Michael Sandel:

Purpose of The Tyranny of Merit is to try to make sense of why we’re so deeply polarized. And I think to understand it, we have to look back at the politics of the last four or five decades.

Nick Hanauer:

It’s just not merit that tyrannizes us, it’s the neoclassical and neoliberal framework for understanding economic cause and effect, which is equally tyrannical.

Speaker 3:

From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

David Goldstein:

I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. It wouldn’t surprise a lot of listeners, Nick, to learn that your net worth, give or take, is about a thousand times more than mine. Does that mean, Nick, that you’re a thousand times more deserving?

Nick Hanauer:

I’d like to think so.

David Goldstein:

Well, of course you would. And right there, that’s the secret to this whole notion of meritocracy-

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right.

David Goldstein:

… that we’ll be talking about today. That, really, it’s a defense of the status quo for really, really, really rich people like you.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. Yeah. No, clearly, I’m probably sadly not a thousand times more productive, smart, hardworking, attractive … What else is there?

David Goldstein:

I’ll take everything else.

Nick Hanauer:

Okay.

David Goldstein:

You say, than me.

Nick Hanauer:

Than you. And yet we live-

David Goldstein:

You’ve got better, a thousand times better hair.

Nick Hanauer:

I do. I have probably literally a thousand times more hair than you. Yeah, yeah. So there’s something. So, there you have it.

David Goldstein:

There you go.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, yeah.

David Goldstein:

Yeah, okay.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. And yet, we live in a culture supported by an economic framework that encourages people to believe that if I make a thousand times as much as you do, I’m worth a thousand times as much. And today on the podcast, we get to talk to one of our absolute favorite people in the whole wide world, Dr. Michael Sandel, the noted political philosopher from Harvard, about his latest book, The Tyranny of Merit. And Goldie, I wanted to do this podcast so much because as, I may have told you some months ago, I was in the office of a particular United States senator, who will not be named, in Washington DC, and on his desk was Sandel’s new book, the Tyranny of Merit. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, look at you, reading Michael Sandel.” And he pushed the book at me and he said, “Take a look.” And every page was underlined, and every margin, there were notes written. It was really clear that this senator had taken this book incredibly seriously, and he said it changed his life. It was the thing that finally shattered the neoliberal kind of framework that he had been operating in, really, for his whole life.

And as a consequence, reading Sandel’s book, this senator has really changed his mind about a lot of things. And because this particular person is extremely bright and very self-aware and reflective, again, has changed his mind about a lot of things that he wants to do in the future and feels bad about a lot of the things he did in the past. And so for that reason, I think this book is really, really important. It’s sort of a philosophical companion to our attack on the economics of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics.

Michael Sandel:

I am Michael Sandel. I teach political philosophy at Harvard University, and I’m the author most recently of a book called The Tyranny of Merit, Can We Find the Common Good? And a new edition of a book called Democracy’s Discontent, A New Edition for Our Perilous Times. Both of them are about our civic condition, why it’s in trouble and what we might do about it.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, Michael, if you wouldn’t mind starting out by laying out the thesis of your newest book, and then I want to circle back to Democracy’s Discontent because that’s how I found you. Gosh, I read that book when it came out so many years ago.

Michael Sandel:

Great. Well, the main purpose of The Tyranny of Merit is to try to make sense of why we’re so deeply polarized. And I think to understand it, we have to look back at the politics of the last four or five decades. The divide between winners and losers has been deepening, poisoning our politics and setting us apart. This has partly to do, I think, with the widening inequalities of income and wealth brought about by market-driven globalization, but it has also to do with the changing attitudes towards success that have accompanied the widening inequalities. Those who’ve landed on top have come to believe that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, and that they therefore deserve the full bounty that the market bestows upon them. And by implication, that those who struggle, those left behind must deserve their fate as well.

