Michael Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit and Meritocracy

um thank you all um very much um thank you welcome professor sandell this is our special session um with professor michael sandell who is the author of the recent bestseller in korea puny of merit which is actually um has been translated into korean into uh the illusion of fairness which i thought was an interesting title now um professor sandell has laid some very interesting and provocative in a way assessments and views about our society today and what we should think about as we prepare for a future so without further ado i want to hand over the mic to professor sandell to give us some main concepts and outlines of your book and what you hoped would be the takeaway for i believe many of our um less of our audience who've already read the book so professor sandell you're at the floor is yours or the screen is yours well thank you very much it's it's great to be with you the tyranny of merit or the illusion of fairness it is provocative i agree because when we think of merit most of the time we think of merit as a good thing and it is a good thing if i need surgery i want a well-qualified doctor to perform it if i'm flying in an airplane i certainly want a well-qualified pilot flying the plane so merit in the sense of having competent capable people in important social roles that's a good thing so how can merit become a kind of tyranid and how can it contribute to an illusion of fairness that's the question my book raises and and it's the discussion that i'm hoping to provoke now here's how i came to this question i i wanted to make sense of the deep divisions that have come to afflict certainly my society and many democratic societies around the world over the last few decades the divide between winners and losers has been deepening poisoning our politics setting us apart and this has of course something to do with the widening inequalities that we've seen but it also has to do i think with changing attitudes towards success those who have succeeded have come to believe that their success is their own doing the measure of their merit and this i think it's a kind of meritocratic hubris because it leaves the successful among us to forget the luck and good fortune that helped us on our way it leads us to forget our indebtedness to those who who make our achievements possible family and teachers and coaches and neighborhoods communities country even the times in which we live it's tempting to think and we often assume that if only we could bring everyone up to the same starting point in the race of life then we could begin the race and we could say at the end of the race that the winners deserve their winnings there's something attractive in this idea but if we think about it would that race even where everyone starts at the stage same starting point would it be fair would it would we be able to say that the winners deserve all the benefits that flow from the exercise and their talents not necessarily not necessarily because who's going to win that race the fastest runners the most gifted runners but is the ability of the most gifted runner to run fast to outrun everybody else is that his or her own doing or is that a matter of gift great athletic gifts take take a star basketball player like lebron james of course he practices hard but i could practice hard all day long every day of the week and still not be as great an athlete as lebron james there are two elements of luck and good fortune connected with being talented one of them is well the good luck to have the the talents in the first place that enable us to get ahead but there's a second thing is it lebron's doing that he happens to have the talents that society prizes he makes enormous earnings because he's a great basketball player but isn't he lucky to live in a society that loves basketball if he lived back in the days of the italian renaissance they didn't care much about basketball he wouldn't have been as successful they carried they cared more about great fresco painters so there are two elements of of luck even in even once one has talents that enable us to succeed the moral of the story is that those of us who have managed to succeed in a market-driven meritocratic society that puts great emphasis on kinds of abilities involved in scoring well on the tests that win admission to top universities those of us who have succeeded through this meritocratic competition should be a little bit more humble about our success should remember the luck and good fortune that helped us on our way and once we remember the role of luck in life once we recall our indebtedness i think we're more likely to be more sympathetic and to recognize greater obligations and responsibilities to those in our society who through no doing of their own may struggle may be less fortunate than us so in a way what i mean professor sown by the tyranny of merit and the illusion of fairness is that we who have flourished in the new economy need to remember that it isn't all our doing and that the we therefore owe an obligation to everyone in our society regardless of how credentialed they are regardless of how much money they've been able to make or prestige they've been able to acquire then this i think can make for a less for less polarized societies that are oriented more than we tend to be to a politics of the common good and i i'd love to hear what people think not everyone may agree so i would really welcome any challenges or observations that you or others might like to raise um i there is a room full of people i'm sure that will have a lot of comments um because i have the mic attached to me let me just start it off saying you know it it's a it's a it's a very um provocative interesting concept but at the same time as as we know the devil is in the details as you know um we we sort of try to level the playing field in many ways and sort of adapt more social welfare policies there is also a feeling of frustration that there's inequalities that that also um brings forth as well if you think about maybe someone who has worked 10 hours a day um for their pay versus um if in the universal basic income structure if or or other if someone has not worked and still gets the same kind of pay so how do you deal with the the the other the furthering possible possible furthering inequalities of leveling a playing field well i think that the i know there's a debate going on now in korea about the basic income as there is a debate in many societies and i'm i'm ambivalent about the basic income what i like about it is the idea of placing a floor a basic income security um for everyone uh no one whatever whatever talents people may have or whatever disabilities they may suffer everyone as a human being and as a member of affluent societies like ours should have access to the