Read April 2026 · 3654 words
In an unequal society, those who land on top want to believe their success is morally justified. In a meritocratic society, this means the winners must believe they have earned their success through their own talent and hard work. – page 420 ^ref-19777
The second diagnosis attributes working-class resentment to bewilderment and dislocation wrought by the rapid pace of change in an age of globalization and technology. In the new economic order, the notion of work tied to a lifelong career is over; what matters now are innovation, flexibility, entrepreneurialism, and a constant willingness to learn new skills. – page 472 ^ref-18663
The market-driven version of globalization brought growing inequality. It also devalued national identities and allegiances. As goods and capital flowed freely across national borders, those who stood astride the global economy valorized cosmopolitan identities as a progressive, enlightened alternative to the narrow, parochial ways of protectionism, tribalism, and conflict. The real political divide, they argued, was no longer left versus right but open versus closed. This implied that critics of outsourcing, free-trade agreements, and unrestricted capital flows were closed-minded rather than open-minded, tribal rather than global.1 – page 494 ^ref-9143
They need to ask why those who have not flourished in the new economy feel that the winners look down with disdain. – page 530 ^ref-12120
Central to the case for the meritocratic ethic is the idea that we do not deserve to be rewarded, or held back, based on factors beyond our control. But is having (or lacking) certain talents really our own doing? If not, it is hard to see why those who rise thanks to their talents deserve greater rewards than those who may be equally hardworking but less endowed with the gifts a market society happens to prize. – page 574 ^ref-11067
They also ignore something more politically potent: the morally unattractive attitudes the meritocratic ethic promotes, among the winners and also among the losers. Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment. These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist uprising against elites. More – page 578 ^ref-11106
our success (or the lack of it). The notion that the system rewards talent and hard work encourages the winners to consider their success their own doing, a measure of their virtue—and to look down upon those less fortunate than themselves. – page 582 ^ref-43635
Our technocratic version of meritocracy severs the link between merit and moral judgment. In the domain of the economy, it simply assumes that the common good is defined by GDP, and that the value of people’s contributions consists in the market value of the goods or services they sell. In the domain of government, it assumes that merit means technocratic expertise. This can be seen in the growing role of economists as policy advisors, the increasing reliance on market mechanisms to define and achieve the public good, and the failure of public discourse to address the large moral and civic questions that should be at the center of political debate: What should we do about rising inequality? What is the moral significance of national borders? What makes for the dignity of work? What do we owe one another as citizens? – page 639 ^ref-60502
Today, the common good is understood mainly in economic terms. – page 652 ^ref-6689
In a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), he asked what would happen if, one day, class barriers were overcome, so that everyone had a truly equal opportunity to rise based solely on his or her own merit.14 In one respect, this would be something to celebrate; the children of the working class would at last compete fairly, side by side with the children of the privileged. But it would not, Young thought, be an unmitigated triumph; for it was bound to foster hubris in the winners and humiliation among the losers. – page 664 ^ref-16383
Success is a sign of virtue. My affluence is my due. This way of thinking is empowering. It encourages people to think of themselves as responsible for their fate, not as victims of forces beyond their control. – page 155 ^ref-10024
The more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault. – page 157 ^ref-26246
The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary citizens. – page 395 ^ref-27833
When politicians reiterate a hallowed verity with mind-numbing frequency, there is reason to suspect that it is no longer true. – page 401 ^ref-39578
according to the World Bank, levels of income inequality in China are about the same as in the U.S. Moreover, China now has greater intergenerational mobility than the U.S. This means that in the U.S., the land of opportunity, how much you make is more closely tied to where you started out than it is in China.42 – page 462 ^ref-32963
In recent years, they have been invited, above all, to blame themselves for failing to acquire a college degree. One of the most galling features of meritocratic hubris is its credentialism. – page 520 ^ref-39324