Now, this harsh attitude towards success arises from a seemingly attractive ideal, the ideal of meritocracy. The principle that says, insofar as chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings. Now, we know that, in practice, we don’t live up to the meritocratic ideals we profess. Kids born to low-income families tend to stay poor as adults. But I think the solution isn’t simply to try to perfect the meritocracy, to double down on it. I think the problem goes deeper. Meritocracy has a dark side. It’s corrosive of the common good because it breeds a kind of hubris among the winners, the conviction that our success is our own doing. And it inflicts a kind of humiliation, Nick, on those who are left behind. And it leads the successful to look down on those less fortunate than themselves. And I think this condition, this sense of elites looking down goes a long way to explaining the populous backlash against elites, especially credentialed elites, that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, that contributed to the vote for Brexit in the UK and to the alienation of working people from center-left parties and democratic societies around the world.

David Goldstein:

So to be clear, it’s not just inequality that has created this populist uprising, but what this meritocratic ideal says about inequality and the moral implications implicit in that.

Michael Sandel:

Yes, exactly, exactly. It’s both together. In a way, it’s as if the winners of globalization wanted more than the winnings. They wanted to be able to claim credit. They wanted to be able to have the bragging rights to have deserved the benefits that came their way. And it’s interesting, going all the way back a century ago, Max Weber noticed this. He said, “The fortunate person doesn’t only want to enjoy his good fortune. He wants to believe that he deserves it and that he deserves it in comparison with others.” So I think he was onto this.

David Goldstein:

Nick, you hang out with some billionaires.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

You know these people well. Does this ring true to you?

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Well, in many cases it does. Although I honestly hang out with a group of people who are at least socially self-aware enough to at least feign some humility. And of course, like many of my successful friends are very capable people and they would’ve been successful in some way, shape, or form probably, no matter what. But, to be truly successful, your capability has to intersect with luck in a very profound way, which is the thing that most people don’t account for. As you may know, our work here has been focused mostly on inequality and the way in which economics at large has produced both a set of policies but also a culture that rewards a few and immiserates the many.

One of the questions I have, and I think you say it so well in your book, which is that it’s not just the rising inequality. It’s ultimately to do with the changing terms of social recognition and esteem that’s driving us apart. One of my questions for you is if we made the United States significantly less unequal, right, if we address the inequality in our economy at the scale of the problem, let’s say, does that fix the problem?

Michael Sandel:

It helps. It creates an opening to fix the problem, but by itself, it’s not enough. Because, well, we could imagine one way of trying to alleviate inequalities of income, at least, by doing what some have proposed and enacting a universal basic income. And that would be a good thing in and of itself, but it wouldn’t solve the problem of social recognition and esteem, unless we found a way to accord honor and respect and esteem for the contributions that people make whether or not they have glittering credentials of various kinds, whether or not they have a diploma, whether or not they sit at the apex of the media and Wall Street and academia.

I think that part of what we have to do is to try to renew the dignity of work. Part of what … You mentioned the distinction and I think this is very important between economic policy and the culture, the way we understand the sources and meaning of the inequality. And part of what turned the culture in a way that discredited especially center-left politicians and parties is that during the age of growing inequality, during the age of neoliberal globalization, what the mainstream parties, including Democrats, said, as a way of dealing with inequality, was this, if you’re worried about wage stagnation and job loss and outsourcing and rising inequality, go get a degree. Go to university. You remember what they said? What you earn will depend on what you learn.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right.

Michael Sandel:

You can make it if you try. Now, what these elites missed was the insult implicit in that advice. The insult was this, if you’re struggling in the new economy and you don’t have a university degree, your failure must be your fault. We told you so. We advised you to improve yourselves. That also had the effect, not only of insulting working people and failing to respect and to recognize the contributions that they make through the work they do and the families they raise and the communities they serve, it also let elites off the hook. They didn’t say we need to reconsider the economic policies we put in place that led to this inequality. They said, go get a college degree, then you too will be able to rise as far as your talents and efforts will take you. And it’s the implicit insult that they missed that I think fueled the anger and resentment and the sense of grievance that Donald Trump and other right-wing populists have been able to tap into.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. We call that here in this shop educationism. The idea that inequality, you can solve it with education, which … I mean, even if you divorce from the problem, this idea of insult, which I think you’re absolutely right, there was never a shred of truth to the claim that this would help either. Because Americans have never been better educated, and yet college graduate incomes have been falling for 40 years, right? It was just such a con job.

