NYU Stern’s “In Conversation with Lord Mervyn King featuring Michael Sandel”

[Music] thank you and welcome everyone i'm delighted to convene virtually today with so many members of the nyu and stern community welcome to all of you as many of you may recall from past events the in conversation with lord merwin king series is perhaps the most highly anticipated series run by stern every year it represents a unique learning opportunity attracting renowned thought leaders from business from policy and academia to exchange ideas and viewpoints that are extremely timely from the standpoint of where we are today and today we have a very very special guest whom bourbon will himself introduce our host for today's conversation is always lord bervin king marvin was governor of the bank of england during the financial crisis he is today baron king of lostbury and the title of which i think he is most proud he is the alan greenspan professor of economics and professor of economics and law at nyu without further ado marvin ragu thank you very much and hello everyone good afternoon and welcome to another in conversation with event my guest today is michael sandell professor sandell is professor of government theory at harvard university law school michael's a renowned teacher author and broadcaster so good in fact that academics around the world live in fear that his superb online lectures will put them out of business his latest and new book is the tyranny of merit what's become of the common good michael welcome to stern great to be with you reuben well thank you for taking the time to talk with us and michael and i are going to engage in conversation for around 30 to 40 minutes and then we're going to open up to questions from you the audience so please enter your questions on the q a function in zoom you'll see the q a function typically at the bottom of your zoom screen if you click on that you'll be able to type in your question and i will be able to read them when we turn to the q a session towards the end i will select the questions let's go straight into the discussion michael and talk about your new book the publishers always tell us that the main title of a book should grab attention and the tyranny of merit certainly does that but the publishers also then go on to say that the true description of the book should be in the subtitle yours is what's become of the common good explain well thank you for that mervyn the tyranny of merit it seems at best paradoxical because we think merit is a good thing it's an ideal to aim at if i need surgery i want a well-qualified surgeon to perform the job so there's nothing wrong with merit as such but merit and meritocracy have turned toxic and so let me try to explain why in recent decades the divide between winners and losers has been deepening poisoning our politics driving us apart this has partly to do i think mervyn with the deepening inequality of income and wealth in recent decades but it's not only that i think it has also to do with changing attitudes toward winning and losing towards success and failure that have come with this inequality those on top have come to believe that their success is their own doing the measure of their merit and that those who've lost out must by implication deserve their fate as well this is the dark side of meritocracy the dark side is that meritocracy even if fully realized and of course we fall short even if fully realized meritocracy is corrosive of the common good because it leads the successful to inhale too deeply of their success to to forget the luck and good fortune that help them on their way and it leads them to look down on those who struggle to assume that they have no one to blame but themselves so this is how merit turns to radical and also how it corrupts the common good because if i believe my success is my own doing that i deserve all the rewards that flow from it it makes it hard for me to imagine myself in other people's shoes it makes it harder to appreciate my sense of indebtedness to the wider community if i i'm which are par of which i'm a part so this is where the common good becomes comes to be in tension with meritocratic ideas of success merlin i i think um we saw that very clearly in the last u.s election when hillary clinton came unstuck on one word deplorables we also saw it interestingly in the reaction to the brexit referendum in britain where the single most frequent comment made by the remainers who lost was to complain that the people who voted for the other side were uneducated yeah as if they were superior in some sense yeah now we're just two weeks away from the election michael and your new book in a way is all about the underlying causes of divisiveness in american society could you relate the arguments of your book to to recent developments in american society and in particular to the deaths of despair documented by and case of angus deaton yes well um deaton and case have written powerfully about deaths of despair by which they mean deaths due to suicide alcohol drug overdose people essentially giving up on life giving up hope especially among working people and especially among middle-aged working people and especially among white working people now the populist backlash against elites that we saw in the u.s in 2016 and that we saw as you just mentioned in brexit a lot of the support for those votes came from white working people who felt that this that the economy and the culture had left them behind now it's certainly true that the racist appeals and the xenophobic appeals of donald trump did find some resonance sadly and were a part of this shocking election in 2016. but i think we make a mistake if we assume that these are the only sources of his appeal because it leads us to overlook the legitimate grievances of those working people who have not only faced stagnant wages and job losses in recent decades in the decades of market-driven globalization but they also sense a great many working people since that the work they do is not honored or recognized