Ep. 254: Michael Sandel Interview: Against Meritocracy (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 254 is, is meritocracy a good political ethic? And we're talking with Michael J. Sandel about his new book, the Tyranny of Merit. What's become of the common good? For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin. A good choice to host your podcast, but a smart choice.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, socially unmobile in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan. And I believe that busboys should make just as much as bankers in Cambridge,

0:45 Mark: Massachusetts, but nowhere else.

0:47 Wes: Exactly. Cambridge is utopia.

0:51 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, recognizing the value of my work in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Mark: Welcome, everybody. We've very seldom had a returning guest talking about his or her book. We had Eva Brann, but I can't think of anybody else. But we had him on. We discussed one of his works on episode 97 and we had him on for 98. So normally we wouldn't do this, but this just seemed like a really pressing topic. What'd you guys think of this book? Before he comes out? He's going to come out in a few minutes here.

1:17 Wes: He's in the green room right now

1:19 Dylan: eating some M and Ms. Right. He only wanted the purple M and Ms.

Right.

I really liked it. It's a popular book in that it has some history in it and sort of genealogy about merit and stuff. I think there are a couple of particularly meaty chapters I think that we'll probably focus on. But to me, it's a very timely topic set on the backdrop of the current political climate and what is at issue with our social unrest. How is that reflected in our notions about community and our judgments about inequity? And what kinds of inequity do we have? Both economic as well as social. Social status, inequities. And he provides a language and a thinking about this that I think is really valuable.

And then I valued it in that I think he sets up the questions as well as has an opinion about them. You don't have to agree with him, I don't think with his solution, but come away with understanding the parameters of the problem, even though I basically agree with his conclusion.

2:20 Wes: Anyway, I think you guys probably already know that I'm highly sympathetic to an argument like this. And the argument is that when it comes to questions of justice, we ought to focus not just on redistributive. Justice and getting rid of economic inequality, although he thinks that's important for other reasons. But we have to worry about the way status and recognition are allocated within a society. And what we've done with meritocracy is to ignore that problem. So even though there are benefits to a meritocracy over an aristocracy, which is that the winners and the losers are determined by their merits rather than questions of birth, at least seemingly, and there is some level of mobility, what it does is it produces a certain amount of hubris in the winners and self deprecation in the losers.

Because if it's all about merit, people at the top feel like they deserve to be at the top and people at the bottom feel like they deserve to be at the bottom. And so that's a real problem. It produces resentment. It's, you know, he diagnoses the current populism in terms of this problem in a way that's reminiscent of our discussion of Fukuyama and in our various discussions of the importance of status and recognition and various previous episodes. And then the question is what we do about that and whether that's a tractable problem. Right. So it may be that just these status problems are built into any different political organization.

He doesn't really address that. He has some solutions that involve everything from job training to changing the perceived status of different professions. But there's not a lot of talk about practical solutions in this book. And again, I think that's because it's really hard to conceive of a solution to the question of status.

4:15 Mark: Seth, any opening thoughts?

4:17 Seth: Yeah, well, I'm one of the winners of the globalization because I've worked for several tech companies that are global entities. So I'm seeing this through the lens of the merit that's getting bestowed upon people that I work with in other countries who have been elevated in their context as well. So I think he frames the question really well and he articulates like Dylan said, you know, he gives us a language for articulating the problem. I'm not sure that we don't need a deeper treatment of the concept of nationalism versus globalization. So he's acknowledged that globalization and the opening of markets and the treating of participation in global marketplaces through the channel of education and the system of merit has rewarded some and left others behind.

I guess my question is, okay, we think that the response of the loss of dignity is, you know, racism, nationalism and so forth. What would be a non nationalist, non racist response to a changing economic world like that? I mean, one of the things that he said, he cites the statistic that something like 2/3 of Americans don't go to college. So then the problem statement is how do we create dignified work for 200, 230 million people that isn't globalized? I see the problem statement, I think he's articulated it very well. It seems like a very old problem.

It's like almost town gown. I'm not sure that it's just a question of changing the way that we value specific types of activity. But there's a need for creating work that would fulfill the model and the language and the value that we would want to put on that. And I'm not sure policy wise and mechanics wise, how that would work.

6:01 Mark: Yeah, so he thinks that meritocracy is sort of unhealthy for all those involved, that for people that are striving to get to the top, it is too stressful. And this is what gives rise to helicopter parenting and the college admissions scandal. Just, you place way too much value on this one thing of getting into an Ivy League and not insisting on that. De emphasizing that somehow. But then of course, the people on the bottom, it's not even just that they're self deprecating, that they're actively humiliated and like what do you do? I think there could have been even more on that psychology of the folks that are left behind there that on the one hand they believe that you're already rewarded for hard work, but now the liberals are trying to jump in and put people in front of.

You know, I've been working my butt off all my life and you're giving advantages to these historically oppressed groups before me, at least in the the times. What is the term he uses about the wage that you would give to the. So the poor whites, when blacks were really oppressed, what white privilege literally was at that time was at least I have this status over minorities that now since they don't have that and they're still left out economically now there's like no recompense for that. That that explains the rise of Trump. And he's pretty ruthless about how smug it has made the so called winners, the liberal meritocrats.

This whole conceit that the only reason conservatives vote against their own interests is because they just don't have the right information. If we just use the presidency, use whatever, you know, this is a critique of Obama to provide them the right information, then we won't have any political disagreement. And Sandel thinks that is vastly overstating things that he really is. He's always pushing for public forums where we can actually, in a considered way, debate the common good and what we should be aiming at and how we can go forward given the things that we don't agree on.