Michael Sandel:

The educationism was a false response to inequality. And what it really rests on is an assumption, which I agree with you, is a mistaken assumption that individual upward mobility through higher education is the answer to inequality. But that’s a mistake for a number of reasons. One of them is it’s not so easy to rise. We always in America said, yeah, we may be more unequal than those old European societies, but we don’t need to worry about equality very much because in America, it’s always possible to rise, individual upward mobility. Problem is mobility, it turns out, is not an alternative to equality. Those countries with greater equality of income and wealth have higher rates of mobility than we do.

If I could just give one example of this, in some of the northern European countries, in Denmark, for example. There are very high rates of upward mobility. The OECD did a study of how many generations it would take for someone born into a low-income family, bottom 10%, to rise, not to the top, but to the median income. How many generations? In Denmark, it would take two generations. In the United States, given our mobility rates, it would take five. So the American dream, you might say, is alive and well and living in Copenhagen.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. That’s so interesting.

David Goldstein:

Yeah. I’m curious how much this ideology of meritocracy can be disentangled from the economic ideology, the neoliberal ideology, and the neoclassical economics that has dominated our thinking for the past half century. I mean, a core principle of orthodox economics is this idea that the market pays you what you’re worth, and that is a meritocratic formula if there ever was one. Can we address the larger social philosophical issue without addressing the economic orthodoxy that supports it?

Michael Sandel:

No. We need to question both and challenge both at the same time. Because the kind of meritocracy that fuels, what I’ve described in The Tyranny of Merit as a kind of meritocratic hubris, that meritocracy with its attitudes towards success, the idea that we are self-made and self-sufficient, this notion of meritocracy is the moral companion of neoliberal economic policy. Neoliberal economic policy, and you put it very well, it leads to the assumption or it rests on the assumption that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good. But this is an implausible assumption, even though it’s pervasive.

Even the most ardent defenders of libertarian, laissez-faire, free market economics would be hard-pressed really to make the case that the value of the contribution of a hedge fund manager, or let’s say a billionaire casino mogul, that the value of their contribution is really 1,000 or 2,000 times greater than the value of the contribution of a school teacher or a nurse, or for that matter, a physician. So, on a moment’s reflection, it’s really hard to sustain that idea, that the money people make-

David Goldstein:

Unless you’re in the Hamptons.

Michael Sandel:

Well, you’ll have to tell me about that.

David Goldstein:

If you’re in the Hamptons, people can sustain that quite easily. But I think we’re in violent agreement with you. But go on.

Michael Sandel:

Well, I would just say you are right to highlight or to point to the link between meritocratic attitudes towards success and the hubris and the humiliation that that creates, and neoliberal economic policies that create the inequalities of income and wealth. Here’s one way of thinking about it. Neoliberal economic policies created the growing gap between rich and poor. Meritocratic notions of success created the divide between winners and losers. So they are parallel.

Nick Hanauer:

Oh, that’s interesting.

Michael Sandel:

The cultural understanding of success is what gives us the divide between winners and losers, and it sharpens the sense of resentment, of grievance, and of humiliation for those who are left behind, who see elites looking down on them. And they’re not mistaken, they’re not mistaken. Educationism is the term you use to describe this misdirected ideology. Another term for it would be credentialism, the idea that we’ve discredited most every prejudice in our society, which isn’t to say we’ve eliminated it, but we discredited prejudice except for the prejudice of the credentialed against those with a lesser education.

And if I could give one very tangible consequence of this. If we look at political representation, we take this for granted. What percentage of Americans have a four-year college degree? It’s about 35%, which means about more than 60%, 60 to 65% of Americans do not have a four-year degree. Of those 60 to 65% of Americans, how many of them make their way into Congress, or into the Senate?

Nick Hanauer:

Not many.

Michael Sandel:

In the Senate, there are none. And in the House of Representatives, it’s about 5%. Now, by any other measure, if other groups in our society were that woefully underrepresented in the institutions of government, we would say we need to do something about it. And I think we don’t really debate this question, about the fact that most Americans don’t have a degree and yet almost none serve in Congress. Perhaps because we think, well, isn’t it better to be governed by the well-educated? To which I would say not necessarily. I mean, if you think Congress has done a terrific job of it, you could make a case for it, but that’s a pretty hard case to make out.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

Yeah. You make the point that in the UK, the parliament has never been so unequal on this measure since the 19th century before they expanded the franchise to the unpropertied.

