Michael Sandel vs Adrian Wooldridge on Meritocracy

hello welcome everybody to this intelligence squared online debate meritocracy do we need more or less of it there is no time to lose we're going to get stuck in straight away with your first thoughts we're going to have a vote i love a vote we're going to have a poll essentially which will ask you whether you think we need more meritocracy or less please vote for either more meritocracy or less meritocracy if you're unsure vote undecided uh and just go ahead and do that you should see that uh on your screen now a meritocracy of course can be defined as a system in which people get success or power on the back of their abilities rather than because of their money or social place it is at its heart an idea that strivers will succeed get educated and get ahead an imperfect ladder perhaps that's open to anyone that's willing to make the effort to climb it but as we're going to hear it's an idea a widely accepted idea that's beginning to face quite a lot of criticism who actually benefits from this system do some groups get unfairly blamed for their apparent failure to rise and others get to use it and to get and keep a grip on power some of the ideas we're going to be exploring and while you're voting let me explain briefly how it's all going to work in a moment or two our speakers are going to make their opening remarks then i'll be asking them some questions myself before we throw things open to you so do get those questions ready uh and at 6 55 the speakers will end the debate with short closing statements and i'll invite you all to make another vote your final vote to see if you've changed your mind and i'll announce that before we wrap up at seven so start sending in your questions you can type your question in the box at the bottom of your screen if you don't want your name mentioned click the anonymous button and then we don't need to know who you are before you press send obviously you can also tweet us and that's a good way to join in the conversation using the hashtag iq2 and in a few moments we will have the result of the first vote which you made just a moment ago and it's popped up here we are so those of you who think we need more meritocracy well there are 46 percent of you less there are 23 percent of you and the undecideds are at 31 so there is lots to play for completely unscientific but great fun uh and you should be able to see that result i think in a pie chart on your screen we've got that picture of where you stand let's now open the debate and see if that changes your mind speaking first against meritocracy we have michael sandell he's one of the world's best-known and most influential political professors and philosophers he's professor of government at harvard university his voice is probably familiar to many of us from his baby bbc baby bbc radio 4 series the global philosopher and that explores the philosophical ideas lying behind the headlines with participants from around the world and most relevant of course for this evening is of course his best-selling book the tyranny of merit what's become of the common good michael over to you thank you ritual adrian good to be with you to begin we need to distinguish two ideas that are often muddled often confused the first is the idea of merit in the sense of competence that's a good thing the second is meritocracy that's a problem if i need surgery i want a well-qualified surgeon to perform it if i'm flying in an airplane i want a well-qualified pilot in the cockpit aligning people's skills with the jobs that and social roles they perform that's it's a good thing on sensible practical grounds but that's not meritocracy meritocracy is something different meritocracy is an ethic of earning and deserving it's a system of rule based on deservingness by a system of rule i mean a way of allocating income and wealth power honor esteem the meritocratic ideal can be summed up in a simple proposition if chances are equal the winners deserve their winnings notice this is a moral claim it goes well beyond the practical proposition that it's a good thing to have well-qualified surgeons and airline pilots now this is really the heart the moral argument is really the heart of the case for meritocracy if one can be made and it arises typically in the following way by asking the question what was wrong with a feudal aristocracy a hereditary aristocracy or a class based society and there are two answers to this question the first is a practical objection hereditary aristocracies were inefficient because those who landed on top may well have been incompetent meanwhile there were many gifted talented people surfs peasants harvesting potatoes that's the practical objection the objection of inefficiency but the second objection to a class based society or an aristotle hereditary aristocracy is the moral objection it's unfair why is it unfair because people's life prospects are determined in a hereditary aristocracy by the accident of birth and when that's the case it can't really be said that those who land on top deserve their place they don't deserve their place because it's not their doing they haven't earned it they've lucked into it so that's what's wrong with a feudal or hereditary aristocracy meritocracy seems to offer a solution to this problem if careers are open to talents and if everyone has an equal chance to develop their talents then it can be said so the meritocrat argues that the winners deserve their winnings but can it be said that the winners in a meritocracy deserve their winnings no not really for two reasons first is to do with differences in upbringing family background the second is to do with talents even if everyone can attend a good school even if everyone is free to take university entrance exams still it's the case that those from supportive families are likely to do better and we see this today in most in american universities most of the students at selective colleges and universities in the united states are from affluent families very few from poor backgrounds if you look at the hundred or so most competitive universities in the united states more than 70 percent of those who attend come from the top quarter of the income scale how many from the bottom quarter 3 percent if you look at the most prestigious places the ivy league and stanford and such places there are more students from the top one percent than from families in the bottom half of the country combined put it another way if you come from a rich