We have always been told to believe that a good education and job are the products of personal effort and skills, and they are, therefore, meritoriously deserved. In recent books, though, this view has come under a withering critique on the premise that merit, education, and privileged occupations are now perceived through the lenses of a new ethic that has opened a dangerous gap between those who claim to have all three and those who allegedly lack them.
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good by Michael Sandel offers an insightful exploration of the new meritocratic ethic and its social and political spillovers. Sandel argues that over the past forty years successful people have distanced themselves from those in the lower socioeconomic rungs by convincing themselves that their success is solely due to superior personal responsibility and merit. Thus, they have drawn a thick and bright line that connects success to merit ignoring the role of luck, inborn talents, family entitlements, and other factors that lie outside their control. The new meritocratic ethic is dominated by a hubris that says “I deserve my success” and the more damning view “failure is on you.”
Among professional classes, this meritocratic ethic goes along with the view that education, college education in particular, signifies a lot about one’s station in life, not only in terms of financial success but also in terms of social status and contribution to the common good. Thus, a good education has become an indispensable ingredient of dignified work and informed opinion.
These views, however, have not played well at all with the majority of working-class people, two thirds of whom have no college degree and a majority are occupied in blue-collar jobs. The message “you get what you deserve” has become so powerful that although working people strongly resent it, they have also bought into it, as surveys show. They resent it because they have seen how their lives have been appended as jobs moved oversees and how little attention their displacement has attracted from politicians and administrations. They also feel their blue-color work and lesser education are looked down upon by educated elites. They cling, however, to the American dream that with personal effort all is possible.
What Sandel finds inconsistent with American history is that the Puritan (or Calvinist) belief that salvation comes from God’s grace and not necessarily from personal moral success (i.e., merit) has been replaced by a new message (primarily linked to the prosperity gospel movement) that has tied success to goodness and from there to salvation. As a result, both, religious belief and secular ethic consider merit to be the precondition for heavenly salvation or financial success.
Sandel writes that conservatives and liberals have failed to respond to the grievances of ordinary working people. Conservatives are unwilling to provide a better safety net on the premise this demeans the willingness and ability of working people to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. Liberals, on their part, while they recognize the value of distributive justice, that is, a fairer distribution of economic outcomes, like the conservatives, they fail to deliver contributive justice, that is, to convincingly articulate the idea that all work contributes to the common good, irrespective of its monetary reward or content.
A culture that ignores the contributive value of work is what we find on the dark side of the division of labor. While division of labor is an efficient arrangement, it unavoidably relegates people to different jobs that depending on the times and society’s priorities and biases may confer unequal payoffs and social esteem. Emile Durkheim, founder of modern sociology, saw that danger when he argued that the division of labor can be a source of social solidarity, provided everyone’s contribution is remunerated according to its real value for the community, that is, its contributive value.
The classical economists were keen to recognize two kinds of value: exchange value and use value. The former was the market price a good, including labor, fetches in the market. Use value is the intrinsic worth of a good. In the case of labor, its use value is Sandel’s contributive value. Unfortunately, exchange value and use value rarely coincide. We saw this in the darkest days of the pandemic. The only work that mattered was that of doctors, nurses, hospital aides, ambulance drivers, delivery persons, food store clerks. Except for doctors, the rest were workers of modest salaries. In ordinary times, other occupations, from education to caregiving and public safety to manufacturing and science, provide us with essential services. But think how their exchange value compares to that of executives and experts in business, finance, and the tech industry. And why are professionals, whose only job is to help wealthy people minimize or evade their taxes, so much better compensated than essential workers?
A self-serving industry of consultants and celebrity agents assiduously promote the talents of their clients and why they deserve their high remuneration. Educated elites from top universities have convinced us that only their cohorts should represent us in corporate boardrooms, the Congress and government, and top courts. That was not always so. FDR’s administration had citizens with humble credentials who excelled, and Truman never finished college. Sandel calls this the worship of credentialism that also raises a divide between the well- and less-educated citizens. The irony is that over the last forty years the US has stumbled from one economic or foreign policy crisis to another while it has been run by these highly credentialed people.
The divide between the professionally successful and well-educated people and those of the lower income and educational rungs has shaken social cohesion in many countries beyond the US shores. The challenge of those at the top is to carry success without hubris and not let it be the yardstick for measuring work dignity. Also, by recognizing that the true value of work is not reflected only in its market value. Even better, societies will be served well if their priorities align with the true contribution different jobs make to the common good.
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