Rethinking meritocracy

Singapore is a country that prides itself on meritocracy, and indeed most Singaporeans are proud of that too. The basis is that meritocracy is fair in that everyone has a chance to raise up in the society as long as you have merit, regardless of your ethnicity and your social class.

However, recently, I began to have second thoughts about meritocracy. One of the problems I find is that it breeds a sense of entitlement and a tendency towards indifference for the less fortunate. It is common to find people who feel they are entitled to huge rewards, believing that they deserve so purely because of their own merits, and disregarding any forms of interactions with other people that lead them there. And then there are people who thought the poor deserves to be poor because they are not working hard enough.

Today, I come across another interesting idea in the Straits Times article Misguided fight against 'inequality' (by Samuel Brittan. Straits Times, 8 Oct 2011 p.A39). What is interesting is that the article referred to Hayek's an argument that there is a difference between "value" and "merit". What we are actually doing in the name of meritocracy is not so much rewarding people for their merit as much as their value. Perhaps that's where meritocracy starts to go wrong.

According to Friedrich A Hayek:

The inborn as well as the acquired gifts of a person clearly have a value to his fellows which does not depend on any credit due to him for possessing them. There is little a man can do to alter the fact that his special talents are very common or exceedingly rare. A good mind or a fine voice, a beautiful face or a skilful hand, and a ready wit or an attractive personality are in a large measure as independent of a person's efforts as the opportunities or the experiences he has had. In all these instances the value which a person's capacities or services have for us and for which he is recompensed has little relation to anything that we can call moral merit or deserts. Our problem is whether it is desirable that people should enjoy advantages in proportion to the benefits which their fellows derive from their activities or whether the distribution of these advantages should be based on other men's views of their merits.

For the full reading on this idea, see the following URL:
http://www.woldww.net/classes/General_Philosophy/Hayek-equality.htm