The 'tyranny' of meritocracy

A barely hinged rant about Michael Sandel's book The Tyranny of Merit

Michael J Sandel and I are mortal ideological enemies, except for the part where we reluctantly agree on most facts.

In his book The Tyranny of Merit, he outlines at exhaustive book length the problems of “meritocracy.” It is exhaustive and exhausting - it’s very much an example of “this book should have been a blog post.” I’d go further and say “it should have been a couple of bullets on a slide or two.”

You want the bullets? Here we go:

• Meritocracy is bad because if people are really sorted by their talents, the people who “lose” feel bad about it, because it reflects their innate talents and level of effort rather than luck

• This has led to populist uprisings and widespread discontent after years of “elites” driving globalization and technological progress that have left more and more people “losers” in the meritocratic education and career Red Queen’s Races - in other words, MERITOCRACY = TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT, a position that he hammers repeatedly throughout the book, and is essentially the overarching theme of the whole thing

I very much wanted to say, many times - so what, is the schema before meritocracy - aristocracy - BETTER? Do you have any alternative means that isn’t going to lead to poverty and misery for MORE people?

And are you really the right person to be passionately decrying “meritocracy” and the winner-takes-all dynamics of modern elite education and employment, from your “literally at the very tippy-top of the meritocratic pyramid” position at Harvard??

A book-length screed wherein the comfortably ensconced, top-of-the-hierarchy author continually decries the system they’re at the top of, and suggests interventions that won’t affect them at all, but will tear down the tippy-top people in their (finance bro) outgroups, who are the only arguably better-off, higher status people than themselves, lends itself to inherent skepticism.

The epitome of a “chattering classes” icon

Here we’re getting at WHY I consider Sandel my ideological enemy.

Well, let’s start with his background - a “political philosophy” professor at Harvard for umpteen years, and prior to that a Rhodes scholar. A highly and internationally lauded commentator and “intelligentsia” representative who’s won numerous plaudits and awards (like being the “most influential foreign figure of the year” in China’s Newsweek, or Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top Global Thinker).

He is also apparently a “bioethicist” (boo, hiss - the lowest form of life, per Scott Alexander) even though none of his degrees are STEM at all - his degrees are politics and philosophy respectively - and served as such under George W Bush. I assume entirely in a “lets maximally kill as many tens of thousands of people as possible by not letting any human studies through IRB’s” way, a la the FDA’s usual modus operandi.

Literally, this guy’s whole deal is “wait, wait, let’s all slow down and think critically about everything, and find every bad thing possible that might stem from it, before we do anything.” Which not to put too fine a point on it, is basically the worst of what we societally get from both academia and legislators, is purely and entirely a brake on all progress whatsoever, and is probably the source or a major contributor to nearly everything wrong with America today. The housing crisis, the fertility crisis, the FDA killing more people than it saves, why big projects always come in way over budget and in twice the time, and much else.

He’s not a doer, he’s a thinker. And not a thinker that actually allows us to do anything better or more thoughtfully or drive better outcomes overall, he’s the sort of purely performative, liberal arts, luxury belief redolent, “play around with words and think it’s being clever because it impresses naive undergrads” sort of thinker.

As a triangulation point, what do reviewers think of the book?

In various reviews of the 2020 book: the Evening Standard headline was: "Diagnosis but no cure for the ills of an unfair society", in Kirkus Reviews "Sandel’s proposals for change are less convincing than his deeply considered analysis."; in the British Education Studies Association: "We must abandon the elitism of the university degree. .. Of course, higher education is a good thing, even ‘a common good’. But the university should return to its role of defining and creating knowledge, not credits. "

In the Harvard Magazine review: "But even if equality of opportunity were attainable, which Sandel doubts, he thinks meritocracy would be neither desirable nor sustainable: even a perfect meritocracy has multiple flaws that make it unjust."; The Wall Street Journal headlines: "Review: The Cream Also Rises: The meritocratic ideal makes elites arrogant and threatens communal solidarity. Identity-based policies make the problem worse."

So yeah. It’s infuriating and I find the combination of his philosophy and demonstrated actions personally offensive, and I was just hate reading this book the whole way.

But I actually agree with some of his points.

