The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

by Michael J. Sandel

Governing well requires practical wisdom and civic virtue—an ability to deliberate about the common good and to pursue it effectively. But neither of these capacities is developed very well in most universities today, even those with the highest reputations.

The notion that “the best and the brightest” are better at governing than their less-credentialed fellow citizens is a myth born of meritocratic hubris.

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, is generally ranked among America’s best presidents.53

Today, only 7 percent of the British population attends private schools, and fewer than 1 percent attend Oxford or Cambridge universities. But the governing elites are drawn disproportionately from these places. Nearly two-thirds of Boris Johnson’s 2019 cabinet attended private schools, and almost half are Oxbridge graduates.

Attlee’s government, considered “the most significant reforming administration of twentieth century Britain,” empowered the working classes and, according to his biographer, “set the ethical terms on which Britain’s new social contract was founded.”

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.

Electoral studies found that education, not income, best predicted support for Trump. Among voters with similar incomes, those with more education voted for Clinton, while those with less voted for Trump.59

Throughout much of the twentieth century, parties of the left attracted those with less education, while parties of the right attracted those with more. In the age of meritocracy, this pattern has been reversed. Today, people with more education vote for left-of-center parties, and those with less support parties of the right. The French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that this reversal has unfolded, in striking parallel, in the U.S., the U.K., and France.61

But by the 2010s, education had become the most decisive political divide, and parties that once represented workers increasingly represented meritocratic elites.63

By 2010, fewer than one in ten did. According to Oliver Heath, the decline of working-class MPs in the Labour ranks had a “substantial impact on the relative popularity of the party among working class voters,” who increasingly viewed the party as “ruled by an out of touch metropolitan elite.”

Over 70 percent of voters with no college education voted for Brexit, while over 70 percent of those with a postgraduate degree voted to remain.

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.

The relentless credentialism of our day has driven working-class voters toward populist and nationalist parties and deepened the divide between those with and those without a university degree.

Today, 59 percent of Republicans believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, and only 33 percent view higher education favorably. By contrast, Democrats overwhelming believe (67 percent to 18 percent) that colleges and universities have a positive effect.

One of the casualties of meritocracy’s triumph may be the loss of broad public support for higher education. Once widely seen as an engine of opportunity, the university has become, at least for some, a symbol of credentialist privilege and meritocratic hubris.

Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a condition of dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life.

For meritocratic elites, the rhetoric of “smart” and “dumb” seems to offer a non-partisan alternative to moral and ideological disagreement. But such disagreement lies at the heart of democratic politics. Too determined an effort to rise above the messy terrain of partisan disagreement can lead to a technocratic public discourse that diverts politics from questions of justice and the common good.

Ever since Theodore Roosevelt coined the term a century earlier, the “bully pulpit” has referred to the presidency as a place of moral inspiration and exhortation. Now the bully pulpit would be a venue for facts and data, for good information. This is the essence of a technocratic conception of politics, and it carries more than a whiff of meritocratic hubris.

“to bend the cost curve,” by which he meant reducing the rising cost of health expenditures. Although “bending the cost curve” did not stir much passion on the hustings, he used some version of this phrase more than sixty times in arguing the merits of his health care plan.

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.

Replying to economists’ predictions that leaving the European Union would bring economic hardship to the United Kingdom, a leading Brexit proponent replied, “The people in this country have had enough of experts.”

But Obama’s primary diagnosis of polarized politics in the age of Trump had to do with the public’s inability to agree on basic facts. The reason we are “seeing so much gridlock and venom and polarization in our politics,” he said, is partly because “we don’t have a common baseline of facts and information.”

The biggest challenge we’re going to have over the next 10, 15, 20 years is to return to a civic conversation in which if I say this is a chair, we agree this is a chair. Now we can disagree on whether it’s a nice chair, whether we should replace the chair, whether you want to move it over there. But you can’t say it’s an elephant.

In fact, the slogan “I believe in science” has become a rallying cry for Democrats. Hillary Clinton proclaimed it in her speech accepting the nomination in 2016, Obama used it as president, and a number of candidates seeking the 2020 presidential nomination made it a refrain on the campaign trail. That the slogan implicitly relegates science to the realm of faith seems not to have diminished its popularity.

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

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. Moynihan to the contrary, our opinions direct our perceptions; they do not arrive on the scene only after the facts are cut and dried.

