"The Tyranny of Merit"

[fiefoe]

Michael J Sandel's arguments are pretty easy to grasp, but it's yet another systematic problem with hard (if not impossible) fixes.

• (During the pandemic:) But the moral paradox of solidarity through separation highlighted a certain hollowness in the assurance that “We are all in this together.” It did not describe a sense of community embodied in an ongoing practice of mutual obligation and shared sacrifice. To the contrary, it appeared on the scene at a time of nearly unprecedented inequality and partisan rancor.
• This way of thinking about success makes it hard to believe that “we are all in this together.” It invites the winners to consider their success their own doing and the losers to feel that those on top look down with disdain. It helps explain why those left behind by globalization would become angry and resentful, and why they would be drawn to authoritarian populists who rail against elites.
• As the meritocracy intensifies, the striving so absorbs us that our indebtedness recedes from view. In this way, even a fair meritocracy, one without cheating or bribery or special privileges for the wealthy, induces a mistaken impression—that we have made it on our own... It is also corrosive of civic sensibilities. For the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.
• At the heart of this failure is the way mainstream parties conceived and carried out the project of globalization over the past four decades. Two aspects of this project gave rise to the conditions that fuel populist protest. One is its technocratic way of conceiving the public good; the other is its meritocratic way of defining winners and losers.
• The technocratic conception of politics is bound up with a faith in markets—... the broader belief that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. This way of thinking about politics is technocratic in the sense that it drains public discourse of substantive moral argument and treats ideologically contestable questions as if they were matters of economic efficiency, the province of experts.
• but Democrats did little to address the deepening inequality and the growing power of money in politics. Having strayed from its traditional mission of taming capitalism and holding economic power to democratic account, liberalism lost its capacity to inspire.
• The relentless emphasis on creating a fair meritocracy, in which social positions reflect effort and talent, has a corrosive effect on the way we interpret our success (or the lack of it). The notion that the system rewards talent and hard work encourages the winners to consider their success their own doing, a measure of their virtue—and to look down upon those less fortunate than themselves. <> Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way.
• The politics of humiliation differs in this respect from the politics of injustice. Protest against injustice looks outward; it complains that the system is rigged, that the winners have cheated or manipulated their way to the top. Protest against humiliation is psychologically more freighted. It combines resentment of the winners with nagging self-doubt: perhaps the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor; maybe the losers are complicit in their misfortune after all. <> This feature of the politics of humiliation makes it more combustible than other political sentiments.
• Our technocratic version of meritocracy severs the link between merit and moral judgment. In the domain of the economy, it simply assumes that the common good is defined by GDP, and that the value of people’s contributions consists in the market value of the goods or services they sell. In the domain of government, it assumes that merit means technocratic expertise... the failure of public discourse to address the large moral and civic questions that should be at the center of political debate: What should we do about rising inequality? What is the moral significance of national borders? What makes for the dignity of work?
• Conducting our public discourse as if it were possible to outsource moral and political judgment to markets, or to experts and technocrats, has emptied democratic argument of meaning and purpose. Such vacuums of public meaning are invariably filled by harsh, authoritarian forms of identity and belonging—whether in the form of religious fundamentalism or strident nationalism.
• it is something else to assume that we are, each of us, wholly responsible for our lot in life. <> Even the phrase “our lot in life” draws on a moral vocabulary that suggests certain limits to unbridled responsibility.
• The notion that our fate reflects our merit runs deep in the moral intuitions of Western culture. Biblical theology teaches that natural events happen for a reason... It reflects the belief that the moral universe is arranged in a way that aligns prosperity with merit and suffering with wrongdoing.
• When God finally speaks to Job, he rejects the cruel logic of blaming the victim. He does so by renouncing the meritocratic assumption that Job and his companions share. Not everything that happens is a reward or a punishment for human behavior, God proclaims from the whirlwind.
• When faith is embodied in outward observance, mediated and reinforced by a complex array of Church practices, a theology of gratitude and grace slides, almost inevitably, toward a theology of pride and self-help. This at least is how Martin Luther viewed the Roman Church of his time, eleven centuries after Augustine had inveighed against salvation by merit. <> The Protestant Reformation was born as an argument against merit... His broader point, following Augustine, was that salvation is wholly a matter of God’s grace and cannot be influenced by any effort to win God’s favor... trying to persuade God of our merit is presumptuous to the point of blasphemy.