essential necessities of life basic income security access to health care to education for their children so that's what i like about it but the reason i'm ambivalent is that it's equally important to make sure that people can win respect and recognition [Music] in society for uh for making contributions through the work they do through the families they raise to the communities they serve now not all contributions may be measured or measured accurately by the labor market we often assume that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good but this can't be right really because that would mean that a hedge fund manager contributes hundreds of times more value to the economy or the community than what a school teacher contributes or what a nurse contributes or a doctor but that can't be right so i think that we need and this is why i talk in the book about the dignity of work the dignity of work is a mode of recognition it's not only a way of making a living work is also a way of winning social esteem and i think many people feel excluded not only by being cut off from access to the fruits of prosperity that's the economic aspect but also if the work they do is not respected a source of dignity and pride in within the community and within the society so i think along with basic income security and and basic access to health and education we have to provide everyone an opportunity to contribute and to win recognition for the contributions they make um thank you um for sending what is a gov i mean governments usually um have these policy you know the welfare policies or other social policies people turn to governments to put these basic infrastructures and basic equalities um in order um what is a role of a government and and the fact that inequalities have deepened does it mean that governments have did not have not been able to fulfill their roles yes and in particular it it reflects the fact that democratic governments have i think allowed markets in recent decades to govern and to determine the distribution of the good things in life without the constraint or the oversight that democratic citizens need to exercise the book i wrote before the new one the new one being the illusion of fairness or the tyranny of merit my previous book was on the role of markets and i think during the period of market-driven globalization we've seen a lot of economic growth in korea in the united states and especially in affluent countries but we've also seen a kind of market faith market triumphalist phase that has prevented democratic citizens from exercising some degree of control on the excesses of markets and by this i mean that we we've shifted almost without realizing it from having market economies to becoming market societies the market economy is a tool it's a valuable and effective tool for organizing productive activity but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale it's a place where market thinking and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life beyond the domain of commodities cars toasters televisions iphones we should worry when market values begin to dominate personal relations civic life law the media education teaching and learning these are domains where letting markets decide can crowd out important non-market and civic values worth caring about so my answer to your question professor son is i think that the role of government in a democracy is to enable democratic citizens to have the final word to reason together to argue together with one another about what counts as a valuable contribution to the market we've made a mistake in outsourcing our moral judgment about what contributions matter most to markets i think we need to reclaim that judgment as democratic citizens which goes back to the example of whether we really believe as the market verdict would suggest that what a hedge fund manager contributes or a casino mogul contributes is really hundreds 800 900 times more valuable than what a nurse caring for covent patients contributes or what a school teacher contributes so this i think should be the subject of democratic debate and we as democratic citizens need to fulfill our responsibility to reason together about big ethical questions like these i'd like to actually turn to the the topic of education um i just wanted for those of you who are not able to um join us in our opening session professor sandell is a great fan of sky castle um you know you all have um know the korean drama and so um we have talked about um the issues about university education and the ardent desire in korea to get this kind of access to in a way what professor calls um calls the to gain merit in society um but in korea you know korea comes from uh the you know aft from the ashes of the korean war and almost as much as much if not more than other countries education was considered the latter i mean that was the the considered the only way we were able to pull ourselves out of these ashes um and you know our children giving them a better world than we did so education really played a very very crucial part in korea's success um but you point out that at at certain part at a certain point um universities and education need to rethink um the role and you know the the the sort of values they convey yes and i want to begin professor sohn with agreeing with your premise education including higher education is enormously important i'm certainly not someone who would underplay the value of higher education i've spent my career in higher education encouraging more young people to go to university is a good thing making it possible for those who can't afford it to get higher education access to higher education that's even better so education is a precious thing and korea has the distinction of being one of the societies in the world with the highest percentage of people who have university degrees and that is a tremendous achievement it's enormously impressive so we should begin by recognizing that but when i watch sky castle and when i reflect on the role of higher education in the united states what strikes me is that by making a higher education the primary vehicle for dealing with inequality the primary vehicle for enabling young people to rise we run a risk actually two risks one of the dangers is that those who don't come from families that can help them prepare for those exam standardized exams the college entrance exams they're at a big disadvantage in the united states for example you take the top hundred or so hundred not just a few the top hundred colleges and universities seventy percent of the students who attend them come from well-off families the top twenty-five percent and you know how many come from the bottom 25 of the income scale only 3 if you come from the top 1 your chances of attending a top college or university are 77 times greater than if you