Speaker 1: It's great to be joined today by Professor Michael Sandel, professor of political
philosophy at Harvard University and also author of the now in paperback book, The Tyranny
of Merit.
Can we find the Common Good?
It's so great to have you on.
I appreciate your time.
Speaker 4: Good to be with you, David.
Speaker 1: So to maybe start talking a little bit about the topic of of merit, there's often
sort of like two layers to this discussion.
And one is a focus on an argument as to whether we or a particular country or society or economy
have a real meritocracy.
That's one piece of the conversation.
The second part which is less discussed, but arguably just as important, if we really did
have a pure meritocracy, would that actually be a good thing?
What would be the concerns?
What would be the problems if it was really that everybody got what they deserved?
From whatever sort of perspective we want to approach that question.
So can can we maybe start with how we can combine these two questions and enter the
kind of philosophy that you lay out in the book?
Speaker 4: Yes.
And I do address both questions, and you're right to distinguish them.
It's very important.
The first problem with meritocracy is that we don't live up to the meritocratic principles
we profess.
In Ivy League universities, for example, there are more students from the top one percent
than there are from students and families in the bottom half of the income scale combined.
If you if you come from an affluent family.
Top the top quarter, you're 70 percent of the students who attend the 100 selected 100
plus most selective colleges and universities, 70 percent come from the top quartile, well-off
families.
And you know, how many come from the from the bottom quartile, from low income families.
Speaker 1: It must be incredibly small.
Speaker 4: It's three percent.
Right.
And now so we don't live up to the meritocratic principles we profess, it isn't true, as the
slogan we hear from politicians tells us that you can make it if you cry, that everyone
really has an equal chance to succeed.
So that's one problem with meritocracy.
We haven't realized it.
We don't chances are not truly equal, but there's a deeper problem, which is that the
ideal is flawed.
And this is really the heart of my argument.
In the tyranny of merit, meritocracy has a dark side and the dark side is that it is
corrosive of the common good.
And let me see if I can explain why, because this is a counterintuitive idea, we normally
think that if only we could perfect the meritocracy, then we would have a just society.
Right.
But think about it, if it were really true.
That everyone's place in society and in the income scale were the result of their own
doing such that they could say, I've earned it, I deserve my place, then.
Those who landed on top would believe their success was their undoing, the measure of
their merit, and they would look upon those who struggle as deserving their fate as well.
In fact, the person who coined the term meritocracy, he was a British sociologist, Michael Young.
In 1958, he coined it, The rise of the Meritocracy was his book as a dystopian scenario.
Because he glimpsed this, he glimpsed the hubris that a meritocracy generates among
the successful and the humiliation and resentment it generates among those left behind.
Now, you asked me, David, how do I bring these two arguments together in the book?
We've got, in a way, the worst of both worlds.
We don't have a true meritocracy because opportunities are not truly equal, and yet those who have
landed on top, especially in recent decades, have come to believe that their success is
their own doing and that they therefore deserve the full measure of the benefits that a market
society showers upon them.
So we have the hubris among the successful.
We have the humiliation and the brewing resentment, understandable resentment among those who
struggle even without a genuine meritocracy.
And and I think that the anger and resentment among many working people, that elite, meritocratic,
elite, credentialed elites look down on them.
That set of resentments and anger, those grievances have gave rise to Trump, Donald Trump, and
they persist because the Democratic Party really has become the party of meritocratic
credentialed elites and has lost contact with the working class, which once constituted
its base going back to the New Deal.
Speaker 1: That's that's very interesting.
And there's a lot of aspects there that that we could dig more into because you mentioned
political party.
It seems that one of the I don't even know that it's a side effect.
I mean, it's really a direct consequence of the idea that everybody sort of has what they've
earned and what they've deserved with equal opportunity.
It seems like politically it's a recipe to justify doing very little to help those whose
position is is lesser or less good, because after all, it's a direct result merely of
their actions that they are there.