And of course, it's so rich talking about this now after witnessing an actual debate in which nothing like that was even faintly possible.

8:03 Dylan: One of his fundamental criticisms is that whether it be meritocracy or markets, like in his other book, that these are somehow mechanisms that once you get them going, they automatically work like that. There's a conceit behind meritocracy and technocracy and even the market economies, that it's like a clockwork universe. You start it going and then things just sort out and that the result of that mechanism will be a just and sufficiently equitable society in which free people can sufficiently recognize their freedom and their actualization and more or less things can work out the way they ought to work out.

I think one of his underlying criticisms, and this is true of his book on liberalism and the limits of justice, the market book and this book, is that that's just not true. That's not true about the way we are as individuals. It's not the true the way politics works and the way communities and that that possibility of a value neutral structure that just works without kind of constantly being added to by individuals in this, as Mark said, this kind of constant dialogue is a myth.

9:13 Mark: Let's bring out Michael. Michael, welcome.

9:16 Dylan: Good to be with you.

9:17 Seth: So, Michael, I was just on vacation this week and I listened to the audiobook version for about half of it. So I've had your voice in my head for about seven hours over the past two days. And I've had that experience now of feeling like I know you. You know, how people feel like they know personalities, that they're comfortable with their voice. So I wanted to ask to at least just a softball to get started, you know, like, how do you make the decision to do that recording yourself as opposed to professional voice talent? I was curious about that because you're a professional teacher, I guess. And so that makes sense that you would want to lecture. But is that the rationale for the audiobook?

9:56 Dylan: I did read it myself, and that's because I care about communicating as effectively as I can. And I think even the way one reads, certainly the realm of philosophy, maybe in other fields too, has an expressive dimension that can contribute to the clarity of one's argument. At least that's how it seemed to me. Readers and listeners can decide for themselves Whether that's the case.

10:21 Seth: No, I think that's true. It didn't feel like a performance, you know, in the sense that it wasn't performative, in that it did feel like you were very expressive, and I actually appreciated it. So I just thought I would bring that up to kind of ease our way in.

10:35 Mark: Can we start very current that we are now in a position where you're kind of giving a pox on both your houses argument that the Republicans have made this mistake of actually believing in meritocracy, in other words, that if you are rich, you deserve to be rich. If you're poor, you deserve to be poor. The Democrats, they acknowledge that that's not actually the case all the time, that there are plenty of barriers, but their goal still of reducing those barriers so that you can rise as far as your talents will take you, that still affirms the main ideological point, that meritocracy should be the goal.

11:06 Dylan: My book, the Tyranny of Merit, is a critique of meritocracy. And there are at least two ways of objecting to the meritocracy we have. One of them is that we don't live up to the meritocratic principles we profess. This is, I think, the less controversial aspect of the book. Social mobility has stalled in the United States. It's harder to rise one generation to the next, from poverty to relative affluence in the United States than it is in many European countries and in Canada. So I think one of the reasons that the appeal to meritocracy, the political promise that you can make it if you try, one of the reasons that that promise has lost its capacity to inspire is that people realize that it isn't so easy to rise one generation to the next.

But I also pose a further challenge to meritocracy, which is that even if we could live up to meritocratic principles, even if we could create truly equal chances, and we're far short of that now, meritocracy still has a dark side. A perfectly meritocratic society would not be a just society, nor would it be a good society. And the reason I think meritocracy has a dark side is that it's corrosive of the common good. It cultivates attitudes towards success and failure that lead those who land on top to believe their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, and by implication, that those who struggle, those who are left behind, have no one to blame but themselves.

This leads those left behind in the new economy, left behind by the last four decades of market driven globalization to feel not only that they've fallen behind in terms of wages and job opportunities, but also that elites look down on them. And this sense of elites looking down has fueled the anger and resentment, the sense of grievance that has fueled the populist backlash against mainstream parties. We saw it play out most dramatically, I think, in 2016. But the reaction against the backlash against meritocratic elites, the anger at elites looking down, this, I think, was directed to elites across the political spectrum.

Though if we look at the US and Britain and center left parties in Europe, it's center left parties that had borne the brunt of it. And we could perhaps discuss later why that's the case.

So I really appreciated the argument and I found it sort of distilled a nice language about talking about this. And one of the pieces of the language that you bring in is, is that meritocracy fails in part because there's a misguided thought that if we just set things up, it's just going to work, you're just going to turn the crank and there'll be a quote, unquote, level playing field. And by the dint of our free exercise of our own capabilities, at the end of the day, things will be basically equitable, equitable enough. Right. Allowing for things to be somewhat unequal, but equitable enough and also just enough.

One way of phrasing your criticism is that it's neither just nor equitable in the end, because in part it's misguided to think that we can just turn the crank on this and that we can have something like a value neutral way of running our community, that we have to have a kind of active, vibrant back and forth, in fact, between how we make these practical decisions about the ways in which these rules work out. And there's a misguided faith that we can do that in a neutral way. In five, you have this critique of free market liberalism from Hayek, as well as the role for state liberalism from Rawls, where both of them have some things in common.

One thing being that there's a set of rules that we can come up with that will lead to a just enough and an equitable enough society if we just follow them. And it seems to me that part of your criticism is that they're just wrong about that. They're just wrong about that's the way we work as individuals and that's the way communities work politically.

