Jason Furman's Reviews > The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

There is so much not to like in this book that I feel like I need to write a well organized essay about it at some point rather than these quick slapdash notes. But for now all I have are these quick slapdash notes.

That is not to say the entire book is wrong, much of it is right and important--but none of what is right and important is particularly novel, it is in fact common fare on the oped pages of major publications, like inequality has risen, opportunity is not as high as many think, elite colleges do not live up to their stated meritocratic ideals and the increase in non-employment is a problem. At one point it had a novel framing of a familiar issue that I liked--which is the need to focus not just on distributive justice but also on contributive justice, particularly how to do justice to people's contributions. To some degree this was saying work should be in the utility function as a positive--and that we should reshape social attitudes so we think that way about our own work and others work.

But most of the book reads like the sophmoric ranting of a random person on Twitter going on about neoliberalism and globalization without seriously engaging with what either of them actually proposed or their consequences. You would think that Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's only solution to our economic problems was to hector people into going to college without acknowledging they had much, much more to their agenda than that--including expanding wage subsidies (i.e., the EITC), an idea Sandel mistakenly claims is heterodox and attributes to Oren Cass. (To be clear, Cass has a bigger proposal--but it is reminiscent of Ned Phelps not to mention one that I developed with Phill Swagel, two people Sandel would consider "neoliberal").

Sandel goes on about the financialization of the economy which wastes resources and creates rents, crediting these ideas to heterodox thinkers when he could just have easily have cited leading mainstream economists publishing in leading journals like Jeremy Stein and Thomas Philippon. But then Sandel throws in legitimate issues (e.g., the wasted resources for high-speed trading) with ones where is probably wrong (e.g., objecting to Credit Default Swaps because people do not buy the actual company) and certainly wrong (e.g., objecting to stock buybacks). And, like most of the issues he identifies, he does not have a real solution (he proposes a financial transactions tax which would address a small subset of the issues he raises).

Sandel is completely obsessed with the very elite universities which are a much smaller part of the overall story of what he claims to care about. And he does not address the awkward fact that even if Harvard eliminated legacies, athletics and extracurriculars a pure merit-based admissions would still admit about 10% of students from the top 1%. At the very least this says that a lot of the solution to the issues he is worried about has to happen before students are 17 and apply to college, like preschool, school reform, and then the awkwardness of differential parental inputs and genes. (By the say, like so much else in the book, his discussion of SATs as exacerbating inequalities of opportunity does not seriously engage much of the research that finds the opposite).

Sandel over claims on the proposition that the elevation of a meritocracy means that people are blamed more for their failings today than they were in the past. He argues, "The providentialist notion that people get what they deserve reverberates in contemporary public discourse." He then cites as an example Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 on America's sins like abortion, feminism and LGBT. But Falwell was widely reviled for that statement, if anything the reaction to it is the opposite of what Sandel is claiming.

Other anecdotes he offers (and yes, the evidence is almost all anecdotes), go directly against his thesis. He talks about when he was in high school (presumably the late 1960s) and how they sat people in his math class in order of their grades, with a resorting of the seating periodically after new tests. It is impossible to imagine that happening today in the "everyone gets a trophy" world.

Sandel is very negative on just about every consequentialist and person focused on distributive justice (e.g., Rawls is blamed for legitimating wealth and letting the wealthy feel good about themselves for creating jobs and reducing poverty). But then everything comes back to money for him. He talks a lot about "esteem" and "dignity" but for him it really does seem to come down to money. Which is fine, but then admit that distributive justice is an important part of the answer. But also the "common good" and shared project can't just be people discussing philosophy with each other but bonding over sports, Taylor Swift, a shared identity as Americans, and many other aspects of life that bring meaning, purpose, dignity and connection that are outside the economic sphere.

But perhaps what bothered me most was that the book jumbles up positive and normative claims with no clear delineation between them. I could not tell if he had a different moral philosophy than the people he criticizes (in many cases straw mans). Or a different reading of the data. Much of the argument is about Trump being elected means we need to change the way we talk about various issues. If Trump had lost would we have not needed to change? He makes sweeping (and wrong) statements about wages falling in inflation-adjusted terms over fifty years and (possibly wrong) statements like after-tax inequality continuing to rise. If those facts were the opposite would that change his philosophy? I wish I knew because there are some valid and interesting philosophical ideas but they are messily mixed together with a lot more that does not seriously engage with economics, economic policy, or the often messy and subtle facts about the world.