• And how can I be sure of this state of grace?” The persistence and urgency of this question led Calvinists to a certain version of the work ethic. Since every person is called by God to work in a vocation, working intensely in that calling is a sign of salvation... But it proved difficult if not impossible to resist the slide from viewing such worldly activity as a sign of election to viewing it as a source. Psychologically, it is hard to bear the notion that God will take no notice of faithful work that increases his glory.
• By founding its ethic in the doctrine of predestination,” Calvinism substituted for “the spiritual aristocracy of monks outside of and above the world the spiritual aristocracy of the predestined saints of God within the world.” 18 <> Confident of their election, this spiritual aristocracy of the elect looked down with disdain on those apparently destined for damnation. Here Weber glimpses what I would call an early version of meritocratic hubris.
• wishes to be allowed the belief that the less fortunate also merely experience [their] due.” 20 <> The tyranny of merit arises, at least in part, from this impulse. Today’s secular meritocratic order moralizes success in ways that echo an earlier providential faith: Although the successful do not owe their power and wealth to divine intervention—they rise thanks to their own effort and hard work—their success reflects their superior virtue. The rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor.
• Lears sees in American public culture an uneven contest between an ethic of fortune and a more muscular ethic of mastery. The ethic of fortune appreciates the dimensions of life that exceed human understanding and control. It sees that the cosmos does not necessarily match merit with reward. It leaves room for mystery, tragedy, and humility. It is the sensibility of Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
• Bowler writes, “shame compounds the grief. Those who are loved and lost are just that—those who have lost the test of faith.” 42 <> The harsh face of prosperity gospel thinking can be seen in the debate about health care.
• Surprisingly, however, no American president used these terms in the context of Cold War debates. 54 <> It was not until the 1990s and 2000s that “the right side” and “the wrong side” of history became a staple of political rhetoric, and then mostly by Democrats.
• Believing that one’s projects and purposes are aligned with God’s plan, or with a vision of freedom and justice unfolding in history, is a potent source of hope, especially for people struggling against injustice. King’s teaching that the arc of the moral universe “bends toward justice” inspired civil rights marchers of the 1950s and 1960s to carry on... But the same providential faith that inspires hope among the powerless can prompt hubris among the powerful. This can be seen in the changing sensibility of liberalism in recent decades, as the moral urgency of the civil rights era gave way to a complacent triumphalism in the aftermath of the Cold War.
• Over time, Obama’s providentialism became less a prophetic call for change than a kind of righteous repose, a comforting reassertion of American exceptionalism.
• The balance between merit and grace is not easy to sustain. From the Puritans to the preachers of the prosperity gospel, the ethic of earning and achieving has exerted an almost irresistible allure, threatening always to override the humbler ethic of hoping and praying, of gratitude and gift. Merit drives out grace, or else recasts it in its own image, as something we deserve.
• Too strenuous a notion of personal responsibility for our fate makes it hard to imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes.
• In the early 1980s, Harvard and Stanford admitted about one applicant in five; in 2019, they accepted fewer than one in twenty.
• After Reagan, “you deserve” became a non-partisan fixture of presidential discourse. Clinton used it twice as often as Reagan; Obama, three times as often, in contexts ranging from the quotidian to the consequential.
• For decades, meritocratic elites intoned the mantra that those who work hard and play by the rules can rise as far as their talents will take them. They did not notice that for those stuck at the bottom or struggling to stay afloat, the rhetoric of rising was less a promise than a taunt.
• (Trump voters:) They embraced meritocracy, but believed it described the way things already worked. They did not see it as an unfinished project requiring further government action to dismantle barriers to achievement.
• insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary citizens.
• When politicians reiterate a hallowed verity with mind-numbing frequency, there is reason to suspect that it is no longer true. This is the case with the rhetoric of rising. It is no accident that the rhetoric of rising was at its most fulsome at a time when inequality was approaching daunting proportions.
• In both cases, beliefs and convictions shape perceptions. Americans’ strong attachment to individual initiative, together with their willingness to accept inequality, leads them to exaggerate the possibility of rising through hard work. Europeans’ skepticism that individual effort conquers all, together with their lesser tolerance of inequality, leads them to underestimate the possibility of rising.