Yes. And I do take up both Hayek and Rawls. One of the striking things looking at the two of them, of course, ideologically they're typically regarded, and rightly so, as opposites. Hayek, the advocate of laissez faire free market capitalism, and Rawls, the defender of a version of liberal equality that underwrites something like the welfare state. And yet both Hayek and Rawls reject in principle the idea of meritocracy. Both reject the idea that a market society, even a market society against background conditions in Rawls case that fulfill the two principles of justice.

Both reject the idea that justice is a matter of giving people what they deserve. In the case of Hayek, he distinguishes between contributing value to the economy and being meritorious or virtuous. And Hayek says that even in a well functioning market economy of the kind he favors, the results should not be misunderstood to reflect merit or moral desert. And he makes this argument on the grounds that who makes most in a market society will reflect, for example, the accident of who has the kind of talents that enable them to provide what consumers want.

Having those talents or having relatively scarce talents, which certainly affects one's success in the labor market, is not something that one deserves in the first place. That's Hayek's argument against the idea that the free market answers to merit. Rawls makes a surprisingly similar argument. He argues that the distribution of talents is arbitrary from a moral point of view, so that the earnings we make, whether in a market society or in a just society as he defines it, still reflects contingencies, especially to do with contingencies of native endowments that are no doing of the person whose talents they are.

So it's striking, first of all to notice, and I point this out, as you say, Dylan, in chapter five of the book, that both Hayek and Rawls reject meritocracy. And yet further argument I make is that both of them offer alternative accounts of who gets ahead, who makes most that lend themselves to the attitudes towards success that I think are at the heart of the anger and resentment we find today. And that's because in Hayek's case, he emphasizes that market results reflect the value of one's contribution to the economy or to the common good. But once he concedes that, then it's hard to tell.

People, look, you contributed the greatest value. What you do is of greatest value to the society in which you over here contribute is not very valuable, as the market result tells us. But don't take that personally, don't take that as a reflection on your merit. That's just the way things work out. That's a hard position to sustain morally, culturally, psychologically, with regard to social esteem. And there's something similar in Rawls's case. He rejects moral desert as the basis of distributive shares, but instead affirms what he calls entitlements, entitlements to legitimate expectations.

Once I fulfill what the rules of the game say will be rewarded, I'm entitled to my winnings, even though I can't say I morally deserve them due to the contingencies that we mentioned before. But that too, as in Hayek's embrace of value, Rawls embrace of entitlement to legitimate expectations, also makes it very difficult not to assign superior prestige, honor, social recognition to those who land on top. And so in both cases, my reason for undertaking the entire book is not about these philosophical conceptions. It's really this chapter right in the middle, chapter five.

But it's a way of showing that both on the right, laissez faire defenders of the free market, and on the center left, those who say we should provide a decent safety net and welfare state, both lack the resources to identify and to challenge the anger, the resentment and the grievances about elites looking down, which are ultimately about social recognition and esteem, not only about the distribution of income and wealth.

20:37 Wes: So what both Hayek and Rawls are concerned with is justice, right? In the sense, for Hayek, it's about freedom, freedom from coercion, freedom from the imposition of some particular conception of the good on people. And for Rawls, it's about what you do when you think about what a just society looks like, let's say from the original position, from behind a veil of ignorance. And then you get, despite the fact that you're composing society so as to favor the least advantaged, you end up with certain meritocratic properties as a byproduct. Right?

So what you call the entitlements, I think to me, the question is, once you start to challenge those, I think the question is how far do we go? Because I think there's some conflict here between, you know, with a certain conception of rights, right? So how, how far do we go in reorganizing society before we violate rights or before we create an unjust structure for soc, at least in Rawlsian terms. And then if we are going to reconfigure society so as to redistribute status and social esteem, can we do that within this framework? Are we altering the Rawlsian framework as a whole, or are we just kind of patching it up by taking some measures that will pay attention to social status and esteem.

How do we reconcile that attention with some consideration of the right?

22:04 Dylan: The question is whether for Hayek and for Rawls, it's possible to separate questions of justice from questions of social recognition and esteem, questions of honor, questions of what contributions count as valuable contributions to the common good. If justice touches on those questions is even entangled with those questions of honor, recognition, valuation, and esteem, then one way of describing the mistake that both Hayek and Rawls share is in thinking that it's possible to define a just society in a way that rejects any particular conception of the good.

Because once we get into the distribution of honor, esteem, social recognition, once we get into debates about what contributions to the common good are truly valuable and which contributions are less so, once we get into those debates, we are already trespassing, passing conceptions of the good. And so the critique of meritocracy that I offer in the new book the Tyranny of Merit plays out a theme from earlier works, including a theme that we've discussed previously on this podcast, which is whether it is possible to detach questions of justice from conceptions of the good.

To show how this question arises with regard to meritocracy. One of the central points of my argument against the version of meritocracy that underlies our public discourse is the idea that the money people make is the measure of our contribution to the common good. Now, some would say, well, that's only true in a labor market that operates under conditions of fairness. But I would say that even subject to that constraint, it's a mistake to assume that the money people make is an accurate measure of their contribution to the common good. I think it's been a mistake to outsource our moral judgment about the value of who contributes what to markets, and that the only way to take up that question is to reason together, argue together, debate together as democratic citizens, what contributions really are valuable and in what measure.

And to discuss that we can't avoid discussing what purposes and ends do we care about? Should we care about what purposes and ends are worthy of us, of this political community? That's the only way we can really have a debate.

