Matt Taibbi discusses the “meritocracy,” reviewing Michael Sandel’s new book, “The Tyranny of Merit.” He describes the divide between the those with and without college degrees as stark. He describes this entire topic as unsettling for everyone along the political spectrum. An excerpt from his article, which is titled “Does America Hate the “Poorly Educated”? Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit” doesn’t say so, but the pandemic has become the ultimate expression of upper-class America’s obsession with meritocracy“:
As Sandel notes, Trump was wired into these politics of humiliation and never invoked the word “opportunity,” which both Obama and Hillary Clinton made central, instead talking bluntly of “winners” and “losers.” (Interestingly, Bernie Sanders also stayed away from opportunity-talk, focusing on inequities of wealth). Trump understood that huge numbers of voters were tired of being told “You can make it if you try” by a generation of politicians that had not only “not governed well,” as Sandel puts it, but increasingly used public office as their own route to mega-wealth, via $400,000 speeches to banks, seats on corporate boards, or the hilariously auspicious, somehow not-illegal stock trading that launched more than one member of congress directly into the modern aristocracy.
The Tyranny of Meritocracy describes the clash of these two different visions of American society. One valorizes the concept of social mobility, congratulating the wealthy for having made it and doling out attaboys for their passion in wolfing down society’s rewards, while also claiming to make reversing gender and racial inequities a central priority. The other group sees class mobility as entirely or mostly a fiction, rages at being stuck sucking eggs in what they see as a rigged game, and has begun to disbelieve every message sent down at them from the credentialed experts above, even about things like vaccines.
The eternal squeamishness Americans feel about class will prevent this topic from getting the attention it deserves, but the insane witches’ brew of rage, mendacity, and mutual mistrust Sandel describes at the heart of American culture is no longer a back-burner problem. Tension over who deserves what part of society’s rewards, and whether higher education is a token of genuine accomplishment or an exclusive social rite, has become real hatred in short order. In the pandemic age, Americans on either side of the educational divide have moved past rooting for each other to fail. They’re all but rooting for each other to die now, and that isn’t a sentiment either side is likely to forget.
This is another curious asymmetry in the racism culture wars. I recently read that about 70% of pro basketball players are black. This does not conform to the principle of equity we’re supposed to apply to, say, education, where the distribution of races on the faculty should approximate their prevalence in the general population. But nobody is demanding that more white or oriental players should be put in the lineup in order to be fair and equitable. Why the discrepancy?
Clearly, people are content with running pro sports (and some other businesses) as strict meritocracies. But public schools? Merit plays second fiddle to political correctness. My personal theory is that the general population cares a lot about sports and wants the best that money can buy. But public education is of no real concern to most people other than as a pageant where people get to signal their virtue, indifferent to outcomes that don’t really matter to them.
Gad, isn’t this proof that we care more about professional sports than we care about excellent education?
The fundamental problem is misunderstanding the role of and need for a college education. In a factory of perhaps 1,000 workers there is no need for more than 15 people with college degrees, and that’s the upper limit. The real number is probably closer to two. We saw that people with college degrees were paid better, and mistakenly believed that if they gave college degrees to everybody, then everybody would make more money. It doesn’t work that way. First you have to create the need for more college graduates. We made more and more money available for college, driving up prices without increasing the need for graduates. Politicians got to brag, government clerks got jobs, colleges raked in the money, and the kids were chained to a lifetime of debt. Neither their teachers nor parents had educated them in financial literacy.
Eventually the kids woke up and found themselves without jobs. It didn’t matter what you got your degree in, you still couldn’t get a job. Two generations were told they were special and not like the dum-dums who worked manual labor. They were given the worst advice possible: Follow your dreams! This led to a complete disconnect between degrees and the job market. We graduated plenty of snowflakes with degrees in gender studies, who five years after graduation were lucky when they were promoted to barista. I have a Bachelors in Spanish and Music and a Masters in high-energy laser physics, both from US universities. I have a Medical Degree from a university in Germany. My wife’s brother never went to college, is an elevator mechanic, and his net worth is ten times mine.
The snowflakes look around for someone to blame, and start with the baby boomers. I’m one, and have been told repeatedly I have a duty to die to make room for their entitled posteriors. I’ve spent the last twenty years working at rates affordable to small businesses and entrepreneurs to help them turn their experiences into jobs in new companies they own. I typically had four or five at a time, most women because men feel challenged when they hear me say I can help them own their own companies. Few can imagine not being a wage-slave. The women are far more amenable to self-examination, but also far more likely to wait for me to do the work.