Sandel, M. (2021)

Sandel, M. (2021) The tyranny of merit. What's become of the common good? Penguin Random House UK

(54) Being on the right side of history. "... assumption: given enough time, and notwithstanding the fitful pace of progress, history bends towards justice. This assumption brings out the providentialism implicit in arguments that appeal to the right side of history. Such arguments rest on the belief that history unfolds in a way that is directed by God, or by a secular bent towards moral progress and improvement."

(55) "In [ML] King's hand, as in [Theodore] Parker's, the faith that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice is a stirring, prophetic call to act against injustice. But the same proverbial faith that inspires hope among the powerless can prompt hubris among the powerful."

(59) "These days, we view success the way the Puritans viewed salvation - not as a matter of luck or grace, but as something we earn through our own effort and striving. This is the heart of the meritocratic ethic."

(59) "The more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault. This logic makes meritocracy corrosive of commonality. Too strenuous a notion of personal responsibility for our fate makes it hard to imagine ourselves in other people's shoes."

(64) "The more thoroughgoing our responsibility for our fate, the more we merit praise or blame for the way our lives turn out."

(69) "According to Google Ngram, which tracks the frequency of words and phrases in books, the use of the phrase "you deserve" more than tripled from 1970 to 2008."

(72) "For decades, the meritocratic elites intoned the mantra that those who work hard and play by the rules can rise as far as their talents will take them. They did not notice that for those stuck at the bottom or struggling to stay afloat, the rhetoric of rising was less a promise than a taunt."

(73/ 74) "When politicians reiterate a hallowed verity with mind-numbing frequency, there is reason to suspect that it is no longer true. This is the case with the rhetoric of rising. It is no accident that the rhetoric of rising was t its most fulsome at a time when inequality was approaching daunting proportions. When the richest 1 percent take in more than the combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population, when the median income stagnates for forty years, the idea that effort and hard work will carry you far begins to ring hollow. This hollowness produces two kinds of discontent. One is the frustration that arises when the system falls short of its meritocratic promise, when those who work hard and play by the rules are unable to advance. The other is the / despair that arises when people the meritocratic promise has already been fulfilled, and they have lost out. This is a more demoralizing discontent, because it implies that, for those left behind, their failure is their fault."

(88/89) "... the single-minded focus on / education had a damaging side effect: eroding the social esteem accorded those who had not gone to college. ... The credentialist prejudice is a symptom of meritocratic hubris."

(95) "Elites seemed oblivious not only of the partisan character of their "smart" policies, but also to the hubristic attitudes their persistent talk of "smart" and "dumb" expressed."

(105) "Obama believed that the primary source of democratic disagreement is that ordinary citizens lack sufficient information."

(109) "In support of his long-held belief in the primacy of facts, Obama was fond of quoting Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who once told an obdurate opponent, "You are entitled to you own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

(108) "One of the defects of the technocratic approach to politics is that it places decision-making in the hands of elites, and so disempowers ordinary citizens. Another is that it abandons the project of political persuasion. Incentivizing people to act responsibly -... is not only an alternative to coercing them; it is also an alternative to persuading them."

(110) "The idea that we should all agree on facts, as a pre-political baseline, and then proceed to debate our opinions and convictions, is a technocratic conceit. Political debate is often about how to identify and characterize the facts relevant to the controversy in question. Whoever succeeds in framing the facts is already a long way to winning the argument."

(111) "The partisan divide on climate change is not mainly about facts and information but about politics."

(111) "Speaking in 2018 at MIT, Obama imagined the rational debate the country could have about climate change, if only everyone agreed on the basic facts"

(111) According to Obama climate change deniers had made a debate based on agreed on basic facts impossible. "But such a debate, even if possible, would be an impoverished mode of political argument. It assumes that our only choice is between resignation and imprudence on the one hand, and a value-neutral technocratic fix on the other. But this misses the deeper moral and political considerations that underlie the climate change controversy."

(139) Frank Knight. "The economic order does not simply satisfy pre-existing demand; "its activity extends to the formation and radical transformation, if not the outright creation, of the wants themselves.""

(159) "... what, in the absence of an open frontier, could serve as the instrument of mobility a fluid, classless society required? [James] Conant's answer was education."

(165) "... higher education in the age of meritocracy has not been an engine of social mobility; to the contrary, it has reinforced the advantages that privileged parents confer to their children."

(178) "The rise of helicopter parenting coincides with the decades when meritocratic competition intensified."

(179) "Understandable though it may be, parents' drive to direct and manage their children's lives for meritocratic success has taken a harsh psychological toll, especially on pre-college teenagers."

(199) "... giving up on work was not the most grievous expression of the damaged morale of working-class Americans. Many were giving up on life itself."

(200) "People with less education have long been at greater risk than those with college degrees of dying from alcohol, drugs, or suicide. But the diploma divide in death has become increasingly stark."

(212) Contributive justice "... theories of contributive justice teach us that we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make."

(216) Oren Cass "... if the economy no longer works for the average worker, it is he who needs to transform into something it likes better."

(226) "Four decades of market-driven globalization has brought inequalities of income and wealth so pronounced that they lead us into separate ways of life. Those who are affluent and those of modest means rarely encounter one another in the course of the day."

(227) "A lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain humility: "There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I." Such humility is the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart. It points beyond the tyranny of merit towards a less rancorous, more generous public life."