Michael Sandel on The Tyranny of Merit

 

At the heart of the populist resentments that roil American politics are grievances about work. Those grievances are about more than job losses and stagnant wages, though. “Work” is both economic and cultural. The people left behind by globalization haven’t just struggled while others prospered; they sense that the work they do is no longer a source of social recognition.
 
From the end of World War II until the 1970s, it was possible for those without a college degree to find a good job that enabled them to support a family and lead a comfortable, middle-class life. That is far more difficult today. Over the past four decades, the earnings difference between high-school and college graduates—what economists call the “college premium”—has doubled.
 
Globalization brought rich rewards to the well credentialed—the winners of the meritocratic race. It did nothing for most workers. Productivity increased, but working people reaped a smaller and smaller share of what they produced. Although per capita income in the U.S. has increased 85 percent since 1979, white men without a four-year college degree make less now, in real terms, than they did then.
 
The meritocratic age has also inflicted a more insidious injury: eroding the dignity of work. The valorization of those who score well on standardized tests and go on to college or university implicitly disparages those without such credentials. It tells them that the work they do, less valued by the market than the work of professionals, is a lesser contribution to the common good.
 
This way of thinking about who deserves what is the result of two related tendencies. One is the meritocratic sorting that, in recent decades, has made a four-year college degree an almost indispensable condition of opportunity and success. The other is the neoliberal, market-oriented version of globalization embraced by mainstream parties of the center-right and center-left since the 1980s. Even as globalization produced massive inequality, these two outlooks—the meritocratic and the neoliberal—undermined the dignity of work, fueling resentment of elites among working people, along with a political backlash.
 
Michael Young, who coined the term meritocracy in the late 1950s—and who used it as a pejorative—observed four decades later: “It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.”
 
 
Working-class men without a college degree voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016. Their attraction to his politics of grievance suggests that they were angered by more than economic hardship. One of the reasons mainstream analysts and politicians were shocked by Trump’s election is that they were oblivious to the culture of elite condescension. This culture is a consequence, in large part, of the meritocratic sorting project and the inequality brought about by market-driven globalization, but it finds expression throughout American life. The working-class fathers on television sitcoms, such as Archie Bunker in All in the Family and Homer Simpson in The Simpsons, are mostly buffoons—ineffectual and dumb. Joan Williams, a professor at Hastings College of Law, in San Francisco, has pointed a finger at what she calls “class cluelessness” among progressives. In a 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild gave voice to working-class discontent: “You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored.”

 
Any serious response to working-class frustrations must combat condescension and credentialist prejudice. It must also put the dignity of work at the center of the political agenda. Thinking through the meaning of work would force Americans to confront moral and political questions that we otherwise evade: What counts as a contribution to the common good? What do we owe to one another as citizens?
 
Debating the dignity of work requires us to ask whether market wages offer a true measure of the social value of various jobs. According to a consumerist conception of the common good, the answer is yes, they do. This conception, familiar among economic-policy makers, defines the common good as the sum of everyone’s preferences and interests. In this view, we achieve the common good by maximizing consumer welfare, typically by maximizing economic growth. If the common good is simply a matter of satisfying consumer preferences, then market wages are a good measure of who has contributed what. Those who make the most money have presumably made the most valuable contribution, by producing goods and services that consumers want.
 
But this is not the only approach to the common good. What might be called a civic conception rejects this consumerist notion. According to this view, the common good is not simply about adding up preferences or maximizing consumer welfare. Nor can it be achieved through economic activity alone. It requires reflecting critically on our preferences, and deliberating with our fellow citizens about how to bring about a just and good society.
 
The civic conception also suggests a particular way of thinking about work: specifically, that the most important role we play in the economy is not as consumers but as producers. It is as producers that we develop and deploy our abilities to provide goods and services that fulfill the needs of our fellow citizens and win social esteem. The true value of our contribution cannot be measured by the wage we receive; it depends instead on the moral and civic importance of the ends our efforts serve.
 
Consider the two careers of Walter White, the high-school-chemistry teacher turned meth mogul in the television series Breaking Bad. When White abandoned the classroom to apply his skills to making a highly prized version of methamphetamine, he earned far more than the modest pay he’d received as a teacher. But this does not mean that cooking meth is a more valuable contribution to society than teaching high school. Who contributes most to the common good cannot be determined by the market; it requires a moral judgment that democratic citizens must debate and decide. The coronavirus pandemic has likely changed the way many Americans feel about whose contributions matter most. But those “essential workers” on whom we depend are among the least-well-paid members of society.
 
The idea that economic policy is ultimately for the sake of consumption is so ingrained that we struggle to think our way beyond it. “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production,” Adam Smith declared in The Wealth of Nations. John Maynard Keynes echoed Smith. Most contemporary economists agree. But an older tradition of moral and political thought held otherwise. Aristotle argued that human flourishing depends on realizing our nature through the cultivation and exercise of our abilities. The American republican tradition taught that certain occupations—first agriculture, then artisan labor, then free labor broadly understood—nurture the virtues that equip citizens for self-rule.
 
