What to Do about Unequal Ability?

• Author: Leef, George

The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

By Michael J. Sandel

272 pp.; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

America is in the grip of a tyranny. So says Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel in his latest book. This tyranny doesn't have an individual tyrant, but instead is systemic. America's economy, controlled by politicians of both leftist and rightist orientations, has allowed merit to trample all over people who come up short in the skills that enable one to make it big in today's world. People who are fortunate enough to have what it takes to earn degrees from elite colleges can parlay their advantages into "outsize" rewards, while those who weren't so fortunate are left behind, suffering economically and emotionally in the wake of the winners.

Unequal talent I The key to Sandel's argument is that no one deserves his or her attributes. He writes about those who gain admission to top schools:

While it is true that their admission reflects dedication and hard work, it cannot really be said that it is solely their own doing. What about the parents and teachers who helped them on their way? What about talents and gifts not wholly of their making? What about the good fortune to live in a society that cultivates and rewards the talents they happen to have? These people, in short, were lucky to get their abilities and, in a well-governed polity, would have to share their good fortune with everyone else.

Luck has always been a problem for egalitarians, but Sandel claims that it has gotten much worse in America over the last 40 years. That is because, beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing through the Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, presidents have allowed two evils to run rampant: globalization and financialization. Those phenomena have, according to Sandel, allowed a tiny few with the right credentials and skills to reap prodigious rewards, while leading to stagnant wages and an "erosion of the dignity of work" for the vast majority.

Rather than governing for the benefit of the masses, our political leaders have embraced what the author calls "the rhetoric of rising." That is, they have told Americans that they too can get ahead if they go to college, where they'll get the right skills for success. Sandel correctly sees that such rhetoric gives people false hope. It's good to have a Harvard professor arguing that we have oversold higher education--a point I'll return to below.

First, however, I'd like to focus on...