I suspect all humans (including myself) have a tendency to interpret what is “fair” in a way that is beneficial to themselves.
Without any nuance or details, its easy to agree that (all things being equal) if a given person works harder and spends more time and effort to achieve something, they deserve more of the “spoils” of the hard work. That is what would be fair.
But fairness is actually a much more complex concept than people like to admit. “Fair” over what period of time? “Fairness” that includes what variables and are there extenuating exceptions to those variables, or if not, why not? Fairness and merit that factors in what kind of “effort”? Is a race where one person is taking performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and one is not, is that interpreted as a case of the one with PEDs is “working harder”, or is that an unfair advantage?
When I think of my two young children, they often interpret things in very concrete, immediate terms… my brother got an ice cream cone, so I deserve one too (whether or not the other child got one or a dozen ice-cream cones in the past month). Dad brought back a red towel for me, but my brother got a blue towel - thats not fair. Children have a very black and white view of the world.
At a more advanced age beyond early childhood things start to get more complex:
If one child’s parents hires a tutor for their child every time they have a difficult time in a school, and so the child gets better grades, does that child automatically deserve to get into the honors math class because he’s “worked harder” and gotten better grades over the child of the single divorced mother who works works 12 hour days at minimum wage jobs and doesn’t have time or money to deal with tutors?
If a child lives in school districts that offer many in-school and after school activities like Lacrosse, Crew, Fencing, Tennis, etc. so the child is able to excel in a wide variety of sports that Ivy League schools tend to like more and recruit for their sports teams (and give scholarships for), does that mean that children who go to those schools districts are working harder (spending more time in those activities) and therefore deserve to be accepted into the Ivy League schools more than children in poorer school districts who don’t offer those activities, and so the children in those poorer areas are less deserving? Is that “fair”?
What about if a child grows up surrounded by parents who hire Ivy League School Application consultants in the 10th and 11th grade to help optimize their resumes for the Ivy League Application, and so get exposure to these resources due to their parents hiring them? Do these children “deserve” (i.e. is it “fair”) to get into Ivy League schools at a higher rate because the produce a polished applications and essays than the children of parents who have never gone to college and have no idea that “Ivy League College Application Consultants” are even a thing that most parents in Palo Alto, Woodside, Pacific Palisades, New Canaan, Mercer Island, Highland Park, etc. are hiring? (I was a little shocked when I discovered how prevalent this is in these areas… most of the parents I know do this sort of thing, you don’t see this much in other countries I’m familiar with).
When you look closely at what most higher income families are doing to enhance the relatively position of their children (mandarin speaking nannies, tutors, optimized nutrition for brain health, top private schools (or public schools in the highest income neighborhoods … since US school funding is based on neighborhood incomes / home values), after school tutors, after school coaching for sports most acceptable to the Ivy Leagues, premium healthcare and therapy from a young age to maximize physical and mental health, coaches for admissions into the top schools (these coaches are frequently the former admissions directors or worked in the admissions offices of these schools)… the entire system looks a lot less like “Merit” based entry into the top US universities, and instead like some completely rigged olympics where some contenders are allowed performance enhancing drugs, and the others are not. People who aren’t getting these “performance enhancements” have a very low likelihood of getting into the best schools. Is this “fair”?
If you don’t live and attend schools in the high income areas (whether its Marin County, Westchester County, Highland Park, … the list is long) you have no idea of the extent to which parents will do a million small things to give their kids an advantage… over and above the very common advantage of “Legacy Admissions” (as if all the other advantages of wealth are not enough)…
I suspect the argument of “fairness” is frequently just another way to tilt the already heavily tilted playing field, in a single group’s direction, (when some other group tries to decrease the tilt of the playing field).
But - many people outside the highest income zip codes have absolutely no idea how ridiculously unfair the existing system already is for lower income groups (and I think this is something shared by everyone in the lower 50% of income in the US, though there seem to be other areas where some ethnic groups get even more screwed over). Having lived in other countries, I find it amazing how unfair and undemocratic a country people here accept.
Anyway, just my perspective on things from what I’ve seen. Everyone has a valid perspective in this area, but we are all only seeing our own perspective from our own experience. The important thing to keep in mind is that other’s perspectives are valid and important to consider and understand.
Some examples of what “Meritocracy” looks like in the US (below):
For prices up to $1.5 million, parents can buy a five-year, full-service package of college admissions consulting from a company in New York City called Ivy Coach.
The service — all of it legal — begins as early as eighth grade, as students are steered toward picking the right classes and extracurriculars to help them stand out from the crowd. Then comes intensive preparation for the SAT or ACT, both “coachable exams,” explained Brian Taylor, the company’s managing director, followed by close editing of college essays.
“Is that unfair? That the privileged can pay?” Mr. Taylor asked. “Yes. But that’s how the world works.”
(at least thats how the US works, but is it how most people want it to work?)
Full article unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/KXDvR
Meritocracy has several features. Its members are highly educated and credentialed; they are hardworking (“[t]oday’s Stakhanovites are the one-percenters”, p. 81) and combine “progressive virtues” of inclusion and privacy, with “conservative virtues” of hard work, saving and contempt for the poor.
Through such contempt and their belief that advantages they enjoy are fully merited, meritocrats have created a deep chasm within the US polity between themselves and the rest, most notably between themselves and the middle class (the poor never played much of a role anyway). As Markovits argues, not only in income, but in consumption patterns, beliefs, attitude to and health outcomes etc. the gap between the meritocrats and the middle class is wider today than the gap between the middle class and the poor.
Education is the key mechanism through which meritocracy reproduces itself. The investment in children’s education begins at age 2. By the time children of the rich get out of the graduate school, the cumulative difference between parental investment and subsidies provided by the elite schools they have received, and investments along the similar path taken by the children of the middle class, attains an astronomical amount of 10 million US dollars.
