The Tyranny of Merit: Part Three, "Why Good Enough" is Good Enough

Michael Sandel

I started off this series talking about "Operation Varsity Blue", which was a scandal that involved wealthy individuals pulling strings in order to get their children into a small number of prestigious American universities. I then introduced a Harvard philosopher, Michael Sandel, who wrote a book titled The Tyranny of Merit. It suggests that our belief in and support for a meritocratic economy has severely damaged the sense of social solidarity in many nations. 

In the first part of my review, I discussed the poorly thought-out ideas that underlie our beliefs about whether or not someone "deserves" whatever the economy chooses to give them. In the second instalment, I talked about how this emphasis on a goofy understanding of "merit" results in masses of people defined as "losers" developing "ressentiment" towards the people that they've been told are "their betters". The suggestion is that this has fuelled a wave of destructive right-wing populism all over the world.  

In this final part, I'd like to spend some effort explaining how this belief system also creates misery for the people "of merit" who we think "deserve" the finer things in life. I also want to suggest one simple concept that could impart a great deal of sanity in our lives---if we took it to heart and used it to modify our economic model. 

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Making people more qualified for a specific job doesn't increase the number of positions---it just increases the competition for those jobs that already do exist.  You can't educate a population out of unemployment. Similarly, you can't educate a population out wealth stratification either. 

Education does work as an individual strategy, for a short period of time. Some people who are the first individuals that go the extra mile can get ahead of others that don't do that. But the problem is that everyone else quickly figures out what is going on, and copies the strategy. At that point, it ceases to be "the extra bit" and instead gets added onto "the bare minimum". 

I think that this should be pretty much self-evident, but certain elements of our political environment are so ideologically "welded" to the idea of merit and solving employment issues through education that I'm going to cite some evidence to support this point. For example, I found an interesting article titled Massification of higher education, graduate employment and social mobility in the Greater China region, by Ka Ho Mok which was published in 2016 by the British Journal of Sociology of Education, (37:1, 51-71, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2015.1111751).

As we all know, there was a massive expansion of institutes of higher education in the US and Canada after WWII. (The University of Guelph is an example of this expansion.) This was predicated on the idea that for a nation to prosper in the modern world, it needs an educated workforce that can out-compete other nations. But, as we found out, no matter how "high tech" a country becomes, there is never going to be a need for more than a relatively few people who's expertise requires a university degree. That's why we have now Phds driving cabs. (And why I once walked into my basement to hear a couple tradesmen I'd hired arguing over Immanuel Kant.)

As Mok Ka Ho found out when he investigated the education statistics of Asia, and the People's Republic of China in particular, exactly the same thing seems to be happening there. China recently went through a period of dramatically expanding its higher education infrastructure and now finds itself facing the same over-supply of graduates that we already have in North America and Europe. Here are some graphs from his paper.

First, the rapid growth in Chinese government university capacity compared to the mature Asian economies (remember to add Hong Kong to China).

Next the increase in private (ie: "Minban") colleges in China.

And now we have un- and under-employed graduates from schools of higher education. 

As the author states in his conclusions, just creating more university graduates just makes it harder and harder for people to get one of the jobs that they expected to have. 

"In this case, not all youth completing higher education will get a good job. However, any youth who wants to have a better job must first obtain a higher education degree. Put differently, if everyone stands on tiptoe, nobody gets a better view; but if you do not stand on tiptoe, you have no chance of seeing." (Mok, p-10)

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I sweated and fussed over this article for a long time. It's not like regular, "legacy journalism", but I still think it raises issues that need to be mentioned. If you agree and you can afford it, why not subscribe? Pay Pal and Patreon make it easy to do.

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And of course, the competition that forces young people to "stand on tiptoe" doesn't end with higher education. According to a 2014 Gallup poll, in the USA 50% of salaried workers (ie: the people who are "winners") work over 50 hours a week---with 25% working over 60. 

And lets not forget that commuting times add to the work week. In 2021 the United States Census Bureau states that the average one way commute is now 27.6 minutes, which adds up to 4.6 hours a week. So add that to the numbers I cited above. (No wonder working from home is so popular!)

