#221 — Success, Failure, & the Common Good
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with Michael Sandel, an American political philosopher and author of The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? about the ethics of success and failure in our society, the enduring problems with capitalism, how college has become a sorting mechanism for a new kind of caste system, and the paradoxes which come from valuing excellence all the while recognizing the role that luck plays in producing it. It s a very timely conversation as we struggle really throughout Western society to deal with the politics of humiliation and injustice and the rising levels of wealth inequality to which they are anchored. And now I bring you Michael Sandels, who is a man of many honors and talents. He teaches the quite famous course on Justice that has been televised and viewed by tens of millions of people, and he s the author of several books, the most recent of which is The Terrible of Merits: What s Become of The Common Good ? a new book about the idea of meritocracy, written by a man who argues that there is no such thing as a fair society, and that the only flaw in meritocracy is that we don t give everyone the opportunity to rise or fall based on their own merits. What could be wrong with that? point of view? Well, if we could just let everyone deserve the opportunity they don t need to be well-qualified? on the face of it is a counterintuitive idea, isn t that a good thing, because it could be a good one, right? And so if I need someone to be a surgeon, I need a good surgeon? so I need to perform a good job based on my connections, rather than on their connections, or by virtue of their birth, and so on? what could be I need I need not be a well qualified to be good at it? I don t know. - Sam Harris - making sense of the point of this point of it? - is it a good idea? - is there a point of the common good that we could be better than a good doctor? by someone who is not based on meritocracy based on virtue, not by virtue, rather by their connections or by their meritocracy? - and so I don't need to get it by virtue or by an accident? - what could I need it based on a good degree of skill or by a good social role? - or by luck, rather?
Transcript
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Michael teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, where he teaches the quite famous
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course on justice that has been televised and viewed by tens of millions of people.
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And he's the author of several books, the most recent of which is The Tyranny of Merit,
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We talk about the ethics of success and failure in our society, the enduring problems with capitalism,
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how college has become a sorting mechanism for a new kind of caste system.
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We cover what I have come to think of as the pernicious myth of the self-made man,
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and we discuss the paradoxes which come from valuing excellence, all the while recognizing the role
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It's a very timely conversation as we struggle really throughout Western society to deal with the
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the politics of humiliation and injustice and the rising levels of wealth inequality to which they are anchored.
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Clearly we're going to have to get a handle on this sooner rather than later.
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So, you know, I will have properly introduced you here, but give me your short-form bio.
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You're a man of many honors and talents, but how do you describe yourself in an elevator with a stranger?
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At Harvard, and you also, if I'm not mistaken, teach what's often described as the most popular
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I'm teaching it this semester, adapted to include new examples of justice and ethical dilemmas
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arising from the pandemic and from this moment of racial reckoning.
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Well, you have a new book, The Tyranny of Merit, What's Become of the Common Good,
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But another colorful fact about you, which I only just learned, was that in 1971, at
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the age of 18, you debated Ronald Reagan when he was the governor of California.
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But I also recall that you and I once debated, I think I probably got the more seasoned Michael
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We met at either Pomona or Harvey Mudd College?
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So we've met once, and I remember that being quite a collegial and amicable debate on, it
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surely must have been on religion at that point.
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I think it was about the role of religion in public life, if I remember correctly.
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Well, nice to meet you, albeit at some distance here, on a new topic.
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And it's a topic that I think we substantially agree on, although I must say there's something
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so counterintuitive about a criticism of meritocracy.
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It makes the topic itself surprisingly elusive.
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Once you think you have the thesis in hand and you agree with it, it's almost like you wake
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up and can no longer find your purchase on the felt sense of the argument anymore, because
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there's just something so ingrained about this notion that the only flaw in meritocracy,
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which is to say, you know, truly valuing differences in competence and excellence and rewarding people
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along that continuum, is that the flaw is generally thought and felt to be that we haven't achieved
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We don't have a fair society with real, anything like equality of opportunity, but if only we
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could give everyone the opportunity they deserve, well then what could be wrong with just letting
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How do you think about this notion of meritocracy at this point?