Michael Sandel:

Yes. In fact, it’s interesting that this tendency for those without a diploma to be essentially excluded from representative government in practice, it’s true not only in the US, it’s true in Britain where very, very small percentage of those without a degree are members of parliament. It’s true in the parliaments of Europe, in France, in Germany, in the Netherlands, and it wasn’t always this way. It’s interesting.

If we look back to the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, after the adoption of universal franchise and the abolition of property rights, those without university degrees had very substantial representation in national legislatures. You have to go back, as you were just suggesting, to the 19th century when there were still property qualifications for voting. And when the landed gentry predominated, you have to go back really to the days of the landed gentry and the aristocracy to find a similar lack of representation in legislatures by those without university degrees.

Nick Hanauer:

But just to clarify for our listeners, you are not arguing in your book against banning merit altogether. As you say, hiring someone on the basis of merit is perfectly sensible. Can you just explain the distinction that you’re trying to draw here?

Michael Sandel:

Yes. Insofar as merit means trying to have well-qualified people perform social roles, merit is a good thing. If I need surgery, I want a well-qualified surgeon to perform it. That’s merit. If I’m flying in an airplane, I want a well-qualified pilot at the controls. That’s merit. So merit in that sense is a perfectly good and sensible thing. So, how does merit become a kind of tyranny? It becomes a kind of tyranny when the view, you could call it an ideology, takes hold, especially at times of widening income inequality. That the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. And this goes back to the assumption that the money people make is the true measure of their contribution to the common good. Now, this is when we get the idea that the successful deserve the winnings, that those who land on top … that our success is our own doing. It’s meritocracy in that thoroughgoing sense that I am critical of and that I think has created the ground for this deep polarization.

David Goldstein:

You have an interesting thought experiment in the book where you ask the reader to imagine two equally unequal societies, one in aristocracy, the other, a meritocracy, and which would you choose to be a part of if you were going to be either in the top or in the bottom, and you point out that for the poor, it actually … there’s a strong argument for why you would prefer the aristocracy.

Michael Sandel:

There are arguments both ways. So, if you’re poor, if you’re poor and you’re looking up in an unequal society, you might say, given the choice, “Hey, I’d rather live in a meritocracy because at least there’s a hope of upward mobility. If not for me, at least for my children.” That would argue in favor of a meritocracy, if you were choosing from the bottom looking up. But there’s another consideration that cuts the other way, which is if I live in an … if I’m a serf, let’s say, in a feudal aristocracy, I have a hard life and I might be resigned to the fact that neither I nor my children have any chance of living in the manner and rising to the top. And that’s deeply dispiriting and demoralizing. On the other hand, I know that I landed where I landed through bad luck, and that the nobleman or the landed gentry for whom I toil is not better than me, he’s luckier than me.

Whereas, from the standpoint of a person struggling in a meritocracy, insofar as that person absorbs the understanding of success that accompanies a true meritocracy, that person has to be burdened by the thought that “I must not be as talented or as capable. I may not work hard enough. I may not be smart enough to have landed on top. My success or my lack of success, rather, is my own doing, is my failure.” And so, there is a burden associated with that. And it’s interesting that this demoralizing aspect of losing out in a meritocracy was the critique of meritocracy that was identified when the term meritocracy was coined by Michael Young, a British Labour Party sociologist in the late 1950s. He put the term meritocracy into currency with a little dystopian book he wrote called The Rise of the Meritocracy.

Now, Michael Young was a member of the Labour Party. He was in favor of greater equality, and he thought the fact that the old class system was breaking down was a good thing. But he noticed this feature of a meritocracy, and he predicted that over time, those who lost out in a meritocracy would feel looked down upon by the winners who would construe their success as their own doing. And Michael Young predicted that in the year 2034, there would be a populist backlash over throwing the meritocratic elite. His prophecy came true 18 years ahead of schedule.

David Goldstein:

And here we are. One of the things that struck me in the book was your whole conversation of right versus smart. And I saw in this a critique that I intuited, but never quite fully understood because, honestly, you were speaking to me as well. I’m one of these people who has a kind of technocratic streak and always felt that, well, yes, smart people should be running the country. I want people who are smarter than me to run the country. But that how corrosive it was within the Democratic Party and how much of it led to their loss of support in working people. If you could just explain that difference and how really the center-left lost its way.

