Love And War And Status
“All is Fair in Love and War” - common saying
“So many social, political, and also economic struggles — no matter what they may appear to be on the surface — are actually about who should rise and fall in status.” - Tyler Cowen
We often work to seem neutral and fair in many areas of life. But when it comes to our most important areas, we usually drop this pretense and switch to acting fully selfish and partisan. That is the meaning of the saying “all is fair in love and war”. It can make sense to try to be “fair” about stuff that doesn’t matter so much, to gain a reputation for being cooperative. But on stuff that really matters, we can’t gain enough by being fair to beat the gains from shamelessly grabbing what we can.
Like love and war, status is an area of life we feel is too important to risk being fair; our instinct is to grab instead. So when the subject comes up of if we are giving status to the right things, few are inclined to offer a neutral fair analysis of the costs and benefits of assigning more or less status to different things. Instead, most everyone grabs, pushing to raise the status of what they have, and to lower the status of stuff their rivals have. (Which is why it seems so unlikely that cultural elites will fairly and rationally evaluate how our culture’s status markers should change.)
For example, in the latest Atlantic cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America” David Brooks suggests big changes to our status system. His complaints about status today:
About a fifth of [Princeton’s] graduating class … [goes] into banking or consulting or some other well-remunerated finance job. … 59% of Americans believe that our country is in decline … trust in institutions has plummeted … large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump. … Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about … militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration. … system overrates intelligence. … Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. … elite schools draw more students from the top 1 percent [of income] than the bottom 60. … advantages of elite higher education compound over the generations. … students … ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. … At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. … Many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system.
Here is Brooks’ proposal for change:
Building a school system geared toward stimulating curiosity, passion, generosity, and sensitivity will require us to change the way we measure student progress and spot ability. … grades, test scores, awards … [don’t] tell you if a student can lead a dialogue with others, or whether a kid is open-minded or closed-minded. …
An electronic portfolio of their best work … mastery transcript … tests [of] non-cognitive skills … what’s important is that none of them is too high-stakes. We are using these assessments to try to understand a person, not to rank her. … High-school teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches would collaborate each year on, say, a five-page narrative about each student’s life. … independent assessment centers … could help … college-admissions … employers.
These assessment methods would inevitably be less “objective” than an SAT or ACT score, but that’s partly the point. Our current system … wanted to [rank] all human beings … [on] a single scale, … If the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid, with a tiny, exclusive peak at the top; it would look like a mountain range, with many peaks. … Reviving vocational education, making national service mandatory, creating social-capital programs, and developing a smarter industrial policy. … invest more in local civic groups.
Brooks admits that we lack reliable ways to make comparable scores for people on these things, and that reliability falls as stakes get larger. His solutions is dimensionality: if we score people on hundreds of varied dimensions, and refuse to combine them into a few key scores, why then we can’t say who is better, and so losers won’t resent winners, as there are no winners. People also won’t bother to game or corrupt metrics, as no metric would matter enough to bother. That is, the solution to fights over status is to end status as a thing.
The idea that we could just end status seems to me so crazy far at odds with human experience as to boggle the mind. If you put Brooks in charge of some things, I’m confident that some things might rise in status and others fall, but status would still be a thing. And I see no reason to think that any of Brooks’ complaints about our current system would apply any less to his new system.
But what you can be sure of is that Brooks himself, and his allies, would rise in status, and his rivals would fall. All is fair in love and war and status, after all.
Using “objective” measures like SAT or ACT scores is the worst way schools can contribute to a meritocratic-based distribution of status positions, except for all the others.
I feel that this entire discussion seems to come at the system from the wrong direction entirely. Yes, any hierarchy will pile up losers at the bottom, those at the bottom will often resent being at the bottom (no matter how deservedly), will therefore reject the system, and one of the better ways to minimize this is to have a multiplicity of hierarchies simultaneously such that few people are ever at the bottom of ALL of them at any given time. Likewise, it's helpful, perhaps even necessary, that people have a reasonable expectation that, wherever their current position in those hierarchies, they can theoretically advance upward in at least one of them by talent, effort, or luck. That's all true, relevant, and even useful... But it's still just working the issue from the implicit perspective that the focus is to minimize the resentment of those at the bottom or, more charitably, to make hierarchies that aren't deserving of resentment.
What always seems to get lost in that effort is a recognition that hierarchy is not simply a natural reality, nor simply "a social construct", but ultimately it is a means to a purpose. Hierarchy is a tool. It is functional. Hierarchy is a sorting method. A properly working meritocracy sorts and ranks people by their suitability to hold certain responsibilities. Yes, high positions tend to come with high status, often with fame and wealth, but those are simply incentives for qualified people to work towards, compete for, and hold those positions that bear immense responsibilities requiring the utmost merit. Deliberately obscuring merit ranking by avoiding objective measures of merit or artificially manipulating measures of merit may address the resentments of those judged lacking in merit, but at what cost to the accuracy and efficiency of the function of meritocracy?
It's true that there is a lot of resentment from the bottom. Similarly, hierarchy in general and "meritocracy" in particular are criticized routinely by some dissatisfied with the very idea that people can be sorted and ranked. Yet, nobody who is dying really wants their doctor to be less than the best available. People didn't tolerate deliberate ambiguity in the competency of aircraft designers and pilots for much longer than it took to broadly recognize that such ambiguity resulted in unacceptable malfunctions and unprofessionalism. World leaders across the globe are being booted from office via elections, not because people at the bottom resent being at the bottom (that's always been true), not because the gap between the bottom and top is growing or too large (people are typically upset or not that there IS a gap, but the actual size of it seems to make very little difference in how broadly or deeply it is resented), rather the rising resentment across all these otherwise dissimilar societies is rooted quite clearly in the sense that the meritocracy has FUNCTIONALLY failed. The the positions of immense responsibility are currently held by people who are demonstrably UNQUALIFIED to hold them. It's not truly "anti-elite" in any sense of rejecting that elites should exist or should have high positions of responsibility, not truly a rejection of hierarchy or meritocracy, but instead a rejection of the people who have failed to fulfill their responsibilities within that system. Our elites seem corrupt, deluded, incompetent, LACKING IN MERIT.
Brooks therefore comes across more than a little like someone trying to cure a common cold while ignoring a metastasizing cancer. Restoring the perceived legitimacy of the meritocratic system is not essentially about minimizing how many people there are at the bottom. That's fiddling about the edges without getting to the core issue. It's essentially about restoring the actual effectiveness of the system at sorting and ranking people to best enable us to find those fit for the responsibilities of each position, high and low. It's about removing those who prove themselves unit from their positions. It's about finding the people who will succeed in those positions. It's even, perhaps most difficultly, about us collectively finding the humility to accept wherever we end up in the sorting and ranking, because it is more important that the most meritorious people be given the high positions than it is to advance ourselves into high positions.
All isn't fair in love and war. Short-sighted selfishness, ironically, becomes self-defeating when confronted by problems that require long term cooperation.