In today’s HINDU an absurd article under the title “myths of meritocracy appeared at p 10. As usual the bogey of DMK principles argued assimilative by the 3 authors. And all of them were ideas stolen from Oxford university article:
ARTICLE dealt with long ago: Economic class is not the only determinant of an individual’s access to the job market, as social identities ascertain the rules of an individual’s participation in society. Social discrimination and barriers function to exclude individuals from accessing opportunities despite fulfilling the otherwise prescribed criteria. People from the same economic class belonging to different social groups receive different treatment due to their identity. Even the provision of welfare programs or admissions to schools or colleges can suffer from skews due to societally existing prejudices clouding the judgement of decision-makers, whether overtly or covertly. We have already laid out how social groups across the world faced injustices, including the exclusion from wealth acquisition, which in turn is a crucial determinant of access to education and skills. However, the effect of social inequalities is not just limited to getting education and skills, but also extends to the job market itself. Prejudicial behaviour, structural discrimination, and biased beliefs ensure the exclusion of people from disadvantaged sections for jobs and positions for which they completely fulfil the criteria. It also results in differential rewards for people with the same productivity, skillset, and position as exemplified by the well-acknowledged gender wage gap. Thereby, neither is access to skill equally accessible nor are the terms of participation in the job market. These realities stand in contrast to the meritocratic ideal of rewards received being proportional to effort. Inequality of opportunity is undesirable for a multitude of reasons. Ethically, individuals should not be treated differentially based on any socially constructed identity. The equality of humans is a widely accepted notion, implying that there are no relevant differences in people’s characteristics that would justify unequal treatment. Inequality of opportunity is unfair structural discrimination that violates this principle of human equality. Theoretical equality does not necessarily translate to substantive equality, and although countries across the world have some measure of the former, there is an absence of substantive equality. A fair world entails equal treatment in practice and not just in theory. Pragmatic considerations also make inequality undesirable. Many economists have justified a certain level of inequality in society by arguing that it stimulates growth and development, and the presence of extraordinarily privileged or wealthy individuals can benefit the society as a whole and increase cumulative welfare, or increase the size of the pie to be shared. However, such theories have proven fallacious as the promise of trickle-down economics has failed to deliver. The reality is one where the wealthy claim a significant portion of the pie without adding enough value to justify such inequality. While the benefits of inequality have proven to be non-existent, the harms continue to plague societies. Inequality of opportunity prevents people from accessing certain professions where they could potentially excel. There could be countless potential artists, musicians, scientists, or intellectuals who never got the opportunity to explore that potential due to the circumstances of their birth, lack of exposure and unavailability of safety nets. Aside from such missed opportunities for enhancing social welfare, there are more direct consequences of inequalities. Economic inequality is associated with higher rates of health problems and a lower life expectancy.6 There is also a positive correlation with crime rate indicators like homicides and incarceration rates.7 Studies have found that people in more equal societies are also more likely to trust each other.8 These are all directly negative consequences of inequalities structurally resulting from inequality of opportunities, that require interventions. Inequalities threaten the democratic processes that proudly underline our societies. Elections fought with massive corporate funding inevitably result in political processes built to serve the interests of the wealthy, creating a symbiotic nexus between the economically wealthy and the politically powerful, excluding large sections of society from fair access to democratic power. Even the principle of one person, one vote is being upended in practice which is more reflective of the notion ‘one dollar, one vote’. Wealth and social power are strong determinants of narratives prevalent in society and significantly determine voting patterns. Media houses, which play a crucial role in transmitting relevant information to individual voters, are increasingly controlled by those with socio-economic power, effectively controlling information channels that represent the fourth pillar of democracy. They actively intervene to proliferate narratives through the spread of selective information, in order to further their interests. These deliberate actions are reflective of socio-economic asymmetries resulting from inequality of opportunity transforming the nature of political processes and resulting in unrepresentative democracies wherein people are denied fair access to information that is crucial to their decision-making. Consequently, the implication for any welfare-concerned democratic state is action targeted at reducing the inequality of opportunity. Necessarily, these actions would be redistributive, aimed at creating a level playing field with the end-goal of an entirely egalitarian society where circumstances would be irrelevant to an individual’s life outcomes. Healthcare and education are primary needs which must be provided for through public enterprise. The existence of private enterprise in these areas hinders the equal provision of opportunity, and there are multiple avenues to counter that. The Iceland model entails the creation of efficient public systems that eliminate the space for private enterprise. Harsher alternatives include the prevention of private educational and health institutions; however, such banning might impinge on freedom unnecessarily. Consequently, the most viable alternative is proper regulation of private institutions and imposing affirmative action policies like mandatory service provision to socio-economically disadvantaged groups, while striving to make public institutions more efficient. Affirmative action policies are crucial interventions to counter social exclusion, challenges that continue to exist in society wherein merit and skills can prove inadequate owing to prejudicial beliefs. Welfare policies require substantial amounts of resource investment. The means of raising these resources available to most countries across the world is taxation. Accordingly, we