Judges have to decide whether a legal argument has merit. If it does not, they should reject it. However, one argument may have more merit than another because it better meets the protocols underlying the juristic process.
Amartya Sen, obviously, doesn't get this. He wrote a paper titled Merit & Justice to show he understood neither concept.
He begins portentously enough
Justitia and Justitium
Sen says rules based Justice is the latter and his own consequentialist Justice is the former. But, in Latin, the first word is Justice personified and the second word is an interregnum when no one holds sovereign power, or else a time of National Emergency when the usual laws are suspended. The origin of the word lay in the period when the Court was not in session.
However, the Law still operates when the Judges are on holiday. When they get back to work they will punish infractions. On the other hand, during an 'interregunum' or 'Justitium', the Laws may be suspended. Consider Ukraine. Nobody will be punished for seizing a gun and shooting the invaders or trespassing on private property so as to attack the enemy. The usual laws don't apply. But, once the Ukrainians have prevailed, the country will probably punish wrong-doing more effectively than ever before.
Sen's fundamental mistake is to think that when people speak of 'Social Justice', they are referring to something which would be implemented by Judges rather than Politicians. But, Justice is not Policy. Executive policy is what leads to actions which in turn have consequences. Judges may prevent some actions or enjoin others on the basis of the Law- i.e. pre-existing rules. If Judges take over the running of the country then and only then could Judgments be 'consequentialist'. But, here the Judiciary has usurped the Executive function. In all but name, the Judges are dictators.
I have been asked to write on “Justice in Meritocratic Environments.” The idea of meritocracy may have many virtues, but clarity is not one of them.
Nonsense! Meritocracy means the most meritorious run things. This depends only on what we mean by merit but, it is obvious that the thing can't be inherited. It is some skill, talent, or trait which one possesses to an exceptional degree.
The lack of clarity may relate to the fact, as I shall presently argue, that the concept of “merit” is deeply contingent on our views of a good society.
No. Merit does not mean the same thing as good. Good people may lack merit. We could certainly choose people we think are good- granny, Santa Claus, the brain damaged guy who is always cheerful and sweet- to run things. Alternatively, we could get in guys with high I.Q and a track record of probity and excellent decision making. But they may not be as good and sweet as the retarded guy. For example, they may be doing sex. Sex is nasty. Good people don't do it.
Indeed, the notion of merit is fundamentally derivative, and thus cannot but be qualified and contingent.
No. Merit is observable. Nothing observable is more or less contingent than anything else. What is important is that merit is independent of being good or anything else the cretin, Sen, might mention. He should know this. College's publish a 'merit list'. The kids on the merit list may not be the cutest or the most popular or the best connected. Merit is an' independent variable' and has some objective or observable aspect.
There is some elementary tension between (1) the inclination to see merit in fixed and absolute terms, and (2) the ultimately instrumental character of merit—its dependence on the concept of “the good” in the relevant society.
There is no inclination to see merit in fixed or absolute terms. It is not the case that kids are put on the 'merit list' because of a 'merit measurement' similar to a measurement of height. I.Q may matter, application may matter, other genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors may matter. But then again they may not.
Long term, our notion of what merit is might change and thus we might say the notion is 'instrumental'. But so is everything else. Short term, merit is an independent variable. Depending on prevailing circumstances, we might ignore it or emphasize it. Thus, if I want to do business in a corrupt country, I choose a local partner who is a close relative of the Dictator. I don't choose a meritorious dissident. However, in a highly competitive 'open market', I may need to buddy up with the smartest people.
A society may pretend to have a concept of the good, but none do in practice. There are different conceptions of the good. Young peeps think it is good to have sex. Old peeps think its good to go to Church.
This basic contrast is made more intense by the tendency, in practice, to characterize “merit” in inflexible forms reflecting values and priorities of the past, often in sharp conflict with conceptions that would be needed for seeing merit in the context of contemporary objectives and concerns.
This isn't really a big problem. For any given purpose we can screen out useful from useless 'merit'. Anyway, it is only some senile pedagogues who talk of merit and justice.
Some of the major difficulties with “meritocracy” arise, I would argue, from this internal conflict within the concept of “merit” itself.
No. What is repugnant is the notion that some should rule over others by reason of some quality they possess to a greater degree. Aristocracy is repugnant because being related to the King or the Duke is what matters. Oligarchy is repugnant because the rich are treated as a superior class. Meritocracy is repugnant because we end up being ruled by a bunch of pointy headed scholarship winners. What isn't repugnant is people choosing their own leaders and abiding by their sensible decisions.
When I received the invitation to write on justice in meritocracies, I was reminded of an amusing letter I had received a couple of years earlier from W. V. O. Quine (addressed jointly to John Rawls and me, dated December 17, 1992):
I got thinking about the word justice, alongside solstice. Clearly, the latter, solstitium, is sol ` a reduced stit from stat-, thus “solar standstill”; so I wondered about justitium: originally a legal standstill? I checked in Meillet, and he bore me out. Odd! It meant a court vacation.
Originally, sure. But, by metonymy it came mean an interregnum when no sovereign power existed. or a National Emergency when the rule of law was suspended. Poor old Quine didn't have access to Google search. Also, being a philosopher, he was as stupid as shit.
Checking further, I found that justitia is unrelated to justitium.
It is totes related. Justititia means Justice as doled out by Courts of Law. Sometimes Courts close for vacation. But the Law continues to operate. That's it. There is nothing very profound going on here.
Justitia is just(um) ` -itia, thus “just-ness,”
Nope. It is Justice personified just like the English word 'Justice'. Fuck does Quine or Sen think just-ness mean?
quite as it should be, whereas justitium is jus ` stitium.
Why does Sen bring up this stupid shit? The answer is that he is just name-dropping. True, no new decisions are made while the Court is not sitting, but the Law still operates. The notion Sen is groping towards is 'epoche' where everything else is 'bracketed' for a phenomenological purpose. But phenomenology turned out to be a waste of time.
I shall argue that meritocracy, and more generally the practice of rewarding merit, is essentially underdefined,
It is well enough defined for any pragmatic purpose. We say a Government of noblemen is an aristocracy. An administration formed by people who stood first in their specialization is a meritocracy. The Defense Minister is the most successful General, the Commerce Minister is the most successful Businessman, the Justice Minister is the most brilliant lawyer and so on and so forth.
