The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Meritocracy is killing the middle class

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Meritocracy has long been championed as a way of attaining success through hard work and skill; society's best and brightest are rewarded based on their performance, not their background. But some people have started to poke holes in this theory, arguing that meritocracy, as it exists today, is an illusion. Critics argue this foundational principle has been co-opted by society's elite, allowing them to transfer social status and wealth to their children by limiting the competition they face whether it's attaining higher education or gaining lucrative employment. The faux meritocracy of the 21st century is exacerbating inequality and diminishing opportunities for middle and lower class families and youth. While not perfect, others argue that meritocracy is the best system we have for conferring society's resources on individuals thereby rewarding human talent. Meritocracy has transformed over a century or more Western societies mostly for the better, giving the poor and middle class a chance at upward mobility and including women and other historically disadvantaged groups in the collective pursuit of individual success. Social mobility is stalling not because of meritocracy, but due to institutions' failure to complete the meritocratic revolution and fully embrace its core principles and ideas. Arguing for the motion is Daniel Markovits, Professor of Law at Yale Law School and author of The Meritocracy Trap. Arguing against the motion is Adrian Wooldridge, political editor of the Economist and author The Aristocracy of Talent. QUOTES: DANIEL MARKOVITS “Meritocracy has restructured education in such a way that having rich parents is almost a necessary condition for getting the kind of education that you need to get ahead.” ADRIAN WOODLRIDGE “Inequality between the upper and middle class is widening due to a lack of meritocracy. And the best solution to the problem is more meritocracy, not less meritocracy.” Sources: CNN, HBO, The Institute of Art and Ideas, Fox News, CNN The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail]. To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. How many you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution? This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Welcome to the Monk Debates. On every episode, we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information

to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, meritocracy is killing the middle class. When I stood in Downing Street as Prime Minister for the first time this summer, I set out my mission to build a country that works for everyone. Today, I want to talk a little more about what that means and lay out my vision for a truly meritocratic Britain. that puts the interests of ordinary working-class people first. As Churchill said of democracy, a meritocracy is the worst system to select a society's elites except for all the others.

And finally, new rule, if you believe in the philosophy of equality of outcomes, then you really shouldn't have watched the Grammys last Sunday. Because the Grammys are still largely about the idea that certain people do music better than others, and it's okay to reward them for it. That's called meritocracy. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Well, meritocracy is a philosophy that has long been celebrated in Western cultures.

It's championed as a way of attaining success through hard work and skill. Society's best and brightest are supposedly rewarded based on their performance, not their background. But some people have started to poke holes in this theory, arguing that meritocracy, as it exists today, is an illusion. The meritocratic ideal that if you're a lot of, You work hard. You can rise. You can overcome the inequality we've experienced in recent decades through individual mobility. That ideal is flawed. It's corrosive of the common good. That's philosopher Michael Sandell, a fierce critic of meritocracy. He argues that this foundational principle has been co-opted by society's elite so that they can control the transfer

of social status and wealth to their children, promoting radical inequality, and stifling social mobility. While not perfect, others argue that meritocracy is the best system we have to reward human talent. Meritocracy has transformed Western societies mostly for the better, giving the poor and middle class a chance at upward mobility in the collective pursuit of individual success. Social stability is stalling right now, but not because of meritocracy. It's due to to our collective inability to complete the Merocratic Revolution. On this installment of the Monk Debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments

by debating the motion, be it resolved, meritocracy is killing the middle class. Arguing for the motion is Daniel Markovitz, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and author of the bestseller, The Meritocracy Trap. Arguing against the motion is Adrian Woolridge, political editor of the economist, and author of The Aristocracy of Talent, How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.

