No aspect of this peculiar modern ideal has come under greater scrutiny than the associations it constructs between, on the one hand, wealth and virtue and, on the other, poverty and moral dubiousness. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen considered the emergence of financial worth, in the early nineteenth century, as the central and often sole criterion employed in commercial societies’evaluation of their members:“[Wealth has become] the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession has become necessary in order to have any reputable standing in the community. It has become indispensable to acquire property in order to retain one’s good name … Those members of the community who fall short of [a relatively high standard of wealth] will suffer in the esteem of their fellow men; and consequently they will suffer also in their own esteem.” In such a society, it was, Veblen implied, nearly impossible to conceive of being both virtuous and yet poor. Even the most unmaterialistically minded person must sense an imperative to accumulate wealth and demonstrate possession of it—as the only means of escaping opprobrium—and must feel anxious and blameworthy on failing to do so.
Accordingly, the possession of a great many material goods becomes desirable not principally because such goods provide any abjective or subjective pleasure (though they may do this, too) but because they confer honour. In the ancient world, debate raged among philosophers about what was materially necessary for happiness and what unnecessary. Epicurus, for one, argued that simple food and shelter were all that was needed, and that an expensive house and lavish meals could be safely passed up by every rational, philosophically minded person. However, reviewing the argument many centuries later in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wryly pointed out that in modern, materialistic societies, countless things that were no doubt unnecessary from the point of view of physical survival had nonetheless in practical terms come to be seen as “necessaries,” simply because no one could be thought respectable and so lead a psychologically comfortable life without owning them:
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct… . Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency[,] have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people.”
Since Smith’s day, economists have been almost unanimous in subscribing to the idea that what best defines, and lends such bitterness to, the condition of the poor is not so much the direct physical suffering involved as the shame attendant on the negative reactions of others to their state—in other words, the unavoidable sense that their poverty flouts what Smith termed the “established rules of decency.” In The Affluent Society (1958), J. K. Galbraith proposed, with a bow to Smith, “People are poverty-stricken whenever their income, even if adequate for survival, falls markedly behind that of the community. Then they cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum necessary for decency; and they cannot wholly escape, therefore, the judgment of the larger community that they are indecent.”
3.
This notion that “decency” must be attached to wealth—and “indecency” to poverty—is the essential focal point of one line of sceptical complaint against the modern status ideal. Why, the system’s critics ask, should a failure to pile up riches be taken as a marker of an unconditionally flawed human being, rather than evidence of a greater or lesser deficit, or even a fiasco, in one particular aspect of the far larger, more complicated project that is the leading of a good life? Why should wealth and poverty be read as unerring signposts for human morals?
The reasons, it turns out, are not mysterious. The very act of earning money frequently calls upon virtues of character. Working at— and keeping—almost any job requires intelligence, energy, forethought and the ability to cooperate with others. And the more lucrative the position, the greater the requisite merits. Lawyers and surgeons not only earn higher salaries than street cleaners; they also typically bring to bear on their work more sustained effort and greater skill.
A day labourer “would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt,” wrote Adam Smith, because (to return to his passage with italics) not having such a shirt must imply a degree of poverty that, Smith’s contemporaries felt certain, “nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.” Only someone who was a congenital drunk, unreliable, thieving or childishly insubordinate would be incapable of securing the modest employment needed to finance the purchase of a linen shirt—given which, the ownership of this article of clothing might indeed safely be taken as a minimum guarantee of good character.
It requires but a short leap of imagination from there to make the assumption that extreme good conduct and an assortment of virtues must lie behind the acquisition of cupboards full of linen shirts, fleets of yachts, myriad mansions and jewels. The very concept of the “status symbol,” a costly material object that confers respect on its owner, rests upon the widespread and not improbable notion that the acquisition of the most expensive goods must inevitably demand the greatest of all qualities of character.
4.
Opponents of economic meritocracy have long believed, however, that true merit must be a more elusive, complex quality than could ever be neatly captured by the parameters of an end-of-year salary. Their scepticism is analogous to that of educationalists who insist that the “intelligence” of students cannot be fairly measured simply by making them sit an examination and then grading their answers to questions such as:
Pick out the antonyms from among these four words:
obdurate spurious ductile recondite
For the most part these critics would not argue, of course, that merit and intelligence are, respectively, everywhere equally distributed or entirely immeasurable. They merely wish to point out that the vast majority of us are unlikely ever to know how to do the apportioning or measuring properly and hence should take infinite care before acting in ways that presume otherwise—for example, in the economic sphere, by abolishing taxes for the wealthy (who, it is occasionally said by extreme defenders of economic meritocracy, deserve to keep all their earnings) or revoking state benefits for the poor (who would thus, these same defenders would add, have the opportunity more fully to experience the depths of deprivation that they must likewise deserve).
Such scepticism does not sit well, though, with the demands of everyday life. It is easy to understand the wish for some system, be it educational or economic, that will assure us of picking out the worthiest few from a classroom or in society and, in turn, passing over the least worthy—that is, the losers—in good conscience.