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4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
I really wanted to like this but really struggled. I'm not sure whether I'm simply allergic to any book that tries to assess What Happened in 2016 (though this is obviously a bit more far-ranging in scope) or if any project to that end is automatically a failure...but every attempt to explain the discontented Trump voter just fell flat for me. I'm just not sure what special insight Mr. Sandel has into the Trump Voter that others don't, especially the many many Trump voters who are high-income beneficiaries of the very meritocracy Sandel decries. And I actually think his assessment of the meritocracy overall rings true and is very smart! There are parts of this I found extraordinarily compelling and a useful lens to look at the all the shit we're going through now. There is moral clarity here....and a lot (A LOT) of repetition, analysis that is a bit tossed off/trusting of flawed polling. And of course, there is simply no analysis of race in a way that is deeply harmful to the overall project (final anecdote about Hank Aaron excepted, I guess). I don't know. This doesn't quite hit but it was an interesting read.
We all go through achieving or failing while living in a meritocratic society. The author Michael Sandel emphasizes the importance of taking some time to reflect on the tyranny of meritocracy. When we achieve or fail at something, we should ask ourselves, "Do I deserve this? If so, how much credit should I get?". The author says that one's success and failure are affected by the following factors: 1) one's merit (i.e., talents and efforts); 2) surrounding environments (i.e., a wealth of family); 3) luck. This process, reflecting on one's own success/failure, affects how members of society treat each other: More dignity & respect and less hubris & humiliation. Like many other philosophical questions, the answer to this 'meritocracy' paradox seems to be lying around the word 'balance'. The balance will be somewhere between a person take all credit (or blame) versus a person take no credit (or no blame).
A philosophical goldmine. This is the book I'm going to be giving to all my cerebral friends for Christmas this year. Political elites all over America NEED to understand this book.
I grew up poor. Took one semester of college but didn't finish, in large part because I was already working as a self-taught computer programmer. It was the late 90s when any breathing programmer was richly rewarded by the dot com boom. My career in technology turned out to be very economically rewarding, better than if I had taken 4 years to finish college. Through it all, I have always acknowledged this truth: luck and other factors influenced my successes at least as much as my hard work and self-study. Many other similarly gifted programmers live in my part of the world, and the magic of having worked for a startup unicorn didn't happen to them. I was convicted by something Taleb wrote in "Fooled by Randomness" about a janitor who won the lottery, but if you had re-rolled the dice of his life a million more times, he would not have made a lot of money in those other lives, comparing it to a professional like a dentist whose financial life would turn out decently in most of the million alternate possible lifetimes. In some ways, I was the janitor who won the lottery.
In a society that increasingly believes we are living in a meritocracy, people come to believe that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates level riches are something a person morally deserves because of free markets, as well as the result of their cultivated talents, hard work, intelligence, etc. The dark side of this belief: if the ultra successful merited their rewards, then we are led to believe that those who do not win the race also morally deserve their failure. We imagine they failed because it was their fault, so they deserve their lot in life too. Over time, these attitudes evolve a group of elites whose kids start the 100M race of life on the 90M line, competing against other children who start on the actual starting line. It is obvious who will win such a race. Worse yet, the winners are enabled to think it was all their hard work that brought their successes, often ignoring the role of luck and circumstance, as well as their special talents and gifts bestowed on them by factors outside their control -- for example, I can make no special moral claim to have chosen to be born natural abilities that led me to success as a computer programmer. Then also there is the fact that I was born into a time and place which valued those gifts. Nerdy guys born into the 1800s were not similarly advantaged, and I had no control over which timeline I was born into. Successful people who think they did it all by themselves are displaying "Meritocratic Hubris".
Skip forward to my favorite chapter, which described the lives of many Americans who, like me, didn't finish college and worked in what are sometimes called "unskilled" careers. They were working in factories and other industries which for decades have been increasingly outsourced to cheaper labor markets. Some of their jobs have been lost to cheaper labor provided by undocumented economic immigrants from Latin America. I absolutely understand the motivation of migrants to escape the poverty of a place like Guatemala, having lived there for two years in the middle 90s. But until this book, I had not felt full empathy for the bleak situation of my many
fellow citizens here in America. I had been telling myself the also-true narrative that migrants come here often for jobs in farm work that most US citizens won't do, and that many of these migrants are shamefully exploited as a permanent underclass of cheap labor, constantly in fear of being deported, under Trump more than ever before. But there is another underdog that also needs my support and respect: these US citizens who were left behind by a globalizing economy. Instead of showing true concern and care, our political elites are guilty of treating these people condescendingly. Many white males without college degrees have simply stopped trying to find the employment that they've lost. Imagine being told by condescending social elites that the solution is to just learn new life skills, and "The more you learn, the more you can earn." Previous to 2016, the states that went for Trump had been suffering increasing rates of "deaths by despair" -- alcoholism, drugs, suicide.
