Meritocracy and Inequality Acceptance
When is inequality fair? And why can people who agree on the ideal of meritocracy still disagree sharply about redistribution?
In a new article for the Nature Human Behaviour special issue Inequality in a Complex World, Alexander W. Cappelen and Bertil Tungodden bring together recent research on how meritocratic ideas shape the acceptance of inequality and attitudes towards redistribution.
The article focuses on the meritocratic fairness view, where inequalities are considered fair when they reflect performance, but unfair when they result from luck or inherited privilege.
The authors explore why people who share this view may still disagree about redistribution. Such disagreements can arise from different beliefs about the sources of inequality, different views on how unequal opportunities should be taken into account, and different ideas about how strongly performance should be rewarded.
Taken together, the article sheds light on why debates about inequality and redistribution can remain polarised even among people who share meritocratic ideals. It concludes by asking how a better understanding of these disagreements can help create a more constructive and less polarised debate about redistribution.