We can easily say 'this Cabinet is more aristocratic than the last which was principally composed of people who had risen by their own ability rather than by virtue of birth and breeding. '
Of course, we can stipulate that we won't commit to a notion of merit till somebody give us a b.j. But then anybody can stipulate any old shit.
and we cannot be sure about its content—and thus about the claims regarding its “justice”—until some further specifications are made (concerning, in particular, the objectives to be pursued, in terms of which merit is to be, ultimately, judged).
There are no further objectives. Either x is more meritorious than y, or not. One may as well say that before we can decide who is taller we must first be told what the objective of that comparison is. If the tallest guy gets a million dollars, I will decide I'm tallest. If the tallest gets shot, I'm shortest.
The merit of actions—and (derivatively) that of persons performing actions—cannot be judged independent of the way we understand the nature of a good (or an acceptable) society.
Yes it can. What Sen is saying is that judging how good an action is has exactly the same effect as judging how meritorious it its or how worthy of appreciation or approbation it is. These are just different names for the same thing.
There is, thus, something of justitium or “standstill” in our understanding of merit,
No there isn't. There could be a justititum if we fall asleep or go to take a shit. Then judgment will be suspended till we wake up or finish shitting and rejoin the bench. Obviously, if the enemy invades we will stop doing this type of judgment and go get our guns and go to the battlefield. Well, we would if we were Ukrainian. Them guys kick ass.
which involves at least a temporary “stay” (if not quite a “court vacation”). Indeed, examining the nature of this “standstill,” which is ethically and politically illuminating, may be a better way of understanding the place of meritocracy in modern society than seeing it as a part of some categorical justitia that demands our compliance.
This is crazy shit. We understand merit immediately in the same way that we understand words like 'smart' and 'stupid'. True, if we are paid to grade people on merit, then we may refuse to do so while on vacation. But there is no 'standstill' here.
Sen is pretending that there is a concurrency or other such stasis or deadlock because before we can decide what is meritorious we first have to decide what is good and before we can decide that we have to decide what is true and before we can decide that we have to decide what is knowledge and before we can decide that we have to decide what is sapience and before we can decide that we have to decide what it means to make a decision and before we can decide that we have to decide what it means to decide what it means to decide and so forth.
This is childish shite. It simply isn't true that we don't have an intuition of merit independent of what we consider good or true or justified. The thing is a 'Tarskian primitive'. No doubt, there are some subjects where we can't judge merit but somebody with expertise in that field could do so.
The general idea of merit must be conditional on what we consider good activities (or to see it in more deontological terms, right actions).
No. We may not consider Music to be a good thing. We may consider it irreligious. Yet we can agree that A.R Rahman is a meritorious musician though he will go to Hell because Music is from Satan.
The promotion of goodness, or compliance with rightness, would have much to commend it, and in this basic sense the encouragement of merit would have a clear rationale. But given the contingent nature of what we take to be good or right, there would inevitably be alternative views regarding (1) the precise content of merit,
This is context dependent. Merit in Music is not the same thing as merit in mathematics. This has nothing to do with conceptions of the Good or the Right or the True or the Beautiful.
and (2) its exact force vis-`a-vis other normative concerns in terms of which the success of a society may be judged.
This is wholly irrelevant. This guy is more meritorious in Mathematics irrespective of anything else that is going on in society. Sen may think that whether I am taller than him or he is more meritorious than me as an economist is a matter which depends on other 'normative concerns' like whether Putin's cat is happy. But Sen is a cretin.
This problem would be present even without the difficulties raised by rigid and inflexible conceptions of what is to be seen as “merit”
Nonsense! If we define 'merit' in an inflexible manner as being able to run a mile in 2 minutes while proving the Reimann hypothesis, no problem would arise. We would see much merit in a College which recruited kids and got them closer and closer to this ideal.
(an issue to which I shall turn later on). This is not to deny that any particular comprehensive theory of justice will contain within its specifications the relevant parameters in terms of which the content and force of merit-based rewards can be judged.
No. A theory can't contain stipulations or specifications unless it is context dependent. But, in that case, it isn't comprehensive at all. Thus, if there is a 'gravitational constant' in your theory of Physics, it is incomplete, not comprehensive.
For example, John Rawls’s (1958; 1971) classic theory of “justice as fairness,” which has been overwhelmingly the most influential proposal in contemporary political philosophy, does provide enough structure and specification to allow us immediately to judge the demands of merits and meritocracy.
But Rawls says that there is a 'plug in' of Econ and Poli Sci and other such knowledge behind the veil of ignorance. That is exactly the same thing as 'stipulation' in a court of law- i.e. things to be taken as facts for the purpose of the trial. A comprehensive theory of Justice would itself generate its own Economic theory and Political theory and Sociological theory and theory of History and so forth. A Karmic theory of justice- featuring ingress of karma binding particles- is an example.
Yet the Rawlsian substantive theory of justice involves a particular compromise between conflicting concerns: formalized in his “two principles of justice,” including the priority of liberty and the significance of efficiency and equity in the achievement and distribution of individual advantages.
No. Rawls predicts that, under certain conditions, a particular reflective equilibrium will be reached. But an equilibrium is not a compromise because there is no 'transferable utility'. What Sen means is that the two principles contradict each other. Rawls lexically preferences one over the other. That's not compromise. That's one being placed higher than the other by arbitrary stipulation.
Many who have been much influenced by Rawls (including this author) are more at peace with the importance of these general concerns than they are with the specific compromise arrived at in Rawlsian theory. There are, in particular, (1) different ways of recognizing the prior importance of liberty,
& different ways of recognizing that recognizing could mean shitting yourself incessantly
(2) distinct “spaces” in which efficiency and equity can be judged, and
distinct 'graces', 'maces', and 'laces' in regard to which efficiency and equity can be judged by shitting yourself incessantly.
(3) dissimilar ways of balancing the two types of concerns.
and dissimilar gays of valancing the two types of concerns by shitting yourself incessantly.
2 It is indeed hard to expect a reasoned unanimity on the exact lines of any particular compromise between these concerns, given the depth of these demands.
Or to expect to be hard when shitting yourself incessantly.
