The Joe Walker Podcast - The Tyranny Of Merit — Michael Sandel

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, where he is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Theory. His course “Justice” is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television and has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/michael-sandelSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Swagman and Swagettes, before I throw to the episode, I'd like to give a quick shout out to my friend Susie Jamil and a series of events she's running in August. Susie is an incredible Australian entrepreneur who runs an intellectual events company called Think Inc. Think Inc. tours world famous speakers and intellectuals and facilitates thoughtful conversations live on stage followed by audience interaction. I went to my first Think Inc. event before I knew Susie. In 2016, I saw physicist Brian Green live at Luna Park in Sydney. Think Inc also has the best logo of any company I know. Go to their website to see what I mean. Now, as a live events company, Think Inc was going to be an obvious casualty of the pandemic, but not on Susie's watch. It's been truly inspiring to watch how she pivoted and managed her business through the

pandemic. She became, to borrow from Ben Horowitz, a wartime CEO, and she succeeded. I'm not getting paid for this shout out, but in August, Think Inc. is, knock on wood with fingers crossed, returning to the stage, and I'd love to see the tour bring their live events business roaring back to life. So what exactly is happening in August? Well, in August, Think Inc. is touring Peter Singer, the world's most influential living moral philosopher. Another fun fact, the last live event Peter did was, I believe, for the Jolly Swagman podcast in Melbourne before the pandemic. With Think Inc., he'll be returning to the stage with live events in Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, as well as a virtual event so you can attend from the comfort of your own home. I'll be attending the Sydney show,

so perhaps the swag people can catch up for a beer in Enmore before or after the event. Head to thinkinc.org to get your tickets and to check out Think Inc's awesome logo. It's a visual pun, and puns may be the lowest form of wit, but buns are the lowest form of wheat. That's thinkinc.org. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Friends, welcome back to the show. A short introduction to this episode. You might be wondering how the idea of merit could ever be described as tyrannical.

After all, the moral arc of history has bent towards merit. Generations of activists, dissidents, legislators, philosophers, cronyism and discrimination, and live in a world where, given enough brains and elbow grease, anybody can make good. Sure, you may never be the next Roger Federer, but at least you can afford, if you try, front row tickets to see him play on Wimbledon Centre Court. Now, to be sure, we have a way to go before the proverbial playing field is as flat as Centre Court, but no one disagrees with our destination. We want meritocracy. And yet meritocracy has a dark side, a dark side thrown into starkest relief by the rise of populism and by the deaths of despair phenomenon unfolding in parts of the West, most notably unfolding in meritocracy's poster country, America.

But isn't the solution to these ills just more meritocracy's poster country, America. But isn't the solution to these ills just more meritocracy? My guest is here to convince you of an alternative way of thinking. Michael Sandel is the Antean Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Theory at Harvard University. His famed Justice Course was the university's first course to be made freely available online and on television, and has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world. Michael is the author of numerous best-selling books, including most recently, The Tyranny of Merit, from which this episode takes its title. Without much further ado, please enjoy my conversation with the great Michael Sandel. Michael Sandel, welcome to the Jolly Swagman podcast.

Good to be with you, Job. Michael, I'm so honoured to have you on the show. You're such a voice of decency and moral clarity, and I think you have really important things to say at this moment, so welcome. Thanks so much. I want to take you back, Michael, to the height of the Vietnam War. You were 18 years old in your senior year at high school, and like I was, a plucky high school debater. And you sent a letter

to the then governor of California, who happened to live in the same district as your high school, challenging him to a debate. And that governor was Ronald Reagan, how did he respond and what happened? At first he didn't respond at all. But then my mother read in a magazine that he loved jelly beans. So I bought six pounds of jelly beans, put them in a package with a red bow, along with an invitation, and took it to his house and delivered it. There were guards outside. He was the subject of protests during the Vietnam War.

They looked warily at this large square package. They asked, what's in it? I said, jelly beans. They examined it closely and let me take it to the door in the end. Someone took it and a few days later he accepted. And he came and spoke at our school and engaged me in this exchange. And who won the exchange? Well, I should tell you, Joe, I was a high school debater, full of confidence.

