The Tyranny of Merit: Part One, the Theology of Deserving

In last week's video review I explained how an industry has been created to get teens from wealthy families into a small number of "prestigious" American universities---even some ways that are illegal. I ended up by pointing out how ridiculous the whole exercise really is because it is easy to get into lots of very good American colleges---if you have money. Now I want to introduce something that is related, but I believe deadly serious: The Tyranny of Merit.

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The phrase comes from a book with the same title by a professor of philosophy named Michael J. Sandel at Harvard University. 

The author and the cover of his book---from his Harvard website and Amazon.

Sandel argues that a key part of the rise of populist conservatism is because of resentment among people who feel that they've been "sold down the river" by smug university graduates who have taken over society and hog all the power and money. 

There are a lot of different issues here, so I'm going to try to work my way through some of them one after another to explain why I think Sandel's ideas are so important. In this article, I'm going to go into some depth about what I'm calling the theology of deserving.

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I can remember hearing politicians in the 1980s going on about the need to give people an education so they could find good jobs. At the time I was appalled to hear this because there are several problems with this line of thinking.

The first one is that when you educate someone you aren't magically creating a job for them to fill. In response to the oft-repeated cliche, I'd like to point out that teaching someone how to fish doesn't guarantee that there is anything left in the pond to catch! To cite a personal example, I was born at the end of the Baby Boom, which meant that when I graduated with a BA it was very hard to find a good job---simply because my older siblings already had most of them and the economy was going through one of its periodic "down cycles". This is easy to see on a graph I found at the Macleans Magazine website.

See that spike in the early 80s? That when my cohort graduated from college and university. Pretty hard to get a job with 13% unemployment! At that time all the traditional employers---eg: factories---had signs up saying "Not Taking Applications". I counted myself lucky because I was a young, single man who had a low-pay janitorial position. I felt this because when I was out in public polishing floors I met a lot of middle-aged guys with families to support who would ask if the company was hiring. 

During that recession I went to my home town for Yule and the local bar was offering free turkey dinners because of all the unemployment. My friends from high school and I got together. There was a wide gamut of different educational streams there---from engineering and heavy diesel mechanics, to fine art and philosophy. Most of us didn't have jobs. I remember one guy complaining, "I didn't have any fun at all when I was at college---and I still don't have a job!"

The notion that increasing the level of education in your workforce will create jobs is based on a misunderstanding of the difference between what makes an individual more competitive in their personal job hunt with what will help an entire population find work. If you are getting a good education and no one else is, then yes education can be a very good strategy for getting a job. But if everyone in your cohort is doing the same thing, all that is happening is the competition for those few jobs that do exist is getting hotter and hotter.

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The interesting question that flows out of the above is "Why exactly would anyone believe that education is a way of dealing with unemployment?" I would suggest to you, dear readers, it's because of a collective delusion that flows out of our religious and economic heritage. In other words, blame it on both Christianity and Capitalism.

For a very long time there was (and for all I know may very well still be) an argument between theologians about what is more important for salvation, grace or works? That is to say, is it more important to believe in God's mercy or to be a good person? In high school I talked about this with a friend who was a fundamentalist Christian. I asked him, "Who has a better chance of getting to heaven---an atheist who lived like a saint his whole life, or, a monster like Hitler who had a genuine 'death bed conversion'?" His position was the atheist saint goes to Hell and Hitler is now strumming a harp in Heaven.

The reason why any of this has any bearing on unemployment and higher education is because our society places a lot of emphasis on whether or not someone "deserves" a secure job, a decent life, etc. This why, for example, there is so much institutional anxiety about catching welfare "cheats" and making sure that people on unemployment insurance are out banging the bushes to find another job. 

It isn't because welfare pays such a princely sum of money. In fact, it's so low that a friend of mine used to say "welfare is its own punishment". According to the Maytree website, welfare rates in Toronto---as of 2019---ranged from $9,773 for the single person considered employable to $31,485 for the couple with two children.

And if the official unemployment rate is over 13% (ie: when I graduated with a BA), what is the point of forcing people to go through the motions of seeking gainful employ?

For that matter, what is the point of forcing someone who is sick to go into a doctor's office to waste her time writing a note for his boss? (After all, it's very simple to add up the sick days in a year to suggest someone might be taking too many---or not enough, for that matter.)

None of this makes any practical sense. As many folks have pointed out over the years, money wasted seeking out cheats and following procedures aimed at preventing cheating often costs so much money that it would make more sense to just accept a small amount of fraud as the price of doing business. In fact, the situation often seems to me like that of a store owner who decides to devote a huge amount of the company gross to eliminating all shop lifting instead of just accepting a small amount of "shrinkage" as the price of being open for business. 

It is hard to find information about the extent of welfare "fraud" in Canada. According to a background paper by the British Parliament's National Audit Office, this is because no level of government attempts to track it. But the authors do cite an Ontario commissioned audit by the global auditing firm KPMG from 1992 that would suggest that something like $70-100 million was lost yearly due to fraud of all types in our province. This sounds like a lot of money, but the Ontario budget for social assistance in 1992 was $6.2 billion, that means that if we accept the outside extreme of KPMG's number (ie: $100 million) and make that a percentage of the entire social assistance budget, we end up with fraud costing 1.6% of the total. Since retail sales businesses in North America accept a shrinkage rate of about 1.85%, it would seem that fraud really isn't an objectively important issue for welfare. (Incidentally, this is a classic example of why it is so important to see government expenditures as a percentage instead of just a gross dollar amount!)