Not that meritocracy is a bad idea - meritocracy is OBVIOUSLY the better system, what are you even?? WHAT ALTERNATIVE EXISTS, GENIUS??

His whole schtick is “meritocracy has eliminated the dignity of work for people without college degrees,” which I can barely even start addressing.

• Do you think factory workers and horse shit shovelers in the late 1800’s enjoyed a lot of dignity in their work? What about farmers? Or serfs? Those were both the vast majority of jobs in the 6,000 years of pre-industrial times. Oh, wait? You mean enjoying your work and feeling that it was dignified and a source of status has ALWAYS been rare? You don’t say. “Dignity” has *always* been in short supply for the great majority of jobs, and people just sucked it up for all of history.

• Do you think most cashiers, baristas, customer service reps, and waitstaff today enjoy any dignity in their work in the aggregate, as they’re being yelled at by Karens and micromanaged by bad bosses?

• “Status” is inherently zero sum and relative, so it will ALWAYS be finite and allocated only to the top decile or quintile at most.

You know how everybody in the doomed Manosphere seems to think we need to go back to the 50’s, where women were well behaved and stuck in kitchens, marrying duds and having their babies? This is Sandel, unironically. He’s indexing on the post-war Baby Boom years as how “work” and “status” should be for everyone all the time, when it was the largest historical aberration from the norm in living memory.

The GI Bill meant college enrollments soared, the post-war economic boom meant jobs were booming and paying more than ever, national debt was decreasing, cost of living was still reasonable and houses were actually being built, and the glass ceiling ensured that men were higher status than women, so people married and had kids at higher rates than ever.¹

The post-war boom in question, by: GDP growth, gov debt, TFP, housing starts, change from GDP trough, college enrollments, marriage rates, and TFR

Ah, that halcyon day!

But seriously, indexing on the post-war boom and pretending it’s normal and the way things should be forevermore is like indexing on the year you won the lottery, and then getting mad that your income, wealth, quality of life, and overall happiness didn’t keep that pace up in each and every subsequent year. And this is so obvious to anyone with a brain that it’s hard to conclude anything except that all of his thoughts and writings are purely performative, and have zero connection to his actual beliefs or behaviors.

This is my overall problem with him, I think. He’s a complainer, not a doer. All theorem with no praxis. A “bioethicist” not a researcher. All he does is impede other people from getting things done. He’s literally sitting in his Ivory Tower, shitting all over that same Ivory Tower. That’s…not admirable.

It should be pitied, and you know, maybe he should get therapy or something. Or stay true to his principles and commit honorable seppuku rather than perpetuating the ‘monstrous meritocracy machine.’ Either literal or career seppuku, I think either one would be a fine and reasonable stand. Go and be one of those baristas you’ve told us should be as dignified and high status as you are, guy. Show us the way!

A hypocrite or a wasted life

One of the most obvious implications of his book is that he’s either a complete hypocrite and doesn’t actually believe anything he’s saying, or by his own lights he’s entirely wasted his life.

He uses recurrent examples in his book of the difference between “economically valued” and “socially valuable” work, with drug dealers and finance bros his go-to examples of “highly compensated but socially reprehensible.”

I unironically think both finance bros and drug dealers contribute more value to the common good than Professor Sandel.

First, for finance bros, a recurring bete noir and personal nemesis in his book: He himself mentions that it’s probably likely that they contribute at least 15-30% to correctly allocating capital and funding productive enterprises that lead to more jobs and economic growth. Having both worked in finance and interacted with numerous banks and investors, I agree with this rough estimation (but think it might be up to roughly 50%).

But 15-30% of economic growth and new jobs created? That’s a really big deal! That’s actually a huge positive benefit, to the entire country!

Versus by his own admission and in his own repeated arguments, Sandel has entirely wasted his life. All he’s done is perpetuated the “tyranny” of merit his entire life, directly contributing to the caste differentiation and elite dynamics that ended with Trump being elected (his recurring “wake up call” that is repeatedly called out as the worst possible outcome that’s been driven by the tyranny of meritocracy in his book).

And contra to his own argument and views, he’s almost certainly contributed to the aggregate “enwokening” that was probably more of a factor in the cultural rift and dynamics that put Trump into office (not just once, but twice) than the meritocracy he likes to condemn so much (from his comfortable position at the Platonic tippy-top of said meritocracy).