Daniel, Adrian, welcome to the Monk Debates. Nice to be here. Thank you for inviting us. An important debate today in some ways, a classic, but one that is, I think, more relevant than ever, as societies kind of grapple with growing inequality, especially economic inequality, that many feel has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic

and the economic fallout from it. So we're going to have a far-ranging debate, a far-ranging conversation about the idea of meritocracy. Does it work? Is it in society's advantage? Could there be a different way of rewarding talent and distributing society's goods between and across individuals and communities? So the opportunity to tap into both of your thinking

on this, which is broad and in-depth is a privilege indeed. Our resolution today, be it resolved, meritocracy, is killing the middle class. Daniel, you're arguing in favor of the motion, so I'm going to put a couple minutes on the clock and turn the program over to you for your opening statement. Thanks again for having me. So meritocracy was invented and embraced by people who wanted to break an old aristocratic elite and open up advantage to outsiders. And the logic behind that was straightforward. Nobody has a monopoly on talent and effort.

And so if society makes advantage, depend on individual accomplishments, then outsiders will start getting ahead. And initially, that's in fact what happened. The old aristocratic elite was to be blunt, neither particularly smart nor particularly hardworking. And insurgents and upstarts, who had more talent and a better work ethic, broke into the elite throughout the rich nations of the world

and used meritocracy to get advantage. What's happened since then, though, is that the mechanism has started to function very differently. The new meritocrats, the people who themselves got ahead based on their talent and their effort, are unlike the old aristocrats in that they have an unrivaled ability to train their children and an insatiable appetite for training their children. And this has the result that meritocracy now excludes the broad mass of the population, in particular the middle class, for meaningful advantage.

Because nobody else can compete with the training that rich people can buy for their children. And then in the labor market, meritocracy has remanded, work in such a way that precisely the skills that only elite educations can give have become incomparably more valuable than before. And so work has been remade in education's image, again, to favor the elite graduates of elite colleges who themselves had elite parents. Very concretely, what has this done to the middle class? At school, for example, rich children in America score 250 points higher on the SAT, on average, the middle-class children, which is twice as big a gap as the gap between middle-class children

and children below the poverty line. So it's small wonder that meritocratic colleges, like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, have more students in them from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. At the same time at work, the elite jobs, the graduates of those elite schools now monopolize, are paid much, much more than they used to,

and the growth in wages of the elite jobs has far outstripped the growth in wages of middle-class jobs. In 1960, a doctor might have made four times as much as a nurse. Today, it's eight times as much. A law firm partner might have made five times as much as a legal secretary in 1960. Today, it's 40 times as much. And when Rockefeller took over a bank in 1960,

he made 50 times as much as a bank teller. Today, Jamie Diamond, who runs, the successor bank makes a thousand times as much as a bank teller. So what meritocracy has done in brief is it has restructured education in such a way that having rich parents is almost a necessary condition for getting the kind of education that you need to get ahead. And then it has restructured work in such a way that having that elite education is almost a necessary condition for earning high incomes.

And the middle class has been left behind and shut out by these well-intentioned. but now misfiring innovations. Daniel, thank you for terrific opening statements, setting out your views succinctly and to the point. We're now going to get the con argument on today's resolution, be it resolved meritocracy, is killing the middle class. Adrian, your opportunity for your opening statement. Aristotle once said that a healthy middle class is vital to the health of society,

and he's absolutely right. And there is certainly a big problem with, the states of the American middle class at the moment. The middle class is bifocating. The American people are sick and tired of growing income and wealth inequality in our country, where two people now own more wealth than the bottom 40%, where the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 92%, and where 45% of all new income

has gone to the top 1% since 2009. In other words, the people on top are doing phenomenally well. So the upper middle class is becoming more aristocratic in its qualifications and in its tastes, and the lower middle class is being sucked down into the working class. But I don't think that this is essentially a problem with meritocracy. It's a problem in many ways with the lack of meritocracy, and the best solution to the problem is more meritocracy, not less meritocracy.

Aristotle, again, let me talk about, said that there is sort of a dark side to every social formation. So kingship has its dark side in tyranny. Aristocracy has its dark side in oligarchy. Democracy has its dark side in populism. And what we're seeing now is the dark side of meritocracy, or rather Pluto meritocracy, when meritocracy is corrupted by plutocracy, when the privilege, use their privileges to transmit their position to their children by buying them better education.