• In recent years, they have been invited, above all, to blame themselves for failing to acquire a college degree. One of the most galling features of meritocratic hubris is its credentialism.
• This was the meritocratic promise. It was not a promise of greater equality, but a promise of greater and fairer mobility. It accepted that the rungs on the income ladder were growing farther apart and offered simply to help people compete more fairly to clamber up the rungs... But put aside, for the moment, the question of whether the meritocratic ideal is an adequate basis for a just society and consider the attitudes toward success and failure it promotes.
• One of the most ruinous examples of credentialism gone awry is described in David Halberstam’s classic book The Best and the Brightest. It shows how John F. Kennedy assembled a team with glittering credentials who, for all their technocratic brilliance, led the United States into the folly of the Vietnam War. <> Alter saw a similarity between Kennedy’s team and Obama’s, who “shared the Ivy League as well as a certain arrogance and a detachment from the everyday lives of most Americans.” As things turned out, Obama’s economic advisors contributed to a folly of their own, less lethal than Vietnam but consequential nonetheless for the shape of American politics. Insisting on a Wall Street–friendly response to the financial crisis,
• For the kind of achievement-conscious people who filled the administration, investment bankers were more than friends—they were fellow professionals; people of subtle minds, sophisticated jargon, and extraordinary innovativeness. 27 <> Frank argues that this reflexive respect for investment bankers “blinded the Democrats to the problems of megabanks, to the need for structural change, and to the epidemic of fraud that overswept the business.”
• As a measure of meritocracy’s hold on the public mind, the growing frequency of “smart” is less revealing than its changing meaning. Not only did “smart” refer to digital systems and devices; it increasingly became a general term of praise, and a way of arguing for one policy rather than another. As an evaluative contrast, “smart versus dumb” began to displace ethical or ideological contrasts, such as “just versus unjust” or “right versus wrong.”
• At a time of intense partisanship, the language of smart and dumb has an understandable appeal; it seems to offer a refuge from ideological combat, a mode of political argument that steps back from moral controversy and seeks consensus on the basis of what’s smart, sensible, prudent. Obama was drawn to this seemingly non-partisan, meritocratic way of thinking and speaking.
• From the 1920s to the 1950s, MPs without college degrees served in substantial numbers, accounting for one-third to one-half of legislators. Beginning in the 1960s, the portion of degree holders began to climb, and by the 2000s, non–college graduates were as rare in national legislatures as they were in the days of aristocrats and landed gentry.
• Two of the four iconic American presidents on Mount Rushmore (George Washington and Abraham Lincoln) lacked a college degree. The last U.S. president without a diploma, Harry S. Truman... Thomas Frank describes the varied backgrounds of those who launched the New Deal:
• But one of the most successful British governments since the war was its least credentialed and most broadly representative in class terms. <> In 1945, Clement Attlee’s Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill’s Conservatives... Seven of his ministers had worked as coal miners.
• Turning Congress and parliaments into the exclusive preserve of the credentialed classes has not made government more effective, but it has made it less representative. It has also alienated working people from mainstream parties, especially those of the center-left, and polarized politics along educational lines. One of the deepest divides in politics today is between those with and those without a college degree.
• Piketty speculates that the transformation of left parties from worker parties into parties of intellectual and professional elites may explain why they have not responded to the rising inequality of recent decades.
• One of the defects of the technocratic approach to politics is that it places decision-making in the hands of elites, and so disempowers ordinary citizens. Another is that it abandons the project of political persuasion. Incentivizing people to act responsibly—to conserve energy or to watch their weight or to observe ethical business practices—is not only an alternative to coercing them; it is also an alternative to persuading them.
• But attributing political disagreement to a simple refusal to face facts or accept science misunderstands the interplay of facts and opinion in political persuasion. The idea that we should all agree on the facts, as a pre-political baseline, and then proceed to debate our opinions and convictions, is a technocratic conceit. Political debate is often about how to identify and characterize the facts relevant to the controversy in question. Whoever succeeds in framing the facts is already a long way to winning the argument.