24:51 Wes: How are the results of those discussions operationalized? How are they institutionalized? You have some suggestions at the end of the book about contributive justice, for instance, about using lotteries for colleges, or using something like sin taxes, taxing capital gains at a higher level, or consumption financial transactions, not for redistributive purposes, but because they signal they're status signaling. And so they say something about what's valuable in a society. So you have a few suggestions at the end. But it seems to me like the problem is larger than some of the fixes that you give at the end.

I'm wondering about the extent to which we can really reconfigure the way people value things and the way status is distributed by virtue of these discussions, and whether there's another way to institutionalize that and whether that institutionalization does just the things that Rawls and Hayek might worry about, which is to say, infringe on people's rights or something like that.

25:54 Dylan: Can you give me a couple of examples that you worry about along these lines?

25:59 Wes: Well, so for instance, how do we make one form of work more of equal status to another form of work? How do we give the plumber equal status to the doctor, for instance?

26:12 Dylan: And the violation of rights that you worry about would be what in that case?

26:16 Wes: Well, I'm wondering what the solution is first. So for instance, the violation of rights could be simply a matter of indoctrination or propaganda or sort of heavy handed. Not that I'm specifically worried about this, but I can imagine someone being worried about this heavy handed social control in order to change people's perceptions of things. But I'm less worried about that than what the actual solutions to this look like, other than having conversations about the subject.

26:44 Mark: Can I just give an example that I think might support military folks? You know, since we don't have an infinite budget, we can't pay soldiers as much as would be nice, but yet we seem to have a pretty unambiguous, you know, agreed to pretty much on all sides of the political spectrum. Thank you for your service. We salute you. So this is just an example of just by having these. I don't know if this arose out of a public debate, but it's certainly a public sentiment that you could do something similar with teachers. You could do something, you know, I don't know how far that goes, but

27:15 Wes: how do you engineer that?

27:16 Dylan: To me, it's not a question of engineering in the hard sense. In fact, at some level, part of the criticism is that we think we can over engineer the whole problem and that there's a kind of hard work involved that's a little bit messy. It's essentially politics behaving that needs to be tended to. So there's an activity of politics of continually making the case both by assent as well as by argument for certain kinds of values. So in the case that Mark gives to me the way in which we have that. Is that because everybody keeps saying it. Everybody keeps saying and making arguments in different ways by talking about the value that soldiers have to our community, towards our nation, and we assent to that value and that we can do similar things in our political discourse for other things.

28:05 Wes: But it may be that there's a moral psychology to this which is more primal than cultural influence. So, for instance, beauty is something that status conferring. Sure. Intelligence is something that status conferring. And that status conferral is not just a matter of people thinking they deserve it. Beautiful people know they don't deserve beauty. It's not just a matter of it being valued by society. But I'm saying there may be a natural connection between those things, but I

28:31 Dylan: don't think those things are at odds.

28:33 Mark: Right.

28:33 Dylan: I don't think the idea is again to engineer out things that you're grouping in as natural increments of value so that we as biological beings may have deep rooted physiological means behind why we value certain kinds of beauty over others, and that those allocations of that kind of beauty is an accident in the population. I don't think this argument makes it so that you have to try to engineer that out completely, but that there are, in our connections with one another, values that come from us being connected to each other. Part of the reason we value them is both the rules we make up, the things we engineer as well as the things that we assent to.

So an example to me was in the contributive justice that was at the end of the book was saying, look, the way our tax system works right now is that we tax work and glorify finance by capital gains. And so therefore we increase the social capital and the market capital of unproduced value, unproduced money. And one way that we could address this structurally is to flip that around. You can have an argument about which way to do it, but effectively to say we will tax less work and tax more unworked production. Just even framing that question reveals the value judgment that's implicit in that structure of our tax code.

30:01 Wes: I like that. I just don't see that as a very significant fix to the distribution of status. But maybe Dr. Sandel should get a chance to respond.

30:09 Dylan: I think the examples Mark and Dylan have given are very good examples to illustrate that it's not a matter of engineering or indoctrinating anything. Rethinking what counts as a valuable contribution to the common good, and reconfiguring our economy to reflect those judgments is an alternative to simply assuming that the market can answer this question for us and to do so in a morally defensible way. I think that the respect accorded military service that Mark raises is a good example. The fact that this isn't engineering, and yet neither is it biologically inscribed as if given by nature.

What we consider more and less valuable is illustrated by the fact that social valuations of various kinds of contributions change, and sometimes change over a period of years or a few decades. In the case of the phrase that Mark raised, thank you for your service as a way of according social recognition to the military or the practices one finds at a great many sporting events honoring veterans, this has not been a constant. This is not just given by nature. It reflects social and political debates and shifting views. In the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, for example, many felt that the military had been implicated in an unjust war, and military service for many was disparaged.

And then I think there came a wave of reaction against that. An attempt to separate the soldiers who had gone off to fight the Vietnam War, to separate what they did from the policymakers who enacted that folly. And gradually, I think, there was a greater social recognition of the contributions made by those who serve in the military. So this is something that evolved from the 70s up through the 80s and 90s to the present. Another example is how during this pandemic, this is over a much more recent time horizon. Since the pandemic, I think there's been a much greater appreciation of the importance of the contributions made by the people we are now calling essential workers.

I don't just mean people who are working in the hospitals tending to COVID patients, but delivery workers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, grocery store clerks, home health care providers, child care providers. Now, these are not traditionally or in market terms, the best paid or the most honored jobs. And yet now I think we have seen at least the beginnings of a greater recognition and appreciation of essential workers. We sometimes have clapping, applauding them. We see banners and yard signs thanking them. And I would say that this could be an opening for a broader public debate about how to reconfigure the economy as we emerge from the pandemic to bring the rewards for essential workers such as these into greater alignment with the importance of the work they do now.

