The Tyranny of Merit Quotes

“The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“Being good at making money measures neither our merit nor the value of our contribution.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“I am thinking of the everyday ways that conscientious, well-to-do parents help their kids. Even the best, most inclusive educational system would be hard pressed to equip students from poor backgrounds to compete on equal terms with children from families that bestow copious amounts of attention, resources, and connections”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“For why do the successful owe anything to the less-advantaged members of society? The answer to this question depends on recognizing that, for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient; finding ourselves in a society that prizes our talents is our good fortune, not our due. A lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain humility: "There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I." Such humility is the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart. It points beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“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.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“Social well-being … depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It implies the existence, not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a high level of general culture, and a strong sense of common interests.… 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”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“Ungenerous to the losers and oppressive to the winners, merit becomes a tyrant.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“A wealthy CEO could justify his or her advantages to a lower paid worker on a factory floor as:
"I am not worthier then 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 talent 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 whom 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.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“The wealthy and powerful have rigged the system to perpetuate their privilege; the professional classes have figured out how to pass their advantages on to their children, converting the meritocracy into a hereditary aristocracy; colleges that claim to select students on merit give an edge to the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the well-connected. According to this complaint, meritocracy is a myth, a distant promise yet to be redeemed.14”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“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”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“But a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind of tyranny, or unjust rule.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“If I am responsible for having accrued a handsome share of worldly goods—income and wealth, power and prestige—I must deserve them. Success is a sign of virtue. My affluence is my due.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“This morally blinkered way of conceiving merit and the public good has weakened democratic societies in several ways. The first is the most obvious: Over the past four decades, meritocratic elites have not governed very well. The elites who governed the United States from 1940 to 1980 were far more successful. They won World War II, helped rebuild Europe and Japan, strengthened the welfare state, dismantled segregation, and presided over four decades of economic growth that flowed to rich and poor alike. By contrast, the elites who have governed since have brought us four decades of stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year, inconclusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the financial crisis of 2008, a decaying infrastructure, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a system of campaign finance and gerrymandered congressional districts that makes a mockery of democracy.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“Few politicians speak that way today. In the decades after RFK, progressives largely abandoned the politics of community, patriotism, and the dignity of work, and offered instead the rhetoric of rising.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“shifting our focus from maximizing GDP to creating a labor market conducive to the dignity of work and social cohesion.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“If meritocracy is an aspiration, those who fall short can always blame the system; but if meritocracy is a fact, those who fall short are invited to blame themselves.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“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.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“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.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“In this way, even a fair meritocracy, one without cheating or bribery or special privileges for the wealthy, induces a mistaken impression—that we have made it on our own. The years of strenuous effort demanded of applicants to elite universities almost forces them to believe that their success is their own doing, and that if they fall short, they have no one to blame but themselves.
This is a heavy burden for young people to bear. It is also corrosive of civic sensibilities. 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.”
― Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“But differences of talent are as morally arbitrary as differences of class.23”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“Corren tiempos peligrosos para la democracia. Puede apreciarse dicha amenaza en el crecimiento de la xenofobia y del apoyo popular a figuras autocráticas que ponen a prueba los límites de las normas democráticas. Estas tendencias son preocupantes ya de por sí, pero igual de alarmante es el hecho de que los partidos y los políticos tradicionales comprendan tan poco y tan mal el descontento que está agitando las aguas de la política en todo el mundo.”
― Michael J. Sandel, La tiranía del mérito

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“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. Satisfying consumer demand is not valuable in itself; its value depends, case by case, on the moral status of the ends it serves. DESERVING”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“But beyond fairness and productivity, the liberal argument also gestured toward a third, more potent ideal implicit in the case for markets: Enabling people to compete solely on the basis of effort and talent would bring market outcomes into alignment with merit. In a society where opportunities were truly equal, markets would give people their just deserts.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“This is how Trump voters may have heard Hillary Clinton’s meritocratic mantra. For them, the rhetoric of rising was more insulting than inspiring. This is not because they rejected meritocratic beliefs. To the contrary: They embraced meritocracy, but believed it described the way things already worked. They did not see it as an unfinished project requiring further government action to dismantle barriers to achievement. This is partly because they feared such intervention would favor ethnic and racial minorities, thus violating rather than vindicating meritocracy as they saw it. But it is also because, having worked hard to achieve”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“Contributive justice, by contrast, is not neutral about human flourishing or the best way to live. From Aristotle to the American republican tradition, from Hegel to Catholic social teaching, 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. According to this tradition, the fundamental human need is to be needed by those with whom we share a common life. The dignity of work consists in exercising our abilities to answer such needs. If this is what it means to live a good life, then it is a mistake to conceive consumption as “the sole end and object of economic activity.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“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.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“For white men and women aged 45–54, deaths of despair increased threefold from 1990 to 2017.9”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“They resented meritocratic elites, experts, and professional classes, who had celebrated market-driven globalization, reaped the benefits, consigned working people to the discipline of foreign competition, and who seemed to identify more with global elites than with their fellow citizens.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?