need stringent progressive taxation systems that heavily tax very high incomes, along with some form of wealth taxation. Wealth tax by itself fails to distinguish between wealth acquisition by individuals which could result from individual effort and inherited wealth resulting from circumstances. Thereby, it is essential to institute high inheritance taxes that aim to raise resources while simultaneously levelling the playing field by reducing the induced privilege of inheritance. Governments must have a will to raise taxes, which requires politics to reduce the leverage held by the wealthy through laws that prevent, or at least reduce corporate influence on electoral processes. However, there exists a widely acknowledged risk of wealthy citizens leaving the country and shifting to so-called tax havens. It becomes vital that such taxation is brought about by internationally coordinated action. These policy suggestions might seem unrealistic to some, and that is a consequence of widespread resistance to redistributive policies. The last part of this essay seeks to demonstrate how the notion of meritocracy is culpable in the creation of this resistance. Meritocracy espouses individualistic causation for outcomes, wrongly informing the disadvantaged sections of society that their suffering results from their inaction and inadequacy of effort. Concurrently, privileged groups find comfort in the idea that their position in society and welfare level results entirely from their merit and determination. This narrative often pedestalizes individuals from disadvantaged groups who manage to have a successful life despite their circumstances, to argue that society is indeed meritocratic, ignoring countless others whose lives continue to be heavily determined by their circumstances. There is no denying that individual effort is an essential determinant of outcomes. However, in placing the locus of control over outcomes entirely within the individual, the idea of meritocracy as it exists in society ignores structural disadvantages as well as privileges. The notion that any individual, no matter where she is born, can access the highest rewards in society implies that welfare is purely a function of personal factors like effort and dedication. Through our deconstruction of inequality of opportunities, we have established that welfare is, in practice, determined significantly by one’s socio-economic context, or where one is born in society. The idea of meritocracy arrived when there already existed significant social differences in access to resources and opportunities. It made obscure social privileges by shrouding them under the notion of merit-based rewards and helped structurally overlook them. Michelle Obama shocked American society by mentioning that slaves built the White House.9 America is structurally oblivious to the fact that the origins of large portions of wealth owned by white people trace back to the exploitation of African-American people through the explicitly exploitative structure of slavery. Despite an ostensible dismantling of the structure, there were no fully corrective measures for the history of injustices which meant that white people and African-Americans were never at a level starting point. While there exist other sociological and epistemological factors behind this, one of the reasons for the structural obfuscation of privilege is the idea of meritocracy that convinces an average white person that their ability to access a certain level of education, go to college, and get high-paying jobs directly results from their effort, and not privilege inherited from exploitative structures.10 In India, there has been consistent backlash and uproar against reservation, an example of affirmative action. The privileged caste groups, or Savarnas, feel wronged that people from the disadvantaged sections, or Dalits, get reserved seats in educational institutions and jobs due to their birth identity, feeling that it discriminates against them and does not reward merit. The feeling of being wronged and the single-minded emphasis on merit results from the obfuscation of privileges through the flawed notion of society being meritocratic. An identification and cognisance of structural disadvantages would lead to the realisation of the flawed nature of meritocracy, and recognition of circumstances as a determinant for outcomes. The consequences of this ignorance created by meritocratic narratives are twofold. It creates intense resistance to any redistributive policies which dilute the wealth and welfare enjoyed by privileged groups, who argue they have justly earned their possessions. These groups have resisted, in India’s case violently so, affirmative action policies as well as increases in taxation. There is a pushback on policies aimed at higher taxes by the wealthy who are convinced that they fairly earned their wealth/income entirely through effort, and the government wrongfully redistributes their resources to those who did not dedicate enough effort to succeed. The flipside is the possible world where acknowledgement of privilege and its role in determining outcomes replace narratives of meritocracy. There would be a clear understanding of the importance of circumstances in defining outcomes and the underlying deeply unfair structural discriminations. Studies have documented a preference for fairness among people to the extent that they would trade-off efficiency for increased fairness.11 There is a deep sense of angst that accompanies the awareness of living in an unjust society. A world where people are compelled to confront their privilege would be a more conducive world for social justice action, and policies aimed at the creation of a more egalitarian world. José Ortega y Gasset wrote, “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia”, which translates to: “I am: I and my circumstance”.12 Meritocracy structurally ignores circumstances in its measurement of a person’s worth, thereby privileging those whose circumstances were more favourable than others’. In an ideal world, circumstantial factors would not affect an individual’s life outcomes. However, in a socially unjust world, this ignorance turns structural, becoming an injustice of itself, placing the onus on individuals who have been structurally disadvantaged to alleviate their suffering even when their circumstances function against them, and allowing other groups to benefit while being blissfully unaware of their privilege. This essay argues that this notion of meritocracy is flawed due to the existing inequalities of opportunity; and that it is an active impediment to policies aimed at rectifying these injustices. Thereby, the tryst to alleviate inequalities must concurrently dismantle the notion of meritocracy as it currently exists, in order to move towards an egalitarian future. K Rajaram IRS 251224 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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