Introduction — If Everything Really Were Fair
Let us begin with a small thought experiment.
Imagine that one day a perfectly fair society comes into being. Your parents wealth, their connections, your skin color, your gender, none of these decide your fate any longer. Only one thing determines where you end up: your talent and your effort. If you are clever and work hard, you rise. If you are not, you remain below. No one is held back because of where they came from.
Most people would feel that such a society is just. In fact, we are taught from childhood to dream of exactly this kind of world. "Hard work pays off." "Your success is in your own hands." "Anyone can make it if they try." These are the slogans of that dream.
But an uncomfortable question follows close behind. Suppose the society truly is perfectly fair, so that everyone ends up in precisely the place their abilities warrant. Then whom can the person at the very bottom blame? They can no longer blame society, for there was no discrimination and no injustice. Only one conclusion remains: "I was not good enough."
It is precisely here that the American political philosopher Michael Sandel makes us pause. In his 2020 book "The Tyranny of Merit," he asks: is a perfect meritocracy really the paradise we longed for, or a new form of cruelty?
This essay follows that question. But not in order to take one side. We will listen seriously to those who criticize meritocracy and to those who defend it. The judgment belongs to you, once you have read to the end.
Part One — The Strange Birth of a Word
A Word Born in a Dystopian Novel
Here is a curious fact. The word "meritocracy," which we use today as a compliment, was originally not praise but satire.
The man who coined it was the British sociologist Michael Young. In 1958 he wrote a book called "The Rise of the Meritocracy." From the title it might seem like a book celebrating merit, but it was the opposite. It was a work of satire, a dystopia set in an imagined future.
The future society Young imagined looks like this. People no longer obtain their positions through family or wealth. Everything is distributed according to merit, measured as "intelligence plus effort." Tests and measurements decide everything. At first glance, it appears fair.
But Young shows how this society eventually collapses. The elites who rise through merit grow ever more arrogant. "We passed the tests, you failed them. Therefore everything we enjoy is deserved." Those left at the bottom, in turn, are stripped even of their excuses. In earlier times one could say "the world is unfair," but now even that is impossible. All that remains is the brand of having been filtered out by merit.
Young novel ends in a revolt of those at the bottom. He was warning that meritocracy could create a new class society, perhaps a crueler one.
Satire That Became a Compliment
History, however, took a strange turn. Young warning was forgotten, and only the word "meritocracy" survived, settling into a positive meaning. Politicians promised meritocracy, companies boasted of it, schools taught it.
Michael Young found this deeply frustrating. In 2001, shortly before his death, he published a newspaper essay lamenting that the very word he had coined as a warning had become a banner of praise. Watching political leaders proudly proclaim a "meritocratic society," he felt his satire had been read entirely backwards.
This is the starting point of the concept of meritocracy. Whether it is a good word or a bad one was contested from its very beginning.
A Scene from History — Meritocracy a Thousand Years Ago, the Civil-Service Examination
But the fact that the word "meritocracy" was born in 1958 does not mean the idea behind it was first conceived then. The thought of sorting people by examination and granting them positions is far older. Its most striking instance is the imperial civil-service examination of East Asia, the keju.
Let us paint a scene. China, a thousand years ago, on a cold dawn. A young man enters a narrow examination cubicle, and the door closes behind him. For several days he eats and sleeps in that tiny space, writing his answers. In the cubicle next door, someone collapses, unable to bear the strain. On the day the list of those who passed is posted, the son of some poor family becomes an official overnight and lifts up his entire clan, while another grows old having sat the exam for decades without ever seeing his name appear.
Begun under the Sui and Tang dynasties and lasting more than a thousand years, the examination system was a vast experiment in selecting officials by test scores rather than by birth. In principle it is startlingly modern. People were to be judged not by whose son they were, but by what they knew. In practice the system did open a road to advancement even for commoners, and it firmly rooted a culture that revered learning.
