Even a tyranny of the meritocracy cannot help a democracy

Whether it is a limited government or an expanded one, a government we shall always need, without which we will look at "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  A government requires an executive team, managers, workers, and a process to figure out how to make sure that this government does what we would like it to do.

Easier said.

In this struggle to figure out this problem, it appears that we are a lot less comfortable with some kind of a democracy over other alternatives.  Yes, I am channeling Winston "Bengal Famine" Churchill here, who observed that democracy is the worst form of governance that humans ever invented, except that the alternatives are even worse.  I suppose politics and elections are all about the various levels of discomfort we have with this system.  The discomfort leads even conservatives to worry that the American democracy has become a plutocracy, even as a few other nutcase-conservatives worry that it is becoming a communist society.

If any kind of a inherited right to govern does not appeal to us, then surely the meritorious climbing up to govern should be ok, right?

Yep, a trick question that was!  As this reviewer of Twilight of the Elites notes:

The ideal of meritocracy has deep roots in this country. Jefferson dreamed of a “natural aristocracy.”

What is the problem?

[America] is governed by a ruling class that has proved unworthy of its power. According to Hayes, the failures of the last decade created a deep crisis of authority. We counted on elites to do the right thing on our behalf. The Iraq War, steroid scandal in baseball, abuse cover-up in the Catholic Church, incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina, and, above all, financial crisis showed that they didn’t know enough or care enough to do so.
Twilight of the Elites advances two explanations for these failures. The first emphasizes elite ignorance. People with a great deal of money or power aren’t like the rest of us. Their schedules, pastimes, and even transportation are different to those of ordinary people. This isn’t always because their tastes are distinctive, at least initially. It’s often a job requirement.
In addition to their unusual lifestyles, elite types don’t spend much time with averages Joes. At work, they’re surrounded by subordinates. At home, they live in literally or metaphorically gated communities and socialize with people similar to themselves. Again, there’s nothing sinister about this. Because of their distance from the rest of the population, however, members of the elite often have little idea what’s going on in less rarefied settings.
One consequence, Hayes argues, is that elites have trouble making good decisions. 

Any which way we are damned!

The defect of meritocracy:

 ... is not the inequality of opportunity that it conceals, but the inequality of outcome that it celebrates. In other words, the problem is not that the son of a postal clerk has less chance to become a Wall Street titan than he used to. It’s that the rewards of a career on Wall Street have become so disproportionate to the rewards of the traditional professions, let alone those available to a humble civil servant.

So, what can be done then?

For years now, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have been writing about the problems with how the economic rewards are shared, in a language that even I can understand.  Yes, I admit that these two are very much a part of the meritocracy.  The elites.  The NYRB reviews their books (End this depression now! and The price of inequality)

“Unfortunately,” Krugman writes,

we’re not using the knowledge we have, because too many people who matter—politicians, public officials, and the broader class of writers and talkers who define the conventional wisdom—have, for a variety of reasons, chosen to forget the lessons of history and the conclusions of several generations’ worth of economic analysis, replacing that hard-won knowledge with ideologically and politically convenient prejudices.

It might be tempting then to think that perhaps only the well-informed, intelligent, and meritorious ought to lead the governance.  But, it assumes that those with whom we disagree are not intelligent, ill-informed, and not meritorious.  Further, we have plenty of examples of failed leaders with plenty of merit!  Any which way we are damned!


The NYRB reviewer goes on to note:

[The] most striking feature of these two books by Nobel Prize–winning economists is their emphasis on politics. Economists have traditionally insisted on the primacy of economic factors. In studying growing inequality, for instance, they have focused on economic forces like trade and technological change. Only in recent years (in part through the urgings of iconoclasts like Krugman and Stiglitz) has there been a turn to politics to explain America’s distinctive economic challenges—a reorientation that brings economics back toward its original conception as the science of political economy.

So, we are then back to the starting point: how do we deal with this politics and government?

By putting politics center stage, Krugman and Stiglitz greatly advance that cause. Yet neither offers a fully convincing diagnosis, albeit for very different reasons.

We are damned!

[We] have a choice. Politics got us into our economic mess, and only a revitalized politics can get us out of it.

Dream on!

[There] is no society without a governing class. Whether they’re selected by birth, intelligence, or some other factor, some people inevitably exercise power over others. Hayes mounts a powerful critique of the meritocratic elite that has overseen one of the most disastrous periods of recent history. He lapses into utopianism, however, when he suggests that we can do without elites altogether. Like the poor, elites will always be with us. As the word’s original meaning suggests, the question is how they ought to be chosen.

Dream on!

But, I don't know Jack!