It was an almost universally left-leaning student body. There were about 2,400 of us. And I thought it would be easy work to dismantle Ronald Reagan's arguments. He was for the Vietnam War. We were against it. He was against Social Security. We were for it. And he was against the 18-year-old vote, which was then about to be decided. Needless to say, we were for that. And yet, as I went through my list of very tough, probing questions, he responded to them with ease. He didn't change his view. He didn't change our minds, but he showed a kind of respect and genial humor that I found disarming, and so did the students. Then came the questions from the students after I had at him, and the hour ended, and off he went, and we weren't quite sure

what had happened. I can't say I really laid a glove on him. He didn't change our minds, but he impressed us in ways that, this was 1971, nine years later, would enable him to be elected President of the United States, despite holding more conservative views than most voters. Have you done many public debates throughout your life? And have you ever changed an adversary's mind in or as a result of a performance in a public debate? I have done quite a few public debates. I don't know that I've changed the mind of the adversary, as you describe them, or of the interlocutor. But I have had experience, the experience of engaging in a debate and changing the minds of onlookers or of participants, if not the debating opponent.

And usually that comes not by arguing vociferously or shouting, but instead by drawing out the full implications of the position of one's interlocutor. And that can sometimes lead those who initially agreed to, well, at least to reflect. I think debate can do that. Philosophy is not really about winning arguments. It's about reflecting critically on assumptions. And I think that's how political persuasion at its best works, by reflecting critically on the assumptions that underlie our political views. What's the best example of that in recent history, of political persuasion done right? That's a good question. I would say, well, the most recent example, I think, is the changing of the public mind within a relatively short period of time on the question of same-sex marriage. If you think back during the Obama presidency, it would have been unthinkable

in the early years of the Obama presidency for him even to have come out in support of same-sex marriage. He was against it when he was elected in 2008. And yet by the end of the Obama presidency, most liberals and progressives, at least in the United States, and a great many people in the center supported it. And so I think there was quite a dramatic changing of the public mind on same-sex marriage within a relatively short period of time. That's the most recent example I can think of, of a dramatic turning of the public mind. Yeah, I remember hearing the news of the legalization of same-sex marriage in America and thinking, oh, geez, where did that come from? I think you guys legalized before we did. After high school, you studied at Brandeis University and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where you were a Rhodes Scholar. You're now,

of course, a famous or world-famous Harvard professor. Can you think of pivotal moments, hinges in your life where you were the beneficiary of luck? Yes. Well, I think you mentioned that after college, I went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. I think that was a moment of luck. I hadn't even thought or planned or prepared to apply for a Rhodes scholarship. When I was in college, I didn't know what I wanted to do. When I grew up, I thought, well, I loved politics and journalism. I thought maybe I would go into political journalism, maybe enter politics, possibly law, maybe academia. But that was in fourth place, I think. And then a professor of mine suggested I apply for this scholarship, which I did really at the last minute, on the spur of the moment. I went in for the interview and hadn't prepared, didn't really know what to expect.

And lo and behold, the committees that I met with were congenial, and it all worked out. And going off to Oxford, I thought I would study a philosophy for a term just to fill in my background so I could go back to concrete things, politics and economics, which had interested me. And one term didn't prove to be quite enough, so I took a second term. And before I knew it, I was hooked by philosophy and wound up studying there for four years, studying philosophy and writing a dissertation and then going into academia. So this was not a well-planned, deliberate journey, but it kind of emerged. There was a great deal of luck in who advised me, who directed me,

who was on this or that committee that gave me opportunities. The teachers I was lucky enough to encounter at Oxford. And then for that matter, the job interview that got me the post at Harvard as a 1980, as a young beginning professor. I think there was luck at every step along the way. Different membership of any of those committees could have landed me back in political journalism, I suppose. I'd like to quote Peter Thiel, first outside investor in Facebook, founder of PayPal and Palantir. Peter has said that, as a society, we attribute too much to luck. Luck is like an

atheistic word for God. We ascribe things to it that we don't, we attribute too much to luck. Luck is like an atheistic word for God. We ascribe things to it that we don't understand or don't want to understand, end quote. Do you agree with Peter that we attribute too much to luck? No, I think in general, we attribute too little to luck. In fact, that's one of the main arguments of my new book, The Tyranny of Merit. The idea is that merit has become a kind of tyranny because in recent decades especially, the successful have come to believe that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, the product of their effort and hard work, and by implication, that those who struggle have no one to blame but themselves.

