EricC -
Thanks for your thought out, coherent summary/analysis. I think
you cover the issues (as I see them) well, conflating credentials
with competence or capability (while there is a correlation,
sometimes it is negative, and in fact it is just a tiny subdomain
within a higher dimensional space).
My own collapse/summary of the topic is that there is a complex
tension between the instincts of the individual as organism and
the individual as a member of a
family/community/tribe/species/nation/culture/planet...
I have been trying to let Glen's offering of Anarcho-Syndicalism settle in my heart/brain/soul a little more before I "respond-from-the-hip". While I don't expect this particular convolution of the above issues to be "an answer", it does sound like a useful "stalking horse" to think from (closest idiom to what I previously used "strawman" to achieve).
- SteveS
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 :- )
On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 1:28 PM <[hidden email]> 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
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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