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Well, you're right, Sam, it is a counterintuitive idea, because merit on the face of it is a good
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What could be wrong with trying to assign people to social roles and to jobs based on their merits
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rather than based on arbitrary factors or the accidents of their birth or whom they know,
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And if I need a surgeon, if I need surgery, I certainly want a well-qualified surgeon to
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perform it, not someone who's poorly qualified.
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So on the face of it, merit seems an unqualified good.
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And yet, when merit comes to be a governing philosophy, a way of determining access to
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And the book tries to bring out this paradoxical feature of merit.
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But I would put it this way, if we had a perfect meritocracy, if we could one day overcome all
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of the obstacles that hold people back, all of the prejudices, wouldn't that be a good
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Well, it would have this feature, that the winners of the race, this fair race, would believe,
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understandably, that they deserved their winnings, provided the races run fairly, and that the
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losers deserved whatever place they wound up in.
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And here, when we think about a society and an economy and a democracy, here's where the
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First, it's a good thing to bring everyone up to the same starting point in the race.
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But if we could, it would be predictable that the fastest, most gifted runners would win,
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and would believe they deserved all of the benefits and the material rewards and the honors that
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But a question, one question could be asked is, do we deserve, in the first place, the talents,
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the gifts that enable us to flourish in a market society like ours?
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Or is having those talents a matter of good luck?
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Take, for example, make it concrete, LeBron James.
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He's a great basketball player, just helped lead the Lakers to the NBA championship.
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He works hard to cultivate his great athletic talents.
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But does he really deserve those talents and all the benefits that flows from them?
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Or is having those talents, certainly it's not his doing that he's gifted in that way.
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But more than that, Sam, it's the fact that he lives in a society that loves basketball.
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If he lived back in the Renaissance, they didn't care much for basketball then.
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So that, too, is a matter of contingency and good luck.
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So for these two reasons, it's a mistake for the successful to assume that their success
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is the measure of their merit and that they, therefore, deserve all of the benefits that
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And here's where the dark side of it comes in, especially when we think about our current
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As the successful come to believe that their success is their own doing, a measure of their
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merit, they tend to inhale too deeply of their own success.
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They forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way.
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And they tend to look down on those less fortunate than themselves, believing that their failure
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And I think this hubris among the successful, meritocratic hubris, I call it, and the humiliation,
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the demoralization among those left behind accounts for some of the resentments that have
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gathered in recent decades against elites, resentments that we saw bubble up and find expression in
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So there's the kind of the ethical case, and then the political ramifications of getting
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And so you've just sketched that in brief, and your book really goes deeply into it, that
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we have this sense among the successful, certainly, that they desperately want to believe that their
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There's this notion of justified advantage, which just by the very logical nature of the
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claim begets this notion of justified disadvantage, right?
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The people who are not winners, i.e. the people who are losing to one or another degree, also
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And this leads to a kind of, you know, resentment and populist anger that we've seen, and the
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attendant politics of personality and Trumpism, and also this now pervasive and totally
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destabilizing distrust of institutions and expertise.
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Now we're living in a kind of shattering of our public conversation about basic facts, because
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so-called elites are despised to the degree that they are in the media and in academia and
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And I'm quite sympathetic with much of this criticism, because the elites have played their
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And maybe we'll touch on some of those specifics.
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But before we get into the politics of all this, let's linger on the ethical case, because
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I totally agree that we should view differences in success in general as a kind of multivariate
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You know, it's not just a matter of the normal forms of good luck.
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I mean, you know, down to your genes and all that they do to determine who you are and down
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to the environment and all that it does in concert with your genes to determine who you are.
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No one created the society into which they were born.
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Take the perfect example of someone like LeBron James.
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He neither created his physical attributes that allow him to succeed as a basketball player,
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nor did he create the world in which basketball would be valued or even deemed interesting.
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And so he has won a kind of lottery, and yet there does still seem to be this problem in
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how we deal with differences in ability that we value and will inevitably value, because
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I mean, if you value basketball, if you enjoy watching the sport, almost by definition, you
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will value the far end of the continuum of the bell curve of basketball talent more than you'll
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And so no one wants an NBA where everyone gets a chance to play and everyone gets a trophy at
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I mean, that annihilates the principles by which one would even capture your attention, you know,
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If you could wave a magic wand and reset all of our ethical and attentional dials here, just
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Take the limited case of basketball, you know, thinking about basketball, valuing basketball,
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buying tickets, and rewarding the obvious merits of a player like LeBron James.
