The amount of reading, research and preparation that you put into each and every podcast is phenomenal !! Often the concepts are hard to grasp and require considerable thought. In our complex greedy, confused, angry , fractured ,society, humility is indeed something that is sadly lacking. I enjoy every episode that you produce . Thank you.
Thanks for this. I had been looking for a book that talks about the origin of this concept. Your work is always so well-rounded and greatly appreciated. Thank you.
The most important failure of American meritocracy is that so often the skills to rise especially to get to the top are skills at rent extraction, manipulation. Meritocracy is not beneficial when it's part of oligarchy, kleptocracy... The value of skills and hard work are dependent upon what ends they are directed towards. Genghis Khan had a wide variety of rare skills and he worked really hard. There is the issue of some notions of meritocracy ignoring the role of luck... genetics/epigenetics/parents/environment(physical & social). But social democratic meritocracy doesn't do so.
I would suggest examining the notion of meritocracy in a more critical light. It is a fundamentally absurd idea and should be rejected entirely. Of course we should always value skill and hard work, but that must not be done within any conception of "meritocracy." This concept unavoidably does the opposite of what it claims. It is simply not possible to value skills and hard work as a society that attempts to create some sort of rewards hierarchy based on those things. It's unavoidable that you end up valuing the rewards more than the skills and hard work.
@@colonelweird Meritocracy is opening jobs to talent rather than heredity, personal connections, bribes. But if the talent is for forms of rent-extraction like monopolization, union-busting, increasing executive pay, scamming people, ... then it is destructive. High progressive taxes on inheritance is a way of reducing an hereditary elite. Low poverty & inequality promotes social mobility and thereby less inherited status--among many other goods
Superficiallyy, these arguments are valid. Realistically, the author starts by postulating a working Meritocracy, but then complains that it wouldn't work with today's conditions. ...Duh.!
This episode was a game-changer! Michael Sandel's insights on meritocracy were eye-opening. Thanks, Philosophize This!, for another thought-provoking video!
Seems to be confusing the placement with the reward system. Of course a meritocracy would be as bad as anything else if it's winner-take-all and losers-get-scraps-if-even-THAT. The problem is winner-take-all is a straight line to corruption. duh-doy.
You can't abolish class division, at least not permanently. Even if you somehow smoothed the entire world out into a perfectly homogenous egalitarian anarcho-socialist utopia where everyone has the exact same income, some people would still eventually have the right combination of hard work, natural talent, knowing the right people, and plain old luck required to become richer and more influential than their peers, at which point a feedback loop would occur where said individuals consolidated more and more power until, assuming there aren't regulations or systems in place to prevent this, you've reinvented monarchy.
Thank you for reviewing Dr Sandel's book, it is sushi for the mind😊 Sandel raises very interesting points... Especially in regards to genetic 'therapy', whether it is ethical to do selective abortion for a fetus with significant 'life modifying' ailments and what the limits are, he leaves it blank for everybody to draw their own conclusions... But the big take away that I got was, it may be my misinterpretation, there is no perfect meritocracy and whatever modicum of meritocracy that may be in a system degenerates into credentialed elitism albeit non meritocratic.
Isn't the major flaw in meritocracy within its simplicity? Whenever a simple solution is presented, it almost always is simply wrong. But how would the people ever know any better? Other than listening to valuable podcasts 😉
Communism is not about abolishing all conflict. It is about abolishing class divisions. I think most communists would agree that even in a communist society there would still be contradictions.
Wow man Ive always been so passionate about the education system Ive always known it was so flawed and I hated that I couldnt fully prosper because of ridiculous policies and old systems. I’m so mad I didnt stand up for education when I was in high school when I knew it was bs and wanted to fix it.
