There's been some interesting blogging recently on mobility and meritocracy. A little while ago Atrios wrote, in the context of President Bush perpetuating the harmful idea that professional sports are some magical opportunity for poor people, "Lots of people in this country are basically born on 2nd and 3rd base and then manage to stay there for the rest of their lives. And many of them look down on those who start at home plate and fail to hit a home run." Yglesias, relatedly, goes further in addressing the meritocracy myth (and its stepbrother, entitlement) thusly:
[T]he merit illusion stems from the well-documented fact that people don't have a great intuitive grasp of statistics or large numbers. If your family connections boost your odds of getting into Harvard from one percent to five percent, you'll perceive that as having triumphed against the odds on merit rather than using family connections to quintuple your chances. . . . It's difficult, however, for people to keep in their heads the idea that, yes, you may have displayed considerable merit to get where you are but also you've taken advantage of a lot of undeserved privileges of birth. Similarly, if you wind up needing to compete on merit against a few hundred other people for a couple dozen highly desirable slots, the question of what happened to all those other people who got excluded from consideration for non-merit reasons sort of falls out of sight.
I think this is absolutely right, and extraordinarily important. Nobody wants to believe their successes have been handed to them, or are some kind of accident, especially those who work really really hard to get where they are. After all, successful people (defined broadly) have probably beaten out lots of competition for whatever accomplishments they've achieved. But as Matt said, tons of people never even make it to the competition. A fascinating and stark example comes from this analysis of higher education and wealth, entertainingly using AJ Soprano as an archetype. The data demonstrates that, not surprisingly, if you're rich, you're likely to go to college no matter how bad your test scores are. But that's just college in general, you might say -- dumb rich people going to college unnecessarily isn't a problem, right? So let's look at the "highly selective" colleges numbers. For kids whose test scores are in the bottom quartile, only 0.2% of those whose families make under $20,000 per year go to a selective university. And it seems about right that bottom quartile test scores wouldn't get you into a selective college. But for kids whose families make more than $100,00, in the bottom quartile of test scores, 3.5% manage to sneak their way into "highly selective" colleges. So rich kids are nearly 18 times as likely to get into selective colleges than poor kids with the same (crappy) test scores. 18 times!
The numbers aren't as stark with the next example, but for reasons I'll get to, I think they're even more important: for the second-highest quartile of grades, 27% of students go to selective colleges. This seems pretty reasonable, after all, selective colleges have to dip below the top quartile of test scores, and certainly some of those students will have money. In the under $20,000 category of second-quartile scorers, however, only 6.2% go to selective colleges, meaning if your family makes $100K+, you're more than four times as likely to go to a selective college than a kid whose family makes under $20,000.
Here's the thing, though: I would guess that if you're in the bottom quartile and you get into a highly selective college, you know it's not because you're smart, and you probably know it's because your family has money. But that second quartile group, that's chock full of kids who think they made it *purely* on merit. They had very good scores! They worked really hard! They beat out lots of other kids who came from relatively wealthy families! They don't see, though, that they're overwhelmingly more likely to get into that college than the kid with the same grades and much less money. This leads to a sense of entitlement, not only that the achievement was self-made, but that the people who didn't make it must not have really been trying. That the other kid just didn't study or work or think as hard. And some of these effects are similar with regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, or other "other" that people don't really think about when they consider class/financial/education/etc stratification.
Now, in the end, I'm not entirely sure what to do about all this, especially on an individual level. Certainly I would and do support public policy that helps create an equal playing field, and personally I find it important to recognize that my successes, whatever they have been or end up being, are in many ways tied to the fact that I hit the privilege jackpot. People who look like me and who have the financial security that my parents were able to provide don't exactly have a lot working to keep them down. But even without knowing what should be done, exactly, acknowledging these realities seems important in its own right.
Tomorrow, check back for how this relates to the blogosphere . . .