family in the top one percent your chances of attending an ivy league school are 77 times greater than if you come from a poor family and this is despite generous financial aid to those from poor backgrounds so this is one problem now you might say well the solution to this problem is simply more meritocracy improve educational opportunity for low-income students so they can compete on a level playing field yes by all means we should do that but that but suppose that we could suppose that we could somehow counteract it's unlikely counteract all of the advantages of family background in meritocratic competition then what then hypothetically whoever did best on objective tests standardized tests aptitude tests like the american s.a.t they would win admission but because those tests would then truly measure talent iq intellectual promise but that raises a further question because remember we're talking about moral deservingness why do the talented the gifted as defined even by the best iq test you could imagine why did they deserve the winnings that that would flow to them in a meritocratic a competitive society is there having an iq a high iq or is their ability to do well on standardized tests is that their doing or is that their good fortune there are two contingencies to do with the way talents could be rewarded first having this or that talent is not one's own doing think of a great athlete like ronaldo or lionel messi or wayne rooney having the talent great athletic talent that's a gift second the fact that these great footballers live in a society that loves football that's not their doing that too is their good luck and ronaldo lived back in the days of the renaissance they didn't care much about football they were more interested in fresco painting so these are two elements of moral contingency that undermine the idea that the talented if we could identify them somehow without any class bias that the talented deserve all the benefits that flow from the exercise their talent so here's the question it's a question for adrian a question for any defender of meritocracy what is the difference morally between the accident of birth of being born to a well-off family or in the upper class and the accident of birth involved in being born gifted or with the talents society happens to prize if someone happens to be born with a high iq are they any more deserving than someone who happens to be born into the upper class that's the question for adrian and i'm eager to hear what he has to say michael sandel thank you so much so much to think about there and to chew over and adrian you've had the gauntlet from thrown down uh at you let me introduce you uh formally to our debate and remember if you're listening at home uh you can ask your questions and do tweets using the hashtag iq2 adrian wooldridge welcome he's the political editor at the economist and author of its budget column his latest book is the aristocracy of talent how meritocracy made the modern world he's the author of 10 other books including capitalism in america co-written with alan greenspan and he's also written seven books with john nicholsweight adrian your turn thank you very much for that well let me address uh michael's question in the um interactive part of this discussion when we're talking to each other and let me start out just as michael did by laying out my general store and then we can get into more more precise questions later on um i want to just make the general case of why we need more meritocracy first what is meritocracy and why do we need more of it meritocracy is a system for allocating talent the opportunity in order to do that we need to judge people on the basis of their individual abilities rather than on the basis of their family background or their connections or their superficial polish and in order to do that we also need to provide something like a quality of opportunity universal education system which gives everybody a basic fair chance in life we need more meritocracy because meritocracy is a good thing and it's a good thing rather like exercise is a good thing rather rather than like ice cream is a good thing in other words more of it is better and it's we need more meritocracy because i think the problems of meritocracy of which there are certainly important ones can usually be solved by more meritocracy rather than less meritocracy i want to start off by arguing that meritocracy is both a precious thing and an extremely precarious thing it's a precious thing because it's a relatively late invention in human history uh it was the product of the french revolution of the american revolution of the english liberal revolution in the 19th century and before meritocracy came along people were judged according to their class backgrounds according to their status jobs were bought and sold on the open market everything was about connection patronage connection and grovelling public groveling to people what meritocracy did was to blast away that world and create a new world of individualism and in doing so it offered opportunities to people at the bottom of society or lower down society and one of the most important things to remember about meritocracy is it's a revolution from below it was first of all made by middle-class radicals like tom paine it was then taken up by feminists by female radicals who said if you're going to judge men by merits you should also judge women by merit it was taken up by the working class working-class people who wanted admission to the temple of knowledge working-class people who just wanted better opportunities and it was also taken up by um ethnic minorities african-americans like w.e.b dubois who is one of the great advocates of merit it's also a precarious thing because meritocracy is a revolt against human nature it's something that's deeply unnatural something that plato recognized at the very beginning of the discussion of meritocracy it's something human beings are pre-programmed to look after their kit and kin to try and give advantage to their children and that creates endless competition between families and what meritocracy does is to say for the benefit of everybody we've got to stop doing this and we've got to create objective rules whereby people could be judged according to common standards that's the sort of hobby and bargain that meritocracy does but that can easily easily uh be destroyed and you can easily push back against that that's what really worries me about less meritocracy is you tend not to get a bit