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

by Michael J. Sandel

“Even if it works to perfection in eliminating the influence of social contingencies,” Rawls argues, a fair meritocracy “still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents.”24 Income inequalities due to natural talents are no more just than inequalities that arise from class differences. “From a moral standpoint the two seem equally arbitrary.”25 So even a society that achieved true equality of opportunity would not necessarily be a just society. It would have also to contend with the inequalities that arise due to differences in people’s native abilities.

Don’t make the best runners wear lead shoes; let them run at full speed. But acknowledge in advance that the winnings do not belong to them alone. Encourage the gifted to cultivate and exercise their talents, but with the understanding that the rewards those talents reap in the market should be shared with the community as a whole.

The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases.29

“A society in which the position of the individual was made to correspond to human ideas of moral merit would therefore be the exact opposition of a free society.”

From Rawls’s point of view, to base principles of justice on one such conception would be to undermine freedom; it would impose on some the values of others, and so fail to respect each person’s right to choose and pursue his or her own conception of the good life.

“A society in which it was generally presumed that a high income was proof of merit and a low income of the lack of it, in which it was universally believed that position and remuneration corresponded to merit … would probably be much more unbearable to the unsuccessful ones than one in which it was frankly recognized that there was no necessary connection between merit and success.”

When opportunities are known to be unequal, and the selection clearly biased towards wealth or lineage, people can comfort themselves for failure by saying that they never had a proper chance—the system was unfair, the scales too heavily weighted against them. But if the selection is obviously by merit, this source of comfort disappears, and failure induces a total sense of inferiority, with no excuse or consolation; and this, by a natural quirk of human nature, actually increases the envy and resentment at the success of others.

Once market value is taken as a proxy for social contribution, however, it is hard to resist the thought that people deserve, as a matter of justice, whatever income corresponds to their market value, or “marginal product” in the economist’s jargon.

An economic system should be judged less by its efficiency in satisfying consumer demand than “by the wants which it generates [and] the type of character which it forms in its people … Ethically, the creation of the right wants is more important than want-satisfaction.”48

All the successful can honestly say is that they have managed—through some unfathomable mix of genius or guile, timing or talent, luck or pluck or grim determination—to cater effectively to the jumble of wants and desires, however weighty or frivolous, that constitute consumer demand at any given moment. Satisfying consumer demand is not valuable in itself; its value depends, case by case, on the moral status of the ends it serves.

This is the claim that the “right” (the framework of duties and rights that governs society as a whole) is prior to the “good” (the various conceptions of virtue and the good life that people pursue within the framework).

Rawls explains the priority of justice over merit by way of an analogy: We don’t set up the institution of property because we believe thieves have bad character and we want an institution that will enable us to punish them for it. That would be, so to speak, a “meritocratic” theory of punishment. It would put the good before the right. But this gets the moral logic backward. Instead, we set up the institution of property for reasons of efficiency and justice; then, if people steal, we enforce the law by punishing them. Having violated the rights of others, they become worthy of punishment. The point of the punishment is to penalize thieves for committing an injustice, not to stigmatize them for bad character (though this may be a side effect).52

I am not worthier than you nor morally deserving of the privileged position I hold. My generous compensation package is simply an incentive necessary to induce me, and others like me, to develop our talents for the benefit of all. It is not your fault that you lack the talents society needs, nor is it my doing that I have such talents in abundance. This is why some of my income is taxed away to help people like you. I do not morally deserve my superior pay and position, but I am entitled to them under fair rules of social cooperation. And remember, you and I would have agreed to these rules had we thought about the matter before we knew who would land on top and who at the bottom. So please do not resent me. My privileges make you better off than you would otherwise be. The inequality you find galling is for your own good.

Entitlements to legitimate expectations may be as potent a source of meritocratic hubris and working-class resentment as claims based on merit, virtue, or desert.

Aristotle considered justice to be mainly about the distribution of offices and honors, not the distribution of income and wealth. Today’s populist revolt against elites is animated in large part by anger among working-class voters at what they take to be the disdain of the professional classes for those without a college degree. Insisting on the priority of the right over the good makes social esteem a matter of personal morality, and so blinds liberals to the politics of hubris and humiliation.

As Thomas Nagel, a liberal egalitarian philosopher, has written, “when racial and sexual injustice have been reduced, we shall still be left with the great injustice of the smart and the dumb, who are so differently rewarded for comparable effort.”

At first glance, this “luck egalitarian” philosophy, as it came to be known, seems a generous response to the accidents of fortune. In seeking to redress the undeserved benefits and burdens that the lottery of life bestows, it seems to offer a humane alternative to a competitive meritocratic society.

Liberals who defend the welfare state on the basis of luck egalitarianism are led, almost unavoidably, to a rhetoric of victimhood that views welfare recipients as lacking agency, as incapable of acting responsibly.

It supports the disparaging view that welfare recipients have little to contribute and are incapable of acting responsibly. And as Anderson rightly observes, denying that those in need of public support can exercise meaningful choice is hard to reconcile with respecting them as equal citizens, capable of sharing in self-government.64

In short, luck egalitarianism “offers no aid to those it labels irresponsible, and humiliating aid to those it labels innately inferior,” Anderson writes.