But this isn't about saving money. Instead, for many people it comes down to a question of morality. They are offended at the thought that people they think don't DESERVE welfare, employment insurance, or, sick pay are getting it anyway. In this type of thinking, having food and shelter is "heaven" and it is the reward for a "saintly" work ethic. The idea that someone gets their "reward" without putting in the effort, diminishes their sense of right and wrong. The fact that there might not be enough jobs that pay a living wage---or even that don't---doesn't enter into their calculus. 

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The question of "deserving" becomes really hard to support when you consider the people in our society who don't do well at school. I'm not talking just about folks who aren't interested in university. There are also a lot of people who can't "make the grade" at a college or trade either. The problem is that these folks do necessary work but they aren't deemed "deserving" of a wage that will allow them to live a comfortable life. They can't afford housing, they often have to work at several jobs with no benefits, and, the work they can find is often precarious. 

But just how exactly are these people "not deserving" of a decent life? Is it because the work they do isn't important? Well, if so, why were so many of the positions they fill---healthcare worker, meat packer, delivery guy, farm labourer, janitor, etc---deemed "essential workers" during the pandemic? 

It might be that they don't have higher education, but maybe that's because they simply don't have the intellectual gifts necessary to make it through university or college. But how exactly does that fit into their "deserving" what they make at these crappy jobs? People are who they are, and you can't expect someone who isn't smart enough to go to school to do it anyway anymore than you expect a paralyzed man to win a marathon. 

This is where we get out of the realm of "works" and into "grace", and from there into the cloud-cuckoo land of "predestination". In Christianity the same sorts of problems with regard to salvation manifested themselves as does "deserving" in Capitalism. People who honestly looked at the issue of whether or not someone "deserved" to go to Heaven had to admit that people's behaviour was heavily influenced by their childhood and their environment. Seeing that, they had to admit that God didn't seem fair if he judged them just on their acts.

This led to the idea of "grace", which suggested that God's mercy fell upon the just and unjust equally, much like the rain. But this belief was simply too much for some people to accept, which resulted in the idea of "predestination", which taught that people's sense of "free will" was pretty much an illusion---and we are all doomed to either Heaven or Hell from before we were born. (How God decided who got what was considered a "mystery" too profound for ignorant people to ever understand.)

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I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole that is Christian theology. But I do want to show how fundamentally delusional it really is. That's what happens when you hold onto something that is fundamentally illogical and then expend all your mental effort to explain it while at the same time refusing to reject any of your initial assumptions (eg: that God, Heaven, or, Hell really exist). Thankfully, issues like predestination, salvation by works, and, grace no longer dominate social discourse. Certainly, they are no longer the excuse for horrific wars---like they were in 16th and 17th century Europe. 

But we still are in the grips of theological thinking in the form of trying to squeeze economics into religious shoes by talking about whether or not someone "deserves" to either make a living wage at an "unskilled" job let alone have a decent life with no job at all. I don't find it surprising that public debate goes this way, because our dominant worldview---Capitalism---has been described in religious terms from it's very conception. 

That's where things like "the invisible hand" fit in. Capitalism can be defended as simply being an organizing system that can be justified by being the most efficient possible. (I don't agree with this, but there is a seemingly plausible argument in it's favour.) But since the beginning, people have tended to see the fact that some people succeed in competition and others lose as being evidence of their inherent virtue or vice. And once you start to see success or failure in society as being a reward for good or bad behaviour, you are stuck on the conveyor belt that drives you into the weird world of theology.

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Of course, there's a 500lb gorilla in the room of this worldview. That is, what about people who are rich but didn't work for it?  According to the People's Policy Project, a crowd-sourced policy think tank, a very significant fraction of wealthy people made their money the old-fashioned way: they inherited it. Here's a graph from them that splits the US population into ten groups (a "decile") and gives the mean (ie: half the people above the number and half below) inheritance.

So following this chart, half of the people in top ten percent of the population received more than $367,400 in inheritances. (Numbers are in thousands. Because this is a mean instead of an average, we are ignoring the very small number of people who inherited tens or even hundreds of millions---which would skew the numbers far too high.) Obviously, anyone who inherits their wealth doesn't "deserve" it, do they? 

If you believe that people should "deserve" whatever money they get, where does inheritance fit in? It seems that we if we believe in the capitalist theory of "deserving", we end up in the same dead end of predestination whether we follow the road of poverty or wealth.

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My discussion has rambled a bit so far, which I think is inescapable because it's not easy to come up with a logical argument about things that make no inherent sense. All I can do is grab bits and pieces and hold them up to show how nutty they really are. 

Economics shouldn't be about morality and the concept of "deserving" doesn't hold up under critical scrutiny. No one really deserves much of anything at all. But it is the case that there is more than enough to go around, and if we could get rid of the insane notion that some people deserve more than others, we might develop national and international policies that would foster a greater level of equality in the world. And, that would be a good thing.

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That's enough for this kick at the can. Remember that pesky Delta variant, so keep wearing your mask and get your shot. 

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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!