One of the most ruinous examples of credentialism gone awry is described in David Halberstam’s classic book The Best and the Brightest. It shows how John F. Kennedy assembled a team with glittering credentials who, for all their technocratic brilliance, led the United States into the folly of the Vietnam War.24 – page 685 ^ref-10616
The “smart thing to do” always pointed to a prudential or self-interested reason that did not depend on moral considerations. – page 742 ^ref-53227
Defending one’s policies as smart rather than dumb is closely akin to credentialist ways of talking about people. – page 744 ^ref-11748
Elites seemed oblivious not only to the partisan character of their “smart” policies, but also to the hubristic attitudes their persistent talk of “smart” and “dumb” expressed. By – page 769 ^ref-49384
a time when racism and sexism are out of favor (discredited though not eliminated), credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice. In the United States and Europe, disdain for the poorly educated is more pronounced, or at least more readily acknowledged, than prejudice against other disfavored groups. – page 772 ^ref-25095
The researchers surveyed the attitudes of well-educated Europeans toward a range of people who are typically victims of discrimination—Muslims, people of Turkish descent living in Western Europe, people who are poor, obese, blind, and less educated. They found that the poorly educated were disliked most of all.39 – page 776 ^ref-7737
therefore the fault of those who do not make it to college. “Compared to the working class, the less-educated were perceived to be more responsible and more blameworthy, they elicited more anger, and they were liked less.”42 – page 790 ^ref-49123
It has not always been this way. Although the well-educated have always been disproportionately represented in Congress, as recently as the early 1960s about one-fourth of senators and one-fourth of members of the House were elected despite lacking a college degree. Over the past half decade, Congress has become more diverse with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender, but less diverse with regard to educational credentials and class.45 One consequence of the diploma divide is that very few members of the working class ever make it to elective office. In – page 807 ^ref-4974
fewer than 2 percent of the members of Congress worked in such jobs before their election. In state legislatures, only 3 percent come from working-class backgrounds.46 – page 813 ^ref-19511
This rising tide of credentialism was accompanied by a precipitous decline in working-class MPs, who now constitute only 4 percent of the House of Commons. The class composition of the Labour Party, which traditionally represented the working class, underwent the most dramatic change. In 1979, 37 percent of Labour MPs came from a manual occupation background. By 2015, only 7 percent did. As Oliver Heath, a British political scientist, observes, “Such changes in MPs’ occupational background have made parliament much less representative of the broader British population, and the Labour party much less representative of the working class whose interests it was traditionally supposed to represent.”48 – page 820 ^ref-9963
Aren’t highly educated leaders more likely than those with less-distinguished credentials to give us sound public policies and reasoned political discourse? No, not necessarily. Even a cursory glance at the parlous state of political discourse in Congress and in the parliaments of Europe should give us pause. Governing well requires practical wisdom and civic virtue—an ability to deliberate about the common good and to pursue it effectively. But neither of these capacities is developed very well in most universities today, even those with the highest reputations. And recent historical experience suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment, which involves moral character as well as insight, and the ability to score well on standardized tests and win admission to elite universities. The notion that “the best and the brightest” are better at governing than their less-credentialed fellow citizens is a myth born of meritocratic hubris. – page 847 ^ref-23017
Throughout much of the twentieth century, parties of the left attracted those with less education, while parties of the right attracted those with more. In the age of meritocracy, this pattern has been reversed. Today, people with more education vote for left-of-center parties, and those with less support parties of the right. The French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that this reversal has unfolded, in striking parallel, in the U.S., the U.K., and France.61 – page 892 ^ref-4769
those who lack high-powered educational credentials resent the globalization that elites promote, and turn to populist, nativist candidates, such as Trump in the United States, and Marine Le Pen, who leads a nationalist, anti-immigrant party in France.69 – page 926 ^ref-36083
Today, 59 percent of Republicans believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, and only 33 percent view higher education favorably. By contrast, Democrats overwhelming believe (67 percent to 18 percent) that colleges and universities have a positive effect.72 One of the casualties of meritocracy’s triumph may be the loss of broad public support for higher education. Once widely seen as an engine of opportunity, the university has become, at least for some, a symbol of credentialist privilege and meritocratic hubris. – page 941 ^ref-22495