less of it it tends to collapse like a souffle collapses um two points i really want to emphasize one is that the we have an incomplete revolution the reason we need more meritocracy is that the meritocratic revolution is incomplete um and um let me pick on um michael's uh it may seem a bit ungenerous but let me do that partly because um harvard is such a global bastion a global brand and partly because why not why not let's go let's go for let's go for this harvard gives privileged access to the children of alumni it gives privileged access to the children of faculty members it's harder to think of two more privileged groups of people on the planet it gives privileged access to people who give money to the university think of jared kushner the son-in-law of donald trump a very mediocre academic performance at school his father gives a great deal of money to harvard university and hey presto is in the university so i think somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of places are unhooked unpegged given purely on the basis of academic marriage so we haven't seen a complete revolution we've seen a revolution frustrated we need more revolution not less of it secondly and i think a more subtle point is that the revolution has been somewhat corrupted by plutocracy there's been a marriage recently of money and merit of meritocracy and plutocracy people buying better education for their children um in um private schools or moving to golden suburbs where they get very very good state schools um and a huge investment on the ti on the part of the cognitive elite in particular to preserving their position and that creates a problem i think of of the solidification of a plutocratic-meritocratic elite at the top of society but my solution to that and i think it's a real and very very important depressing problem is again more meritocracy not less meritocracy have academic selection um have a system of of searching through the entire population for lost einsteins hidden einsteins have a system of using objective tests like iq tests to find these people so that we can have upward mobility so we can stop this opportunity hoarding which is such a moral obligation at the moment um there are other terrible remnants of the answer regime particularly i think in america you know buying and selling ambassadorships the whole trump regime which brought the family and family members right back into the center of power people being given jobs because they're related to the president so again this supports my argument that meritocracy is a precarious thing and it can easily go we can easily go back into reverse we can end up in the 19th or the 18th century very very quickly two more points just to reinforce my overall argument one is economic prosperity there is an intimate relationship between meritocracy and economic respect prosperity societies that are meritocratic are more prosperous than societies that are not meritocratic and that benefits everybody it benefits the poor as well as uh as the rich it benefits us collectively it's not a question of dessert uh but a question of general of the common good uh the subtitle of michael's book public companies are more productive than private companies um open institutions are more efficient and productive than closed institutions meristocratic countries are more productive than non-meritocratic countries so singapore the world sort of leader in meritocracy is far more productive than say sri lanka which 40 years ago was equal in wealth to singapore now singapore has pulled well ahead in terms of life expectancy and wealth and that is because it's been relentlessly meritocratic and also i think you know if you look at um sweden far richer and far more dynamic than italy which is a nepa still a nepotistic society the moment and finally i'd like to point to the example of china because we're not considering this argument or just in isolation from the rest of the world just in terms of anglo-america we collectively in the west face uh a giant competitor really for the first time for a long time which is china a country which could easily become the world's leader in both in terms of hard power in terms of soft power and in terms of economic power china is massively reinforcing its meritocratic credentials it's creating a meritocratic educational system it's using meritocracy to select and promote people in the civil service um it's encouraging competition all over the place and i think this is not the right time for us in the west to be having less meritocracy to be resting on our laurels and saying well we can just undo these meritocratic things because the country that gets to define the future will be the country that is the most meritocratic the most rigorous in selecting and using human talent and i hope that is a liberal society like america or like the united states or the european union north in the chinese uh society not china i think that would be a terrible future for the world adrian thank you so much i'm bursting with questions there is so much to get into and remember you can join in do keep your questions coming type them into the box at the bottom of your screen so i'm going to begin actually adrian i'm going to ask you to address that the the question that michael posed quite directly this idea that isn't meritocracy undermined by the fact that if you're gifted you're just given talent it's got nothing to do with opportunity sure that's an absolutely fundamental question i will now answer it or address it at least um and that is that i think there are very very few people who are so gifted naturally by genetics that they don't have to work that they don't have to put in a great deal of effort you know burning the midnight oil and i you know even even the young mozart had to practice even the young beethoven had to practice so i think effort is an important part of merit um michael young who wrote wrote the book as it were a meritocracy defined uh meritocracy as i cube as effort and i think effort is something which um gives us a sort of moral claim over things that we um we we need some sort of notion of agency for um effort to make any sense and we need some notion that we're struggling against our you know probably in favor of our better selves and against our weaker selves by trying to do things now rules his answer to that question is that well your ability to work hard is also something that is genetically given i i'm not sure what evidence he has of that but i think it's very hard to think