come from a low-income family so one of the dangers of making education the primary route to success is it reproduces the inequalities that we would hope it would remedy there's a second danger which is evident from sky castle but also i notice it in my students beyond the problem of fairness higher education when it becomes thought of as primarily a vehicle for getting a good job and making a lot of money this we impose enormous pressure on young people to compete for admission and then even when they succeed in winning admission they are so anxious so pressured many they're very very high a level of mental health challenges more than that there's the tendency to view education not as a good in itself not as an opportunity to explore and reflect on what's valuable in life and what path to pursue but as a tool as an investment in what is sometimes called human capital and this diminishes and can crowd out the intrinsic importance of learning and loving learning for its own sake and the exploration and the self-discovery and the journey that it makes possible so these are my two worries those worries are dramatized in sky castle but they're the same worries i have looking at my students so nothing i nothing in my critique questions the importance of education but what i do want to ask and invite us to just to reflect on is why is education important beyond its instrumental role in enabling a certain number that relatively small number of people to get good jobs and careers that pay well it's about something more than that something deeper something more fundamentally human and i don't want us to lose sight of that thank you one final question because i think again our session is about to um run out of time but you brought up um something because okay here here's my um thing that i've been sort of thinking about as i'm reading your book and i'm talking to you you talk about the tyranny of meritocracy but when you think about meritocracy you yourself your students you know harvard university students are at the pinnacle at the very top of this food chain um so i mean where where does someone who's at the very top who's like the the winner of the winner um as you pointed out how do you come up how do you why do you think about the the tyranny of uh merit i mean what what moves you to look into this subject is it i don't know guilt i mean it's it's something a personal question i've sort of been thinking about all right it's a it's a really it's a fair question and a very good question professor son and i i would say it's not guilt that inspired me to write this book and and to question the way meritocracy is working these days it was two concerns really one of them is a concern i had looking at my students at the enormous pressure to which they've been subject for many years growing up not just when they're in university but um the pressure to achieve to study to take cram courses to take special to tutoring for the entrance exam to do extracurricular activities we there's i worry about the injury the wounds that an intensely competitive meritocratic society inflicts on the winners we've talked a lot about the unfairness to those who don't succeed in this system i worry also about tremendous anxiety and pressure to achieve that we are imposing on the winners and the damaging effects it can have so that's part of what motivated me and you're right uh i do inhabit this meritocratic society and setting at harvard and it does worry me that we are turning education into a kind of careerist track for defining winners and that this is distracting us from the intrinsic love of learning and reflecting and exploring which is really what education is ultimately for so that's one of my motivations the other is looking at the condition of democracy today in my society and in many societies there is a dark shadow hanging over democracy we've just experienced a time when democratic norms have been challenged even violated as we saw with the attack on the u.s capitol on january 6th democracy is in trouble and one of the reasons it's in trouble is that in here i'm speaking of the united states our society is deeply polarized and and i wrote the the new book in part to try to understand why we are so deeply polarized that democracy itself is at risk and i believe part of the reason for the depolarization for the erosion of the social bonds that hold us together is that in recent decades the divide between winners and losers has been deepening and it's been deepening in ways that make elites complacent this is what i mean by meritocratic hubris the tendency to inhale too deeply of our own success to forget the luck and good fortune that help us on our way this is a toxic attitude for the successful to have toward their own success because it leads them to look down on those less fortunate than themselves and on the other hand if we could manage to question our meritocratic hubris to recognize the role of lot to recognize our indebtedness to those who make our achievements possible then i think it's a little bit easier to look upon those who struggle with greater sympathy to say there but for the accident of birth or for the luck of fortune or for the grace of god there go i that could have been me so an appreciation of the role of luck in life can prompt a certain humility and it seems to me that this kind of humility is the civic virtue we need now it could be the beginning of the way back this humility among the successful it could be the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success and of com competition that drives us apart it could be the beginning could point us at least toward a less harsh attitude of the toward the divide between winners and losers it could lead us or so i hope toward a less rancorous more generous public life at least that's part of what inspired me professor to write the book to make sense of the of the risks democracy is facing today and the way those risks are connected to the deep divide that a market-driven meritocratic society can produce thank you professor sandell for those insights we could talk for hours but unfortunately we don't have the time i thank you very much for giving us a lot to think about and not to really ponder on as we try to explore and make our way into the future unknown future thank you all for attending i hope i was able to sort of reflect some of your questions and your um uh your further uh what what you wanted to know so again that's it for me thank you professor sandell um hopefully one of these days we're looking forward to welcoming you here in seoul in person i would love that thank you so much bye-bye bye you

Channel: World Knowledge Forum

Views: 5,254

Keywords: #Micheal sandel, #meritocracy, #justice, #마이클샌델, #정의란무엇인가, #공정하다는착각, #정의, #하버드 명강의

Id: 4J4mDXrWKyQ

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021