Rewarding hard work is also a form of meritocracy. Without rewards, why should anyone do anything? This Sandel guy seems to have vested interest in a Nepotistic status quo. From Nepotism arrises incompetence. If frontline workers are to be genuinely valued more, they should be paid more. Clapping for the NHS doesn't help much. This video is brilliant BTW. Thanks man
The problem with the way meritocracy has been seized on by its more modern proponents is that it focusses on a single idea in a complex world. A single idea in support of that other 'singularity' - individualism. There is nothing, as far as I can see, wrong with celebrating people's contribution to collective benefit whether it be heart surgery or chatting to your neighbour who sees no one else all day. It just requires us to recalibrate what is 'good'. Education has been a particular beef of mine for a while and I would very much agree with Michael Sandel about that focus on community values. This doesn't mean (for those who fear they will be a cog in the machine) that individuals aren't important. It is vitally important that education allows us to learn about ourselves, what we're better at naturally, what's important to us and how all that relates to others. This is not to devalue parents, but they can only pass on what they know. If all they have known is poverty and exclusion that's what they'll pass on. An education that values community and your role in it and a society that rewards all contributions will produce parents that will pass on these values. It will never be perfect but we might just feel a bit happier with our lives doing our bit to bring it about. Thanks for another great episode.
You are assuming that education ends when you become an adult. It does not. Chatting to your neighbor requires no skill and therefore, no one pays for it to be done. First we'd have to define value and reward.
@@patchadams4me I agree wholeheartedly that education is a lifelong project. My point was that we need to rethink the purpose of education - particularly in the early years and orient it around developing children's sense of themselves, their own agency and their relationship to others. This is a large part of the 'value' which puts people and well-being first. The reward can be both intrinsic and extrinsic as people develop joy and contentment from achieving the value and society rewards that in the form of income. Granted this is somewhat Utopian but if we achieved this only partly it would be a huge improvement.
Still waiting for something to counter the last 50 episodes or more of left to extreme leftist leaning viewpoints. Hell i guess the entire post modernism series was of the same type, so we are way off course here when it comes to anything resembling intelligent human thought
Is the meritocracy really just forced competition over bullshit? I asked a PhD economist to explain how an automobile engine worked. He couldn't even start. But he drove a white SUV. Can consumers evaluate what they are buying beyond price and brand name?
Meritocracy is kind of a black and white term. It's meant to separate the person who believes it from others. Also, people who led very linear lives seem to embrace this. It also seems to be used frequently by business people who are destructive in business and society. The ones who say, "What? It's the cost of doing business." All while killing your grandmother in a nursing home, or displacing your neighbor through mass housing purchases, or making it hard for other people to start and run a business, leading to a decline in their town.That's why the word has bad connotations now. The actions behind the word definitely doesn't show merit.
Isn't the problem with meritocracy simply that it is automatically solidifying top positions in society for whomever is in power? If people with certain merits decide for everyone, they can decide that: 1. whatever merits and traits they already have will be held valuable, thus electing themselves into power positions 2. people close to them will be helped more to get those merits thus making meritocracy lead to nepotism and heritability of power 3. their enemies' efforts to acquire required merits will be blocked It doesn't matter what the merits required are, it could be anything measurable from education to physical power, money, fame or the ability to high jump, throw frisbees or whatever. If some merit group is allowed to have power undemocratically, they can use that power to perpetuate their positions by setting up training, testing, controls, indicators etc to favor them and their kin.