Obama conceded that proponents of globalization “did not adapt quickly enough to the fact that there were people being left behind.” – page 018 ^ref-65362
The idea that we should all agree on the facts, as a pre-political baseline, and then proceed to debate our opinions and convictions, is a technocratic conceit. Political debate is often about how to identify and characterize the facts relevant to the controversy in question. Whoever succeeds in framing the facts is already a long way to winning the argument. Moynihan to the contrary, our opinions direct our perceptions; they do not arrive on the scene only after the facts are cut and dried. – page 043 ^ref-37920
The appeal of the technocratic position, but also its weakness, is its seemingly frictionless value neutrality. Talk of “smart technology” and “smart regulatory frameworks” glides over the moral and political questions that make climate change a daunting and difficult issue: What would it take to counter the outsize influence of the fossil fuel industry on democratic politics? – page 078 ^ref-38672
Facing up to the failures of meritocracy and technocracy is an indispensable step toward addressing that discontent and reimagining a politics of the common good. – page 090 ^ref-30889
meritocratic success brings a sense of achievement for having earned one’s place. From this point of view, it is better to be rich in a meritocracy than in an aristocracy. For similar reasons, being poor in a meritocracy is demoralizing. If, in a feudal society, you were born into serfdom, your life would be hard, but you would not be burdened by the thought that you were responsible for your subordinate position. – page 127 ^ref-10882
Michael Young was a British sociologist affiliated with the Labour Party. In 1958, he wrote a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy.3 For Young, meritocracy described a dystopia, not an ideal. – page 136 ^ref-54764
Allocating jobs and opportunities according to merit does not reduce inequality; it reconfigures inequality to align with ability. But this reconfiguration creates a presumption that people get what they deserve. And this presumption deepens the gap between rich and poor. Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are … no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class. They know too, that not only are they of higher caliber to start with, but that a first-class education has been built upon their native gifts.8 – page 162 ^ref-62307
How can they carry on a two-sided conversation with the lower classes when they [the elites] speak another, richer, and more exact language? – page 174 ^ref-30606
The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality. – page 243 ^ref-6112
Unless the family were abolished, children would inevitably grow up in families that varied in the advantages they afforded, and any attempt to give all children an equal prospect for success would involve intolerable state coercion. – page 315 ^ref-60690
The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases.29 – page 381 ^ref-32976
the income my talents command depends on how many other people also possess them. Having talents that happen to be scarce and yet highly prized certainly boosts my income, but it is nothing for which I can claim credit. “It is hard to see how it is more meritorious merely to be different from other people than it is to be like them.”43 – page 513 ^ref-58584
Luck egalitarians say that those who choose to take risks are responsible for their fates when their bets go badly. The community owes help only to victims of bad luck they have not courted—being struck by a meteor, for example. Those who lose a bet they have willingly made can claim no help from the winners. Ronald Dworkin makes this point with his distinction between “brute luck” (the meteor victim) and “option luck” (the losing gambler).66 – page 701 ^ref-3739
“Those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their talents will take them.” Meritocratic elites had become so accustomed to intoning this mantra that they failed to notice it was losing its capacity to inspire. Tone-deaf to the mounting resentments of those who had not shared in the bounty of globalization, they missed the mood of discontent. The populist backlash caught them by surprise. They did not see the insult implicit in the meritocratic society they were offering. – page 779 ^ref-51819
A high degree of social mobility is the essence of the American ideal of a classless society. If large numbers of young people can develop their own capacities irrespective of the economic status of their parents, then social mobility is high. If, on the other hand, the future of a young man or woman is determined almost entirely by inherited privilege or the lack of it, social mobility is nonexistent.9 – page 849 ^ref-57276