I've always believed that all honest work is dignified, and I was particularly touched by a story of Martin Luther King Jr speaking to a group of sanitation workers (garbage men) and telling them that their work is as valuable to society as that of doctors, because without the work they do we would all be living in filth and disease. American society needs to do some thinking about whether the only goal of a free market should be money and ever increasing profits at the expense of wellbeing. We need to come back to a vision of work that offers dignity and respect for the contributions made by all members of our societies.
I really hope some of the elites pick up this book and are taught the empathy that I gained from it. We need to get the conversation moving forward, bring all participants to the table and perhaps after discarding our meritocratic hubris we can rediscover our shared humanity in the process.
I grew up poor. Took one semester of college but didn't finish, in large part because I was already working as a self-taught computer programmer. It was the late 90s when any breathing programmer was richly rewarded by the dot com boom. My career in technology turned out to be very economically rewarding, better than if I had taken 4 years to finish college. Through it all, I have always acknowledged this truth: luck and other factors influenced my successes at least as much as my hard work and self-study. Many other similarly gifted programmers live in my part of the world, and the magic of having worked for a startup unicorn didn't happen to them. I was convicted by something Taleb wrote in "Fooled by Randomness" about a janitor who won the lottery, but if you had re-rolled the dice of his life a million more times, he would not have made a lot of money in those other lives, comparing it to a professional like a dentist whose financial life would turn out decently in most of the million alternate possible lifetimes. In some ways, I was the janitor who won the lottery.
In a society that increasingly believes we are living in a meritocracy, people come to believe that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates level riches are something a person morally deserves because of free markets, as well as the result of their cultivated talents, hard work, intelligence, etc. The dark side of this belief: if the ultra successful merited their rewards, then we are led to believe that those who do not win the race also morally deserve their failure. We imagine they failed because it was their fault, so they deserve their lot in life too. Over time, these attitudes evolve a group of elites whose kids start the 100M race of life on the 90M line, competing against other children who start on the actual starting line. It is obvious who will win such a race. Worse yet, the winners are enabled to think it was all their hard work that brought their successes, often ignoring the role of luck and circumstance, as well as their special talents and gifts bestowed on them by factors outside their control -- for example, I can make no special moral claim to have chosen to be born natural abilities that led me to success as a computer programmer. Then also there is the fact that I was born into a time and place which valued those gifts. Nerdy guys born into the 1800s were not similarly advantaged, and I had no control over which timeline I was born into. Successful people who think they did it all by themselves are displaying "Meritocratic Hubris".
Skip forward to my favorite chapter, which described the lives of many Americans who, like me, didn't finish college and worked in what are sometimes called "unskilled" careers. They were working in factories and other industries which for decades have been increasingly outsourced to cheaper labor markets. Some of their jobs have been lost to cheaper labor provided by undocumented economic immigrants from Latin America. I absolutely understand the motivation of migrants to escape the poverty of a place like Guatemala, having lived there for two years in the middle 90s. But until this book, I had not felt full empathy for the bleak situation of my many
fellow citizens here in America. I had been telling myself the also-true narrative that migrants come here often for jobs in farm work that most US citizens won't do, and that many of these migrants are shamefully exploited as a permanent underclass of cheap labor, constantly in fear of being deported, under Trump more than ever before. But there is another underdog that also needs my support and respect: these US citizens who were left behind by a globalizing economy. Instead of showing true concern and care, our political elites are guilty of treating these people condescendingly. Many white males without college degrees have simply stopped trying to find the employment that they've lost. Imagine being told by condescending social elites that the solution is to just learn new life skills, and "The more you learn, the more you can earn." Previous to 2016, the states that went for Trump had been suffering increasing rates of "deaths by despair" -- alcoholism, drugs, suicide.
I've always believed that all honest work is dignified, and I was particularly touched by a story of Martin Luther King Jr speaking to a group of sanitation workers (garbage men) and telling them that their work is as valuable to society as that of doctors, because without the work they do we would all be living in filth and disease. American society needs to do some thinking about whether the only goal of a free market should be money and ever increasing profits at the expense of wellbeing. We need to come back to a vision of work that offers dignity and respect for the contributions made by all members of our societies.