Now, there is something appealing about assuming that we are the masters of our fate, that we control our destiny, that everything we achieve is the result of our own doing. But this misses the role of luck and good fortune that help us on our way. not only to accident and circumstance and the contingencies of life, but our indebtedness to those who make our achievements possible. Family and teachers and friends and community and the country in which we live, for that matter, the times in which we live. There's all sorts of luck woven through these circumstances, unpredictable, unforeseeable circumstances of life. And I think part of the problem politically is that the divide between winners and losers has deepened in part because those who've landed on top have come to believe that their success is their own doing.

And to look down on those less fortunate than themselves, saying it's their fault. They've fallen short. They haven't tried. They lack talent. I think a greater appreciation of the role of luck in life can prompt a certain humility. And I think humility is one of the civic virtues missing these days. It's in terribly short supply. The humility that can come when we reflect on our circumstance, on our success, in our achievement, if we've been fortunate, and see that it isn't all our own doing, that our fate is not entirely in our achievement, if we've been fortunate, and see that it isn't all our own doing, that our fate is not entirely in our hands, and therefore we should be a little chastened by the chance and contingency of life, and recognize our obligation, especially those of

us who are fortunate, our obligations to look after those less fortunate than ourselves. So for these reasons, Joe, I think luck plays, we pay too little attention to luck, not too much. The belief that my success is my own doing, I call that a kind of meritocratic hubris. And meritocratic hubris, in a way, forgets the luck and good fortune that help us on our way. It forgets our indebtedness. And so part of what I'm arguing for in the tyranny of merit is rethinking the meritocratic hubris, the lack of humility that comes with thinking that everything I've achieved,

I've done for myself. And this idea that we are self-made and self-sufficient is, I think, a debilitating way of thinking about success that's ultimately corrosive of solidarity and the common good. So merit is good, but meritocracy has gone toxic in practice. I want to dwell on meritocracy in principle for a moment. What is justice and would a perfect meritocracy be just? It's tempting to assume, and we often do assume, that if only we could have a perfect meritocracy be just? It's tempting to assume, and we often do assume, that if only we could have a perfect meritocracy, then we would have a just society. The idea is attractive at first glance because we fall short of the meritocratic principles we profess. Chances are not truly equal.

So it's tempting to think, if only we could give everyone an equal chance, enable everyone to start the race of life at the same starting line, then we could say that the winners deserve their winnings, that winning is a true measure of one's merit and talent. But even a perfect meritocracy would fall short of being a just society for the following

reason. Suppose we succeeded in bringing everyone up to the same starting point in the race. And suppose we provided everyone with good running shoes and a good diet and good coaching and good training. Perfectly equal opportunity. Who would win that race? The fastest runners would win. Usain Bolt, the great sprinter, gold medal sprinter, would win due to talents, due to gifts. But can we really say that our talents are our own doing? Yes, Usain Bolt practices hard. He's a brilliant sprinter. But his training partner, who's not quite as gifted as he, works even harder by his own admission. Usain Bolt says

that his training partner, his friend, practices works harder than he. But we still say Usain Bolt should get the gold. And yet, if winning the gold, if winning the race depends on talents that we ourselves have received as gifts rather than made, then it's hard to say we morally deserve all the rewards that a market society heaps upon the winners, heaps upon the successful. So this is the first flaw with the meritocratic ideal, even if we could achieve it. It wrongly attributes moral dessert to the winners, even though their winning depends on talents and gifts for which they can claim no credit. What do you make of that, Joe? Do you find that persuasive? I do. I do. I've sort of always found that persuasive and I've always been acutely aware of the role that luck plays in our lives.

It's less clear to me what you do with that fact, but perhaps we can talk about that a little later in the conversation. I would like to talk about meritocracy in practice. And as you know, in a short book published in 1958, Michael Young, the same Michael Young who drafted British Labor's 1945 manifesto, coined the term meritocracy.

But the book was a satire in which meritocracy was a dystopia. Yet despite this, people ignored the message and began to imbue the word meritocracy with positive connotations. One of those people was no less than Tony Blair. And I'd like to read six quick quotes from Tony Blair and then one quick quote from Michael Young. So here's Tony Blair in 1995. We are light years from being a true meritocracy.

