The trap of merit...

The trap of merit...  Mickey Kaus may just be my favorite liberal.  He's got a great piece up called The Great MacGuffin, about Obama's recent “Inequality” speech.  The whole thing is good, but this part especially resonated with me:

3. The Trap of Merit: Obama draws a link between inequality and lack of mobility:

[W]hile we don’t promise equal outcomes, we have strived to deliver equal opportunity — the idea that success doesn’t depend on being born into wealth or privilege, it depends on effort and merit. …

In fact, we’ve often accepted more income inequality than many other nations for one big reason–because we were convinced that America is a place where even if youre born with nothing, with a little hard work you can improve your own situation over time and build something better to leave your kids. As Lincoln once said, “While we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.”

The problem is that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20 percent has about a 2-in-3 chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to the top.

The argument is that as inequality grows it becomes harder to climb the ladder because the rungs are further apart. The problem, for this argument, is that declining mobility is also what you would expect if the meritocracy were working perfectly, without race or class prejudice (and inequality were stable or even shrinking). In a meritocracy, after all, the best rise to the top, the least talented and industrious wind up at the bottom. At some point, after a number of decades, maybe most of the talented will be at the top and the untalented at the bottom! Or at least, once the meritocratic centrifuge has sorted everyone out, there won’t be that many talented people at the bottom to rise in heartening success stories (and those stories that do turn up will mainly involve immigrants). Worse, if you grant that a reasonable share of “merit” is inherited, then you are going to wind up with a more static class structure for generation after generation. This is the scenario outlined by Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein. Just because it’s profoundly depressing doesn’t mean it’s not true. Yes, luck still plays a big role. No, genes aren’t everything, or even maybe a majority of everything. But they’re something, and we should think about Herrnstein before we whine that people aren’t rising to or falling from the top as much as they used to.