Earning rent with your talent: modern-day inequality rests on the power to define, transfer and institutionalize talent

In this article, I develop the point that whereas talent is the basis for desert, talent itself is not meritocratically deserved. It is produced by three processes, none of which are meritocratic: (1) talent is unequally distributed by the rigged lottery of birth, (2) talent is defined in ways that favor some traits over others, and (3) the market for talent is manipulated to maximally extract advantages by those who have more of it. To see how, we require a sociological perspective on economic rent. I argue that talent is a major means through which people seek rent in modern-day capitalism. Talent today is what inherited land was to feudal societies; an unchallenged source of symbolic and economic rewards. Whereas God sanctified the aristocracy’s wealth, contemporary privilege is legitimated by meritocracy. Drawing on the work of Gary Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jerome Karabel, I show how rent-seeking in modern societies has come to rely principally on rent-definition and creation. Inequality is produced by the ways in which talent is defined, institutionalized, and sustained by the moral deservingness we attribute to the accomplishments of talents. Consequently, today’s inequalities are as striking as ever, yet harder to challenge than ever before

The paradox of inequality: income inequality and belief in meritocracy go hand in hand

Inequality is on the rise: gains have been concentrated with a small elite, while most have seen their fortunes stagnate or fall. Despite what scholars and journalists consider a worrying trend, there is no evidence of growing popular concern about inequality. In fact, research suggests that citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. How to make sense of this paradox? I argue that citizens’ consent to inequality is explained by their growing conviction that societal success is reflective of a meritocratic process. Drawing on 25 years of International Social Survey Program data, I show that rising inequality is legitimated by the popular belief that the income gap is meritocratically deserved: the more unequal a society, the more likely its citizens are to explain success in meritocratic terms, and the less important they deem nonmeritocratic factors such as a person’s family wealth and connections

Meritocracy, Elitism and Inequality

The appeal of meritocracy is plain to see, because it appears to promote equality of opportunity. However, in this paper we argue that meritocracy is also a deeply elitist project. Firstly, we place Michael Young in context to show how his critique of meritocracy should be understood as a socialist vision to ameliorate class divides. Secondly, we show how economic inequality in the UK has not generated systematic resistance: in fact, inequality and belief in meritocracy have gone hand in hand. Thirdly, we argue that people see their own lives as meritocratic rather than ascribed, and that such values are deeply embedded in popular life. We offer two explanations for how such views have come about, and show how they have helped construct a more unequal society

Adolescents' future in the balance of family, school, and the neighborhood:A multidimensional application of two theoretical perspectives

OBJECTIVE: Family, school, and neighborhood contexts provide cultural resources that may foster children's ambitions and bolster their academic performance. Reference group theory instead highlights how seemingly positive settings can depress educational aspirations, expectations, and performance. We test these competing claims. METHODS: We test these claims using the British Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N = 4968). RESULTS: Results are broadly in line with the cultural resource perspective. However, important exceptions to this pattern point to reference group processes for children from low-educated parents, whose academic aspirations are especially low when they either attended an affluent school or lived in an affluent neighborhood—but not both, and for children from highly educated parents attending poor schools, whose realistic expectations of the future are higher than their peers in affluent schools. CONCLUSION: The resource perspective strongly predicts adolescents’ (ideas about) education, but reference group processes also play an important role in neighborhoods and schools.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13137Published versio

Inequality is a problem of inference: How people solve the social puzzle of unequal outcomes

A new wave of scholarship recognizes the importance of people’s understanding of inequality that underlies their political convictions, civic values, and policy views. Much less is known however about the sources of people’s different beliefs. I argue that scholarship is hampered by a lack of consensus regarding the conceptualization and measurement of inequality beliefs, in the absence of an organizing theory. To fill this gap, in this paper I develop a framework for studying the social basis of people's explanations for inequality. I propose that people observe unequal outcomes and must infer the invisible forces that brought these about, be they meritocratic or structural in nature. In making inferences about the causes of inequality, people draw on lessons from past experience and information about the world, both of which are biased and limited by their background, social networks, and the environments they have been exposed to. Looking at inequality beliefs through this lens allows for an investigation into the kinds of experiences and environments that are particularly salient in shaping people’s inferential accounts of inequality. Specifically, I make a case for investigating how socializing institutions such as schools and neighborhoods are inferential spaces that shape how children and young adults come to learn about their unequal society and their own place in it. I conclude by proposing testable hypotheses and implications for research

Learning about inequality in unequal America: How heterogeneity in college shapes students’ belief in meritocracy and racial discrimination

Harvard UniversityPublished versio

Merit and ressentiment: how to tackle the tyranny of merit

My contribution to this special issue engages with Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Meritocracy and its significance to the academic conversation about meritocracy and its discontents. Specifically, I highlight Sandel’s diagnosis of the rise of populism and his proposed remedy for the ‘tyranny of merit’. First, building on Menno ter Braak’s writings on the rise of fascism, I explore the sources of ressentiment in contemporary societies as stemming not from disillusionment with meritocracy but from the broken promise of liberalism and democracy more generally. Second, I consider Sandel’s proposals to reform elite university admissions and to ‘recognize work’, explore their wider applicability, and reflect on their limitations to meaningfully change how success and failure is socially experienced and morally understood.Published versio

Does informing citizens about the non-meritocratic nature of inequality bolster support for a universal basic income? Evidence from a population-based survey experiment

Despite citizens’ precarization and policymakers’ enthusiasm for a universal basic income (UBI), this alternative to targeted welfare has, curiously, received limited popular support. We theorize that this is due to people overestimating society’s meritocratic nature. Accordingly, we field a randomized survey experiment with a representative sample of the Dutch population (n = 1,630) to investigate the impact of information provision about the non-meritocratic nature of wealth and ethnic inequality on support for a UBI. Informed by extant research indicating that citizens respond differently to the same information because of material circumstances or different worldviews, we further estimate conditional average treatment effects to explore moderation by (1) income, (2) economic egalitarianism, (3) welfare chauvinism and (4) institutional trust. We find that support for a UBI is higher among individuals with lower incomes and those who are more egalitarian and less welfare chauvinistic. Nonetheless, while exposure to our factual treatment makes participants more concerned about inequality and supportive of economic redistribution in general, it neither directly nor conditionally affects their support for a UBI. Our findings suggest that a UBI may be deemed too radical an approach to addressing inequality. We discuss theoretical and policy implications and provide suggestions for future research