1997, I want a society based on meritocracy. Later in 1997, the Britain of the elite is over. The new Britain is a meritocracy. 1999, the old establishment is being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class. Later in 1999, the meritocracy is built on the potential of the many, not the few. And then in the year 2000, the meritocratic society is the only one that can exploit its economic potential for the full of all its people. And then here was Michael Young, the original coiner of the word, in an op-ed in The Guardian in 2001. I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found

a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair. The book was a satire meant to be a warning, which needless to say has not been heeded, against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033, end quote. Now, Michael, I assume Mr. Blair never read the book, and it's not the first time a satire has been taken literally. I live in Australia where Donald Horn's derisive nickname, The Lucky Country, has been inverted into a self-compliment. But what was it about meritocracy positively defined that so appealed to New Labour, a party whose previous incarnation was inextricably bound up with the working class? There were a couple of sources of

the appeal of meritocracy, especially in Britain. The first is it offered an alternative to the rigid class-bound system, where hierarchies were fixed essentially based on the accident of birth, and where the children of the working class didn't have a chance to go to the best schools and to compete to enter the best universities and to get the kinds of jobs and opportunities that flowed from that. So if the alternative to meritocracy is aristocracy with fixed heredities based on birth and rigidities of class will, of course, by that contrast, if that's the only alternative, meritocracy seems liberating, seems democratic by contrast. And I think that was Tony Blair was still playing upon that contrast. But of course, Michael Young was well aware. He was writing in the late 1950s at a time when the class system was beginning to break down in post-war Britain, and he welcomed the dismantling of the rigid class system and its hierarchies,

but he glimpsed that meritocracy had a dark side. Now, there is a second part of the, before we get to the dark side, there's a second source of the appeal of the kind of meritocracy Tony Blair was advocating, and that is that it seems to attribute to each individual a kind of mastery over our fate, over our circumstance, that we are self-made and self-sufficient individual moral agents and human beings, that we are

masters of our fate, that we can go, that we can rise as far as our talents and efforts will take us. In fact, this phrase was used time and again by politicians in the U.S., in Britain, and elsewhere, especially during the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s. Everyone is free to rise as far as their talents and effort will take them. So there is something liberating in this. So then what is the dark side? Well, in the tyranny of merit, I argued that the dark side of meritocracy is that it's corrosive of the common good. And the reason it's corrosive of the common good is that it leads to meritocratic hubris among the successful, by which I mean the tendency of the successful to inhale too deeply of their own success. And it also leads to demoralization, even humiliation, among those who fall short. Michael Young pointed out that in an aristocratic society, those at the top couldn't really

believe, though they might try, that they had earned their place. They were born into it. And those at the bottom, the peasant classes, or later the working classes, didn't really believe that they landed at the bottom because they were less capable and worked less hard than the landlords, let's say, or the factory owners, they knew the system was rigged. They knew they were unlucky, not simply lacking in talent or intelligence or in the ability to work. Whereas in a perfect meritocracy, this was Michael Young's great insight, the truer the equality of opportunity, the greater the tendency of the winners to believe they've earned it. By dint of my hard work, I've achieved it.

And by implication, the greater the tendency of those who don't rise to believe they must lack the talent and the effort to succeed. This is the dark side of meritocracy, the hubris among the winners, the demoralization among the losers. Michael Young was onto this. Part of my argument in The Tyranny of Merit, which is indebted to Michael Young, is that he was right and that the divide between winners and losers and the resentments created by the dark side of meritocracy has pulled us apart and has really opened the way for figures like Donald Trump and other authoritarian populists to tap into the resentments and grievances of those who feel looked down upon by credentialed elites, who feel that their work isn't respected.

And this is where the critique of meritocracy becomes part of a political diagnosis, where I argue that much of the appeal of figures like Trump is the ability to somehow connect with the anger and resentment that we were witnessing in America, the UK, parts of Europe. Obviously, that was the year of Brexit and the year that Trump was elected. And I remember thinking, Michael, that the new divide is now global versus national. And I remember thinking that global was good, national was bad, and that bad had won out over good. What did the Joe of 2016 miss? Well, the Joe of 2016 was right to be worried by Brexit and the election of Trump and the polarization that these events reflected. But I think it would be a mistake to see this as a contest between globalization and national identity, with globalization being on the side of the angels and national identity being a source of prejudice and xenophobia and hatred. I think it's more complicated than that, because part of what paved the way to Trump was a kind of complacent faith in a neoliberal globalization project

that meritocratic elites advanced, really for four decades. It began with figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who made the explicit argument that government is the problem, free markets are the solution. But even after they passed from the political scene and were succeeded by center-left politicians, like Tony Blair, whom we've discussed, and Bill Clinton in the U.S., these center-left politicians did not challenge the fundamental market faith. They accepted the neoliberal globalization project. They softened the harsh edges of unfettered laissez-faire, a free market ideology.

