Meritocracy as the market’s referee
In an episode on what he called crony capitalism, Bob Zadek used meritocracy to describe what happens when government steps out of the role of neutral referee. He offered an analogy: if the NFL wanted a football team in Portland, Maine, and gave that team a 14-point head start every game, the league would not be a meritocracy and the best team would not win. The winner would more likely be the team that chose to play where the league picked. Zadek applied the same logic to the Obama administration’s promotion of Serious Materials, a window manufacturer, arguing that the president and vice president had effectively decided for consumers which insulated window to buy. He described Serious Materials as a classic example of crony capitalism at work Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011).
Guest Luigi Zingales agreed that government tries to influence market outcomes, but said businesses themselves using government to influence outcomes in their favor are even more dangerous. He described such influence as pervasive and difficult to monitor in a democracy because it operates through indirect means, commissions, and small norms that are not easy to detect Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011).
Immigration and the refusal to compete
In a discussion of immigration restrictions, Zadek framed American opposition to open immigration as a betrayal of meritocratic principle. He said that from the founding of the country through the 1880s there were essentially no immigration rules other than to arrive and be welcome, and that the country had no problems as a result. He argued that Americans who gave lip service to meritocracy — to letting the best man win and competing for the job — became unwilling to compete when someone would do their job for less money. He called this cowardice and economic protectionism, and said no one owns a job; people are entitled to a job only if they do the best job for the lowest money Let Them All In (2013).
Guest Alex Nowrasteh placed the restrictions in the Progressive Era, saying they increased from the 1880s to the 1920s until the border was closed to almost all immigrants in the late 1920s. He grouped immigration restrictions with the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the nationalizing of the currency, the income tax, and alcohol prohibition as efforts to centralize economic and social decision-making in Washington. He noted that many conservatives and Republicans who understand those other Progressive Era policies to have been bad still cling to the notion that immigration restrictions were good for the United States Let Them All In (2013).
Seniority versus merit in teaching
A caller named Nick told the show that his sister had been forced out of the school system into another career, and that five scientist friends with biotech experience who wanted to return to teaching were turned away while the union hired five teachers from Poland through the State Department who had never taught in America. Zadek put the question to guest Rebecca Friedrichs: why isn’t the teaching system a meritocracy, given that the goal ought to be hiring the most qualified candidate regardless of sector or union status A Teacher’s Brave Stand Against Her Union – Rebecca Friedrichs and Terry Pell (2017).
Friedrichs agreed with the caller that schools should hire whoever is best for the children, and said she sees herself as a public servant while her union approaches collective bargaining as if teachers are entitled to a whole bunch of things. She described what she called a one-two punch: the union pushed for tenure laws and then used collectively bargained grievance procedures so that administrators trying to discipline an underperforming or abusive teacher run headlong into union-engineered procedures. She said she had seen abusive teachers who were not fired, and that the result ties the hands of taxpayers, administrators, and everyone else A Teacher’s Brave Stand Against Her Union – Rebecca Friedrichs and Terry Pell (2017).
Democracy as anti-meritocratic
Guest Jayant Bhandari argued that democracy is a non- and anti-meritocratic system of governance. He said that when the masses decide who should rule, the lowest common denominator — the lowest 51% of a society — decides who runs the country, and that in Pakistan each cycle of democracy brought fanatic elements to power and locked women back into their houses. He compared governance to professions: no one votes on who should build bridges or become a doctor; those are meritocratic systems of selection Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017).
Bhandari went further, calling democracy the worst form of government and a cancer. He said that because the least competent people in terms of understanding public policy have the most votes, a cycle of populism overtakes government institutions and corrupts everything in society, including associations and businesses. He said democracy has decayed Western societies slowly over the last 200 years, so the decay is not very visible, and that it ensures institutions stand not on moral pillars but on the pillars of populism Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017).
Zadek agreed, saying that implicit in Bhandari’s argument is that democracy is not automatically a universal good but simply one element of governance, and that one cannot have too much democracy in the way one cannot be too rich or too thin Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017).
The meritocracy trap
The show devoted an episode to Daniel Markovits, identified as a Yale Law Professor, and his book The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. Zadek opened by calling meritocracy something one would imagine to be a universal good, and said Markovits takes issue with that core belief, questioning whether a meritocratic system causes economic, social, and perhaps political harm Daniel Markovits on the (De)Merits of Meritocracy (2019).
Markovits began from the idea that people should get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than their parents’ social class, which he said seems right in a basic way and seems to give everybody a fair shot. He identified two problems. First, people who have gotten ahead have enormous income, wealth, and skill, and can devote that to training their children in a way nobody else can afford, so that rich kids get an education middle-class kids cannot match. Testing and admitting on the merits therefore excludes almost everybody but the rich: at the Ivy Plus colleges, there are more students from households in the top 1% of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half. Second, in the world of work, these super-educated people change how companies operate in ways that favor their rare training, capture the productivity for themselves, and reduce job opportunities for everybody else. Meritocracy, he said, privileges one set of people and excludes almost everybody else from the prizes of income and status Daniel Markovits on the (De)Merits of Meritocracy (2019).
Merit-based governance in Liberland
Vít Jedlička, described as the founder and president of the Free Republic of Liberland, told Zadek that the country’s constitution was inspired by the US constitution, a little bit by Swiss democracy, and a little bit by the Singapore meritocracy. He said the government is divided into three branches similar to those of the United States, with a Congress forming a government that proposes laws subject to approval. The distinctive feature he described is that in that institution people do not vote one person, one vote, but one person and as many merits as they have, so that people who have done more for the country or paid more voluntary taxes have a bigger say than those who have done or paid less. He called this one of the important principles that needs to be fixed with regular democracy Founding the Free Republic of Liberland (2021).
Jedlička added that laws and regulations are subject to three vetoes: by citizens on a one-person, one-vote basis, by a Senate he described as a House of Elders, and by a Constitutional Court. He said it is important that the state create as few laws as possible and that there be many ways to get rid of them so the system does not get clogged up as in modern societies Founding the Free Republic of Liberland (2021).
Across episodes: the term’s shifting work
The excerpts show no single argument developing across episodes so much as a term put to different uses by different speakers. In the earliest excerpt, Zadek uses meritocracy to mean market competition undistorted by government favoritism, and Zingales extends the critique to businesses that capture government. In the immigration episode, Zadek again invokes meritocracy as competition for jobs, this time against protectionist immigration policy. In the teachers union episode, Zadek and Friedrichs apply it to hiring and retention in public education, contrasting merit with seniority and grievance procedures. Bhandari then inverts the frame, treating democracy itself as anti-meritocratic. Markovits, in the only episode built around the concept, argues that meritocracy as practiced entrenches privilege rather than dissolving it. Jedlička offers a constitutional design that embeds weighted merit in voting. The treatments do not build on one another; each speaker arrives with his own definition.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define meritocracy in any settled or stipulated way, and no speaker responds directly to another’s usage across episodes. The Markovits episode excerpt ends before the discussion of finance and labor that the topic list advertises, so the specifics of his argument beyond the two problems he states are not available here. The Liberland excerpts describe the merit-weighted voting principle but do not report how merits are measured or adjudicated. The Bhandari excerpt ends mid-transcript at a section break, and the Zadek monologue that follows is not included.