Meritocracy: The Doha Debate
This summer, I did a Doha Debate on meritocracy. It was a four-way panel: me, Dan Markovits from Yale Law School, Poornima Luthra from Imperial College London, and Parag Khanna, founder and CEO of AlphaGeo. It was a thrilling intellectual experience, amplified by the excitement of visiting Qatar for the first time. Qatar, which competes with United Arab Emirates for the distinction of having the world’s best immigration policy.
A few friends criticized my willingness even to visit Qatar, infamous for giving sanctuary to the leadership of Hamas (initially, you should know, at the request of the United States government). But if I refused to visit countries whose governments are deeply evil, I could barely go anywhere. Indeed, I’d have to permanently leave the United States, because the lesser of our two evils is still really evil. Which is frankly absurd. I hold my own head high as long as I keep my own hands clean.
What about appearing on al Jazeera? Again, as long as I’m candidly expressing my actual views, I see no problem. Indeed, I’m a small part of the solution of improving discourse in Qatar, the Middle East, and the world. If al Jazeera offered me my own show, I’d take the offer. Qatar, the Middle East, and the world all need a lot more Caplan.
In coming weeks, I’ll share my reflections on the debate, and write a critical review of Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap. To preview, he’s an absolutely brilliant guy who believes an odd mix of deeply reasonable and totally crazy things.
If you say the same about me, I’ll totally take it as a compliment.
Here is the full version of the debate.
And here is the short version.
I have to admit that, after listening to a couple of incredibly simplistic and moronic comments from the students, I couldn't bear listening to the entire *debate.*
However, if you should find yourself debating this topic in the future, Bryan, you should ask your opponents if they think that, absent societal and economic constraints, they could shoot 3 pointers as well as Steph Curry, or play tennis as well as Carlos Alcaraz, etc. If they are honest enough to say "no," then you should ask them why they are willing to admit that, in the field of sports, individual merit and ability (and effort, tenacity, etc.) are important, why then do they think these factors are irrelevant in other spheres of life? If they are dishonest enough to say "yes," then I just recommend a deep eye roll.
Hopefully you also raised the issue of "zero sum thinking," which is really the background fallacy to people thinking that this is a very important question. The reality is that we all benefit tremendously from competence and merit. In fact, the amount of the benefit is probably directly and exponentially proportional to the distance between the competent and the incompetent.
One small point. I think it could help in debates like this to ask people to clarify their positions.
For example, a panelist said "meritocracy is a myth" and Bryan objected by saying that it would obviously be worse to assign people randomly to jobs. The panelist then gave the CV experiments as evidence for her claim. And Bryan replied by saying that biases can be justified as heuristics.
Bryan and the panelist were clearly talking past each other here. Bryan took her to mean something like "any degree of meritocracy is bad", while she probably meant "our society isn't 100% meritocratic", given that she cited the CV studies. Of course she's right about this, but then 100% meritocracy is obviously an unreasonably high bar. And of course it's unreasonable to try to express that with the phrase "meritocracy is a myth". But the point is that it would really help to try to get people to clarify what exactly they mean when they throw around phrases like that.