In the 20th century, the producer ethic of the republican tradition gradually gave way to consumerist notions of freedom, and to a political economy of economic growth. But the idea that work draws citizens together in a web of contribution and mutual recognition did not disappear. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked it when he spoke to striking sanitation workers in 1968, hours before he was assassinated. “The person who picks up our garbage is, in the final analysis, as significant as the physician,” King said, “for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”
 
 
The idea that we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good, and win the esteem of our fellow citizens for doing so, runs from Aristotle to MLK to Catholic social teaching. In this conception, we aspire above all 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.
 
A political economy concerned only with the size and allocation of GDP undermines the dignity of work and makes for an impoverished civic life. Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the presidency in 1968, understood this: “Fellowship, community, shared patriotism—these essential values of our civilization do not come from just buying and consuming goods together.” They come instead, he went on, from the kind of work that allows a person to say, “‘I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures.’”
 
Few politicians speak that way today. Progressives have largely abandoned the politics of community, patriotism, and the dignity of work, offering instead the rhetoric of rising. To those who worried about stagnant wages, outsourcing, inequality, and losing their jobs to immigrants and robots, governing elites offered bracing advice: Go to college. Equip yourself to compete and win in the global economy. What you earn will depend on what you learn. You can make it if you try.
 
This was an idealism suited to a meritocratic, market-driven age. It flattered the winners and insulted the losers. By 2016, its time was up.

 
On the surface, the dignity of work is hardly a controversial idea. No one speaks against it. It is invoked rhetorically to support standard political positions. On the right, some have cited the dignity of work as an argument for cutting welfare, positing that this would make life harder for the idle and wean them from dependence. Sonny Perdue, Donald Trump’s secretary of agriculture, made the connection explicit, claiming that the reduction of access to food stamps “restores the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population.” For their part, liberals have responded to a single-minded focus on maximizing GDP by promoting a greater measure of distributive justice—fairer, fuller access to the fruits of economic growth.
 
But what many workers want even more is a greater measure of contributive justice—an opportunity to win the social recognition and esteem that goes with producing what others need and value.
 
In our deeply polarized time, when large numbers of working people feel ignored and unappreciated, when we desperately need sources of social cohesion and solidarity, a more robust affirmation of the dignity of work might seem likely to find its way into mainstream political argument. But this has not been the case.
 
A political agenda that took contributive justice seriously would raise uncomfortable questions for liberals and conservatives alike. It would challenge a premise that proponents of market-based globalization widely share—that market outcomes reflect the true social value of people’s contributions. An agenda that took contributive justice seriously would require public debate about what counts as truly valuable contributions to the common good and where market verdicts miss the mark. This wouldn't be an easy conversation—the common good is contestable. But a renewed debate about the dignity of work would disrupt our partisan complacencies and morally invigorate our public discourse. Right now, as pandemic shutdowns shine a light on the once-“unseen” essential workers everywhere, is the moment to have such a debate.
 
Consider, as illustrations, two versions of a political agenda focused on the dignity of work—one conservative, the other progressive—and the need to challenge market outcomes to affirm it. The first comes from a policy adviser to Republican Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential run. In his book The Once and Future Worker, Oren Cass offers a series of proposals aimed at the grievances Trump tapped into but failed to address. Cass argues that supporting the dignity of work in the United States requires Republicans to give up their orthodox embrace of free markets. 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. This matters more for a good society, Cass maintains, than economic growth.
 
One of the policies he proposes 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. The wage subsidy is, in a way, the opposite of a payroll tax. Rather than deduct a certain amount of each worker’s earnings, the government would add a certain amount. The mechanism here may be distributive, but the rationale for it is anchored firmly in the idea of contributive justice.
 
Such anchoring was made explicit in the wage-subsidy proposal enacted by a number of European countries when the coronavirus pandemic required them to shut down their economies. Rather than offer unemployment insurance to workers who lost their jobs, as the U.S. government did, Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands covered 75 to 90 percent of wages for companies that did not lay off workers. This enabled employers to keep workers on their payroll and sent a very clear signal affirming the value of workers and the dignity of work. The U.S. approach may have made up for some amount of lost wages, but that was it.

 
A second approach to renewing the dignity of work, more likely to resonate with political progressives, would highlight the rising role of finance. In the United States, the financial industry’s share of GDP has nearly tripled since the 1950s. In 2008, it claimed more than 30 percent of corporate profits. Its employees make 70 percent more than comparably qualified workers in other industries. This would not be a problem if all this financial activity were productive—if it increased the economy’s ability to produce valuable goods and services. But that’s not the case. Adair Turner, the chair of Britain’s Financial Services Authority, has estimated that, in advanced economies such as the U.S. and the U.K., only 15 percent of financial flows go into new productive enterprises rather than into speculation on existing assets or fancy derivatives. The rise of finance offers perhaps the clearest example in a modern economy of the gap between what the market rewards and what actually contributes to the common good.
 
The financial crisis of 2008 brought the industry dramatically to the public’s attention. The resulting debate was mainly about the terms of the taxpayer bailout and how to reform Wall Street. It largely ignored the moral and civic implications of modern finance. A political agenda that recognizes the dignity of work would use the tax system to reconfigure the economy of esteem by discouraging speculation and honoring productive labor. A radical way of doing so would be to lower or even eliminate the payroll tax and to raise revenue by instead taxing consumption, wealth, and financial transactions. A modest step in this direction would be to reduce the payroll tax and make up the lost revenue with a financial-transactions tax on high-speed trading, which contributes little of value to the real economy.
 
