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

by Michael J. Sandel

The political divide that mattered, the winners explained, was no longer left versus right but open versus closed. In an open world, success depends on education, on equipping yourself to compete and win in a global economy. This means that national governments must ensure that everyone has an equal chance to get the education on which success depends. But it also means that those who land on top come to believe they deserve their success. And, if opportunities are truly equal, it means that those who are left behind deserve their fate as well.

“Our problem,” Clyburn said, “is too many candidates spend time trying to let people know how smart they are, rather than trying to connect with people.”

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.

Those admitted with sparkling, legitimate credentials take pride in their achievement, and consider that they got in on their own. But this is, in a way, misleading. While it is true that their admission reflects dedication and hard work, it cannot really be said that it is solely their own doing. What about the parents and teachers who helped them on their way? What about talents and gifts not wholly of their making? What about the good fortune to live in a society that cultivates and rewards the talents they happen to have?

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.

Central to the case for the meritocratic ethic is the idea that we do not deserve to be rewarded, or held back, based on factors beyond our control. But is having (or lacking) certain talents really our own doing?

Those who celebrate the meritocratic ideal and make it the center of their political project overlook this moral question. They also ignore something more politically potent: the morally unattractive attitudes the meritocratic ethic promotes, among the winners and also among the losers. Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment. These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist uprising against elites. More than a protest against immigrants and outsourcing, the populist complaint is about the tyranny of merit. And the complaint is justified.

Our technocratic version of meritocracy severs the link between merit and moral judgment. In the domain of the economy, it simply assumes that the common good is defined by GDP, and that the value of people’s contributions consists in the market value of the goods or services they sell. In the domain of government, it assumes that merit means technocratic expertise.

When faith is embodied in outward observance, mediated and reinforced by a complex array of Church practices, a theology of gratitude and grace slides, almost inevitably, toward a theology of pride and self-help.

It is no accident that the rhetoric of rising was at its most fulsome at a time when inequality was approaching daunting proportions. 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.

What is striking, however, is not that politicians inflate their college credentials, but that they feel the need to do so.

Christopher Hayes, an author and host of an MSNBC television program, observed that in recent years the left had had its greatest successes on issues that involved “making the meritocracy more meritocratic,” such as combating racial discrimination, including women in higher education, and advancing gay rights. But it had failed in areas “that fall outside the meritocracy’s purview,” such as “mitigating rising income inequality.”

Noting that productivity rose during the 1980s and 1990s but that wages did not, he doubted that inequality was due mainly to a failure of education. “The real problem was one of inadequate worker power, not inadequate worker smarts. The people who produced were losing their ability to demand a share in what they made. The people who owned were taking more and more.” Failing to see this led Democrats “to ignore what was happening in the real economy—from monopoly power to financialization to labor-management relations—in favor of a moral fantasy that required them to confront no one.”

Having well-educated people run the government is generally desirable, provided they possess sound judgment and a sympathetic understanding of working people’s lives—what Aristotle called practical wisdom and civic virtue. But history shows little connection between prestigious academic credentials and either practical wisdom or an instinct for the common good in the here and now. One of the most ruinous examples of credentialism gone awry is described in David Halberstam’s classic book The Best and the Brightest. It shows how John F. Kennedy assembled a team with glittering credentials who, for all their technocratic brilliance, led the United States into the folly of the Vietnam War.

The authors conclude that well-educated elites are no less biased than less-educated folk; “it is rather that [their] targets of prejudice are different.” Moreover, the elites are unembarrassed by their prejudice. They may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less-educated.

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.

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.

More detailed studies have found that political polarization on climate change tracks not only general levels of education but also scientific knowledge. People with greater scientific knowledge, as measured by science courses taken and tests of scientific literacy, are more likely than those who know less about science to adhere to their party’s views on climate change.86 These findings challenge the idea that those unwilling to support measures to alleviate climate change are simply ill-informed about science. The partisan divide on climate change is not mainly about facts and information but about politics. It is a mistake to assume that the more people know about science, the more likely they are to converge on measures to combat climate change. The technocrat’s belief that, if only we could agree on the facts, we could then have a reasoned debate about policy, misconceives the project of political persuasion.

The appeal of the technocratic position, but also its weakness, is its seemingly frictionless value neutrality. Talk of “smart technology” and “smart regulatory frameworks” glides over the moral and political questions that make climate change a daunting and difficult issue: What would it take to counter the outsize influence of the fossil fuel industry on democratic politics? Should we reconsider the consumerist attitudes that lead us to treat nature instrumentally, as a dumping ground for what Pope Francis has called our “throwaway culture”?89 And what about those who oppose government action to reduce carbon emissions, not because they reject science, but because they do not trust government to act in their interest, especially in a large-scale reconfiguration of the economy, and do not trust the technocratic elites who would design and implement this reconfiguration? These are not scientific questions to be answered by experts. They are questions about power, morality, authority, and trust, which is to say they are questions for democratic citizens.

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

Hayek’s reply to this objection is revealing. Rather than try to show that those who earn handsome rewards in the market morally deserve them, he rejects the idea that economic rewards reflect people’s merits, or moral desert. This is the force of his distinction between merit and value. 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.

Rawls calls this way of dealing with unequal talents “the difference principle.” It departs from meritocracy, not by preventing the gifted from exercising their talents but by denying that they merit or deserve the rewards those talents command in a market society. “The difference principle represents,” Rawls writes, “an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.” Society should be arranged “so that these contingencies work for the good of the least fortunate.”