Yet fairness demands that we also see its shadows. To prepare for the examination, one needed the leisure to devote long years to study alone, and that leisure came, in the end, from families of some means. A poor child did pass now and then, but it was the exception rather than the rule. And once the exam decided everything, people devoted their lives to memorizing the prescribed classics whole and writing formulaic answers. Practical knowledge and creative thought that did not appear on the test were pushed aside. The meritocracy of a thousand years ago already displayed, in miniature, the very problems we wrestle with today: the inequality of opportunity and the harms of exam-worship.
Interestingly, when modern Europe introduced the practice of selecting its officials by examination, some reformers are said to have drawn inspiration from the East Asian system. The notion of choosing talent by test rather than by birth flowed across East and West alike. One distant ancestor of the civil-service exams, entrance exams, and licensing exams we take for granted today was, in fact, that examination hall in the cold dawn.
The story of the examination system reminds us of two things at once. One is how old and how alluring a dream the ideal of selecting people by ability has been for humanity. The other is that this dream carried both light and shadow from its very beginning. A thousand years later, we may still be dreaming the same dream and wrestling with the same shadow.
Part Two — The Appeal of Merit Is Real
Before rushing into criticism, fairness demands that we acknowledge one thing clearly. Meritocracy has a genuine appeal. The whole world did not embrace this ideal for no reason.
It Matters What You Compare It To
When we evaluate meritocracy, we often compare it to perfect fairness. But historically, the real competitor of meritocracy was not perfect fairness. It was the systems that came before it: aristocracy, hereditary rule, nepotism, the caste of birth.
In these old systems, what you could do did not matter. Whose son you were born as, which family you belonged to, what rank you held, these decided everything. The clever child of a farmer could never become a noble, and the most incompetent child of a noble still claimed a high position.
Compared to such a world, meritocracy is an enormous advance. The idea of judging people by ability rather than birth gave countless people, for the first time, a ladder to climb. The promise that a poor child who studies well can become a doctor, that someone of ordinary origins can build a company on skill alone, is a precious value humanity fought hard to win.
Efficiency and Justice, Two Birds at Once
Defenders of meritocracy offer two main arguments.
The first is efficiency. It benefits society as a whole to entrust the most important work to the most capable people. We want to be operated on by the most skillful surgeon, not by someone who merely happened to be born into a good family. The same goes for the pilot of our plane and the engineer who designs our bridge. When positions are distributed according to ability, society runs better.
The second is justice. Rewarding effort and talent seems just in itself. The intuition that someone who studied through the night should fare better than someone who only played, the intuition that those who contribute more should receive more, these are powerful. Meritocracy stands on this strong moral foundation.
These two claims cannot be lightly dismissed. Even critics of meritocracy do not deny its appeal. The trouble lies elsewhere.
Motivation, the Invisible Engine
There is one more thing defenders stress with particular force: motivation.
Picture a small scene. Suppose a company declares that no matter how hard anyone works, no matter whether the results are good or bad, everyone will be rewarded exactly the same. At first this might seem appealing in its equality. But what happens over time? The person who stayed late to solve a problem, the person who racked their brain for a new approach, gradually begin to ask: "Is there any reason for me to try harder?" When the link between effort and result is severed, the invisible engine that moved people slowly grinds to a halt.
This is precisely the point defenders make. Reward according to ability is not simply a matter of giving more to someone; it is a mechanism that pulls society as a whole toward making better things. Beneath the countless efforts to develop better medicines, to build safer bridges, to make more useful tools, lies the promise that "if you do well, you will be repaid." That promise is not always kept perfectly, but a society in which it has vanished entirely is harder still to imagine.
Of course, critics add a caveat here. Is material reward really the only thing that moves people? Motives unrelated to reward, such as curiosity, a sense of mission, the desire to help one's colleagues, surely exist as well. Yet the core of the defenders' point still holds: if we sever the link between effort and result carelessly, the price society pays is by no means small. This is a weighty reason that keeps us from dismissing meritocracy as a mere outdated myth.