We're definitely seeing that. But I think that is a perversion of meritocracy. If you look at the history of meritocracy, it was something that was advanced initially in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the English liberal revolution, by middle-class people who wanted to open up opportunities, If you look at the creation of a ladder of opportunity, it was the work of the middle classes, middle class reformers, it certainly benefited the middle classes. And if you look at the golden

age of meritocracy, it was also the golden age of the middle classes. And I think what's happened is that this noble and revolutionary idea has been captured by plutocracy. And the best way to restore the meritocratic spirit is more meritocracy, rescuing it from the hands of the And I would say that, you know, a simple example of this perversion would be to look at Harvard, not not Daniels School Yale, but at Harvard, where only 20% of the places are given away on real merit. The other 80% are given away on the basis of some sort of hook. If your parents went to Harvard, for example, if you do athletics, often very elite athletics like rowing or polo or the rest of it, or if you're a very talented musician or some of it. something like that. And I think the best way to make that university more middle class and less plutocratic than it now is, is to take away these hooks. Introduce pure meritocracy, and you

would see immediately a huge surge, for example, in the number of middle class people, particularly in the number of Asian Americans, particularly the sons of immigrants, who are being excluded by the way that the system is now rigged. So Pluto meritocracy, bad, real meritocracy, good. Thank you, Adrian. Terrific opening statements from you both now in opportunity for rebuttal. So, Daniel, your chance here to react to Adrian's opening statement. What do you want to take exception with? I think I want to start by pointing out that there's a large zone of agreement between us, which is that we both agree that there are plutocratic corruptions in our current social order, which are unfair and unmeritocratic. So in the United States, it's effectively possible for a very wealthy person to buy admission to university for their children. That's unfair and unmeritocratic.

Legacy preferences in which this children of graduates of universities get a leg up in admissions are unfair and unmeritocratic. So we both agree that those are bad things, and we both agree that equality of opportunity is a good thing. I think the point on which we disagree, and this is, I think, an important point for us to return to again and again throughout this discussion. is whether the greater part of the violation of equality of opportunity stems from these non-meritocratic forces or stems from meritocracy itself. So let's take university admissions. A recent study put out by Georgetown Center on Education points out that if university admissions were based exclusively on the SAT,

elite universities would be full of richer and whiter students than they're full of now. The reason why is that the SAT is supremely teachable, and rich people and people with cultural privilege are able to devote large amounts of resources to teaching their children to do very well on that test. That doesn't mean it's not meritocratic. Unlike having a father who went to Harvard,

doing well on the SAT measures something that's genuine accomplishment. But because accomplishment responds to training and because rich people can buy more training, meritocracy itself becomes an engine of exclusion and of middle class suppression. And the real question for a debate like ours is how important that effect is relative to the forms of corruption that Adrian talked about,

which we both agree are corrupt and unacceptable. The question is if you got rid of those forms, would you cure the bigger part of the problem the middle class is facing or only the smaller part? And my view is you would cure only the smaller part, which is why we need to find a new way of allocating advantage that's not purely meritocratic if we want to save the middle class. Thank you, Daniel. Adrian, your opportunity now for rebuttal also. Sure. Daniel talks about the way that meritocracy is, as it were, self-perpetuating,

that the people who come to the top come to the top in part because they're clever, and they certainly try and preserve their position, not just through, corruption, but by transmitting their privileges to their children, by investing an enormous amount in education. There's clearly a great deal of truth in that, but I think there are two big problems with that argument. First is the problem of regression to the mean, that according to the principles of genetics, it should be the case that very bright people have slightly less bright children, on average, over time. And it's also the logic of numbers that the sheer number of exceptionally bright people in the broad population is vastly going to outweigh

the number of bright people who are the children of 2% of the population. So if we had a fully functioning meritocratic system, it would counteract this tendency towards the perpetuation of the elite. Secondly, Daniels' point about the nature of the economy being distorted by the existence of an elite which essentially manipulates the system in order to give itself and people like itself big advantages. I think there's some truth in that. But is it that the economy is being distorted or is it that certain chunks of the economy just reward high levels of talents by their very nature? So they do it. That happens in the finance sector. It happens in the IT sector. As Bill Gates is very fond of pointing out, people who are really, really, really good at