Michael Sandel:

Yes. The emphasis on technocratic expertise is an emphasis that became more and more prominent in the Democratic Party, especially from the 1990s up through 2016 and beyond. And it was connected to this idea, and it’s a meritocratic idea, that the ultimate term of praise of a person or of a policy is smart. So the distinction becomes not so much the moral distinction or the ideological distinction of right versus wrong, justice versus injustice, but instead, smart versus dumb. And it’s understandable why Democrats of the ’90s and 2000s fell into this way of talking about policy, and for that matter, personnel, valorizing the smart. It was related to their emphasis on higher education as an instrument of upward mobility, as if it were an answer to inequality. But it goes beyond that. It goes to valorizing a technocratic approach to government and politics. It seems nonpartisan to say I’m for smart policies rather than this policy promotes the common good as I see it, or this policy promotes a just society as I’m prepared to defend it.

Those are debatable propositions. What serves the common good or what promotes a greater justice. They’re debatable. They’re contestable. They’re controversial. They require moral argument in politics. In a way, it’s a kind of defensive maneuver, a gesture towards seemingly nonpartisan modes of governing to say, “No, I’m going to govern in a way that’s smart.” And we saw it time and again in a slogan which reflects this, the slogan, “Follow the science.” How often did we hear this during COVID? But even before, even during the glory days of neoliberal globalization. The argument was that outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries, deregulating the financial industry, insisting on the free flow of capital across national borders, all of this will help everyone. The gains to the gainers can be used to offset the loss to the losers. That’s what the mainstream economists said. These were the experts. These were the experts who endorsed this kind of hyper-globalization.

And then the financial crash came in 2008, and that expertise was tainted a little bit, but they dusted themselves off. They rebuilt that system, and they persisted in a kind of technocratic mode of governance. And then when COVID came, we heard the slogan, “Follow the science,” which was another depoliticizing, seemingly nonpartisan stance toward deciding such questions as whether or not to close schools during COVID. Well, science is certainly relevant to that question, but science can’t tell you by itself whether or when or under what conditions to close schools. That’s a political judgment that involves ethical judgments that should be informed by science, but can’t be determined by science.

And I’m afraid we’re making a similar mistake now, this emphasis on smart policies, technocratic policies, as we are engaged in the debate about climate change. And my worry is that we’re going to replicate the same kind of technocratic hubris and political divide over climate change that we saw over COVID because of the kind of technocratic hubris of governing elites who think they don’t need to involve themselves in messy-on-the-ground debates about the common good, including with the folks whose jobs will be displaced by the transition to a green economy. It’s enough to say, this is what the scientists tell us we must do, but that’s going to put people off.

David Goldstein:

It’s, in a way, undemocratic.

Michael Sandel:

It’s deeply undemocratic.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. The word that we find that is used most to advance this, at least in economics, is efficiency. That word is so corrupt today in the sense that it merely means capital efficiency. It means we want to-

David Goldstein:

Cost-cutting.

Nick Hanauer:

Cost-cutting. We want to do this in a way so that the people who are putting up the capital get the highest possible return, and every other consideration be damned, right? Issues of justice be damned, inequality be damned, environmental impact be damned, social solidarity be damned, everything. It doesn’t matter what … And as if capital efficiency is godliness, is the common good, right?

Michael Sandel:

Yes, yes.

Nick Hanauer:

We have confused these things in ways that are just so profoundly corrosive to people’s lives and democracy and everything else like that. It just really, really maddening. You are a philosopher. We tend to … Our focus is on the economics itself. And it’s just not merit that tyrannizes us, it’s the neoclassical and neoliberal framework for understanding economic cause and effect, which is equally tyrannical, right? The idea that markets are perfectly efficient, that people are homo economicus, that the economy is a Pareto optimal equilibrium, that people are paid their marginal product. All of these ideas are effectively a protection racket for the rich and seek to disengage people from the moral questions that really define the texture of our lives.

Michael Sandel:

Yes. I think that puts it very well. And the heart of the problem for politics is that this way of thinking and running and managing the economy is deeply undemocratic. Because if efficiency considerations or if cost benefit analysis are the final word, can give us the final word or the decisive word on how to organize the economy, then economic choices and policymaking are the province of experts. Those who know how to run the cost benefit analysis and how to crank out the efficiency considerations.