Part Three — Sandel First Blade: The Problem of Luck
Sandel critique is precise. He does not say that meritocracy is a lie. Rather, he probes, in turn, the point that meritocracy fails to keep its promise fully, and the point that even if it kept it perfectly, a moral problem would still arise.
The first blade is luck.
The Illusion of "I Made It On My Own"
A question. Is the clever mind you were born with your own achievement? Is the diligent temperament you inherited the result of your effort? Did you choose to grow up under parents who valued education, in a house full of books, in a safe neighborhood?
If we are even a little honest, many of our most important assets are not of our own making. Talent is a gift drawn in the lottery of genes, and the fact that this talent happens to be prized in our particular era is itself good fortune.
To stress this point, Sandel offers an example. If society awarded its wealth and honor according to some ability other than basketball, the gift of a brilliant basketball player would amount to no more than an ordinary knack. It is luck which talents we are born with, but it is equally luck whether we are born into a society that happens to prize them.
This idea is not Sandel alone. Before him, the political philosopher John Rawls advanced a similar insight in his 1971 book "A Theory of Justice." Rawls called the distribution of natural talents "arbitrary from a moral point of view." Who is born clever and who is not is not morally ordained, but merely a contingency of nature. So Rawls argued that the benefits talent brings should be treated as a kind of common asset, with society designed so that even the least advantaged also benefit.
Even Effort Is Indebted to Luck
Here a common objection arises. "Granted that talent is luck, but effort is mine, is it not? I truly worked hard."
Sandel respects this objection but presses one step further. Even the capacity to make an effort, the temperament to discipline oneself and persist with grit, is owed in large part to upbringing, environment, and disposition. Where did the willpower to rise at dawn and study every day come from? There was a home, a school, and a culture that cultivated it. The same effort is rewarded in some environments, while in others there is no ladder to climb no matter how hard one tries.
This is not meant to belittle effort. Effort is surely precious and deserves praise. The question Sandel poses is simply this: "Is my success wholly my own achievement? Is there no share of fortune within it?" Answering this question honestly already shifts our attitude a little.
Part Four — Sandel Second Blade: Hubris and Humiliation
The problem of luck is, in fact, only a prologue. What Sandel truly worries about are the two feelings meritocracy plants in our hearts: the hubris of the winners and the humiliation of the losers.
The Hubris of the Winners
In a society that believes in perfect meritocracy, the successful naturally come to think this way: "I got here by my own power. All of this is what I deserve."
This thought is dangerous. The moment one believes one success is entirely one own doing, two attitudes disappear. One is gratitude, gratitude toward the parents, teachers, society, and luck that helped. The other is humility, the humility to say "I too might not be where I am, had I been born into different circumstances."
When gratitude and humility vanish, hubris takes their place. And hubris leads naturally to contempt directed downward, the gaze that sees others as "people who could have succeeded but did not," "people who simply did not try."
The Humiliation of the Losers
The mirror image of hubris is humiliation. In a perfectly meritocratic society, those who fail have nowhere to flee.
In the old society of fixed rank, a person of low standing could at least think, "This is not my fault, the world is unfair." That thought is painful, yet it also serves as a shield protecting one self-respect.
But in a society where everyone believes that everything is decided by merit, that shield disappears. Failure becomes a verdict: "I am not enough." The fairer the society, the more heavily, paradoxically, the responsibility for failure falls upon the individual. This is the cruelest paradox of meritocracy: the greater the fairness, the deeper the wound of the loser.
Sandel sees this sense of humiliation as connected to a great fracture in contemporary politics. In a society where credentialed, expert elites quietly suggest that "you fell behind because you did not try hard enough," those who receive this message every day feel deeply insulted. And that insult often erupts as anger, sometimes as a backlash against the entire elite.
