Bernanke's right view on meritocratic winners

Here is Ben Bernanke's ten suggestions to Princeton grads. I pay most of my attention to his remarks on meritocracy.


Quoting from his third point:

3. The concept of success leads me to consider so-called meritocracies and their implications. We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate--these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others. As the Gospel of Luke says (and I am sure my rabbi will forgive me for quoting the New Testament in a good cause): "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded" (Luke 12:48, New Revised Standard Version Bible). Kind of grading on the curve, you might say.

Because so often and so many of us are so much consumed by fear we expend all our energies keeping our positions or trying to do better rather than giving another a helping hand. Where is the capacity to do as Bernanke advise except for the negligible few, too small to make an impact against the forces pulling us in the other direction.

I am afraid we have over paid for our present success, which is neither wise nor durable. Moral persuasion by ministers cut no ice because there is no skin in the game. Heng Swee Keat might have gone further than most  of his colleagues from the changes he is bringing to MOE but without the confidence and courage to purge the sacred cows of exams, the inertia of the civil servants with their poverty of imagination, his right ideas can only stay on track with much effort. Much energy goes into producing so little output and temporary results. I am seeing it with my kids' and their schoolmates experience with the latest, "Values in Action" program. By and large it is impossible to take students, teachers and the principals minds away from exams grades. In fact the highest scoring ones, considered the ablest, plan their lives around them. It's a fools' game which time will prove. For where your heart's is, there is your treasure. It is the old heart and old treasure with an updated look. We try to design luck out of our system, hence the obsession with tests. Willfully blind, we pretend that we have succeeded especially for those who had  'meritocratically' reached the top. If in your mind luck has no role in your success, you have no obligation to the rest. Guess what we are ending up with - Those who have more 'merit' demands the lion's share because they had earned it.

Everything we do we are creating a society of a few winners with many losers. How sustainable is that? We are doing something about this but with more show than substance. We have no courage to re-admit good and back luck into our education system. We forget that without some unpredictability we cannot truly build characters. We also cannot give people the hope that they can do better because they tried.

I guess I have to come back and rewrite this sometime. I am trying to squeeze ten times the thoughts into one time the number of words. An impossible task.