Again, the mechanism is distributive, but the rationale and message is contributive. Taxation is not only a way of raising revenue; it is also a way of expressing a society’s values. The moral aspect of tax policy is familiar. We commonly argue about the fairness of taxation—whether this or that tax will fall more heavily on the rich or the poor. But the expressive dimension of taxation goes beyond debates about fairness, to the moral judgments societies make about which activities are worthy of honor and recognition, and which ones should be discouraged.
 
These proposals I’ve cited are not solutions in themselves, but illustrations of what it would mean to shift our debate about work to a contributive ethic, one that views work as an arena of social recognition. Renewing the dignity of work requires that we contend with the moral questions underlying our economic arrangements: not only what kinds of work are worthy of recognition and esteem but also what we owe one another as citizens. The two are connected. We cannot determine what counts as a contribution worth affirming without deliberating about the purposes and ends of our common life. And we cannot deliberate about common purposes and ends without seeing ourselves as members of a community to which we are indebted. This sense of indebtedness would enable us to say “We are all in this together”—not as a ritual incantation in times of crisis but as a principle that informs our everyday lives.
 
This article is excerpted from Michael Sandel’s new book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
 
What Liberals Get Wrong About Work. By Michael Sandel . The Atlantic , September 2, 2020.
 

Mobilizing to confront the pandemic and, eventually, to reconstruct the shattered economy, requires not only medical and economic expertise but also moral and political renewal. We need to ask a basic question that we have evaded over these last decades: What do we owe one another as citizens?

 
In a pandemic, this question arises most urgently as a question about health care: Should medical care be accessible to all, regardless of their ability to pay? The Trump administration decided that the federal government would pay for coronavirus treatment for the uninsured. Whether it will be possible to reconcile the moral logic of this policy with the notion that health coverage in ordinary times should be left to the market remains to be seen.
 
But beyond the issue of health care, we need to think more broadly about the way we contend with inequality. We need to better reward the social and economic contributions of work done by the majority of Americans, who don’t have college degrees. And we need to reckon with the morally corrosive downsides of meritocracy.
 
In response to rising inequality, mainstream politicians of both parties have, in recent decades, called for greater equality of opportunity — improving access to higher education so that all Americans, whatever their starting point in life, can rise as far as their effort and talent will take them. This is, in itself, a worthy principle.
 
 But as an answer to inequality, the rhetoric of rising — the promise that the talented will be able to climb the ladder of success — has a dark side. Part of the problem is that we fail to live up to the meritocratic principles we proclaim. For example, most students at highly selective colleges and universities come from affluent families. At many elite colleges, including Yale and Princeton, there are more students from the top 1 percent than from the entire bottom 60 percent of the country.
 
There is also a deeper problem: Even a perfect meritocracy, in which opportunities for advancement were truly equal, would corrode solidarity. Focusing on helping the talented clamber up the ladder of success can keep us from noticing that the rungs on the ladder are growing further and further apart.
 
Meritocracies also produce morally unattractive attitudes among those who make it to the top. The more we believe that our success is our own doing, the less likely we are to feel indebted to, and therefore obligated to, our fellow citizens. The relentless emphasis on rising and striving encourages the winners to inhale too deeply of their success, and to look down on those who lack meritocratic credentials.
 
These attitudes accompanied the market-driven globalization of the last 40 years. Those who reaped the bounty of outsourcing, free-trade agreements, new technologies and the deregulation of finance came to believe that they had done it all on their own, that their winnings were therefore their due.
 
Meritocratic hubris and the resentment it provokes are at the heart of the populist backlash against elites. They are also potent sources of social and political polarization. One of the deepest political divides in politics today is between those with and those without a four-year college degree.
 
  
In recent decades, governing elites have done little to make life better for the nearly two-thirds of Americans who do not have a college degree. And they have failed to confront what should be one of the central questions of our politics: How can we ensure that Americans who do not inhabit the privileged ranks of the professional classes find dignified work that enables them to support a family, contribute to their community and win social esteem?
 
As economic activity has shifted from making things to managing money, as society has lavished outsize rewards on hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers, the esteem accorded to traditional work has become fragile and uncertain. At a time when finance has claimed a greater share of corporate profits, many who labor in the real economy, producing useful goods and services, have not only endured stagnant wages and uncertain job prospects; they have also come to feel that society accords less respect to the kind of work they do.
 
The coronavirus pandemic has suddenly forced us to reconsider what social and economic roles matter most.
 
Many of the essential workers during this crisis are performing jobs that do not require college degrees; they are truckers, warehouse workers, delivery workers, police officers, firefighters, utility maintenance workers, sanitation workers, supermarket cashiers, stock clerks, nurse assistants, hospital orderlies and home care providers. They lack the luxury of working from the safety of their homes and holding meetings on Zoom. They, along with the doctors and nurses caring for the afflicted in overcrowded hospitals, are the ones who are putting their health at risk so the rest of us can seek refuge from contagion. Beyond thanking them for their service, we should reconfigure our economy and society to accord such workers the compensation and recognition that reflects the true value of their contributions — not only in an emergency but in our everyday lives.
 
Such a reconfiguration involves more than familiar debates about how generous or austere the welfare state should be. It requires deliberating as democratic citizens about what constitutes a contribution to the common good, and how such contributions should be rewarded — without assuming that markets can decide these questions on their own.
 