Kindred Voices
Sandel is not alone in telling this story. The American journalist Christopher Hayes argued in his 2012 book "Twilight of the Elites" that once meritocratic elites rise to the top, they kick away the ladder and build structures favoring their own children. It is a warning that meritocracy can degenerate into a hereditary aristocracy of its own.
The legal scholar Daniel Markovits reached a similar diagnosis in his 2019 book "The Meritocracy Trap." He saw meritocracy driving not only the poor but even the elites at its summit into endless competition and burnout. It is, he argued, a game in which everyone loses.
Part Five — The Sorting Machine of Credentials
There is one arena on which Sandel especially focuses: education, and in particular the competition surrounding elite universities.
When the University Becomes a Gate That Divides Rank
In modern society, a degree from a good university has become more than a proof of learning. It has become, in effect, a gateway that divides social standing. Sandel calls this the function of "sorting." Elite universities are not only places of teaching, he argues, but vast sorting machines that decide who goes up and who goes down.
The trouble is that this sorting is not as fair as it appears. Elite admissions claim to select students by ability, yet the very opportunity to cultivate that ability is already distributed unequally. A child who had access from early on to good schooling, private tutoring, rich experiences, and connections competes in the same exam hall with a child who did not. And the result often closely resembles the circumstances of the parents.
Sandel cites figures on the makeup of entering classes at elite American universities, noting that the proportion of students from the highest income brackets far exceeds that from the lowest. A gate that claims to select by merit easily becomes, in practice, a channel that sends those already in advantageous positions back up to the top.
The Diploma as a New ID Card
This gives rise to a phenomenon called "credentialism." Rather than what one can do, what diploma one holds becomes the standard by which people are judged. The degree comes to function as a kind of identity card.
Sandel worries about the message this sends to the many who hold no degree. The more a society lines people up by credentials, the more those who did not attend a four-year university feel they are treated as second-class citizens. The countless forms of labor that work with the hands, that make things, that care for people, come to be honored far less than their value warrants.
The core question Sandel raises here is "the dignity of work." Not all valuable work requires a college diploma. Yet when meritocracy makes the degree the only road to success, the self-respect and social recognition of those who contribute by other paths are stripped away.
Part Six — So Should We Abandon Meritocracy?
By this point, it may seem that Sandel is arguing we should scrap meritocracy. But it is not so simple. And the rebuttals of meritocracy defenders are far from weak. Let us now give both sides a fair hearing.
The Defenders Rebuttals
Those who defend meritocracy say the following.
First, "pushing the logic of luck to its limit is dangerous." If everything is luck, if even effort is luck and responsibility is luck, then we can hold no one accountable for anything. But everyday life runs on the premise of responsibility and autonomy. If we deny the meaning of effort entirely, perhaps no one will strive to achieve anything.
Second, "the alternatives are worse." That meritocracy is imperfect does not make its alternatives, nepotism or heredity or the lottery, more just. To point out flaws is one thing; to offer a better alternative is another. If we shake meritocracy, we must answer the question of what will fill the empty space.
Third, "reward according to ability keeps people motivated." The belief that effort yields better results is a powerful engine that moves society. Sever this link and the drive for innovation and dedication may weaken with it.
Fourth, "why not simply expand equality of opportunity?" The real problem, this rebuttal holds, is not meritocracy itself but the unequal starting line. If so, the answer is not to abandon meritocracy but to strengthen education and welfare so as to guarantee a truly fair starting line for all.
What Sandel Actually Proposes
Sandel answer is not to discard meritocracy wholesale but rather to lighten its weight and change our attitude. A few of his proposals can be summarized as follows.
The first is to change our attitude toward success. The successful should acknowledge that luck and the help of others are woven into their success, and recover humility and gratitude.
The second is to restore the dignity of work. Let us build a society in which all labor that contributes to the community is honored, with or without a college degree. When work is seen not as mere money-making but as a way of contributing to the community, people feel their dignity.