But in a way, they consolidated that market faith and they connected it with a kind of meritocratic faith. So globalization, the version of globalization they pursued, produced widening inequalities and wage stagnation for most workers. But their response to that inequality was not to contend with it directly, not to try to restructure the economy or to rethink the neoliberal policies and deregulation that had brought it about. Instead, it was to make working people the following offer. If you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to university. What you earn will depend on what you learn.

You can make it if you try. These were the political slogans and mantras of the 90s and early 2000s. Figures from across the political spectrum among mainstream politicians. So in a way, this was an embrace of a neoliberal version of globalization. It emphasized that the alternative to inequality was individual upward mobility through higher education. But there was something insulting in this offer that they didn't quite recognize.

The insult was this. If you didn't go to college, and if you're not flourishing in the new economy, your failure is your fault. You didn't get a good enough education. Now, this insult was politically damaging, especially when we remember that most people don't have a four-year university degree. The majority of people, nearly two-thirds in the U.S. don't, likewise in Britain and

in most European countries. Not sure what the figure is in Australia, but it's true that a majority do not have a four-year university degree. So it's folly to create an economy that sets as a necessary condition of dignified work and a decent life a four-year degree that most people don't have. But how does this connect with global identities as against national ones? As well-educated, credentialed, meritocratic elites in professional classes reaped the benefits of neoliberal globalization and deregulation during the 90s and 2000s,

they came to identify less with their fellow citizens within the nation and to identify more with cosmopolitan identities, professionals, well-educated, well-credentialed people like themselves who lived around the world. And so this left a great many people feeling left out, feeling excluded, feeling looked down upon, but also feeling that their sense of patriotism and national community was itself a kind of prejudice, ideally to be overcome. And so then figures like Donald Trump come along, and they speak to this hunger for national community by asserting a harsh, unforgiving kind of xenophobic nationalism, and in some cases outright racist appeals. Well, for people who feel looked down upon by elites,

by global elites, for people left behind by the neoliberal globalization project, there is an appeal. Many responded to this kind of xenophobic and in some cases racist appeal of Donald Trump and authoritarian populists. So I think to get around this, to provide an alternative, Joe, back to the Joe of 2016, progressives need to find a way to articulate a meaningful sense of community and to recognize the importance of national citizenship alongside global identities and allegiances and not leave national identity to

be defined by right-wing xenophobic authoritarian figures like Trump. Yeah, I made this point to Peter Singer in a live podcast in Melbourne at the beginning of last year before the pandemic. I made the point that a new Darwinian left, which was a reference to his book, A Darwinian Left, a new Darwinian left should embrace patriotism as opposed to nationalism. But I want to keep talking about the populist backlash for a moment, but take a quick detour through the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession. And I love the take provided by Angus Deaton and Anne Case in their book, Deaths of Despair and the Future

of Capitalism, their take on the Great Recession. Let me quote from the book. So they write, we have emphasized that the Great Recession did not bring deaths of despair in the way that the Great Depression brought epidemics of suicide in the US and Britain, but that does not mean that it did not matter. We suspect that the upsurge of populism on the right and of rage against inequality on the left have much to do with the financial crisis. Until the crash, it was possible to believe that the elites knew what they were doing, that the salaries of the CEOs and the bankers were being earned in the public interest, and that economic growth and prosperity would make up for the ugliness of the system. After the crash, when so many ordinary people lost so much,

including their jobs and their homes, the bankers continued to be rewarded and went unpunished and politicians continued to protect them. Capitalism began to look more like a racket for redistributing upward than an engine of general prosperity, end quote. The point being that the real import of the Great Recession wasn't the economic and social misery that it inflicted, although it certainly inflicted those in great measure, but it pulled back the mask of American capitalism and showed to people that this thing is rigged. And so, I guess if that was the spark that lit the populist backlash, what you're telling me is that there was this mountain of dry wood that had been building up a mountain of resentment for the previous three decades.