or appreciated by the society in the way it once was and this i think connects to this sense of elites meritocratic professional technocratic elites looking down on those less credentialed than themselves and this tendency i think and which has been so divisive in our society in our politics is connected to what seemed an inspiring political project the response to the inequalities of recent decades by mainstream parties of the center right and the center left was individual upward mobility through college education here was the message if you want to compete and win in the global economy go to college and then you too will have a chance to rise now encouraging people to go to college is a good thing expanding access to university who for those who can't afford it is even better i'd be the last person to to question that i've spent my career in higher education but as a response to inequality that's a very narrow limited response and there's an insult implicit in it the insult implicit in the meritocratic promise go to college then you too can rise is this if you didn't go to college if you don't have a university degree and you're struggling in the new economy the implication is your failure is your fault and we easily forget that most but most americans don't have a four-year college degree nearly two-thirds don't roughly similar figures in the uk and in much of europe so it's folly to create an economy that sets as a necessary condition for dignified work in a decent life a four-year university degree this i think explains some of the the resentment and the anger generated by a seemingly promising inspiring offer go to university then maybe you too will be able to rise and and win in the global economy i must say i have been struck both in new york and in london by the fact that the educated elites have enormous difficulty understanding why the so-called uneducated right voters they do behave as they do it's it's an incomprehension and i think your point about their feelings superior and that being a real danger to our sense of togetherness is really very important and could i just one thing about that mervyn politically this represents a change in political allegiances by the 2000s the democratic party in the u.s had become more attuned to the values and the outlook of the well-educated professional classes than to the values and outlook and attitudes of the the blue-collar workers who once constituted a very important constituency and the same is true this split where we're well educated that education is a big divide in politics and donald trump did very well among those without a college degree hillary clinton did very well among those with advanced degrees this is a reversal from traditional patterns of voting and we've seen the same reversal in britain in france and in in other european countries and it's worth asking why this happened and how it helps explain the the backlash against elites and the sense that the credential they're looking down it's a big factor in our politics and i think these factors are much deeper in many ways than the economic inequalities that often talk so much about they are symptoms of a much deeper phenomenon i think what's interesting is that the word meritocracy that you've used before was actually coined by the sociologist michael young some 60 years ago and of course what's interesting is that his book was a satire on the idea that we might replace status through the accident of birth and aerotalk aristocracy by status through genetic inheritance so why did people ignore the implicit message in his book and come to imbue meritocracy with really positive connotations it's a it's a fascinating question mervyn it's true that the person who coined the term meritocracy michael young with a short book in 1958 did not conceive meritocracy as made an ideal to aim at or an ideal vision of a just society he saw it as a kind of dystopian scenario he was writing at a time when the british class system was breaking down he was a sociologist affiliated with the labour party in britain the class system was breaking down that was a good thing but he foresaw a meritocratic society as it unfolded even one that managed to enable people to compete on a truly level playing field would have this invidious result that the successful would believe that their success was earned their own doing a matter therefore of desert and that those who struggled would believe they'd had every chance they would believe the demoralizing thought that their failure was their own doing and this is what he saw as the defect of a meritocratic society when he coined the term and what happened since is that politicians at the center right and center left alike came to embrace meritocracy as a governing ideal the project was and in the book i referred to the rhetoric of rising if only chances can be made equal then everyone will be free to rise as far as his or her talents will take them that's the ideal and it was offered by politicians across the political spectrum and michael young he heard when tony blair in britain was saying i believe in a meritocratic society i want to bring us closer to it late in life michael young wrote an op-ed column op-ed piece in the guardian saying to tony blair please no you got it wrong this has a dark side and so michael young glimpsed it and in the book he predicted that in the year 2034 there would be a populist backlash against the meritocratic aid elite he was right except that backlash came 18 years ahead of schedule so what's fascinating is that in the book your comments that the educated elites are just as intolerant as other groups but the target of their disdain is is somewhat different that struck a chord with me and my reflection is that over over the past 60 years quote ordinary unquote people in britain have become much more socially liberal and tolerant whereas the educated elites have become more and more intolerant of anyone who doesn't share their view on either liberal or other political positions do you share that