Meritocracy, cronyism and distributive justice
I just got back from a trip to India, which has led me to a lot of interesting thinking. Among the things that are so striking about India is the rigorous and intensely Darwinian education system. The Indians bill it as being a pure meritocracy, using tests as gates to force the cream of India’s billions of people to work their way to the top.

This system is in complete contrast to the crony capitalism that hallmarks the Bush administration. As I was thinking about this, I came to realize that the Bushlings do not dispute the utility and necessity of collective community institutions like those described in my Goatherder essay. What they want to do, however, is limit the availability of those community resources. They want the rich and connected to have access to all of the services that they need, and the highest quality of those services. As income and connections fall, so do the level and quality of the community institutions.

Their mechanism for doing this is the false God of privatization. They argue that it is desirable to privatize community services because they can be run more “efficiently” by private enterprises than by the government. While this may be true, privatized services lack the value of distributed justice. They are not available in the same quantities and with the same quality for everyone. You can buy more privatized services if you are rich and connected.

Moreover, the very reason that they are more efficient is because they are lacking in qualities of distributed justice. The fewer masters you have to serve, the more efficient you can be in serving your masters. Public government services, by definition, will be less efficient because they have to serve all the people. It is not their mission serve people in proportion to the dollars and favors they can spend. So efficiency cannot be the sole measure of community services. By definition, the more distributive you are, the less efficient you are. But the corollary to that is that you can only be maximally efficient by being anti-democratic, anti-distributive – by choosing to serve only a few masters.

It can be argued, of course, that the United States had swung too far toward the distributive end of the spectrum during the sixties and seventies, and lost much of its vigor as a result. In a competitive world, we have to foster a certain level of efficiency, even at the expense of social justice, if we are to survive. If that is true, however, it only leads to the next debate: if we are going to have public services serve fewer masters, how do we choose which of us it will serve?

And that question leads us back to India. India claims to have a different model for selecting those few lucky citizens that will receive special (efficient) community services. They claim to have a rigorous meritocracy. This is in significant contrast to the Bushling model, which uses family money and connections to select who will receive special (privatized) services.

Now we can debate the morality and utility of different balances between efficiency and distributed justice. I am sympathetic to India’s argument that it cannot provide quality education and other services to all of its citizens, so it should choose the most able, provide them with great services, and burden them with the responsibility of lifting the country up to the next level (where more citizens can receive quality services.) But it is virtually impossible, I think, to morally defend the Bushling model of quality services only for the rich and connected. Under those circumstances, the moral costs of efficiency are prohibitively high.

One final note: It is not clear, of course, that India’s system is really as purely meritocratous as they claim. In the land of the caste system, it is a little hard to believe that they can do away with social stratification. To the extent that it is a meritocracy, it will be interesting to see how long it lasts – and whether the new generation of India’s educated class really will let the great unwashed compete fairly against their upper class children.