But here’s the problem. I think the appeal, the deep appeal of market thinking and market reasoning and this economistic view of the world that you’re describing, the deep appeal is not only that markets deliver the goods, prosperity, rising GDP and the like. The deep appeal of market thinking and market reasoning is that markets seem to be value-neutral instruments that spare us from engaging in messy, contentious, controversial debates about justice, about equality and inequality, about what we owe one another as fellow citizens. So the appeal of markets is that they seem to be a neutral way of deciding contested questions. They seem to spare us the need to engage in moral reasoning in public, because we worry about disagreement, about the lack of consensus, about the hard work of deliberating as democratic citizens over contested questions of justice and the common good.

But this is a false promise of markets. Markets are not neutral instruments. As you well know, efficiency considerations, cost benefit analysis, these are not neutral ways of deciding contested questions of justice or the common good. They don’t leave these questions unresolved. They simply enable them to be decided by systems often … decisions often at a distance from public view, superintendent largely by the wealthy and the powerful and the well-connected.

Nick Hanauer:

And this is the essence of the argument you made in the first book of yours that I read, which was Democracy’s Discontent. Is it not?

Michael Sandel:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

So, what’s annoying about it is that … I read that book … When did it come out, ’96, ’98? When did it come out?

Michael Sandel:

Yes. Originally in ’96.

Nick Hanauer:

Okay. I must have read it ’96, ’97. I was still a raging neoliberal in those days. But the book made it … Because, look, I grew up in that soup, and I was a business person and an entrepreneur. As you must know, there is nothing more comforting than to believe that your success is your own, and that markets are perfectly efficient and the rich deserve to be rich, and the poor deserve to be poor if you’re rich, right? It’s an easy thing to believe. But your book rocked my world in ’96, ’97, or whenever I read it. And I guess my question is, this is sort of a personal question, how come you were so far ahead in your thinking?

Michael Sandel:

Wow. It’s a generous question. It’s a very generous question.

Nick Hanauer:

Because you were onto it 20 years before the rest of us, or a long time before the rest of us.

Michael Sandel:

Yeah, fair enough. And again, it’s generous of you to observe. What struck me at the time … Now this was a time of market triumphalist faith. The Cold War had ended. There was a heady sense of satisfaction that the world, that ours was the only system left standing. That we had won, we had prevailed. America’s version of democratic capitalism was the wave of the future. It was only a matter of time before other countries would see the light. And yet, beneath the surface of the peace and prosperity and triumphalism of the moment, it seemed to me that fractures in the Democratic project could be glimpsed in two ways. There was a broad in the land, or so it seemed to me, a growing sense of disempowerment, a sense among ordinary citizens that their voices didn’t matter, that we didn’t have a meaningful say in shaping the forces that govern our collective life.

So there was a sense of growing disempowerment, and it was also a sense that the moral fabric of community, from family to neighborhood to the nation, was unraveling around us, that we were less anchored in the forms of community that gave our life meaning, that gave us a kind of moral anchor or a sense of situation in the world, a sense of belonging. And I think these sentiments were present, or so I thought, even in the 1990s, in the midst of the seeming prosperity and global success of American capitalism, and I worried. I worried that a purely procedural, managerial, technocratic approach to governing the economy and the society created a kind of moral void. I worried that it was hollowing out public discourse. After all, if the experts and technocrats are deciding the most important questions, then there’s very little left for us to do and to debate as democratic citizens.

And when that happens, when public discourse, the terms of public discourse become emptied of larger moral meaning and purpose, people want, well, they feel disempowered, that they don’t have a meaningful say, but people want public life and public debate to be about big questions, including questions of justice and debating questions of equality and inequality, of moral and civic obligation. And when there’s a moral void at the center of our public discourse, sooner or later, this was my worry, sooner or later, that moral void will be filled with narrow intolerant moralisms, either religious fundamentalisms or strident hyper-nationalism. These are the two kind of default reaches for meaning and purpose that fill empty spaces in public discourse of a democratic society. And that’s what I worried about.

