Meritocracy - Neither Descriptive nor Desirable

A guest poster at Kiwiblog informs us that full equality of opportunity exists - the only reason why you might be unsuccessful in life is because you're lazy.

This is of course silly, not even the most ardent meritocrat would argue that there is a 0% correlation between your parents' wealth and your own (for example), even correcting for other factors like IQ. Hard work just isn't all the story. But underlying it is the common concept that wealth in society is and ought to be distributed according to merit.

Morally, this is the wrong way of looking at things. As Robert Nozick showed a while back, if you want a society where wealth is strictly patterned according to a particular variable you like (hard work, intelligence, number of posts read on Defective Equilibrium), you are going to have to continually interfere in voluntary (and often mutually beneficial) transactions to maintain this distribution. To take the merit-based argument, if you really want wealth to be distributed according to merit, once you had a meritocracy, you would have to forbid people giving gifts to people less meritorious than themselves, lazy people from accidentally making new discoveries and getting rich off them, etc. To actually maintain the pattern would require a state that intrudes in things most people think it probably shouldn't.

Equally important is that 'merit' is such a nebulous concept, it's more or less impossible to draw any moral conclusions from it. What attributes I think are good are likely to be highly different to the attributes you admire. Maybe I think that a lazy but brilliant person is of greater merit than a hard-working average person, or maybe vice versa. There's not an obvious set of independent standards by which we can judge this. Most people implicitly judge it by imagining what they want to be like, and assuming that everyone should also aspire to that, or something very similar. But that is not a very good way of doing it. It's easy to accept that different people can gain equal enjoyment from living vastly different lives, that is, theories of the good should be thin (at best). But people are for some reason reluctant to generalise this when thinking about desirable personal attributes.

There's also the important question of which of your attributes you deserve and which you do not (further reading: Rawls' Original Position). Surely I don't 'deserve' in any merit-based way the money my parents worked to earn (note that this is a different thing from saying I am entitled to it in a Nozickian sense). But then why should I deserve their work ethic, intelligence, or anything else I might (or might not) inherit from them? Surely I can't claim to be a better person for things I'm not responsible for in any meaningful way?

Conclusion: The meta-readers among you will notice that I've presented a kind of right-wing and a kind of left-wing argument here. My hope is that no matter where on the political spectrum you fall, you will reject meritocracy. There are just simply way better alternatives out there.