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

by Michael J. Sandel

Conservatives argue, for example, that affirmative action policies that consider race and ethnicity as factors in admission amount to a betrayal of merit-based admission; liberals defend affirmative action as a way of remedying persisting unfairness and argue that a true meritocracy can be achieved only by leveling the playing field between the privileged and the disadvantaged.

In an unequal society, those who land on top want to believe their success is morally justified. In a meritocratic society, this means the winners must believe they have earned their success through their own talent and hard work. Paradoxically, this is the gift the cheating parents wanted to give their kids. If all they really cared about was enabling their children to live in affluence, they could have given them trust funds. But they wanted something else—the meritocratic cachet that admission to elite colleges confers.

For the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.

Before they can hope to win back public support, these parties must rethink their mission and purpose. To do so, they should learn from the populist protest that has displaced them—not by replicating its xenophobia and strident nationalism, but by taking seriously the legitimate grievances with which these ugly sentiments are entangled. Such thinking should begin with the recognition that these grievances are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.

Construing populist protest as either malevolent or misdirected absolves governing elites of responsibility for creating the conditions that have eroded the dignity of work and left many feeling disrespected and disempowered. The diminished economic and cultural status of working people in recent decades is not the result of inexorable forces; it is the result of the way mainstream political parties and elites have governed.

Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It is the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too.

“The fortunate [person] is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate,” Max Weber observed. “Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he ‘deserves’ it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others. He wishes to be allowed the belief that the less fortunate also merely experience [their] due.”20

Today’s secular meritocratic order moralizes success in ways that echo an earlier providential faith: Although the successful do not owe their power and wealth to divine intervention—they rise thanks to their own effort and hard work—their success reflects their superior virtue. The rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor.

The more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault. This logic makes meritocracy corrosive of commonality. Too strenuous a notion of personal responsibility for our fate makes it hard to imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes.

The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary citizens.

When the richest 1 percent take in more than the combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population,30 when the median income stagnates for forty years,31 the idea that effort and hard work will carry you far begins to ring hollow.

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.

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

Higher education derives much of its prestige from its avowedly higher purpose: not only to equip students for the world of work but also to prepare them to be morally reflective human beings and effective democratic citizens, capable of deliberating about the common good.

Residents of rural communities believed that too much tax money and government attention went to undeserving people. “The undeserving included racial minorities on welfare,” Cramer wrote, “but it also included lazy urban professionals like me working desk jobs and producing nothing more than ideas.” Racism is part of their resentment, she explained, but it is intertwined with a more basic concern “that people like them, in places like theirs, were overlooked and disrespected.”28

Economic concerns are not only about money in one’s pocket; they are also about how one’s role in the economy affects one’s standing in society. Those left behind by four decades of globalization and rising inequality were suffering from more than wage stagnation; they were experiencing what they feared was growing obsolescence. The society in which they lived no longer seemed to need the skills they had to offer.

theories of contributive justice teach us that we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make.

In a market society, however, it is hard to resist the tendency to confuse the money we make with the value of our contribution to the common good.

It is often assumed that the only alternative to equality of opportunity is a sterile, oppressive equality of results. But there is another alternative: a broad equality of condition that enables those who do not achieve great wealth or prestigious positions to live lives of decency and dignity—developing and exercising their abilities in work that wins social esteem, sharing in a widely diffused culture of learning, and deliberating with their fellow citizens about public affairs.

Individual happiness does not only require that men should be free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinction; it also requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture, whether they rise or not.4