Meritocracy Undermined: How The "Lemons" Drive Out The "Cherries" From Formal Politics

Meritocracy is a political philosophy holding that power should be vested in individuals almost exclusively based on ability and talent. Advancement in such a system is based on performance measured through examination and/or demonstrated achievement in the field where it is implemented.

A lemon as against a cherry is an American slang term for a car (or more broadly, a thing) that is found to be defective only after it has been bought.

So, what is the link between meritocracy and the lemon problem? One of the linkages that can be drawn is rather an application of a theory developed in a 1970 paper entitled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" by Economist and Nobel Laureate George Akerlof, which built the foundations for a better understanding of the implication of information asymmetry (unequal information) on market development.

He established that in a market with asymmetric information, the bad goods or products (goods of a lesser quality) (used cars in his paper), which are the lemons drive out the cherries (good products). This is fundamentally because, without information, good and bad products cannot be distinguished, at least efficiently and thus people may end up paying more for the bad goods and less for the good ones. So, if the price is likely to be the same for both good and bad goods, then suppliers would tend to supply more or only bad ones for the same price. They will make a lot of savings by not producing the good products.

Across countries, communities, societies and culture, a basic question we ask is why don't we have many quality individuals in politics? Many people do so well privately but are disinterested in official politics. Not exclusively, one of the basic reasons is that the good and bad politicians cannot be distinguished depending on how a country measures quality and more importantly our valuation of them.

For instance, if the quality of a potential person for parliament is not based on his ability and talent (meritocracy in a good sense) but how much noise (in the bad sense usually presented in a manner that suggest they care about society) he can make, then most of the talkatives (who are perhaps lemons) would find their way in parliament. If the nation thinks charisma is all there is about good leadership, then those with charisma, even if they are thieves or liars beside others are more likely to be voted for.

So, our relative valuations (informed by a host of factors including ethnicity, culture, etc.) of the characteristics of good leadership as a society may create information asymmetries that would make it difficult to distinguish the cherries from the lemons.

The best people who do not possess the qualities upheld by society but have more of the others (less valued by society) would be valued less or the same as the lemons. Eventually, the cherries would be driven out of the political landscape, leaving the lemons to rule.

So what is the way forward? By upholding meritocracy, the society can set minimum standards that produce adequate information that signals the quality of potential politicians and thus enables people to distinguish between the lemons and cherries. America is a typical example - you must have achieved "something" in life to be appointed to certain positions.

However, this may not suffice in the democracies of the developing world, because they tend to interpret democracy to mean anybody at all can represent them, and thus create incentives for the lemons to drive out the cherries. Ultimately, the extent to which meritocracy is upheld in a country contributes to its level of development.