The pandemic exposes the error of equating ‘merit’ with cognitive ability. In a new book, David Goodhart advocates a rebalancing of dignity and status.
Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, by David Goodhart (Free Press, 368 pages, $27)
Never call a dead metaphor too soon.
As a scholarly term of art, body politic went mainstream at a time when civic equality trumped entrenched power imbalances. Yet its older, figurative meaning may be coming alive anew, as recent trends in what sociologist Daniel Bell called the “techno-economic order” have helped turn status ever more hereditary — again. Society’s component parts — the head, hands, legs of the body politic — play distinct roles, some of which may command higher status, but the smooth functioning of the whole hinges on some level of equity and cooperation between them. If imbalances of self-esteem fail to reflect this, this ancient metaphor stresses, it won’t be long before the entire societal edifice comes crumbling down.
As a kind of secular revealed truth, this insight likely predates its earliest written form, but it’s still worth a detour into Aesop’s “The Belly and the Members.” In the fable, the stomach, personified with a human face, is alone able to supply nourishment. It chooses to play solo and hoards all the food. The result is unwitting suicide: Dead of starvation, the feet leave the other body parts paralyzed. The need for the complementary functions of social groups to be ordered toward the common good is ambiguous, for it can be invoked against either despots or the mayhem and social disorder that only their kind can stave off. But it seemed so intuitive in ancient times that Romans filled Aesop’s mold with their own history of class struggles — in one version, patricians rely on it to persuade a breakaway plebeian faction to cease their rebellion. Just what each member of the compact can expect from the others is left unanswered in the story, but the kind of revolutionary disjunction it warns about frightened even the early Church. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul the Apostle speaks of a united Church as “the body of Christ.”
Given that background, consider David Goodhart’s discussion of the crisis in what he calls today’s “cognitive meritocracy.” The doyen of British scholars of populism, Goodhart in his bestseller The Road to Somewhere (2017) documented the profound value divides that Trump and the Brexiteers rode in 2016, between communitarian patriots and a deracinated elite driven by self-actualization, cosmopolitanism, and adaptiveness to social change. Even when they take the form of electoral upsets, these divides remain rather symbolic. Those who weaponize them electorally haven’t always translated them into actual policy change. After formulating the anywhere-versus-somewheres dichotomy, Goodhart in his new book, Head, Hand, Heart (2020), shows again his knack for capturing complex social science in readable prose, although this time with a deeper cut. Here he extends his inquiries beyond the realm of politics and grounds them in far deeper moral questionings.
The over-rewarding of cognitive merit at the expense of the wider spectrum of human ability is, in a way, one cause of our populist moment. But in another sense, unlike the case with unchecked immigration, supranationalism, or deindustrialization, it was not the elite’s deliberate policy preferences that gave us a “cognitive meritocracy” but rather far deeper trends in political economy and social mores, trends that Goodhart is ahead of the curve in documenting. The book was ready before March, so if COVID-19 helps in any way to even out the rewards to those who have different skills and make different economic contributions, it’ll have been sheer luck for him. The pandemic may in fact also take the political sting out of his case, for it is precisely the cognitocrats working remotely who were made to realize the indispensable role of hand and heart — the essential workers keeping our shelves stocked and our ailing patients ventilated. That is, unless the elites let go of another chance to bridge their disconnect by failing to act on this score. If they did fail, they would provoke populist grievance over an issue that otherwise might have avoided politicization.
Grounded as it is in a natural bias toward attainment over inherited status, meritocracy itself seems to have outlived its natural luster. In a spate of recent titles, writers — Michael Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit (2020) and Daniel Markovits in The Meritocracy Trap (2019), foremost among them — have decried the overreach of meritocracy, from being a mere device for staffing the civil service to what sometimes looks like a full-fledged hierarchy, one that ends up shaping our notions of virtue and human worth. Though he largely eschews ethical questions, Goodhart is more ambitious in challenging the specific form that our ascendant meritocracy has taken. Society has indeed come to equate merit with cognitive aptitude, beyond just the way our business and political elites are groomed. In questioning the larger paradigm, he turns his book into a more actionable policy blueprint, but he also hints at the ways in which a more nuanced moral code could help heal social ills.
