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

by Michael J. Sandel

Finding our way beyond the polarized politics of our time requires a reckoning with merit. How has the meaning of merit been recast in recent decades, in ways that erode the dignity of work and leave many people feeling that elites look down on them? Are the winners of globalization justified in the belief that they have earned and therefore deserve their success, or is this a

matter of meritocratic hubris?

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.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was born of the promise to admit students based on academic merit rather than class and family pedigree. But today’s meritocracy has hardened into a hereditary aristocracy.

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.

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.

This morally blinkered way of conceiving merit and the public good has weakened democratic societies in several ways.

Not only has technocratic merit failed as a mode of governance; it has also narrowed the civic project. Today, the common good is understood mainly in economic terms. It is less about cultivating solidarity or deepening the bonds of citizenship than about satisfying consumer preferences as measured by the gross domestic product. This makes for an impoverished public discourse.

For those who feel aggrieved by the tyranny of merit, the problem is not only stagnant wages but also the loss of social esteem.

Such vacuums of public meaning are invariably filled by harsh, authoritarian forms of identity and belonging—whether in the form of religious fundamentalism or strident nationalism.

But it is one thing to hold people responsible for acting morally; it

is something else to assume that we are, each of us, wholly responsible for our lot in life.

Viewing health and wealth as matters of praise and blame is a meritocratic way of looking at life.

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. This hollowness produces two kinds of discontent.

This tendency to move from fact to hope and back again is not a slip of the tongue or philosophical confusion but a characteristic feature of political rhetoric. It plays out with special poignance in the rhetoric of rising.

In recent years, they have been invited, above all, to blame themselves for failing to acquire a college degree. One of the most galling features of meritocratic hubris is its credentialism.

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.”19

When meritocratic elites tie success and failure so closely to one’s ability to earn a college degree, they implicitly blame those without one for the harsh conditions they encounter in the global economy. They also absolve themselves of responsibility for promoting economic policies that heighten the wage premium a college degree commands.

Surely we want highly qualified engineers to build our bridges and well-trained doctors to perform our appendectomies. So why not seek elected representatives who attended the best universities? Aren’t highly educated leaders more likely than those with less-distinguished credentials to give us sound public policies and reasoned political discourse?

No, not necessarily. Even a cursory glance at the parlous state of political discourse in Congress and in the parliaments of Europe should give us pause. 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. And recent historical experience suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment, which involves moral character as well as insight,

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

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.

To govern a democratic society requires contending with disagreement. Governing in the face of disagreement presupposes a view about how disagreements arise, and how they might be overcome in this or that moment, for this or that public purpose.

“bully pulpit”

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.

Obama wished we could have a wholesome debate such as this, and he lamented that the climate change deniers had made it impossible.88 But such a debate, even if possible, would be an impoverished mode of political argument. It assumes that our only choice is between resignation and imprudence on the one hand, and a value-neutral technocratic fix on the other. But this misses the deeper moral and political considerations that underlie the climate change controversy.

One of the failures of the well-credentialed, meritocratic elites who have governed for the past four decades is that they have not done very well at putting questions such as these at the heart of political debate.

Young suggests that being clear-eyed about the moral arbitrariness of one’s rank has a certain advantage; it prevents both the winners and the losers from believing they deserve their lot in life. This does not vindicate the class system. But 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.

The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality. This is not, in itself, an argument against it. But it raises a question: Is the inequality that results from meritocratic competition justified?

Hayek draws a distinction between merit and value. Merit involves a moral judgment about what people deserve, whereas value is simply a measure of what consumers are willing to pay for this or that good.20

The most compelling objection to inequality, he suggests, arises from the concern that “the differences in reward do not correspond to any recognizable differences in the merits of those who receive them.”21

Hayek is able to reply that, even if we consider the vocation of teaching to be more admirable than managing money, wages and salaries are not awards for good character or worthy achievement but simply payments that reflect the economic value of the goods and services market participants have to offer.