perception well i think it's certainly true that credentialed a leads have a kind of credentialist prejudice against those who haven't been to university and who work in jobs that don't require a university education in fact some sociologists and social psychologists did a series of surveys in europe and in the us about attitudes of college-educated respondents toward various groups various groups typically the victims of discrimination and prejudice and they gave them a list listing all kinds of groups including immigrants immigrants from turkey and europe african americans in the united states people with various sorts of disabilities and on the list was those with lesser educations and in both europe and in the us they found that the group most disliked on that list of traditionally disfavored groups victims of discrimination were the less less educated and what's interesting is we by no means have gotten rid of prejudices based on race and ethnicity and gender but at least people aren't keen to affirm those prejudices they tried to deny them not so in the case of the less educated so the credential credentialism it's a cultural phenomenon is in a way the last acceptable prejudice and i think it's it reveals the the corrosive effect that this meritocratic project has worked on the on the public culture and it's registered in in the the divisiveness we see today in society and in politics so at stern our very own john height has obviously written about the coddling of the american mind are we in danger of educating a generation of students it was so intolerant of the attitudes of those without a college education that divisiveness becomes entrenched in our society and perhaps immune to any measures to try to reduce economic inequality i do think these attitudes the credentialist prejudices we've been discussing marvin do become embedded in the public culture and i think it will take a determined deliberate project to disentangle them and and uh to move away from i think it will require a shift in the terms of public discourse which is not an easy thing but i i think what it requires is that we respond to inequality economic but also cultural inequality inequalities of esteem and recognition by moving away from the rhetoric of rising as the primary response to inequality and focusing instead on affirming the dignity of work now the dignity of work is subject to many interpretations different political parties animated by various ideologies will interpret the meaning of the dignity of work differently but that's the debate we should be having we should focus less on arming people for meritocratic competition and more on asking and debating what does it mean to affirm the dignity of work not only in terms of pay important though that is but also in terms of social recognition and esteem and this will also i think require rethinking the educational system in the role of higher education as the arbiter of opportunity today universities have been assigned the role of dispensing the credentials and defining the merit that a market-driven meritocratic society honors and in some ways this has made universities all the more central and important but i think it's been corrosive not only for those who don't go to university but i think that turning universities in distorting machines for a meritocratic society risks crowding out the educational mission itself so the tyranny of merit is not only oppressive toward those who are excluded it's also oppressive in a different way toward those who go through the young people who go through the stress strewn meritocratic gauntlet that the adolescent years have become for families who aspire to send their kids to college and they arrive wounded they arrive habituated to jumping through hoops to networking to gathering credentials and this leaves less and less space for the exploratory stance toward education trying to figure out what's worth caring about and why i worry about this the wounded winners as well as those who are demoralized and excluded this phrase the dignity of work seems to me at the heart of trying to restore a sense of togetherness and eliminate bison it's it's obviously difficult i my wife is from scandinavia and i've never forgotten that she talked to me about how in the nordic countries people attach value and status though not economic rewards to people who are for example good cleaners people respect there's respect if you do that job and do it well if you do it badly you don't get respect that should be true of all jobs but if you do your job well the fact that you aren't paid so much doesn't seem to matter to either side what matters is that you are you're both human beings and respected for what you can do and trying to get that back so for example outsourcing in recent years became quite a common practice in businesses as a way of reducing costs the trouble with outsourcing is that the jobs that were outsourced were no longer part of the firm the company the project and you couldn't speak to them and say we're all in this together so i refused at the bank to go along with outsourcing and i just wonder what things in practice we can do to try to restore the dignity of work to people who feel that it's been taken away well you were onto this merman at the bank of england i love the way in which you resisted the pressure to outsource precisely because of your palpable sense that all the workers in an enterprise whatever their particular role need to feel not only that they are making the contribution but that they are appreciated and recognized for that contribution here's where work is not only about making a living it's not only an economic activity it's also about contributing to the common good and winning recognition for doing so one of the the idea at the heart of the dignity of work i think urban is that the fundamental human need is the need to be needed by one's fellow citizens and to be appreciated to be recognized when one contributes to meeting those needs when one contributes to the common good this i