Further, it is not obvious that even in an imagined “original position” (with primordial equality) a consensus of reasoning would emerge to settle this issue adequately.
Why not? The consensus would be that Professors have shit for brains. Tell them to fuck off if they start gassing on about a Theory or Idea of Justice or Equality or anything else. Behind the veil of ignorance, people can still see that Knightian uncertainty exists. In other words, we don't know all possible future states of the world or what probability distribution is associated with them. Thus, 'regret minimization' not 'maximin' is the right decision rule. This involves telling Professors to fuck off now rather than later on. In practice, this is what happens anyway. Otherwise pedagogues would be running things.
The absence of a general agreement on a precise resolution (or on an exact formula) that balances the forces of the discordant concerns against each other does not, however, make it useless to analyze the role of meritocracy or to examine the nature of its conflict with the demands of other aspects of justice.
If so, why mention the matter? It is obvious that we can recognize merit or beauty but we don't have a formula for measuring either.
Since I have argued in favor of “incomplete” theories of justice elsewhere (particularly in Sen 1970 and 1992),
An incomplete theory is not a theory. It may be a description. Equally, it may just be hot air.
I am less uneasy with a “standstill” than a more determined or a more resourceful theorist of justice (or of welfare economics) would be.
There is no 'standstill' during a Court vacation. The laws continue to apply. Sen may be thinking of 'epoche' but that is purely philosophical or phenomenological.
Merits, Actions, and Incentives The term meritocracy seems to have been invented by Michael Young in his influential book The Rise of Meritocracy, 1870–2033 (Young 1958).
The concept was much older. 'Careers open to talent' would have been the older formulation.
Young himself was deeply critical of the development he identified, and meritocracy as a formalized arrangement has not, in general, received good press.
Merit may be wrongly conceived so that only upper class men are seen to possess it.
The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1988, p. 521) presents the following uncharming definition: A word coined by Michael Young (The Rise of Meritocracy, 1958) for government by those regarded as possessing merit; merit is equated with intelligence-plus effort, its possessors are identified at an early age and selected for an appropriate intensive education, and there is an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications.
We believed that a guy with 'skin in the game' will show more diligence than some 'meritorious' fellow who didn't create any asset and thus should not get to decide how to dispose of it.
Egalitarians often apply the word to any elitist system of education or government, without necessarily attributing to it the particularly grisly features or ultimately self-destroying character of Young’s apocalyptic vision. 2 I have discussed possible variations from the Rawlsian system in Sen (1970, 1980, and 1992). Other proposals can be seen in Arneson (1989), Cohen (1989), Dworkin (1981), Roemer (1985 and 1994), Van Parijs (1995), and Walzer (1983), among other contributions. 3 The lack of complete decidability in the Rawlsian “original position” was one of the two main theses presented in a paper that I jointly authored with Gary Runciman, “Games, Justice and the General Will” (Runciman and Sen 1965).
But showing that decidability is not algorithmic is not the same thing as showing that decidability is lacking. The thing could be non-deterministic. What matters is whether Juristic decisions are 'buck stopped'- i.e. there is a forum beyond which there is no further appeal. Defeasibility is not a scandal, rather it is a characteristic of the Law.
The other thesis of that essay concerned the usefulness of game theory in clarifying Rousseau’s concepts of “social contract” and “general will,” and Rawls’s ideas of the “original position” and “justice as fairness.”
This is foolish. Game theory treats the pay-off matrix as fixed. Incomplete contracts don't have fixed pay-off matrices because they accept Knightian uncertainty- i.e. some future states of the world are not known. This means that there will be renegotiation during the life of the contract. Some stipulation may be made as to how this renegotiation can occur and the Law- which is a service industry au fond- may seek to make itself useful in that regard.
I tend to share some of the suspicion of meritocratic systems to which such descriptions relate (more on this later), but when characterized in these frightening terms, it hardly seems possible that any reasonable society today would encourage or tolerate “the rise of meritocracy,” and yet that is exactly what Michael Young claims has occurred.
It is obvious that soldiers will want the smartest soldier to lead them- otherwise they will suffer excess mortality. In peace time, it may not matter if the C-in-C is a titled nitwit. In war, merit must rise to the top. The same can be said of other 'Public' or 'Club' goods. If allocation is done by nitwits, we all suffer.
Meritocracy may rightly deserve condemnation, but to define it in such thoroughly revolting terms makes it hard to understand how it can appeal to anyone and why it may have an expanding role in modern society.
We don't want fools with Harvard degrees deciding things. As Prime Minister Modi says 'hard work is better than a Harvard education'. A bad definition of 'merit' will lead to a bad consequences.
We have to do more groundwork first to understand what it is that gives meritocracy its appeal within its own rationale, and only after that can we examine whether that appeal can survive scrutiny. In fact, meritocracy is just an extension of a general system of rewarding merit, and elements of such a system clearly have been present in one form or another throughout human history. There are, it can be argued, at least two different ways of seeing merit and systems of rewarding it.
Sen's specialty is seeing differences where non exists.
. Incentives: Actions may be rewarded for the good they do, and a system of remunerating the activities that generate good consequences would, it is presumed, tend to produce a better society.
Incentives may include 'not getting shot' or 'not being held up to public ridicule and contumely'
The rationale of incentive structures may be more complex than this simple statement suggests, but the idea of merits in this instrumental perspective relates to the motivation of producing better results. In this view, actions are meritorious in a derivative and contingent way, depending on the good they do, and more particularly the good that can be brought about by rewarding them.
Incentives and penalties apply to inappropriate actions- e.g getting naked at the Office party and peeing in the punch bowl. There is generally some effective sanction for such behavior.
Action propriety: Actions may be judged by their propriety—not by their results—
but only because 'propriety' is concerned with promoting good results. Nobody cares if you get naked at home and drink your own piss. There is no difference between 'incentives' and 'propriety'. Rather, incentives are attached to proper actions and penalties are attached to improper ones. Why? Because proper actions promote good results. Improper actions promote bad results. It does not matter whether or not some other action or eventuality prevents the bad result or promotes the good result though this may lessen the severity of the punishment. Why? Because punishment is costly.
and they may be rewarded according to the quality of such actions, judged in a result-independent way. Much use has been made of this approach to merit, and parts of deontological ethics separate out right conduct—for praise and emulation—independent of the goodness of the consequences generated. In one form or another both these approaches have been invoked in past discussions of merit, but it is fair to say that the incentives approach is the dominant one now in economics, at least in theory (even though the language used in practice often betrays interest in the other categories—more on which presently). Although the praiseworthiness of “proper” actions is not denied in economic reasoning, the economic justification of rewarding merit tends to be grounded in consequences.
