The Tyranny of Merit (2020)
Michael J. Sandel (1953)
272 pages
In the United States, the mantra that if you’re talented and work hard, you too can succeed has taken on the force of dogma. How could one possibly disagree with the idea that a tight link exists between effort, talent and success?
He opens by arguing that one significant consequence of meritocracy’s consummate hold on the US psyche has been the growth of populism over the past decade:
It is a mistake to see only the bigotry in populist protest, or to view it only as an economic complaint. … The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an angry verdict on decades of rising inequality and a version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary citizens feeling disempowered. It was also a rebuke for a technocratic approach to politics that is tone-deaf to the resentments of people who feel the economy and the culture have left them behind. (17)
Trump’s reelection in 2024 only reinforces Sandel’s conclusion.
today it is rarer for a poor American to become rich than a poor Briton which means the American dream is less likely to be realized in America. (41, Luce).
When a significant portion of a society discovers that one of the fundamental stories it believes about itself has become defunct – and particularly when it impacts their children’s future – it can’t be surprising that they eventually rise up in anger.
Sandel makes clear that the idea of “hiring people based on merit … is generally the right thing to do” (33) – most everyone desires the best possible plumber, electrician or airplane pilot. The difficulty comes when one transforms one’s success or failure into an indication of one’s moral status. He argues that exactly this has occurred, however, as an outcome of how deeply meritocratic thinking has instilled itself into American consciousness, expressed as a
rhetoric of opportunity … summed up in the slogan that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise ‘as far as their talents will take them.’
He notes that “politicians of both parties have reiterated this slogan to the point of incantation.” (23) And this has led to psychologically unhealthy effects that now haunt our society and politics.
Those who haven’t elsewhere encountered arguments describing the difficulties with meritocratic thinking will likely approach this book imagining Sandel will have a hard time convincing them to view merit negatively. As it happens, however, his principal critique of it in the essay makes an extremely convincing case. Perhaps most surprising is his demonstration of the ways in which it perverts the thinking and lives of not only those who are successful, but also those who aren’t.
Those who succeed, Sandel notes, come to believe in their success as a justified reward for their hard work, as a reflection of their personal effort and ability – that they deserve what they have in terms of wealth and power. The dark side of this belief reveals itself in their feeling about those who have not succeeded: it becomes too easy to reverse the logic of success and conclude that those who fail do so because of lack of effort and ability – that they, too, deserve what they, in this case, don’t have. This can become evident not only in how those who have failed are treated, but also, in a tendency to reject social and political policies for supporting the broader community.
A similar dynamic plays out among those who fail, as they have also fully internalized the idea of merit as an appropriate measure of a person. They feel deeply the humiliation of their failure, Sandel argues, believing that they have failed because they, personally, somehow did not put in the necessary effort or have the necessary ability to succeed. And yet, they too will reject proposals for broad-based social or political support, considering it to undermine personal responsibility.
Sandel traces American meritocratic thinking back to Christian theology, as early church leaders attempted to make sense of the presence of suffering in the world and understand what would lead to salvation for a given person. To answer this question, they invoked the idea of merit, based on one’s behavior before God. In more recent times, however, a more aggressive religious view of merit has set in, as “American Christianity has produced a buoyant new variant of providentialist faith called the prosperity gospel.” (46) In this view, health and wealth indicate who is being rewarded by God, and who punished. It was a short step for such a belief to carry over into secular society:
The tyranny of merit arises, at least in part from this impulse. Today’s secular meritocratic order moralizes success [as] the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. (42)
What has been lost, Sandel argues, is an
“ethic of fortune [that] appreciates the dimensions of life that exceed human understanding and control. [Which] sees that the cosmos does not necessarily match merit with reward. [Which] leaves room for mystery, tragedy, and humility.” (43)
(The group Dead Can Dance has a musical piece that turns on this idea, in Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book.) Both people who have experienced success as well as those who have suffered failure ignore the role of such outside forces; they need to recognize that
a lively sense of the contingency of our lot conduces to a certain humility: “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of fortune, go I.” [Even] 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 tyranny, or unjust rule. (25)
To paraphrase an extreme version of this argument that Sam Harris has made on his podcast Making Sense: we, none of us, had any say, whether through effort or talent, in our not having been born in the middle of the civil war in Sudan. Sandel puts forward a variety of less dramatic examples of consequential circumstances that people too often ignore or discount in their success – or failure.
Sandel goes on to describe how the ethic of the deserving versus the undeserving propagated through US society and, particularly political rhetoric, over the last century. A shift has occurred, he argues, from an early 20th century focus on solidarity and the country as a common project, to one of expectations on the individual, characterized by phrases such as personal responsibility, in which people’s “success would be the measure of their merit.” He notes the debates since the 1980’s over welfare, that “have been less about solidarity than about the extent to which the disadvantaged are responsible for their misfortune.” (64-65)
Although President Reagan first made this critique of welfare mainstream, President Clinton and politicians on both sides of the aisle have continued such rhetoric into the 21st century. It has crystalized around a concept that Sandel refers to as a “rhetoric of rising,” the idea that the government’s focus needs to be on giving everyone the opportunity to get as far as their hard work and talent can take them.