IT just add an enormous amount of value. So that may be something that's not a distortion, but is a reflection of changes in the nature of the economy. And secondly, I think it's very important we fixate on the east and west coasts in the United States. And we see this image of a very divided society because of those coasts. But there are big chunks of the United States, which have a different sort of economy, which is much, not egalitarian, but much less divided. I remember going to visit Coke industries in Wichita, Kansas. And you see a whole bunch of people there who are doing very well, but they went to pretty ordinary schools.

They have pretty ordinary attitudes. They're regular Americans. So there are parts of the economy which are still preserving this much healthier middle class. Let me say something about each of Adrian's three points, starting with the last one, namely that there are parts of the United States, as there are parts of the United Kingdom and Europe, in which there is more equality and authority. thriving middle class. I agree with that entirely. And it's important to study those and to learn

what is going well there so that it can be replicated elsewhere. My only caveat is that those tend not to be the parts of the society or the economy where there is the highest level of growth and dynamism right now. And the trick for replacing meritocracy with something better is to capture and sustain the growth and dynamism that meritocracy has enabled while suppressing its, tendencies towards inequality and exclusion. So that's the first point. Two other points. Adrian talks about regression to the mean in genetic intelligence. I agree with that. And if I thought that the main mechanism by which meritocracy produces inequality was a genetic one, I would, a little ironically, be much less pessimistic than I am. I think the main mechanism is not nature, it's nurture,

It's training. And I'm skeptical of actually genetic explanations of people's adult abilities. Instead, what I think the rich do is that they buy intense and enormous amounts of training. The average elite private school student gets over $75,000 a year spent on her education in the United States today compared to $12,000 to $15,000 a year for the average public school student. The pandemic has made this only worse. The average American public school student has lost 60, 6-0 days over the course of the pandemic in which they have had no contact with their school at all.

The average elite private school student has lost zero days of no contact with their school. So that's the mechanism. And that mechanism, interestingly, does not suffer from regression to the mean because elite families just keep investing in their children. and if they're unable to do it well themselves, there's now an entire ecosystem and infrastructure, which allows them to pay others to do it for them. One final point, which I think is very important,

and I hope we can spend some time on in this discussion, the question of how the economy is restructured so that the highest-paying jobs are ones that only elite-educated people can do. I think there's a real question here, how many of those jobs are, in fact, really very valuable and productive, and how many are not. I agree that some of them are. People who innovate in medical science, for example, are both meritocrats and extremely socially valuable.

Others, I'm less sure, take finance today. There's no question, as Adrian says, that very, very talented people are extremely valuable to their employers and their clients in finance today. At the same time, the best studies suggest that finance as a whole is no more effective for the overall economy than it was 50 years. years ago when it was much less meritocratic. What's happened is that we have restructured finance to move away from a sector that used middle-class mid-skilled workers to produce social value by increasing volume of employment, to a sector that uses a small number of elite super-skilled workers, to produce roughly the same per-worker social value, but pay the workers much, much more. And so a real question for us is how much of our meritocracy has produced innovation on the finance model versus how much is producing innovation on the health care model.