Because life is grounded in consequences. If we do stupid shit, we may die. We will certainly lose something valuable- e.g. the cool stuff we'd have had if we'd done the sensible thing.
Adam Smith (1776 and 1790) made this distinction forcefully and proceeded to provide one of the first systematic analyses of the use of incentive systems as they operate naturally in societies and how they can be further sharpened.
Smith was writing about sentiments- feelings. This has nothing to do with economics. We may feel an action is improper but then, learning the facts of the case, we may revise our opinion. Economics is about rational choice under scarcity. It isn't about actions motivated by irrational sentiments.
The distinction between the propriety and merit of an action is described by Smith in the following way:
There is another set of qualities ascribed to the actions and conduct of mankind, distinct from their propriety and impropriety, their decency or ungracefulness, and which are the objects of a distinct species of approbation. These are Merit and Demerit, the qualities of deserving reward, and of deserving punishment.... [u]pon the beneficial or hurtful effects which the affection proposes and tends to produce, depends the merit or demerit, the good or ill desert of the action to which it gives occasion.
This is why, in Econ, we have a notion of 'merit goods' and 'demerit goods'. If you provide the former, your activity is virtuous. If you provide the latter, it is repugnant. 'Repugnancy markets' may be outlawed.
I shall concentrate in this chapter on the view of merit in terms of results and incentives. It is, in fact, virtually the only grounded and defended theory that can be found in the contemporary economic literature (shared by welfare economics, social choice theory, game theory, and implementation theory).
Because 'merit' and 'demerit' goods have been analyzed in terms of externalities and empirical work has been done on this. However, sometimes we discover that 'merit' goods are mischievous. Thus Gandhian 'khaddar' was not a merit good. It kept weavers poor and added negative value to raw cotton. Similarly, the fact that some women go out to work was not repugnant. It was good in itself. Gandhi, crackpot that he was, thought that if a woman walks down the street, she must be a street-walker. But then he also described Parliament as a Brothel because every so often its members give themselves to a new Prime Minister who, no doubt, sodomizes them with his 'Black Rod'.
Indeed, the practice of rewarding good (or right) deeds for their incentive effects cannot but be an integral part of any well-functioning society.
Or a badly-functioning society. Gandhi was rewarded. He should have been ignored.
No matter what we think of the demands of “meritocracy” as it is usually defined, we can scarcely dispense with incentive systems altogether.
But we needn't bother designing them. Let the market do so.
The art of developing an incentive system lies in delineating the content of merit in such a way that it helps to generate valued consequences
Sadly, the thing seldom works. India gave incentives to mathematical economists. They turned out to be utterly useless or mischievous. Sen, thankfully, ran away to England taking with him his best-friend's wife.
. Merit Rewarding as a System The derivative character of merit
It has no such character. Merit self subsists. Whether it is employed usefully is a separate question.
leads us to the central question as to what the “valued consequences” are and how the success and failure of a society are to be judged. Once an instrumental view of merit is accepted, there is no escape from the contingent nature of its content, related to the characterization of a good—or an acceptable—society and the criteria in terms of which assessments are to be made.
Nobody has an instrumental view of merit. We recognize that Ramanujan had great merit as a mathematician. We also recognize that if he had been left to rot in some clerical position, or as a charity case, in India, he would not have been able to contribute much to Mathematics. By contrast, there were plenty of England returned 'Senior Wranglers' who made zero contribution. Kosambi worked under one such in Pune.
If, for example, the conceptualization of a good society includes the absence of serious economic inequalities, then in the characterization of instrumental goodness, including the assessment of what counts as merit, note would have to be taken of the propensity of putative merit to lessen—or generate—economic inequality.
Very true. India would have had less economic inequality if mathematicians were employed as cow dung collectors and cow dung collector were employed as Professors of Mathematics. But this is not a conceptualization of a good society. Why not simply say that no woman should get preggers till a man has got preggers?
In this case, the rewarding of merit cannot be done independent of its distributive consequences.
No rewarding of anything can be done if you don't got no cash.
In India shortly after independence, a system of preference for lower-caste candidates in the civil service was introduced in the newly formulated constitution of the Republic of India, reserving a certain proportion of places for them minimally, although recruitment in general was governed by examination. The argument defending this preference system was partly based on some notion of fairness to the candidates (given the educational and social handicap typically experienced by lower-caste candidates), but, more important, it was argued that the reduction of inequality in the society at large depended on breaking the effective monopoly of upper-caste civil servants.
This is foolish. India had 'untouchability'. Clearly one way to break that type of bigotry was showing that Dalit Ambassadors and Governors and Ministers and Judges and Generals are just as good as those of other castes. Indeed, speaking generally, SC & ST candidates are better, not worse, than High Caste nitwits.
The other point has to do with the smart and thorough manner in which the Scheduled Castes organized themselves and put forward their demands.
The upper-caste bias in the distribution of justice and in the allocation of governmental help could be changed only by having civil servants from less privileged backgrounds.11 This latter argument is an “efficiency reason”— efficiency in pursuit of a distribution-inclusive social goal.
Not in the Indian case. It was obvious that the number of Government jobs was very small relative to the population. Thus the purpose was not 'efficiency' but 'demonstration'. When people saw that Dalit Ministers were better at Governance, they changed their views regarding what Dalits were capable of. Gandhi said 'Harijans have less sense than cows'. But, by the Nineteen Seventies, people wanted Jagjivan Ram to become PM. Why? He had done well no matter which portfolio he held. The guy was smart. Desai, by comparison, was a cretin loathed by his colleagues. Sadly, Charan Singh prevented Ram from becoming PM. This was shortsighted. Charan and his very smart son could have built themselves up in UP while Ram did sensible things at the Center to pull up the economy. Later Ajit Singh could have led India into free-market reform. He was a very brilliant man- who had done very well in America.
