Survival of the Fittest

Yale Law professor, Daniel Markovits, wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine, a few years ago where he argued that meritocracy makes everyone miserable. The Harvard Gazette recently claimed that meritocracy is a myth. And the Princeton University Press has said that “belief in meritocracy is not only false, it is bad for you.” People on the left have also claimed, as usual, that meritocracy is a philosophy of white supremacy designed to keep people of color down. We used to be a country that embraced meritocracy. Most of the great things in our country were built through meritocracy. But more and more, we, as a society, are moving away from a merit-based system.

These types of attacks on meritocracy began with the introduction of the word, “equity” in place of “equality” in our societal conversations. “Equality” means treating everybody equal under the law. It prevents a multi-tiered justice system from emerging because everyone is treated the same regardless of what societal category they fall into. Equality will produce unequal outcomes because everyone has different abilities. Conversely, “equity” means artificially creating equal outcomes by treating everyone unequally under the law. Equity requires the creation of a multi-tiered justice system to produce the desired equal outcomes. The cost of “equity” will always be equality.

Equity disregards the merited outcomes and replaces them with the desired equal outcomes. It takes from someone one who has earned something and gives it to someone who has not earn it. People no longer have control over the outcomes in their lives because the outcomes are forgone conclusions. So, the straight A student who aced the SATs will not get accepted into a University because he didn’t check the correct equity boxes, while the B student who did okay on the SATs will get accepted because he did check the correct boxes. And that is how unmeritocratic equity works. Ability and achievement do not factor in as much as other considerations which artificially create the desired outcomes. The best examples of how meritocracy produces the best results is in professional sports where winning, defeating your opponent is preeminent.