Meritocracy and Economic Inequality

By Kenneth J. Arrow, Samuel Bowles, Steven N. Durlauf. 2001

341 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most Americans strongly favor equality of opportunity if not outcome, but many are weary of poverty's seeming immunity to public policy. This helps to explain the recent attention paid to cultural and genetic explanations of persistent poverty, including claims that economic inequality is a function of intellectual ability, as well as more subtle depictions of the United States as a meritocracy where barriers to achievement are personal--either voluntary or inherited--rather than systemic. This volume of original essays by luminaries in the economic, social, and biological sciences, however, confirms mounting evidence that the connection between intelligence and inequality is surprisingly weak and demonstrates that targeted educational and economic reforms can reduce the income gap and improve the country's aggregate productivity and economic well-being. It also offers a novel agenda of equal access to valuable associations.Amartya Sen, John Roemer, Robert M. Hauser, Glenn Loury, Orley Ashenfelter, and others sift and analyze the latest arguments and quantitative findings on equality in order to explain how merit is and should be defined, how economic rewards are distributed, and how patterns of economic success persist across generations. Moving well beyond exploration, they draw specific conclusions that are bold yet empirically grounded, finding that schooling improves occupational success in ways unrelated to cognitive ability, that IQ is not a strong independent predictor of economic success, and that people's associations--their neighborhoods, working groups, and other social ties--significantly explain many of the poverty traps we observe.The optimistic message of this beautifully edited book is that important violations of equality of opportunity do exist but can be attenuated by policies that will serve the general economy. Policy makers will read with interest concrete suggestions for crafting economically beneficial anti-discrimination measures, enhancing educational and associational opportunity, and centering economic reforms in community-based institutions. Here is an example of some of our most brilliant social thinkers using the most advanced techniques that their disciplines have to offer to tackle an issue of great social importance.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1820661c3851382e226a9fc9e1a468c6eeca052

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Citations in the corpus

Responsibility for what? Fairness and individual responsibility (2010, background): “Second, we consider meritocratism, which argues that an individual should be held responsible for all factors that can be considered personal traits, but not for factors that are unrelated to individual merits (Arrow et al., 2000).”
The psychological impact of intragenerational social class mobility (2011, methodology): “(Hendrickx et al., 1993; Hope, 1975; Sobel, 1981).”
Influences of nature and nurture on earnings variation: A report on a study of various sibling types in Sweden (2009, neutral): “Following the suggestion of Feldman et al. (2000), we make use of a wide variety of sibling types, differing in both their genetic connectedness and the extent to which they were reared together.”
Public Attitudes Toward Cognitive Enhancement (2014, background): “Moreover, the data suggests that people generally endorse at least some form of meritocracy [77], viewing unequal distribution of goods as more acceptable when they involve differences in effort than when they arise as a result of luck [78, 79].”
Inequality Of Opportunity And Growth (2013, background): “The first one is about meritocracy (Lucas, 1995, Arrow et al., 2000).”
Personality traits and occupational attainment (2006, background): “The Bell Curve was a well-publicised example, although this has been widely criticised (see Fraser, 1995; Fischer et al., 1996; Devlin et al., 1997; Arrow et al., 2000; Korenman and Winship, 2000).”