Even though the typical “objective functions” that are implicitly invoked in most countries to define and assess what is to count as merit tend to be indifferent to (or negligent of) distributive aspects of outcomes, there is no necessity to accept that ad hoc characterization.
Voters from the early Seventies onward showed they didn't care about distribution. They were only concerned with the absolute level of material welfare. They wanted the smartest scientists to do science and the most beautiful actresses to star in movies. They were pleased if a guy who used to drive a taxi ended up living in a mansion because his handsome face and histrionic gifts made him the 'King of Bollywood'.
This is not a matter of a “natural order” of “merit” that is independent of our value system.
Yet, that 'natural order' does indeed prevail. That's one reason why I have not been crowned Miss Teen Tamil Nadu.
The dependent nature of merit and its reward has to be more fully understood to see the nature and reach of merit-based systems.
We must understand that cats are actually dogs. If we don't understand this we won't be able to properly run a dog show properly. Clearly, the most beautiful doggie says miaow.
This dependence is the main reason behind the “standstill” that has to be overcome.
There is no standstill. There may be a Husserlian 'epoche' but phenomenology turned out to be stupid shite.
There are also, however, other tensions that arise within the general approach of merit-based rewards. There is, in particular, a tension of moral psychology within the incentive-based rationale of rewarding merits, arising from its instrumental nature. Actions are rewarded for what they help to bring about, but the rewarding is not valued in itself.
Why isn't there a prize for being the bestest Judge at a Beauty contest? Why not a prize for the bestest prize? How come I don't get fame and fortune for deciding that Beyonce is prettier than Amartya Sen?
Insofar as the rewards handed out could have been used for some purpose that is valued in itself, it would obviously have made sense—given other things—to use them for that purpose.
One drawback of being a teacher is having to mark test papers. I suppose, sooner of later, there will be an 'app' to do that for them. Then, more people would be willing to be teachers. As things are, good teachers are quitting in droves because they have to spend more and more time on admin rather than teaching.
But equally obviously this very thought denies the productive role of the incentives, and thus the “side use” is not entertainable in practice.
It may be, as technology advances. We can imagine receiving a reward for giving Amazon reviews or something of that sort.
The psychological tension that it creates arises from the necessity of accepting some assignments that are not themselves valued (and may, in fact, be revoltingly unequal and unattractive), which are contingently justified by the actions of the recipients and the effects that these actions have on the rest of the society (for example, on aggregate outputs and incomes).
Again, this is a matter where the underlying disutility or waste of resources can be corrected by using new technology and having better 'mechanism design'.
At one time, the 'gate-keepers' of publishing represented a waste of resources. Now, thanks to Amazon self-publishing, fans of a particular genre can fulfill that gate-keeping function for free.
There is some tension also in the feature that the extent of inequality that an incentive-based system has to tolerate would depend crucially on what motivates people to act in one way rather than another.
But all democracies had ceased to tolerate nutters who gassed on about equality. The thing was stupid shit. What the working class wanted was more nice shiny things. They were delighted if their favorite soccer player or film star lived more opulently than any Duke.
Various proposals for the development of cooperative values have been considered in this context.
By cretins. Nobody else gave a toss about this issue.
The instrumental nature of incentive systems makes the justification for payments turn pervasively on the actual effects of different payments on behavior and choices.
Very true. We stop paying for stuff we don't receive.
To consider a rather unattractive example of an incentive argument, in deciding how much to pay a blackmailer,
That's an illegal transaction.
the payment that would be justified would depend on what would induce him or her to give up those compromising documents. It would be in the blackmailer’s interest to pretend that nothing short of a very vast sum would be acceptable, and it would be for the payer to judge whether he or she is bluffing.
This is foolish. The blackmailer has to know the victim's ability to pay. Pretending he wants a billion dollars from a beggar will cause that beggar to go to the police or just get together with some thngs to beat and torture and kill the blackmailer.
In the normal working of an economy, of course, we do not encounter cases on this level of directness, and also competition—when present— limits what an individual operator can demand and expect to get. But there is often an element of unclarity in deciding on the incentive effects of changes in reward systems, for example in deciding on the likely effects of reducing remarkably high payments to top executives that have now become standard and are typically defended on incentive grounds.
Such unclarity is ubiquitous because of Knightian Uncertainty. But good economists can greatly reduce the unclarity by applying the proper Structural Causal Model. The plain fact of the matter is that you can always pay a professor a little money to defend anything under the sun. Having money to buy what you want is important. Arguments defending this or attacking that are a dime a dozen.
There are also interesting incentive questions to be sorted out in predicting the likely results of raising the regulational minimum wage for employees (potentially influencing the profitability and employment decisions of firms). Debates on these subjects have tended to be quite intense in recent years.
Again these are empirical matters for 'positive economics' not Sen-tentious shite.
Some radical critiques of a functioning capitalist economy, with its manifest inequalities, relate to this tension; it provides grounds for powerful egalitarian rhetoric and condemnation of inequality even when the economic reasoning remains incomplete.
Some nutters get paid for writing that shite. It is a market phenomenon.
Arguments of this kind have to be distinguished from other radical critiques that see the real incentive effects as quite different from what is claimed on their behalf by the beneficiaries—or “apologists”—of the system.
Very true. QAnon has a radical critique which focuses on the role played by the Post Office in promoting pedophilia.
When Marx (1875), following a line of socialist thinking, considered the case for “from each according to his ability to each according to his need,” he noted the unfeasibility of this option, because of incentive problems, even when socialism would be established. He settled, thus, for an incentive system of payment according to the value of work “at the early stages of socialism,” but also expressed his hope for an evolution of human motivation in the long run such that need-based distribution could become practicable without being, then, derailed by incentive problems.
Marx also thought it would be impossible to prevent child labor. He agreed with Smith on this. Gandhi, by contrast, believed that everybody should go around slaughtering puppy dogs.
For an important critical scrutiny of the issues related to high payments to executives and professionals in contemporary America, see Bok (1993). 15 For example, the unorthodox findings of Card and Krueger (1995) on the predicted consequences of minimum wage variations have been subjected to remarkably intense attacks in some business publications. This is not surprising since incentive arguments of different kinds provide the intellectual backing for many prevailing practices as well as proposals for change.