Would this count as engineering? Is it a matter of indoctrination? Does it violate anybody's rights? I don't think so. I think it does involve public debate about how to do that.

33:45 Wes: I'm not suggesting that those things violate rights. I'm just suggesting that there might be measures in which one has to think about those things at Rawls and Hayek are actually worried about. I'm more skeptical of you, that this moment where people are applauding essential workers will produce a lasting change in status. And I think some of it is lip service. And I also see the Vietnam War differently. I don't.

34:08 Dylan: It might not.

34:08 Wes: You know, I think it produced a partisan split in the way the military is evaluated. And to some extent that partisan split is still around. And I think if you looked around historically or if you looked at other countries, I think you would be hard pressed not to find the persistence of the same sort of rhetoric, at least among a large part of the population, valorizing the military and even militarism. Those are sort of empirical. We'd have to agree to disagree on those sorts of evaluations. And you could just chalk it up maybe to my greatest cynicism on these matters.

34:41 Dylan: This isn't necessarily disagreement, because I'm not saying that we will emerge from the pandemic with a lasting improvement in the social recognition for essential workers. I think that very much remains to be seen. I think it's an open question, though morally and politically, I'm in favor of it. And as for the partisan disagreement about military service, I don't disagree that there is a partisan disagreement. What I'm saying is that that very disagreement reflects competing values about the importance of and the value of the contribution made by those who serve in the military.

And any debate about the value of social contribution touches on contested conceptions of the common good. And my broader philosophical point is the fact that these are contested conceptions of the common good. The fact that there is and will be disagreement, partisan and otherwise, about how to value military service or essential workers or hedge fund managers, the fact that there is disagreement about the value of their contribution is not a reason to say it should not figure in our public discourse. To the contrary, I think those disagreements about the common good should be right at the center of our political discourse, because if they aren't, then we simply default to labor markets to give us the answer in practice about what roles will be rewarded most.

36:18 Seth: Am I reducing what your claim is too much by saying once we take a market approach to organizing society, not only have we impoverished the language that we can use to talk about value and good, but you also mentioned that from an operational perspective, you hand over responsibility for public policy decisions to technocrats and specifically economists. You talk about the rise not just of finance, but the notion that if what markets do is maximize profit or strive towards efficiency. If economic efficiency is really the only overriding value, you don't have a language for discussing the public good.

The impoverishment is not just what happens to the people who fall into the unfortunate bucket of not participating in this new whatever new model gets created. Even the people who benefit from it in a financial sense have no understanding that they don't have a language for articulating their own value. They think they have value, but they really don't have. There's a fundamental problem with a market approach which you raised in your previous book. I'm wondering whether it's possible if we don't have a language, if that approach doesn't give us the language for having the discourse that you're talking about, do we have to first step back and just acknowledge you can't have a discussion about flourishing human value from within the framework of a purely free market economic system?

And is that going to be the kind of thing that as Americans, we just can't even. It's difficult for us to even have that conversation because of this commitment to the notion that we have a free market, but also we're free individuals to make choices in that market.

37:56 Dylan: The last sentence or two, I would qualify just slightly, but you've given a beautifully nuanced, actually and rounded account of what I'm trying to say in the new book. In the Tyranny of Merit, the slight adjustment I would make, Seth, to the last sentence or two. Insofar as we rely on markets to tell us what social roles, what jobs really do contribute the most to the common good, we make a mistake because often market verdicts get that wrong. We also make a mistake because, just as you put beautifully, that kind of reliance, that kind of outsourcing of moral judgment deprives us of the language we need.

The language of moral reflection, the language of reflecting on social purposes and ends on the common good, deprives us also of the habits and the practice we need in reasoning together about contestable questions to do with the common good and to do with what roles matter most and how they should be honored and recognized. And so the argument in the Tyranny of Merit is similar in this respect, I suppose, to the argument in my previous book, what Money Can't Buy. We as Democratic citizens should reclaim this terrain of moral and civic argument and debate, reclaim it from markets, reclaim it from technocratic experts, including economists.

39:33 Mark: We read Aristotle's rhetoric just a few months ago, and I've been wondering since then. You talk about the need for public deliberation and this is a common theme in all the books, is you have to have venues and occasions for public deliberation. I mean, we just had a debate where that was so obviously not on display. But in hearing Wes's skepticism about how to actually enact these things, that it's. Oh, it's just people playing lip service. A big portion of what's going on in your book is this history of how certain phrases like rising as far as your talents can take you.

I really found that fascinating. Like, okay, this was first used by Reagan and you know, exactly when these kind of various things started, when the American dream began and how people articulate the American dream. It almost seems like public deliberation might be too demanding a term than the public and the public really deliberate anything. It's very hard. Maybe we can have a civil conversation with five of us on this call, but to expect the community at large to have a conversation is maybe too much.

40:30 Wes: We'd have to ban Twitter, I think.

40:33 Mark: Well, but so rhetoric spouting and then what Twitter does, what social media does, is amplify rhetoric. So the fact that something like thank you for your service or rising as far as your talents can take you, the fact that these things take off, they're memes. This is the dumb way that these ideas actually do get passed around. Not by calm deliberation, in which we reach a sophisticated understanding, but, for instance, by Andrew Yang reformulating guaranteed minimum income as the freedom dividend, and actually being able to get on that debate stage and put it out there enough times.