For example, should we consider a federal wage subsidy to ensure that workers can earn enough to support thriving families, neighborhoods and communities? Should we bolster the dignity of work by shifting the burden of taxation from payroll taxes to taxes on financial transactions, wealth and carbon? Should we reconsider our current policy of taxing income from labor at a higher rate than capital gains? Should we encourage the domestic manufacture of certain goods — beginning with surgical masks, medical gear and pharmaceuticals — rather than promoting outsourcing to low-wage countries?
 
Even when they recede, pandemics and other great crises seldom leave social and economic arrangements as they were. It is up to us to decide what the legacy of this wrenching episode will be. Our best hope is to pursue the intimations of solidarity implicit in this moment to reframe the terms of public discourse, to find our way to a morally more robust political debate than the rancorous one we have now.
 
The moral and civic renewal we need requires that we resist the anguished but misconceived debate now emerging about how many lives we should risk for the sake of restarting the economy. This debate assumes that the economy is like a main street shop that turns on the lights after a long weekend and reopens for business, just as before.
 
The real question is not when but what: What kind of economy will emerge from the crisis? Will it be one that continues to create inequalities that poison our politics and undermine any sense of national community? Or will it be one that honors the dignity of work, rewards contributions to the real economy, gives workers a meaningful voice and shares the risks of ill health and hard times?
 
We need to ask whether reopening the economy means going back to a system that, over the past four decades, pulled us apart, or whether we can emerge from this crisis with an economy that enables us to say, and to believe, that we are all in this together.
 
Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard and is the author of many books, including the forthcoming “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?”
 
 
Are We All in This Together? The pandemic has helpfully scrambled how we value everyone’s economic and social roles. By Michael Sandel.  The New York Times, April 13, 2020.

The philosopher believes the liberal left’s pursuit of meritocracy has betrayed the working classes. His new book argues for a politics centred on dignity

 Michael Sandel was 18 years old when he received his first significant lesson in the art of politics. The future philosopher was president of the student body at Palisades high school, California, at a time when Ronald Reagan, then governor of the state, lived in the same town. Never short of confidence, in 1971 Sandel challenged him to a debate in front of 2,400 left-leaning teenagers. It was the height of the Vietnam war, which had radicalised a generation, and student campuses of any description were hostile territory for a conservative. Somewhat to Sandel’s surprise, Reagan took up the gauntlet that had been thrown down, arriving at the school in style in a black limousine. The subsequent encounter confounded the expectations of his youthful interlocutor.

 “I had prepared a long list of what I thought were very tough questions,” recalls Sandel, now 67, via video-link from his study in Boston. “On Vietnam, on the right of 18-year-olds to vote – which Reagan opposed – on the United Nations, on social security. I thought I would make short work of him in front of that audience. He responded genially, amiably and respectfully. After an hour I realised I had not prevailed in this debate, I had lost. He had won us over without persuading us with his arguments. Nine years later he would get elected to the White House in the same way.”

 Undeterred by this early setback, Sandel has become one of the most famous public intellectuals and debaters in the English-speaking world, taking a berth at Harvard after receiving a doctorate as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford. He has been described as “a philosopher with the global profile of a rock star”, reaching audiences of millions online from his Harvard base. Listeners to his BBC Radio 4 series, The Public Philosopher, will have become familiar with the Socratic style of questioning, as Sandel artfully tests the assumptions in the arguments of his audience. Millions of YouTube viewers, where his lectures on justice can be freely accessed, will be familiar with the high, serious forehead and gentle, softly spoken delivery.

 Sandel’s politics are squarely on the left. In 2012, he added intellectual lustre to Ed Miliband’s renewal project for Labour, speaking to that year’s party conference on the moral limits of markets. The speech, and his book of the same year, What Money Can’t Buy, helped inspire Miliband’s critique of “predatory capitalism”, which was the Labour leader’s distinctive contribution to post-crash political debate in Britain.

 What Money Can’t Buy sealed Sandel’s status as perhaps the most formidable critic of free-market orthodoxy in the English-speaking world. But as an age of violently polarised, partisan and poisonous politics has taken hold, it is that early encounter with Reagan that has begun to play on his mind. “It taught me a lot about the importance of the ability to listen attentively,” he says, “which matters as much as the rigours of the argument. It taught me about mutual respect and inclusion in the public square.”

 The question of how to revive these civic virtues lies at the heart of Sandel’s new book, published this month. As American commentators warn of an “Armageddon” election in a divided country, how can a less resentful, less rancorous, more generous public life be revived? The starting point, uncomfortably, turns out to be a bonfire of the vanities that sustained a generation of progressives.

 The Tyranny of Merit is Sandel’s response to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. For figures such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it will make challenging reading. By championing an “age of merit” as the solution to the challenges of globalisation, inequality and deindustrialisation, the Democratic party and its European equivalents, Sandel argues, hung the western working-class and its values out to dry – with disastrous consequences for the common good.

 As he talks, the tone is as modulated as ever; the phrasing characteristically elegant and fluent. But a sense of frustration is palpable, as Sandel charts the rise of what he sees as a corrosive leftwing individualism: “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this on both sides of the Atlantic – was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them. This is what I call in the book the ‘rhetoric of rising’. It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope. We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.”