Thank you, Daniel. Adrian, do you want to come back on those, or I've also got a burning question for you if you'd like to take that instead? Well, let me just come back briefly, because Daniel and I agree on an enormous amount here. I certainly think that we do have a problem with the sort of oligarchy, let's call it that, or a pluton meritocracy, a group of people who have captured the benefits of the society and are perpetuating their positions. I think we also agree that the financial sector is too big and that although it produces enormous rewards for certain people who participate in itself,

collectively, it's taking up too much of the talent of society and has become something of a parasite. But the question is, what do we do about this? How do we break the connection between social privilege and the inheritance of social privilege? And is getting rid of meritocracy the best way of doing that. And I believe that actually going back to a much purer version of meritocracy, more testing, more educational selection, getting rid of the incrustations of corruption, but also doing much more to look for the hidden iron signs in society is the way to do that. And I don't, the Georgetown study, I'm very suspicious of the Georgetown study. And there are many, many, many, many studies of the impact of SATs.

But I don't think most elite institutions would be whiter and more privileged if we just did it on the basis, if we just selected positions on the basis of SAT scores. And I don't believe that the Asian Americans who bought a legal case against Harvard against Harvard's discrimination against them believe it either. A group of about 60 Asian organizations. Asians is suing Harvard University. They say that affirmative action hurts Asian students, and they have the numbers to prove it. According to a study by Princeton University, Asian applicants must score 140 points higher on the SAT than white students do,

270 points higher than black students do, and 450 points higher than African American students, just to have the same shot at getting in. I think that you would definitely get more Asians, and I suspect you would get far fewer frat boys at Harvard to take Harvard as an example, then if you just rely purely on SATs. There are many studies, and I don't take the Georgetown one as being the best. Great. Let me join the debate here for some questions that our audience would have, listening to you both now in this excellent debate. And Daniel, to come to you first, I want to hear a bit more from you on Aterian's argument about sheer numbers here.

Both of you agree on this notion of a kind of plutocracy who has kind of captured the commanding heights of these elite institutions and elite jobs in the economy. But why isn't Adrian right that if you simply corrected these institutions to allow for a truly meritocratic intake, whether it's through a SAT or some kind of reform standardized testing, just the sheer number, the 99%, the extent to which nature will distribute human talent across that pool, and it will just be so much larger than the 1% of the children of the plutocratic elite that that necessarily, maybe quite quickly, would reinvigorate a much truer version of meritocracy, as we might have known in generations past. Sure. I think that in some sense, this is an empirical question.

And there are many advantages to a debate like this, but a disadvantage is we can't actually pour over the datasets in real time. Let me give you. a report of something I did with the SAT, with the college board's SAT report from, I think, 2018. I looked through it to see how many kids there were in America, one of whose parents at least had a graduate degree, who scored the Ivy League median in the SAT verbal portion of the test. And the answer was roughly 15,000. And then I tried to find out how many kids there were in America, neither of whose parents had graduated high school, whose verbal SAT hit the Ivy League median.

And it turned out the tail of the distribution was so thin there that statistical techniques became unreliable. But if you grind out the numbers, the answer was 32 in the whole country. Now, obviously, children, neither of whose parents have graduated high school are a particularly disadvantaged group. These aren't middle class kids. But I present this fact just to illustrate, how enormously powerful training is for children.

The number of kids, neither of whose parents who graduated high school, who have the native talent to thrive in the Ivy League in the United States, is absolutely enormous. It's just that to win at the meritocratic competition, you don't have to have just native talent. You have to have all of this training over the course of your life, and the training is incredibly, incredibly expensive. and that's why looking at SAT scores only for admissions

would distort away from equality the classes of these universities. I should say one thing that's true. I agree highly with Adrian. One group that would be benefited by this is Asian Americans, or in particular actually because Asian Americans are very large and diverse group, certain subsets of Asian Americans

who are now disadvantaged by non-meritocratic college admissions. In a way I think that Adrian and I, both agree is unjust. But the larger group of beneficiaries would actually be the children of rich white parents who mostly are not frat boys. They're very hardworking kids who have had education squeezed into them in a way that makes them perform very, very well. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits,

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I want to remind our listeners, our debate resolution today, be it resolved, meritocracy, is killing the middle class. Adrian, you've been arguing against this motion. Let me put a question to you, which is to build, I guess, on what Daniel just said, is that what we're really describing here is not simply a principle, an idea of, of how to allocate and organize society, we're really describing a culture that we now exist, as you both have described and you both agree, in a intensely elite, plutocratic culture

where the benefits of society are rewarded anything but equally. So I wanna hear a bit more from you and push this debate a bit for both of you towards, how do we reform this? How do you confront the vested power and structure? in society to reassert the meritocratic principle. Because as Danielle describes it, it is deeply entrenched, and its command and control is extensive.

