O Mérito e o Capitalismo Americano

Mérito, trabalho duro, seriedade, nunca foi reconhecido e remunerado no Brasil. O melhor exemplo é Lula, um político profissional chegado numa branquinha, que despreza o estudo e nunca trabalhou na vida, tendo sido eleito pelo partido da bandidagem paradoxalmente chamado partido dos trabalhadores. Nos EUA, pelo contrário, existe um consenso de que o mérito tem valor e constitui um dos pilares do seu sistema econômico. Luigi Zingales escreve um excelente artigo a respeito:
It isn’t easy to decide what constitutes merit, of course. Consider an environment with which I’m familiar: American academia. Let’s say you want to determine who the best professors are. How do you rank publications? Do you value the number of papers that someone has written, or their impact? How do you measure that impact—is it merely the number of times that a paper has been cited, or should citations be weighted by the importance of the journal that makes the citation? Do you value good citations (“This is a seminal paper”) and bad citations (“This paper is fundamentally flawed”) equally? What about teaching? How do you evaluate that? Should it be measured by students’ satisfaction, or should other criteria come into the picture? If so, which? And what about other dimensions, such as collegiality and “service” to the school? Any system of determining merit must assign various weights to each of these dimensions, a process that is inevitably somewhat arbitrary, and the arbitrariness can create the presumption of unfairness and favoritism.
As that example suggests, a system of measuring merit should be efficient and difficult to manipulate, and above all, it should be deemed fair—or at least not too unfair—by most of the people subject to it. We can now begin to understand why support for meritocracy translates so neatly into support for the market system. Markets are far harder to manipulate than, say, a list of tenure requirements that an academic committee has created, or—to take a broader example—the decisions of statist regimes determining which lucky citizens get which consumer products. The market system has the reputation, too, of producing efficient results. And it doesn’t violate the prevailing notion of fairness too much.