Queralt: genetics, not just effort, drives inequality

Queralt: genetics shapes merit, and the left ignores it

How much of your salary have you actually earned, and how much came built in? That is the question Jahel Queralt (Alcanar, 1982), professor of Philosophy of Law at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, asks out loud in her essay Nadie merece nada ('Nobody Deserves Anything'): genetic inheritance, the luck of the border and the family environment shape a person's path as much as or more than effort. She discusses it in an interview published by ABC, where she also reproaches the left for having forgotten about meritocracy, one of its great ideas. The thesis is not comfortable. Nor is it new.

What Queralt says about genetics and merit

The first target is the fable of the industrious ant and the grasshopper. Queralt calls it an individualist tale and, above all, a false one: it assumes the grasshopper could have done what the ant did, and that is the questionable point. Around both there is a context — the country where they are born, the family, the teachers, the scholarships — and before that, two different creatures. The luck of being born on one side of the border or the other enters the equation just like innate abilities.

There is a further step, and it is the uncomfortable one. 'Even the capacity for effort is given to us,' the author argues, pointing to those who cannot concentrate because of their DNA or their environment. From this she draws a practical consequence: less sarracena about other people's paths, less neighbourhood pride and less guilt for those left behind. The discourse of effort works as an incentive, she admits, but it creates the appearance that everything is within anyone's reach.

It is worth separating two things that usually go hand in hand. Recognising the weight of the involuntary does not eliminate individual agency; it simply situates it. The author herself defends selecting the most capable person. What she rejects is the next step: taking for granted that whoever reaches the top won the place fair and square.

Efficiency and justice: what kind of meritocracy she defends

Her definition is almost provocatively simple: choosing the best-prepared candidate in a context of fair opportunities. Two pillars: efficiency and justice. The efficiency argument is the one of household common sense: when you look for a doctor or a teacher for your children, you want the best, not the nicest. 'I like to emphasise this collective dimension,' she says.

The justice one works as a fault detector. If, looking at the list of the best, they are all men or all fit the same sociological profile, the odds are the starting track was tilted and the 'most qualified' criterion is legitimising a privilege. That is where she takes a swipe at parts of the left: confusing real society with a perfect meritocracy is what she calls the ideology of meritocracy.

She also points to the commodification of the concept, the habit of marrying merit to market salary. There is no such obligatory marriage. Hiring the best under fair conditions allows for correcting pay afterwards, and the public sector is the cleanest example: there, the selection criterion can be completely separated from what a private employer would pay. It is the part of the book that will generate the fewest headlines.

Why did the left abandon meritocracy?

Because it won the cultural battle and lost interest in it, she suggests. As the ideal becomes consolidated, it is taken for granted and stops mobilising; in parallel, a narrative grows that presents what has been achieved as proof of talent. Elites, more than the right, are the customers of that narrative: it allows them to say 'we earned it'. And it consoles those at the bottom with a 'if you work hard, you can make it' that is only true if society is almost perfectly meritocratic.

The detail that breaks the propaganda is simple: those who rise from the bottom are usually a statistically improbable case, and around them were others who worked just as hard and did not make it, for lack of charisma or for arriving two minutes late to an interview. Many did not lack merit. They lacked luck.

The meeting with Sandel: the question that went unanswered

The scene has its comic side, and Queralt tells it without cruelty. In Madrid she got to interview Michael Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit, who came accompanied by his son Adam Adatto Sandel, also a philosopher and author of a book on discipline. Too much of a coincidence. The professor asked him how his critique of inherited privilege squares with the advantages anyone passes on to their own children. Sandel smiled, promised to answer at the end and let the clock run. There was no afterwards. She puts it this way: when the reproach touches your own sofa, people look the other way.

From individual inheritance to immigration: the leap the text does not make

Here it is worth pausing. The essay talks about differences between individuals: some taller, others stronger, some with an ear for music and others without. It establishes no hierarchies between populations or classifications of capacity by origin, and population genetics offers no such ranking. Anyone who reads the interview as scientific endorsement of the idea that mixing very different people condemns a country to failure is adding the penultimate chapter of a book the author has not written.

What can legitimately be discussed with data is something else: how much of the labour market outcome of the migrant population depends on language, recognition of qualifications and the social network of origin — variables well known in any integration study — and how much on the institutions that receive them. That is a discussion of scales and time, not of chromosomes. Reducing the problem to biology saves you from thinking, which is precisely its promise.

One reasonable doubt remains when closing the book. If talent is distributed by lottery, someone will have to explain why the winning numbers cluster in the same streets, the same universities and among the same surnames. The uncomfortable answer — that the lottery is also inherited — is what makes meritocracy a good ideal and a terrible alibi.