I wound up, however, disagreeing with him about something else.
"The most attractive face of globalization," said Ignatius, is "the idea that the great universities are creating a color-blind meritocracy that doesn't care where you're from as long as you did well on the SAT."
The problem here has nothing in particular to do with globalization, and everything to do with meritocracy. Suppose I offered the reverse contention: We should try and create an intelligence-blind pigmentocracy that doesn't care how you did on your SAT as long as your skin is pale. Would anyone sign on for that? Of course not. Because, as all respectable people agree nowadays it's wrong for people to live crappy lives on account of dark skin. But why is the Ignatius's SATocracy any better? Exactly half of the population is destined to get below average SAT scores. Exactly ten percent of the population is destined to do very poorly on the SAT, relative to the rest of the population, and wind up in the tenth percentile. Were scores to increase across the board, so that everyone got better than a 1500, we'd have to reconfigure the test to make it harder -- the point, after all, is to draw distinctions between people. If it's wrong for the dark-skinned to experience poor living conditions on account of their hue, it's equally wrong for the low-scoring to experience poor living conditions on account of their test scores.
There is an important difference here. Racial discrimination has no real social welfare benefits. But if we didn't allow any economic inequality on the basis of "merit" we'd have a big problem on our hands -- people would lack incentives to work hard and develop skills that are in high demand, the economy would collapse, and everyone's standard of living would fall.
But this defense of inequality doesn't come close to justifying Ignatius's vision of pure meritocracy. Instead, the idea would be, just as the great philosopher John Rawls contended, that we should allow just as much inequality as maximizes the well-being of the worst off. Indeed, it's worth noting that the term meritocracy was coined decades ago in Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy and it was supposed to be a bad thing. Nobody genuinely wants a society in which those lacking in "ability" -- the severely retarded, say -- are just left to die out in the cold.
When I raised these issues in a Friday blog post a lot of commenters who thought they agreed with me were, in fact, disagreeing. People raised the point that the SAT isn't necessarily a fair guide to intellectual ability. They alleged that various biases exist in various tests. What we really need to do, some said, was implement reforms so as to bring us closer to true meritocracy, to a society where everyone, regardless of birth, has a genuinely fair shot at success.
My point is a more far-reaching one. Some people are smarter than others. Some people are less smart. The less smart don't just deserve a "fair chance" to succeed, a chance they're bound to squander due to lesser ability. Instead, insofar as they're willing to work hard, contribute to society as best they can, and abide by the rules of the game, they deserve a fair share of society's wealth -- the highest standard of living we can manage to arrange for them.
After all, the "merit" in "meritocracy" isn't, at the end of the day, genuine moral worth. Rather, Ignatius is talking about the possession of skills that happen to be in high demand relative to their supply by people who have enough money to buy them. Once upon a time, being able to kill large game was a high-value skill and being able to dominate the low post on a basketball court wasn't. Today it's the reverse. For a while in the 1990s a basic working knowledge of HTML could make you a lot of money. Today in 2006, it gets you very little. These things change. They're essentially arbitrary. It's important, economically, to reward the possession of useful skills to some extent, but we shouldn't confuse this with merit. Raising your kids well or making sure your elderly neighbor has what she needs to make it through a storm is meritorious, but it won't earn you money.
The reverse of a racist hierarchy isn't "meritocracy" understood as a hierarchy of intelligence -- it's a just society where everyone has what they need. Martin Luther King's famous dream was of a world where people would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," standardized test scores didn't enter the picture.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