think is what was brilliant about your approach to the full range of workers the bank of england and if we could expand this attitude this outlook this orientation to work to society as a whole into companies generally i think we would go a long way toward affirming toward renewing the dignity of work i think another another measure we need to take another institution we need to rethink going back to higher education is the steep hierarchy of prestige in forms of learning under the pressures of the meritocratic society we accord enormous prestige to selective four-year colleges and universities and we woefully under invest in forms of learning that the majority of our fellow citizens depend on to equip themselves to enter the world of work and to contribute to the common good i'm thinking of state colleges two-year community colleges forms of technical and vocational training in the u.s we woefully under invest in these forms of learning but it's not only a matter of of money it's finance it's also a matter of recognition and prestige we have this very steep hierarchy of prestige it doesn't have to be that way you mentioned the experience of your wife reflecting on the nordic countries in regard to work germany does a much better job than we do not only in funding but also honoring forms of learning on which people depend to learn trades to to learn various locations and technical skills so this too i think is part of what we would need to reconsider if we were to take seriously a political agenda focused on the dignity of work how to renew it what it consists in how to affirm it so let's look at um parts of the rest of the world in your book you describe visits to china and you report that chinese students are just as likely to say that they deserve their success and money as students at harvard and since in a way she adopted meritocracy as a principle of administration for a thousand years or more how has china managed to avoid the divisiveness that's so evident in the west and do you think that in your view china will face growing problems in the future well this is this is a complex question mervyn as as i'm sure you know i i do mention in the book and this is a purely uh impressionistic observation that speaking with students university students in china i've been struck by how thoroughgoing and deeply held are their own meritocratic convictions comparable to what i find among american students and by meritocratic convictions i mean a deeply held belief that their admission to selective universities is the result of their determined effort their conscientious striving during their high school years but in many cases even before now in many ways this is understandable it's paradoxical because the the actual class profile in the u.s and in china of highly selective universities reflects the fact that affluent successful parents have figured out how to pass their advantages onto their children they figured that out in fact in ivy league universities in the us despite generous financial aid policies there are more students from the top one percent than from the entire bottom half of the country combined but i i sympathize mervyn with students in the u.s and in china who nonetheless believe that they're winning admission to top colleges and universities is thanks to their own strenuous efforts they almost can't help but think that given the highly pressurized achievement-oriented years they've spent doing homework competing for grades getting s.a.t prep tutoring being carted off to various extracurriculars the curricular activities the better to to enhance their record for the application for the admissions committee doing good works in distant countries all the more to impress admissions committees so the pressure under which these young people are under it has effect in many cases on on their mental health as we see by the time they arrive very high levels worrisome levels among college students generally of of anxiety of depression of perfectionism born of the desire constantly to strive to please through achievement one's parents and teachers and coaches and admissions committees so i sympathize with students who come away believing that i'm here thanks to my effort even though there are all sorts of advantages that are also in play now how will this uh play out in terms of divisiveness within our societies whether in the us or whether in china in the u.s i think we've seen how this credentialism and this intense ascend and meritocratic attitudes towards success have have poisoned our politics in the case of china it's a bit trickier but i would say this mervyn in many ways this is the generation that was raised on the promise of rising gdp and affluence and yet what strikes me when i speak to young people in china is a hunger a thirst for discussion and reflection on values on ethics on the meaning of justice and the good life because they sense that gdp by itself is not an adequate source of meaning so i think there is a quest for larger meaning and purpose and i find this everywhere i go but including in china and so this i think goes alongside the conviction that effort is what has been the the source of what has success these students have enjoyed it's an opening for a broader discussion about the meaning of a good society what we owe one another as citizens but it's a it's the question is whether that opening that hunger that yearning will be filled with opportunities genuinely to reflect or whether it will be contained by the harsh demands of nationalism and the strictures of the economy that they are um that they are in the midst of so i think it's very much an open question where it will lead now you grew up in los angeles studied at brandeis we're a rhodes scholar at baylier college oxford and now you're at harvard that's an elite cv but much of your writing is about the problems of everyday life what drew you as a philosopher it still draws you to those problems well i when i was growing up mervyn i i loved politics i followed actual concrete politics