Benjamin Rubenstein

If everyone has an equal chance, the winners deserv

If everyone has an equal chance, the winners deserve their winnings. This is the heart of the meritocratic ideal. In practice, of course, we fall far short. Not everybody has an equal chance to rise. Children born to poor families tend to stay poor when they grow up. Affluent parents are able to pass their advantages onto their kids. At Ivy League universities, for example, there are more students from the top one percent than from the entire bottom half of the country combined. But the problem isn't only that we fail to live up to the meritocratic principles we proclaim. The ideal itself is flawed. It has a dark side. Meritocracy is corrosive of the common good. It leads to hubris among the winners and humiliation among those who lose out. It encourages the successful to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. And it leads them to look down on those less fortunate, less credentialed than themselves…. Even as globalization brought deepening inequality and stagnant wages, its proponents offered workers some bracing advice. 'If you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to college.' 'What you earn depends on what you learn.' 'You can make it if you try.' These elites miss the insult implicit in this advice. If you don't go to college, if you don't flourish in the new economy, your failure is your fault. That's the implication.…. Encouraging people to go to college is a good thing. Broadening access for those who can't afford it is even better. But this is not a solution to inequality. We should focus less on arming people for meritocratic combat, and focus more on making life better for people who lack a diploma but who make essential contributions to our society. We should renew the dignity of work and place it at the center of our politics. We should remember that work is not only about making a living, it's also about contributing to the common good and winning recognition for doing so…. We often assume that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good. But this is a mistake. Martin Luther King Jr. explained why. Reflecting on a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, shortly before he was assassinated, King said, ‘The person who picks up our garbage is, in the final analysis, as significant as the physician, for if he doesn't do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.’