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lillian1998 's review for:
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
An interesting take on meritocracy. I was familiar with the general gist of the meritocracy, but had not thought of some of the ideas in this book, nor considered how deeply entrenched in merit our society is.
Takeaways:
At some point we’ve conflated merit and morality.
- The book suggests a religious tie-in to this.
- Moral actions are rewarded, and there’s a notion of ‘fate’ or ‘karma’ wherein goodness is rewarded, so those who are not rewarded by society must be bad in some way.
The difficulty with understanding merit as one who benefits from merit is that it’s hard to attribute success to luck when there’s indeed a portion of hard work.
- I am part of the meritocracy of course, and I wouldn’t say I got here by sheer luck.
- As far as living circumstances go, I’m privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others.
- Society happens to appreciate the things i’m good at (i.e. studying and getting a good grade), so that in a sense is where the luck comes in. My parents give anything and everything for me to have an education and for me to focus solely on that education. That’s luck. I managed to work and do extracurricular activities and get half decent grades - that’s effort. So i guess ultimately it’s a combination, but no one can REALLy say they get where they are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Physics doesn’t allow that.
The meritocracy is especially rampant in higher education - it’s actually NOT currently serving as a method of social mobility.
- we kinda knew that, really.
- standardized test scores correlate to SES, as does admission into prestigious schools.
One way out of the meritocracy is to employ a ‘threshold’ method of selection, whereby all applicants that meet a minimal requirement will all be raffled for admission.
- frankly ridiculous
- this is what McMaster did for their med school admissions when the pandemic hit, and they couldn’t conduct normal MMIs, suggesting that ‘all students offered an interview were roughly equally qualified’
- as if
- The books suggests that without a threshold system, people would be less stressed, more grateful, and the burdens of the meritocracy would be lesser
- it’s quite a thing to do to take control out of peoples hands like that, and maybe i’m having a strong reaction to this idea because i’ve trended existentialist and nihilistic with philosophy and ‘leaving things up to fate’ feels really wrong.
- long story short i dont like it, but i am as deep into meritocracy as anybody can reasonably be and in general pretty successful at navigating it. so my opinions are skewed, certainly.
- and i’m not really fully able to wrap my head around this hot take
Takeaways:
At some point we’ve conflated merit and morality.
- The book suggests a religious tie-in to this.
- Moral actions are rewarded, and there’s a notion of ‘fate’ or ‘karma’ wherein goodness is rewarded, so those who are not rewarded by society must be bad in some way.
The difficulty with understanding merit as one who benefits from merit is that it’s hard to attribute success to luck when there’s indeed a portion of hard work.
- I am part of the meritocracy of course, and I wouldn’t say I got here by sheer luck.
- As far as living circumstances go, I’m privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others.
- Society happens to appreciate the things i’m good at (i.e. studying and getting a good grade), so that in a sense is where the luck comes in. My parents give anything and everything for me to have an education and for me to focus solely on that education. That’s luck. I managed to work and do extracurricular activities and get half decent grades - that’s effort. So i guess ultimately it’s a combination, but no one can REALLy say they get where they are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Physics doesn’t allow that.
The meritocracy is especially rampant in higher education - it’s actually NOT currently serving as a method of social mobility.
- we kinda knew that, really.
- standardized test scores correlate to SES, as does admission into prestigious schools.
One way out of the meritocracy is to employ a ‘threshold’ method of selection, whereby all applicants that meet a minimal requirement will all be raffled for admission.
- frankly ridiculous
- this is what McMaster did for their med school admissions when the pandemic hit, and they couldn’t conduct normal MMIs, suggesting that ‘all students offered an interview were roughly equally qualified’
- as if
- The books suggests that without a threshold system, people would be less stressed, more grateful, and the burdens of the meritocracy would be lesser
- it’s quite a thing to do to take control out of peoples hands like that, and maybe i’m having a strong reaction to this idea because i’ve trended existentialist and nihilistic with philosophy and ‘leaving things up to fate’ feels really wrong.
- long story short i dont like it, but i am as deep into meritocracy as anybody can reasonably be and in general pretty successful at navigating it. so my opinions are skewed, certainly.
- and i’m not really fully able to wrap my head around this hot take