of a society which doesn't give people some sort of notion that that working hard is a good thing a morally good thing that they should be rewarded for michael sandel are you underestimating the role of of effort surely that plays into how much talent you have well effort is admirable but it's no answer to the challenge i put to adrian for a couple of reasons first if what he really wants is selection by iq test standardized tests then it's strange that he would invoke effort why not select students based on how hard they work even the even the devoted meritocrat who invokes effort which does seem to be our own doing doesn't really believe that the gold medal in the olympics should go to the athlete who works the hardest or who perspires the most even and i suspect adrian thinks the gold medal should go to the to the fastest runner regardless of how much he or she perspires and works and trains in relation uh to the second place finisher so effort is an evasion of the question and and we can see richola that it's an evasion if we take one as a small example one of the cases that adrian raised i agree with him that harvard and other universities should not give an advantage to the children of alumni and in fact at harvard if you're the child of an alumnus your chances of admission are one in three the majority still don't make it but one in three if you're not the child of an alumnus your chance of admission is about one in 25. so adrian's right about that it's unfair but suppose someone defended legis the legacy preference with exactly the argument that adrian just tried to make about effort even those who are admitted with a legacy preference work very hard the majority of children of alumni who apply don't get in so they work hard too they aren't so advantaged by the legacy preference that they they don't need to expend effort i think adrian would consider that a very weak defense of the fairness of legacy admissions saying they have to work hard too i say that that weak argument in defense of legacy admissions is a weak argument generally it's a it's an evasion with respect to the question what is the difference and i think ritual we should in fairness give adrian a chance to address this question what is the difference between the accident of birth that lands someone on top in a feudal aristocracy and the accident of birth that lands someone on top if we had a society truly governed by the fair objective iq tests that adrian wants what's the moral difference in terms of deservingness that's the question sure i mean i think the deservingness lies not in iq and it lies not in effort it doesn't lie in pure ability and it doesn't lie in the amount that you s that you sweat it lies in the combination of the two at least lies in the combination of innate ability which i think is best discovered by iq tests or other sorts of tests and basically by definition is no i agree with that sorry let me finish let me finish the other thing we don't necessarily morally deserve our innate ability but we do deserve our achievements it's the combination of iq and effort that produces achievement so half of that uh is morally deserved which is your uh which is your achievement your effort half of it is not morally morally deserved so i would say it's people who who who reach the top of the cognitive uh world you know people like harvard professors and are people who are in one sense lucky they've been born intelligent but in another sense they're morally admirable because they've devoted their lives to achievements and to mastering extremely difficult subjects which very few people can master so it's the combination of effort deserved and iq which is not deserved and i also think that it's important also to think of the common good and i think the common good is best deserved by allocating talent to opportunity and the common good is undermined if we if we don't do that michael i'll let you come back on that but i just want to also put one more point into the mix if i may that ibra makes kendi has said that standardized tests which is partly what we've been talking about uh one of the most effective racist policies ever i mean i wonder what you make of that they're sorry ritual they're the most effective that they actually are a racist essentially that they they are effective in in propagating racist agendas so that you're separating you're effectively downplaying some minorities well it is certainly true that the history of iq testing and of mental testing as a way of allocating opportunities is bound up with the history of eugenics which is in large part a racist legacy and so i myself uh uh very much dislike and am skeptical that there is a single uh quality called talent that is equivalent to cognitive ability which in turn can be tested from a young age by an iq test and i think that this is uh it's in the legacy of the people you know who used to measure the size of skulls and phrenologists to try to determine who had the greatest brain size iq tests used to allocate income and wealth and opportunity and power i think do still reflect that eugenic legacy so i am very skeptical of them but i could be wrong and adrian will will tell me why i'm wrong but if i'm wrong about that and if iq tests are accurate measures of a singular talent cognitive ability that the society needs then all the more reason uh to notice that even on adrian's theory if there is such a thing as innate cognitive ability on the basis of which opportunity and power should be distributed that is not the doing of the person who possesses it and therefore it can't be the basis of deservingness adrian let me reply to there are several points there first of all i don't believe that there is a signal single cognitive ability that should determine everything else and the positions should be allocated purely on the basis of iq tests i think there are several sorts of abilities i think there is also an important distinction between innate ability on the one hand and achievement on others on the other hand and it is this process of turning ability into achievement that confers a moral worth to uh people who might be regarded as meritocrats on the issue of the standardized tests i think and and zendi's point about standardized tests all systems of measurement can be criticized on the grounds that they privilege some groups over other groups i think it is the case that if you took um essays and performance in essays you could say some groups perform better than other groups if you say that