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chonglar 's review for:
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
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.