And in fact, it's this isn't theoretical.
Some of the primary arguments made to cut welfare programs against the so-called enhanced
unemployment during the pandemic that we've seen against all of these things is that it's
some form of laziness or simply choosing one's circumstances.
Why would we reward people for that?
It has a very direct line to policy.
Speaker 4: It does.
And we hear this argument all the time in debates about welfare and other forms of income
support.
What's interesting is the way troubling, but also important to come to terms with the way
the Democratic Party has migrated from being a party that speaks for the middle class and
the working class against the privileged to being really the embodiment of credentialled,
well credentialed elites and the professional classes.
And this happened really over the last four decades as the Democratic Party, along with
Republicans, embraced a kind of market driven, finance driven version of globalization and
education, admonishing people to improve themselves through higher education.
That's been a big part of the message, especially of the Democratic Party in the face of rising
inequality and wage stagnation and job loss over the last four decades.
What we've heard from politicians, mainstream politicians, is not an attempt to deal directly
with inequalities of income and wealth and power.
They've offered a kind of meritocratic workaround.
They've they've offered individual upward mobility through higher education.
If you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to college.
What you earn will depend on what you learn.
That was Bill Clinton.
You can make it if you try.
That was Barack Obama.
But what they miss now, it teams inspiring to encourage everybody to go to college or
university and increasing access, broadening access to higher education.
That's a good thing.
I'd be the last person to argue against that.
But as a response, or is the primary response to the rising inequality of the globalization
decades and is a response to the wage stagnation and job losses experienced by many working
people?
That is a pale offer because those who pass it contains an implicit insult.
If you think about it right, improve your condition.
You will surmount wage stagnation and job loss and inequality.
The problem is that you aren't well enough educated.
The problem is not that we embrace policies that created this widening gap.
It's that you are not well enough educated.
So that was the insult implicit in the seemingly inspiring admonition to go get a better education.
And the result was rising resentment among people who felt that their concerns were not
being taken seriously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a couple of interesting things there.
I mean, so we've seen a story that I first remember hearing it.
I think it was with Rick, the senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, about maybe 20
years ago, where he started to say, you know, we're we're education is liberal indoctrination.
We're never going to have those people on our side because these mechanisms of colleges
and universities, they're just going to indoctrinate people into left wing sort of points of view.
The left, on the other hand, has talked about let's get people college educations, let's
look at free college, let's look at making it cheaper, more accessible, et cetera.
And there's a couple of effects of that.
One is that it's saying if and until you do that, you will be less than the people that
have done that.
But also, isn't there some degree to which if everybody went ahead and did that, doesn't
it sort of zero out and not even actually solve the problems of inequality that it claims
to resolve?
Speaker 4: You're right.
It does not solve the problem of inequality.
I think it's desirable for its own sake to make college free and or at least as accessible
as possible.
Yes.
People from every background that are good in and of itself and I'm all in favor of it.
But the question is whether that is an adequate response to the inequality and wage stagnation
of recent decades.
And I say it isn't.
First of all, those of us who spend our days in the company of credential of the credentialled
can easily forget a simple fact.
Most Americans do not have a four year college degree.
Nearly two thirds do not.
Right.
So it's folly to create an economy that sets is a necessary condition of dignified work
and a decent life, a college degree that most people don't have.
It also this way of thinking is too, too blinkered to narrow an approach to inequality because
it leaves in place the steep hierarchy of prestige and esteem associated with people
who who are well credentialed.
Right.
And it implicitly disparages those who aren't.
And this is embodied in policy and in funding.
An economist at the Brookings Institute Figured Institution figured out that we spend about
one hundred and sixty four billion dollars a year helping people go to college.
And how much do we spend supporting people who go in for vocational and technical training
in community colleges?
At the federal level, about one billion hundred and sixty two to one.