The nasty workload that is imposed on "winners" dramatically lowers any sense of sympathy that might have been felt towards losers in days past. The sense of "noblesse oblige" disappears when you feel that you have had to work far too hard to get and keep your position of "privilege". But there is another side to this that needs to be pointed out. 

Robert D. Putnam, Twitter

People who have precious little time for themselves also have precious little time for the community too. And this can be a real problem. In 1995, the sociologist Robert D. Putnam wrote a paper titled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. (He later expanded it into a best-selling book for both academics and the general public.) In it he argued that in addition to the all the various other types of capital that influence the productivity of a society (financial, human, infrastructure, etc), there is also the complex interactions between people in formal groups---"social capital"--- that build a sense of solidarity and allow for informal reciprocity that is important to the full functioning of the society. 

He argued that in the United States its institutions are based upon an assumption of very high levels of social capital but that this has been in steep decline since the 1970s. This erosion is undermining the democratic institutions that has sustained it since the revolution. Putnam cites a lot of examples, but here's one paragraph that will give you the flavour of the statistics he mentions.

"Similar reductions are apparent in the numbers of volunteers for mainline civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts (off by 26 percent since 1970) and the Red Cross (off by 61 percent since 1970). But what about the possibility that volunteers have simply switched their loyalties to other organizations? Evidence on "regular" (as opposed to occasional or "drop-by") volunteering is available from the Labor Department's Current Population Surveys of 1974 and 1989. These estimates suggest that serious volunteering declined by roughly one-sixth over these 15 years, from 24 percent of adults in 1974 to 20 percent in 1989. The multitudes of Red Cross aides and Boy Scout troop leaders now
missing in action have apparently not been offset by equal numbers of new recruits elsewhere."

(Putnam, p-227, Journal of Democracy 6 (1),1995)

He deals with the potential objection that new, "more relevant" social capital organizations may have grown up to replace things like the Boy Scouts and Red Cross by saying that they are important, but aren't remotely the same. The groups that are withering away require regular face-to-face interactions between people who live in the same geographic community. In contrast, groups like the American Association of Retired People (AARP) and the Sierra Club generally involve not much more than cutting a cheque once in a while. 

"These new mass-membership organizations are plainly of great political importance. From the point of view of social connectedness, however, they are sufficiently different from classic "secondary associations" that we need to invent a new label-perhaps "tertiary associations." For the vast majority of their members, the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter. Few ever attend any meetings of such organizations, and most are unlikely ever (knowingly) to encounter any other member. The bond between any two members of the Sierra Club is less like the bond between any two members of a gardening club and more like the bond between any two Red Sox fans (or perhaps any two devoted Honda owners): they root for the same team and they share some of the same interests, but they are unaware of each other's existence. Their ties, in short, are to common symbols, common leaders, and perhaps common ideals, but not to one another."

 (Putnam, p-228)

As for the causes of this decline, he suggests several different possible causes:

• entry of women into the workforce
• increased mobility as people move to follow jobs
• the Technological Transformation of Leisure, by which he means television and then the Internet (which includes things like reading this blog and gaming)

I can add a few more, such as the rise of tourism. To cite a personal example, when I started being involved with a woman from another country I began travelling to visit her during my vacations. This dramatically cut the amount of time I had to devote things like politics and other forms of activism. (Especially as I worked evening shifts and couldn't make any meetings outside of vacation time.)

And, I'd like to add, the increased competition needed to get and keep a good job is probably also a factor. No matter how committed someone might be to the ideals of scouting or the Red Cross, someone who is working over 60 hours plus five more commuting every week is not going to have the time or energy to devote to any sort of community organization.   

It might seem to the casual reader that it's no big deal that increasing numbers of salaried employees can no longer get involved in volunteer organizations. But if think about it, these people have specialized skills and access to an entire world that working stiffs like me often know nothing about. Cutting these people out of the social capital matrix is bound to have an out-sized implication. 