And so, the narrative became, you look down on us and tell us that we're worthless, and you're not even good at your jobs yourselves. Is that an accurate summation? Yes, in a word, yes, Joe. You've summed it up very well. And the passage you read from Angus Deaton and Anne Case about deaths of despair. I agree with that entirely. And I cite them in The Tyranny of Merit. Their our politics are entirely compatible, even complementary. Because the dry tinder that you're describing, that was there for the kind of incendiary events that unfolded beginning in 2016. The financial crisis, I think, was a trigger for, well, not to mix the metaphor, was a spark

that enabled this dry tinder to come ablaze given the politics of grievance that Trump was able to articulate. But he never could have succeeded had the way not been prepared for him by the financial crisis, the way the financial crisis was dealt with by mainstream politicians and the anger against elites that you aptly summarized.

I think that Deaton and Case, to some extent in their book and subsequently, have embraced this account of the way that meritocratic, the meritocratic bent of our politics has exacerbated this sense of grievance, has deepened the demoralization and despair that has led to the epidemic of deaths of despair. And what they bring out, and what I also want to emphasize, is this is not simply an economic matter. It's also a matter of social recognition and esteem. By 2016, the Democratic Party had become more oriented to the values and outlook and interests

of the well-educated professional classes than to the blue-collar voters who traditionally constituted its base. And this is a historic shift of enormous political importance. And it's not only true in the U.S. It's been true of social democratic parties and mainstream center-left parties in democracies throughout the world that they have essentially lost, they've alienated the blue-collar voters who once were their primary base. It's true of the Labour Party in Britain, the Democratic Party in the United States, the socialist parties in France, the SDP in Germany, and in many other places, center-left parties, by embracing both neoliberal globalization and a meritocratic

answer to inequality, have alienated working people and given rise to this sense of grievance that right-wing authoritarian populists exploit. Another way of putting this, Joe, is that right-wing authoritarian populism of the Trump variety is usually an indication of the failure of social democratic politics. And that, I think, is true today, especially if we look at the abdication of social democratic politics or progressive politicians, their abdication of the project of trying to rein in the excesses of capitalism and confronting inequality from the 1980s to the present. A quote from Jeremy Bentham. The community is a fictitious body composed of the individual persons

who are considered as constituting it as its members. The interest of the community then is, what is it? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. That is a quintessentially weird quotation, weird in the sense of Joe Henrik's acronym, Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich and democratic, describing the Western psychology. How is the weirdness of the technocratic elite connected with its focus, its blinkered focus on distributive justice? Well, the passage you just read about the good of the community from Jeremy Bentham highlights to my mind the defect, the emptiness of a purely utilitarian

account of the common good and for that matter of justice. But this way of thinking about the common good is simply an aggregate, a summing up of individual wants and desires and preferences, is deeply influential. And its influence has been deepened by economics. Economics is a social science, but also is a tool for governing, and especially is a tool for technocratic governance. And it's this conception,

this narrow conception of justice and of the common good that I've been arguing against for some time. And what it misses, it seems to be an expression of individual liberty. Each person should be free to pursue their wants unimpeded. That's freedom, according to this narrow conception. But what that misses is we are not free simply when we act on our desires unimpeded. That's a consumerist idea of freedom and of the common good.

We're only really free, and the ancient political philosophers, going back to Aristotle, understood this. We're only really free if we can have a meaningful say in how we are governed, and if we can have a meaningful voice in how to define our common purposes and ends. This is a civic conception of freedom and of the common good that goes beyond the summing up, the counting, the aggregative notion of the common good that you just read out from Jeremy Bentham. And so it seems to me we need, as a matter of philosophy, to recapture the civic understanding of freedom and the common good that requires that we as citizens deliberate about common purposes and ends, which may involve messy debates about competing values, but it's necessary

because it enables us to grow and to reflect and to deliberate and to engage with our fellow citizens, to reason together about the meaning of justice and of the common good and about what we owe one another as fellow citizens. A purely consumerist conception, the Benthamite utilitarian conception, lends itself to economists and experts and technocrats figuring out for us how best to seek the public good. This way of thinking underlies the market fundamentalist faith we were discussing earlier, and that came to prominence in the 1980s and that continued through the 90s and 2000s.

