During the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was presiding over the rape of Russia by finance types, there was a joke going around: <\/p>\n
\nEverything that they said about Communism was a LIE<\/b>.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, everything that they said about Capitalism was the Truth<\/b>. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Donald Trump hews fairly close to this.<\/p>\n
Everything he said about himself was a lie, but much of what he said about the US elites was the truth<\/a >, and this review of the book The Tyranny of Merit<\/i>, provides an interesting primer on this idea. <\/p>\n
The thesis of this book is that the “Meritocracy” sees itself as important, when it is really self-important, and that it is pervasively corrupt, where the efforts to benefit themselves are hypocritically sold as benefiting society as a whole:<\/p>\n
In examining the 2016 populist revolt that gave rise to Donald Trump and Brexit, most observers have focused on two explanations. Some say the uprising was driven by economic dislocation: Voters were angry about rising inequality and felt they were losing out because of trade. Others argue that anger with the establishment stemmed from racist discomfort with immigration, demographic change, and growing religious diversity. <\/p>\n
In his new book, the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel focuses on a third factor: elite smugness and self-dealing. To Sandel, 2016 represented a rebellion of voters lacking a college degree against a governing class that believes that its credentials, wealth, and power are the products of its merit. These leaders, Sandel argues, have condescended to blue-collar workers, \u201ceroded the dignity of work and left many feeling disrespected and disempowered.\u201d <\/p>\n
Sandel focuses primarily on the left. For three decades, he writes, leading Democrats\u2014including Bill Clinton (Yale Law \u201973), Hillary Clinton (Yale Law \u201973), and Barack Obama (Harvard Law \u201991)\u2014embodied personally, and touted rhetorically, a brand of meritocracy hopelessly oblivious to what he calls the \u201ctyranny of merit.\u201d Sometimes, this is implicit, as when Pete Buttigieg flexes on his ability to speak eight languages and his experience as a Rhodes Scholar. Other times, it\u2019s explicit. Speaking in Mumbai in 2018, Hillary Clinton bragged that she \u201cwon the places that represent two-thirds of America\u2019s gross domestic product\u201d\u2014that is, the places that had been successful in the era of globalization. This, Sandel writes, \u201cdisplayed the meritocratic hubris that contributed to her defeat.\u201d The Democratic Party \u201conce stood for farmers and working people against the privileged. Now, in a meritocratic age, its defeated standard bearer boasted that the prosperous, enlightened parts of the country had voted for her.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n
But Sandel is right to probe the dark things that can come from embracing meritocracy. Liberals have been overemphasizing their credentials and the economic success of their cosmopolitan metropolises. In doing so, they\u2019ve forgotten that these markers are not good indicators of worth. The ability to obtain post-secondary degrees, particularly from elite institutions, is at least as much a reflection of one\u2019s class and race as it is of one\u2019s deservedness. The wealth and success of more liberal places has as much to do with an unequal system that allows existing wealth to concentrate as it does with the merit of those cities. <\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n
The term meritocracy, almost universally praised today, was coined in the 1950s by the British sociologist Michael Young to describe a dystopia. In contrast to an aristocracy, where people on top know they are just lucky and people on the bottom know they are merely unfortunate, in a meritocracy a small minority of winners feel enormous pride in their accomplishments and the majority feel humiliated by their low position. Young\u2019s book predicted a revolt against meritocratic elites in 2034. \u201cIn 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule,\u201d Sandel writes. <\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n
As a result, embracing meritocracy too tightly can be politically disastrous. In 2016, some working-class people were left with \u201cthe galling sense that those who stood astride the hierarchy of merit looked down with disdain on those they considered less accomplished than themselves.\u201d The disdain was made explicit in 2016 when Hillary Clinton, speaking at fund-raisers in the Hamptons and Martha\u2019s Vineyard, labeled millions of working-class Americans as \u201cdeplorables.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n
Trump brilliantly exploited the idea that well-educated progressives looked down on those with less education (and, sometimes relatedly, those who are deeply religious). He rarely spoke of opportunity and upward mobility. A candidate \u201ckeenly alive to the politics of humiliation,\u201d Sandel says, Trump feigned respect for working-class people. \u201cl love the poorly educated,\u201d Trump famously said after one primary victory. The gambit worked. Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won college-educated voters, but Trump won voters without a college degree\u2014a larger share of the electorate\u2014by seven percentage points. <\/p>\n
Liberals, of course, tend to have policies that are far more helpful to those without college educations than do conservatives. But Democratic governments stacked with well-educated elites have little real understanding of working-class struggles, and, just like Republicans, they can cause problems for the poor. For example, the mostly Ivy League status of Obama\u2019s cabinet helped inform \u201ca Wall Street\u2013friendly response to the financial crisis,\u201d Sandel writes, one that failed to comprehend \u201cseething public anger.\u201d Instead, the too-big-to-jail philosophy seemed to exonerate well-educated Wall Street bankers who engaged in selfish behavior that did grave damage to the country. Timothy Geithner and Rahm Emanuel were happier to bail out financial executives\u2014who shared their pedigrees (and in some cases their former jobs)\u2014than they were to rescue average Americans. In other words, a belief that wealth and education equal merit helped lead to stunning inequality.
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nFrom this review, and the policy prescriptions in the book, it seems to me that they have missed the point: Many of the problems of “Meritocracy” do not come from a disdain for those less educated, though this is clearly a problem, much of it comes from the replacement of actual merit with credentialism. <\/p>\n
There is no reasons that jobs which a decade ago required nothing beyond a high-school diploma a generation (or 2) ago now require a college degree, and possibly a post graduate degree. <\/p>\n
Teachers entering schools in the 1950s needed an associated degree in education, or a bachelors in some other subject, while now all teachers need a masters degree in education. <\/p>\n
Unfortunately there has been a whole infrastructure of credentialed people doing the bullsh%$ job<\/a > of creating credentials, verifying credentials, and ranking credentials for other people. <\/p>\n
Interestingly enough it is not the US that has the most extremely credentialed society on earth, it is likely India, where credentials, they call it caste there, completely permeate their society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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