Jahel Queralt, professor of Political Philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, observed with amazement how on the left – both political and academic – the word meritocracy had acquired a cursed aura. It was accused of deceiving with false promises, dividing society between proud winners and humiliated losers, and offering a moral alibi for inequality. But Queralt believes that meritocracy «is the only way for those of us from humble families to climb a few rungs». So the question ended up imposing itself: what does the left propose instead?
From that perplexity arises Nobody Deserves Anything. Why the Left Needs Meritocracy (Anagrama), an essay that combines political philosophy and personal experience to defend a deliberately uncomfortable thesis: the left has good reasons to fight meritocracy as an ideology, but it is wrong to confuse it with the ideal of justice. Abandoning it as a guiding principle would mean giving up one of the great historical achievements of progressivism.
Because meritocracy was not born to justify that the rich are rich: «Its origin is to deny that birth, class privilege, gender, connections, or family wealth have to determine each person’s social expectations,» explains Queralt. Before British sociologist Michael Young popularized the term in 1958, the meritocratic revolution had been underway for centuries. It is in the challenge to the estate privileges of the 18th-century French Revolution, in 19th-century British reformism, in Fabian socialism and, later, in the expansion of education and the welfare state. Even George Bernard Shaw could defend selection by merit and ability within an egalitarian socialist project: it was, Queralt says, about preventing «the talent of the working classes from rotting away».
The principle, as formulated, seems hardly objectionable. If we need a surgeon, a judge, or an engineer, we want the position to be held by whoever can perform it best, not by whoever has the right parents, more money, or better contacts. And according to Queralt, it is not even necessary to resort to great moral principles to justify it: efficiency is enough. A society is a system of cooperation and has an interest in having different tasks performed by those most competent for them. «The reason we have to defend meritocracy is not individual recognition, but collective benefit,» states Queralt.
The problem starts before reaching the starting line. The author of Nobody Deserves Anything recalls that when she finished Law she thought about taking the judge exam, but the scholarships that existed then were token. If taking the exam requires several years without income, only those who can afford it will be able to try. The exam can be impeccably meritocratic and yet the system may have also lost the best candidates for the position: «From an efficiency point of view, this is suboptimal because we have wasted talent».
Here appears the second half of the meritocratic contract. It is not enough to select the best candidate: it is necessary to ensure that everyone has had sufficient opportunities to become the best candidate they could be. Otherwise, meritocracy does not destroy privilege, but consolidates it and creates what Daniel Markovits has called a «meritocracy aristocracy».
The mistake is to transform an ideal of justice – how opportunities should be distributed – into a description of how our society already works. And yet, much of the left has ended up accepting precisely that identification. If the word meritocracy serves to legitimize unjust inequalities, the solution would seem to be to repudiate it. Queralt proposes exactly the opposite: many of the pathologies we denounce as consequences of meritocracy are, in reality, deficits of meritocracy.
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But to rescue it, it must first be stripped of two attachments. The first is the moralization of merit. That someone is technically better than another does not mean they are morally better. We can applaud a person’s ability, talent, or effort without concluding that they deserve a moral medal for possessing them.
Queralt takes the idea quite far. It is not necessary, she warns, to accept her own skepticism about free will. It is enough to recognize how much of what we are depends on factors we never chose. She ended up being a professor, doing intellectual work that requires certain abilities. But can those abilities be entirely attributed to her effort and decisions? «This is a set of chances: genetic luck, social luck, circumstantial luck». She could have studied in another city, met other people, been born into another family. «How can you claim all the merit when it is so evident that all these conditions exist?», she asks.
But, she insists, none of this obliges us to stop admiring excellence. We can applaud someone extraordinarily good at their craft just as we admire a sunset or a person’s physical beauty: that is, without attributing moral merit. What Queralt wants to remove from circulation is something else: the conversion of competence into virtue and success into higher moral esteem.
The second attachment is commodification: that is, the necessary connection some establish between meritocracy and the market. Being deserving of a position by technical criteria does not mean deserving everything the market pays for occupying it. That leap – «if you deserve the position, you also deserve the remuneration» – does not belong to the original meritocratic ideal. And yet, it allows building a powerful justification for inequality: if I have earned everything I have, any tax comes to seem like a confiscation of what legitimately belongs to me. But meritocracy distributes opportunities and positions; it does not itself establish what the salary gap between those who hold one or the other should be.