But part of the problem with the technocratic conception of the common good, the consumerist conception, is that it leaves us with an empty and hollow form of public discourse. Because if the big questions are to be decided by experts and technocrats and economists, then there's very little left for democratic citizens to argue about and reason about. And when a financial crisis comes along, the experts and the technocrats are very likely to lean toward shoring up the unregulated financial system that led to the crisis. This is why I think you're right, going back to your observation about 2008 being a turning point or an inflection point.

I think that's true because it brought together the effect of this technocratic way of thinking about governing. It drew upon and reinforced the disempowerment of a great many working people who were not experts or technocrats, but citizens. It reinforced the inequality that kept them down. And because of politics of the common good, a more strenuous civic idealism did not find expression. Then people looked elsewhere. And angry people looked elsewhere. And this paved the way to Donald Trump in the United States and similar figures in

many other democracies, sadly. What is contributive justice? Why does it matter? And why can't we just give the people their SOMA? Well, in the tyranny of merit, I argue that distributive justice is not enough. We need contributive justice, by which I mean everyone in a democratic society should have an opportunity to exercise their talents, to contribute to the common good, and to be recognized, to win social recognition and esteem for having done so. One of the reasons that the inequality brought about by globalization is so galling, the source of such anger and resentment, is not only that due to wage stagnation and the loss of manufacturing jobs, working people have less purchasing power. That's a problem, and it's a problem of distributive justice that needs to be remedied.

But it's not the only problem. The further problem has to do with the dignity of work, social recognition, and esteem. At a time when more and more rewards and honor and prestige are associated with managing money rather than with making and producing and performing useful goods and services, work in the traditional sense seems less valued, less appreciated by the society. And so, contributive justice is about giving people the opportunity to meet the needs of others. Another way of putting it is this. One of the most fundamental human needs is the need to be able to answer those needs and to win recognition and appreciation and respect for having done so. This is why it's not enough simply to administer Soma that could elevate people's serotonin levels or utility functions. This is why it would not be enough simply to acquiesce in the obsolescence of work, turn everything over to robots and AI,

and simply pay people a universal basic income. Some in Silicon Valley want to do that as a way of buying off opposition to the obsolescence of work they believe their robots may bring about. But even a universal basic income, even a generous one, would not be enough by itself to enable people to feel and to say and to believe that they were contributing as participants in the economy and in their societies and in their political communities, contributing to the common good and winning recognition for doing so. In many ways, the crisis we have today goes beyond a

crisis of inequality, of income and wealth, though it's certainly that. It's also a crisis of recognition and of mutual recognition. This is what I mean by contributive justice. So, Michael, you speak about renewing the dignity of work, and I'm conscious that the dignity of work is a politically charged phrase, and people will interpret it differently depending on their tribe. So, what do you mean by the dignity of work, and what would you say to people who argue that the dignity of work rhetoric is weaponized by those seeking to diminish distributive justice. It can be. It can be. For example, we hear right-wing politicians sometimes argue for cutting welfare benefits and necessary income support policies and even access to health care, arguing that these harsh measures are for the sake of encouraging the dignity of work, by which they mean forcing people to work for low wages

under hard conditions. But you're right that the rhetoric of the dignity of work has been invoked by those on the right as well as on the left. And what I mean by dignity of work, well, one powerful expression of it goes back to a political hero of mine, Robert F. Kennedy, when running for president in 1968. He put it this way. He said, fellowship, community, shared patriotism, these essential values do not come from just buying and consuming goods together. They come instead from dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that enables us to say, I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures. It's tempting to assume, we often assume, in our market-drenched societies, that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good. But this is a mistake. And by calling for a politics focused on the dignity of work,

what I'm really calling for is for democratic citizens to reclaim from markets the judgment about what contributions matter most. And this can lead to very practical, political, concrete questions. For example, why should we tax earnings from capital gains and dividends at a lower rate than we tax earnings from work.

