Meritocratic Decay
Does systematic equality produce systemic inequality?
I.
Consider a brief thought experiment:
100 healthy children (1:1 M:F) are raised in the same, fictitious, isolated and bountiful community. Each child has equal access to more than enough of identical resources: exercise, nutrition, education, and healthcare. These children also have equal opportunity defined as: they may do whatever they can do (provided their actions are legal). Is this system fair?
By controlling for everything other than individual differences, we ensure that these children succeed or fail as much on merit alone as is possible. It would not be unfair to say that the extent of their success is theirs to own.
All else being equal, for how many generations can that system continue until it’s unjust?
Wherever you draw the line, it probably won’t be too long. Intervention is necessary to ensure that equal access and opportunity are sufficiently equal.
II.
A Procedural Justice argument would suggest that ‘if the procedure is just, then the outcome is just’. Accepting it means that because the procedures are fair within every generation, the outcomes for each generation are also fair.
Yet, it’s equally true that visiting inequality upon future generations because of the conditions of previous generations is not what we would call justice. The mistakes and misfortunes of your parents should not be your burden. However, in the system we just described, this is exactly what happens over time. In essence, pure procedural justice may not scale across time in meritocratic systems.
Meritocracy is intra-generationally just and inter-generationally unjust. It’s not either fair or unfair — it’s both. Systematic equality produced systemic inequality.
This is Meritocratic Decay, a long-term tension between procedural justice and substantive justice. Unlike classical problems of procedural and substantive justice, while we feel the effects of Meritocratic Decay in the short-term, we cannot see it until we view the process in its entirety, from beginning to end.
Remember, our thought experiment lacks the complexity of a real society. Complexity in systems wildly augments the meritocracy problem. We made little-to-no account of genetic variability (and associated good or bad luck in that department), mental illness, economic crises, or significant technological advancements.
Furthermore, most of the things we can’t control for are not natural causes of equality and justice (except that some small subset of them have a reasonably equal chance of happening to anybody). The best we can say is that, typically, natural causes of inequality are distributed pretty randomly.
‘Goodness’ is found in the right actions, processes, and procedures. There are only so many ways to be good; only so many ways to order and structure oneself and the world to benefit us all. There are many, many more ways to be bad. As with any structure, ‘Good’, well-ordered structures require constant energy to maintain and almost never pop-up out of nowhere. Nature is not a well-spring of fairness.
Systems are not all alike, and society isn’t a monolithic system. Society is a supersystem [3]: layers of complex, dynamic systems - interdependent and interconnected by varying degrees - some of our design and others not, some in our control and others not.
A system will only suffer problems of Meritocratic Decay to the extent that it is meritocratic. Few systems, if any, are wholly meritocratic. Furthermore, if there are any wholly meritocratic systems, they may not be the same. For example: systems predicting outcomes using past performance are liable produce different outcomes to ones predicting outcomes using a measure of potential and/or dispositions.