The matter becomes more uncomfortable when we leave the finish line and return to childhood. What does it really mean to offer equal opportunities? Queralt introduces here a difficulty any parent knows: many of the advantages we pass on to our children come precisely from goods we are not willing to sacrifice. Reading them stories, filling the house with books, dedicating time to them, or choosing a certain school for them can give them an advantage over other children. But eliminating those differences would require interfering in family privacy in ways few would consider acceptable.
In the book, she recalls a conversation with her children’s father about whether to enroll them in the public school in the neighborhood or look for another option. The question behind it is uncomfortable: how many advantages is it ethical to buy for a child? We want to be good parents and we want to be just citizens, but both aspirations are not always compatible. Queralt rejects easy solutions. «You should not sacrifice your child’s well-being for your political ideals», she says, especially when a private decision is compensating for something the state should provide but does not. But she also does not accept that we can shelter those decisions under the label of strictly private. «The personal is political». Choosing a school is an individual decision protected by our freedom, but it also has collective consequences.
Spain offers, in her opinion, a good example. The high presence of charter and private schools should lead not only to asking why so many families prefer them for their children, but what is failing in the public system. It is a vicious circle: «The more those who can afford it move to private services, the smaller the social group with the capacity and interest to demand better public services».
At this point, it is inevitable to ask her about the latest PISA report. Queralt focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, which has resisted the general deterioration of results better than Spain. There, she explains, two policies combine that seem especially interesting from a meritocratic perspective: additional funding, student by student, to compensate for socioeconomic disadvantage and differentiated attention according to performance. «It is recognizing that people’s abilities are different. And this is not stigmatizing anyone: it is accepting that we have been dealt different cards». An equalizing policy, she argues, must care as much about those who do not reach the expected level as about those who can advance faster.
“It is recognizing that people’s abilities are different”
The most provocative part of the argument appears when she asks what exactly that equality of opportunity that the left wants to promote means. For decades, the answer has focused almost exclusively on the «social lottery»: parents’ income, neighborhood, school, contacts, cultural capital. Queralt believes the other half of the story is missing: the genetic lottery.
«From birth, we are not equal». The phrase especially discomforts the left, she acknowledges, because genetics carries an obvious historical stigma: talking about innate differences evokes some of the worst human experiments of the 20th century. Added to this is a Rousseauian egalitarian intuition according to which we are born equal and society makes us unequal. There is also a pragmatic reason: social inequalities seem manipulable through taxes, schools, or public policies, while for a long time genetics was presented as a black box.
But ignoring genetic inequality also has political consequences. Genes and environment are not two independent lotteries: they interact, reinforce, or compensate each other. «We cannot address social inequalities as if they appeared on flat ground, because they appear on ground that is already quite unequal,» she states.
Refusing to talk about it, Queralt argues, can produce exactly the effect the left intends to avoid: blaming those with less genetic luck. She gives the example of obesity: when biological predispositions are removed from the narrative, failure easily becomes a character flaw again: lack of will, discipline, or effort.
«What is not named cannot be corrected». That is the ultimate reason why Queralt wants to open a conversation she knows is uncomfortable. She does not propose making genetic profiles of schoolchildren nor offers a closed recipe. She suggests abandoning both determinism – believing genetics is an inexorable destiny – and its reverse, denialism that turns it into a taboo. As we better understand the predispositions that condition our abilities, she argues, we should be able to think of policies that mitigate their effects instead of pretending they do not exist.
In the end, the meritocracy Queralt defends looks very little like the caricature her critics fight. She does not claim that winners deserve their wealth, nor that those who fail are to blame for their failure, nor that the market is an infallible moral tribunal. She asserts something much more modest: that a society works better when it tries to have each person develop their abilities and then selects for each task whoever can perform it best. And precisely because those abilities depend largely on a combination of genes, family, education, circumstances, and chance, no one can claim their position as an exclusively personal achievement.
Perhaps that is why the apparently anti-meritocratic title of the book actually contains its defense of meritocracy. Nobody deserves anything. Neither those who reach the top deserve a medal, nor those who hover near the ground deserve our reproach. But a just society does have reasons to try to ensure that the cards we have been dealt condition as little as possible how far we can go.
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NOBODY DESERVES ANYTHING. WHY THE LEFT NEEDS MERITOCRACY
Editorial Anagrama. 128 pages. 9.49 euros. You can buy it here