Perhaps we should shift from taxes that fall upon labor, payroll taxes, for example, or income taxes, to financial transactions taxes. So I have in mind some concrete policies that could prompt a public debate about whose contributions really matter. During this pandemic, we've seen something revealing in this regard. Those of us with the luxury of working from home and holding meetings on Zoom have come to recognize how deeply we depend on workers we often overlook, not only those in the hospitals caring for COVID patients, I'm thinking also of delivery workers, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, home health care providers, child care workers. These are not the best paid or most honored workers in our society. But now we've been calling them essential workers.

So this could be a moment for a broader public debate about how to bring their pay and recognition into better alignment with the importance of the work they do. This would be an expression of the dignity of work as I understand it. Here's one other expression of it, Joe. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, shortly before he was assassinated, went to Memphis, Tennessee, to speak to some striking sanitation workers, garbage collectors. And what he told them was this, the person who picks up your garbage is, in the final analysis, as important as the physician. Because if he doesn't do his job, diseases are rampant. And then he added this, all labor has dignity. So this is the spirit of the dignity of work, as I understand it. You're right. The term can be appropriated

to oppose progressive policies of welfare support and health care and the like. But this is the debate we should have. Whose contributions really matter? The hedge fund manager or the nurse or the teacher or the care worker? Does the hedge fund manager really contribute 400 or 600 or 800 times the social value that a teacher does or a nurse? Most people don't think so. Well, if that's the case, shouldn't we figure out ways to reconfigure our economy and our system of reward and of social esteem to take account of the reflective judgments we would make together about what really counts as a valuable contribution to the common good. This is what I mean by the dignity of work, but also what I think would require a morally more robust kind of public

discourse than the kind to which we've become accustomed, Joe. You asked me whether I was persuaded that a perfect meritocracy would be unjust. And I said that I was, but I wasn't sure how to operationalize that. So, I'd like to finish with that. Why are equality of opportunity and equality of outcome a false dichotomy? Well, there's a third alternative. First, equality of opportunity, the idea that no one should be held back by poverty or prejudice, that's an important moral principle. But we need to recognize that it's a remedial principle. It's not a sufficient condition of a just society.

So what would be, what more do we require, would be required for a just society than equality of opportunity? Some say equality of result, by which they mean a kind of utopian, but maybe ultimately oppressive system in which everyone's income and wealth must be the same. I don't think that is the alternative to equality of opportunity. What I argue for toward the end of my book, The Tyranny of Merit, is a broad democratic equality of condition. And by this I mean creating within politics, but also within civil society and the economy, conditions where people from different walks of life can look one another in the eye, hold their head up high, and believe that they, and rightly believe, that they are respected as equal citizens and that part of the basis of that equality is that they contribute to the common life and that they share in deliberation about public purposes and ends. A broad democratic equality of condition is undermined by, its possibility is eroded by the kind of market fundamentalism and by the meritocratic

self-satisfaction that have predominated in recent decades. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that people from different social backgrounds, different walks of life, encounter one another, bump up against one another in the course of their everyday lives. Because this is how we learn to negotiate and to abide our differences. And this is how we come to care for the common good. Part of the problem in recent decades is that those who are affluent, the winners, and those who struggle to make ends meet increasingly lead separate lives.

We send our children to different schools. We live and work and shop and play in different places. So the common spaces of democratic life have been emptied out. They are no longer the class-mixing institutions that they once were. Any project of overcoming this separation, this coming apart of our societies, depends on rebuilding, I think, Joe, the civic infrastructure of a shared democratic life. And it also requires a change in attitudes, going back to the meritocratic hubris and to the role of luck with which we began.

Those who are alive to the role of luck in life, I think, are more likely to be open, especially if they're successful, more likely to be open, especially if they're successful, more likely to be open to their obligations to everyone within their society, more open to the possibility of looking at those who may struggle and saying, there, but for the accident of faith, or the luck of the draw, or the grace of God, there go I. That could have been me. And so this overcoming, rethinking our meritocratic hubris, recognizing the role of luck

and good fortune in our achievement, this I, can conduce to the kind of humility that can prompt a greater sense of mutual obligation for our shared condition. And this, in the end, is the attitude that's necessary to cultivate the broad democratic equality of condition that I think needs to supplement equality of opportunity as an ethic for a healthy democratic society. Michael Sandel, thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure, Joe. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Head to my website, thejspod.com, for show notes, transcripts, resources, and to join my mailing list.

The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our video editor is Alfetti. I'm Joe Walker. Until next time, thank you for listening. Ciao. We'll see you next time.