Tyranny of Merit (pt.1)

Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard philosophy professor, questions the assumption that by working hard and playing by the rules you deserve what you earn. This "meritocratic" notion of justice is observably increasing inequality and fostering a winner/loser culture that led to the populist backlash of Trump and Brexit.

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-20-tyranny-of-merit-pt-1/

Part I: What is Meritocracy and why is the commonly held belief that it is a good thing wrong? COVID has shown us a lot about how our society works, yet over the last 40 or 50 years, our politics and system of merit has set up a dynamic of the "worthy" as "smart" and the underclass as "dumb", assigning virtue and morality through position and advancement.

Part II: The merit of the market. Our economy of working hard and getting rewarded has failed over half the country. As GDP has tripled, the lower-half of workers have not seen a wage increase in 60 years, allowing all of the economic growth to be concentrated at the top.
Equally, we look at Hedge fund managers and "Breaking Bad" to consider what the market actually values more than virtue, morality, or humanity.

Part III: Luck egalitarianism and distributive justice. How do we develop a society where people are compensated by more than the market, where they have a civic and psychological wage of prestige? If you think this is not important for a society, look at the "Deaths of Despair" wherein under-educated middle-aged men's self-inflicted deaths have tripled since 1990.

Michael Young wrote a satirical dystopian story about the shifting of "equality" from birth or wealth to ability or talent. He foresaw that a society based on merit would morally condemn those left behind even more brutally than a class system.

Part IV: In conclusion Sandel offers the story of Henry Aaron, where to escape prejudice and poverty he hits homeruns. So we are tempted to applaud merit, but Sandel sys this is a mistake. We should not applaud a system that requires hitting homeruns to escape from a life of poverty and injustice.

5:32 -Boomerang CEO

9:13 Max Weber: the forunate needs to know he desereves his fortune

10:33 Obama: The right thing, the smart thing

13:10 Our biggest bias: the uneducated

17:01 The finance industry: extracting rent from the real economy

20:07 workers wages have remained stagnant, while the economy has tripled

24:14 Moral Markets, Breaking Bad

32:41 Deaths of despair

34:43 Michael Young: the dark side of merit

35:50 Talent over prejudice: The mistake of meritocracy

36:56 The prison that deforms you so you can squeeze through the bars