We’ve already seen that finance bros contribute more than he does, so let’s consider drug dealers! At considerable risk to their own freedom and well being, they purvey the chemicals which people in America have demonstrated a bottomless appetite for, every single one of them stronger and more effective in improving short term well-being than therapy, alcohol, or antidepressants.

Let’s compare - individual street-entrepreneur-purveyed adderall, or Sandel’s classes, but without any credential or credit attached. Happily, we have a strong comparison point for the second:

In September 2009, Boston’s WGBH published to YouTube a series of 12 videos from Michael Sandel’s Justice course at Harvard University. Each hourlong video is a combination of lecture from Sandel and facilitated Socratic dialogue among the hundreds of students who take his class every semester.

On YouTube, the first video has been played almost 5 million times. The second video over a million times. The next ten videos have been played about 300,000 to 400,000 times each. All told, the series has about 10 million views.

As a back of the envelope calculation (ignoring people who watch videos multiple times, who don’t finish videos, etc.), it seems unlikely that more than 6% of people who started the series finished the whole thing.

Okay, so 6% of people appreciate Sandel’s un-credentialed offerings enough to finish his free Youtube course.

What percentage of customers for street-pharmacist purveyed adderall do you think are repeat customers? Probably 70-90%? Even if we limited it to literal Harvard students? So…at least 10x more impactful / desirable, by revealed preference?

Sounds like drug dealers are probably driving at LEAST 10x the value that Sandel does!

It’s not a permanent well being buff? Welcome to the hedonic treadmill, population everyone. I’d also bet strongly that Sandel’s classes aren’t a permanent well-being buff - in fact, since they’re of the genre “complain about everything and look for reasons to feel guilty about your success,” it’s a good bet they’re reliably the opposite. Score another one for the drug dealers.

It decreases well being over time if overindulged? Welcome to junk and fast food, gambling, smoking, alcohol, apps, TV, and the entire “attention economy!” Also, given the intrinsically negative viewpoint he tries to inculcate in his students, and the record levels of anxiety, depression, and other neuroses already existing in those same students indicating they’re more prone to this than average,² I think it’s pretty safe to say that Sandel’s courses and thoughts might ALSO follow a negative dose response curve in the long term. I’m chalking up another mark in the “drug dealer advantage” scorecard - that’s 3 / nought.

Okay, what do you even agree with? All you’ve been doing is ranting about how dumb this guy is.

Yes, sorry. It comes from hate reading an entire book while agreeing with a lot of the facts to get to the “good” parts and recommendations, and then those good parts not being good, but instead crushingly dumb.

Okay, here’s where we agree:

• Everything is luck. EVERYTHING. Part of believing that everything is 80/20 genetic is that it’s basically ALL luck - your IQ, your ambition, your risk appetite, how hard working you are, how motivated you are, whether you get obese or not, whether you have discipline and self control in other areas of life. Luck. All of it. There is no justice, no dessert, the world is profoundly unfair, and we should provide for people with bad luck, and yes that means even dumb people who make actively awful and self destructive choices. Meritocracy is still the absolutely best system though, because it aligns incentives for the people who are capable to put in lifetimes worth of hard work, driving the economic and technological growth that improves things for everyone.

• The returns to productivity increases and economic growth have gone to the top ~10% pretty much exclusively since the 70’s. This famous graph:

  

• This kind of sucks for everyone, and since everyone spends 7-9 hours a day watching attractive millionaires flex on their own living standards and lives, it leads to a lot of discontent.

• Finance and the FAANGS have absorbed the cream of the last 2-3 generation’s minds, and it’s largely been used to farm dumber people for alpha and eyeballs instead of driving anything net-valuable to society.

• “Meritocracy” isn’t really a palatable answer for probably 70-80% of the population overall, because being “able to rise according to your talents and hard work” will only end with high status for the top ~20 at most, and everyone else will feel dumb or like failures.

• That “able to meritocratically rise” portion of the populace has been decreasing since the 70’s (hence all the growth going to the top), and is going to get even smaller in the future (due to AI, globalization, etc)

• Professor Sandel has entirely wasted his life - I mean, I’m assuming he believes this, if he believes anything he’s written (at exhaustive book length, repeatedly)

Where we disagree:

• Meritocracy is a bad idea - what better way of allocating jobs and compensation is there, seriously? How are we supposed to GET economic and technological growth without meritocracy? Because that’s the engine that lifts everybody up.