The percentage of “first generation” students (the first in their families to attend college) at Harvard today is no higher than it was in 1960. Jerome Karabel, the author of a history of admissions policies at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, concludes that “the children of the working class and the poor are about as unlikely to attend the Big Three [Harvard, Yale, and Princeton] today as they were in 1954.”35 – page 000 ^ref-43325
One of the primary arguments for a meritocracy over a hereditary aristocracy is that those who rise due to their own merits have earned their success and therefore deserve the rewards their merits bring. Meritocratic sorting is bound up with judgments about earning and deserving. These are inescapably public judgments, about whose talents and achievements are worthy of honor and recognition. – page 100 ^ref-61899
A 2009 Time magazine cover story sounded the alarm: “The Case Against Over-Parenting: Why It Is Time for Mom and Dad to Cut the Strings.” We had become “so obsessed with our kids’ success,” Time observed, “that parenting turned into a form of product development.” The drive to manage childhood now began early. “Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to ’97, and homework more than doubled.”66 – page 204 ^ref-59083
In a book entitled The Price of Privilege, Levine described what she called a “mental health epidemic among privileged youth.” Traditionally, psychologists had assumed that “at-risk” youth were disadvantaged kids in the inner city, “growing up in harsh and unforgiving circumstances.”69 – page 221 ^ref-10002
When researchers look at kids across the socioeconomic spectrum, they find that the most troubled adolescents often come from affluent homes.70 – page 227 ^ref-22664
Rather than engage in the exceedingly difficult and uncertain task of trying to predict who among them are the most surpassingly meritorious, choose the entering class by lottery. In other words, toss the folders of the qualified applicants down the stairs, pick up 2,000 of them, and leave it at that.85 This proposal does not ignore merit altogether; only those qualified are admitted. But it treats merit as a threshold qualification, not an ideal to be maximized.86 This – page 321 ^ref-1841
Setting a threshold of qualification and letting chance decide the rest would restore some sanity to the high school years, and relieve, at least to some extent, the soul-killing, résumé-stuffing, perfection-seeking experience they have become. It would also deflate meritocratic hubris, by making clear what is true in any case, that those who land on top do not make it on their own but owe their good fortune to family circumstance and native gifts that are morally akin to the luck of the draw. – page 337 ^ref-1472
If you have a bachelor’s degree, your risk of dying in middle age is only one quarter of the risk facing those without a college diploma.14 Deaths of despair account for much of this difference. People with less education have long been at greater risk than those with college degrees of dying from alcohol, drugs, or suicide. But the diploma divide in death has become increasingly stark. By 2017, men without a bachelor’s degree were three times more likely than college graduates to die deaths of despair.15 – page 560 ^ref-37068
Robert F. Kennedy, seeking his party’s nomination for president in 1968, understood this. The pain of unemployment was not simply that the jobless lacked an income but that they were deprived of the opportunity to contribute to the common good. “Unemployment means having nothing to do—which means having nothing to do with the rest of us,” he explained. “To be without work, to be without use to one’s fellow citizens, is to be in truth the Invisible Man of whom Ralph Ellison wrote.”36 – page 668 ^ref-57616
Only a political agenda that acknowledges this injury and seeks to renew the dignity of work can speak effectively to the discontent that roils our politics. Such an agenda must attend to contributive as well as distributive justice.37 – page 698 ^ref-1172
From Aristotle to the American republican tradition, from Hegel to Catholic social teaching, theories of contributive justice teach us that we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make. – page 773 ^ref-45672
As Adair Turner, chair of Britain’s Financial Services Authority, explained, “There is no clear evidence that the growth in the scale and complexity of the financial system in the rich developed world over the last 20 to 30 years has driven increased growth or stability, and it is possible for financial activity to extract rents [unjustified windfalls] from the real economy rather than to deliver economic value.”59 – page 862 ^ref-5588
All this finance has not made us more prosperous. Instead, it has deepened inequality and ushered in more financial crises, which destroy massive amounts of economic value each time they happen. Far from being a help to our economy, finance has become a hindrance. More finance isn’t increasing our economic growth—it is slowing it.65 – page 925 ^ref-26045
My proposal to replace some or all of the payroll tax with a financial transactions tax—a “sin tax,” in effect, on casino-like speculation that does not help the real economy—is intended as one way of framing such a debate. – page 934 ^ref-49147