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alexisrt's review
4.0
In the US today our ruling philosophy is that of merit: that you get what you deserve, and if you get it, you deserve it. This is eroded around the edges by critiques of how the playing field isn't level, but many of these critiques don't take aim at the concept itself: they simply seek to make it fairer.
Harvard professor Sandel takes well deserved aim at this. Merit as a sorting criterion has pernicious effects: those who don't succeed believe that they got what they deserved, while those who do have an inflated sense of their own worth. It also leads to an overly technocratic view of government, led by a small elite, and ratchets up the prestige of a small number of institutions--he's fairly scathing about college admissions.
That said, there are some flaws with the work. First, perhaps because he takes it that this book is going to be read by the very elites he criticizes, his work as it relates to contemporary politics is somewhat imbalanced. He excoriates Clinton and Obama for their liberal elitism, but is relatively silent about how the right manipulates this idea, and his views on how meritocracy drives Trump voters fails to take sufficient account of race and gender. The chapter on the dignity of work fails to go far enough: it relates entirely to paid labor and the working class, while ignoring how we tie moral value to paid labor. It would have been much more effective to explore how we differentiate between paid and unpaid labor and devalue the worth of people who are outside the paid labor force, such as the disabled and caregivers.
Harvard professor Sandel takes well deserved aim at this. Merit as a sorting criterion has pernicious effects: those who don't succeed believe that they got what they deserved, while those who do have an inflated sense of their own worth. It also leads to an overly technocratic view of government, led by a small elite, and ratchets up the prestige of a small number of institutions--he's fairly scathing about college admissions.
That said, there are some flaws with the work. First, perhaps because he takes it that this book is going to be read by the very elites he criticizes, his work as it relates to contemporary politics is somewhat imbalanced. He excoriates Clinton and Obama for their liberal elitism, but is relatively silent about how the right manipulates this idea, and his views on how meritocracy drives Trump voters fails to take sufficient account of race and gender. The chapter on the dignity of work fails to go far enough: it relates entirely to paid labor and the working class, while ignoring how we tie moral value to paid labor. It would have been much more effective to explore how we differentiate between paid and unpaid labor and devalue the worth of people who are outside the paid labor force, such as the disabled and caregivers.