• Finance bros and high school teachers are equally talented, and the high school teachers drive more “social value” and are severely underpaid (lol, I can’t even)

• The answer to the “tyranny of merit” in schools is to nerf our T20 universities, banning the SAT as an entry criteria, and randomly selecting from the remaining pool of applicants, whose sole criteria is GPA(!?)³, and also we should preserve Affirmative Action (ie overt racism) by giving preferred minorities 2 and 3 tokens in the random draw over the boo-hiss majorities and unpreferred minorities (aka Asians). Once again, so wrong on so many levels, I’m just not even going to try.

• The answer to the “tyranny of merit” in jobs is something really incoherent, but seemingly involves “deliberating with our fellow citizens about

  how to bring about a just and good society, one that cultivates civic virtue and enables us to reason together about the purposes worthy of our political community” and “an institution akin to trade associations or guilds to ensure that workers’ skills were adequate to make contributions seen as worthy of public esteem” - I really couldn’t grap what he’s proposing, but it sounds something like…a Status Police? I’m not sure how he proposes to allocate “public esteem” and ensure it remains allocated in his preferred ways, but I assume that’s what would be needed to do that?

He also has a crushingly dumb “let’s eliminate payroll taxes and make up the shortfall by taxing HFT finance transactions” proposal.

You can tell he’s a liberal arts guy rather than a STEM guy, can’t you? Because if you do even the simplest of napkin maths, you’ll see this could never work.

Let’s ground things on current payroll taxes and SS / Medicare / Medicaid entitlement expenditures. We currently take in ~$1.6T from payroll taxes, and we currently spend ~$2.7T on those entitlements annually, for a $1.1T deficit shortfall just in this one area (overall, we take in $4.4T and spend ~$6T annually).

Now how much does finance drive to US GDP in its ENTIRETY? About $1.9T. Literally, if you appropriated 100% of finance’s revenues, profits, and salaries paid to all employees, you could cover maybe 70% of those entitlements. And needless to say, you’d completely devastate job growth, company growth, new company foundings, loans to existing companies, and the economy overall - because even if finance is a source of great waste, at least 15-50% even according to the skeptics is actually going to capital allocation and things that drive growth on those fronts.

I agree a HFT tax is not the *worst* idea, but it will bring in approximately zero dollars in tax revenue per year - people and companies change their behaviors based on taxes paid, and before the law was even written, there’d be a lot of lobbying and back and forth between financial firms, campaign donors, and politicians, and at the end of the day some threshold would be written into law that market makers will stay under so they’re not taxed. The whole thing would be the typical political kabuki theater of pretending to do something to get credit from rubes, and then nothing coming of it empirically.

But needless to say, you can’t eliminate even 10% of payroll taxes with anything like what’s he’s proposing.

Where we MIGHT agree:

• Lotteries are as fair as anything for a realistic, non-racist admission criteria for people that pass a reasonable threshold that has SAT / ACT as an IQ filter

Oh, another good one, and this could be the true litmus test of the courage of Sandel’s convictions. He proposes in this 2020 book:

“scaling back environmental regulations that cost jobs in manufacturing and mining industries”

and

“On the fraught subjects of immigration and free trade, Cass urges that we view these from the standpoint of workers, not consumers. If our goal is the lowest possible consumer prices, he observes, then free trade, outsourcing, and relatively open immigration policies are desirable. But if our main concern is creating a labor market that enables low- and middle-skilled American workers to earn a decent living, raise families, and build communities, then some restrictions on trade, outsourcing, and immigration are justified”

As possible interventions to foster “worker dignity.”

In other words, fewer environmental laws, less immigration and more tariffs - exactly what Trump v2 is enacting at this very moment!

I actually couldn’t find anything Sandel had written or opined on regarding these recent “Trumptastrophes,” but I’d be VERY surprised if he ever says anything good about them, given the prevailing Ivy culture and he being a card-carrying, thoughtcrime-abhorring member of the academic left in good standing.

More Democracy?

Throughout the book, he pays a lot of lip service to “becoming more democratic” and “giving the oppressed-by-meritocracy folk more voice and say in the directions we take as a country.”