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If I were recruiting a basketball, an NBA team, I would still go, Sam, for the best players.
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The question is what moral dessert we attribute to those who enjoy material rewards as well as
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honorific rewards for excelling in this or that way.
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So in the narrowly contained realm of basketball, the hiring practice wouldn't be different.
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But when we look at the society as a whole, and when we look at social roles, and when we
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look at who gets to govern, and who gets to have the greatest voice, and who makes the
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most money, there's the tendency to assume, let's take the economy, there's a tendency
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to assume that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common
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But this is a mistake, because there are all sorts of contingencies that determine who makes
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a lot of money and who makes less, contingencies that are in no way related to differential contributions
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And when we ask about who governs us, we want, in broad terms, here's the basketball analogy,
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we want to be governed by the people who are best at governing.
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Or in a representative democracy, we want to be represented by those who are best at that
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But today, essentially, we are governed by only a segment of the population, those who have
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managed to get four-year university degrees, overwhelmingly in democracies in the U.S.
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Parliaments and executive branches are dominated by, overwhelmingly by those who have university
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degrees, even though those of us who have such degrees represent a minority of our fellow
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Most people don't have a four-year university degree.
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Nearly two-thirds do not in the United States and in Europe.
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So if we're talking about governing, this touches, too, on your point about expertise, Sam, and
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the backlash against elites and experts, I think that we've confused, talking about merit and
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governing, we've confused the virtues necessary to govern well in a democratic society with
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So in many of the domains, once we get outside of basketball, the problem is that we have
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woefully misconstrued what counts as the relevant merits.
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So that's why the basketball illustration is helpful up to a point.
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But when it comes to distributing economic rewards and when it comes to governing, what we tend to
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regard as merit actually misses the mark by quite a long way.
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Okay, so I think it's helpful to grab the ethical side of this before we talk about just descriptively
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what's happening at the level of our politics and society at large.
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So I hear in part of this criticism, a criticism of the notion that there's any direct causal
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The cartoon version of, you know, blameless wealth that one would get in a libertarian circles,
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This notion that the only way someone becomes spectacularly wealthy is to create a commensurate
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I mean, that is how a free market would reward, you know, human excellence and value creation.
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And the way that gets deranged, I mean, obviously, there, you know, we don't live in the cartoon.
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There are ways this is not reflective of reality.
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But I think there is a core truth to it, right?
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Now, you might say that we value the wrong things, right?
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So someone can open an Instagram account and flaunt their body, and if they're young and
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beautiful, they'll have millions of people following them, or at least some of them will.
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And they may be able to leverage that into vast wealth, as have the Kardashians.
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It's not to say it's their only assets, but there's no question they are being rewarded
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by some notion of, if not value, created for society.
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There is a machinery here that is working based on what people, the choices people are making,
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And money is flowing in what is deemed to be the right direction.
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And that's a case where we, I think we might say, okay, well, people are just valuing the
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wrong things, and other people are becoming amazingly wealthy based on this distortion and
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But then when you have something, you have someone else who's become immensely wealthy
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by a purely creative act that has just brought nothing but joy to the world.
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I mean, someone like J.K. Rowling, she writes her books, people line up at midnight to buy
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them in front of bookstores all over this world.
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That was a fairly pure register of the value being created, and she became among the wealthiest
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As a result, what are you suggesting could change about our current system with reference
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I mean, shouldn't we reward her in precisely the way we have and esteem her in the way that
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Well, there are two reasons that the answer might be yes, that we should reward her in the
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Though it's important that you drew this distinction just at the end of the question, Sam, between
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rewarding her monetarily and rewarding her with esteem, and the answer may be different in
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But if she is providing something that is valued and that is worthy of being valued, then she
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should be rewarded, certainly with esteem, for having done that.
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Now, but there are two reasons we might want to reward her.