But differences of talent are as morally arbitrary as differences of class.23

In short, luck egalitarianism “offers no aid to those it labels irresponsible, and humiliating aid to those it labels innately inferior,” Anderson writes. “Like the Poor Law regime, it abandons those disadvantaged through their own choices to their miserable fates and defines the deserving disadvantaged in terms of their innate inferiority of talent, intelligence, ability, or social appeal.”65

The contrast between chance and choice makes judgments of merit and desert unavoidable.

This reduces the disagreement between free-market and egalitarian liberals to a debate about the conditions under which a person’s choices can be considered truly free rather than burdened by circumstance or necessity.

No. Overcoming the tyranny of merit does not mean that merit should play no role in the allocation of jobs and social roles. Instead, it means rethinking the way we conceive success, questioning the meritocratic conceit that those on top have made it on their own. And it means challenging inequalities of wealth and esteem that are defended in the name of merit but that foster resentment, poison our politics, and drive us apart. Such rethinking should focus on the two domains of life most central to the meritocratic conception of success: education and work.

A high degree of social mobility is the essence of the American ideal of a classless society. If large numbers of young people can develop their own capacities irrespective of the economic status of their parents, then social mobility is high. If, on the other hand, the future of a young man or woman is determined almost entirely by inherited privilege or the lack of it, social mobility is nonexistent.9

But as Conant acknowledged, sorting for talent and seeking equality are two different projects.

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.” This was the downside of equality of opportunity. It enabled “every young person [to] go as far as his ability and ambition would take him, without obstacles of money, social standing, religion or race.” But there was “pain involved for those who lacked the necessary ability.”52

Gardner gamely argued that “achievement should not be confused with human worth” and that individuals were worthy of respect regardless of their achievements. But he seemed to understand that the meritocratic society he was helping bring about left little room for the distinction between educational achievement and social esteem.54

In a book entitled The Price of Privilege, Levine described what she called a “mental health epidemic among privileged youth.” Traditionally, psychologists had assumed that “at-risk” youth were disadvantaged kids in the inner city, “growing up in harsh and unforgiving circumstances.”69 Without denying their plight, Levine observed that America’s new at-risk group consisted of teens from affluent, well-educated families. In spite of their economic and social advantages, they experience among the highest rates of depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints, and unhappiness of any group of children in this country. When researchers look at kids across the socioeconomic spectrum, they find that the most troubled adolescents often come from affluent homes.70

What accounts for the inordinate levels of emotional distress among young people from affluent families? The answer has largely to do with the meritocratic imperative—the unrelenting pressure to perform, to achieve, to succeed. “For children and parents alike,” Luthar writes, “it is nearly impossible to ignore the ubiquitous, pervasive message emblazoned from their early years onward: there is one path to ultimate happiness—having money—that in turn comes from attending prestigious colleges.”72 Those who prevail on the battlefield of merit emerge triumphant but wounded.

see this in my students. The habit of hoop-jumping is hard to break. Many still feel so driven to strive that they find it difficult to use their college years as a time to think, explore, and critically reflect on who they are and what is worth caring about. An alarming number struggle with mental health issues.

Perfectionism is the emblematic meritocratic malady. At a time when young people are relentlessly “sorted, sifted, and ranked by schools, universities, and the workplace, neoliberal meritocracy places a strong need to strive, perform, and achieve at the center of modern life.”76 Success or failure at meeting the demand to achieve comes to define one’s merit and self-worth.

Today, the role of colleges and universities as arbiters of opportunity is so entrenched that it is difficult to imagine alternatives. But the time has come to do so. Rethinking the role of higher education is important, not only to repair the damaged psyches of the privileged but also to repair the polarized civic life that meritocratic sorting has produced.

In the late 1970s, CEOs of major American companies made 30 times more than the average worker; by 2014, they made 300 times more.

One familiar answer is that white working-class voters, swayed by fear of cultural displacement, overlooked or overrode their economic interests to “vote with their middle finger,” as some commentators put it. But this explanation is too quick. It draws too sharp a distinction between economic interests and cultural status. 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.