This is obviously not a real answer for either side, for many reasons:

• He literally spends his entire book trying to point at Trump getting elected as the worst outcome possible - he’s really going to listen to the people that put Trump into office? That’s half the country. He thinks they’re going to listen to him, a literal Harvard professor and anointed chatterer? I have the feeling he had a very racially biased and tiny subset of the “oppressed by meritocracy” people in mind when he was suggesting stuff like this.

• People believe that their children marrying somebody from the other party is the worst outcome imaginable

• Everyone has unfavorable opinions of each other, and believes the other side is a “threat to America”

• All this stuff below:

  

But more importantly, as I talked about in my “Why we need to clone LKY 200 times” post, democracy is fundamentally broken and dumb entirely. We need a governance method with LESS democracy to address any of our pernicious and apparently unaddressable-with-democracy problems, and we have the technology and means to do much better now, and should do so.

But what might an actual solution look like?

So broadly, 80% of people are losing out, this fraction is only going to increase notably as AI and robotics gets better, nobody is going to cooperate politically, democracy is dumb to begin with, and none of these trends look like they’re going to improve any time soon.

Obviously we need SOME solution, and as always, politics isn’t going to provide it. Neither are overly verbose Ivy chatterers - and one darkly humorous point I’d like to make is that the niche of “generating kilowords you don’t actually believe in just to look clever and dunk on your outgroup” is now ably filled by AI, so he should really start automating his workflows.

So what always has to step in to fill the gap in these situations? Technology.

What do we have on that front?

First, gengineering. If we want to ensure that people really ARE coming from positions of more equal capabilities and gifts, and that their ultimate station in life and the content of their character results purely from their choices rather than from luck and immutable biology, we need broad scale gengineering, and we need it soon.

The technology has been here for editing SNP’s into primate embryos for more than 5 years. A handful of companies are offering embryonic *screening,* but essentially nobody is offering embryonic gengineering, because it’s not legal anywhere in the world.

If you want to see my full arguments for why we should allow gengineering, as well as a list of the pretty significant value we could drive today just with SNP’s, see my post here.

Second, AI personal assistants and whisper earrings

I just wrote a post about “whisper earrings,” stemming from an early Scott Alexander short story.

Basically, Phd-smart, maximally conscientious advisors are going to make better decisions than first 80%, and very quickly, 99.9% of people.

Through a combination of better knowledge and being able to persuade you to do better actions occasionally by framing those better actions in terms of the things you most value, and putting them into the terms and arguments you most resonate with, these Phd assistants will enable people to make marginally better decisions across a lot of important areas of life.

Better eating and movement and health habits, better relationship habits, they can coach you to more success in your work or hobbies, it’s basically a superweapon.

If they can only get you to make 10% better decisions on the margins overall, that’s an incredibly huge effect size - because you make decisions basically all day. A 10% edge compounding daily, weekly, yearly, and by the decade is an impossibly large effect size.

Just think if you’d been 10% more motivated and smart when optimizing your career, and did this over years and decades - think you’d be in a materially different place today?

What if you were 10% more thoughtful, empathetic, and interesting in your personal interactions, and did this repeatedly across most interactions? Think your relationships might be longer lasting and higher quality?

Read the whole post if you want the full argument, but this is a pretty obvious area with lots of low hanging fruit, that’s applicable to EVERYONE.

Third, UBI and AI job automation via kiosks, robotics, and API’s

We shouldn’t be forcing people to work jobs that they hate and that don’t actually provide any value. Lean in. Give the AI’s and machines those jobs as fast as you can, and give UBI and Infinite Jest style heavens to the people as fast as you can.

Every cashier, barista, or therapist replaced by AI is a great benefit to all of us - they get to avoid crushingly pointless “work,” and we get faster and cheaper goods and services.

What if they actually like being a barista? Great - I’m sure there’ll be high end coffee shops who will want the cachet of actually human workers giving “high touch” service, and will charge accordingly. Let the top 10% of baristas that are skilled and actually intrinsically enjoy their jobs work at those places, it’s win / win. That isn’t most people, let’s be realistic.

How does this work, economically?

