Assessing Meritocracy
Scholars examine how meritocracy functions across societies and how it shapes inequality and opportunity.
Categories
Conference | One-Time Event
Location
The University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris 41 rue des Grands Moulins 75013 Paris, France
Organizers
Steven Durlauf, Geoffrey Wodtke
Assessing Meritocracy will bring together international academics to explore normative and positive dimensions of meritocracy, with some focus on comparative aspects of meritocratic institutions across regions. We aim to develop work on meritocracy that employs commonalities and heterogeneities between countries in order to understand how different societies have operationalized meritocracy and how this operationalization has realized meritocratic goals and affected inequality. This conference is the first in a series and will generate long-term collaborations with interdisciplinary scholars interested in evaluating the positive and normative aspects of meritocracy.
Participation is by invitation only.
Schedule
Thursday, February 26
| Start Time | End Time | Session | Session Leader |
| 9:30 a.m. | 10:00 a.m. | Breakfast & Registration | |
| 10:00 a.m. | 10:10 a.m. | Opening Remarks | Michele Lowrie |
| 10:10 a.m. | 11:00 a.m. | Meritocracy and Equality of Opportunity | Harry Brighouse |
| 11:00 a.m. | 11:50 a.m. | Accidents of Affluence: Sibling Correlations in Wealth | Fabian Pfeffer |
| 11:50 a.m. | 12:05 p.m. | Coffee Break | |
| 12:05 p.m. | 12:55 p.m. | Meritocracy Misunderstood: Ideological Critiques and the Normative Core | Jahel Queralt |
| 12:55 p.m. | 1:55 p.m. | Lunch | |
| 1:55 p.m. | 2:45 p.m. | Work and School in the Age of Growth | |
| 2:45 p.m. | 3:35 p.m. | Social Mobility and Persistence of Elites in Times of Regime Change: Evidence from the 1917 Russian Revolution | Andrei Markevich |
| 3:35 p.m. | 3:50 p.m. | Coffee Break | |
| 3:50 p.m. | 4:40 p.m. | Intergenerational Mobility in Late Qing Dynasty (1783–1909) | Kristina Butaeva |
| 4:40 p.m. | 5:30 p.m. | The Meritocratic Consensus and Stratification in Higher Education | Zachary Bleemer |
| 7:30 p.m. | 9:30 p.m. | Private Conference Dinner |
Friday, February 27
| Start Time | End Time | Session | Session Leader |
| 9:30 a.m. | 09:50 a.m. | Breakfast | |
| 9:50 a.m. | 10:40 a.m. | Common People? The Elite Market for Ordinariness and how it Legitimises Income Inequality | Aaron Reeves |
| 10:40 a.m. | 11:30 a.m. | Inferring Trade-offs in University Admissions | Debopam Bhattacharya |
| 11:30 a.m. | 11:45 a.m. | Coffee Break | |
| 11:45 p.m. | 12:35 p .m. | Assessing Merit in French Affirmative Action Programmes | Agnès Van Zantan |
| 12:35 p.m. | 1:25 p.m. | Inclusion or Exclusion? Arguments Involving Meritocracy | |
| 1:25 p.m. | 1:25 p .m. | Boxed Lunches To Go |