The Virtues of Rough Meritocracy

“The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve ‘the common good,’” Rand declared. That may be true, but the support of the common good was “a secondary consequence,” she contended, a side effect of capitalism rather than a principled argument on its behalf. Instead, the “moral justification” for capitalism was that it supported a meritocratic system of just deserts.

“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him,” John Galt, Rand’s avatar, declares in the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. And yet, this member of the meritocratic elite—an inventor, entrepreneur, or visionary—gets “nothing” for his troubles except “material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time.”

Meritocracy, on this account, commends itself not because of the benefit it provides the unremarkable many but because of the rewards it confers on the outstanding few. As Rand saw it, in a just society, those who wield power, receive honor, and have access to great wealth do so for the same reason Olympians like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps stand atop the medal podium. They have provided the world a superior example of virtue and talents. Their accomplishments alone make them deserving.

This is the second argument marshaled in favor of meritocracy, the ethics of achievement. It embraces the system not because of the benefits to a broader society but out of a cold and somewhat unforgiving sense of justice together with a romantic affinity for grand achievement.

Institutionalizing meritocracy

Whether you embrace meritocracy chiefly for utilitarian reasons or because you are enamored with an ethics of achievement, you are left with the question of how, exactly, to institutionalize it.

This is no small matter. To say that excellence is a virtue or that it should be cultivated or even that it should be rewarded when shown in competition is all fairly banal. More importantly, any of these beliefs may be maintained without any endorsement of meritocracy, which is divisive and consequential not because it embraces the notion of merit but because it is a radical social theory. For the meritocratic impulse to be meaningfully implemented, one must be prepared to overturn social hierarchies, threaten tradition, transform culture, reorient education, and fundamentally revolutionize institutional decision-making across society.

Over the past 250 years, so much of the story of the US can be understood as an ongoing effort to embrace and implement this radical theory. In the view of Jefferson, Adams, and other members of the founding generation, the American colonists had left behind a caste system in Europe, a crumbling, feudal world where all individuals were not free and equal to compete for honors, prizes, and preferment. These were reserved for what Jefferson termed an “artificial aristocracy,” a group of people who held sway not because of talent and virtue but birthright and inherited wealth.

Importantly, at the nation’s founding, nearly 700,000 people were held in bondage, and women were excluded from democratic decision-making, so the first few decades of the American experiment were hardly a meritocratic utopia. Since then, the competition for honors, prizes, and preferment has dramatically expanded to include these groups as well as immigrants from all over the world, and among the consequences of this process has been a heightening of meritocratic competition.

This development is not without controversy, especially for those who were already part of the contest. This is not only because the more people who enter any contest, the more intense the competition, but also because groups are most often excluded not for reasons of mere caprice but because of deep cultural assumptions about who has the right to compete. A true meritocratic competition assumes a baseline spirit of social equality. Whatever differences there may be in religion, ethnicity, sex, color, nationality, or birth, none of them requires either exclusion or advantage. The aim is simple: to select and elevate “the best.”

But merely allowing everyone to compete for honors, prizes, and preferment does not alone a thriving meritocracy make. Humans do not enter the world with their capabilities and skills finely honed for reaching the heights of individual achievement, and one of the familiar crucibles of adolescence is figuring out what contests to commit to. Becoming chief justice of the US Supreme Court, a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi, or a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes all involve displays of excellence, but they also require cultivating exceedingly different skill sets.

That is where the work of implementing a meritocratic system comes in, a commitment that is even more radical than the social equality assumed by open access to all types of competition.

To establish a well-functioning meritocracy, it is necessary to build a society that selects and trains for excellence, one that is not only willing to abide by status funnels but tends to be obsessed with them. Jefferson anticipated both elements when he described in his letter to Adams a system of public education that would ensure that “worth and genius” were “sought out from every condition of life.”

The program would start by providing youth with “a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic” to serve as a kind of universal basic training, and once a cohort of young boys passed through it, the best among them would be chosen according to an annual selection to advance to a district school. There, they would receive advanced training at what would effectively be a high-school level before the funnel would narrow again with a final round of selection, wherein the “most promising subjects” would be chosen to receive a university education.

Though he failed to convince the Virginia legislature, for Jefferson, this vision of education embraced a meritocratic process by which a nation built its very own “natural aristocracy.” It would require institutionalizing a repeated pattern of training and selection among the citizenry that over time would establish a hierarchy of the talented, one that would determine who was best equipped to lead and who was better off learning to follow.