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So what exactly could be done to deal with the problems of meritocracy? Sandel ends The Tyranny of Merit with a suggestion for the problem that started off this series. He suggests that the small number of elite universities should award positions based on a lottery. This has a variety of benefits. First, it allows everyone who wants to get into those schools a chance to relax the intense competition. In Mok's language, it would allow them to get off "their tiptoes". Second, it would mean that not being a graduate of an elite school is evidence of being unlucky, not being somehow "substandard".

One thing that I noticed while reading this part of Sandel's book was what he didn't say. It's obvious that even with a lottery, there would have to be some sort of "standard" that individuals would have to pass in order to qualify for a ticket in the first place. That means that in effect, these elite schools would cease looking for "the absolute best" and instead would only want a random selection of those who are "good enough". 

Changing our society from one that seeks out "the best and brightest" to one that is looking for "good enough" would be absolutely game changing. 

I know one thing that I'd be looking forward to, is an end to complaints that people are getting hired to good jobs that they aren't "the best" at. For example, I've heard time and time again in my life about women and people of colour being hired just because of the placement of their reproductive organs or pigment in their skin. Generally, this comes from a white male who thinks that he would have had the job if it was awarded "fairly". (This is an example of the ressentiment that I discussed in my second article on Sandel's book.)

This isn't to say that I agree with the assessment that said individuals weren't "the best", but there are so many intangibles involved in a good hire that cannot be quantified. For example, there has to be a benefit to having police officers that look like people in the community they are supposed to "protect and serve"---instead of the old days when cops were all big white men. Once we accept that the objective basic qualifications for a job are defined, then hiring committees can then think about what other things they want in a recruit---without having to justify their decision to every single person who thinks that they would have been better candidates.

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The big point of using the term "good enough" for hires, though, is to drive a stake through the heart of the idea that the well off and the poor both deserve their lots in life. This does, however, leave open the question of how we are going to divide the economy's spoils. 

I see this as a key part of the utility of getting rid of the meritocratic ideal. If we accept that there just aren't enough good jobs for everyone and that there are usually lots more qualified people than positions, we will be able to have a serious conversation about what we are going to do for the majority of people. That's because it puts us back in the same place where we were before the Industrial Revolution. At that time people were poor simply because they weren't born into the aristocratic class and no one beat themselves up because the weren't deserving of anything better. Similarly, aristocrats who had any self-awareness realized that the only way they could justify their wealth and position would be to live a life of public service (that's where noblesse oblige comes from). 

The big difference is that we are now living in what economists call a "post-scarcity economy". By that, I mean a situation where there is more than enough goods like food, shelter, etc, for everyone to live a decent life. Moreover, due to automation, full employment is no longer necessary to achieve this abundance. This means that any poverty we see around us is a problem of distribution failure instead of absolute dearth.  

So why do we still have poverty? It's just because of the way we think. We believe, for a variety of reasons, that some people deserve to be rich and others deserve to be poor. As the Buddhists would say, our society is suffering from a collective delusion. That's why Sandel says the meritocracy ideal is a Tyranny---it is keeping us from creating a much better egalitarian world. 

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This is where the idea of a Guaranteed Annual Income enters the scene. If we decide to bring back the sort of taxation regime that existed in the 1950s, the government would be able to fund a basic income that will ensure that no one lives in poverty. And once that was in place, the issue of why some people are poor or not ceases to be an issue of metaphysics, theology, or, crowd psychology, and instead becomes simply irrelevant.

Here's an neat video that explains how seriously "out of whack" people's notions about wealth distribution are in the USA. (Canada is in a much better place, but we are evolving towards the American situation---as is most of the rest of the world. Wealth stratification is a universal problem.)

If this sounds depressing, just remember that there is no objective reality behind this problem---it's simply an issue of what ordinary voters believe. If enough of us wake up to the real situation we find ourselves in, we can toss overboard old ideas about how society operates and experiment until we find a system that works better for us all. 

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That's enough about the Tyranny of Merit. Make sure you are vaccinated, still wear a mask and social distance when it makes sense to do so. Just remember that if you have had the shot, you can still get the bug which means you can give it to someone else. You probably won't get very sick, but if you give it to someone else it might end up with someone who will. Have fun as the restrictions ease off, but just remember that we are still a long way from the pandemic being over!

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!