it took um you you know teachers assessments probably one of the most subjective of all you probably find it privileges some groups over their other groups i think standardized tests are probably the least offensive when it comes to privilege privileging groups and which is why you know if you if if you look at this long history of meritocracy it's always been uh it's tended to be underprivileged groups but women in the 19th 19th 20th centuries who've appealed to standardized tests standardized examinations they said judges by the same standards as the people in privileged uh they privileged in power and we will um we will beat them as has often been the case and finally on the eugenics point uh it is true that many of the advocates early advocates of iq testing um were eugenicists it's also true that many of the early advocates of socialism were eugenicists sydney webb was a eugenicist many of the early advocates of contraception that barry stopes was a fanatical eugenicist where eugenics was a pervasive belief um in that period uh you know from the 1880s right the way through to the second world war that the contaminated intellectuals of every shape colour and size so i don't think that is a dispositive uh uh objection to it but this moral point uh which michael keeps coming back says i keep producing the same answer that turning ability into achievement is a is a moral thing which confers con converts dessert on those who are willing to put in the time to do it i want to open up to questions from the audience but one last question to you michael from me which is we've talked a lot about the problems with meritocracy but but what's the alternative is there a solution to this yes just if i could quickly add one other word about standardized tests and race in 1951 there was an applicant to boston university graduate school who scored on the standardized test below average and verbal ability they admitted him nonetheless his name was martin luther king jr one of the great orators in american history on the standardized test he was below average in verbal ability as far as alternatives to uh to meritocracy first we should recognize that we that the question is not really whether to get rid of meritocracy and to put in something else it's to begin by recognizing that if meritocracy is is a system that promotes upward mobility opportunity for those from below as adrian said in his opening statement it's not a matter of displacing it we don't have one if we look at the united states and in the uk in terms of of mobility it's very unlikely for people to rise from poor backgrounds low-income backgrounds bottom 20 percent to the top in the united states only about five percent manage that to rise from the bottom 20 percent to the top and most people only about a third even make it to the middle in the u the uk and the us are among the worst of the rich uh the developed countries in terms of uh intergenerational mobility in denmark it takes two generations for someone from a low income family to reach the average income two generations in the us and the uk it takes five generations and so i think and i'll turn to the alternatives ritual but it's not as it's not as though we have a functioning meritocracy with social mobility the most nominally meritocratic societies the u.s and the uk have less intergenerational mobility than most of the northern european countries and then japan and then canada so i think we should recognize that as for the alternatives i think there are two broad alternatives to a meritocracy uh that claims uh to reward people according to their deserving-ness in the exercise of their talents one alternative would be a a liberal free-market society that dropped the moral pretense that says the winners deserve their winnings that drops the pretense that those who land on top deserve their success and that those who struggle must deserve their fate as well one could embrace i don't favor this alternative but one could perfectly well embrace the kind of liberal market society that friedrich hayek argued for hayek argues adrian doesn't like rawls's argument against the moral arbitrariness of talents hayek we should remember made exactly the same absolutely helen that talents are arbitrary from a moral point of view and therefore he rejected high acted the meritocratic idea that those who make the most money in a free market deserve those winnings so uh one alternative ritual to answer your question would be a liberal free market society that dropped the meritocratic assumption and i i would say the meritocratic hubris associated with the idea that the winners deserve their winnings another alternative to a meritocratic society would be also to reject meritocratic hubris to reject the idea that the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor and that would be broadly speaking a social democratic society which there are many versions that considered the winnings of the winners not theirs as a matter of desert and therefore open to various forms of redistribution and public investment to provide for the dignity of work for a decent life and a greater measure of equality greater social mobility for those who didn't do well on the standardized tests so you can choose i prefer the second myself and that could be a debate for another evening i prefer the social democratic version but it's important to notice that the alternatives to a society where the rich are rich because they are assumed to be more deserving than the poor a merecratic society could be a hayekian liberal free-market society or it could be any number of versions of a social democratic society well there we go two solutions uh alternatives adrian i'm sure you'll want to come back to those but we've got loads of questions and i want to get through them so i'll try and get through them as quickly as i can and if you haven't asked a question already do type it in into the box at the bottom of your screen and uh you can click the anonymous button before you press send and you can also tweet us using the hashtag iq2 so adrian coming back to you you've kind of placed meritocracy uh in a in a political context in a in a historical context but somebody asks is meritocracy truly a universal concept or is it just an anomalous feature of weird societies western educated industrialized etc etc well the answer to that question is most definitely not um if you look at the history of meritocracy there are there are two traditions really um two very powerful traditions one is the