Skip to main content

The Tyranny of Merit

 





Book Review

The Tyranny of Merit

Author: Michael J Sandel

Merit is not always right. It generates winners and losers and often creates hubris among the winners and resentment among the losers. Moreover, there is something immoral about handing over the world to a group of people who possess certain qualities (merits) just by luck.

Michael Sandel is a political philosopher at Harvard University and author of many books. His latest book, The Tyranny of Merit [2020], is an incisive critique of meritocracy.

Our world places much premium on merit. Students are admitted to premier institutions on the basis of their merit which is assessed by highly challenging tests. Jobs are allotted also on the basis of merit. Merit is important, no doubt. It ensures efficiency and fairness. Those who are more capable should be given greater responsibilities. It also promotes aspiration and individual freedom (freedom to forge one’s own destiny). It is also morally comforting: we feel that we get what we deserve. Fine enough. But meritocracy has its dark side too.

Sandel argues that meritocracy is not a remedy for inequality but a justification for inequality. It is not much different from aristocracy which justified and sustained inequality on the basis of birth. You are born into a particular family without your choice or knowledge and that accident determines your fate: that is aristocracy. If you are born rich, you are a winner in that system. Otherwise you are a goner. You have no choice.

Meritocracy gives us the illusion of choice. If you work hard, you can make it: meritocracy exhorts. Really? Sandel doesn’t agree. He thinks that the role of effort is inflated in meritocracy. Your talents matter more, much more. And your talents are not your choice. Your talents are your luck. Letting luck determine one’s destiny is no better than letting the accident of birth do it.

Sandel gives detailed statistical and other researched data to show how meritocracy has led to credentialism. Credentialism is belief or reliance on academic or other formal qualifications as the best measure of a person’s intelligence or ability to do a particular job. Many American Presidents like Clinton and Obama emphasised on the importance of education in forging one’s destiny. Sandel argues that this focus on education is not fair. It shifts the blame saying: “Inequality is not a failure of the system; it is a failure of you.”

This blame-shifting engenders many severe problems the foremost of which is self-hatred or loss of self-esteem. It is the resentment of such people who felt left out because of insufficient educational qualifications that led to the victory of Donald Trump as President and to Brexit, argues Sandel. He has the statistics too to prove his point.

Educational qualification needn’t matter so much, however. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee was an Oxford graduate. But his foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had left school at the age of 11. The leader of the House of Commons at that time, Herbert Morrison, did not have education beyond the age of 14. Aneurin Bevan, health minister, left school at 13 and worked as a miner.

This is not to discredit education, of course. Education is important. But there are other equally important matters too. The world should belong to everyone, even the less gifted. And the handicapped. And the disabled. And… That’s important too.

Sandel shows us that even academic scores have a correlation with wealth. “The higher your family income, the higher your SAT score,” he puts it as bluntly as that. There are people who pay as much as $1000 per hour for one-to-one tutoring for SAT. Academics is a billion-dollar industry. Therefore, education is not all about the intellect.

Meritocracy is not as much about merit as we pretend. Many other factors are at play. Your success in a meritocratic system is not as much a result of your own effort as you imagine. There are many more talented people out there who don’t get the opportunities you got.

If the successful people internalise that fact – that they are not all self-made winners – half the problem may be solved. After all, changes begin from attitudes. If I know that I am here as a winner because of sheer good fortune, I will be more concerned about my fellow human beings. That concern can make a lot of difference to the world.

This is an excellent book that deserves to be read by all the winners and policy makers. Almost all the examples and research data come from America.  But the vision is universal.

 

PS. Thanks to Jose Maliekal, professor of philosophy, author of Standstill Utopias and a good friend for sending me a free digital copy of this book.

Comments

  1. Sonia DograNovember 28, 2020 at 3:47 PM

    I cannot agree more. The divide that meritocracy creates, can lead to loathe for the system as well as oneself. It begins right away in schools. At least Indian schools. The realization that my achievement is more a matter of my luck or whatever will at least keep me grounded and more compassionate. After all, there is no dearth of talent. It's the other things that don't add up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 28, 2020 at 4:38 PM

      The author cites statistics to show that the students of good universities in the US are rather contemptuous of their less educated counterparts. So this happens not only in India.

      Humility is a virtue that the author mentions explicitly at the end. So you sync with him wholly.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.   Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...
14 comments
Read more

Good Life

I introduced A C Grayling’s book, The God Argument , in two earlier posts.   This post presents the professor’s views on good life.   Grayling posits seven characteristics of a good life.   The first characteristic is that a good life is a meaningful one.   Meaning is “a set of values and their associated goals that give a life its shape and direction.”   Having children to look after or achieving success in one’s profession or any other very ordinary goal can make life meaningful.   But Grayling says quoting Oscar Wilde that everyone’s map of the world should have a Utopia on it.   That is, everyone should dream of a better world and strive to materialise that dream, if life is to be truly meaningful.   Ability to form relationships with other people is the second characteristic.   Intimacy with at least one other person is an important feature of a meaningful life.   “Good relationships make better people,” says G...
21 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let...
36 comments
Read more