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One is to encourage her and people with creative gifts like hers to continue to exercise them
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by writing books that we love to read or our children love to read.
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That reason has to do with providing an incentive to her and others like her to continue doing
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what they're doing, because we like the stories that she writes.
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But it's important to notice that that reason, the incentive reason, has nothing necessarily
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to do with whether or not she morally deserves all the money she makes writing Harry Potter stories.
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And so the second question is, should we reward her in the sense that not only does she get
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a lot of money for selling a lot of Harry Potter books, but we also consider that she morally
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deserves the money that she makes thanks to the market success of the books.
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Now, this is why your mention of esteem matters.
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We might decide that she deserves esteem for having written beautiful and compelling Harry
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And yet it could very well be a further question whether she should make ten times more than
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other writers or people in other professions, or a hundred times more, or a thousand times
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It's hard to claim that as a matter of moral desert, she deserves to make X times more, where
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X is in proportion to her actual earnings relative to other people, whereas I think it's easier
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to say she's certainly worthy of admiration for the creativity she brought to bear writing
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If I could just add, I think you put it very well when you said part of the objection is
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Part of the objection to assuming that the money people make is the measure of their contribution
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It's important to keep hold of this question because it's a question that the free market
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But here's a simple, concrete example to test it.
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I don't know, Sam, if you were a fan of Breaking Bad, Walter White.
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Walter White started out as a high school chemistry teacher, and he didn't make much money.
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He had to work, when he wasn't teaching, at a second job at a car wash.
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And then, as we know, he broke bad and became a meth dealer.
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He used his talents as a chemist to make perfect methamphetamine and made millions and millions
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selling this methamphetamine because there was a great market demand for it.
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So here would be the test for the pure idealistic free market libertarian.
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Assuming there were a competitive market in high school chemistry teachers and in meth cooks,
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and Walter White made thousands of times more cooking and selling meth than teaching high school chemistry,
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would we conclude from that that his contribution as a meth dealer was thousands of times greater,
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more important than his contributions as a high school chemistry teacher?
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So part of what I'm suggesting is that really to understand the question of merit
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when we're talking about the economy and economic rewards,
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we have to address the question about whether we are valuing the right kinds of things
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in the design of markets and in the allocation of rewards.
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There's so many things that distort this notion of value,
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a notion that there's a linear relationship between the value being created by someone's efforts
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and their monetary rewards or their rewards with respect to esteem.
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I mean, you just take the case of, you know, someone who's saving your life.
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You're having a heart attack, you know, the paramedic shows up and saves your life.
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Well, in that moment, this is the most valuable job on earth for you, right?
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But that doesn't suggest that we could have a society that paid paramedics $20 million a year
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Because it's more of a trade than, you know, finding the outlier in the NBA can be thought of as a trade
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or, you know, the outlier with respect to writing novels.
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I don't see how we get away from this seemingly crazy, outsized reward structure for the people
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who are on the far tail of the continuum for things we value, you know, rightly or wrongly.
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There is this larger criticism we could explore around, you know, a society that is just captivated
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by the wrong things, and that's a much longer conversation that will outlive both of us.
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How do we want the things we should want in the end?
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How do we live lives, you know, all together that we won't regret, that in hindsight will
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seem sane, and how do we avoid, you know, just colossal wastages of time and opportunity
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collectively, but in a world where people can freely spend their time, attention, and money
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on things they want, and in a system that maximally incentivizes a creative and, you know,
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hopefully ethical response to those wants, right?
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I mean, if we want to be able to give everyone at all times what they want, what they really
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want as quickly and as efficiently as possible, something like capitalism seems like the best
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answer we've ever arrived at, and something like global technocratic capitalism is where
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we've landed, and again, we can point out flaws in this.
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I mean, there are, you know, obviously negative externalities to various business practices
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that, you know, free markets don't account for, and we want some kind of regulation, you know,
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environmental and otherwise, but it's hard to see that, you know, if you are going to be writing
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novels that are so creative that people want to open theme parks in order to explore the
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consequences of your ideas, right, and people by the tens of thousands show up at those theme parks
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every year to buy the merchandise that is derivative of your ideas, other than just deciding that
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someone like J.K. Rowling needs to pay more in taxes, that we should have something like a wealth
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tax or a tax that's so progressive that, you know, very, very wealthy people pay the preponderance
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of their wealth back into the system. If we just had our tax codes straightened out, wouldn't that be
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a sufficient remedy for this particular lottery problem?
