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On The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (2020).
Previously, Michael Sandel argued for the necessity for public policy to be driven by ethics (see our ep. 97) and then applied this to argue against a purely market-driven society (see our interview with him for ep. 98). A society where everything is for sale seems obviously open to critique, but what about this idea that both of our political parties agree on: that society should be structured so that people rise in status based on their individual talents and effort, not on their class, ethnicity, or anything else superficial like that?
While Michael is happy to admit that meritocracy is better than a hereditary aristocracy, he doesn't think it's a sufficient basis for structuring a society. First, there's the liberal critique that the system doesn't actually work, that there's still bias, and much less mobility overall than Americans think. But much more fundamentally, even if we had a perfect meritocracy where talent and effort were always rewarded objectively, this would be dystopian. Why? Because it leaves the majority of society behind, labels them "losers," and in fact blames them for their failures. At least in a classed society, people are aware of the role of luck in giving them their station, but if your national ethic says that those making less money deserve less money, then you've got a lot of angry people ready to, for instance, vote for someone who makes them feel less humiliated.
This book is a diagnosis of our political ills: both parties believe in meritocracy, only Democrats think it still needs work to achieve, and Republicans think it's already functional. Neither of these positions properly values the common good. The pandemic has shown us that, for instance, "front-line workers" are undervalued by our market economy. Claiming that the vast inequalities of wealth and income are somehow justified by the fact that CEOs and hedge fund managers and the link work thousands of times harder than these workers is ridiculous. Offering an American Dream of possible escape from poverty by a select few while the rest are left behind is not enough. Emphasizing that "the more you learn the more you earn" promotes the prejudice of credentialing: that unless you have a college education, your contributions to society will not be valued. This is insupportable in a society where 2/3 of us don't have college educations. We all know people who despite being less educated, are more sensible, savvy, and/or wise than many college professors.
Besides which, hard work is never sufficient to rise: You have to have talent, which is not something that's under your control. You have to have a support system to buoy you. Even the energy to work hard is something that people naturally have different amounts of. Yet a meritocracy gives rise to arrogance in those that end up on top. They believe that they deserve their rewards, and this smugness makes them insensible of the needs of the rest of society, and makes the rest of society resent them further.
The emphasis on getting into the best schools, since that's what society deems as necessary for leadership, ruins the childhoods of the affluent and/or aspiring, leading to things like the college admissions scandal, helicopter parenting, and over-scheduled, over-worked teenagers who are trained into a hoop-jumping way of life that leaves them scarred and hyper-competitive when they finally enter adulthood.
So Michael has identified some things wrong with our national ethic. He thinks that we should place less emphasis on status and change the activities we revere so that these better reflect the moral value added to society rather than merely the financial value. Moreover, we need to think about justice not just as distributive--about who gets how much--but as contributive, since a fundamental part of our well-being is a feeling that we're contributing positively.
What can we actually do to bring about these changes? Michael has a list of legislative suggestions including changing college admissions practices, increased funding for trade schools, reducing the wealth gap through progressive taxation, and in general raising the common level of the least well off through both job creation and redistribution so that everyone can feel valued. Most importantly, though, changes in social ethics come through public discourse. Michael's book traces the rise of various rhetorical memes like "the more you learn, the more you earn" and "rise as far as your talents allow," and so this book is itself an attempt to discourage those ideas in favor of others.
Whatever the specific legislative solutions, we need to acknowledge the need for real dialogue about national values, and this can't be accomplished either by a social media environment where everyone is shouting past each other, nor a technocratic approach that pretends that the other side's disagreement is just a matter of their ignorance, and so the role of government should just be to give accurate information. As bad as misinformation is, correcting that will not be enough to achieve workable consensus. For instance, Michael points out that the most virulently anti-climate-science people are actually very well informed about the matter; it's not the case that as you learn more, you inevitably lean left, and in fact it's the least informed that don't have very strong opinions about the matter one way or the other.
Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth do a joint-interview/discussion for this first half, and we continue without Michael for the second half, trying to figure out how much social ethics concerning status actually can be changed and how to go about enacting change.
Buy the book. Read about the book in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Hill, and you can find many other interviews with him talking about this on YouTube.
Sponsor: Visit TheGreatCoursesPlus.com/PEL for a free trial of The Great Courses Plus Video Learning Service.
1. Meritocracy is generally used to justify inequalities in income and status. In Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, David Swartz says that Bourdieu’s life work revolved around understanding how the dominant class reproduces itself in such a way that no one revolts. Both the rising members of the dominant class and the subservient class think that the outcomes are justified in some way. In the US, the new dominant class is based on meritocracy, with the outcomes discussed in this episode.
2. I read Elizabeth Anderson’s essay chapter Equality in The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, She suggests different conceptions of what Sandel calls status. Anderson rejects the idea that inequality revolves around wealth and income. She suggests that equality should be understood in terms of social relations. She describes three forms of social relations, command, standing, and esteem. She sees no justification for hierarchies in any of these areas. I particularly like this:
“Equal citizenship status in a republic provides such a ground. When fellow citizens meet in the public square, they meet as co-sovereigns—as co-creators and guarantors of the republic that makes them free and independent. Each can stand erect before everyone else; no one has to bow and scrape before another. Everyone basks in the glory of the republic they jointly sustain. This basal equality of esteem, of the free citizen and the recognition of that status with all its rights and dignity by fellow citizens, constitutes the essential background condition for the practice of republican virtue*. Thus, genuine virtue requires an underlying equality of esteem.”