And I said at the end of the book that I thought that unless we could rejuvenate a stronger civic engagement in a morally more robust kind of public discourse, that, sooner or later, we would have politicians and political parties who would promise a politics that would shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise us a politics to take back our culture and to reassert our sovereignty with a vengeance. Well, that was my worry in 1996.

David Goldstein:

When you’re right you’re right, I guess.

Michael Sandel:

Well, it’s a mixed blessing. It’s a mixed blessing because-

Nick Hanauer:

If only you could have put money on that.

Michael Sandel:

Well.

David Goldstein:

Yeah, spoken like a plutocrat, Nick. Always going to how to make money off of something. Oh, golly. Well, Michael, we’ve taken this interview long. We often ask the benevolent dictator question what you would do if you had absolute control. But instead, I’m going to answer the benevolent dictator question what I would do, and that is, I would have you teach introductory economics at Harvard rather than Gregory Mankiw. Rather than Mankiw. Well, it’s Furman now who’s teaching it, but using Mankiw’s book. Because you need to teach those elites from the very beginning as they’re coming out of those elite institutions. You have to get to them young, Michael.

Michael Sandel:

Well, I’m willing to be conscripted in that noble purpose. But if I get to be a benevolent dictator for a day or for a moment even, may I add one other proposal?

David Goldstein:

Yes, 100%.

Nick Hanauer:

Absolutely.

Michael Sandel:

What I would do would be to make as a central civic and political project, creating, or in some cases recreating, class mixing institutions, by which I mean public places and common spaces that enable people from different walks of life, the affluent and those who struggle to make ends meet, to encounter one another in the ordinary course of the day. Democracy … We don’t have very many effective class mixing institutions. And in many ways, the affluent in the recent decades have been able to buy their way out of the common spaces of shared democratic citizenship. And democracy doesn’t require perfect equality, but what it does require is that people from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different class backgrounds, racial, ethnic, religious backgrounds, encounter one another, bump up against one another in the course of our everyday lives. Because this is how we learn to negotiate and to abide our differences. And this is how we come to care for the common good.

So, beyond the discussions, and I think they’re necessary discussions, that we have about how to address economic policies, to address inequalities of income and wealth, beyond even the cultural discussions about credentialism, technocracy, and renewing the dignity of work rather than purely celebrating credentialism, well, the well-credentialed and the successful. I think we need to renew the civic infrastructure of a shared democratic life to recall us to the sense in which we share a civic life and can at least begin to deliberate as democratic citizens about common purposes and ends, about what it is, that if we work it out, messy those debates will be, if we work it out and deliberate and argue together with civility and mutual respect, maybe we’ll reach some agreement on contested, hard questions. And even where we don’t, maybe we’ll be reminded of what it is to be a citizen.

Nick Hanauer:

That is fantastic.

David Goldstein:

Okay, I elect you benevolent dictator.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time.

David Goldstein:

Final question, Nick. We got to ask the final question.

Nick Hanauer:

Oh yeah, we got to ask the final question, why do you do this work?

Michael Sandel:

I do this work, well, in part because though my subject is philosophy, what I teach and write about is political philosophy, I don’t believe, I’d never believed that philosophy resides in the heavens far beyond the world in which we live. I’ve always thought that philosophy belongs in the city where citizens gather and where, at our best, we reason together and argue together about big philosophical questions such as the meaning of justice and the common good.

So, what animates me is a certain view of philosophy, but also a certain reading of our present moral and civic crisis. We’ve lost the ability … We need to recover the lost art of democratic public discourse. And that means, above all, that we have to discover and learn and teach the art of listening. And by listening, I don’t mean just hearing the words, but I mean listening for the arguments and the moral convictions lying behind the opinions of those with whom we disagree, and figuring out how to engage with those differences and those disagreements. So, that’s my project, to connect philosophy to the world in a way that promotes our ability to reason together in public about the hardest moral and civic questions we face.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m not sure if you knew, I studied philosophy too, but it never occurred to me to take it in that direction. Although, Goldie, I guess I have. Here I am.

David Goldstein:

You say-

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. What am I saying?