 The recommended way to “rise” has been to get a higher education. Or, as the Blair mantra had it: “Education, education, education.” Sandel homes in on a 2013 speech by Obama in which the president told students: “We live in a 21st-century global economy. And in a global economy jobs can go anywhere. Companies, they’re looking for the best-educated people wherever they live. If you don’t have a good education, then it’s going to be hard for you to find a job that pays the living wage.” For those willing to make the requisite effort, there was the promise that: “This country will always be a place where you can make it if you try.”

 Sandel has two fundamental objections to this approach. First, and most obvious, the fabled “level playing field” remains a chimera. Although he says more and more of his own Harvard students are now convinced that their success is a result of their own effort, two-thirds of them come from the top fifth of the income scale. It is a pattern replicated across the Ivy League universities. The relationship between social class and SAT scores – which grade high school students ahead of college – is well attested. More generally, he notes, social mobility has been stalled for decades. “Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults.”

 But the main point of The Tyranny of Merit is a different one: Sandel is determined to aim a broadside squarely at a left-liberal consensus that has reigned for 30 years. Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.” Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own. “On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.” Not only was this state of affairs seen as irreversible, it was also presented as laudable. “To object in any way to that was to be closed-minded, prejudiced and hostile to cosmopolitan identities.”

 A relentless success ethic permeated the culture: “Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.” As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified. “They became reliant on the professional classes as their constituency, and in the US as a source of campaign finance. In 2008 Barack Obama became the first Democratic candidate for president to raise more than his Republican opponent. That was a turning point but it wasn’t noticed or highlighted at the time.”

 Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure. Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”
 
It is a withering analysis. Does he empathise, then, with Trumpism? “I have no sympathy whatsoever for Donald Trump, who is a pernicious character. But my book conveys a sympathetic understanding of the people who voted for him. For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites, which he thinks have looked down upon him throughout his life. That does provide a very important clue to his political appeal.
 
“Am I tough on the Democrats? Yes, because it was their uncritical embrace of market assumptions and meritocracy that prepared the way for Trump. Even if Trump is defeated in the next election and is somehow extracted from the Oval Office, the Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalisation.”
 
So much for the diagnosis. The only way out of the crisis, Sandel believes, is to dismantle the meritocratic assumptions that have morally rubber-stamped a society of winners and losers. The Covid-19 pandemic, and in particular the new appreciation of the value of supposedly unskilled, low-paid work, offers a starting point for renewal. “This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem. We now realise how deeply dependent we are, not just on doctors and nurses, but delivery workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, lorry drivers, home healthcare providers and childcare workers, many of them in the gig economy. We call them key workers and yet these are oftentimes not the best paid or the most honoured workers.”
 
There must be a radical re-evaluation of how contributions to the common good are judged and rewarded. The money to be earned in the City or on Wall Street, for example, is out of all proportion with the contribution of speculative finance to the real economy. A financial transactions tax would allow funds to be channelled more equably. But for Sandel, the word “honour” is as important as the question of pay. There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree.
 
“We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity,” he says, “which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice. It would be a serious mistake to leave the issue of investment in vocational training and apprenticeships to the right. Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven’t been to university.”
 
A new respect and status for the non-credentialed, he says, should be accompanied by a belated humility on the part of the winners in the supposedly meritocratic race. To those who, like many of his Harvard students, believe that they are simply the deserving recipients of their own success, Sandel offers the wisdom 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… but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
 
“Humility is a civic virtue essential to this moment,” he says, “because it’s a necessary antidote to the meritocratic hubris that has driven us apart.”
 
The Tyranny of Merit is the latest salvo in Sandel’s lifelong intellectual struggle against a creeping individualism that, since the Reagan and Thatcher era, has become pervasive in western democracies. “To regard oneself as self-made and self-sufficient. This picture of the self exerts a powerful attraction because it seems on the face of it to be empowering – we can make it on our own, we can make it if we try. It’s a certain picture of freedom but it’s flawed. It leads to a competitive market meritocracy that deepens divides and corrodes solidarity.”
 
Sandel draws on a vocabulary that challenges liberal notions of autonomy in a way that has been unfashionable for decades. Words such as “dependency”, “indebtedness”, “mystery”, “humility” and “luck” recur in his book. The implicit claim is that vulnerability and mutual recognition can become the basis of a renewed sense of belonging and community. It is a vision of society that is the very opposite of what came to be known as Thatcherism, with its emphasis on self-reliance as a principal virtue.

 
There are, he believes, optimistic signs beyond the “clap for carers” moment that an ethical shift is finally taking place. “The Black Lives Matter movement has given moral energy to progressive politics. It has become a multiracial, multigenerational movement and is opening up space for a public reckoning with injustice. It shows that the remedy for inequality is not simply to remove barriers to meritocratic achievement.”
 
In the closing section of his book, Sandel recalls the story of Henry Aaron, the black baseball player who grew up in the segregated south and broke Babe Ruth’s record for career home runs in 1974. Aaron’s biographer wrote that hitting a baseball “represented the first meritocracy in Henry’s life”. It’s the wrong lesson to draw, says Sandel. “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.”
 
Fair competition does not constitute a just vision of society. Even if Trump is defeated in November’s presidential election, this is a truth, Sandel says, that Joe Biden, and his counterparts in Europe, must take on board. For inspiration, he says, they could do worse than turn to one of his intellectual heroes, the English Christian socialist RH Tawney.
 
“Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture. My book comes out of that tradition.”
 
 
 
Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit'. By Julian Coman. The Guardian , September  6, 2020.
 

Looming above America’s present struggles over injustice and inequality is the sense that certain self-mythologies are beginning to evaporate. When Barack Obama was in the White House, he often studded his speeches with a favorite pop lyric, “You can make it if you try.” He mentioned it more than a hundred and forty times, even though the facts of declining social mobility rendered that image less and less convincing. In various studies, no more than eight per cent of Americans who are born into the bottom fifth of U.S. households, as measured by income, ever reach the top fifth; more than a third stay at the bottom.

 That analysis of Obama’s language is just one of the startling facts in the latest book by the political philosopher Michael Sandel, who has spent decades scrutinizing the tenets of Western liberalism, including beliefs about justice, markets, and, now, meritocracy. In “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?,” Sandel examines how the notion of “meritocracy,” a word coined in 1958 by Michael Young, a left-leaning British sociologist, was torqued into an American shibboleth. Over time, Sandel argues, it fed a “toxic brew of hubris and resentment.” He writes, “It flattered the winners and insulted the losers. By 2016, its time was up. The arrival of Brexit and Trump, and the rise of hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, announced the failure of the project.” In the final months of Sandel’s writing, he found that the pandemic underscored the political problems he was describing. “The question now is what an alternative political project might look like,” he wrote. Among his prescriptions, he favors some popular liberal proposals, such as introducing a tax on financial transactions, but also some provocative suggestions, such as creating a lottery system for élite college admissions. I recently spoke by phone with Sandel, who is Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government. He was at home in Brookline, Massachusetts. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed American notions of success and failure, how they have contributed to inequality and division, and what Joe Biden might say to stake out a more inspiring, and more dignifying, realm of Democratic values.

 Evan Osnos

You write that America was “morally” unprepared for the pandemic. Was there ever a point in this crisis when you thought, Perhaps this will galvanize us?

 Michael Sandel

In the early days of the pandemic, we often heard the reassuring slogan “We are all in this together.” We heard it from politicians, advertisers, celebrities. The slogan was all around us. It was inspiring in a way because it reminded us of our shared vulnerability in the face of the virus. But I think many people felt that the slogan rang hollow, even in the early weeks, because we knew, and felt, and sensed that we were not truly all in this together. It soon became clear that some of us would ride out the pandemic working from home, relatively removed from the risks, while others—including those whose work enabled the rest of us to work from home—had little choice but to expose themselves to the risks that come from working in stores, and in warehouses, and delivering goods. So it quickly became clear that we were not all in this together.

 At the heart of your project is that unravelling of social bonds, a process that you describe as unfolding over many decades. You were obviously working on this book long before the pandemic. So, what was the origin moment that led you to look at the common good, and the role of meritocracy in our lives?

 The theme of the common good, and our difficulty bringing it to bear in our public life, has been a concern of mine for a very long time, going back to my previous book [“What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets” (2012)], where I worried that we had shifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society, in which everything was up for sale. Going back even further, I worried that contemporary liberalism focussed too single-mindedly on the individual detached from community, and that this was leading to a politics that failed to engage with our shared identities and with shared moral purposes. So our uneasy relation to the common good has been something that’s concerned me for a long time. I was prompted to write this book, “The Tyranny of Merit,” by trying to make sense of 2016. First with Brexit in Britain, then with the election of Trump in the United States, 2016 was a moment of populist backlash. But against what? That was the question.

 It seemed to me that there was more to this backlash than simply the loss of jobs, and the wage stagnation that resulted from globalization. There was more to it also than the ugly sentiments of xenophobia, misogyny, and racism that Trump fomented and appealed to. It seemed to me that entangled with these ugly sentiments were some legitimate grievances that the mainstream parties had missed and had failed to address. Central to those grievances was anger and resentment against professional and meritocratic élites, who seem to be looking down on those less fortunate, less credentialled than themselves.

 EA : In your books, there’s this pattern, it seems to me, in which you have sensed at various moments these comforting ideas—“morally satisfying,” I think is a term that you’ve used—that are either underdeveloped, or overdeveloped, or exploited in some way. You’ve challenged some of these presumptions that we have about how a good society is organized. How do you see the theme that ties together some of these big critiques that you’ve made over the years?

 MS : A central theme has been questioning the widely held assumption that the way a pluralist society should contend with its moral and civic disagreements is to aspire to a neutrality that, I believe, can never be achieved. So, for example, in the previous book, “What Money Can’t Buy,” I tried to show that part of the deeper appeal of the market faith, which took hold from the nineteen-eighties through the early two-thousands, was the assumption that markets were a neutral instrument for defining the public good. We could somehow avoid messy, contentious debates about the meaning of a just society, and how to achieve the common good, by outsourcing our moral disagreements to markets. The effect has been to create an empty, hollow, unsatisfying public discourse, which frustrates democratic citizens, I think, in many parts of the world. Certainly in this country, citizens want public life to be about big questions that matter, including questions of values, and this reach for neutrality has not only led to the embrace of the market faith, but it also has led our politics to embrace a technocratic space—the idea that experts and technocrats can tell us what the common good consists in—and this technocratic faith is very closely connected to the idea that the meritorious, the well credentialled, should govern.