But 'intellectual backing' is worthless or, at any rate, can be got quite cheaply. What we have seen is vested interest groups achieving great success in rewriting tax and other codes so as to benefit themselves. This has been well studied by empirical political scientists. Normative economics has achieved nothing in this context.
These arguments draw a good deal of their immediate significance from the tension under discussion.
What tension? It is a fact that the guys who run Fast Food and big Retail and so forth, have massive political clout because of their ability to influence elections through PACs. Biden may hope to restore the 'countervailing' power of Unions. However, citizen action at the local level can create more diverse 'Tiebout models'.
Since rewards to merit in the form of incentive requirements are not valued in themselves, there is a tenacious rationale for discussing the possibility of reducing their demands in favor of social objectives that may be valued in themselves (including reduction of economic inequality, insofar as it is generally favored in the society in question), so long as this can be done without greater harm through the actual— as opposed to imagined—effects on incentives.
The Chinese may be able to introduce a 'Social Credit system', but it is difficult to see how a Liberal Democracy could do so. Moreover, as the recent reversal of Roe v Wade shows, there are deep divisions regarding what is a merit good or a demerit good. Progressives are faced with the unenviable task of clamoring for the right to kill innocent fetuses.
The lack of intrinsic status of merit-rewards in an incentive system makes that complex instrumental connection central to economic debates on policies and strategies.
I am not aware of any such 'economic debates' in any democracy over the last three decades which have impacted 'policies and strategies'. On the other hand, ' promoting family values' or 'protecting the middle class' has helped successful politicians.
Meritocracy and Additional Features So far I have been discussing the nature and implications of rewarding merit, particularly given the dependence of merit on social criteria of success.
We are not concerned with 'rewarding merit'. We are concerned with 'careers open to talent' so that merit can rise by itself. During COVID some elite institutions had a poor track-record of prediction while some people, lacking elite credentials, were publishing better predictions on Twitter. Their merit was rewarded because policy makers paid attention to them. I imagine that some were able to get into lucrative career paths as a result of their success.
The approach of what may be called meritocracy, however, tends to take a less “parametric” view of the determinants of merit
Sen does not understand that 'merit' is a Tarskian primitive. We can distinguish merit or beauty without being able to specify a formula or a Structural Causal Model for it. We don't know the 'determinants' of Merit though we do know how an average person may become more meritorious in some particular field, through proper training and work experience.
and frequently sees it as given characteristics that deserve rewards. The definition of meritocracy, quoted earlier from The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1988), somewhat exaggerated the “extremism” of the chosen views of merit and its reward, but it drew attention to the fact that the idea of “meritocracy” must be seen as something quite a bit more demanding than the rewarding of merit according to some agreed criteria of social success.
The problem here is that there is a 'spontaneous order' by which merit and beauty and talent are rewarded. There is no need for 'agreed criteria' though no doubt there are Magsaysay or Noble or other prizes which, however, sometimes reward cretins.
There would seem to be at least three substantial departures from the kind of general system of rewarding meritorious actions that I have been considering in the preceding discussion. 1. Personification and genetics:
If people are free to mate with whom they like, there isn't much you can do about this.
In the incentive approach to merit, it is characteristic of actions, not of people as such.
But people perform actions. It is a characteristic of people.
But conventional notions of “meritocracy” often attach the label of merit to people rather than actions.
Because certain people are predicted to perform meritorious actions. Thus if you hire Beyonce to star in a musical show, you are likely to get a performance with considerable merit. If you hire me, the audience will run away.
A person with standardly recognized “talents” (even something as nebulous as “intelligence”) can, then, be seen as a meritorious person even if he or she were not to use the “talents” to perform acts with good consequences or laudable propriety.
No. If we say that person is 'talented but always drunk off his head' we understand that no good acts will be performed.
This “personal quality” of merits sometimes gets invoked even in a largely incentive-oriented system of economic reasoning, with which the “personal quality” view is basically in conflict.
This is termed 'pre-market skills'. It is something we have to screen out before getting to evidence of statistical discrimination.
Some people are seen as being just more meritorious than others, and may indeed have been born more talented. In some versions of personification, the inborn talents are seen not only as being variable between one person and another (for which there may be considerable evidence), but also as distributed according to some other readily distinguishable characteristic, such as skin color or the size of the nose (for which the evidence seems very problematic, to say the least).
There is statistical evidence but no valid 'Structural Causal Model'. It isn't the case that I'd get smarter if I used ointment to make myself fairer.
When used in this form, personification can encourage meritocratic acceptance of—rather than resistance to—inequalities of achievement (often along racial and ethnic groupings), which are present in many contemporary societies.
It is obvious that if you have the wrong conception of merit then you will reward stupid shit. But the same is true if you have the wrong conception of beauty. That's the only reason I'm not now Miss Teen Tamil Nadu.
2. Deserts and entitlement:
Have nothing to do with merit. They pre-exist. This soldier should continue to get his pension and to receive honors though he is now too old to fight or perform acts of valor. However, a coward and poltroon may have an equal entitlement to a pension because he was cleared of all charges by a Military Tribunal.
An incentive argument is entirely “instrumental” and does not lead to any notion of intrinsic “desert.”
No. It may have a notion of intrinsic 'desert' and state that a particular mechanism would be a better instrument to secure 'just deserts'. Thus, Zelenskyy, once he has won his war, may say 'some of our people showed exceptional valor and self-sacrifice. I will appoint a commission to gather information about this. We will use some of the 'reparations' we are owed to reward those people, or their families'.' In this case it is obvious that 'desert' is intrinsic. An instrument has been created to find and reward it.
If paying a person more induces him or her to produce more desirable results, then an incentive argument may exist for that person’s pay being greater
Only in the sense that an incentive argument exists for kidnapping the guy's dog and threatening to kill it if he doesn't work harder.
. This is an instrumental and contingent justification (related to results)—it does not assert that the person intrinsically “deserves” to get more.
It may do. It may not.
To return to an illustration used earlier, an incentive argument may well exist even for paying a blackmailer some money to induce him or her to hand over some compromising material, but that incentive argument is not the same as accepting that the blackmailer “deserves” to get that money because of the blackmailer’s intrinsic virtue.
