Myth of Meritocracy

It's not something that gets mentioned much in mainstream media. The myth of meritocracy is, as McNamee and Miller put it (http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v21/merit.htm), "...a gap between how people think the system works and how the system actually does work."

It is a commonly held perception by white, social conservatives that the reason they are in the social position they occupy is because of the quality of character, work, etc that they exhibit. This myth is the reason why the likes of George W. Bush can say the things they say, while still keeping a straight face.

However, this notion that the elites "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" is inconsistent with in-place institutions in our society. There are hierarchies in place that makes it all but impossible for minorities and women to make significant advances, as a group. That is not to say that individuals are not able to make advances; however, we commit the composition fallacy when we say that African Americans, Latinos, or Women can advance in our society: just because individuals can advance does not mean that a whole can advance.

So what factors are at play?

First of all, consider the current wealth structure (at least as of 2001):


Wealth Group Share of Net Worth
99-100th percentile 32.7%
95-99th percentile 25.0%
90-95th percentile 12.1%
50th-90th percentile 27.1%
0-50th percentile 2.8%
Total 100.0%


According to McNamee and Miller, "These tables show that the distributions of income and especially wealth are highly skewed. The top 20 percent of American households, for instance, receive a large portion of the total amount of available income (49.7%) while the lowest 20 percent of American households receive a much smaller portion of available income (3.5%)." They go on to write, "any of the arguments suggesting that "merit" is behind the distribution of income and wealth also make the case that merit is distributed "normally" in the population. That is, that the shape of the distribution of merit resembles a "bell curve" with small numbers of incompetent people at the lower end, most people of average abilities in the middle and small numbers of talented people at the upper end. The highly skewed distribution of economic outcomes, however, appears quite in excess of any reasonable distribution of merit. Something that is distributed "normally" cannot be the direct and proportional cause of something with such skewed distributions."

Consider the following interpretation of Marx (http://humanoidinterface.wordpress.com/2006/10/29/on-meritocracy/): "In this age of universal capitalism and consequently of widening economic disparities, this myth has gone a step further. Corporations use 'Meritocracy' to rob the poor in the very name of poverty, i.e. because they are poor. It is through the exploitation of labour by the corporations that the economic gap is widened. Capitalism itself is an inverse meritocracy. One only needs to look closer at how capitalism functions—who does the work, who gains the wealth and how that wealth is being accumulated. In a capitalist society, social advancement is based on the exploitation of the members of society who actually perform the work and who therefore create all value.[5] The myth of meritocracy neutralizes the two diametrical opposites, capitalism and social advancement according to value, or merit."

I think this characterization of capitalism is a good one. It is, as the writer describes it "inverse meritocracy." Since America is capitalist, and since capitalists operate under the notion that they earned their status, we see that American capitalism produces the myth of meritocracy, therefore, American capitalism is a system of inverse meritocracy.