6:06 that period you are about to talk about actually starts back in 1971, and has more to do with the removal of the gold satandard that about meritocracy, but go on... 7:02 wait, we are comparing average rent to base wages? That doesnt seem like a fair comparison. Should it not be average wage to average rent? It would be just as deceptive to look at New Yorks median income and compare it to the cheapest available appartment and say "look at how affordable this city is!" 8:29 correct; government intervention often does spoil the situation of hard working people.or do we want to ignore the red tape stopping so many housing projects in their tracks; laws cheered on by NIMBYs who then complain about how "capitalism has failed the housing market" 9:32 HOLD UP. We cant say that an example of a flaw of meritocracy is that if you take a successful person and put them in an un-meritocratic society they will not do as well. The logic does not follow. A high IQ person in any era of technological development, so long as the society is meritocratic, WOULD in fact find success. Your example proves the opposite of what you are trying to say. 10:45 If this were true, we would see less government spending on social services, fewer government programs, and less charity spending. Yet all of these things have been on the rise for the same amount of time as you have talked about. We are throwing out ideas here and accepting them as true without even considering ther veracity 11:24 fair point about the shift in blame away from those with centralized control...I conceed that point for sure. 16:48 world needs more humility? Well, that I can agree with as well. 17:44 value is measured in pay; specifically the value the person who is paying holds for the service or product (with a consideration for that services availability).
Hey Stephen, I've already expressed how I admire the effort and care you put into your content, so do not take this as any criticism the points you made, but rather just as arguments from a different perspective to pose some contrast to the propositions of Sandel: The first thing I'd like to suggest is that, though your analysis of the relation between the cost of living and the progression of wages is quite accurate in terms of evidences, this divergence does not begin in the 1980s, it begins in 1973. And it begins exactly in 1973 because at this year the cabinet of president Nixon made the choice to break away from having the U.S. dollar backed on any scarce asset (like gold and silver) to allow themselves to freely inject artificially created volumes of money into the economy. Along with it, the global trend adopted by the proponents of the Modern Monetary Theory decided to enforce policies of a steady artificial rate of (positive) inflation for political gains, which are the economic roots of the disparity you mentioned and which have never been supported by any fundamentally liberal thinker (let alone any neoliberal, whatever that's supposed to mean anyaway). The second observation I'd like to put out there is that Sandel, as well as Michael Young and his predecessor Alan Fox (who wrote 'Socialist Commentary', 1956) all clearly mistake the concepts of meritocracy with technocracy. Though their dystopic technocratic view of a meritocratic hierarchy can be reasoned to represent a meritocratic system, it certainly does not encompass the whole spectrum of meritocracy (a technocracy can be argued to be a form meritocracy, but a meritocracy is not necessarily a technocracy) and I'd argue most people who truly believe there is any benefit to the concept of merit would object to a technocratic society. Just bringing this to the table to give some contrasting points of view to the topic. Anyway, I hope everything is well with you and your close ones and that the things that were going on before have past or be overcome soon! :)
The largest problem with meritocracy is who decides? By what criteria do you measure best? Nevermind the undemocratic mind your betters; it is argument for oligarchy and the stilted social order that comes with that; pulling up the rungs as you go. With a true meritocracy, golden parachutes wouldn't exist and the guillotine would be a constant reminder of the grave responsibility those deemed superior should bear (I mean if the spoils go to the best and brightest, the whip should also be there when they falter). We don't, so the whole concept is a fraud.
Is the "getting into heaven" problem similar to the Euthyphro problem? Wouldn't this ultimately make formulating a meritocratic society prima facie impossible because what the society deems worthy of merit is contingent on it's own definition of merit? Apologies for the weird wording. Thanks for the show
I wonder whether the reason people get pissed off about this podcast is that they don't realize you're trying to present these ideas in a unified, positive light as much as possible for the format -- which means critiques of these ideas get short shrift. In this one, the way you say Sandel is not one of those anti-capitalist types seems a bit suspicious, lol! Because maybe Sandel _should_ ask a few more difficult questions about capitalism? As a socialist myself, my response to Michael Sandel is probably predictable: good ideas, Prof. Sandel, but they will never work under late-stage capitalism, since our values are always going to be downstream of our material conditions (in the full marxist sense of that phrase). That makes your ideas basically just nostalgia, though they would be important to develop in a socialist system. But in any case, this seems to be very useful as a critique of the contemporary reality of our supposed meritocracy ... though I think the critiques could go a lot harder. Even on the most basic conceptual level, meritocracy is incoherent. It would have been good to dig into that. But maybe that's just not what Sandel is about.
