Lucky, lucky, lucky

When I worked in mainstream finance, I came across a lot of people (men, mostly) with big-sounding job titles and hefty salaries to match.  Frequently, they would claim, or at least imply, with great confidence that their success was evidence of the meritocratic nature of the financial services industry: they were smart, they had worked hard, their efforts had been recognised and rewarded.  As things go in milk-making, so they go in business: the cream naturally rises to the top.  Once, I was foolish enough to say to my CEO that the problem with senior managers at our firm was that all the people at the top thought they owed their position to merit but almost no-one who worked for them shared that view.  I added that this was also true in most comparable firms.  I doubt my career trajectory improved after that conversation, but it was probably already too late.  Nonetheless, I still stand by what I said then: if you really want to know how good a manager is, don’t ask them, talk to their junior staff instead. 

Mohandas Gandhi was once asked his opinion about Western civilization, and replied, “I think it would be a very good idea”, which nicely sums up my view about meritocracy.  What we have in the West is a system that encourages people at the top to believe they deserve to be there, without paying much attention to whether there is any evidence to support that belief.  We are born with nothing and we die with nothing (the Book of Job reminds us), so we convince ourselves that what we make of our lives is down to us, and that consequently we should bear responsibility for our failures and take credit for our successes.  Except that we are not born into nothing: we are born into a complex socio-economic world, which supplies advantages to some and disadvantages to others, and what we are able to make of our lives is significantly constrained by the place of our birth, our sex organs and skin colour, and the attitude our parents take towards our education.

So, let me offer some advice to those seeking to navigate the fake meritocracy of the employment world.

If you want a good job that pays well and does not require you regularly to take risks that are highly correlated with an early death, in a society that has good levels of stability, low levels of violent crime, laws that protect property ownership, and generous and widely available public services, then the best option is to be born in a Western country.  Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands are good choices in Europe, Canada works well for the Americas, Japan for Asia, and New Zealand for Oceania.  Other options are available, of course, although gun crime, climate change, and populist electoral results have reduced the consistency with which ideal outcomes can be achieved.  If you are unlucky enough not to have been born in a Western country, then make sure you migrate to one as a child, young enough to assimilate quickly.  The third best option is to come as an adult, although be aware that Western cities are full of well-educated recent immigrants driving taxis, cleaning houses, and hoping that their children might secure the benefits of global upward mobility that passed them by.

Once you have secured well remunerated work, you will want to gain more skills, acquire more responsibility, earn the trust and respect of your colleagues, and enjoy the improved pay and benefits associated with career development and promotion.  Onwards and upwards, as they say.  Once again, some societies make this easier than others, and many Western countries retain the annoying habit of assigning greater prestige to old-fashioned professional employment – lawyer, professor, bank manager, doctor, or bishop – than to newer, equally demanding but less respected roles – advice worker, recruitment consultant, tech entrepreneur, therapist, or yoga teacher – as if tradition were somehow to be considered a genuine source of esteem.    Here, the key advantage is to choose to be a boy baby, and not any other sort, since then your culture will supply you with a lifetime of affirmation that career success is a natural expectation for you, is available through the assistance of older boys, and to be achieved and then celebrated by the exhibition of typical boy behaviour.  Girl babies have a few compensatory options: mimicry (often unpopular), expending double the effort (usually exhausting), or resignation (preferable to despair).  The main consolation for girls is that things are much better today than they used to be and look set to improve further, albeit at a testudinian pace.

In addition to male sex organs, the lighter your skin colour the better, since it is widely believed in Western culture that science has demonstrated that genetically inherited low prevalence of the pigment melanin is a direct predictor of intelligence, good taste, and the virtues of civility.  Paradoxically, the same culture also assumes that artificially induced melanin production, whether from lounging in the sun or from sun lounges, is mostly a signal of wealth and success, due to the meritorious nature of Western society.  Skin colour is, of course, hard to disguise at job interviews, but to improve your chance of being called to interview, and since a great deal of long-listing for employment is now conducted online, it is advantageous not to have a melanin-flavoured-name.  As with most other elements of your CV, your name is much easier to change than your birth features.      

You will discover that interesting, well-paid jobs, in socially stable, wealthy societies are highly competitive.  How, then, should you go about improving your chances of securing one, and of keeping hold of it.  The best strategy is to choose your parents wisely.  Pick a family that invests in education, by which I mean spends time with you rather than money on you, and encourages you to develop a respect for knowledge and an aptitude for lifelong learning.  The sooner you acquire the habits needed to learn – patience, focus, willingness to make errors and learn from them, curiosity, knowing who to listen to and who to ignore – the better.  In addition, your parents should equip you with a sound moral character, some hobbies that teach persistence, and sufficient experience of games and sport to know how to accept defeat and to celebrate victory with dignity.  It helps if your parents speak English, which is the most important language in the world, but if they don’t, make sure you become fluent as soon as possible.  The second most important language is mathematics, but in most work roles, you can get away with bluffing this, especially if you are a boy baby born with a paleface. 

These issues are well described in a trilogy of novels by the Zimbabwean author, Tsitsi Dangarembga.  I read her first book – Nervous Conditions (1988) – around fifteen years ago, shortly after spending a week in Namibia, which shares with Zimbabwe a history of racial hierarchy, initially imposed by colonial rule, and then only partially and imperfectly reformed after a war of independence.  A few years later I read the second instalment – The Book of Not (2006) – and then completed the series when the final volume – This Mournable Body (2018) – was published.  The story follows the career of Tambu, from the age of thirteen, and her failure to find employment, financial security, social status, or happiness, despite her brilliant education.  These injustices are introduced to the reader in the first sentence of Nervous Conditions: “I was not sorry when my brother died”.  Tambu is only sent to school when her brother unexpectedly dies, for her family could only afford to educate one child.  She is a black girl in a poor country, where her achievements count for little as compared with the easy access to work and money available to white girls and boys.  For her, education is not a liberation, but a painful reminder that the facts of our birth are the principal determinants of the prospects of our working lives. 

White boys, born in the West, to families that invest in education, are triply advantaged just as Tambu was triply disadvantaged.  We might be born and die naked, but throughout our lives we are clothed by the culture we inhabit, and however much the culture of the West encourages us to think that what we achieve is what we merit, the reality is quite different.  Our belief that achievement is self-manufactured is belied by a close examination of our systems of education, employment, and wealth distribution.  We grant opportunity to some at the expense of others, we grant privilege to some at the expense of others, and we indulge the wishful thinking of some at the expense of others.  Assigning the senior positions in society – whether in business, government, or the arts – by lottery would be fairer than the current system.  And at least if we used a lottery, those at the top would no longer be able to pretend that they deserved their success.  And the rest of us would not have to worry about the consequences of pointing this out. 

Instead of asking ourselves the question, have I been successful in life? we would do better to ask, in what ways have I been fortunate? I have been lucky, lucky, lucky.