Ronald Dworkin makes this point with his distinction between “brute luck” (the meteor victim) and “option luck” (the losing gambler).66

By fixating on natural talent as a primary source of income inequality, egalitarian liberals exaggerate its role and, inadvertently, enlarge its prestige.

Women were excluded, Black students were barred from Princeton and scarce at Harvard and Yale, and Jewish enrollment was restricted by formal or informal quotas.

As Lemann observes, the SAT “would become not just a way of handing out a few scholarships at Harvard, but the basic mechanism for sorting the American population.”

“Twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually and be instructed, at the public expense.”16

Second, a system that celebrates and rewards “the best geniuses” is prone to denigrate the rest, implicitly or explicitly, as “rubbish.” Even as he proposed a generous scholarship scheme, Jefferson offered an early instance of our own meritocratic tendency to valorize the “smart” and stigmatize the “dumb.”

Making higher education meritocratic did not bring about a classless society, nor did it avoid disparaging those excluded for the lack of talent. Some would say these developments simply reflect a failure to realize meritocratic ideals. But as Conant acknowledged, sorting for talent and seeking equality are two different projects.

The country “would benefit by an elimination of at least a quarter, or perhaps one-half, of those now enrolled in advanced university work,” he wrote in 1938, “and the substitution of others of more talent in their place.” In line with this view, he opposed the GI Bill, enacted by FDR in 1944, which provided free college education for returning veterans. The nation did not need more students going to college, Conant thought; it needed better ones.

To the contrary, SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth. The higher your family income, the higher your SAT score.

If you come from a family with an annual income greater than $200,000, your chance of scoring above 1400 (out of 1600) is one in five. If you come from a poor family (less than $20,000 per year), your chance is one in fifty.

While high school grades are to some extent correlated with family income, SAT scores are more so. This is partly because, contrary to long-standing claims by the testing industry, the SAT is coachable. Private tutoring helps, and a profitable industry has arisen to teach high school students the gimmicks and tricks to boost their scores.30

America’s selective colleges and universities ousted the complacent, entitled, hereditary elite that worried Conant. But this aristocracy of inherited privilege has given way to a meritocratic elite that is now as privileged and entrenched as the one it replaced.

Jerome Karabel, the author of a history of admissions policies at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, concludes that “the children of the working class and the poor are about as unlikely to attend the Big Three [Harvard, Yale, and Princeton] today as they were in 1954.”

Their finding: higher education today does surprisingly little to promote upward mobility.36

This is especially true at elite private colleges. Although attending a place like Harvard or Princeton does give a poor kid a good chance of rising, such places enroll so few poor kids to begin with that their mobility rate is low. Only 1.8 percent of Harvard students (and only 1.3 percent at Princeton) rise from the bottom to the top of the income scale.37

American higher education is like an elevator in a building that most people enter on the top floor.

In recent decades, colleges and universities have made important strides in recruiting African American and Latinx students but have done little to increase the proportion of lower-income students. In fact, as public debate has raged about affirmative action for racial and ethnic minorities, colleges have quietly practiced what amounts to affirmative action for the wealthy.

study of nineteen selective colleges and universities co-authored by the former president of Princeton found that recruited athletes enjoy greater admissions advantages than either underrepresented minorities or alumni children, and that only 5 percent of them come from the bottom quarter of the income scale.

In short, turning higher education into a hyper-competitive sorting contest is unhealthy for democracy and education alike.

One of the primary arguments for a meritocracy over a hereditary aristocracy is that those who rise due to their own merits have earned their success and therefore deserve the rewards their merits bring. Meritocratic sorting is bound up with judgments about earning and deserving. These are inescapably public judgments, about whose talents and achievements are worthy of honor and recognition.

The schools are the golden avenue of opportunity for able youngsters; but by the same token they are the arena in which less able youngsters discover their limitations.”

“If a society sorts people out efficiently and fairly according to their gifts, the loser knows that the true reason for his lowly status is that he is not capable of better. That is a bitter pill for any man.”53

The plain fact is that college education is firmly associated in the public mind with personal advancement, upward social mobility, market value and self-esteem. And if enough of the American people believe that one must attend college in order to be accorded respect and confidence, then the very unanimity of opinion makes the generalization true.

Once, people took pride in sending their children to places where they could rub elbows with upper-class blue bloods. Now people took pride in sending their children to places that signified their superior merit.

Although many assume that getting into college is harder today than in the past, this is not generally the case. The majority of colleges and universities in the United States accept most students who apply.58

All told, forty-six colleges and universities now accept fewer than 20 percent of applicants. Several of these schools were the desired destination of students whose parents perpetrated the 2019 college admissions scandal. But only 4 percent of U.S. undergraduates attend these hyper-selective colleges. More than 80 percent attend schools that accept more than half of their applicants.

This is not mainly because employers believe students learn more at elite colleges than at less-selective places, but because employers have faith in the sorting function these colleges perform and value the meritocratic honor they bestow.62

Some of these consultants advise parents to seek disability diagnoses for their children, to get them extra time on standardized tests. (In one wealthy Connecticut suburb, 18 percent of students receive such diagnoses, more than six times the national average.)

This way of transmitting privilege is doubly objectionable. For those who lack the apparatus of advantage, it is unfair; for children entangled in the apparatus, it is oppressive.

In fact, the use of “parent” as a verb only became common in the 1970s, when the need to prepare children for academic success came to be seen as a pressing parental responsibility.64