27:55 Dear workers, your problems stem from CLASS. Bourgeois Liberalism doesn't even allow 'rationality and science' to exist in its "free market" society. Just look at the West's "Rules based order" as a perfect example. Class abolition will not end suffering, it will not end contradictions. It will only end the gross disparity between the thieving capital owners and slave workers. Abolishing class will not end suffering in the world.. but it will bring egalité closer for the workers of the world. And that's better than what the majority of the workers around the world are suffering through, currently.
Is the problem merit? Or is the problem rent? As a Georgist, I'd focus on the problem of rent before blaming it all on merit or the "merit mindset". Rent is produced by a society and belongs to that society. It takes Land, Labor, and Capital.
TL;DR: meritocracy generally allocates wealth and rewards according to one's abilities rather than one's needs. I'd like to point out however that few people would call this a necessary element for a system to call itself a meritocracy, so your title is somewhat misleading.
Has anyone ever worked for an insurance company or bank? Just because one went to school and has the extra certification doesn't mean the person deserves the job. Yes it does mean that one can do algebra and perhaps Microsoft Word, or Excel, but it doesn't necessarily make that person more deserving. Some of the smartest people I ever met worked in the Electrical field, and many of them were ex convicts who probably read more books and did more algebra in prison. Alot of the credentialed class just tow the party line better. And that is what is valuable in a so called meritocratic society.
Just because someone is from a rich family doesn't mean they don't have merit. All those rich kids went to great schools and had a lot of help in high school. They probably are better candidates for ivy league schools than their less-wealthy competition.
Sometimes I wish that water was not wet but unfortunately that is the basic condition of water. Likewise, sometimes I wish that Humans behaved differently and we had no war and no poverty and no sickness etcetera but unfortunately that is just the basic human condition. It is easy to look at our society and vilify it because some people fare better than others. If we take a closer look at the two examples of Ivy League school admittance and of Social Safety Nets we can easily see that the market is being manipulated. In the instance of school admittance, legacies are given preference and since they don't have to compete on the same level it isn't a true meritocracy. In the instance of social safety nets we can examine the difference between social assistance and social dependence, and realize that the government has removed incentives for hard work in some cases. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water by abandoning the principles that have greatly improved the human condition over the last 250 years or so because some disparities still exist in the system. There is no system with which we can eliminate disparities. In other words, we should focus on making opportunities more fair than making outcomes more fair.
I think meritocracy is good/needed if it's social democratic... evil if it's oligarghic, kleptocratic, rent-extracting... Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Article first Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good. To disagree with Sandel I don't think campaigning for the dignity of the working-class is near enough. To change thinking political & economic inequality must be much lower than today's US... more like 40s to 60s America or present day Denmark.
@@Brian-kr1pt Homogeneous doesn't equate to high social trust. As inequality is lower social trust is higher. In 1960 the US was very far from homogeneous yet high in social trust.
Our civilization? Man, that's rough. Look upon this website where access to scholarship and information of a degree which is unparalleled in history is made available to the public for free and weep. Gnash your teeth in despair at the ability for people to make a living off of their passion thanks to the interconnectedness of mass information systems allowing them to expand their reach far beyond their local environs. Truly we have fallen!
Rather than sociological philosophy, I keep gravitating toward your historical approach, that have been touched upon in your episodes that start back with #1. In the words of Vincent Lombardi, "This is a football!"
I have been stuck wondering how the society story is changed by AI especially when shortly AI is going to have the ability to do things better that most people do. Especially at first thinking tasks. How does our story change?
