[FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

[Eric Charles]

So.... delayed response to the original... based on the longer reviews I've
seen, this is partially a criticism of meritocracy itself, but also a very
strong criticism of the neo-liberal bastardization of meritocracy. As it
says in the opening line of the review in the original post: The thing
being criticized are "pernicious assumptions" about merit. From what I can
tell, his TED talk summarizes the book well:
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_the_tyranny_of_merit

He starts out with some discussion of moral luck, but in my opinion not a
great discussion of it. Then he moves on to criticize a world where pieces
of paper are confused for ability. In such a world, those without the right
pieces of paper are deemed to lack merit and are told they can't have
dignity. That part is criticizing a world in which our leaders continuously
message that everyone should go to college, encouraging a false belief that
a getting a degree somehow magically makes you successful, and encouraging
the implicit (or sometimes explicit) judgement that not getting a degree
somehow a personal failure and that getting a degree and then not
succeeding is an incoherent position to be in. The failure of that program
of thought has been huge. It is hard to explain how many of the students I
taught at Penn State Altoona had their lives made worse by getting a
degree. They are working the same jobs they could have worked out of high
school, but with 4 years less experience, added shame and frustration,
crippling debt, and a worse relationship with parents who can't understand
why having a degree hasn't made their kids successful. And you can't try to
defend this by hand-waving at education being virtuous in its own right,
but it won't work, because by any reasonable measure they aren't very
educated either.

Even with as right as some parts of that critique are, it is all somehow
seething with the suspect rhetoric of the protestant work ethic. There is
nothing inherently virtuous in being exploited for your labor (in the
Marxist sense of providing profit to a capitalist), and he is somehow
lumping all "work" together in a way that obscures that.

When all is said and done, it is an interesting argument, but my
Libertarian Goat is doing fine, thank you :- )


<echarles at american.edu>


On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 1:28 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This should do it!
>
>
>
>
> https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-j-sandel/the-tyranny-of-merit/
>
>
>
> The thesis is that “meritocracy” is the cause of the fact that the us is
> now the least socially mobile country among the western democracies.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
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