So, you know, give me some optimism here. Optimism is very hard to come by when you're dealing with this debate. I think Aristotle, as I said at the beginning, Aristotle is profoundly right that a society that doesn't have a large, vigorous, healthy middle class is a society that's in danger. And I think that is the case in the United States at the moment, and it fills me with pessimism about the future. But I do think there are some grains of optimism here, not so much in the United States, but more generally, that I think if you combine two things, one is the use of objective tests to search for the hidden iron science

and talent. And the second is the use of academically, selective and rigorous schools in areas where there is a lot of poverty, that you can discover those hidden Einstein's. And I want to give you an example of this actually working, which is the Brampton Manor Academy in the United Kingdom in the east end of London, which has an extremely poor catchment area. It has a great many children on free school meals, which is an index of how poor it is. It has children overwhelmingly drawn from ethnic minority back backgrounds, particularly Indian and black pupils. And this year, it got more children into Oxford and Cambridge than Eaton did, because it has a very rigorous system of selection and a very rigorous system of training. So I think if we're sufficiently committed to looking for talent, and once we found it, nurturing it through highly rigorous education, then we will be absolutely amazed by what we discover. And I would like to add just as a parenthesis here, that Oxford and Cambridge are doing a much better job of

addressing this problem than Harvard or any of the American Ivy League's universities are, to their shame and our credit. So, Daniel, I mean, we've had waves of educational innovation, you know, I think of Dewey and the progressive movement in the United States in the early 20th century. I mean, why isn't this just a challenge for a new wave of kind of education? reform that, you know, defenestrates the plutocrats from the likes of Harvard and Yale. And we're off to the races again. You know, American society rebuilds its middle class. These high-paying expert jobs are more equally distributed through society. You know, and a new era, a new dawn

opens up. So, so first of all, let me say, I think Adrian is right that Oxford and Cambridge are doing a better job at this than the elite American universities. And that the trick of finding and then nurturing talent from outside of the elite is a trick that can be learned and supported, and I'm in favor of supporting it. I think the real question is whether enough such cases can be found in a systematic way to rebuild an equal society, or whether the result of these efforts, no matter how well-intentioned and skillfully pursued, will simply be to add a little bit more social churn at the top

to a society that remains fundamentally unequal and fundamentally damaging to the middle class. I worry that the second thing will happen, and that's because I think that the expense of training children in the way in which elites train their children is so great that it can't be done at scale through the public system. There's some evidence of that in early returns, So there's evidence that in the Ivy League, systematic efforts to admit more students from outside of the elite have succeeded at admitting more students from outside of the elite.

The sheriff Pell Grant recipients at Ivy League universities, for example, has gone up in the past five years. But mostly those new admissions have come at the expense of middle class kids. So the number of rich kids remain the same. The number of working class and poor kids goes up and the number of middle class kids goes down. and that's because the intense education that the rich can buy for their children continues to make their children successful meritocrats. And so if you have that worry, what you actually need to do to solve the problem and rebuild the middle class is not sort of prayerfully look for new avenues of opportunity for excluded people into an elite that remains as rich and as elite as ours is. what you actually need to do is make the elite absolutely less elite. That is to say, shrink the difference in equality of outcomes, shrink inequality of outcomes,

in the service of promoting a quality of opportunity. Wow, that's an interesting idea. So, Adrian, come back on that. I mean, to what extent can we fix this problem by changing the emphasis from, you know, a quality of opportunity to a quality of outcome and to really think. think about institutional and other reforms that level the playing field not on the kind of the intake, but on the outtake, on what flows through these institutions where people are at in terms of the opportunities that are open to them as they leave high school, whether it be public,