Now there is there's something wrong with that mode of funding for those forms of learning,
including community colleges and technical and vocational training that many people rely
on to prepare themselves for the world work.
But this this imbalance reflects this broader skewing of our values in the direction of
valorizing people who are well credentialed and implicitly disparaging those who have
not been to university.
And this is showing up in the way people are voting.
Trump managed.
To tap into the grievance against elites that many working people felt, and you can look
at the voting behavior in the last few decades as a college, the college educated vote has
gone increasingly for Democrats and the vote among those who haven't been to college goes
increasingly for Republicans and especially Republicans like Trump of an authoritarian
populist bent who channel the anger in the sense of grievance.
And what's interesting is a similar pattern is unfolding in Britain and in France and
in other countries that have embraced globalization, emphasize the meritocratic solution to inequality
and have alienated center left parties.
Speaker 1: Now, there are some who would look at that phenomenon that you identify as the
college educated voter, voting more for Democrats, voting more for center left and left wing
parties in the UK and say, well, this is there's a very simple, intuitive explanation for that.
As you become more educated and you learn more about the world, you realize it's better
for everybody.
It's better for the country to vote for these people.
You're doing an altruistic thing.
You're doing a rational thing, and we're all better off for it.
Speaker 4: Right.
And that in itself, I think, is a hubristic analysis of the situation, because, in fact,
the policies, the kind of finance driven globalization or neoliberal policies embraced by center
right, center left parties, really center left and center right.
But politically, the toll has been taken upon the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Labor
Party in Britain, the Socialist Party in France.
These policies have failed in the 2008 financial crisis was the most dramatic illustration
of how a kind of finance driven globalization project fails.
The recession that followed, which fell very heavily on low and middle income Americans,
demonstrated demonstrated further.
The failure and then to add insult to injury is the meritocratic attempt to say that the
solution to to inequality and wage stagnation is not to reconsider the policies that we
promoted and enacted for 30 or 40 years.
It simply for you to improve yourselves.
There is something deeply disparaging about that.
So I think that what I'm proposing for the Democratic Party is a shift to focus less
on arming people for meritocratic competition and to focus more on the dignity of work to
ask what would it take to make life better for everyone, regardless of of the university
credentials they may have.
And we could explore.
And there will be debates about what counts, what policies actually support and affirm
the dignity of work.
But I think that should be the starting point.
Speaker 1: Last thing I want to touch on, are there societies that we can look at either
today or historically that have had maybe what we would call a more balanced or productive
or rational view on the kind of interaction between merit and and equality that might
be interesting as a model in some sense?
Speaker 4: Well, in some ways.
And this is not to engage in golden age nostalgia, but the political coalitions that formed during
the time of FDR and the New Deal were an example of coalitions that did not depend on admonishing
working people to improve themselves, but instead asked how can we structurally reform
the economy to strengthen collective bargaining, to strengthen unions, to give working people
more of a voice, more of a say, as well as to be able to negotiate better working conditions?
I think today, in some ways, Biden has begun to depart from the meritocratic, technocratic,
neoliberal orientation of his predecessors.
And it's interesting to notice that Joe Biden was the first Democratic nominee in 36 years.
Without an Ivy League degree, Rice may have opened him at least a little to a broader
horizon.
He speaks more actually about the dignity of work than he does about meritocratic striving
and meritocratic competition.
There's also an interesting political figure now looked at the German elections, the social
Democratic candidate, Schultz.
Has been trying to make this shift as well, to focus, he's actually offered a critique
of the single minded focus on merit and has emphasized instead notions of respect and
the dignity of work.
And I think that this is a more promising direction for the Democratic Party and for
the center left parties generally.
Speaker 1: I could not could not agree more.
And much of what we've been talking about today is in the just out in paperback book,
The Tyranny of Merit.
Can We Find the Common Good?
We've been speaking with the book's author, Professor Michael Sandel from Harvard University.
So appreciate your time and your insights today.
Speaker 4: Thank you, David.