The third is to ask again about the common good. Meritocracy easily encourages an ethic of every-one-for-themselves. Sandel says we must again debate the sense that we are beings indebted to one another, and what it means to live well together.
Here is a curious fact. Regarding elite admissions, Sandel went so far as to float the provocative proposal of selecting students by lottery among applicants who clear a certain qualifying bar. The aim is to ease the madness of admissions competition and to make everyone acknowledge that acceptance is not pure self-achievement but a result mixed with fortune. Whether or not one agrees, the question it poses to us carries real weight.
Part Seven — The Old Philosophical Debate About "Desert"
Here, for a moment, it is worth peering at an older philosophical question that lies beneath meritocracy.
On What Is Reward Based?
When we say "that person deserves it," where does that desert come from? Philosophers have quarreled over this question for a long time.
On one side stands the view that strongly believes in desert. People are owed something according to their actions and effort, it holds. The intuition that one who works honestly should receive reward, and one who is idle should receive a corresponding result, is morally right. From this view, reward according to ability is not mere efficiency but justice itself.
On the other side stands the view that doubts desert. Rawls is the representative figure. He held that if natural talent, the environment that cultivated it, and even the disposition to make an effort are largely the products of chance, then it is hard to say that anyone "deserves" to have more on that basis. For Rawls, a just society is not one that pays out people deserts, but one that adjusts the inequalities born of chance so that they benefit everyone, especially the weakest.
Both Sides Have a Point
What is interesting is that neither side wins this debate outright.
The strength of the desert-doubting side is honesty. It makes us frankly acknowledge the luck woven into our success and awakens compassion for the unlucky. But pushed to its limit, this logic reaches an awkward conclusion. If even effort is luck, then a criminal responsibility is luck too, and the credit for good deeds is luck. Then praise and blame, reward and punishment, all lose their meaning. Most people find this conclusion hard to accept.
The strength of the desert-believing side is that it preserves the sense of responsibility and autonomy. It treats people not as mere products of their environment but as agents who choose and bear responsibility. But pushed to its limit, this logic risks ignoring the role of luck and blaming the weak too easily.
Sandel position, interestingly, lies somewhere between the two. Without entirely denying the meaning of effort and responsibility, he warns us to beware of our tendency to overvalue our own achievement. Lifting the discussion beyond the question of justice to the question of attitude, how we regard one another, is his distinctive move.
Part Eight — The Natural Lottery, Looked At More Closely
The problem of luck has appeared several times in this essay, but it is worth looking at squarely, once, in greater depth. Philosophers often call it the "natural lottery."
Three Draws
When we are born into the world, at least three lotteries are drawn without our knowing.
The first is the lottery of genes. We do not choose what intelligence, what temperament, what health, what appearance we are born with. The child born with musical gifts, like the child born with mathematical intuition, did not order those gifts and receive them.
The second is the lottery of where we are born. Which country, which city, which household we are born into is not our choice either. If two children with the same potential grow up, one in a neighborhood near good schools and libraries, the other in a place with none of these, their starting lines differ from the outset.
The third is the lottery of the era. We do not choose the age we live in. Which talents are prized differs from age to age. There were times when skill with a bow brought wealth and honor, and times when skill at writing code does so. The same talent can become gold or become useless, depending on the era one is born into.
Add up the results of these three draws, and we realize that much is already decided before we even reach the starting line. This does not mean effort is meaningless. How we play the hand the lottery dealt us is surely partly our own doing. It is only that we should not forget that the cards we hold are, in large part, not of our own choosing.
Yet Responsibility Is Still Needed — The Defenders' Reply
Here the defenders offer an important rejoinder. If everything is a lottery, how can we run a society at all?