I really hope some of the elites pick up this book and are taught the empathy that I gained from it. We need to get the conversation moving forward, bring all participants to the table and perhaps after discarding our meritocratic hubris we can rediscover our shared humanity in the process.
An informative read on how merit as a status hurts us and society writ large.
And my final review of 2020. This is a welcome contrast to Jonathan Sacks's pretty terrible [b:Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times|50623466|Morality Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times|Jonathan Sacks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585200023l/50623466._SY75_.jpg|75623786]. Sandel also tries to offer an explanation for what happened to the idea of "the common good". Both books were written before coronavirus which just made them even more relevant. Of course, any real world problem like the collapse of the common good isn't going to have a single, simple explanation like "it's morality, duh" or "it's meritocracy, duh".
That said, Sandel makes a fairly strong case that meritocracy run amok carries at least a fair amount of the blame and, in general, makes a more compelling case for his answer than Sacks did for his.
Sandel ranges widely but his core argument is:
Sandel traces the rise of modern meritocratic beliefs touching on the history of Protestantism ("The Protestant Reformation was born as an argument against merit") through the Prosperity Gospel; American Exceptionalism ("If the wealthy and powerful countries owe their might to their virtue, can't the same be said of wealthy and powerful citizens?); and the market reforms of Thatcher and Reagan (eagerly adopted by the political opponents who succeeded them).
All of these culminate in what Sandel calls the "rhetoric of rising", exemplified in much of Obama's public speeches. The idea that you'll go as far as your talents will take you. That you'll get what you deserve.
Sandel questions the very foundations of meritocracy -- Does we deserve our talents? Does effort make us worthy? Recurring again and again is Sandel's contention that meritocracy itself results in toxic beliefs about the winners and losers.
But he saves his most trenchant criticisms for higher education (he is a long-time professor at Harvard University) and the credentialism it has spawned.
After reading Sandel's book it is hard not to come away with a despairing sense of inevitability about the tyranny of meritocracy. As he points out Protestantism was explicitly created to rebut meritocracy and it didn't take very long at all for meritocracy to co-opt Protestantism. "Psychologically, it is hard to bear the notion that God will take no notice of faithful work that increases his glory."
And if is difficult to maintain grace and humility within the context of a religion, how much harder is it in our materialist, consumerist world?
If our talents are gifts for which we are indebted—whether to the genetic lottery or to God—then it is a mistake and a conceit to assume we deserve the benefits that flow from them.
That said, Sandel makes a fairly strong case that meritocracy run amok carries at least a fair amount of the blame and, in general, makes a more compelling case for his answer than Sacks did for his.
Sandel ranges widely but his core argument is:
The more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault. This logic makes meritocracy corrosive of commonality.
Sandel traces the rise of modern meritocratic beliefs touching on the history of Protestantism ("The Protestant Reformation was born as an argument against merit") through the Prosperity Gospel; American Exceptionalism ("If the wealthy and powerful countries owe their might to their virtue, can't the same be said of wealthy and powerful citizens?); and the market reforms of Thatcher and Reagan (eagerly adopted by the political opponents who succeeded them).
All of these culminate in what Sandel calls the "rhetoric of rising", exemplified in much of Obama's public speeches. The idea that you'll go as far as your talents will take you. That you'll get what you deserve.
John F. Kennedy never used the term “you deserve.” That changed with Reagan, who used “you deserve” more often than his five predecessors combined. [...] After Reagan, “you deserve” became a non-partisan fixture of presidential discourse. Clinton used it twice as often as Reagan; Obama, three times as often
Sandel questions the very foundations of meritocracy -- Does we deserve our talents? Does effort make us worthy? Recurring again and again is Sandel's contention that meritocracy itself results in toxic beliefs about the winners and losers.
If, in a feudal society, you were born into serfdom, your life would be hard, but you would not be burdened by the thought that you were responsible for your subordinate position.
But he saves his most trenchant criticisms for higher education (he is a long-time professor at Harvard University) and the credentialism it has spawned.
In 1979, 41 percent of Labour MPs were elected to Parliament without having received a university degree; by 2017, only 16 percent managed to do so.
[...]
In 1979, 37 percent of Labour MPs came from a manual occupation background. By 2015, only 7 percent did.
[...]
Among cabinet members in these countries, the educational credentials are even higher. In Angela Merkel’s 2013 cabinet, for example, nine of the fifteen ministers had PhDs, and all but one of the others had master’s degrees.
[...]