 EA : It’s an interesting scenario that here you are at Harvard, surrounded by students who have risen to the top of the meritocratic system, faculty members who have risen to the top, and a culture embedded with the idea that, through rigorous training, you can build not just the opportunity but almost a moral position to lead the country. When you talk about the flaws of meritocratic hubris, how does that go over at Harvard?

 MS :

We shall see. [Laughs.] I’m bracing for the reaction. But, all kidding aside, I think that many of my colleagues will recognize, in their experience, many of the problems that I raise. I should first explain what I mean by “meritocratic hubris.” It’s the tendency of those who land on top to believe that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, and, by implication, that those who struggle, those who were left behind, must deserve their fate as well. It’s the tendency to forget our indebtedness to family, teachers, community, country, and the times in which we live as conditions for the success that we enjoy. The more we believe that our success is our own doing, the harder it is to see ourselves in other people’s shoes, the harder it is to feel a sense of mutual responsibility for the fate of our fellow-citizens, including those who aren’t flourishing in the new economy.

 EA : When you talk to your students about this, do they see what you see? Many of your students would describe themselves as progressive, alert to the embedded inequalities in our lives—and yet at the same time they are living it, they are enacting it. How do they reckon with some of those tensions?

 MS : They are at both poles of that paradox. They are, for the most part, keenly aware of the advantages that have helped them achieve, and many spend generous amounts of time in various forms of public service. At the same time, given what the experience of their teen-age years has been in such a competitive meritocratic society, they arrive at university having experienced a stress-strewn, meritocratic gauntlet of high-pressured achievement—often with helicopter parents hovering not far overhead. So, while they recognize the advantages they’ve enjoyed, it’s hard for them not to believe that their effort and their striving account for where they’ve landed.

 What worries me about the intense pressure is that the tyranny of merit is exerted in two directions. On the one hand, and most important, it’s exerted toward those who are excluded, who don’t make it, either because they don’t get in or they don’t aspire to getting in—and yet live in a society where remunerative jobs and social esteem attach to the professional classes. But the meritocratic pressures also exert a kind of tyranny on the winners. It disfigures the childhood and adolescent years of many children growing up, and their families, by the fevered striving to win admission to selective universities, the extreme expression of which was the college-admissions scandal of 2019. Part of the argument of the book is that, for everyone’s sake, we need to step back and reflect on whether this competition is a good way to organize our society, to allocate opportunity and esteem.

 EA : One of the themes in the book is the rhetoric that comes from political leaders. You mention Ronald Reagan’s drawing of distinctions around who deserves help and who does not, using the phrase “through no fault of their own,” and President Obama’s use of “you can make it if you try.” Do you think Obama should have shifted his message to describe hope in a different way?

 MS : Yes. I think that Democrats and mainstream Republicans alike, from Reagan to Obama, articulated hope in what I call in the book the rhetoric of rising. It said we should all be able to rise as far as our efforts and talents will take us. Now, who could disagree with that? It speaks about removing barriers to achievement, and that’s a good and inspiring thing. Removing barriers to achievement, barriers having to do with race and class and gender, is very important. But it’s not, in itself, an adequate response to the inequalities brought about in recent decades by globalization. That was the mistake of the settled consensus of mainstream Democrats and Republicans for the past four decades: the solution to inequality is individual upward mobility through higher education. That was the main political project. And it was expressed in the rhetoric of rising. You can make it if you try.

 But, by 2016, it had lost its capacity to inspire, for two reasons. First, it didn’t fit the facts on the ground. Intergenerational mobility in the U.S. is more difficult than in many European countries and in Canada. But it wasn’t only that social mobility stalled; it was also that the promise of mobility through a university degree contained an implicit insult: if you don’t go to college, and if you don’t flourish in the new economy, your failure is your fault. This insult was felt by a great many working people who turned against the mainstream of political parties, and voted for Trump in the United States, who supported Brexit in the U.K. I think the only way back for the Democratic Party is to be able to speak to the sense of resentment, of grievance, of disempowerment, and of humiliation by those who’ve been left behind. It’s important to remember that the majority of Americans, like the majority of Europeans, do not have a four-year university degree. So creating an economy that makes a four-year university degree a condition of dignified work and decent life is a recipe for political failure.

 EA : When you look at how the Democratic Party has responded to the shock of 2016, have you seen a deep, probing self-reflection about the origins of this moment? Or do you think that there has been a tendency to want to explain it away as an aberration, or an artifact of the strange chemistry of Donald Trump’s political assets?

 MS : I can give a concise answer: No. There hasn’t been the kind of critical reassessment that this devastating event, the election of Donald Trump, should have prompted in the Democratic Party. And I think this lack of critical self-reflection continues—and it worries me, because I think it puts in question whether Biden will win. What we’re going through at this moment is Trump’s specialty: a cascade of outrages, one revelation after the next, each of which leads us to forget the one from the day before. His calling fallen American soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” which we thought was as devastating an outrage as could be imagined. How long ago was that? A year or two years ago? It has almost receded in memory and in public attention to the distant past, because we have yet another outrage about his admitting to having downplayed the virus.

