You Get What You Deserve

In Favour of Meritocracy

It is the test of a great intellect that one can support an idea from which one may gain nothing—indeed, from which one may lose badly—and on this precept, I applaud myself for being a supporter of meritocracy, from which I stand to gain precisely nothing.

That meritocracy is both good and possible is acknowledged by many, but that it exists in actuality is acknowledged by few. I am perhaps the only person in existence who:

• supports a free, meritocratic market economy;

• believes that we live in a fully realized version of said market; and

• accepts his position at the very bottom of it.

This is not the case for the so-called “free-market libertarians.” While supportive of a meritocratic market in principle, they are fond of pinning their economic and personal failures on the few government regulations that still exist. The natural ability of the market to sort individuals into a hierarchy by ability, they claim, has been strangled by state intervention. “Were these forces that temper the market removed,” they whine, “I should be deputy manager by now.”

Left-wing detractors, on the other hand, deny the possibility of such a system altogether. They cite the impossibility of a tabula rasa, argue that fortunes gained and lost will accumulate, compound, and spill over to successive generations, and make other such arguments of procedencia pringada¹.

That the least talented complain of their lowly position is not an argument against, but proof of the existence of, a meritocratic system. Much nonsense, for instance, is spouted about James Forsyth and the number of golgappas he can fit in his mouth without gagging. But his father was certainly an intelligent, and consequently wealthy, man, and we would be intellectually dishonest to deny that his detached maisonette in Islington is anything but the fruit of this genetic inheritance.

Anything else is pure churlishness and sour grapes. But we would be foolish to expect meritocracy to produce a content lower order. With a few exceptions (which, of course, are remarkable and make us question the rule), people are sorted into the social milieu that best suits their intelligence and talents. For instance, the thumping music of the Ecuadorian bar in my neighbourhood, which easily penetrates the thin walls of my Franco-era apartamento, combined with the rhythmic slapping of the Chinese child upstairs by its mother, seems to sing:

“If neither parent studied beyond secondary,

Cease to write, and speak only in estuary.”

And so, it puts me firmly in my place. Neighbourhoods, I am reminded, are not improved when one writes poetry, but when house prices go up.

1. procedencia pringada: “From the mouths of losers”.