• The partisan gap in climate change concern is thus almost twice as large (59 percent) among those with college degrees as among those with a high school education (30 percent)... These findings challenge the idea that those unwilling to support measures to alleviate climate change are simply ill-informed about science.
• Unlike aristocratic privilege, meritocratic success brings a sense of achievement for having earned one’s place. From this point of view, it is better to be rich in a meritocracy than in an aristocracy. <> For similar reasons, being poor in a meritocracy is demoralizing.
• Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are … no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism.
• (Young's) dystopian tale by predicting that, in 2034, the less-educated classes would rise up in a populist revolt against the meritocratic elites. In 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule.
• Hayek draws a distinction between merit and value. Merit involves a moral judgment about what people deserve, whereas value is simply a measure of what consumers are willing to pay for this or that good. 20 <> It is a mistake, Hayek argues, to over-moralize economic rewards by assuming they reflect the merit of those who receive them.
• Rawls disagrees. “Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances.”
• The difficulty of identifying merit gives rise to a deeper problem. Given the inevitable disagreement about which activities are meritorious or worthy of praise, any attempt to base distributive justice on moral merit rather than economic value would lead to coercion. “A society in which the position of the individual was made to correspond to human ideas of moral merit would therefore be the exact opposition of a free society.”
• do certain features of free-market liberalism and welfare state liberalism open the way to meritocratic understandings of success that they officially reject? <> I believe the second is the case. A closer look at these two versions of liberalism reveals that their renunciation of merit and desert is not as thoroughgoing as may first appear.
• Serving market demand is simply a matter of satisfying whatever wants and desires people happen to have. But the ethical significance of satisfying such wants depends on their moral worth.
• Knight offers a critique of meritocracy more thoroughgoing than Hayek’s, and one less susceptible to self-congratulation. Hayek tells the wealthy that although their wealth is no measure of their merit, it does reflect the superior value of their contribution to society. For Knight, this is overly flattering.
• Philosophically, the assertion that principles of justice must be defined independent of considerations of merit, virtue, or moral desert is an instance of a more general feature of Rawls’s liberalism. This is the claim that the “right” (the framework of duties and rights that governs society as a whole) is prior to the “good” (the various conceptions of virtue and the good life that people pursue within the framework). Principles of justice that affirmed a particular conception of merit, virtue, or moral desert would not be neutral toward the competing conceptions of the good life that citizens in pluralist societies espouse.
• Social esteem flows, almost ineluctably, to those who enjoy economic and educational advantages, especially if they earn those advantages under fair terms of social cooperation... But this reply overlooks the fact that the allocation of honor and recognition is a political question of central importance and has long been regarded as such.
• But some luck egalitarians assert a far more expansive notion of responsibility. They argue that even the failure to buy insurance for various possible adversities constitutes the kind of choice that makes people responsible for most any misfortune that befalls them.
• As with other versions of liberalism, the luck egalitarian philosophy begins by rejecting merit and desert as the basis of justice but ends by reasserting meritocratic attitudes and norms with a vengeance. For Rawls, these norms re-enter in the guise of entitlements to legitimate expectations. For the luck egalitarians, they enter through an emphasis on individual choice and personal responsibility.
• There is reason to doubt that it is possible to calculate the premiums and payouts of a hypothetical insurance policy for the lack of native talent. But if it could be done, and if the talented were taxed and the untalented were compensated accordingly, and if, furthermore, everyone had fair access to jobs and educational opportunities, then the luck egalitarian’s ideal of a just society would be realized... Luck egalitarianism defends inequalities that arise from effort and choice. This highlights a point of convergence with free-market liberalism.
• By fixating on natural talent as a primary source of income inequality, egalitarian liberals exaggerate its role and, inadvertently, enlarge its prestige.
• Overcoming the tyranny of merit does not mean that merit should play no role in the allocation of jobs and social roles. <> Instead, it means rethinking the way we conceive success, questioning the meritocratic conceit that those on top have made it on their own... Such rethinking should focus on the two domains of life most central to the meritocratic conception of success: education and work.
• 1940s, by James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University. Conant, a chemist who served as a scientific advisor to the Manhattan Project during World War II, was troubled by the emergence, at Harvard and throughout American society, of a hereditary upper class.