And that was just some weird radical leftist thing. And now that's at least something that people can seriously consider. It needs more amplification or hopefully there will be a future for that piece of rhetoric. Your book gives a good picture of how these changes do take place, especially with something like status, which is, if anything, a social construction. Right. It's status is just what people think of it. So the way to change what people think of it is just as Dylan kept saying, is just to keep asserting these claims. And if they get passed around enough, I mean, yes, we hope.

Hope that that will lead to some legislation. You know, if you say Black Lives Matter, you hope that that will lead to some legislation that will remove inequities and policing and things like that. But also the speech people take is not simply virtue signaling. It's not. I'm going to say this because I don't care if anything actually happens. It's mere lip service, but because so much of this is actually a Social construction. It's just if enough people say it, enough times like that actually becomes true.

42:04 Wes: I think saying something as a social construction does not mean it's necessarily malleable, and it doesn't mean it's also not necessarily by nature. Status is a social construction in the sense that it's social. Sure, it involves a concept of mutual recognition, for instance, and power and prestige. But there may be fundamental psychosocial things going on that are highly determinative of what it is that people value of the things to which they are willing to accord status. I'm not dogmatically asserting that. I'm just saying that that's possibility.

We have to take into account we don't know how malleable status is. We don't know how susceptible it is to cultural intervention. So that's one piece of the skepticism I've expressed, even though I'm largely sympathetic to this book and all of the suggestions in it. And the second piece of skepticism is just about the extent to which these changes can be institutionalized. What concrete suggestions do we have for institutionalize or operationalizing the forces that will change people's conceptions of status? And then to what extent is it valuable?

Anyway, not that I want to beat that horse anymore, because I think we've already discussed that.

43:14 Dylan: I'm certainly less skeptical than you are about it. The rules for engagement, let's call it, that we have right now, aren't things that just happened. They were things that were made. And so to the extent that they are made and are on top of all sorts of the things that you're pointing to, which are, let's call it, a climate that we don't have control over. So there's contingencies that we have in our own lives, and there's the contingencies, I guess I'll call social contingencies, the rules that we try to put forth, either that govern our economy and specific policies, whether our political organization with regards to constitutions or not constitutions, there's a climate that sits on. But those rules are made by us.

43:59 Wes: How about smart versus dumb or educated versus uneducated? Because these are some examples that Dr. Sandel brings up in the book. How malleable are those, how susceptible to changing perceptions or those sorts of things?

44:12 Dylan: To me, smart versus dumb is a really interesting one because I think that, as was pointed out in the book, there's this idea of smart that is heavily tied to higher education and technological sophistication. So you have, you know, smart TVs and smart phones and there's technological and technocratic solutions. But I have a very strong memory of smart having actually nothing to do with those kinds of things, but being, let's call it street savvy and wise. So your carpenter would be smart and clever about solutions to things. And so even that term right there and being dumb about it.

I have very strong memories of talking about people with high levels of education being dumb and being dumb about the choices that they make in their lives and being dumb about how the world works because in fact they are over educated. And so I think that that's a perfect example of the way which those things are malleable about what we mean by smart and dumb.

The discussion here is taking an interesting turn to rhetoric and the significance of rhetoric. It's a central feature of the book that we need to take rhetoric seriously because we can learn a lot from it and from the way rhetoric changes, especially in politics and public discourse. Very often pieces of rhetoric become so familiar, so seemingly uncontroversial, that we forget the questions, often contestable questions that they express or embody. Mark was referring to what I call the rhetoric of rising, the idea that in America everyone should be able to rise as far as their talents and hard work will take them.

Now, we hear this a lot in politics, from Democrats and Republicans alike. We hear it so much that it's become almost an article of faith. Who could be against the idea that people, whatever their background, should be able to rise as far as their efforts and talents will take them? And yet this is a relatively recent phrase in politics. It has a history, and the history is revealing. It only really comes in in presidential rhetoric in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, and it becomes much more frequent. And one can search the use of these phrases in presidential rhetoric nowadays, which I do in the book.

It gathers momentum in the 90s and 2000s. So it begins as a prominent feature of political discourse with Reagan, and then is taken up by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and then Hillary Clinton in 2016. And I track the rise in the incidence of the use of this phrase. But it's interesting. The history is revealing, and the novelty, beginning in the 80s and 90s of this phrase is revealing. Or the companion phrase used often by Obama more than a hundred times. You can make it if you try. Now, what's revealing about this history and about this novelty, this rhetoric of rising comes in, is a mainstay of public discourse among Democrats and Republicans at exactly the time of the deepening inequality brought about by market driven globalization.

The globalization project of expanding markets, the free movement of goods, capital and people across borders, this become the deregulation of finance. This all happens beginning in the 80s, through the 90s and in the 2000s by both parties. And as the inequality deepens, the inequality brought about by this version of globalization, the way the mainstream parties reacted to that inequality and sought to address it was not directly by trying to reconfigure the economy or the version of globalization that had brought it about, but instead by offering individual upward mobility through college education.

And the phrase this rhetoric of rising, rising as far as your efforts and talents will take you. And typically it was coupled with the admonition to go get a college education. What you can earn will depend on what you can learn. This was another iteration of this rhetoric. This reflected a particular stance toward the inequality that was deepening. To tell people that if you go get a college education, then you too may be able to rise as far as your talents and efforts will take you. This offer of individual upward mobility through college education was an inadequate answer to inequality.

