The Tyranny of Merit

 

Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

2020.  288 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux

 

Some years back, long-time friend turned 60, an occasion that often causes reflection.  He gathered a few of us who had started out together in the ‘70s for a reunion dinner.  We had a great time reminiscing about the good old days.  During the evening I said that, the older I got, the more I realized how lucky I had been.  My tablemates disagreed, saying, in effect, “We weren’t lucky.  We were good!”  I acknowledged we were good but, falling back on the language of mathematics, I asserted that skill and hard work are “necessary but not sufficient conditions” for success.

According to Michael Sandel, my old friends were exhibiting an attitude common in our modern meritocracy: a belief, among the successful, that they are entirely responsible for their own success.

The Problem

As I noted in a previous post, it is common to blame inequality for our current ills.  Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, posits that the root cause of both inequality and our political discontent is our modern meritocratic system.

Of course, Sandel believes that merit, in and of itself, is a good thing.  You want a competent plumber, or a well-qualified doctor.  But this perceptive, challenging work argues that an unchecked meritocratic system also has problems.

For one thing, the constant competing and striving required to rise tends to instill a belief in the successful that they did it on their own.  They fail to recognize the people and systems that made their success possible.  Personally, I benefited from good public schools, and an excellent education at a public university at a time when high levels of public support kept tuition low enough for working-class families to afford it.  (“In 1987, public colleges received three times more revenue per student from state and local governments than from tuition….  By 2013, public higher education derived as much of its revenue from tuition as from state and local support.”)

This failure to recognize how we benefit from the common goods of society leads to reduced political support, resulting in an atrophy of those goods.  This, in turn, increasingly makes advancement expensive.  The successful have the resources to assure their children’s success, resulting in a hereditary meritocracy.  Social science backs this up; class mobility in the US has markedly decreased over the last 50 years, and is now lower than most other economically advanced nations.

Meritocracy has negative effects among those who fail to rise.  Being constantly told that “you can be whatever you want if only you work hard enough,” while still being able to barely make ends meet causes the “losers” to blame themselves.  Further, they come to resent being lectured to by the “winners”. 

Perhaps most perniciously, meritocracy has destroyed the dignity of work, by reducing both the economic and cultural status of workers.  We do not pay living wages to essential workers and we generally do not see admiring articles about them, except in times of crisis.  (In the current crisis, we pay lip service to the importance of front-line workers, but do nothing to increase the pay of EMT’s, med techs, or grocery store clerks, and they recognize the hypocrisy.)  Instead, we read admiring articles about the financial engineering of the self-described “masters of the universe” on Wall Street.  

Francis Fukuyama, in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, argues that resentment engenders demands for public recognition of dignity. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.  It goes a long way toward explaining the high decibel level of today’s politics.

We should have seen it coming.  Sandel notes that the very term, meritocracy, was invented by British sociologist Michael Young, in his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy.  While Young recognized that it would allow the children of the working class to compete in a fair system, he also predicted that it would “foster hubris in the winners and humiliation among the losers.”  Young predicted that the winners would consider their success a just reward and look down on the losers.

Now that we’ve gotten ourselves into this bind, how do we get out of it?  After five chapters describing the problem, Sandel devotes a chapter to reforming education and another to restoring the dignity of work.

Reforming Education

Higher education has become a sorting machine, in which a few elite universities provide a gateway to highly paid, high status careers, and everyone else is routed to increasingly expensive public universities or an inadequate system of trade schools.

The high academic reputation of the elite universities is fairly new.  Sandel reminds us that, a century ago, Harvard had a sorry academic reputation; it was little more than a finishing school for upper-class WASP men, who then went on to staff their fathers’ law firms and brokerages.   Back in the 1930s, James Bryant Conant, with the best of intentions, started converting Harvard to a more meritocratic system.  Other elite universities followed suit.

Since the cachet of a degree from an elite institution is pretty much a guarantee of a very high paying, high status job, applications soared.  Stanford went from admitting 1 in 3 applicants in 1972 to less than 1 in 20 today.  This had led to a cruel, high-pressure system in which we subject children to advanced placement courses, the “right” extra-curricular activities and sports, summer enrichment programs, and test prep courses, much of it paid for by well-to-do parents.

Currently, Harvard’s admissions fall into three categories: legacies, children of major donors, and merit.  Noting that perhaps two-thirds of Harvard applicants are capable of earning a Harvard degree, Sandel suggests a lottery among the qualified applicants, in effect, transitioning the system from selecting “the best” to selecting “good enough.”  In addition to restoring class mobility, it might instill in the lottery winners a sense of the role luck plays in their lives. 