Basically, you’ve taken a job you used to have to pay people $10-50 an hour for, and replaced it with something that costs less than ten cents an hour - a 100-500x favorable cost structure makes everything cheaper, per Jevon’s Paradox and supply / demand curves people consume more, and now there’s 1.5x+ spending where there used to be 1x spending - you can afford to pay the displaced workers their entire salaries, the AI companies get a healthy cut, and there’s probably still surplus above that.

And yes, this absolutely applies to lawyers, devs, doctors, and whoever else - I’m just using baristas as a placeholder for “non meritocratically winning today” for the example.

What will we do with a ton of unemployed people with a bunch of time on their hands?

I’m tempted to say “go look at Petrostates,” or “look at the ~104M people in the US today who aren’t employed or looking for work, what do they do?” or something, but I think there’s at least one pretty obvious and feasible end state out there - screens cranked up to 11. Super-duper stimuli.

The median person already spends 7-9 hours a day on screens recreationally today, be it phones or TV’s, and for the ~40% of people who are white collar workers, that’s 7-9 hours after spending ~8 hours in front of screens at work!

Clearly, the appetite for screens and digital entertainment is literally bottomless. Let’s make infinite VR heavens with AI.

What are these purported VR heavens?

They’ll monitor your pupillary dilation, cheek flushing, galvanic skin response, parasympathetic arousal, heart rate and more - they’ll be procedurally generated, and so infinite. There will be a thousand different patterns of rise / fall / rise, quests, voyages and returns, monster slayings, and more, and they’ll all be engineered to be maximally stimulating along the way and maximally satisfying at the ends.

They’re procedurally generated, so they’re infinite. People will be Wall-E style, UBI-supported “coffin slaves,” hooked up to IV’s and catheters and living in the equivalent of Japanese pod hotels. It’s video games and porn and Golden Age of TV and all the best movies, all at once, optimized 1000x, and running forever.

THAT will move the needle on discontent and anomie and not feeling high status in a meritocracy. People will literally be god-kings and empresses of all they survey! They’ll be the tippy top of their little VR heaven status hierarchies, and it will feel “real” because the other minds aren’t NPC’s, they’re AI’s every bit as smart and complex as they are.

It’s a selection mechanism, a Great Filter. If screen time numbers today are anything to go, we’ll lose 80%+ of the population.

Obviously we can’t predict anything about the future once we have widespread AGI or ASI, but we know that various societal / existential hazards like this will abound, and how we or every other country navigates them is very much up in the air.

But local status games? Meaning and engagement in a post-work society? There are definitely answers that can leave everyone happy, if “happy” can be defined as “something people would voluntarily opt into en masse and rarely voluntarily leave.”

1. More than 90% of both men and women had descendants in this golden age, a record high unparalleled in all of history. Today, it’s roughly 75% / 80% of men / women that have descendants. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, it was roughly 60/ 80% m / f, and in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, it was 20-40% / 80%.

2. Per a study he cites in the book, 1/5 of college students report thoughts of suicide annually, and 1/4 were diagnosed or treated for a mental health disorder.

3. Gah, you can tell he has basically zero epistemics or math skills.

SO many reasons this couldn’t possibly work. There’s ~450k - 550k “4.0 or better” students graduating every year - the Ivy league admits ~15k students. How are you supposed to decide here? Randomly? The T20 overall admits ~45k, less than 10% of the 4.0 crowd. How are THEY supposed to decide? Randomly?

You REALLY think there’s zero difference between the top 15k or 45k in that pool and the bottom 45k? Or the bottom ~500k? Do you know WHY the Ivy League only admits 15k? Because it’s a sorting mechanism - it’s supposed to be hard to get into, and that’s what makes it a good place to be educated, because you’re surrounded by other actually smart people when you go. If literally ~15% of the HS graduating class qualifies, it means nothing. The quality of the average Ivy student would plummet - they would literally be moving from the top half percent of students in the country to randomly choosing from the top 15%, with an average 7.5% percentile quality - a literal fifteen-fold decrease in percentile. That’s the difference between a 1540+ SAT score and a 1360 - 1420 SAT score - it’s HUGE. Those are materially different populations, and the average student quality would be VERY noticeably decreased.

Stacked with his favored “lets preserve active racism in admissions” policies, I almost want to give it to him, just to see the blowback. But that would be cruel to everyone involved.