hankyoreh

World-famous political scientist and Harvard University professor Michael Sandel gave Korean President Lee Jae Myung a copy of his book “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” on a visit to Korea last month.

Meritocracy is the idea that anybody can succeed with a little hard work and that people of merit ought to receive commensurate rewards. While meritocracy emerged as a progressive ideal aimed at surmounting the social ill of wealth being hoarded within dynasties and bloodlines, in our modern world, meritocracy faces criticism as a system that justifies inequality.

“The Tyranny of Merit” invites comparisons with “The Meritocracy Trap” by Daniel Markovits, a Yale University professor who is well-known in Korea for his discourse about the inheritance of elite status. He will be a keynote speaker at the 16th Asia Future Forum, which will be held on Oct. 23 on the theme of “Next Democracy.”

Markovits argues that meritocracy is not fair competition, but a mechanism for passing down educational capital. Since elite parents invest immense resources in educating their children, test scores and academic degrees amount to inherited privilege, rather than proof of merit.

But elites come to believe that their status is something they’re naturally entitled to, as it is the result of their effort. That leads them to look down on others who have less than them, and those at the bottom end up resenting this system that excludes them. In this way, by making victors arrogant and losers ashamed, meritocracy shows its true colors as a form of tyranny that destabilizes the system. 

The problem is that this structure is currently threatening democracy. The two scholars both point to education as the crux of the problem. Sandel points out that center-left parties’ advocacy for education as a solution to inequality ended up backfiring and alienating the working class. The advice to “go get a degree” if you want to break out of the cycle of inequality was insulting to those “losers,” and led to the rise of Trump and populism. 

“The elite of each generation has acquired an unrivaled capacity and an unquenchable appetite for training its children in the next. And because training and education work, this means that the children of elite parents outperform all other children on meritocratic measures.  Hence, elite families pass privilege down through their generations, and meritocracy is the social technology that they deploy to do so,” says Markovits. 

That is, education is no longer the ladder of social mobility it once was; instead, it has become a wall that keeps the classes separate and immutable. Meritocratic societies are societies in which class is inherited not through blood, but through educational capital. 

Both Sandel and Markovits expressed concern that this tyranny of meritocracy will continue to worsen so long as we continue to separate schools for the rich from those for the rest of us, with the affluent flocking to private schools and the poor to public ones. 

“Democracy doesn’t require perfect equality of income and wealth. But what it does require is that there be public places and common spaces that bring us together to remind us that we are in this together, that we are participants in a common life,” Sandel told the Hankyoreh. 

Markovits calls meritocracy “irreducibly competitive,” and argues that society should turn away from meritocracy’s focus on superiority and instead embrace “excellence, for all.”

By Han Gui-young, Hankyoreh Economy and Society Research Institute staff writer

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