i'm not talking about political theory but elections campaigns debates arguments who's up who's down who's likely to win that kind of thing and i thought i might like to be a political journalist i loved journalism and dabbled in it for a time and then i came but i came to philosophy relatively late i didn't study much philosophy as an undergraduate when i went off to oxford i thought here was a chance to fill in a bit of philosophical background before i went back to the very concrete political questions that most animated me but i fell in love with philosophy i became hooked by it i began to see that to make sense of the broad terms of public discourse really require delving into big questions of values questions about justice the common good what we owe one another as citizens and those are the questions that have engaged me in political philosophy ever since but i've always wanted to connect philosophy to the world there are some philosophers and i have great respect for them who work out and who write who work out philosophical questions that only philosophers could love or be absorbed in or understand but i think it's also important that there be some of us especially in political philosophy who connect big philosophical ideas with the debates and the concerns the worries and aspirations that animate ordinary citizens in a way marvin this is how political philosophy was born certainly in the western tradition socrates didn't write any books didn't have any publications didn't give lectures he wandered the streets of assam athens essentially engaging people some grand some humble in questions about the lives they lived and the way they thought about what was a good life and what was a good society and so i i think there's i draw some inspiration from that and i think our civic life is in desperate need of philosophy not as an arcane subject but as a way of reflecting on the lives that we live and trying to make sense of the world in which we live i think that one of the the defects of contemporary politics is the hollowness of public discourse and yet people said people want politics to be about bigger things including questions of values and so this i think is a at least a small ray of hope that that there would be a response to a more elevated kind of politics that addresses more uh directly these big questions of justice the common good and the meaning of the good life it's very interesting that your famous course on justice at harvard now a very famous online course as well really starts by asking students questions about incidents that could happen to them in their everyday lives right it's not about linguistic philosophy as you said language that only philosophers could understand and it's also true of economics that you talked about earlier about the need for people to they want to feel needed in other words the interaction between people is a fundamental importance to their well-being and yet when economists discuss preferences of people it's only over well-defined material goods and there is very little attempt to understand the interaction between people now i'm going to ask you one last question and i encourage people to put questions onto the q a session there are questions already and i'll call them in a moment but the last question really is about academic life in the global media market because you know your course has gone online um the global media market has transformed the economics of most other industries sport entertainment 50 years ago the wimbledon champion got 3 000 pounds for winning the title uh federer earns tens of millions of dollars a year so the prize money has gone out of all proportion um relative to the amounts that even the number 100 player in the world who is pretty good i can assure you can earn they're just about enough to stay on the tour for a couple of years so what people want to do is to watch the best and we've stopped watching the local team the local talent you want to see the best in the world is this going to be true of academic life will students want to see the stars and if so how are the rest of us going to survive michael well despite the express you've described in the experiment we did filming and making freely available online my course on justice this was before companies arose to create and to produce vast amounts of online learning we did it just to see what would happen really and we were astonished i was astonished that tens of millions of people would want to watch lectures on philosophy but that's what happened so i've and i've since done various experiments in distance learning debates discussions learning across national boundaries bringing people together we did an experiment with the bbc the global philosopher where we linked participants from 40 or 50 countries you know in discussion of issues such as climate change immigration and the like so i'm fascinated trying to explore how far we can go using technology to replicate in-person teaching the magic of in-person teaching the exchange the discussion the sense of presence uh personal presence and yet i don't think mervyn that even with the best technology it will be possible to replace the human presence in teaching where a student and teacher encounter one another and think together and discuss together possibly in the company of some manageable group of peers other students important questions so i think ideally we should do our best to develop online forms of teaching that can be gripping and engaging and get the benefits of that which includes engaging people from different countries and cultural backgrounds that's what our recent experiments have been about but i i think it'll be important to combine that with in-person local forms of teaching and learning maybe in some kind of hybrid where we don't lose the human contact the human presence that i think is a precious part of teaching and learning well thank you it gives us something to hang on to and hope for uh in our academic careers and i must say teaching with zoom i've been struck at how