Smarts or Character?
On Matt Yglesias, Hayek, and Meritocracy
Matthew Yglesias argues that meritocracy is bad. The problem, he says, is not that we don’t know how to sort the smart from the less smart, but that having smart people in charge who lack good character and judgment is worse for society than having less intelligent people in charge with good character and judgment. To use his example, we want doctors who are smart enough to heal us, but not so shrewd that they use their authority and asymmetric knowledge to scam us.
The problem, as I understand it, isn’t just incentives, that having asymmetric knowledge or power leads people to take advantage of others. It’s that having asymmetric knowledge or power leads to over-focus on the wrong things.
In short, smartness and moral judgment are independent variables, and to some extent—for Yglesias—there is a tradeoff between them.
Yglesias says he’s against those who seem to criticize meritocracy only to be saying that what we need is a better way of assessing merit. But isn’t this what Yglesias himself is doing, swapping out one definition of “the best and the brightest” for another? It seems to me, there is no way around the problem. Not that I’m optimistic about character tests or references, which can be gamed as much as the next assessment.
Say what you will about the biases and limits of standardized tests, or the ways that elites can win at them simply by hiring tutors who coach them on how to beat them, aren’t character tests even more arbitrary, even more game-able? No doubt, one can excel on an MCAT exam and be a horrible person. But I have no doubt that one can also excel on a moral judgment test and also be horrible. Shakespeare’s Iago is a case and point. Othello’s repetition of the phrase, “fair, honest Iago” is as tragically ironic as it is on point.
Yglesias’s title “meritocracy is bad” is either disingenuous clickbait or else misguided. What he really needs (means?) to say is “meritocracy is not enough.”
But how much meritocracy is necessary? At what point does optimizing for meritocracy face “diminishing returns”? Perhaps we need a baseline of competency or excellence amongst our leaders, but beyond that an extra unit of smarts is either irrelevant, wasteful, or even net negative.
It’s ironic that Yglesias favors a welfare-state, yet his critique of meritocracy overlaps with the libertarian thought of Hayek, who likewise thinks that intelligent leadership is, on the whole, worse than decentralized rule.
Where Yglesias differs from Hayek is that he doesn’t reject centralized rule, he simply wants us to place moral leaders at the center rather than smart ones. In this sense, Yglesias follows the Platonic model of rule by guardians, only instead of the guardians being philosophers, they are simpletons with good moral instincts (i.e., instincts that accord with Yglesias’s political views.)
So, is meritocracy really bad? Or is it that we should be pluralistic about what makes someone meritorious? If intelligence (or hard-work) shouldn’t be optimized for, what should be? And why should the standards be different for folks who work in government than those who lead companies, NGOs, and local communities?
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