This is foolish. The incentive argument works the other way. If you pay once, next time the guy will demand more. Blackmail is a crime. The incentive not to be a blackmailer is not being sodomized in a prison cell.
In a meritocratic system, however, this distinction gets blurred, and the established and fixed nature of the system of rewards may generate the implicit—sometimes even explicit—belief that the rewards are “owed” by the society to the meritorious persons.
This is nonsense. By all current Ukrainian laws, Ukrainian Society is not obliged to pay a lot of money, and grant all sorts of honors, to those of its citizens who are showing great valor in its defense. Yet Zelinskyy and his people have a very strong sense of what is owed to those heroes. Indeed, so do we. I bet plenty of people across the globe will contribute to a fund set up to reward those patriots.
As Michael Walzer (1983, p. 136) points out, Desert implies a very strict sort of entitlement,
This is not the case. Desert may exist without any corresponding obligation holder under a bond of law. People cheated by Madoff may deserve compensation. They won't get it because nobody is legally obliged to provide it.
such that the title precedes and determines the selection, while qualification is a much looser idea.
Unless it isn't. Walzer was stooooopid. He thought things had a 'social meaning'. They do in the sense that everybody in a given Society can give umpteen social meanings to any and every thing. His idea were as loose as shit. The fact is 'qualification' can be tightly defined- indeed, it is, in many protocol bound contexts.
A prize, for example, can be deserved because it already belongs to the person who has given the best performance; it only remains to identify that person.
But it doesn't really 'already belong' to them- does it? Why pretend otherwise? Why not say 'you deserve to be repaid the loan you very kindly gave me. Therefore, I have already repaid it to you. Also I fucked your Mummy. She told me she hates you because you smell bad.'?
Prize committees are like juries in that they look backward and aim at an objective decision. When this idea of desert is combined with rewarding “talents” as such— indeed, even the possession of talents (rather than the production of desirable results with them)—the connection with the incentive rationale of meritocracies is fairly comprehensively severed.
No. Identifying talent has to do with predicting the future. Identifying desert has to do with understanding the past. As our 'Structural Causal Model' of the Past improves we may change our mind about who was or wasn't deserving. Consider the Austro-Hungarian Commander in Chief, Conrad von Hotzedorf. Initially, he was highly thought off by military historians. Now we know much more about what actually happened in the past, we consider him the architect of his Empire's destruction. There are many other such examples. At one time, Indians thought Sen deserved the Noble prize. Now we think the fellow is a cretin.
3. Distribution independence: A system of rewarding of merits may well generate inequalities of well-being and of other advantages. But, as was argued earlier, much would depend on the nature of the consequences that are sought, on the basis of which merits are to be characterized. If the results desired have a strong distributive component,
Then merit is irrelevant. In the nature of things, merit is possessed by very few. Rewarding it won't effect Income distribution though it may raise GNP over time.
Nevertheless, there would then be something within that consequential system of evaluation that would work, to a varying extent, against generating more inequality.
No. If some actions are judged meritorious there will be a Tardean mimetic effect. This will raise inequality because ability to mimic is unequal.
In most versions of modern meritocracy, however, the selected objectives tend to be almost exclusively oriented toward aggregate achievements (without any preference against inequality), and sometimes the objectives chosen are even biased (often implicitly) toward the interests of more fortunate groups (favoring the outcomes that are more preferred by “talented” and “successful” sections of the population).
Nothing wrong with that. We want Society to become better, not worse. Everybody competing to become an incontinent beggar passed out in a pool of his own vomit is not a good outcome.
This can reinforce and augment the tendency toward inequality that might be present even with an objective function that, inter alia, attaches some weight to lower inequality levels.
Provided that inequality is of a 'horizontal' type- i.e. compares like with like. Babies and the very old ought not to be compared to people in the prime of life.
None of these three additional features of meritocracy is necessary for a general system of rewarding merits on incentive grounds.
Indeed, nothing is necessary for it to happen. The thing arises spontaneously. There will be good football players and good musicians and good scientists even if no salary attaches to these activities. However, a 'spontaneous order' will emerge such that some football players and musicians and scientists give up their day job and specialize in what they are best at. But this will happen even if no great merit (or absolute advantage) is involved. Comparative advantage (i.e. having a lower opportunity cost) will achieve the same thing.
What are often taken to be “meritocratic” demands have moved, in many ways, so far away from their incentive-based justification that they can scarcely be defended on the classic incentive grounds.
But 'demands' made by shitheads are now wholly ignored. These guys can make a bit of money by 'virtue signalling' and publishing shite books, but this doesn't really affect anything though, no doubt, 'virulent wokeness' can damage the Left or 'bleeding heart' Liberals.
These ad hoc additions call for close scrutiny, especially given the hold they have on popular discussions—and sometimes even professional deliberations—on this subject.
No. The public decided this stuff was just virtue signalling shite indulged in by useless tossers teaching shite subjects.
Concluding Remarks Although I shall not try to summarize this chapter, I shall comment on a few of the issues that have emerged in the preceding analysis.
Nothing has emerged. Merit is like Beauty- we can recognize it but can't explain it fully. Very few have Merit or Beauty and thus there are no 'distributional' consequences at the Macro level. On the other hand, comparative advantage matters. Are high paid executives receiving 'economic rent' (i.e. is their remuneration much higher than their 'transfer earnings' or 'opportunity cost')?If so we can tax away the rent without creating allocative inefficiency or a 'dead weight' loss. On the other hand, high remuneration may be an 'efficiency wage'- i.e. an incentive to push back against certain pressures. In that case, there would be a deadweight loss. The CEO plays possum while the Private Equity guys make out like gangbusters.
First, the rewarding of merit and the very concept of merit itself depend on the way we see a good society and the criteria we invoke to assess the successes and failures of societies.
This is not the case. People who disagree about everything can still agree that such and such person has merit or has beauty. Later, they may discover their error. Sen was once thought meritorious.
The “incentive view” of merit competes with the view of merit based on “action propriety,”
Nonsense! We reward only proper actions regardless of merit. An improper action by otherwise meritorious person must be punished otherwise a bad precedent is created.
but it is the incentive approach that tends, with good reason, to receive attention in contemporary justificatory discussions.