private, enter higher education or the workforce. Why isn't a new stronger emphasis on a quality of outcome the right way to restore a meritocratic principle in our society. Well, I think Daniel's absolutely right that there is a point whereby equality of opportunity, if it leads to too much inequality of results, sort of rubs itself out, cancels itself out, that if people are starting from radically different worlds almost of opportunities, then you can't really talk about equality of opportunity. But I do think that has to be reconciled or weighed against some other things. One is that equality of inequality of outcome, if it produces great innovators like Bill Gates,

and if it produces great innovators like Steve Jobs or any other number of people we could mention, that collectively improves the life of society and collectively improves the opportunities available to everybody. We wouldn't be having this conversation, you sitting in, in Canada and me sitting here in Hampshire and England, had it not been for a whole bunch of people who got very big rewards for the innovations that they took. So the whole of society can become better as a result of innovations. And I think the best way to deal with extreme inequalities of outcome when it comes to wealth, well, there are two ways. One is through taxation, whereby, you know, very rich people are forced to give up some of their wealth,

the system which doesn't really work as well in the United States as it does elsewhere, because people get round it in all sorts of ways, but also a public education system, which provides a chance for really good, rigorous education to a broad base of people. And I also thought that you might, let's try a thought experiment. What would you rather have? A father who was, or mother, who was incredibly rich, but also incredibly dissolute and didn't care very much for you, about you, or a father or mother who was much, much poorer, but had a

sterling work ethic and a very family-focused approach to life. I think the second would be preferable, and the second would probably give you better life opportunities. So, you know, I think having a culture that's focused on effort, reward getting ahead in life, which we would associate with the broad middle classes, is an incredibly valuable thing in itself and produces very good outcomes for the whole of society. So, Daniel, I want to pick up on a key point of Adrian's here, and it's something we touched on briefly earlier in the debate, but it really does need to be underlined and fleshed out, which is this idea that if you calibrate too much for an equality of outcome as a fix to the

plutocrats having captured the machinery of meritocracy, you lose what has been so essential, the kind of miracle of meritocracy over the last century or more, which is this incredible productive energies that it releases in society, the innovation, the progress. Are you concerned or not that we are a danger here of wrenching the machinery, the plumbing of society in ways that could lead to some very negative and profound consequences in terms of very basic things like our pace of progress, our ability to innovate, our ability to materially improve our lives

if we monkey around too much with the current meritocratic system. Look, someone once said that to reject an extreme is not to embrace the opposite extreme. And I wholeheartedly agree, that something resembling meritocracy, some sense that my advantage, my private advantage, my social status, my income and wealth should be connected in some way

to my being actually good at doing things that are valuable to society is an essential part of any growing innovative social and economic order. You know, the countries of the eastern block were not famous innovators between 1950 and 1990. On the other hand, we are now at such an extreme of inequality that it's more likely that inequality and the ability for exceptional people

to capture enormous private wealth is hampering growth in innovation than that it is now driving growth and innovation. People like Goldman Sachs are starting to worry and to warn their clients that inequality is suppressing growth. overall GDP per capita growth and total factor productivity growth, which is the way in which economists measure technological innovation, has not been higher in the three or four decades since 1980 than it was in the decades after the Second World War leading up to 1970.

So I think we're now at a point at which the kind of inequality that we have in outcomes is actually suppressing innovation and growth, or rather distorting innovation and growth so that people invent things like the leverage buyout, which are very, very good for a small number of people who want to get very, very rich, but not actually good for economic production, the general middle class wage, social stability, democratic politics.