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Well, that certainly would be one way of responding to it, by considering a revamping of the tax
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system. A wealth tax would be one possible way of dealing with this, but I would also say,
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if we're thinking now practically and moving into the world in which we live, I think we should have
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a public debate about whether it's fair or desirable to tax earnings from labor, the work people do,
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in the real economy at a higher rate than earnings from interest dividends and capital gains.
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Why should we tax workers at a higher rate than investors from the standpoint of merit or desert
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and contribution to the common good? A more dramatic example of this, Sam, would be, I think we should
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have a debate about whether to trade off all or part of the payroll tax, which, after all, is a tax on
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labor paid partly by the worker and partly by the company, and make up that lost revenue through a
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financial transactions tax, or at least one on speculative financial activity unrelated to
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improving the real economy or high-speed trading. The actual way in which enormous income and wealth
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is generated, the characteristic way is not the J.K. Rowling way, or even the LeBron James way. It's to do with,
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for looking at broader trends over recent decades, the financialization of the economy. We see this in
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the U.S. and Britain, which is the tendency of a greater share of economic activity, of GDP and
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especially of corporate profits accounted for by financial activity rather than providing goods and
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services that people use. Now, there'd be nothing wrong with this or with the outsized rewards that
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people in the financial industry reap if that increased financial activity corresponded to
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a productive contribution to the real economy. But increasingly, the financial activity that has
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exploded in recent decades, especially with financial deregulation in recent decades,
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contributes little, if anything, to the real economy. The social purpose of finance is to allocate
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capital to productive activities, new businesses, enterprises, factories, homes, schools, hospitals,
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roads, and so on, in the real economy. But most financial activity in advanced financial systems,
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such as the U.S. and the U.K., is not of that productive kind. It's been estimated by those who
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know more about it than I do, that only about 15% of financial activity consists in investment in new
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productive assets for the economy. 85% consists of simply bidding up the price or betting on the future
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prices of already existing assets or increasingly synthetically created derivatives and other fancy
00:32:20.340
financial instruments that have precious little to do with making the economy more productive.
00:32:27.060
So in some ways, the standard defense of a laissez-faire free market distribution of income and wealth,
00:32:36.040
drawing on J.K. Rowling or on LeBron James, misses what's actually going on for the most part with the
00:32:43.760
growing inequality in our economy. And so in debating the tax system, I think we should confront that
00:32:52.920
directly. Hence, I would suggest, in addition to a wealth tax, a financial transactions tax, to offset,
00:33:01.460
to enable us to reduce taxes on work in the ordinary sense. Now, if I could just add one more thing about
00:33:09.920
this, Sam. This isn't only for the sake of redistributing income from the wealthy to those
00:33:16.460
who need it more, though that would be one advantage. It's also to prompt a broader public debate
00:33:23.880
about the earlier topic we were discussing, which is whether the purpose of an economy
00:33:31.520
is to help shape the way we value different contributions to the economy and the society,
00:33:41.800
or whether the point of the economy is simply to accept whatever valuations seem to be implicit in the
00:33:48.360
existing system. And I'm hoping by these and other proposals to prompt a broader public debate onto
00:33:56.700
the terrain that you said, rightly, is contestable and we could be debating about for a very long time.