3. It isn’t obvious how we can change things. The Public And Its Problems is John Dewey’s attempt to deal with political matters. He says:
“Equal citizenship status in a republic provides such a ground. When fellow citizens meet in the public square, they meet as co-sovereigns—as co-creators and guarantors of the republic that makes them free and independent. Each can stand erect before everyone else; no one has to bow and scrape before another. Everyone basks in the glory of the republic they jointly sustain. This basal equality of esteem, of the free citizen and the recognition of that status with all its rights and dignity by fellow citizens, constitutes the essential background condition for the practice of republican virtue*. Thus, genuine virtue requires an underlying equality of esteem.”
4. Solutions. To get a decent solution we have to identify the problem carefully. I see the problem as the failure of the state to protect its citizens. The solution starts with forcing the state to provide that protection. If the state protected the average person as well as it protects the capitalists, we’d be on the road to a better state. Following Dewey, I’d identify specific problems facing the Public based on the input of the public and start trying to solve them with actual input from the public.
I think a reading of “Redistribution or Recognition” by Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser is in order now.
Tell us more about it, Erik, if you feel up to doing so. This was I think for us a rare foray into modern political commentary, which we only did because of the prior philosophical work by (and our relationship with) Sandel, so I don’t know that we’d do more right in this vein, but maybe…
Best, -Mark
This article has an example of the kind of societal dialog and process that Sandler is recommending to address equality:
‘Women’s Work’ Can No Longer Be Taken for Granted
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/opinion/sunday/women-pay-gender-gap.html?referringSource=articleShare
Thanks for this episode, Meritocracy is dreadful. I hope to find time to listen to the discussion; this year I have very little time. One point I’ve heard made is that different periods of history and different societies value different skills – so if your natural born skills don’t correspond to the values of your world, you’re disadvantaged. In Ancient Rome, the ability to run someone through with a pike was highly prized; if that were my natural born talent (and I dare you to tell me it isn’t) I would be out of work in a world of guns. Likewise, our society today places tremendous value on snarky humor, so we have David Letterman and many others being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to make fun of people. That might not have got you far in, say, Medieval Europe.
Thanks again – Bill
I just finished this book and really really loved it. Honestly, as a stay at home mother, this gave me the language of the psychological wage and social recognition that I have been missing. It’s not a very respectable job but is one that I take quite seriously.
I have recently been helping to fill in some of the para-professional jobs at my kids’ elementary school and have become quite dismayed with the way in which the people in these positions are treated. They are the lowest paying jobs in the school system and are mostly part time. This is a very privileged school district and my daughter let me know that “the paras are always treated poorly but the teachers are not.” I am filling in because no one wants this job during a time of COVID and the principal called involved parents in an attempt to keep the school staffed and therefore open. These would definitely qualify as one of those under-appreciated but essential worker positions. The principal did not, however, seem to realize that he did not help matters by denying the psychological wage that comes along with a job when he allows children to be little assholes to adults with no consequences. The same is not true for teachers. They are like Gods where we live. We have an entire week where everyone seems to compete for “who can appreciate the teachers the most”.
As my husband and I have spent the last 5 years renovating this old house from the 30’s we’ve watched a lot of This Old House. We’ve also come to really appreciate the value of a good plumber, electrician, and carpenter. This Old House has a project with Mike Rowe Works (dirty jobs) to “close the skills gap in the trades”. On their website it talks about how there are millions of jobs going unfilled because people don’t have the proper training and how it will get worse. As you watch these amazing workers on TOH, (I’m a crazy Superfan of them also but don’t harass them like I do you guys. 🙂 ) you see how much training is required to do these jobs and how few good programs that support this track there are. This seems like a really obvious way government can get involved. In fact they highlighted an organization in my former hometown of Baltimore that takes former convicts and trains them for these kinds of jobs. These are often the first time many of the participants have had a positive experience in a classroom setting. Something like 80% of them go on to be gainfully employed in the field of training they had.
All that said, I wonder if we can ever be a country not driven by markets. In fact, if enough people want brand new houses and amazing master bedrooms, the fact that there is a skills gap may become a self correcting problem. I don’t know. I also can’t help but wonder – do we have to succumb to the need for social recognition? I know this idea underpins so many of the readings you guys have had in the past and I can’t help but think – Geez – what a fragile species we are. We need our king of the jungle hierarchy. I spend a fair amount of my life trying to be FREE of the opinion of others and find it kind of depressing that it’s such an innate quality of human existence that we argue for it to be honored in the way we organize our lives within the context of the group. Shouldn’t we all just try to overcome it? I know – it’s a dumb idea. But it does suck that we need approval and can’t just do what we want and not feel the need to apologize or explain our choices that don’t fall inside the box.
Thank you so much for doing this. I actually missed it when it came out and happened to have read and was excited to find that you covered it! I was sure no one would like it because it felt so readable and uncomplicated. LOL
And geez – Michael Sandel just has this grandfatherly way about him that is so endearing that you almost don’t mind that he has a sneaky way of bringing the conversation back to his talking points so quickly. I’m so glad he was on but look forward to the more free form conversation I hope you have in part 2.