Sunday Posts

Meritocracy is a convenient lie, as Socrates foretold, and it is the ballast of the social system we have built. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, we had kings and queens and their families and nobles, who got the best meat and the best mate, and everyone lived happily. But then the things fell apart as luxury corrupted the nobles and feebled the spirits of their offsprings - and the peasants and the artisans came claiming their fair share. So we had the age of revolutions in Europe and North America, when we created a new, fairer social system, under a 'natural aristocracy of men', where destiny was no longer shaped by birth but by intelligence and hard work, and anyone could make it in life. And, everyone again lived happily ever after. Of course, this did not really happen. Slavery persisted, at least for a long time. The 'fair' system mostly excluded the real peasants and workers and once they have done their duty dying for various revolutions, they were s...

Introduction   In the second decade of the new millennium - now - new questions about human abilities and human worth have arisen. A vast industry of computerisation and gradual rise of ‘machine intelligence’ challenged the prospect of ever-improving urban middle class life, replacing a vast number of secretarial, administrative and other ‘middle ability’ jobs with computer programmes, cheap workers overseas, and increasingly, with robots. Stagnated wages, disappearing jobs and breakdown of the ‘American Dream’ in its many global variants have led to a new ‘struggle for existence’ in the workplace. This technological phenomenon also meant an inversion of the role of Capital and Labour in the production process. With decline of large factories and their unionised workforces in the West (replaced by large factories and their non-unionised labour in China and Indonesia) and with most people turned into keen consumers of latest gadgetry, collective bargaining has fallen out of p...

Lani Guinier has written an important book, which is also a pleasure to read, and this is about the concept of Democratic Merit. Part polemic, against the mindless system of SAT-driven education system in the United States, part Education Treatise and partly high minded discourse on how democratic mindsets work, it should be read not just in the US but in other countries and contexts, because education is all too often seen as a technical thing focused on preparing Doctors and Engineers, and divorced from its social role altogether. The argument in Professor Guinier's book hinges upon a definition of merit given by the Nobel-Laureate Economist, Professor Amartya Sen. In Professor Sen's view, merit is an incentive system for the actions the society values. The merit system as defined by SAT (and other tests), an individualistic, context-blind ability and intelligence, this book argues, is out of step with the requirement of a democratic society. Ms Guinier expands her ar...