Reformulating The Meritocracy

Good review of Twilight of the Elites by Christopher Hayes from Dissent Magazine.

"...But meritocracy goes beyond this in limiting the possibilities of politics. A friend of mine at an Ivy League university teaches business students about John Rawls in a class on politics and leadership. The students are with Rawls when it comes to equality of opportunity. And some of them, especially the liberal ones, are with him on the idea that one doesn’t simply deserve whatever the market determines. But when Rawls gets to the parts about how people don’t deserve their natural talents, and how society should have a veto over their claims to their intelligence, the wheels come off the bus..."

We do tend to focus on penalizing or taxing the result as a means to reaching equality.

And

"...But reformulating our social structures to empower people broadly, rather than to allow mobility for a chosen few, must be the next step beyond meritocratic liberalism. As Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana have argued, a politics of social mobility ultimately fails because it only has room for a certain amount of people to “escape relations of dependence and control” found in the market. The aim should be to move all people from dependence to independence, and to eliminate all forms of domination. The current form of meritocratic social mobility is a zero-sum game, built on exclusivity and hierarchy..."

Isn't that, like, in the spirit of anarchism?