Where is the revolution? That’s the question the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee asks in her column entitled ‘How the right tricked people into supporting rampant inequality’. She cites a paper by Dr Jonathan Mijs of the London School Of Economics, which seems to show that ‘as countries become less equal, attitudes of the majority shift in the wrong direction’. For Toynbee, the ‘wrong’ direction is towards the belief that their country is a meritocracy. In her world, inequality is structural. The rich are rich because of privilege, the poor are poor because of oppression. If people would only see this, they would rise up against the oppressive, neoliberal order.
Dr Mijs’s study finds a negative relationship between income inequality and concerns about inequality. The more unequal the society, the more unconcerned its citizens are about inequality. It also finds a positive correlation between inequality and the belief in meritocracy. Rising inequality is accompanied by a growing belief that success reflects hard work and innate talent. For Toynbee, this is surprising. Rising inequality should lead to less belief in meritocracy as the unprivileged see inequality for what it is: a result of the privileged elites conspiring to enrich themselves on the back of the poor. Instead she concludes that the poor has been tricked into a false belief in meritocracy. She labels this ‘the neoliberal triumph over hearts and minds’.
But the causality is more likely the other way around: where people believe in meritocracy, societies grow more unequal. Suddenly the correlation is not surprising. Meritocratic societies will naturally deliver more inequality. Differences in work ethics and innate talent will be reflected in outcomes.
The belief in meritocracy is of course dangerous to the egalitarians: if you believe that success is a result of innate talent and hard work, you are much less likely to be concerned about inequality. Studies confirm this. But the fundamental belief that you make your own luck is the basis for a successful, prosperous society. The more people who dedicate themselves to bettering their lives, the better. The economy is not the zero sum game the left wants us to believe it is.
Luckily, in Western societies a large majority still believes that success is driven by meritocratic factors. The real danger in the attitude Toynbee espouses is that it absolves people from personal responsibility for their plight. ‘I should have tried harder at school, is a frequent refrain, as if no other forces were at play’, she writes, implying that you really shouldn’t try harder because the system is rigged and more effort would have not made any difference. But trying harder at school is a virtue and should be encouraged. The defeatist attitude of the left, keen to impress on people that only political solutions exist to their problems, leaves people with the worst of advice: don’t try. If that message resonates amongst those at the bottom of society, no wonder inequality becomes entrenched.
‘The right forever tries to prove poor people are more stupid by nature than the rich’, writes Toynbee. But that is a tired cliché. Of course there is a correlation between innate talent and ability and the potential to prosper in a free economy. But similarly, there is a correlation between hard work and success. Under free market capitalism, everybody has a chance to prosper if they try hard enough.
The system may not be perfect. We do not have truly free markets. Crony capitalism protects incumbents. Regulation complicates lives for entrepreneurs. Punitive taxes kills incentives. Western economies are far from pure meritocracies. But instead of demonizing success, we should celebrate it. We should encourage people to be inspired and seek to emulate. Instead we have Guardian columnists telling us that a belief in meritocracy is a bad thing. It is hard to see what good would come from those at the bottom buying into the poisonous idea that trying doesn’t matter.