students have responded to devices like breakout rooms where you can recreate a tutorial for a period and jump from one group to another so that certainly that need to have human contact is very evident so let me now open it up to questions and i've been collecting questions the first one is from frederick who asks what is to replace merit slash performance as the factor determining outcomes or are you advocating equal outcomes as the objective well if by equal outcomes frederick means that everyone has equal income and wealth no i'm not advocating that um what i'm and it's sometimes thought that we have only two alternatives either equality of opportunity where we try to create a level playing field and then say the winners of the race deserve their winnings or a kind of sterile oppressive equality of outcome or equality of results where everyone must have the same income and wealth in the book i resist those two alternatives i don't think those are the only two possibilities what i argue for instead is what i describe as a broad a broad democratic equality of condition which is not about equalizing income and wealth it's by creating common spaces and public spaces that bring people together from different walks of life different class backgrounds different racial and ethnic backgrounds in the ordinary course of life within civil society in sports stadia in libraries in community centers in parks and recreational facilities in public transportation and in public schools and in downtown areas part of what's gone wrong mervyn i think with contemporary democracy is that within civil society within the course of our everyday lives those who are affluent and those of modest means live increasingly separate existences we live and work and shop and play in separate places we send our children to different schools and the effect of this is that there is there are fewer and fewer encounters even chance encounters among people from different backgrounds different social backgrounds different walks of life democracy does not require perfect equality but it what it does require is that people from different backgrounds encounter one another bump up against one another in the course of our everyday lives because this is how we learn to negotiate and to abide our differences and this is how we come to care for the common good that's what i mean by a broad democratic equality of condition merman thank you wendy asks a question i think that links it's an interesting question about what you've been saying she writes meritocracy lacks a moral or ethical component do you think the rising meritocracy and the decline in religious practice or affiliation in the us are linked it's a complicated question that wendy asked it's a fascinating question in the book i try to show that in some ways the deep background source of our meritocratic convictions can be traced to biblical biblical and then christian debates about whether salvation is something we earned through merit or whether it's entirely unearned that is through the grace of god this debate as a theological debate animated much of the argument from early christianity up through the reformation to the the puritans and the puritan work ethic as it developed in the new world so i traced this story briefly in the book and of course today we are not thinking about meriting salvation we're asking whether the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor but there is a striking parallel between our seemingly seemingly secular debates about who deserves what income and wealth mainly and these early theological debates but to go directly to wendy's question i think if we're looking for alternatives to the dark side of meritocracy the hubris the meritocratic hubris it generates i think we need people especially the successful need to be more alive to the role of luck and fortune in life and more alive to their sense of indebtedness now one way of fostering a sense of indebtedness or a sense of one's good fortune is through belief that the grace of god accounts for our having the gifts that enable us to flourish that is one potent source i think it's not the only source i think there are also secular sources of the sense of the role of luck in life the role of contingency the role of accident and fortune but what we need whether inspired by religious or secular understandings of success is a greater tendency for the successful to be able to say to look upon our fellow citizens who may struggle and say there but for the accident of fate or the grace of god or the luck of the draw go i because a greater being more alive to the role of luck in life or grace conduces to a certain humility and this humility i think is the antidote we need the civic virtue we need to contain the meritocratic hubris that now drives us apart it's very interesting that you focus on luck the famous book written by a british sports journalist argued that if you do something a million times then you'll be brilliant at it and you should hit a tennis ball a thousand times million times you'll be able to win wimbledon and a good friend of mine called ed smith who now is in charge of selecting the english cricket team right yeah wrote a book called luck and he described how when playing for his professional team the team decided at the beginning of the season that there was no such thing as luck so you didn't say to someone when they went out to bat good luck when they got out early and came back bad luck basically you blame them for making a mistake this was meant to enforce rigid discipline and focus on winning and doing well and it proved a complete disaster complete disaster and ed went on to discover that he had a an accident an injury playing a game which led to the end of his career that was genuine bad luck and then on arriving at a london station to get the train to go home he just got there in time opened the door jumped into the train fell over the legs of a young woman sitting on the bench turn around apologized to her and six months later they were married