Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Sandel communicates the key concept that in our modern meritocracy, we (both the liberal and conservative mainstreams) have tightly linked personal professional/academic success to moral value and social status, which leaves the “losers” in this system not only with less money and lower status, but also with the societal judgment that their fate is their fault alone, a personal failure. Sandel spends the first half of the book in philosophical territory (which he is most comfortable with), but I found it to be of somewhat limited value. It was strange to me how much he focused on Western religious tradition and philosophy, as if it were the source of the concept of meritocracy, when it seems obvious to me that global economic forces are creating versions of meritocratic systems in places like China. Once Sandel transitions from philosophy to economics and politics, I became more engaged. However, he does not provide new insights into how people are behaving within meritocracy, referencing other’s papers but not interrogating them deeply. For example, he stereotypes Trump supporters/populists as non-college whites who have lost out economically. But the strongest Trump supporters are non-professional economically successful whites. I wish he had addressed this demographic segment specifically, because I think they (successful small business owners) exist at the intersection of “winning” the meritocracy game, yet failing to reap the social status rewards that come with academic/professional credentials. Sandel also only briefly addresses the racism and related status competition that I believe is a powerful engine for white resentment in the US. Other books have been written on this topic, but I was hoping this book would be a synthesis of these two major drivers of social status—meritocratic success and racial privilege. These are my own hopes/expectations, rather than Sandel’s goal, so my disappointment in this gap is somewhat of my own making. I did find the book engaging, and with a number of very valuable insights. His framing of meritocracy in the context of Hayek and Rawls was very helpful to my understanding. In Sandel’s telling, both Hayek and Rawls view economic success and moral desert as independent variables—our market system should not be a judge of one’s moral value to society. In Hayek’s “free-market liberalism,” economic success is strictly a measure how well individuals operate in the market system, which should be held separate from societal merit. However, redistribution of these gains on a basis of merit would require government coercion and is therefore unacceptable. In Rawls’s “egalitarian liberalism,” the disconnect between economic success and merit/justice requires redistribution of the economic gains on a basis of societal merit, according to “the difference principle,” where the gains that accrue to the talented and lucky are redistributed to the less talented/lucky. Meritocracy differs from these two worldviews in that it collapses together economic/professional success with moral desert. Mankiw describes the idealized version of meritocracy: since “each person’s income reflects the value of what he contributed to society’s production of goods and services, one might easily conclude that, under these idealized conditions, each person receives his just deserts.” The fundamental problem of meritocracy, in my interpretation of Sandel, is that he, like Hayek/Rawls/Knight, recognizes that economic market success is fundamentally a function of luck: talent, culture, and even the capacity for hard work are all things that are not truly under our control; yet in our society, this success is interpreted as just and a measure of a person’s moral value and what they deserve—so the losers in this system are implicitly unworthy members of society. Sandel spends much of the book identifying how we attempt to perfect meritocracy, yet our idealized version of meritocracy is fundamentally flawed. He describes our society’s outsized focus on educational attainment as harshly judging those who do not flourish in that system, torturing the competitors in the race, and driving the winning parents to replicate their meritocratic advantages for their children. Meritocracy has replaced aristocracy. But, according to Sandel, instead of the recognition that the aristocrat’s fortunes are a function of the luck of their birth, and not a judgment of their moral worth, in a meritocracy, one’s station is explicitly a judge of one’s worth. One’s success or failure is not about luck, but a manifestation of one’s value as a human. Sandel’s final chapter, “Recognizing Work,” is his (pretty light) policy solutions chapter. He highlights policies by others including subsidizing lower-income work (kind of like an expanded EITC, though he doesn’t say this) and replacing income taxes with a tax on financial transactions. He makes no mention of a Universal Basic Income, making the assumption (in my reading) that market-paid work is the important work to reward (as opposed to unpaid elder or child care, of which he makes to mention). I don’t disagree with the policies he mentions, but “Recognizing Work” seems to me a failure to really address the problems of meritocracy or provide a vision for how our society should adapt its culture. If you’re interested in these topics, the book is definitely worth a read. I hope his next book will be the one I really want, a deeper meditation on relative social status in America and its role as a key political driver.