Why The Meritocracy Isn't Coming Back to Save America

It's true. The Meritocracy isn't coming back, but not for the reasons you think. It has nothing to do DEI, but rather with scale and complexity and the necessary transformations to make both happen.

86. Why The Meritocracy Isn't Coming Back to Save America

My intellectual journey has brought me down a number of different paths, leading to places and vistas that certainly seem odd today. I was educated in the late 1980’s and a good part of the 1990’s. There were certain movements afoot at the time. This really was the peak period for “the consultant” and the “management guru.” It was a time when absorbing the works of management gurus was de rigueur, even for someone who ended up studying for the ministry. It was a time when “church growth” was on the ascendency. I got introduced to the whole field of “management consulting” through a book on managing the process church renewal, specifically to Tom Peters, who, even to this day, remains something of a patron saint for the whole field.

If you are going to read management books, the early Tom Peters material from the late 80’s and 90’s is better than his later works in the 2000’s forward, mostly because he buys into diversity hiring as a path for excellence. In other words, politics began to undermine his core themes revolving around “excellence.” At the time, I didn’t have the grounding in political theory that I do now, and so I really wasn’t able to see the deeper philosophical implications in what Peters was encountering in the business world of the day. From the perspective of managerial science and technique, it is top notch stuff. Peters really was at the height of the game in this regard. If this piece tempts you to read any of his works, go for the older books like: In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies (1982, with Robert Waterman); A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference (1985, with Nancy Austin); Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution (1987); and Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (1992).

Peters is good for insights like the “Management Paradox” which can also apply to societies as well. In order to succeed, you have to do something well and understand the core of your identity. You need to plow a deep furrow. If you are always trying to change and adapt, you never get good at doing any one thing well. At the same time, every organization has to be able to adapt constantly to changing situations and times, otherwise they will get run over by changing technology, markets and social situations and they will get out competed by their rivals. His main concerns developed out of his work as a consultant. He was brought in to help large moribund corporations become more competitive in the marketplace. Basically, companies called Peters in to help them deal with the downside effects of managerialism. Basically, his response to managerialism was to develop mechanisms that would encourage “excellence.”

Before we dive into some of the relevant ideas from Peters that can help inform us today politically, we need to quickly understand how is it is that corporations and governments came to embrace managerialism and all its subsequent downside effects. The important point for us to understand is that managerialism and the administrative state are a necessary feature of scale. No one sets out to become a moribund corporation. And it’s also true that when people began to implement the professional bureaucracy, applying the tools of “scientific management” to government, they were looking more at the outcomes they were hoping to achieve than the administrative monster they would create.

Joseph Tainter argued in The Collapse of Complex Societies that one of the leading functions of a society is that it is a problem solving mechanism. At some point, as a society grows, it embraces greater complexity in order to solve certain problems which it is facing. It makes the necessary adaptations, introduces new ways of doing things and increases the level of societal complexity in the process. Tainter argues that initially, these increases in social complexity bring about huge gains. The outputs far exceed the inputs. But, as the society moves through its life cycle, every new problem adds new layers of complexity, usually accompanied by the growth of society, and, over time, these social systems begin to eat up ever greater amounts of the society’s resources. Eventually, a tipping point is reached where the inputs outstrip the outputs and this is when bad things happen for civilizations. Tainter outlines three basic paths for the civilization at this point: either a slow gradual decline, or a break up into smaller more more manageable pieces, or total collapse. For interest, he argues that America passed this tipping point somewhere in the 1970’s.

The key point to take away from Tainter for this piece is that introducing managerialism when the society is ascending is both beneficial and necessary for the society to properly scale up and realize itself as a society. But all the benefits of managerialism are accrued during the growth phase as society scales in complexity. This is similar for corporations, but on a smaller scale. For a business to grow from a “mom and pop” family business or some some “start up” to become a Fortune 500 behemoth requires that you make certain changes in management style, type and structure. You have to embrace the necessary changes that enable you to grow in scale.

At a certain point you have to become “managerial.” You have to find a way to abstract and rationalize the culture you have built as “command and control” owner, instantiating this in policy and “corporate culture” such that the combination of culture and policy will allow management decisions to be effectively carried out at scale across the whole company. In a sense, what is though of as “corporate culture” has the same function that “ideology” has in government organizations. Once you get to a certain level of scale, it is necessary to transition to this style of management. I suppose in theory it is possible that there is another way to do it, but the ubiquitous nature of “scientific management” globally is a good argument that this might be the only way to do it. There is a certain “necessity” to it demanded by scale. In other words, once your country or your company reaches a certain level of scale, it has no choice but to embrace some form of managerialism. While there is a certain necessity to this transformation, and there are huge benefits which come from their initial implementation through the growth phase, eventually you reach a point where the nature of administrative systems begin to become an anchor on the company or the nation.