Consider. If we told everyone, "your effort too is ultimately luck, so you need bear no responsibility," what would happen? The doctor who stays up all night to save a patient, the engineer who checks the figures again and again to design a safe bridge, if that devotion is ultimately reduced to luck, what would they strive for? Society runs on the premise that people bear responsibility for their actions and that reward follows effort. Deny this premise wholesale, and much that we rely on risks collapsing along with it.
So the most thoughtful position chooses neither side wholesale. It honestly acknowledges the vast role of luck, yet does not discard the meaning of effort and responsibility. Acknowledging the natural lottery becomes the ground of a humility that refuses to blame the weak, while acknowledging responsibility becomes a force that spurs us toward better choices. These two seem like contradictions, yet a mature society strives to hold both at once.
Part Nine — The Flow of the Idea at a Glance
Let us lay out the flow so far in a single timeline.
1958 Michael Young publishes "The Rise of the Meritocracy"
-> first uses "meritocracy" as satire / dystopia
1971 John Rawls publishes "A Theory of Justice"
-> insight that natural talent is "morally arbitrary"
2001 Michael Young laments in a newspaper essay
-> criticizes how his warning was flipped into praise
2012 Christopher Hayes, "Twilight of the Elites"
-> diagnosis that meritocratic elites kick away the ladder
2019 Daniel Markovits, "The Meritocracy Trap"
-> critique that meritocracy burns out even the winners
2020 Michael Sandel, "The Tyranny of Merit"
-> asks about hubris, humiliation, dignity of work, common good
Part Ten — The Two Camps Side by Side
Placing criticism and defense in a single table makes the points of dispute clearer.
| Issue | Critics of Meritocracy | Defenders of Meritocracy |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Starting line | The starting line is already unequal | Even so, far fairer than the caste of birth |
| Role of luck | A large share of success is owed to luck | Stressing luck dissolves responsibility |
| Mind of the winner | Breeds hubris and contempt | Legitimate pride deserves recognition too |
| Mind of the loser | Forces humiliation and self-contempt | Can also spur motivation and striving |
| Credentials | A sorting machine that inherits rank | A rational signal that detects ability |
| Prescription | Humility, dignity of work, common good | Expand equal opportunity, correct the start |
In this table, it is hard to say that either column is entirely right and the other entirely wrong. That is precisely why this subject keeps us chewing on it.
Part Eleven — A Few Small Thought Experiments
To feel the concepts more vividly, let us imagine a few short scenes.
Scene One: The Twins at a Fork
Suppose there are twins with the same talent. One grows up in a stable home that values education; the other has to support the family from an early age. If, twenty years later, their lives have sharply diverged, is that difference wholly a difference in their effort? Even the same seed yields a different result depending on the soil it falls into. This scene reminds us of the weight of luck and environment.
Scene Two: The Cleaner and the Lawyer
When a city grinds to a halt, what work do we need most urgently? When sanitation, care, transport, and food stop, society is paralyzed at once. Yet much of this essential labor requires no college diploma and often carries low pay and low social recognition. It makes us ask whether meritocracy lavishes excessive honor on some work and excessive disregard on others.
Scene Three: What If It Were a Lottery?
Imagine an elite university selecting its entering class by lottery among qualified applicants. The admitted student would say, "I was lucky." The rejected student could say, "I was not lacking, I was unlucky." Both hubris and humiliation are softened. At the same time, a doubt arises. Can we leave even positions that demand selecting the very best to a lottery? This scene shows what softening meritocracy might cause us to lose at the same time.
Scene Four: Two Résumés
Imagine two résumés lying on a recruiter's desk. The owner of the first graduated from a renowned university with excellent grades. The owner of the second never attended college, but has done the same kind of work in the field for ten years and knows it better than anyone. The job posting carries a single line: "four-year college degree or above required." Because of that one line, the second résumé is filtered out before a human eye ever reaches it.