00:34:04.280
What does it mean to value the right kinds of things? What does it mean to encourage certain
00:34:11.020
contributions to the common good and to discourage others? I think that should be a part
00:34:17.060
of our public debate. And one way of making it a part of our public debate is to raise questions,
00:34:24.060
for example, about the role of speculative finance by comparison with the productive contribution of
00:34:31.160
people who produce truly valuable goods and services. Yeah, well, that's obviously a very
00:34:38.620
important distinction. I mean, there's so many areas of the economy where if we could be fully
00:34:43.580
transparent as to the contributions being made by that economic activity, we would want to rethink,
00:34:51.940
you know, what we're incentivizing and how we're rewarding people because there's so much
00:34:56.320
rent-seeking behavior and there's just so much administrative bloat in, you know, the whole sectors
00:35:04.100
of our economy are suffocating under this apparatus we put in place. And we take the medical system and
00:35:10.660
just how much time doctors have to spend dealing with insurance companies. We spend more on medicine
00:35:17.960
than any society on earth and we do not get the return on our investment. So yeah, there's a lot
00:35:25.240
to straighten out there. But even the pure case is hard to think about and puts us up against certain
00:35:33.000
moral paradoxes. So for instance, just imagine a society where we had decided, okay, we've gotten
00:35:40.940
past this notion of mere equal opportunity because we know that even if we could open the doors
00:35:49.540
perfectly and give every child starting right now an equal opportunity to get into Harvard, say,
00:35:56.680
well, there'll still be massive differences in their ability to avail themselves of those opportunities
00:36:03.760
because of all of these other disadvantages. But the paradox here is that the thing that's under our
00:36:10.520
control, the environment, if we perfectly tuned to that, if we gave everyone from utero onward all of the
00:36:19.180
same environmental benefits, right? This is magic, right? We obviously can't do this. But even if we
00:36:26.940
could, where that would land us is in this dystopian, counterfactual world where now what we'll have to
00:36:36.440
spectate on are the massive differences in genetic endowment, right? I mean, if you perfectly secure the
00:36:44.440
environment against disadvantage, well then all you will see is a kind of tyranny of genetic differences
00:36:52.060
and we'll be in some kind of Gattaca-like dystopia. And that would be if with the best of intentions
00:36:58.400
we could create perfectly equitable and enriched environments for everybody. You can take that case
00:37:05.580
and do with what you will with it. It almost seems like a kind of mirage here to figure out how to
00:37:11.640
actually solve this problem given a perfect ability to do so. Well, I think what the mirage-like feel of
00:37:23.600
this thought experiment brings out is that even a perfect meritocracy would not be a just society
00:37:34.020
because the winners would still be determined by factors that were not their own doing. And yet,
00:37:43.900
to make matters worse, the closer we came to providing truly equal opportunity, the greater the tendency
00:37:54.320
for the successful to believe that their success was their own doing, the greater the tendency
00:38:01.600
to forget or to overlook or deny the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way, and the greater
00:38:12.100
the tendency to look down on those who are flourishing less and to say their failure must be their fault.
00:38:22.200
So what goes along with the meritocratic picture is a sense of human agency so thoroughgoing
00:38:32.000
that we tend to attribute moral responsibility for one's fate, for where one lands in life. Notwithstanding
00:38:42.280
the persistent contingencies that you've just described and that we've been discussing,
00:38:48.120
the attitudes towards success and failure, toward winning and losing, as we approach more closely
00:38:57.560
perfect equality of opportunity, those attitudes towards success and failure would become all
00:39:05.000
the sharper, all the more pronounced. And what I'm suggesting is, from an ethical point of view,
00:39:12.160
and you've rightly invited us to distinguish the ethical from the political dimensions of this,
00:39:18.120
ethically, the hubris leads those on top to forget not only the luck and good fortune,
00:39:26.280
but also their sense of indebtedness, as well as looking down on those less fortunate than
00:39:34.160
themselves. So that's the ethical problem. That's the dark side of meritocracy, morally speaking.