One thing that we should realise about social recognition in a free society: it does not depend on rational decisions or conscious reasonings by compassionate philosophers or egalitarian politicians, but on several markets: labour market, housing market, etc. One market more than any other determines the social value of individuals: the "love market". And guess what: the love market is the fairest of all markets, since it is the one that best puts losers on the bottom. When it comes to men, women, not academics, are the best judges of the value of a person. This is the one market that you do not want to tinker with, even if you are Michael Sandel, since a society in which marriages are arranged would no longer be a free society. Those who are at the bottom of this market deserve to be, and it so happens that their position is often linked to their low level of education. Whatever egalitarians say, meritocracy - that is, ultimately, the mechanism which puts people at the place that they deserve on the love market - is the fairest of all possible sources for social hierarchies. Of course, those at the bottom will protest; of course they will yell that the world is unfair to them: this is what the red pill idiots do every single second on the Internet; of course they will cause some sort of trouble whenever they can, but we would be very weak indeed as a society if we took these complaints and protests into account and tried to give these losers better social recognition and a better place on the love market.
Please elaborate how the Philosopher's views that are being expressed and presented here are "completely missing the point". Not sure you understand how this channel operates? Edit: oh, the grand Irony of me reading and commenting on a post before listening to the whole video. So funny how your comment gets addressed directly from like 28:30 on
I watched a lot of Prof. Sandel's lectures and interviews and his points are well made and I tend to agree with him. I should note that I also have a problem with people who criticize meritocracy. I should also note that I do suffer from confirmation bias when I hear other of Sandel's argument: people have an intrinsic value that should never be substituted by how much they have studied or how much money they have. I believe that John Dewey made a similar argument and I found out that even Karl Popper makes arguments in that direction. (Popper's view on education diverge from Dewey's, though).
An actually meritocratic society might cultivate people with the intelligence to formulate a nuanced and elaborate response to address the arguments raised in this video. But we got you instead.
Can meritocracy be applied to procreation? Should being poor, uneducated, untalented factor into whether as an individual my decision would be good for the collective? A laborer complains about the high cost of rent of the one bedroom while having 4 children. I feel no empathy. If I can barely support myself I don't get a pet. What's the math poor employ to justify having 4 children they can't fed, clothe, or house?
Meritocracy isn't about the making of every single person happy, it is required if society is going to function well, or at all. Of course it's imperfect, and always will be. If you tinker with it you'll just make everything worse. Philosophize what you will, but in history that is clear.
If merit is to be politically actionable then before you can employ it you first have to agree on what it is. That is also a political task but, because it precedes a shared definition of merit, it must be carried out under a regime of -ocracy.
You work off the assumption that it is, or should be, the goal of everyone to foster "society". I argue that that is a sentiment only fit for politicians and other glad handers whose very occupation depends on the existance of a "society"... without collectivism, they literally would not have a job. Instead, I support the idea that the only proper goal for an individual is what enhances that individual and their state of mind and situation and results in it becoming more wholesome and in line with that which is natural. "Society" does not exist independent of the sum of the individuals, and the only way society gets better is by its individuals getting better.. anything else is dissipation and destruction. Also, your complaints about people obtaining benefits based on "how they were born" completely misses the point. They are not necessarily there because of who they were born to, but because of the education and experience their parents were able to provide . That worldly men and women of the world are born to worldly men and women of the world is a fact of life, and moaning about how they get accepted more into schools than the child of a brick mason is ridiculous and pandering to the poor and other unfortunates... do better, bro.
He's not working off the assumption or anything, this channel isn't about personal views, he's sharing the works of philosophers. Your fallacious arguments don't address the points Michael Sanders raised as well. "That worldly men and women of the world are born to worldly men and women of the world is a fact of life, and moaning about how they get accepted more into schools than the child of a brick mason is ridiculous and pandering to the poor and other unfortunates... do better, bro." That cancer exists is a fact of life, and moaning about how people with less fortunate genetics get cancer and die more than healthier people is ridiculous and pandering to the diseased... do better, bro. 29 minutes of content, and that's your response, lol. Then again, I'm not surprised someone who misspells simple words in their native language or cannot even get basic punctuation right is making this kind of argument. The benefit of a meritocratic society, if it worked as intended, is that more intelligent people like me get better opportunities than people like you.