Elite universities would probably find a pure lottery system economically unsustainable, so Sandel suggests giving legacies a double or triple allotment of lottery tickets.  As for children of major donors, Sandel puckishly suggests auctioning a limited number of slots.  Maybe then colleges could go back to naming buildings for beloved professors and distinguished (as opposed to rich) alumni.

Government policy could also help, for example by conditioning federal aid on the percentage of lower-income students.

But the real problem in post-secondary education is that we spend a shockingly small proportion of our GDP on public colleges and trade schools.  I have noted above the decline in public funding of universities.  Graduating seniors are saddled with student debt that delays or prevents them from accumulating wealth.

Public trade and vocational schools have all but disappeared.  Only 1/3 of Americans earn a bachelor’s degree; the others are increasingly left without support.  The US spends about 0.1% of GDP on training or retraining workers.  The average among economically advanced countries is 0.5% of GDP, and some European countries spend over 1%.

Restoring the Dignity of Work

Sandel is a lot less specific on how we change our recognition of work.  We have to get away from the idea that the amount of money we make reflects the value of our social contribution.  “Work is both economic and cultural.  It is a way of making a living and also a source of social recognition and esteem.”  The meritocratic system has confused the two.

The political system is starting to recognize this.  Since at least the Clinton administration, politicians have gotten into the habit of speaking of the dignity of work, but almost always in support of existing political positions.  E.g., conservatives argue that cutting welfare enhances the dignity of work, while liberals argue that increasing the minimum wage does.

Sandel argues that modern liberals miss the point.  The good news is that liberals recognize we have to move away from a single-minded pursuit of increased GDP.  But, “They have been offering working-class and middle-class voters a greater measure of distributive justice—fairer, fuller access to the fruits of economic growth.  But what these voters want even more is a greater measure of contributive justice—an opportunity to win the social recognition and esteem that go with producing what others need and value.”

Sandel notes that, “The focus on maximizing GDP, even if accompanied by help for those left behind, puts the emphasis on consumption rather than production.  It invites us to think of ourselves more as consumers than as producers.  In practice, of course, we are both.  As consumers, we want to get the most for our money, to buy goods and services as cheaply as possible, whether they are made by low-wage workers overseas or well-paid American workers.  As producers, we want satisfying and remunerative work.  It falls to politics to reconcile our identities as consumers and as producers.”

Sandel points out that emphasizing consumption leads to an easy, morally neutral answer: increase GDP.  But focusing on production requires a political conversation about a civic (as opposed to economic) conception of the common good. 

“According to the civic idea, the common good is not simply about adding up preferences or maximizing consumer welfare.  It is about reflecting critically on our preferences—ideally, elevating and improving them—so that we can live worthwhile and flourishing lives.  This cannot be achieved through economic activity alone.  It requires deliberating with our fellow citizens about how to bring about a just and good society, one that cultivates civic virtue and enables us to reason together about the purposes worthy of our political community.”  There will be no easy or universally popular answer here.  Sandel points to some possibilities.

He cites Oren Cass, a former advisor to Mitt Romney.  In his The Once and Future Worker, Cass argues that “Rather than push corporate tax cuts and unfettered free trade in hopes of boosting GDP, Republicans should focus on policies that enable workers to find jobs that pay well enough to support strong families and communities.”  Cass recommends a wage subsidy for low-income workers(!), rolling back environmental regulations that cost jobs in mining and manufacturing, and some restrictions on trade, outsourcing, and immigration.

For a liberal perspective, Sandel cites Yale economist James Tobin, who decried the increasing financialization of our economy.  Tobin worried “that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity.”  The solution here is to revise the tax code to disincentivize financial engineering.

On the subject of taxes, Sandel notes that we should consider the expressive nature of the tax code.  Moral judgements are implicit in it.  We value children, so the tax code provides exemptions for dependents.  We value home ownership, so the tax code includes a mortgage interest deduction.  Using the tax code to benefit production instead of consumption might entail reducing payroll taxes and replacing them with taxes on economic sectors we as a society regard as less valuable.

The above are not recommendations.  Rather, they indicate the kinds of political discussions that Sandel feels we should be having.  The key is to move away from a system that values “winning” and toward a system that dignifies and values work.

At that reunion dinner, I tried to convince my colleagues of the role luck had played in our careers.  I pointed out that if we had been a few years older, we would almost certainly have been laid off in the Great Aerospace Recession of the early ‘70s.  I also pointed out that we chose a company, one of many in the industry at that time, that had suffered only one major reduction in force since we’d hired in, and that wasn’t until after we were well established in our careers.  I didn’t change their minds.  It is a small indication of how difficult it will be to change our thinking about the tyranny of merit.  Sandel’s book is a worthy contribution to the discussion.