Michael Sandel:

Look at you now, look you now. There you are.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Michael Sandel:

You’ve brought it full circle.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. And I have to say it’s such a pleasure to have you on. It’s an economics podcast, but some of my favorite episodes when we have philosophers on, and we have Elizabeth Anderson coming up shortly, having heard back on again, really looking forward to that. And I doubly want to thank you for coming on because, clearly, you must not go on every podcast, only the most meritocratic ones, the ones through talent and hard work have demonstrated that they deserve your presence of their podcast. And so, it really makes me feel better about myself. It’s all about me.

Michael Sandel:

I would put it slightly differently. I would say I’m honored to join you in this podcast dedicated, as you are, to reviving our civic life and promoting the common good.

Nick Hanauer:

There you go.

David Goldstein:

Okay. I’ll take that description. That’s much better.

Nick Hanauer:

Okay. Thank you again for being with us.

Michael Sandel:

Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Goldie.

David Goldstein:

You know, Nick, and I’m sure I’ve said this before, every time I hear a Democrat use the phrase “ladders of opportunity” or talk about equality of opportunity, I feel a little nauseous. I’ve always hated that conversation about opportunity. I always intuited that it didn’t get to the heart of the problem. And reading Michael’s book really helps explain why.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, it’s not like merit doesn’t exist and that we shouldn’t try to be meritorious, and that there’s not a difference between people who are good at things and people who are bad at things and so on and so forth. But I think that in particular, Goldie, when you combine, here’s my new thesis, having thought about it not that long, but my thesis is that when you combine the idea of merit with the neoliberal conception or the neoclassical conception of economic cause and effect, the convergence of those things creates this toxic culture and policy agenda, right? Because merit in and of itself is not harmful, right? The idea of merit.

But when you instantiate it in everything you do and say about how the world is shaped, when you also believe that markets are perfectly efficient and therefore the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor, when you connect that with homo economicus, which is that people are reliably selfish, and the more selfish we are, the more prosperity we create, and the idea that the economy is this Pareto optimal equilibrium within which if one thing goes up, another thing has to go down, therefore, any kind of thing you do to reshape it, for example, make it more just, will just decrease efficiency and be bad for everyone. Those things combined create this toxic thing that has infected our culture and led to the divisiveness and polarization that Sandel worries so much about.

David Goldstein:

And that it’s undemocratic, it’s antidemocratic on both sides of the political spectrum, in both parties. Because what it does is it serves as a substitute for the moral debates that we should be having, the democratic debates. Because it’s not necessarily even ever an issue of whether a particular policy proposal is smart, you can argue whether it will work or not work, whether it’s efficient or whether it’s inefficient. If the people don’t want it, if it’s not what the people want, the majority of people want, then we shouldn’t do it. What we should be doing is always the right thing.

And obviously, our argument that when you do what’s right for the middle class, it’s always going to be what’s right for the economy, it’s always going to be what’s right for our democracy. I think that is as much, you and I would agree, that is as much a moral argument as it is a technical economic argument. We think that the two go together entirely. And I feel like reading that book, it provides a lot of support to what we’ve been thinking, helps clarify a lot of my own thoughts. And I got to say, I see myself in the criticism as well because my leanings have always been towards being a bit of a technocrat, that I consider myself smart and I think smart people should be in control. And I think maybe I wasn’t so smart in thinking that because, my God, have they done a shitty job.

Nick Hanauer:

No, Goldie, I agree. And one of the things that I thought Michael raised that was very telling is how few non-college educated people are in Congress. And here’s the thing, is there’s tens of millions of incredibly bright non-college educated people in this country who would be outstanding members of Congress and represent the interests of non-college educated people in absolutely fantastic way. And it really is an embarrassment to our political system that more folks from more walks of life aren’t included in the governance structure.

David Goldstein:

And I would bet, Nick, that if you look at the two parties, I bet you there’s fewer non-college educated representatives in the Democratic Party than in the Republican Party.

Nick Hanauer:

Sadly, I think you’re right because … There is some truth to this idea of Democrats being taken over by elites. In any case, of course, we highly recommend Michael Sandel’s books, The Tyranny of Merit, What’s Become of the Common Good, and Democracy’s Discontent, A New Edition for Our Perilous Times. There are links in the show notes. You can, of course, buy them at your local independent bookstore or at that big, I’d say un-meritocratic online monopoly.

Speaker 3:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.