This scene compresses how credentialism works. Before asking whether someone has the ability to do the job at all, it checks the identity card of the degree first. Of course, a degree is in many cases a useful signal. But when it becomes the only gate, those who have built their ability by another road are eliminated without ever standing at the starting line. This scene makes us ask again whether meritocracy is truly a system that sees ability, or one that mistakes the degree for ability.
Scene Five: The Veil of Ignorance
Finally, let us borrow the famous thought experiment Rawls proposed. Imagine that you must design a society from scratch. There is one condition: you do not know at all what sort of person you will be born as in that society. Whether rich or poor, clever or not, healthy or sickly, you cannot know any of it. Rawls called this state the "veil of ignorance."
Behind this veil, what kind of society would you design? Knowing that you might be born as the unluckiest of people, you would probably choose a society in which even the person at the very bottom can live a decent human life. This thought experiment holds up a strange mirror to us. If I did not know where I would be born, would I choose our present society just as it is? This question makes our intuitions about luck and fairness sharply clear in an instant.
Part Twelve — A Quiz to Work Through Together
A short quiz to check what you have read. Try to recall the answer first, then confirm with the explanation below.
Question 1. Who first coined the word "meritocracy," and with what intention?
Question 2. What are the two core arguments often offered by defenders of meritocracy?
Question 3. From the loss of what feelings do Sandel "hubris of the winners" and "humiliation of the losers" each arise?
Question 4. What expression did John Rawls use for natural talent, and what does it mean?
Question 5. What provocative proposal did Sandel float regarding elite university admissions?
Question 6. How does the East Asian civil-service examination show both the ideal and the limits of meritocracy at once?
Question 7. What is "credentialism," and why does it become a problem?
Question 8. What is Rawls "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, and what does it make us ask?
Now the explanations.
Explanation 1. The British sociologist Michael Young first used it in his 1958 book "The Rise of the Meritocracy." His intention was not praise but satire and warning, a dystopian warning that meritocracy could give birth to a new class society.
Explanation 2. Efficiency and justice. The efficiency logic that society runs better when important work is entrusted to capable people, and the justice logic that rewarding effort and talent is right. To these is often added the point that it is fairer than aristocracy or nepotism.
Explanation 3. Hubris arises from the loss of gratitude and humility. When one regards success as entirely one own doing, gratitude toward others and toward luck disappears. Humiliation arises from the loss of the shield of excuse. In a society that believes everything is fair, failure becomes a verdict of personal responsibility.
Explanation 4. Rawls called the distribution of natural talents "arbitrary from a moral point of view." It means that who is born clever is not something morally justified but merely a contingency of nature.
Explanation 5. The proposal to select admitted students by lottery among applicants who clear a certain qualifying bar. The aim is to ease admissions competition and to make people acknowledge that acceptance is not pure self-achievement.
Explanation 6. The examination system was a meritocratic experiment a thousand years ago, selecting officials by test scores rather than birth. Its ideal of opening a road of advancement even to commoners was clear, yet it favored families with the leisure to study long, and it bred the harms of exam-worship. It is a historical case that shows the light and shadow of meritocracy at once.
Explanation 7. Credentialism is the tendency to judge people by which diploma they hold rather than by what they can do. A degree can sometimes be a useful signal of ability, but when it becomes the only gate, it excludes those who built their ability by other roads and devalues the labor of those without degrees. That is why it becomes a problem.
Explanation 8. It is a thought experiment that has us design a society while knowing nothing of the position we will be born into. By making us mindful of the possibility of being born among the unlucky, it leads our intuitions toward choosing a society in which even the weakest can live a decent human life. It is a device that makes us ask anew about luck and fairness.
Part Thirteen — Meritocracy Come Down to Daily Life
Everything so far may sound rather grand. Philosophers and politics, elite universities and the natural lottery. Yet meritocracy has, in fact, seeped into every corner of our daily lives.
