracy” is still young. It was coined just over half a century ago, when a generalized model of hereditary aristocracy of wealth and status began to be replaced by the notion of a social elevator of self-worth and effort. The term comes from merit, and this in turn comes from the Latin meritum, that is, “due reward.”

There are a thousand ways of understanding meritocracy, and then there is that of the brilliant S.J. Perelman: “From the time I was very young I was going to be a valedictorian. I thought the Sacred Heart School was inaugurated to teach me how to pronounce ‘valedictorian’ correctly, and my father had a man wait with a gun outside my school to keep any other scholars from depriving me of my valedictoriness.” Humor often contains everything, because depending on the degree of irony with which you digest it, this quote by Perelman could reflect both the defenders of meritocracy and its detractors.

From Harvard to Yale, the publications of the great universities of the West are now full of articles against what they call “the myth of meritocracy,” claiming that it propels the evil of inequality that it was meant to combat. This criticism predates 2024. Perhaps they are belatedly theorizing something that has long been a growing practice in all areas of life where merit has a say, or else excusing their embrace of the opposite.

The educational trends in recent decades have been marked by the hegemony of poststructuralist Marxism, which considers that the differentiation caused by the meritocratic education system to be a structure of inequality. Moreover, Foucault believed that “every system of education is a political form of maintaining or modifying the adequacy of discourses, with the knowledge and powers that they imply.” Foucault is a singular thinker: He almost always says interesting things, and he is almost always wrong.

The Jewish universe, where the culture of effort in learning and high performance is strongly rooted in tradition, has numerous examples of people who prospered and created great businesses starting from the humblest of origins. The State of Israel, which has made defending itself a way of life, takes advantage of the potential of meritocracy to optimize its intelligence and military defense resources. The Talpiot program, which emerged after the surprise attack of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, is a good example. The approach, the result of learning from that traumatic experience, is simple: You may not have the largest army, but nothing prevents you from achieving technological superiority with which you can defend yourself against all kinds of enemies, even simultaneously. Talpiot’s idea was to push recruits to the limits of their capabilities in order to find the smartest, most creative young people with the best leadership and teamwork skills. Young talents are followed from elementary school, and the germ that nurtures Talpiot candidates extends to programs such as Nachshon, or the IASA boarding school for high-ability students. The fruits are there for all to see. For example, Israel’s famous Iron Dome, which has saved so many lives, was developed from a prototype designed by one of Talpiot’s outstanding students.

Talpiot does not operate alone. It collaborates with the IDF’s fabled Unit 8200, including in developing technologies. These programs are based on a system of meritocracy taken to the extreme, but they offer an interesting lesson: When someone is facing a critical problem, their immediate impulse is not to put themselves in the hands of the most diverse and egalitarian group of professionals, representing the widest range of groups formally certified as “oppressed” or “formerly oppressed” (a qualification that somehow excludes Jews), but rather in the hands of the best.

The American dream, the great cultural root of the United States, is the meritocratic dream by definition. In the academic universe, meritocracy is built on the essential premise of equal opportunity. When this proposition fails, the whole tower crumbles, giving wings to those who detest the system to ridicule “the myth of meritocracy.” However, it is the accumulation of merit, meaning proven competence, that allows students from humble backgrounds to prosper if they make an effort. When it comes to examining them, their origins, social class or economy will not be what comes under scrutiny. Rather, it will be simply their acquired knowledge and skills. We all know of cases of people who have benefited from this way of dividing students, to use poststructuralist language.

In The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits of Yale Law School argues that meritocracy, rather than democratizing American society, has served to increase inequality. In his opinion, meritocracy worked at first, in the mid 20th century, and helped to replace the hereditary aristocracy, but later, meritocrats took advantage of their position to offer their children an increasingly elitist and sophisticated education, creating ever greater inequality.

He is not the only one who sees things this way. In general, in progressive circles, the antimeritocracy view has triumphed on the pretext that only the rich can afford higher education, and thus access the best positions. Other arguments point out that meritocracy promotes failure in the lives of the unselected, or that it leaves out of the system those who have nonnormative skills that are not easily assessed.

To consider that meritocracy will produce a winner and a loser is a somewhat risky reductionism. It is fair to say that meritocracy will place everyone in the place where he or she will be able to perform best and, consequently, where he or she will be able to contribute more to the common good. “We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others,” reflects lawyer Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, “some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of men. But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.”

The politicization of the dilemma of meritocracy is typical of our times, where everything must be bathed in ideology. Today meritocracy, like the value of effort or discipline, is identified with the right, and egalitarianism with the left. However, there is no ideological basis for anyone on the left to reject meritocracy, because in fact it served to replace aristocracy.

The main drawback of Markovits’ approach, or that of Michael Young—who coined the term meritocracy more than half a century ago—is that it stumbles on its own dogmatism: It does not seek solutions that contribute to improving society, but rather gets bogged down in its own prior ideological nostrums. Yet the truth is that meritocracy, in all spheres of life, demonstrably contributes to better global development by promoting effort, efficiency, and individual excellence.

However, Europe is moving in the opposite direction. It despises excellence, and more and more countries are joining the trend of not failing or keeping a student back a year, even if that means overlooking the fact that a young person lacks the most basic rudiments in certain subjects. The aim is to do justice by being unfair: The student who fails and the one who gets an “A” are to receive the same result for their labor. Needless to say, these initiatives discourage the efforts of the best students while rewarding failure.

In the workplace, the war on meritocracy is even more advanced. Many progressive European governments have decided to impose what they consider to be equality, both in the public and private spheres, especially in matters of gender. Thus, in Europe it is customary to make it compulsory by law to have a certain percentage of women and men in public office or even on the boards of directors of private companies. This is the opposite of meritocracy and can worsen the performance of these bodies. The same is arguably true of restrictions on how many hours employees are allowed to work, and when.

A few days ago a doctor friend of mine was telling me about the dilemma of his boss in a private hospital who has four applicants for two management positions—three boys and one girl—and he has to decide on appointing the best ones as soon as possible. Two of the male doctors are incredibly bright, hardworking and work their tails off every day, and the girl and the other boy are incredibly bad at their jobs and also have no interest in working hard. The law and the company’s parity rules force you to appoint a male and a female to these important positions in the hospital, so you will inevitably be unfair to one of the two brilliant workers who will certainly end up leaving to work at another hospital, and make the organization they previously worked for worse off.

Is this equality? Is the result better for the patients at the hospital? If we widen our field of vision a little, we will see that in reality this contributes, case by case, drop by drop, to the impoverishment of the whole nation.

In school, at work, and in life we must once again vindicate meritocracy, excellence, healthy competition, and great aspirations, by understanding that the logic of individual merit is the best way to fit together the pieces of the workforce of a nation that want to prosper. And we should never be content with assuming our own mediocrity. As the Italian author Susanna Tamaro masterfully wrote in Più fuoco, più vento: “There is no such thing as mediocrity, grayness. There is only our fear. Fear of growing, fear of opening up to emotions. Fear of discovering that there is no cage around us, but only freedom, air. And if we just raise our eyes a little, the infinite space of the sky.”