And if we suppressed inequality of outcomes, in some considerable degree, we would actually trigger innovation industry and growth. Let's go to closing statements. This has been a terrific debate. Our resolution today, be it resolved, meritocracy, is killing the middle class. Adrian, you've been arguing against the motion. Some up this debate for us. What are the key points that you want to leave our listeners with? I think the middle class is in serious danger, and that is almost a mortal threat to the health of any society. However, I don't think that it's the result of meritocracy. Purely, it's the result of this confusion between meritocracy. or this marriage between meritocracy and plutocracy, in which the plutocratic side is really the active side, which is closing opportunities to the middle class

and shrinking the middle class. And my way of dealing with this problem would be more meritocracy, not less meritocracy, that is, more use of SAT tests, rather than using much more subjective methods of assessment, more use of educational selection, and particularly the provision of extremely academically rigorous schools in poorer neighborhoods. I point to the example of this school in the east end of London, which now gets more children from very underprivileged backgrounds into Oxford and Cambridge every year than Eaton does.

It proves, I think, that demonstrates that meritocracy can break down the link between parental wealth and educational outcome. And what most worries me about the idea that softening, meritocracy a bit, which instinctively is quite attractive. Why not make it a bit easier? Why not loosen the rules? So I think if you loosen the rules, you create more space for privileged people to play the system and get their children the sort of advantage that you crave. So it's having hard rules and having rather difficult choices about educational selection that I think are the one thing that we can do that will break this link between privilege and opportunity.

Thank you, Adrian. Daniel, we're going to give you the last word in our debate today, be it resolved meritocracy as killing the middle class. You've been arguing in favor of the motion. Wrap this debate up for us. There's no question that the middle class is in trouble. A middle class child born in 1980 is less than half as likely as a middle class child born in 1940 to earn more money than its parents.

and that decline in upward economic mobility is roughly twice as big for a middle class child as either for a rich child or a poor child. So the middle class is suffering and it's suffering more than other parts of our society. In my view, the root cause of that suffering is this system of self-perpetuating dynastic transmission of privilege by meritocratic means. As rich parents invest amounts in education, educating their children that nobody else can match. Because training works, rich children then do unusually well at meritocratic tests,

not because they're more talented or more virtuous, but just because they're more trained. Rich graduates then remate work in a way that advantages precisely the skills that they have, capture enormous incomes, and pass their privilege down to their children, and the cycle continues. Obviously, we should stomp on the corruptions of meritocracy, arbitration, bribery. But really to fix this requires that we revisit the basic principle of meritocracy, which is a competitive principle, the idea that the one who does best should capture the most. The trick is what to replace it with, not nepotism, not aristocracy, but rather an open and democratic system in which people get rewards for things that are worth doing,

in which training is broadly distributed, in which elite education is diluted, opened, diversified, and in which work focuses, again, on deploying technology to empower and emboldened middle class workers to become more productive. Thank you, Daniel, and thank you, Adrian.

This has just been a terrific debate. We've unpacked some of the big ideas here. We've debated the key issues, and it's really all been as a result of, your sustained engagement with this critical issue, the future of meritocracy in our society. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you both so much for coming on the program today.

Thank you, Rudyard, and thank you, Adrian. Lovely to speak. Thank you for having us. Thank you, indeed. Excellent. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Daniel and Adrian. They certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard,

please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. Here's a note from Diane about our recent monk debate podcast on Afghanistan, which was released before the full withdrawal of U.S. troops. Diane writes, dear Rudyard, it was interesting to listen to this debate again after the rapid triumph of the Taliban. I'd be fascinated to hear a new debate on the question of whether the West has any continuing responsibility for alleviating the humanitarian disaster that the Taliban are about

to unleash on the country. Thanks, Diane. Great advice. We will look into that. A reminder also that our monk members-only podcast featuring yours truly and Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, comes out every Friday. It's yours free to listen to as part of our complimentary basic membership of the Monk debates. You can access that membership. It again for free at www.w.munkdebates.com forward slash membership. Thank you for being part of our community and supporting our efforts to promote the art of public debate. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffith.

The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. Api Rahaja is the associate producer. The Monk Debate podcast is mixed by Kieran Lynch. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating.

Thank you again for listening.