By 2016, however, such language no longer inspired, as people experienced dramatically increasing inequality and ever shrinking mobility, both for themselves and, perhaps more dispiritingly, for their children.
When the richest 1 percent take in more than the combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population, when the median income stagnates for forty years, the idea that effort and hard work will carry you far begins to ring hollow. (73)
Hardly surprising, then, that anger with Democrats as well as traditional Republicans for perpetrating this system, if each side in its own ways, caused a shift of a sufficient number of voters to Trump.
What these voters rejected, argues Sandel, is what he refers to as the technocratic approach to politics that has dominated over the past several decades. That approach includes a focus on education, with an emphasis on the need for a college degree. Here again, individual responsibility does the heavy lifting, with “low educational achievement [considered] to represent a failure of individual effort.” (96) Sandel finds technocratic thinking to be driven by “credentialism” – a belief by those with college degrees that they not only should, but in fact, deserve to arbitrate social and economic policy.
Referencing the debate over climate change, he provides a pointed example of the pitfalls of the classic claim of a technocrat:
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. (110)
In fact, he suggests, the arguments over climate change
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. (112)
Toward the end of the book, Sandel offers potential directions toward solutions to shift away from the worst consequences of meritocracy. His take-off point is that compensating people with money "will do little to address the anger and resentment that now run deep, … because the anger is about loss of recognition and esteem … [more than] diminished purchasing power.”
Instead, he proposes that we re-define the common good from our current focus on consumer welfare, to one based on what he refers to as a “civic conception [in which] the most important role we play in the economy is not as consumers but as producers.” In such a viewpoint, the value of our contribution is not “simply a matter of satisfying consumer preferences, [which leads to a view of] market wages [as] a good measure of who has contributed what.” Instead, the focus becomes on “the moral and civic importance of the ends our efforts serve.” In such a social and economic structure, for example, the common refrain that teachers should be better paid would likely be translated into reality, as opposed to simply lamented as not possible due to market forces. (208-9)
Market fundamentalism … has blinded its adherents to the realities around them, while making it hard for all of us to see the range of [economic] options that have worked in the past and could work again in the future. (424, Oreskes)
An implication of Sandel’s conclusions is that while the distribution of a universal basic income (UBI) might seem like a viable solution for people not earning enough to survive, given stagnant wages and now increasing automation, it will not alone solve the fundamental issue of returning a feeling of self-esteem to people’s lives that currently comes from their work. Although he does not address UBI directly, based on his arguments pursuing it would require an extensive project of decoupling this present-day connection between how much one is paid for one’s work and one’s self-esteem from doing the work. He notes that
In market-driven societies, interpreting material success as a sign of moral desert is a persisting temptation. It is a temptation we need repeatedly to resist. One way of doing so is to debate and enact measures that prompt us to reflect, deliberately and democratically, on what counts as truly valuable contributions to the common good and where market verdicts miss the mark. (213-4)
He does acknowledge that such a debate would not be easy or lead to universally agreed upon answers; market fundamentalists have, in that sense, the easier argument, because they have allowed themselves to – and convinced all of us to allow them to – ignore a whole range of socially, politically and environmentally damaging externalities. Make enough simplifying assumptions, and a problem can seem to have an easy solution, one that, however, fails at some point in the implementation. Ultimately, the key is to shift from a simplistic vision that markets can solve all problems, to a recognition that our present approach, whatever benefits it has provided in the past, is leading to an increasingly unsustainable and dangerous social and political volatility in the present.
In The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel makes a persuasive case that while the idea of merit in hiring for particular positions can seem natural and appropriate, the real-world consequences of a culture of meritocracy have had a corrosive and damaging effect on the cultural and social fabric of the US. It has destroyed the concept of the US as a communal project of its people, by over-emphasizing personal responsibility and ignoring the range of sometimes intangible but often simply ignored accidents, fortunes and contingencies that play a profound role in any individual’s success or failure.
Other notes and information:
Although Sandel shows how Christian belief led us to the current culture of deserving, it could be interesting to consider whether a shift in religious belief away from the prosperity gospel could transform into a shift in secular thinking away from meritocracy and toward support for a new conception of our economy.
In their book mentioned above, The Big Myth, Oreskes and Conway include a fascinating history of the real story behind the novels in the series that includes The Little House on the Prairie, and the associated television series. The novels and show present a very individualistic story, of the family making it largely on their own. Oreskes and Conway report this to have been a significant re-write of the actual history – by the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was a libertarian:
The stories [in the Little House books] were not true, not in their details and not in their overall framework. In the Ingallses’ real lives, hard work didn’t bring success. Nor were they rugged individuals: they relied on neighbors and community for their very survival, and their presence on the frontier was predicated on the federal government’s removal of native Osage peoples and distribution of their land to white settles. Yet in the books, the state scarcely appears, save in a negative light.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
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