he said if you don't believe in luck you haven't lived so let me ask you a question that jay has posed what are some of the effective ways for a society to place honor and prestige on individuals associated with so-called less credentialed institutions or professions we see the beginnings of this jay in the response during the pandemic to workers who are performing essential functions even though these are not workers who are the most lavishly credentialed those of us who have the luxury of working from home we were talking about this earlier can't help but notice how deeply we're relying on workers who are generally overlooked and this could be and now we're calling such workers essential workers or in britain key workers this could be an opening for a broader public debate about the dignity of work it could be a way of challenging a deeply held assumption which is that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good this i think is is a mistaken idea we can think of lots of examples where poorly paid workers make enormously important contributions and where some of the most lavishly paid members of our society are working in sectors that don't contribute all that much to productivity in the real economy so i think that that our recognition of essential workers in our tendency in we've seen in various countries during the pandemic evening applause clapping for essential workers putting out yard signs and banners thanking them i think these are gestures in the right direction but they are gestures that should be the starting point for a broader public debate about how to bring into better alignment pay and social recognition both with the importance of the work that these workers perform even though these are not the most credentialed workers abhishek asks do you think the tyranny of merit is perpetuated because a lot of goods that should be available to everyone access to education clean air nutrition health care are increasingly available only to those who see themselves as winners and are seen by others to be privileged i think this tendency to privatize access to fundamental goods sharpens and accentuates the tyranny of merit in just the way that abhishek has suggested so i think one part of a response to lessen the sting of inequality is to make fundamental human goods and civic goods available on principles other than the ability to pay and that would certainly apply in case of health care clean water clean air public education and and other other essential human goods that would lessen the sting of inequality certainly by making access to these goods less dependent on money but what it wouldn't do the further step that would be required has to do with what we've been discussing mervyn which is how to affirm through the structure of our economy but also the public culture a genuine sense of appreciation and recognition and esteem for the contributions people make through the work they do not only through the work they do also through the service they perform to their communities the families they raise the economy of esteem matters as much as the economy of of wages and pay they're linked but i i don't think that we can neglect either so attilio asks what steps should private corporations take to help reverse this unwanted sociological consequence of making meritocracy the ultimate goal versus one of the tools to better society well i think it would be hard to find a better concrete lesson bourbon than the one that we were just discussing that you um undertook at the bank of england which was not to outsource work of the maintenance workers and of the workers who could easily have been outsourced or it's filled with subcontractors but to create and here this would be the general suggestion to create a corporate culture in which everyone is understood to contribute something valuable and is recognized for doing so and is included in the common life and ethos of the organization of the business so i i love the example that you that you gave merbin i would build on that yeah but it was easy for me because i could say to the staff genuinely that they could all do my job because all they had to do was turn up once a month and decide whether interest rates went up down or stayed the same whereas it was absolutely clear that i couldn't do any of their jobs because that required some real knowledge and practical experience whether it be operating the computers the backup generators or just cleaning the building none of that could i do and it was important i think to make that clear to them that i understood that and it was very much part of my mission and understanding in running the bank so much of the economy today this is just to add one probably obvious no with the gig economy um very great many workers in the gig economy don't really have any connection or mooring to a sense of community the sense of community that comes from from a workplace and feeling a part of a larger enterprise well ladies and gentlemen we have sadly come to the end of our hour and michael i want to thank you enormously for joining us at stern tonight for being willing to share your thoughts and insights with us and to answer questions let me just finish by reminding everyone that michael's new book which every merit crap and indeed every other person should read is called the tyranny of merit what's become of the common good and with holidays coming up whether it be halloween thanksgiving christmas many other religious holidays you have every opportunity to buy lots of copies to give to your extended families michael thank you very much for joining us at stern tonight thank you thank you it's really a privilege to to be in conversation with you thank you thank you very much michael and thank you to everyone for joining us good night

Channel: NYU Stern

Views: 1,867

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: new york university, nyu stern, stern school, Lord Mervyn King

Id: AFcPMKHdl8g

Length: 60min 39sec (3639 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020