tradition you can see come from plato in the west who argued that there's a distinction between men and women goals of silver and of bronze that we need to create a society in which philosopher kings direct society but the other developing almost at the same time is the confucian idea in china and china did much more than the west much earlier on to create an examination state which selected a mandarin elite by a very rigorous programme of examinations and national programme examinations so at the time when the west had characters like eric bloodaxe running around seizing seizing power by his bloody axe the chinese were administering examination systems so no it's definitely not a peculiarity of the western as i said the country that is doing most at the moment to advance in a meritocratic direction that is most keen on harnessing this idea for the purpose of becoming a richer and richer society is china that's an interesting uh interesting answer michael i wonder if you agree that china is using meritocracy and also um if on your key point about the talented deserving or not deserving their benefits uh our audience asks don't do you accept that some of the talented accept that deserve their benefits and if they don't then why not well on china is a meritocracy i think it's i think it's rather a stretch to see china as a meritocracy it's true as adrian says that there is a long confucian tradition that emphasizes not the kind of technocratic uh uh merit that tends to predominate in meritocracies today but a meritocracy of virtue this is the confucian tradition and it's a rich and important tradition but to infer from that tradition that somehow china is a meritocracy and we had better uh well i'm sorry to interrupt but i would not i'm not claiming that china is a meritocracy what i'm claiming is that china is harnessing a great many meritocratic tools promotion by merit um promotion by examinations very rigorous selection in education in order to project its power um it's not a meritocracy it's ruled by you know by somebody who's president for life but it is using these meritocratic mechanisms which are key in my view and i think that the data will support that to prosperous growth and that's something we should take very seriously and should be very worried about all right but but let's look at the role that examination system plays in china the gakau is the name of the university entrance exam for which uh children from the time they are very young are grilled and crammed and prepared and and china now is worried about the effects of the gaucho system of the enormous pressures and also the wasted time and resources that families devote through a life for through the adolescent years to uh preparing their children for this exam they are worried and rightly about the fact that the outcome of the cow the chinese entrance exam disproportionately favors the wealthy they are worried that only about 15 percent of the students admitted to quinoa university and other top universities come from low income or rural backgrounds they are encountering the same worries and and and objections that that we have and one of the measures they've taken which uh is connected to a question i think uh ritual we should ask adrian what he really means by more meritocracy he's emphasized more rigorous objective tests one of the measures china has taken to try to deal with the unfair advantages built in to an examination system is they have banned the private tutoring industry which is a hundred billion dollar industry globally because they think it confers unfair advantages on those who can afford it so china is struggling with the same defects of an examination driven meritocracy as we are but uh it seems to me if adrian really wants to double down on meritocracy more meritocracy can't simply be to rely more on standardized tests that's rather if if you'll forgive me weak t there are much more if you will if one wants more meritocracy the chinese example of banning these private tutoring companies could be one quite modest but for that matter one could go all the way to plato whom adrian invoked who said the only real way to to have uh to perfect a meritocracy is to abolish the family to abolish the family because precisely its families being able in unequal ways to rig the system and pass their privilege onto their kids that has made meritocracy into a kind of hereditary aristocracy so the real if if adrian wants more meritocracy would he ban expenditure on private tutors would he abolish the family and what about a 100 inheritance tax that would be a way of perfecting meritocracy by saying each generation begins anew is adrian in favor of a 100 inheritance tax and finally since adrian emphasizes intellectual capacities in iq there's a further measure what about thanks to new technology genetic engineering for cognitive enhancement to lift up those who have low iqs one of the people who made this proposal actually there is a lab in china in jensen that is trying to find the genetic basis of iq precisely to genetically engineer iq but one of the one of the people uh who suggested genetic engineering as a way to level the playing field and perfect meritocracy was the son of michael young toby young who unlike his father favors meritocracy but he recognizes he recognizes the unfairness that you can't base deservingness on iq if it's simply a matter of the and we are supposed to be listening to the um opinions of the audience but let me because you've challenged me directly let me reply to those things um i agree with you entirely that we have a huge problem of the inheritance of privilege um and we need to do something about the inheritance privilege i believe that more meritocracy is a way of doing something about the inheritance of privilege and what i mean by more meritocracy which is a way i believe that the essence of meritocracy is to break the link between your parental privilege and the and where children end up i believe in having earlier selection um because it's by intervening as early as possible that you can provide opportunities to poorer people that are equal to the opportunities of richer people i believe in making selection on the basis or as much as possible on objective tests i would almost i would also say on the genetic point that we're beginning to gather more and more uh material people like robert ployman are identifying genome-wide polygenic scores which can be used to fight to find hidden einstein's talent in underprivileged children which