In diagnosing how our tilt toward cognitive merit went awry, Goodhart evinces nostalgia, not entirely misplaced, for the Trente Glorieuses (1945–75). While unions remained strong and immigration low across the West, wage growth reliably reflected productivity gains, meaning that new technologies and production methods kept relying on a varied base of human capital as their complement. But as the “middling middle” of industrial and clerical jobs fell prey in the 1970s and ’80s to competition from China and the widespread adoption of information and communications technology, respectively, the dwindling base of occupational pathways to a middle-class life on a single family wage led to fierce competition among prospective employees. Employers naturally began to look for the screening function of a college diploma for job openings that hadn’t required it before.
This lifting of the bar wasn’t necessarily harmful in itself. While the primitive knowledge economy conserved a meritocratic basis, middle- and lower-class folk made early investments in education on a rational basis, and that quickened the gyre of social mobility, to say nothing of the manifold benefits of broader horizons for the many through higher education. Ironically, only when the King Midas among policymakers sought to lift even more people into this cognitive elect were the seeds of dysfunction sown. The road to hell, as it happens, is paved with good intentions — particularly the egalitarian zeal to secure everyone a place at the top.
The side effects began to show up in earnest with the tweaking of incentives to join the cognitive class. In the U.S., where high tuition fees fund private research, the massive debt incurred as a consequence of graduating from college began clogging the path to the middle class as soon as the template of the GI bill (1944) was replicated across other demographics outside the veteran population. But even the U.K., with its public-funding model and wider availability of student loans and scholarships, didn’t succeed at smoothing the rise of a new class of cognitive pawns. Beyond the cost incurred by students and their families, the astronomical rate of undergraduate enrollment in the U.K. has proved a public-choice quagmire too, by cheapening the returns to higher education for every following cohort. Unsurprisingly, this oversupply of graduates went haywire at the bottom of the cognitive pecking order first. Goodhart recounts the tragedy of average-ranked universities fighting to survive after failing to provide for graduates enough of an earnings premium to justify their matriculating in such institutions in the first place. As part of its push to make tertiary education the superior choice, the U.K. legislated an online portal for comparing graduate-salary data by course. The transparency it affords, ironically, has driven school-leavers (high-school graduates) away from unlucrative career paths. Good news.
The political fallout from masses of underemployed graduates upset at a system that promised them a credentialed pedigree but delivered precarity instead seemed, until recently, the predicament of southern eurozone countries only, but a base of square-occupying indignados is fueling left-radicalism in the U.S. and the U.K. too, a symptom of what Peter Turchin termed “elite overproduction.” See, for example, Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), with her account of her political awakening while working as a Manhattan bartender fresh off an economics degree from Boston University. Moreover, policies to make college affordable have often failed to do so. The evidence that larger endowments of U.S. colleges result in higher tuition keeps mounting, fueling the dysfunction of an academic-industrial complex whose benefits to society writ large weren’t all that clear in the first place. A college degree has been made more expensive by these mutually reinforcing trends, while, from the employer’s viewpoint, it has never served as anything but a way to screen candidates. See Bryan Caplan’s The Case against Education (2019).
Failure to reconcile the demands of the labor market, the demand for social mobility, and people’s expectations of equality is front and center in the demise of the cognitive meritocracy that Goodhart diagnoses, but it is only a part of the problem. As universities failed to reform, other trends arose to render their current role outright obsolete. This Goodhart describes as “peak head,” a hinge moment when rounds of automation — robotics and AI, primarily — following the one that sparked the entire cognitive ratchet in the first place come back full circle, combining with the already exorbitant supply of human capital to pull the rug from underneath the “knowledge worker,” whose perceived centrality in the new economy justified the entire edifice. From the sum total of these trends that our cognitive hubris blinded us to, one gets the sense that Goodhart is less sounding the alarm than foreboding the inevitable. After all, a number of market signals are already clear, with rising numbers of school leavers shunning the hype of a cognitive life path, as he documents from experience.