So in the end, what seems like an uncontroversial promise offer of individual upward mobility and rising actually seen against this backdrop can be seen, or so I try to show, as a contestable and ultimately inadequate response to the deepening inequality of the last four decades. And if that's right, and people will agree or disagree with the argument in the book, but if it's right, it suggests that we need a different way of responding to inequality. One that focuses less on arming people for meritocratic competition and that focuses more on making life better for people who make valuable contributions to the economy, but who may not have a four year college degree, which after all, nearly two thirds of Americans do not.

So I argue that it's a mistake to create an economy that sets as a necessary precondition for dignified work and a decent life for a four year university degree that most people don't have.

50:11 Mark: Chapter four is called the Last Acceptable Prejudice. I really thought this was an important idea that I had not heard phrased in this way is just by getting this idea into the public square, circulating around, I think you'll do a ton of good here. But it's also an interesting thing to look at from the perspective of what Wes was saying and Dylan was considering about the smart versus dumb thing that you put out there, that there's always like facts and opinions involved in each of these things, that of course getting an education is supposed to gain you something and so you want educated people Performing your heart surgeries and determining what is accurate climate science and things like that.

You know, of course credentials are important, but we've clearly overvalued them. And you give this again as a critique of the Obama administration and exactly how many of his people in his administration weren't just they all had college degrees or advanced degrees, but they all came from, you know, it's almost as bad as England with everybody is from Oxford or Cambridge, you know that they're all from Harvard or Yale or Princeton. So there's something natural you might say about. We can't just say, God, I really wish that people that were less quick on their feet, I wish we would value, we wouldn't put so much emphasis on what we have called intelligence.

And we can give a lot of conceptual, you know, IQ is not a real thing. There's a lot of different skills, they don't track with each other. That seems my answer to Wes's objection that yes, there's probably something natural, but of course we want more capable is better than less capable capable, sort of by definition. But how these credentials attach to any given actual task, how this translates into who we want to be leading, who we want to be financially rewarded. There's just so much room for tweaking. Not only our infrastructure, you know, how we through laws actually encourage and discourage particular behaviors, how much we put into higher education versus trade schools.

That's one of the recommendations that we put more money to trade schools so that we're not showing that we value a four year degree 50,000 times more than we value a two year degree. When a two year degree is actually would really, if more people get those, that would really help a lot of people. It seems like one of the hardest things rhetorically to make the, the intelligentsia

52:21 Dylan: less smug, which you've called smug, Mark. I call meritocratic hubris. It's the tendency, especially among well educated professionals, the tendency of the successful to inhale too deeply of their own success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. So I think there is a kind of smugness, a kind of hubris that contributes to the tendency. Well, I put it this way. Working people who complain that meritocratic elites or professional elites look down on them are not wrong. There is some legitimacy to that complaint. The complaint itself points to this broader shift in our public discourse and practice over the past four decades.

And just to go to one of the very concrete practical implications of this, Mark, that you raised just now, I think part of the solution is to recognize that we woefully under invest in those forms of learning that the majority of people rely upon to get the education and training they need to do the work that they will ultimately do to contribute to the society. So I think we need massively to increase our investment in state colleges, in two year community colleges and in vocational and technical training. Not only to increase investment financially, but also to redress the highly skewed hierarchy of prestige that sets apart four year colleges and universities, especially brand name ones, from these other forms of learning.

This tendency, this hierarchy, is more pronounced in the US and perhaps also in Britain, than it is in many European countries. In Germany, for example, there is very strong social recognition and honor and respect for the technical and vocational training tracks and forms of learning, far more so than we have here. So this is not a utopian ideal that's inconceivable or somehow contrary to nature. It's the way we've organized our society and the way we've made higher education into the arbiter of opportunity. The way we've assigned prestigious colleges and universities the role of allocating the credentials and defining the merit that a meritocratic society honors and rewards.

It doesn't have to be this way. And I actually think that it would be better for the colleges and universities themselves if they were relieved to, to some large extent of this responsibility and this burden. Because one effect is to exclude a great many the members of the society who don't gain admission to these places and to send the signal that the work they do is somehow less valuable than the work of those who do have four year university degrees. But there's another damaging effect, and that's to the educational mission itself. When these institutions become overly preoccupied with their sorting function, with their credentializing function, as I think they have become today, that begins to crowd out their educational mission.

And I think this is something that colleges and universities should worry about for their own sake, for their own integrity, and not only because it also has this deleterious effect of excluding from social honor and recognition, recognition a great many members of our society. This in a way, is to suggest that the tyranny of merit, as I call it, like all tyrannies, points in two directions. It's a tyranny that's exerted by the winners over those who are left behind. And most of the book is about that. But the tyranny of merit also makes itself felt in the wounded winners who manage.

And I'm thinking now of the young people whose high school years are turned into, into a kind of stress strewn, high pressured, meritocratic gauntlet that oftentimes leaves the wounded and obsessed with jumping through hoops and assembling credentials and satisfying demanding parents and teachers and coaches and admissions committees so that by the time they arrive in college, they find it hard. Many of them do not all find it hard to step back from that intense achievement orientation, to think, to reflect, to figure out what's worth caring about, to figure out what they really want to study and learn.

This, I think is a second damaging consequence of the tyranny of merit. So overcoming meritocratic hubris, beginning to find our way to a more generous public life. I think these are all reasons to step back and reconsider the track that we've been on. And it's led to this deeply polarized politics.

57:33 Seth: That diagnosis that you bring up in the chapter on credentialism, it applies not just to the people who have left behind, but as we see from the rise of, for example, progressive. When you think of like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, we lied, we said go through all these hoops, get credentialed, go to the school and millions of millions of kids have done it and then they don't have jobs and they have debt and they're frustrated and angry as well because they bought into the system and they bought into that. They weren't left behind, but they thought they weren't going to be left behind.