 Democrats and those in the media who are trying to hold Trump to account are calling out his lies. But we, collectively, are asking the wrong question. We’re bathing in the sea of Trumpian outrages and lies. We’re reminding ourselves by the day, by the hour, by the minute, in the 24/7 news cycle, how unfit he is for office. But, by doing so, we are indulging ourselves. None of this is really teaching us anything new about Trump. But it is distracting us from asking, if he is so manifestly unfit for the office he holds, why is it that forty-something per cent of our fellow-citizens don’t see this? Or, if they do see this, why are they still for him? It seems to me that the real question is: What would it take for Biden and for the Democratic Party to speak convincingly to the resentments and grievances that animate those who are not put off by the outrages?

 That question can lead to a critical rethinking of the message of the Democratic Party. Even if Biden should manage to defeat Trump, we will have to have that reckoning. If Biden is to govern effectively, if he’s to have any hope of healing this country, we have to ask that question. And we’ve not really begun to do so. The purpose of the book is to suggest how that rethinking might begin.

 EA : In the book, you detail some practical proposals that you’d like to see introduced to confront these problems. But, in the short term, what would you like to see Joe Biden do in the next couple of months, to give life to those ideas, that you think might help?

 MS : I would urge Biden to play out an instinct that he has already voiced when he speaks about the “dignity of work.” What the rhetoric of rising has missed is the lost dignity of work that a great many people spend their lives engaged in. Not only in terms of stagnant wages, but also in terms of social recognition. Honor. At the heart of the resentment of many working people is the sense that the work they do isn’t respected in the way it once was. Not only the economy but also the culture has left them behind. If he should be elected, as I hope he will be, he should put the dignity of work at the center of his Presidency, which could make life better for everyone, not only the well credentialled. That could be the starting point for moving beyond the tyranny of merit, toward a politics of the common good.

 A Political Philosopher on Why Democrats Should Think Differently About Merit. By Evan Osnos . The New Yorker , September 14, 2020. 

Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, has a lot to answer for. Some armchair psychologists think the reason I turned away from journalism to become a free-school evangelist in 2009 is that I wanted to make my late father proud. He helped set up the Open University, among other things. No doubt there’s something in that, but it was also testimony to the influence of the charismatic Harvard professor, under whom I studied for a year. Sandel is a sort of secular Quaker and was always urging his students to eschew the temptations of worldly success and embrace the common good. That was the path to true happiness.

 
So thanks a lot, professor. I blame you for that disastrous wrong turning. Admittedly, I enjoyed co-founding four schools and will defend Michael Gove’s education reforms to the hilt. But my nine-year stint as a do-gooderended in public humiliation when Theresa May appointed me to the board of the Office for Students. The offence archaeologists went to work, dug up some sophomoric things I’d said years ago, and I had to resign from five positions, including my full-time job running an education charity. It was as if the custodians of the common good were saying: ‘Get back in your lane, Sunny Jim.’
 
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Sandel’s new book, The Tyranny of Merit, should come with a health warning. It’s the same message he drummed into me 30 years ago — show some humility in the face of your good fortune, think of others before yourself, try to be of service — but yoked to a critique of meritocracy. His central point, repeated ad infinitum, is that believing your status is a reflection of your true worth, rather than a function of who your parents were and what school you went to, turns the successful into egocentric monsters and the unsuccessful into aggrieved malcontents. That way, social discord lies. It’s the same critique my father made of meritocracy when he coined the word in 1958 and Sandel sees the populist uprisings of 2016, with Brexit and Trump triumphing at the ballot box, as a foretaste of the bloody revolution my father predicted would occur in 2034.
 
Sandel has some killer stats to flesh out his thesis. In real terms, the median income for working-age American men, about $36,000, is less than it was four decades ago. Today, the richest 1 per cent of Americans make more money than the bottom half combined and those same plutocrats send more students to Princeton and Yale than the entire bottom 60 per cent. Of those born in the lowest fifth of the income scale, only about one in 20 will make it into the top quintile; most won’t even get as far as the middle class. No wonder the sans-culottes are getting restless.
 
Having diagnosed the problem, Sandel proposes a typically utopian solution: society should redistribute recognition and esteem so that ‘those who do not achieve great wealth or prestigious positions’ can ‘live lives of decency and dignity’. But how are you going to achieve that, given the low wages and precarious employment of the unlucky ones? That sounds less like a way of forestalling the revolution and more like a rose-tinted description of its aftermath. David Goodhart, who’s written a book on the same theme called Head Hand Heart, calls this ‘status communism’.
 
Goodhart’s book is less idealistic. He acknowledges that there are some benefits to society in creating incentives for those most able to work hard, but calls for a rebalancing of rewards so workers by hand get a little more and workers by brain a little less. For Sandel, the dominance of the meritocratic elite and the relegation of those outside it to second class citizens, their noses permanently pressed up against the glass, is an existential threat. Goodhart’s concerns are less dramatic. He worries about the imminent replacement of mid-level managerial jobs by intelligent machines, as well as the recruitment crisis in nursing and adult social care. How are we going to persuade fewer people to go to university and more people to acquire useful vocational skills? Some of his solutions are quite imaginative: subsidies for pubs, free relationship counselling, and more male primary-school teachers.
 
The great discovery I made during my midlife career change was that people who throw themselves into good works are actually esteemed less than scurrilous hacks. I daresay Sandel is right and philanthropy is good for the soul. But I’ll have to repair my ego before giving it another go.
 
 
 Being a do-gooder did me no good at all. By Toby Young. The Spectator , September 10, 2020