28:41 listen to this. Understand that you are talking absolute nonsense. He’s not working off any assumptions. He’s presenting the thoughts of other writers. If you had a legitimate gripe, it was never with this man. Actually listen to the timestamp I left.
1) Though he speaks in first person, he's not making the points himself - he's putting forth Prof. Michael Sandel's points. 2) Without society there would be nothing. Your point about "society being the sum of all individuals" is not new, has many forms and, most importantly, you learned from someone else. 3) Your last paragraph is - afaik - absolutely correct. The thing is: that's exactly the problem (in the US, in particular). When the French invated Britain they did it through the south of the island and never cared that much to go further north past London. That was 1,000 years ago and to this day southern England is more prosperous than the northern part. I recommend the Philosophize This! video on the John Dewey/Walter Lippmann debate and also the following video on "different types of rat races": ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6W03DMQ7uxY.html
The 1st paragraph isn't so much individual thinking but Ayn Rand and reflective of the rising tide of narcissism--and away from concerns about working together for the common good as documented by Robert Putnam in "The Upswing." The 2nd misses the point of how a person starts is highly predictive of life outcomes. Looking around it's clear the degree individuals thrive varies wildly based on the culture they grow up in. Do individuals thrive as much in North Korea as they do in Norway? Lots of systematic studies across domains show institutions, culture... matter greatly Wilkinson & Pickett (RU-vid, books--”The Spirit Level” and “The Inner Level”) show how over 30 forms of welfare decline as inequality rises--and there is much more from others. There is a fast growing body of research that demonstrates the vast damage of high inequality. As inequality rises, countries do worse in terms of death rates/life expectancy, mental illness/illheath, disability, infectious disease, heart disease, cancer, obesity, hypertension, lung disease, child welfare, educational success, social mobility, drug & alcohol abuse, homicide, assault, intentional & accidental injuries, gender inequality, status stress & status competition, bullying, chronic inflammation related to stress, teen pregnancy, longer work hours, patents per capita, social distrust & distrust in government, political extremism/polarization, low public-spiritedness, imprisonment/prison cruelty, private debt, public debt, greed, narcissism… The top 20% suffers less damage to health from inequality than those below--but they are still less healthy than their counterparts in lower inequality countries... and even people in the low & middle classes of Nordic countries. The Nordics show up at the top in most areas. How economic inequality harms societies | Richard Wilkinson ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cZ7LzE3u7Bw.html The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity.... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-5JS9TpCjXSQ.html The great moral(within the group), mental & physical health of very low-inequality people at band & tribe level-despite low levels of consumption and primitive tech--also illustrates the vast benefit of low inequality. Humans co-evolved in groups characterized by very low inequality-and very high levels of altruism, comradery, cooperation, democracy & freedom. As inequality increases status-competition rises and all of those values come under strain. The work of Dr. Marilyn Essex & Dr. Suzanne King are some of the researchers that add to Noble's work that shows how broad the damage is from chronic stress, linking it to damaged brains and/or epigentics. Dr. Marilyn Essex studied family stress (using stress hormones found in saliva and family reports) in mostly middle-class kids in America. In general lower-class kids in the US are even more likely to grow up under excessive chronic stress--not so much in Denmark. Dr. Suzanne King is one that found damage to gene expression in the womb correlated with stress. (another researcher in this Charlie Rose found epigenetic changes to a newborn baby were higher as the mothers status was lower.) www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-inequality-does-to-the-brain/ www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jul/13/neuroscience-inequality-does-poverty-show-up-in-childrens-brains Kimberly Noble on Socioeconomic Disparities, Children and Brain Development ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-P7hxDEfNrHM.html charlierose.com/collections/3/clip/29983
Back when I was young, in the late 80s, in the UK, I went out with a girl who was adamant that the country _was already_ a meritocracy. And that was when our upper parliament chamber was full of aristocrats.
