HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II Reply to Critics

Abstract

I am grateful to the participants in this symposium for engaging so thoughtfully with my book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?1 I want to congratulate the editors of this new journal on launching a venue for fresh thinking about inequality and thank them for commissioning this symposium for the inaugural issue.I have learned a great deal from the essays gathered here and the rich array of challenges they offer. In considering my response, I am struck by the fact the none of the fifteen essays defends meritocracy against the principled objections that I (and many others) have raised against it. No one argues, at least not explicitly, that the successful deserve the rewards the market bestows on them, or that they would deserve such rewards if opportunities were truly equal. The essays focus instead on my diagnosis (i.e., my claim that meritocracy gives rise to grievances that fuel backlash against elites) and on the alternatives to meritocracy, as an ideal and as a political project, that I propose.I will address the challenges posed by my colleagues by identifying four themes that appear in the essays: (1) meritocracy and work, (2) meritocracy and race, (3) meritocracy and capitalism, and (4) meritocracy and liberalism. Organizing my reply according to these themes inevitably means that I am unable to address all of the arguments and insights contained in the essays. But I hope this thematic focus enables me to draw together and respond to some of the most important critical reflections the commentaries offer.Several of the essays raise probing questions about the dignity of work: what constitutes the dignity of work, does it offer a promising basis for an alternative political project, and if so, what would be required to achieve it? Kate Andrias finds my critique of meritocracy forceful and compelling and agrees that a politics focused on the dignity of work is a desirable alternative. But she observes that I do not adequately specify the policies that could achieve this, and that I neglect the ways that corporate interests have deliberately and systematically undermined unions and collective bargaining. In her essay, Andrias points out that the degradation of industrial work was “not an accidental byproduct of elites’ misplaced faith in education, technocracy, and market.”2 Beginning in the 1970s, she writes, “employers aggressively moved capital overseas and fissured employment relations, turning to subcontractors and independent contractors in a concerted effort to reduce labor costs, evade responsibility to their workers, and eliminate workers’ collective voice in their jobs.”3Workers fought back, but lost. Andrias makes the important point that the degradation of work is bound up with political power. Just as New Deal labor reforms were achieved through political struggle, any attempt to renew the dignity of work in our time will require organization, alliances, and a new struggle to wrest economic and political power from corporate interests and their political allies. I agree. Andrias’s account is a necessary elaboration of any project to renew the dignity of work. She is right to conclude that my book “leaves for other scholars—and for workers themselves—the task of understanding past and present struggles over the dignity of work and of elaborating what work with dignity could look like”4 today.Patricia A. Cain “needed no convincing” about the problems created by meritocracy and about the political pathologies it inflames. She considers it “abhorrent for any of us to think that we made it to the top because we deserve it”5 and offers a moving litany of instances of luck in her own life. But Cain is less convinced by the solutions I propose. She worries that my discussion of the dignity of work focuses more than it should on paid work. This raises an important point. Any attempt to strengthen social recognition of and esteem for those who make valuable contributions to the common good must look