The Words We Use Without Thinking
"He's like that because he didn't try." "You should have studied harder." "There's always a reason behind success." We say such things often, without much thought. The words themselves are not wrong. Effort matters, and idleness has its consequences. What Sandel reminds us of, however, is that these words can, at a certain moment, become a blade. The instant we pin someone's failure entirely on them, we stop seeing the starting line they began from, the luck they did or did not happen to meet.
The words on the opposite side are no different. "I got here by my own power." This too is half true. They surely did strive. But the moment this becomes the whole story, the countless hands that brought them here, the parents and teachers and friends and society and luck, vanish from view.
A Small Shift of Attitude
Sandel's proposal may begin not only with grand institutional reform but, perhaps, with this small shift of words and gaze. Adding the single phrase "I was lucky" when we speak of success. Pausing once more, when we see someone who has failed, to recall "what circumstances might that person have faced?" Honoring the work of those without degrees as much as its value warrants. When these seemingly trivial attitudes accumulate, the temperature at which we treat one another changes.
The subtlest trap of meritocracy may lie not somewhere in the institutions alone, but in the habits of mind by which we evaluate others and ourselves every day. And so this discussion is, in the end, a matter of policy and at the same time a deeply personal matter of the heart.
And precisely for that reason, the conclusion of this essay does not end by raising one side's hand. The insight of the critic and the rebuttal of the defender each hold a truth worth chewing on seriously from where one stands. What matters, perhaps, is not choosing the right answer but never letting go of the question.
Conclusion — So What Is Your Answer?
Let us return to the thought experiment we began with. A perfectly fair meritocratic society. There, whom can the person at the very bottom blame?
Sandel insight is that this question is not as simple as we thought. Increasing fairness and treating human beings with dignity do not always point in the same direction. Sometimes the fairest system can hand down the cruelest verdict.
Does that mean abandoning meritocracy is the answer? That, too, is not simple. Meritocracy was humanity precious weapon that toppled aristocracy and nepotism, and it carries the genuine values of efficiency and justice. Shake meritocracy, and a heavy question follows: what will fill the empty space?
Perhaps the heart of the matter is not the either-or of abandoning or keeping meritocracy, but our attitude toward it. The humility to remember the share of luck and of others when we succeed, the respect not to see those who fail as second-class citizens, and the sense of the common good that we are, after all, beings indebted to one another. The way out of the tyranny of merit may begin, perhaps, by changing our hearts before changing the system.
Finally, a few questions to chew on.
Recall your greatest achievement. How large is the share of fortune within it?
Someone you have casually regarded as "a person who did not try," from what starting line did they actually begin?
The countless tasks that hold up our society without a college diploma, do we honor them as much as their value warrants?
If you had to design a system to replace meritocracy yourself, what would you take as the measure of ability, and how would you handle the share of luck?
The people lining up before the civil-service examination a thousand years ago, and we who prepare for entrance exams and job searches today, do we really live in different worlds?
Behind the veil of ignorance, not knowing where you would be born, would you choose our present society just as it is, all over again?
And the hardest question. Are a fairer society and a warmer society always the same thing, or must we sometimes choose one over the other?
There is no right answer to these questions. But simply by asking them together, we may take one step toward a society a little less arrogant and a little more kind. Before deciding whether to uphold meritocracy or tear it down, with what eyes will we first look upon the winners and losers around us? Perhaps choosing that gaze is the smallest and yet the most important choice given to each of us.
References
- Michael Sandel, "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" (2020) — publisher page: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374289980/thetyrannyofmerit
- Michael Young — Encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Young-Baron-Young-of-Dartington
- John Rawls — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/
- Desert — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/desert/
- Distributive Justice — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/
- Daniel Markovits, "The Meritocracy Trap" — author page: https://law.yale.edu/daniel-markovits
- Michael J. Sandel — Harvard faculty profile: https://scholar.harvard.edu/sandel
현재 단락 (1/161)
Let us begin with a small thought experiment.