There is no reason to suppose that aspiring nurses and plumbers are less suited to the art of democratic argument than aspiring management consultants.
After reading Sandel's book it is hard not to come away with a despairing sense of inevitability about the tyranny of meritocracy. As he points out Protestantism was explicitly created to rebut meritocracy and it didn't take very long at all for meritocracy to co-opt Protestantism. "Psychologically, it is hard to bear the notion that God will take no notice of faithful work that increases his glory."
And if is difficult to maintain grace and humility within the context of a religion, how much harder is it in our materialist, consumerist world?
“Meritocracy” was born as a term of abuse but became a term of praise and aspiration.
An eye-opening book to people benefiting from meritocracy including myself.
Are we really autonomous subjects or just statistics? By the latter I mean we have started to capitalise on all these summa cum laude, all these first-class degrees, all these grand images propel us to hoard socio-cultural capital, which have inadvertently overridden who we are as empathetic individuals. What’s to gain in an everlasting rat race? Is it alright if we’re no longer yoked to the ground? Have we mechanised ourselves in order to pursue some lifetime end goals, endlessly deferring our desires? Have we confounded our achievements with the raison d’être of our being? As of do we actually possess the latter, I do not know and do not wish to know. Why do I still yearn for an Ivy League stamp of approval? I do not know and do not wish to know.
Finished this on 6 August but written on 11 Sep at airport.
Finished this on 6 August but written on 11 Sep at airport.
In general, Sandel's book is a powerful examination of the ways merit and the U.S. (and world at large) purports to be a meritocracy. It's a damning critique in where the concept of merit and meritocracy come from (a mixture of Horatio Alger and also a satire by Michael Young in the mid-20th century). The crux of his argument is that any society that invokes the ideas of meritocracy means that any time people do not succeed, the inevitable message is that they did not try hard enough and that is why they themselves are failures. That message has a crippling effect on people because it is often not true and ignores the fact that a capitalist system such as ours is structured on the inequality of resources and advancement. To unquestioningly present merit as the centerstone of society has contributed to much of the division and political anger in recent populist movements (on the left and the right).
Sandel's explanation of the limits and problems of merit and meritocracy is important for many to realize and valuable for the most successful people to remember as they consider their choices and their understanding of other people's choices. However, Sandel flounders a bit in my view in that while discussing the ways the merit-discourse exists in modern culture is the "real" reason for the rise of Trump and the extremist and marginalizing behavior by many of his followers. While elites (though he never really defines this) and higher education (and the structures that over-value it compared to other post-secondary training) are problems, Sandel gives too much credence to them and barely anything to the roles that media, particularly right-wing media have also pushed anti-intellectual agendas for decades and the lingering effect that has. This limitation comes through in Sandel's work by his repeated mentions of how Trump won the 2016 election, confusing the election outcome with the actual number of votes that Trump did get (fewer than Clinton, and much less when considering the entire voting population--that's less than 1/4 of the US citizenry). He also fails to acknowledge how the left has also worked to undermine meritocracy with the idea but rather blames them for failing to care or invest in dismantling ideas of meritocracy. For example, he ignores the push for liveable wages such as the advancement of $15 an hour as a minimum wage. In that way, his argument feels limited in terms of how he applies political analysis without genuine consideration of media analysis. However, the book should still be read and considered by many.
Sandel's explanation of the limits and problems of merit and meritocracy is important for many to realize and valuable for the most successful people to remember as they consider their choices and their understanding of other people's choices. However, Sandel flounders a bit in my view in that while discussing the ways the merit-discourse exists in modern culture is the "real" reason for the rise of Trump and the extremist and marginalizing behavior by many of his followers. While elites (though he never really defines this) and higher education (and the structures that over-value it compared to other post-secondary training) are problems, Sandel gives too much credence to them and barely anything to the roles that media, particularly right-wing media have also pushed anti-intellectual agendas for decades and the lingering effect that has. This limitation comes through in Sandel's work by his repeated mentions of how Trump won the 2016 election, confusing the election outcome with the actual number of votes that Trump did get (fewer than Clinton, and much less when considering the entire voting population--that's less than 1/4 of the US citizenry). He also fails to acknowledge how the left has also worked to undermine meritocracy with the idea but rather blames them for failing to care or invest in dismantling ideas of meritocracy. For example, he ignores the push for liveable wages such as the advancement of $15 an hour as a minimum wage. In that way, his argument feels limited in terms of how he applies political analysis without genuine consideration of media analysis. However, the book should still be read and considered by many.
informative
reflective
medium-paced