Because 'action propriety' is like 'not pissing in the punch bowl'. It isn't something you have to stipulate. Everybody understands that actions must be fit and proper. Also, don't piss in the punch bowl. Reserve your urine for golden showers for Putin and Lavrov.
Second, the incentive view of merit is underdefined, since it is dependent on the preferred view of a good society.
This is not the case. Rewarding merit s dependent only on one thing- viz encouraging a particular type of Tardean mimetics. The 'merit scholar' is the one the other kids should be emulating. At the very least, they should know that hard work and intelligence used to some worthwhile purpose should be respected not denigrated.
The theory of merit, thus, needs to draw on other normative theories.
No. It can be wholly positive and defined on the fitness landscape.
The rewarding of merit is, to adapt a Kantian distinction, a “hypothetical imperative” that is dependent on the way we judge the success of a society; it does not involve a “categorical imperative” on what should in any case be done.
This is not the case. 'Recognize and reward Merit' is categorical. Thus the final act of a Leader whose country is being over-run, might be to issue decorations to courageous soldiers and other meritorious people. That country may cease to exist but with its last act it rewarded its great heroes.
It is a different matter that a 'hypothetical imperative' may also exist. Thus 'tell the truth' is both deontological as well as pragmatic or consequentialist. Indeed, Kant provides both sorts of argument for this.
Third, the contingent nature of merit also indicates that its relationship with economic inequality would depend very much on whether an aversion to economic inequality is included in the objective function of the society.
This is false. Merit, by definition, belongs to too few people for its being rewarded to have any distributional effect. It really does not matter if one or two sports, or entertainment, stars live like billionaires. This does not improve income distribution for the great mass of their fans. The thing is like winning the lottery.
If it is included, then merit for reward would have to be judged in an inequality-sensitive way.
Only if it was 'material' in the Accountancy sense- i.e. it affected the macro picture.
Despite the inclusion of inequality aversion among the criteria for judging a society, however, merit-based rewards may, in fact, generate considerable inequality, since there are other criteria as well (or other aspects of the combined objective function).
Not if by 'merit' we mean something exceptional. Then the thing is not 'material'. It doesn't matter in the slightest. Some people may win the lottery. Some others may show exceptional merit and may be given a prize, but this alters nothing in the macro picture.
The presence of inequality and other drawbacks can lead to some psychological tension, especially since the rewarding of merit is not directly valued under the incentive approach.
More prizes should be given for giving prizes. The Iyer Prize was recently jointly awarded to the Noble Prize and the Iyer Iyer Prize for being the most meritorious Prize ever. Why will nobody else award the Iyer Prize or the Iyer Prize Prize a nice Prize attached to a bag full of money and a chance to dine with Queen Bey?
Fourth, even though the incentive-based argument for rewarding merit tends to be, in principle, accepted as the main justification for such a reward system,
This is not the case. When there is a Talent Competition or a Beauty competition or a Spelling Bee or something of that sort, the aim is to stimulate a Tardean mimetic effect. But mimetic effects operate independently of incentives. Thus kids may dress like their favorite pop star not because they gain anything material by it but simply coz they think the thing is cool.
There was a brief moment, when I was in Collidge, when I tried to pass for a 'nerd'. Then my exam results came out. I then decided to pass for a thug. This was actually much more satisfying.
some of the particular interpretations that go with the championing of merit-rewards are unnecessary and, in some cases, inconsistent with the incentive approach. The common additional features include: (1) confounding merit of actions with that of persons (and possibly of groups of people),
Very true. Actions are performed by fairies. People don't perform actions. We should reward fairies not valorous soldiers or great scientists who figure out a way to defeat COVID.
(2) overlooking the instrumental nature of the incentive argument and seeing the rewards of merit as intrinsic entitlements or deserts, and
We don't see merit as 'intrinsic entitlement'. Why? We know plenty of people who are really really pretty or really really witty but who aint making big bucks in Hollywood. We also know that some big movie stars- e.g. Harrison Ford- went through a slump before hitting the big time. Apparently Ford made his living as a carpenter during his dry spell. Good for him.
(3) ad hoc exclusion of distributional concerns from the objective function in terms of which merit is characterized.
If there is an objective function for merit then we have a Structural Causal Model and can mass produce that type of merit.
As for 'distributional concerns'- nobody has given a flying fuck about them for the last 50 years. Academics may not know this but then Academics are as stupid as shit.
Each of these departures makes meritocracies more prone to generate economic inequality,
What generates economic inequality is comparative, not absolute, advantage. Sen simply doesn't know any Economics.
but they are in no sense part of the basic incentive approach to rewarding merit.
There is no such approach. The fact is, if you provide goods and services which people want, then- in an open market- you get rewarded. This has nothing to do with merit. It has everything to do with providing stuff other people like. The Academy or the Bureaucracy may recruit people on the basis of perceived merit or talent, but their brains soon turn to shit.
Perhaps the most fundamental problem with the conventional understanding of “meritocracy” is the distance that has grown between “meritocracy” (thus conceived) and the foundational idea of rewarding merit.
There is no such distance. Meritocracy just means 'careers open to talent'. Some paranoid nutters may rave about how some bureaucracy is recruiting geniuses to some fell purpose. Back in the Fifties, there was plenty of pulp fiction about Fu Manchu or Blofeld or some other evil genius kidnapping the top Scientists and getting them to make a Doomsday machine. But Bond or some other such hero would turn up to blow up their underground laboratory.
Recognizing merit has a mimetic, not an incentive, effect. We know we can never be a great sports star- but we can go for a jog once in a while. We can't become Queen Bey- but we can have fun waggling our buttocks at the Christmas party. Sadly, stupidity can sometimes be mistaken for merit. Plenty of Indians imitated Sen and ended up being utterly useless.
Ultimately, it is the fitness landscape which must decide what is merit and what are demerit goods. Being a Gandhian shithead once appeared meritorious in India. Then, slowly it dawned on us that not being able to feed or defend yourself means you aren't really Independent at all. You are simply a pathetic beggar.
It turned out that cars and fridges and TVs were 'merit goods'. Gandhian shite was a 'demerit' good. Armies are necessary and salutary. So are nukes. If Ukraine hadn't given up its nuclear arsenal it would not be in the jam it is in now. Still, the people of Ukraine have shown their mettle. Let us pray they prevail.
