Introduction

In a recent public lecture given at Peking University (https://youtu.be/03i_Ojbx5do?si=iZzTfL-s_DQQrXfE), Prof. Michal Sandel of Harvard University made a passionate plea to end “the tyranny of meritocracy.”  The event lasted two hours, but thanks to Sandel’s pedagogical skills and oratorical prowess, it felt much shorter. Throughout the lecture, Sandel deftly engaged his audiences and implored them to wrestle with a provocative question:

Does the winner truly deserve their success in a meritocracy?

The Thesis

Sandel’s thesis centers on what he calls “the rule of luck in life,” which covers two key aspects. First, abilities and talents are largely shaped by natural endowments and social circumstances. For example, it is well known that educational achievement is highly correlated with genes. Second, whether a particular talent is valued by society is also a matter of chance. A math prodigy who earns millions as a Wall Street trader today might have lived in destitution in a self-sufficient agrarian society. In the words of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, “merit is a bit of an accident not only in its origin, but also in its being treated as merit.”

Beyond the role of luck, Sandel also argues that no winners are truly self-made or self-sufficient, as they inevitably owe much of their success to others. You may recall that Barack Obama tried to make a similar point during his 2012 presidential campaign; however, his unfortunate phrasing—“if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”—animated his political opponents and may have cost him a considerable amount of conservative votes.

Thus, although merit in Latin connotes “to earn” or “to deserve,” Sandel maintained that successful individuals in a meritocracy do not truly earn their success—certainly not all of it. Stripping away the notion of “deservedness” allows Sandel to build his case against the tyranny of meritocracy.

If those who succeed must deserve their success, so must those who struggle deserve their failures. Meritocracy not only flatters the winners and humiliates the losers but also legitimizes and perpetuates inequality. By pitting winners against losers, meritocracy undermines the idea of the “common good” and makes the pursuit of solidarity and community an impossible project.

When Sandel spoke of those who lose out and felt looked down by the winners, he was likely referring to the working class, especially those from America’s rural areas and Rust Belt. He firmly rejected the unsolicited advice often directed at these “losers”—to go get a college degree, if not for themselves, then certainly for their children.   While acknowledging the intrinsic value of education, Sandel does not believe it is an adequate answer to inequality.  He noted that only about 35% of American adults hold a college degree.  If about two thirds of our fellow citizens do not have a college degree, Sandel reasoned, “it is a mistake to create an economy that makes a university degree a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life.”

On this point I am with Sandel. No amount of education could eliminate losers in a meritocracy. The Austrian Economist Fred Hirsch, in Social Limits on Growth, characterized education as a positional good, where rewards depend on one’s relative standing on a slope.  There is no such thing as leveling up—that is, closing the gap between winners and losers—because the slope itself ensures inequality. As Hirsch put it, the value of education to a man depends on how much education the person ahead of him in the job line has.

The Antithesis

At its core, Sandel’s case against meritocracy is a moral one.  The hubris of winners is immoral; so too is the denigration of losers for their lack of credentials. Yet, what is truly immoral, Sandel argues, is prioritizing merit over virtue, pride and honor over dignity and decency, and inequality over the common good. He opposes meritocracy because he sees it as a principal driver of this moral failure.

As noble and inspiring as Sandel’s critique sounds, I found it ultimately unconvincing. The main problem is that he does not offer a viable alternative to meritocracy—at least not in the lecture (perhaps he does so in his book of the same title, which I have yet to read). The ideal society he describes seemed to verge on an egalitarian utopia. He never clearly defines what the “common good” entails, as if the concept were self-evident. To me, it closely resembles Rousseau’s notion of the “general will,” which has, for better or worse, inspired generations of revolutionaries around the world. Notably, Sandel’s vision is more vague than that of John Rawls, who at least quantified the goal of a just society as maximizing the welfare of its least advantaged members.

Sandel also does not explain how, in the absence of meritocracy, society can achieve the common good and ensure dignified work and a decent life for all. I imagine the programs he envisions would involve centralized, government-led interventions—either actively allocating “dignified work” from the top down, massively redistributing income and wealth on a regular basis, or some combination of both.  Yet, we have seen such programs implemented at scale before, and their track record is far from encouraging.

A case in point is the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that have swept through the American institutions over the past five years. A popular piece of anti-DEI rhetoric rebrands the acronym as standing for “Didn’t Earn It.” This seemingly crude distortion is not merely an internet troll to “own the libs,” but rather a pointed critique of DEI’s underlying anti-meritocratic spirit (after all, merit originally means “to earn”).  If Sandel is right, anti-meritocracy is indeed not a bug, but a feature.   However, DEI has not unified the country around the common good, as Sandel might have hoped. On the contrary, it has provoked strong backlash from right-wing politicians, pundits, and activists—indeed, DEI became a rallying cry for the MAGA movement during the last presidential campaign.

Ironically, many—perhaps even the majority—of those opposing DEI are precisely the “losers” Sandel seeks to liberate from the tyranny of meritocracy. Liberals might once again conclude that these fatheads were acting against their own self-interests.  Yet presuming to know a group’s self-interest better than they themselves do is arguably the ultimate manifestation of the winner’s hubris the very arrogance Sandel scorns and scolds with indignation.

The Audience

I was curious how the students at Peking University would react to Sandel’s dismantling of meritocracy. After all, they are the undisputed winners in an education system that has worshipped meritocratic ideals for thousands of years.   I suspect many would feel their hard-earned success worth defending. Yet, I was somewhat disappointed that no one—neither students nor faulty—was willing to dissent from an opinion that must have struck many of them as baffling.

To be fair, it is an intimidating task to engage a world-renowned Harvard professor of Philosophy in a public debate about metaphysics. It probably did not help that these students were raised in a culture that encourages deference to authority, fosters group conformity, and penalizes contrarians. Moreover, the notion of “the common good” may not have sounded foreign to them at all, as they have been accustomed to similar slogans such as the “China Dream” (中国梦) and “Common Prosperity” (共同富裕).

While the students did not challenge Sandel directly, they did raise a few thoughtful points. The most interesting concerned the phenomenon of involution (内卷) hyper-competition that renders life miserable for everyone, especially for the so-called winners. This discussion prompted Sandel to share a remarkable anecdote.

He recalled that when he was in high school (which I estimate was in the late 1960s), his math class would reseat students every few weeks according to their cumulative GPA—in other words, a student’s academic ranking was publicly broadcast by where they sat in the classroom. I doubt this revelation startled many in the audience, most of whom were likely survivors of similarly excruciating mental experiences. But it was genuinely shocking to me, because in the America that I know, such practices have long been considered beyond the pale.

Needless to say, Sandel shared the story to highlight how much progress American education has made over the past five decades. Yet, one cannot help but wonder if the MAGA America would view that earlier era with nostalgia—seeing its passing as evidence of decadence rather than progress and a deafening call to “make American education great again.”

The End

I will close by conceding that meritocracy has its own problems. Yet I find it hard to swallow wholesale Sandel’s idealistic and simplistic approach to addressing them.  For those seeking a more nuanced analysis, The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor, may be worth reading.

 

Marco Nie

Wilmette, April 27, 2025