i think would be important i believe in terms of breaking the link between parental privilege and and and where you end up i would force public schools private schools in this country to give at least half of their places on the basis of examination rather than on the basis of whether people's parents could can pay for them so um that's not uh i would never go as far as a 100 inheritance tax but i think a redistribute welfare state with a significant inheritance act is an absolutely vital part of of uh meritocracy genetic engineering obviously is uh is an abomination but i think we have to be conscious again i keep returning to this point of china as a competitor that if china is harnessing all the tools it can of meritocracy one of those tools it may well be harnessing in the future uh or some of the tools they may will be are honestly in the future ones that we would regard as abominations so i think in order to be able to compete as well as we can with those we also use all the reasonable tools of meritocracy just to make sure that the the the unreasonable tools don't become mainstreamed i'm gonna come back to some more audience questions and adrian picking up from what you've just been saying uh someone asks do you believe that sort of level playing field even the one that you've described as opposed to perhaps uh what michael was talking about earlier do you believe that type of level playing field can ever work if not the question says pure meritocracy can't work and there has to be some other system well i i i wouldn't advocate pure meritocracy i mean i said more meritocracy is that you usually the best cure so the problems of meritocracy more meritocracy i don't want 100 meritocracy 100 inheritance i think i think all ideas could be taken to a logical absurdity but i do think they can work and let me give one example in this country which is the brampton brampton academy in east london which is a sixth form college which is an extreme is an extremely poor area of east london with many children having having subsidized school meals with many children come from ethnic backgrounds working class backgrounds which gets more children into oxbridge every year than eaton college which is taking people from the whole world so if you have academically selective schools with an academically rigorous ethos you can get those those children the best possible opportunities in order to express their abilities and i think what we need is to go down the brampton manor academy road rather than the road that laurel school in san francisco is going down or the bost or boston latin school is going down which are abolishing entrance tests and replacing entrance uh with from with um from tests with lotteries which i think will destroy those institutions of academic forcing houses and will add to this to the power of the american plutocracy more meritocracy particularly more academies more excellent grammar schools or academies or selective schools for poorer people is the way to go forward michael gary zunwa asks a question that follows very well from that which is what do you think the consequences are of having either more meritocracy or leaving meritocracy as it is what what could be the consequences of that i think the consequences of more meritocracy if one takes seriously the idea of breaking the link between parental privilege and the opportunity of children the only way really to do that is to double down uh on the meritocratic principle and ban private tutors have confiscatory inheritance taxes abolish the family and genetically engineer for iq now adrian describes genetic engineering as abomination and confiscatory inheritance taxes as absurdities but he doesn't say why i agree that these are undesirable i'm not in favor of them but he doesn't have a principled argument to show us how he can save the idea of moral deservingness for the talented because that's at the heart of the meritocratic principle that the talented our moral morally deserving he doesn't show how we can vindicate that idea without giving everyone a truly equal start now there is an alternative which is to focus less on making life a race to focus less on arming people for meritocratic competition and to focus more on the dignity of work to focus more on making life better for everyone whether they are well credentialed whether they are do well on iq tests or not and that's the political agenda that i would favor but if one rejects the idea of regarding the distribution of talents and gifts as a kind of common asset and if one insists the rich are rich because they're more deserving than the poor or would be if we could level the playing field then one has to and to be consistent take all of these radical meritocratic measures to make the playing field level enough to vindicate the principle of moral deservingness i reject that whole project so i don't favor these uh extreme measures but i think that means rethinking the role of colleges and universities as arbiters of opportunity i think it means well asking how we can make life more dignified for the people we've been calling key workers during the pandemic most of whom don't have the meritocratic credentials uh in the high high test scores i i do think michael it's slightly crazy to argue that unless you can make things perfectly fair unless you can make the playing field perfectly level then the whole project of equality of opportunity is an absurdity first of all to reassert my point i think we have a combination of iq and effort here iq genetic ability is not deserved but achievement such as your achievement is deserved because it involves hard work application and making very difficult bets i think meritocracy is a wonderful thing but it needs of course like all good principles to be balanced against other good principles and it needs to be balanced against principles such as privacy such as such as the such as families such as community uh as you're saying i don't think the world ought to be a pure calculating machine for putting people uh into positions on the basis of their iq but that should be part of what we're trying to do we have so many more questions but we're virtually out of time so what i'm gonna allow you both to do is to sum up your thoughts you've got a maximum of two minutes each um and adrian i'm gonna let you go first well i think that um that meritocracy is a revolutionary idea and has always been a revolutionary idea it's something that's come from the bottom of society and has been embraced by