And you're seeing that shift. I mean, I could talk endlessly, I'm in tech, so I'm part of the problem. I'm a cog in the system. But you see, for example, large tech companies and consulting firms are now saying education is not a predictor for precisely. The reason that you mentioned is yeah, you can go to Yale and you can get an mba, but you're going to be just like every other Yale MBA out there. And your vocabulary is super impoverished. Believe me, I work with plenty of people who have degrees from. And it's way more rewarding from my experience to I talk to more people from India and Israel every day than I do from the United States.

Right. And so I have a different perspective, I guess, on that. But the point being Google, Arthur Andersen, a bunch of these companies are now saying we're going to look at what you've accomplished and we're not going to look at your credentials, because credentials don't predict success. It's precise precisely for the reason you mentioned, which is it used to be when you would go to an institution like the one you teach at, you would be expected to have gain exposure to a certain set of ideas about how to think what's good, and you would make conscious decisions about what to study.

And there would be an assumption that you would have a certain kind of perspective. And it's become much more of a factory system. And there's also a proliferation of tools. I think you mentioned in your book about somebody partnering with Khan Academy. Was that right?

59:20 Mark: The SATs themselves.

59:22 Seth: Yeah, yeah, right.

59:23 Dylan: SAT prep as a way, you know, to try to equalize the advantages that affluent families have when they send their kids to get special SAT prep courses and tutoring. And the sat, the people who offer it. The College Board partnered with the Khan Academy to say, well, first they denied the coaching had any effect on the SATs. And when that became patently untrue, they said, well, we'll make the coaching available to everyone through the Khan Academy.

59:53 Seth: Part of the globalization myth and part of the narrative, the American narrative, is about entrepreneurialism, right? So there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there who are doing TED Talks, talking about how the education system isn't necessary. And I didn't go to college and I started this multimillion dollar business. Part of that story includes these publicly available educational resources, like Khan Academy, like Udemy, you know, masterclass, you name it. There's a thousand things out there. But the reality is those tools are seen as the potential to democratize.

But it's still part of the same narrative you mentioned, which is you still are supposed to go get this education, even though it's not credentialed by an institution, but you have to go get some sort of knowledge to participate in that global system. Those tools don't teach you trades. They're not teaching you carpentry and putting you in a track to be an apprentice electrician or a plumber or what have you. And so I see the same narrative that you're describing playing itself out at the. We'll call it the micro level of. Even in my tech world, that's supposed to be representative of this globalization that you talk about.

And I see all the same things at play. Executives who can't think in any other way but in economic terms around efficiency, making terrible decisions about strategy and people in the companies and things like that.

1:01:04 Dylan: The SAT is a good example. It was designed initially and embraced as a way to test aptitude. The A in the SAT was originally Aptitude Native Intelligence. It was based on IQ tests used by the army during the First World War. And it was meant as A democratizing move to base scholarships and college admissions less on the advantages enjoyed by privileged kids who went to schools where they, you know, learned Latin and Greek and all kinds of things. And this would be a test of aptitude. And this was really an expression of the early meritocratic hope that if only we could overcome the unequal chances to do with backgrounds, unequal backgrounds of class and race and ethnicity and gender, if only we could overcome those unequal backgrounds and have truly equal conditions, then those who would win admission to top colleges and universities, those who would get the top jobs, those who would make the most money, then and only then, finally they could say to themselves, I earned it, I did it on my own.

It was not due to the accident of my being born to well off parents, for example, but this ideal, and it goes all the way back. The term meritocracy was coined by Michael Young, the British sociologist, in the late 1950s. He saw the dark side of meritocracy from the time he coined the term for Michael Young, meritocracy. It was a good thing in that it replaced the aristocratic privilege, hereditary privilege, of class bound Britain. That was a good thing that that was changing in the 1950s. But he saw meritocracy, a perfectly realized meritocracy, not as an ideally just society, but as a dystopia.

Because he glimpsed that even in a perfectly realized meritocracy, the winners would believe that their success was their own doing. They would therefore consider themselves less responsible than they might otherwise for those who struggled, because they would believe that they had simply failed to exercise their talents and effort and deserved their place. And Michael Young predicted that by the year 2034 there would be a populist uprising overturning this meritocratic order. He had it more or less right, except that populist backlash came 18 years ahead of schedule.

And I think that what I've tried to do in the book the Tyranny of Merit is to show how this is played out in our own time, to suggest apart from the policy solutions and the reconfiguration of the economy, the better to reflect who really contributes to the common good. I've also suggested that we need to rethink our meritocratic hubris, because when we consider the role of luck in life, it's easier to picture ourselves in other people's shoes. It's easier to have the thought there, but for the luck of the draw or the accident of circumstance, or the grace of God go I.

So I think that a certain appreciation of the role of luck in life can prompt a certain humility. And I think humility is a civic virtue we need now. One that maybe if we seize this moment, can point the way beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life. That's the hope, anyway. Mark.

1:04:58 Mark: Michael Sandel, thanks so much for joining us.

1:05:00 Dylan: Thanks Michael.

1:05:01 Seth: Thank you.

1:05:02 Dylan: Thanks for having me.

1:05:03 Mark: We're going to have another full discussion for part two without Michael, where we can go a little more into some of the conflicts that we just had. So jump over to the next thing in your. It should already be posted. Thank you for supporting us.