Now, unless you are a committed egalitarian, such a system doesn’t seem entirely objectionable. So much of the business of community life is figuring out what to do with scarce resources. Everyone wants to pull the string of the best bow available, but if you spend too much time passing it around, the tribe will go hungry, and you’ll waste a lot of arrows.

No, a system of training and selection is not in itself problematic, but the manner and degree of its precision, the scope to which it is applied, and the rewards that amplify its effectiveness can all raise significant moral concerns.

We don’t live in a world where we are subject to the kind of rudimentary meritocratic system Thomas Jefferson envisioned. Across our education and into our work lives, we are constantly subjected to social, psychological, and intellectual races that test and sort us. These fierce competitions make extravagant demands of competitors, and in order to ensure the commitment and sacrifice necessary to achieve the most impressive results, the prizes for winners have grown increasingly outrageous. To persuade competitors to disdain the comforts of leisure, culture, and friendship in favor of an unending commitment to competition, it’s necessary to promise them prizes that entirely warp their behavior. They must be made to feel like kings if they reach the pinnacle of their profession, and fools otherwise.

And to what end? Why orient a society around an iron logic that can increasingly seem—socially, psychologically, and materially—like a winner-take-all dystopia?

This is what is most often lost in controversies over meritocracy. The debate is not whether there should be any meritocratic sorting at all. It is about the degree to which that logic should shape society and whether the pursuit of other values, such as tradition, solidarity, or compassion, should take precedence over its further refinement.

Indeed, unless you embrace meritocracy as Ayn Rand does, as a system that provides us with the greatest opportunity to gawk at human achievement, what commends it are the benefits the system provides the broader society. And at least in the US, it seems to me that the danger today comes not from too little meritocracy—but from far too much.

Rough meritocracy

That is why, rather than strict meritocracy, I believe rough meritocracy will do.

Let me try to explain what I mean by rough meritocracy by way of an illustration that takes us back to Jefferson’s vision of a meritocratic educational system.

By any estimate, since World War II, American universities have become far more meritocratic in their admissions standards. The influx of working-class students thanks to the GI Bill, sustained desegregation efforts, the extraordinary growth of women pursuing advanced degrees, and a red carpet welcome to international students have all expanded the applicant pool.

And then, in 1983, U.S. News and World Report began publishing its annual Best Colleges rankings, followed shortly thereafter by similar rankings for law, medicine, and other graduate programs. For more than 40 years now, these lists have provided a somewhat insidious scorecard, one that gives 18-year-olds an opportunity to judge their success in a selection process that implies a forward bet on the relative significance of their contributions to society.

Importantly, this scorecard was available to everyone. Employers, graduate programs, anxious parents, and students could all review it, providing new opportunities for pride and shame. Resources were marshaled on the front end to gain entry to the top schools (welcome the six-figure admissions consultant) and, on the back end, to recruit the “best” college seniors (welcome the six-figure signing bonus).

And to what end? Is society better off by Harvard’s admissions rate going from 15 percent in the 1980s to 3.5 percent today? Perhaps the resources of the university are being put to better use, although that assumes the selection mechanism is well designed and reliable. It is fairly easy to judge the winner of a footrace, but when the formula for admissions includes ambiguous qualities such as “personal character” and “capacity for leadership,” how much confidence can we have that those who are chosen are more deserving than merely lucky?

Think of it this way. If you take the 100 best applicants who fell just short of admissions at a place like Harvard and compare them with the 100 who just barely made the cut, would the difference be discernible? What about the unfortunate 100 versus the average admitted student? As someone who was once in the latter category, you can count me skeptical.

Moreover, if we were to further tighten the screws of this selection process, does anyone really think the world would be improved by it? The system already encourages young people to abandon the honeycomb of childhood for the salt mines of SAT prep, and there are only so many hours in a day when you can’t sleep.

No, in respect to admissions at elite universities, I think rough meritocracy will do. Rather than spend more time, money, and resources attempting to further sharpen the blade of an already cutthroat process, there is something to be said for blunting it. How might you do so? If, say, the top 25 universities got together, determined the top 10 percent of their applicants, and randomly distributed them, the resources of any institution would still be devoted to a remarkably well qualified group of young people. We would gain the overwhelming majority of the benefits to society from selective admissions without so much of the cruelty and nonsense that comes with all of the efforts to achieve a strict meritocracy and the incentive systems that attend them.

The Ayn Rands of the world would shake their heads in dismay, but let them. Ultimately, there is nothing to be admired in any individual or nation that struggles so hard to be great that it fails to be good in the process.

John Paul Rollert is adjunct associate professor of behavioral science at Chicago Booth.