people who want to be given a chance like the people at the top of society it's a protein idea a self-correcting idea um it is um on the question of dessert i think we partly deserve our abilities but i don't think meritocracy is just a way of giving wealth or or privilege to the to to the people at the top it's a way of allocating talent throughout society everywhere in society and the result of that uh proper allocation is a wealthier society and a common benefit uh for everybody so and the other thing really i think the problem with less meritocracy is you can very easily slip back into uh the world that we've seen most terribly demonstrated by donald trump and his and his family meritocracy is a precious thing hard to create easy to destroy thank you very much michael sandel if i could have your final thoughts we shouldn't confuse meritocracy with the principle of equality of opportunity equality of opportunity is a good and important principle no one should be held back due to prejudice or or coming from a poor family but equality of opportunity is a remedial principle it's not an adequate principle for a just society or for a good society meritocracy is though is something else it's the idea that if chances are equal the winners deserve their winnings and it's that idea of deservingness based on talents that needs to be defended and i don't think we've heard a convincing defense of it but i think we need also a kind of moral turning because the the moral case for meritocracy is really the heart of the issue insisting that my success is something i deserve is my doing makes it hard to see myself in other people's shoes appreciating the role of luck in life though can prompt a certain humility there but for the accident of birth or the grace of god or the mystery of fate go i this spirit of humility is the civic virtue we need now it's the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart it points beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous and perhaps more generous public life michael thank you very much so now you've heard the arguments is this about enshrining a system of opportunity a universal system or is it actually just preserving this idea of deserving this it's time to make your final vote on whether we need more meritocracy or less a poll will appear for you to make that vote if you still haven't made up your mind you can say you're undecided and just to remind you when we voted at the beginning uh 46 of you thought we needed more meritocracy 23 thought you needed less meritocracy and 31 of you were undecided so uh have a little think i'm sure you there's so much there to chew on whilst we're waiting for that adrian i do want to pick up on one thing that came up in the questions that was uh referred to earlier do you think that modern meritocracy has played a role in the decline of mental health and and life satisfaction because it creates this sense of a race well i think if you go back to the world before meritocracy though it was a world of incredible frustration of people who didn't have opportunities and abilities what meritocracy does in an ideal form is to give people the ability the opportunity to express their talents so if you go to pre-meritocratic society it was a society of mute in glorious milton's it was you know thinking dude the obscure and what you you know if you look at the history of the british working class british working-class education it's a history of incredible frustration of people feeling that their abilities were not expressed not discovered and not recognized so yes we have a competitive society which puts a lot of pressure on people but the pressure of doing a lot of homework i think is is is not as as demoralizing as the pressure of having your abilities unrecognized because you didn't have any opportunity and one more for you michael do you think there is a system you proposed to alternatives a liberal free market society or more social democratic model do you think there is a system that treats people with respect for diversity and inclusion well i think that the the systems we've been discussing the the one that holds out the greatest hope for treating people with respect is a version of social democracy that is concerned not only with distributive justice which is very important but also with contributive justice making sure that everyone whatever their job whatever their social role is respected and accorded dignity and esteem for the contributions they make i think that's one of the things we've learned during the pandemic those of us with the luxury of working from home during the pandemic came to recognize how deeply we depend on workers we often overlook delivery workers warehouse workers grocery store clerks care workers these are not at the top of the meritocratic heat they are not the best credentialed best paid most honored members of our society but now we were calling them key workers essential workers and this could be the glimmer and intimation of a society that that uh shares more broadly a sense that we are all in this together and that reflects that sensibility in the way we allocate income and wealth but also recognition and esteem this has been such an interesting conversation i wish we could keep it going uh there's so much more i'd like to ask you i've got the result of the final vote so just a reminder at the beginning 46 of you thought we should have more meritocracy 23 thought we should have less meritocracy and 31 were undecided now in the final vote 42 percent of you want more meritocracy 42 of you want less meritocracy and just 16 are undecided i love these votes i know they're not scientific and we can't read too much into them but it's great to hear people responding to the debate and responding to some great ideas uh that have been put about there by adrian wooldridge and michael sandell thank you very much to both of our panelists and thank you to all of you listening at home for all those great questions uh intelligent squared is always doing interesting things i'm gonna hand you back to hannah

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 63,996

Keywords: Intelligence squared, intelligence squared debates, michael sandel, adrian wooldridge, debate, ritula shah, meritocratic society, meritocracy, does meritocracy work, meritocracy advantasges, meritocracy drawbacks, meritocracy problems, philosopher, book, meritocracy philosophy

Id: uOpdahGGoxE

Length: 62min 43sec (3763 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021