Studies of public opinion show that the more people know about science, the more polarized are their views on climate change.

Unlike aristocratic privilege, meritocratic success brings a sense of achievement for having earned one’s place.

A society that enables people to rise, and that celebrates rising, pronounces a harsh verdict on those who fail to do so.

Without defending the class-bound order that was passing, Young suggested that its moral arbitrariness and manifest unfairness at least had this desirable effect: It tempered the self-regard of the upper class and prevented the working class from viewing its subordinate status as personal failure.

They knew “that many bosses were there not so much because of what they knew, as who they knew, and who their parents were.” Knowing the system was rigged empowered the working class to challenge it politically. (This was the point of having a Labour Party.) Equally important, the arbitrariness of the class system spared workers from judging themselves by the inferior status society had assigned them.

it does shed light on a paradoxical feature of a meritocratic order. Allocating jobs and opportunities according to merit does not reduce inequality; it reconfigures inequality to align with ability. But this reconfiguration creates a presumption that people get what they deserve. And this presumption deepens the gap between rich and poor.

“One of our characteristic modern problems,” Young observed (and remember, he was “observing” as if living in 2033), is that “some members of the meritocracy … have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern.” He added sardonically that some meritocrats were “so tactless that even people of low caliber have been quite unnecessarily offended.”10 (Hillary Clinton’s statement during the 2016 campaign that half of Donald Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables” comes to mind.)

Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance … Are they not bound to recognize that they have an inferior status—not as in the past because they were denied opportunity; but because they are inferior? For the first time in human history the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard.

He concluded his 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.

For example, critics of affirmative action in hiring and college admissions argue that such policies are inconsistent with equality of opportunity, because they judge applicants on factors other than merit. Defenders of affirmative action reply that such policies are necessary to make equality of opportunity a reality for members of groups that have suffered discrimination or disadvantage.

Overcoming discrimination would not be enough. The institution of the family complicates the project of giving everyone an equal chance. It is not easy to offset the advantages that affluent parents confer on their children.

it is important to notice that the meritocratic ideal is about mobility, not equality. It does not say there is anything wrong with yawning gaps between rich and poor; it only insists that the children of the rich and the children of the poor should be able, over time, to swap places based on their merits—to rise or fall as a result of their effort and talent. No one should be stuck at the bottom, or ensconced at the top, due to prejudice or privilege.

The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality.

First, my having this or that talent is not my doing but a matter of good luck, and I do not merit or deserve the benefits (or burdens) that derive from luck.

LeBron James makes tens of millions of dollars playing basketball, a hugely popular game. Beyond being blessed with prodigious athletic gifts, LeBron is lucky to live in a society that values and rewards them. It is not his doing that he lives today, when people love the game at which he excels, rather than in Renaissance Florence, when fresco painters, not basketball players, were in high demand.

If our talents are gifts for which we are indebted—whether to the genetic lottery or to God—then it is a mistake and a conceit to assume we deserve the benefits that flow from them.

They know that success is an amalgam of talent and effort that is not easy to disentangle.

Natural gifts and the advantages they bring embarrass the meritocratic faith. They cast doubt on the conviction that praise and rewards flow from effort alone.

I see a similarly exaggerated emphasis on striving in my Harvard students who, despite their impressive talents and often favorable life circumstances, invariably attribute their admission to effort and hard work.

In his book The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek argues that the only equality compatible with freedom is the purely formal equality of all citizens before the law. Careers should be open to everyone, but the state should not try to create a level playing field by providing equal or compensatory educational opportunities, a project he viewed as unrealistic and ultimately coercive.

In a free society, my income and wealth will reflect the value of the goods and services I have to offer, but this value is determined by contingencies of supply and demand. It has nothing to do with my merit or virtue, or the moral importance of the contribution I make.

His argument is more radical. It rejects the very idea that the money people make should reflect what they deserve.

In all these instances the value which a person’s capacities or services have for us and for which he is recompensed has little relation to anything that we can call moral merit or deserts.

In his classic work A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls argues that even a system of fair equality of opportunity, one that fully compensated for the effects of class differences, would not make for a just society. The reason: If people competed on a truly level playing field, the winners would be those endowed with the greatest talent. But differences of talent are as morally arbitrary as differences of class.23