I Don’t Think He’s Read the Code

In his most recent Washington Post column George Will laments the present attacks on standardized testing and, indeed, on the very idea of meritocracy:

This cultural moment is defined by the peculiar idea that America has such a surplus of excellence, it can dispense with something that should be rejected as inequitable — rigorous competition to identify merit. Progressives are recoiling from the idea that propelled humanity’s ascent to modernity: the principle that people are individuals first and primarily, so individual rights should supplant rights attached to group membership.

Progressives’ unease with society measuring merit when allocating opportunity and rewards is discordant with the nation’s premises. And rejecting meritocracy at a time when China — the United States’ strongest geopolitical rival ever — is intensifying its embrace of it is “an act of civilisational suicide,” Adrian Wooldridge warns.

He continues:

So they attack selective public schools that base admissions on standardized tests. All uses of such tests, and Advanced Placement high school classes, and other sorting procedures are stigmatized because they produce disparate outcomes, which supposedly reveal “systemic racism.” That dangerous dogma collides with this fact: Substantial cognitive stratification is inevitable in modern, information-intensive societies. As Wooldridge says, there cannot be sustained economic growth without meritocracy.

and

Some progressives, who are more interested in minimizing inequality than maximizing opportunity, insist that not even industriousness makes an individual deserving is because it is an inherited trait. However, less loopy progressives rightly warn that there can be inherited hierarchies in meritocratic societies. America does fall short of Thomas Jefferson’s hope for “culling” talent “from every condition of our people.” SAT prep classes are not models of social diversity; parents are conscientious (this is not a vice) about transmitting family advantages to their children.

with his peroration:

It is a virtue of meritocracy that it produces inequality. “You need,” Wooldridge writes, “above-average rewards to induce people to engage in … self-sacrifice and risk-taking. Reduce the rewards that accrue to outstanding talent and you reduce the amount of talent available to society as a whole.”

I don’t think the problem is with standardized testing. I think it is there are so few different standardized tests that are or have historically been accepted by prestigious schools. In other words it is a problem of centralization, bureaucracy, and, in fact, that there are prestigious schools in the first place. That Goldman-Sachs, S&P Global Ratings, or Harvard Law (or, going farther down the food chain, Cravath, Swaine & Moore) draw so many from Ivy League schools is not a confirmation of the superiority of those individuals. It’s a ratification of the admissions policies of those schools which are in part meritocratic, in part elitist, and in part who knows what?

Shorter: the problem being attacked isn’t meritocracy so much as that the definition of merit is so crabbed.

I would add that China has a millennium-old tradition of meritocracy, going right back to the imperial civil service examination. It was, in fact, true that a peasant’s son who passed the exam received a lifetime job in the imperial civil service. However, it was a lot easier for the child of a rich man to pass the exam.

However, I don’t think that George Will has read the code. Those rejecting merit or industriousness as a basis for compensation reject America as it has been historically. Rather than seeing it as benign they think it is and was malignant. Surely anything would be better. What are the contours of that “anything”? I’m not sure they know but they are convinced that it would be an improvement because of the benignity of their motives.