The myth of meritocracy

Meritocracy represents a vision in which power and privilege would be allocated by individual merit, not by social origins. According to the meritocratic ideal, jobs should go not to people who have connections or pedigree, but to those best qualified for them, regardless of their background. Reservations allows for exceptions – for positive discrimination, to help undo the effects of previous discrimination. In moving toward the meritocratic ideal, we have imagined that we have retired the old encrustations of inherited hierarchies. But that is not the real story.

• Meritocracy is an ideal in which riches and rule were earned, not inherited. Democracy would give way to rule by the cleverest - not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent.
• Education mattered as a means of mobility, but also as a way to make people more forceful as citizens. Wealth reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve. 
• The eminent know that success is a just reward for their own capacity and their own efforts. Nearly all parents try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring. When you have inequalities of income, people with extra money pursues that goal. If the financial status of your parents helped determine your economic rewards, you would no longer be living by merit.
• Higher education in the US and Britain was seen as a great equaliser. But higher education is a great stratifier. Elite US universities – including Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, and Yale – take more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. Yale law professor Daniel Markovits argues - American meritocracy become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.
• Emerging cohort of mercantile meritocrats who had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers believes they have morality on their side and there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The carapace of merit had only inoculated the winners from shame and reproach.
• In US, liberal elites look down on ordinary Americans, ignore their concerns and use their power to their own advantage. Working-class men often think that middle-class and upper-class men are unmanly or undeserving. American white working class has been persuaded that they do not deserve the opportunities that have been denied to them.
• Talent is capitalised efficiently only in high tax brackets and that we have simply failed to achieve the meritocratic ideal. If you were upholding meritocracy, then your equation was sponsoring a larger inequality.
• The central task of ethics is to ask what it is for a human life to go well. A plausible answer is that living well means meeting the challenge set by three things: your capacities, the circumstances into which you were born, and the projects that you yourself decide are important. Because each of us comes equipped with different talents and is born into different circumstances, and because people choose their own projects, each of us faces his or her own challenge. There is no comparative measure that would enable an assessment of whether your life or my life is better. What matters in the end is simply that we do our best.
• The capacity for hard work is the result of natural endowments and upbringing. So neither talent nor effort would determine rewards in the world of the meritocracy. People who have been repeatedly labelled ‘dunce’ still have capacities and the challenge of making a meaningful life. The lives of the less successful are not less worthy than those of others. There is simply no sensible way of comparing the worth of human lives.
• Money and status are rewards that can encourage people to do the things that need doing. A well-designed society will elicit and deploy developed talent efficiently. The social rewards of wealth and honor are inevitably going to be unequally shared, because that is the only way they can serve their function as incentives for human behavior. But we go wrong when we deny not only the merit but the dignity of those who were unlucky.
• People will inevitably want to share both money and status with those they love, seeking to get their children financial and social rewards. But we should not secure our children’s advantages in a way that denies a decent life to the children of others. Each child should have access to a decent education, suitable to her talents and her choices; each should be able to regard him- or herself with self-respect. We need to apply ourselves to something we do not yet quite know how to eradicate contempt for those who are disfavored by the ethic of effortful competition.
• Most CEOs of big corporations, Wall Street mavens, and high-priced lawyers got where they are because they knew the right people. A prestigious college packed with the children of wealthy and well-connected parents is now the launching pad into the stratosphere of big money. Elite colleges are doing their parts to accelerate the trend.
• Jared Kushner (Ivanka Trump's husband)'s father reportedly pledged $2.5 million to Harvard just as young Jared was applying, in 1998. The young man gained admission, despite rather mediocre grades.
• The monstrous concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the rich can effectively buy college admission for their children. It has created a justice system in which the rich can buy their way out of prison. It has spawned a political system in which the rich can buy their way into Congress and even into the Presidency. (Donald Trump, perhaps Starbuck’s Howard Schultz). And a health care system in which the super-rich can buy care unavailable to others (concierge medicine). Ditto in India also - even more blatant. It seems, everything is for sale. 

We live in a plenitude of incommensurable hierarchies, and the circulation of social esteem will always benefit the better novelist, the more important mathematician, the savvier businessman, the faster runner, the more effective social entrepreneur. We cannot fully control the distribution of economic, social and human capital, or eradicate the intricate patterns that emerge from these overlaid grids. But class identities do not have to internalize those injuries of class. It remains an urgent collective endeavor to revise the ways we think about human worth in the service of moral equality. 

We live in a system that espouses merit equality and a level playing field 

but exalts those with wealth power and celebrity however gained. - Derrick A. Bell

In India, a typical entrance test for medical admissions is competed by over 200,000 students for 2,000 seats i.e. 1:100. Almost all successful students belongs to wealthy, well-connected and attended very expensive & unethical coaching classes. Any system that ignores level playing field for poorer sections must be disbanded. The present entrance exam could be used as a qualifier test to select 20,000 merit students i.e. top 10%. And the final 2,000 students (among the qualified 20,000) should be selected purely on lottery basis, with no weightage for skewed merit. This would enable elimination of non-merit candidates and disbanding of all kinds of reservations. Women reservations (among merit qualified only) may continue for some more time. Aspiring poor candidates need not go through expensive coaching classes route to get into merit list of 20,000 because a real merit student could easily get qualified with self preparation. Thus coaching classes would lose their sheen and exploitation of aspiring students will come to an end.