At the heart of his book lies a recognition of the rigid system of values that governs our management of the economy and the stubborn mismatch between economic opportunities and the fluid demands placed on workers. His argument for redistributing status from the cognitive to the hand and heart of the economy is a moral one, but its main selling point is rather practical and urgent. The change in values he advocates isn’t just warranted by our reverence of COVID-19’s unsung heroes. It is also necessary if future generations are not to feel socially discouraged by the prospect of technical vocations, the growing demand for which needs filling, anyway.
Rebalancing the numbers of those acquiring different skills may be vital if our zombie cognitive meritocracy is to give way to a viable alternative, but, as Goodhart makes clear, it won’t be sufficient. Something infinitely fuzzier than the occupational makeup of the workforce or the relative incentives to choose one path over another is in need of rebalancing too. As the meritocratic vacuum sucked ever more school leavers, and mid-skilled workers into a cognitive rat race that wasn’t for them, those they left behind saw their “status” sapped as a result. But the relative value that society places on different occupations and life choices is an elusive notion, subjective and therefore hardly measurable. It also interacts with the perhaps more important variable of self-esteem in ways that are also hard to grasp and may vary across the occupational ladder. Low-skilled workers have lower status, but they tend to value status less, particularly in robust “working-class cultures” such as the U.K., although meritocracy’s overreach naturally ends up eating away at these pockets of good sense too.
Goodhart reckons the positional nature of status — man’s envy plays a part in this puzzle, mind you — and the kind of economic meliorism that the center-left of his formative years applies to income inequality may fail to do the trick this time. Yet he gets around what could invite a “politics of envy” charge by focusing on dignity too. The term is hard to define, but at least it is an absolute good, so a fairer distribution of it can do away with the always misguided assumption that Margaret Thatcher ironized at PMQs (prime minister’s questions) in 1990 in a famous exchange with Simon Hughes: “They’d rather have the poor poorer as long as the rich are less rich.” The evolution of status, after all, may not owe exclusively to the rise of a cognitive class. Sure, a meritocratic system demotes the non-cognitively apt, but the demotion has taken place uniformly across countries that have embraced the over-valorizing of cognitive aptitudes at different speeds. Germany’s world-class vocational system may explain the relatively high “status” of its manual workforce. But France, disparaged for the out-of-touch entre-soi of its elite, is often criticized not for dismissing vocational training but for sending too many of its school leavers into it, with a whole slate of knock-on effects — not least precisely on the self-esteem of these young renegades of meritocracy — that Goodhart would be wise to lay on the balance.
The premium on analytical skills and abstract reasoning has surely overheated, but it originates partly in the sheer complexity of the industrial era itself. Postindustrial society has added to the problem by elevating developers and software programmers while shedding our base of industrial and clerical jobs. But the shocks to labor are only one side of the coin. On the consumer’s side, the bonanza created by meeting wants (some of which industrial society itself contrives) instead of needs erases the producer’s role from the conscience of the self-absorbed consumer. A range of simultaneous sociological trends — urban density, anomie, occupation and class homogamy, and recently digital nomadism — have further desensitized us to the plight and the dignity of Homo faber.
This bias also ends up feeding into the worldview of policymakers, as evidenced by the consumerism that informs Ricardian trade policies to this day, even after the deindustrialization that they’ve accepted as the downside of lower prices and greater consumer choice produces consequences that include opioid addiction, declines in church attendance, and other communitarian ills long seen across America’s rustbelt but increasingly also in, for example, Scotland and northern England. Embedding the producer’s handwork back into all that we consume could help restore hand and heart at the heart of our economic cosmology. It would also mean lower living standards for all, so there’s likely no reversing Émile Durkheim’s transition from mechanical to organic solidarity, except for sectors such as agriculture, where it becomes possible and desirable for a combination of health and ethical reasons.
To reform our economy, culture, and politics to increase the visibility and recognition of non-cognitive contributions — and therefore to reinforce the proverbial body politic before it breaks apart — we may have more than just meritocracy to rethink. It is less clear that COVID-19 will make the world less technocratic, more communitarian, and more in tune with the things that really matter in life, but Goodhart’s book will no doubt have been an important contribution to that goal.