Unlike Hayek, Rawls does not conceive freedom in market terms. For Rawls, freedom consists in pursuing our own conception of the good life while respecting the right of others to do the same. This means abiding by principles of justice that we and our fellow citizens would all agree to if each of us set aside our particular interests and advantages. Thinking about justice from this point of view—without knowing whether we would be rich or poor, strong or weak, healthy or unhealthy—would not lead us to affirm whatever distribution of income resulted from the market. To the contrary, Rawls argues, it would lead us to accept only those inequalities that help the least-advantaged members of society.

Knight’s second argument is more far reaching. It questions an assumption that Hayek takes for granted. This is the assumption that equates market value with social contribution. As Knight points out, meeting market demand is not necessarily the same thing as making a truly valuable contribution to society. Serving market demand is simply a matter of satisfying whatever wants and desires people happen to have. But the ethical significance of satisfying such wants depends on their moral worth. Evaluating their worth involves moral judgments, admittedly contestable, that economic analysis cannot provide. So even setting aside the question of talents, it is a mistake to assume that the money people make by catering to consumer preferences reflects merit or moral desert. Its ethical significance depends on moral considerations that no economic model can supply.

Knight further argues that “the wants which an economic system operates to gratify are largely produced by the workings of the system itself.” The economic order does not simply satisfy pre-existing demand; “its activity extends to the formation and radical transformation, if not to the outright creation, of the wants themselves.” Any ethical assessment of an economic system must therefore consider “the kind of wants which it tends to generate or nourish,” not only its efficiency in satisfying “wants as they exist at any given time.”

For Knight, this is overly flattering. Being good at making money measures neither our merit nor the value of our contribution. 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.

Considerations of justice are prior to considerations of merit and virtue. This is the heart of Rawls’s case against meritocracy. In a just society, those who become wealthy or attain prestigious positions are entitled to their success, not because it testifies to their superior merit but only insofar as these benefits are part of a system that is fair to everyone, including the worst-off members of society.

Philosophically, the assertion that principles of justice must be defined independent of considerations of merit, virtue, or moral desert is an instance of a more general feature of Rawls’s liberalism. 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). Principles of justice that affirmed a particular conception of merit, virtue, or moral desert would not be neutral toward the competing conceptions of the good life that citizens in pluralist societies espouse. Such principles would impose on some the values of others and so fail to respect everyone’s right to choose and pursue their own way of life.

Most differences in income “are due to the fact that society has invested far more in developing some people’s talents than others and that it puts very unequal amounts of capital at the disposal of each worker. Productivity attaches mainly to work roles, not to individuals.”

Although the new elite has now taken on a hereditary aspect, the transmission of meritocratic privilege is not guaranteed. It depends on “getting in.” This gives meritocratic success a paradoxical moral psychology. Collectively and retrospectively, its results are almost pre-ordained, given the overwhelming predominance on elite campuses of affluent kids. But to those in the midst of the hyper-competitive struggle for admission, it is impossible to view success as anything other than the result of individual effort and achievement. This is the standpoint that generates the conviction among the winners that they have earned their success, that they have made it on their own.

Although the age of globalization brought rich rewards to the well-credentialed, it did nothing for most ordinary workers. From 1979 to 2016, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States fell from 19.5 million to 12 million.2 Productivity increased, but workers reaped a smaller and smaller share of what they produced, while executives and shareholders captured a larger share.3 In the late 1970s, CEOs of major American companies made 30 times more than the average worker; by 2014, they made 300 times more.4 The median income of American males has been stagnant, in real terms, for half a century. Although per capita income has increased 85 percent since 1979, white men without a four-year college degree make less now, in real terms, than they did then.5

Her story was an interwoven tale of economic deprivation and cultural dislocation. Economic progress had become harder, “restricted to a small elite.” For the bottom 90 percent, the American dream machine “had stopped due to automation, off-shoring, and the growing power of multinationals vis-à-vis their workforces. At the same time, for that 90 percent, competition between white men and everyone else had increased—for jobs, for recognition, and for government funds.”30 To make matters worse, those who believed they had been waiting patiently in line for their chance at the American dream found that other people were cutting in line ahead of them—Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees. They resented the people they viewed as line cutters (the beneficiaries of affirmation action, for example) and were angry at the political leaders who allowed them to get away with it.31 When those waiting their turn complained about the line cutters, elites called them racists, “rednecks,” “white trash,” and other insulting names.

What Kennedy glimpsed about the discontent of his time is what contemporary liberals miss about ours. They have been offering working-class and middle-class voters a greater measure of distributive justice—fairer, fuller access to the fruits of economic growth. But what these voters want even more is a greater measure of contributive justice—an opportunity to win the social recognition and esteem that go with producing what others need and value.

According to the civic ideal, the common good is not simply about adding up preferences or maximizing consumer welfare. It is about reflecting critically on our preferences—ideally, elevating and improving them—so that we can live worthwhile and flourishing lives. This cannot be achieved through economic activity alone. It requires deliberating with our fellow citizens about how to bring about a just and good society, one that cultivates civic virtue and enables us to reason together about the purposes worthy of our political community.38

The value of our contribution depends instead on the moral and civic importance of the ends our efforts serve. This involves an independent moral judgment that the labor market, however efficient, cannot provide.

A political economy concerned only with the size and distribution of GDP undermines the dignity of work and makes for an impoverished civic life.