• best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually and be instructed, at the public expense.” ... Seen in retrospect, Jefferson’s indelicate language highlights two potentially objectionable features of a meritocratic system of education that our language of social mobility and equal opportunity obscures: First, a fluid, mobile society based on merit, though antithetical to hereditary hierarchy, is not antithetical to inequality; to the contrary, it legitimates inequalities that arise from merit rather than birth. Second, a system that celebrates and rewards “the best geniuses” is prone to denigrate the rest, implicitly or explicitly, as “rubbish.”
• Jerome Karabel, the author of a history of admissions policies at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, concludes that “the children of the working class and the poor are about as unlikely to attend the Big Three [Harvard, Yale, and Princeton] today as they were in 1954.”
• At Williams College, a small, prestigious liberal arts college in New England, 30 percent of the class consists of athletic recruits.
• Conant’s faith that it is possible to sort people without judging them ignores the moral logic and psychological appeal of the meritocratic regime he helped launch.
• In 1972, as the “re-sorting” was already well under way, Stanford accepted one-third of those who applied. Today, it accepts less than 5 percent. Johns Hopkins, which accepted the majority of its applicants (54 percent) in 1988, now accepts only 9 percent. The University of Chicago experienced one of the most precipitous drops, from a 77 percent acceptance rate in 1993 to 6 percent in 2019.
• there is also poignance in this belief, for it is forged in pain—in the soul-destroying demands that meritocratic striving inflicts upon the young.
• But today, “comping,” or competing for admission to student organizations, whether or not they demand special skills, has become commonplace. The culture of comping is so extreme that some students experience freshman year as “Rejection 101,” a lesson in dealing with the disappointment of failing to make the cut.
• The American indifference to active labor market policies may reflect the market faith that supply and demand (in this case, for labor) automatically align, without outside help. But it also reflects the meritocratic conviction that higher education is the primary avenue to opportunity.
• But by 2016, more Americans were dying each year from drug overdose than died during the entire Vietnam War.
• After the civil rights movement, the racial segregation that upheld this perverse psychological wage subsidy fell away, Ehrenreich suggests, leaving poor whites without “the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were.” Liberal elites who “feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism” are right to condemn the racism. 26 But they fail to see how attributing “white privilege” to disempowered white working-class men and women is galling;
• From Aristotle to the American republican tradition, from Hegel to Catholic social teaching, theories of contributive justice teach us that we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make. According to this tradition, the fundamental human need is to be needed by those with whom we share a common life. The dignity of work consists in exercising our abilities to answer such needs. If this is what it means to live a good life, then it is a mistake to conceive consumption as “the sole end and object of economic activity.”
• One of the policies he proposes to achieve this goal is a wage subsidy for low-income workers—hardly standard Republican fare. The idea is that the government would provide a supplementary payment for each hour worked by a low-wage employee, based on a target hourly-wage rate. The wage subsidy is, in a way, the opposite of a payroll tax... Whatever the merit of Cass’s particular proposals, what is interesting about his project is that it works out the implications of shifting our focus from maximizing GDP to creating a labor market conducive to the dignity of work and social cohesion.
• A second approach to renewing the dignity of work, more likely to resonate with political progressives, would highlight an aspect of the globalization agenda that is often overlooked by mainstream politicians—the rising role of finance.
• A radical way of doing so would be to lower or even eliminate payroll taxes and to raise revenue instead by taxing consumption, wealth, and financial transactions. A modest step in this direction would be to reduce the payroll tax (which makes work expensive for employers and employees alike) and make up the lost revenue with a financial transactions tax on high-frequency trading, which contributes little to the real economy. <> These and other measures to shift the burden of taxation from labor to consumption and speculation could be done in ways that would make the tax system more efficient and less regressive than it is today. But these considerations, however important, are not the only ones that matter. We should also consider the expressive significance of taxation.
• The moral of Henry Aaron’s story is not that we should love meritocracy but that we should despise a system of racial injustice that can only be escaped by hitting home runs. Equality of opportunity is a morally necessary corrective to injustice. But it is a remedial principle, not an adequate ideal for a good society... Breaking down barriers is a good thing. No one should be held back by poverty or prejudice. But a good society cannot be premised only on the promise of escape.