00:39:41.380
It's the hubris. The more we appreciate, the more we would be alive to the role of accident,
00:39:48.120
and luck and luck and fortune, the more open we would be toward a certain humility, toward success,
00:39:56.280
toward winning. And this openness to humility can open us also to a greater sense of responsibility
00:40:05.880
for those less fortunate than us, those who struggle, those who may be left behind through no fault of
00:40:13.900
their own. So that's the ethical side of it. But politically, even though we haven't realized the
00:40:21.720
perfect meritocracy that you've just described, and that we've been imagining, it has so, this ideal,
00:40:29.900
this picture has so dominated public discourse, that it has shaped the response to the deepening
00:40:36.300
inequality of the last four decades. And I think it's no accident that meritocratic modes of public
00:40:45.060
discourse and moral argument have strengthened their hold at the very same time that inequalities of
00:40:54.880
income and wealth have deepened with the kind of market-driven globalization we've had in recent
00:41:00.460
decades. And this has fueled the anger, the resentment of those who have lost out. It's one thing
00:41:10.700
to feel that you've lost out because the system is unfair, the system is rigged. That's a worry about
00:41:19.180
fairness. But humiliation is a deeper kind of demoralization, because it's a system where the
00:41:27.600
attitudes towards success and failure lead those who struggle to believe, well, maybe I don't work
00:41:35.300
hard enough. Maybe I'm not talented enough to land where they landed. That's deeply demoralizing,
00:41:42.860
and maybe that's why they're looking down on me. One of the most potent sources, Sam, I think of the
00:41:49.360
populist backlash that we've seen most dramatically in 2016, is the sense among many working people
00:41:59.820
that elites look down on them. And this has a specific meaning in the context of American politics,
00:42:06.700
because for four decades, the meritocratic promise was, yes, there may be deepening inequality,
00:42:13.340
but you can rise. Everyone can rise through individual effort and training, provided you go
00:42:22.660
to college. Then you too can compete and win in the global economy. What you earn will depend on what
00:42:30.500
you learn. So the response, and this includes Democrats and Republicans, the response to the deepening
00:42:38.980
inequality was to offer individual upward mobility through higher education, which on the face of it
00:42:47.500
seems inspiring. I'm all for improving access to, widening access to higher education. But as a remedy
00:42:55.300
for the inequality that we've seen, it's a pale, inadequate solution. And it contains what seems an
00:43:03.160
inspiring message. You too can rise if only you go to college, contains an insult, an implicit insult.
00:43:11.520
And the insult is this. If you don't have a university degree, and you're struggling in the new economy,
00:43:18.760
your failure must be your fault. And this politically is folly, when we recall that most, most people don't
00:43:27.320
have a four-year college degree. So instead of focusing on arming people for meritocratic
00:43:33.980
competition, I think we should be focusing more on affirming the dignity of work and having a public
00:43:41.600
debate about what it would mean truly to enable everyone to flourish, whether they're in blue-collar
00:43:48.200
jobs or whether they're well-credentialed people in professional jobs.
00:43:54.200
Yeah, so let's focus on the problem of college, because this is, in some measure, the whole
00:44:01.860
problem in microcosm, but it's also the longest lever that has separated the fates of winners and
00:44:10.420
losers in our society. I mean, college, you know, on your account, other people have hit this topic.
00:44:17.400
Daniel Markovitz was on the podcast a couple months ago. I mean, college has become a kind of
00:44:23.000
sorting mechanism for a new caste system in our society. And again, as you point out, this is not
00:44:30.800
just a problem with, you know, one party or the other, and this comes from everywhere, that this is
00:44:36.780
the way you will successfully compete in this increasingly global state of economic nature.
00:44:44.400
And it's not only something that is offered more or less to everyone, and everyone who will claim
00:44:51.940
the opportunity can sort of get it in hand, but there's something, you know, generally fair about
00:45:00.320
how all of this shakes down. Because of course, the elites, right, the best of the best in any field
00:45:07.260
will wind up and should wind up at the best universities, because how else would the best
00:45:12.660
universities select their student body? And if they, you know, if this gets gamed occasionally and
00:45:19.480
occasionally perversely with people buying their way in, there's a probrium attached to that. But
00:45:25.300
in the general case, it's hard to even optimize that because these schools are fantastically expensive
00:45:34.980
to run. And if, you know, if you're not going to give alumni any, any advantage, well, then why would
00:45:41.580
they be donating year after year to, you know, to Harvard's endowment, right? So it's, there's
00:45:47.140
something that, while it's not ideal, many people look at this and think, well, how else could it be?
00:45:52.600
So I ask you, you know, in our closing chapter here, what is the problem with college and how should
00:45:59.320
The main problem with college is that we, and by we, I mean the society as a whole,
00:46:05.580
not just the higher education community, we have made colleges and universities
00:46:11.860
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