Calvinism’s Doctrine of Predestination, which claimed that by worldly work and frugality one could show God he was chosen for ‘saviour’, first inspired what we now know as meritocracy.

The great Protestant Reformation of the 16th century allowed culture to shift away from Catholicism’s claim that one’s behaviour on Earth had no relation to one’s admission to heaven (so long as one confesses his sins and pays a hefty indulgence to the Church of course). Now, the Doctrine goes, some people are damned to go to hell regardless of how much they apologise for their sins. However, from Calvinism’s perspective, you could now also almost ‘earn’ a spot in heaven with good behaviour. This ideological change gave birth to Weber’s ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ and the emergence of a ladder, for whoever was willing to climb it, between classes.

Yet as private schools, private healthcare, and a dried up welfare state seem to be making the opportunity to do so more and more difficult, whatever meritocracy did emerge following the Protestant Reformation (perhaps best embodied in ‘The American Dream’) seems to have vanished. Why is it that those who have benefited from equality of opportunity are kicking down the ladders up which they climbed? Andrew Carnegie in his ‘Gospel of Wealth’ praised the entrepreneur as virtuous and posited that he would be a wise philanthropist, investing in the preservation of social mobility. But could it be that instead it is Keynes who was right in saying that in solving ‘the economic problem’, we breed the distasteful qualities of avarice and usury?

The field of behavioural economics has attempted to address this question through controlled experiments: notably a study on the effects of inequality on human behaviour by Hoffman, which uses the ‘Dictator Game’ to show the potentially detrimental effects of feeling deserving or entitled. This is a two-player game with an initial endowment of $10 given to Player 1. Player 1 then dictates the allocation of $10 between himself and a partner, Player 2. Player 1’s decision is final. Hoffman compares outcomes when the role of ‘the dictator’ is allocated randomly versus when the role is earned by better performance in a current affairs quiz undertaken prior to the game. The most startling result was the percentage of players who opted to give nothing to their partner: an increase of 100%, from when a player was allocated their position randomly to when then player feels as if they have earned their role as dictator by scoring higher on the quiz.

“The Psychological Consequences of Money”, a study conducted by Vohs, complements these conclusions as it claims that money enhances individualism and undermines communal motivations based on observations in a series of nine experiments. The idea is that money promotes a feeling of self-sufficiency, which manifests itself in an expectation that others can and should do the same. For example, their fifth experiment, they saw that individuals primed with money (given a subconscious cue to think about money) spent on average half as much time helping an individual who had dropped pencils on the ground as those who were not primed with money. These results, along with the initial selfish behaviour of ‘earners’ in Hoffman’s experiment, support the idea that earning one’s success and being perceived as deserving may lead to a behavioural tendency toward selfishness.

Most of us who study and work in a world with competition and market efficiency at its heart would like to argue that this is a good thing. After all, what we want is to incentivise others to work hard and contribute to society: if we start providing handouts, we are not enabling others to help themselves. While this is an attractive argument, especially for those arguing against support of the welfare state, the problem lies in the increasingly tenuous linkage between effort and reward. While the fractionalization of society across lines of culture and class have allowed us to live in a ‘safe-haven’ of sorts, where effort and reward seem to be almost one and the same, this is a very small cross section of society.

The reality is that this feeling of deserving that many of us possess is a result of living in a sheltered environment and is mostly unwarranted. Just because my hard work paid off here, in a city with robust institutions of law and order, does not mean it would have almost anywhere else. According to the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon, the benefits associated with being born into, living and working in a prosperous country with a functioning economy most likely account for 90% of people’s individual wealth.

If Hoffman and Vohs are right, and feeling deserving inspires selfish action, then I urge everyone who has worked hard to get where they are to remind yourselves what a privilege it is to be allowed the opportunity to succeed. Perhaps in doing so, the combination of immense luck and hard work that we call ‘success’ can then be put to use more productively in resurrecting as opposed to destroying what is left of meritocracy.

References:

Hoffman, Elizabeth, et al. “Preferences, Property Rights and Anonymity in Bargaining Games.” University of Arizona, 1991.

Kornhauser, Marjorie E. “The Morality of Money: American Attitudes Toward Wealth and the Income Tax.” Indiana Law Journal (1994): 119-169.

Mettler, Suzane. Degrees of Inequality: How the politics of higher education sabotaged the American dream. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Vohs, Kathleen D. “The Psychological Consequences of Money .” SCIENCE (2006): 1154-1156.