By contrast, research on gratitude indicates that remembering the role of luck increases generosity. Frank cites a study in which simply asking subjects to recall the external factors luck, help from others that had contributed to their successes in life made them much more likely to give to charity than those who were asked to remember the internal factors effort, skill.
Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behavior. The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies.
They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value. Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.
Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice. Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.
However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles. Its ideological alchemy transmutes property into praise, material inequality into personal superiority.
The second is to emphasize in labor market policy and tax policy, in regulatory policy, forms of economic production that favor middle-class, mid-skilled labor. Right now, for reasons having to do with the structure, not just of the income tax, but also the social security wage tax, middle-class labor is the highest-taxed factor of production in our economy.
There are enormous tax incentives to replace mid-skilled workers with super-skilled workers and robots. And if we reversed that and created incentives to hire middle-class, mid-skilled workers, then people who invent new technologies would have incentives to invent technologies that made middle-class mid-skilled workers more productive. Is it possible for an investment bank or a law firm to survive without extracting 80 hours a week from its employees?
On the other hand, if you look at the German banking sector or, for that matter, the German legal sector, these are sectors of that economy that produce extremely high-quality justice and a legal system and an extremely effective way of financing economic activity in that country, while at the same time having much less elite and much less highly paid workers who work many fewer hours. The systemic path is an essential part of good policy going forward, but there are individual paths also.
And there are individual businesses that seem to do pretty well at this. So, a business like Costco, for example, pays its workers much more per hour than other similar retail businesses, but is also very profitable because it trains its workers and deploys technologies of selling that make the workers more productive. So rather than de-skilling workers and having them be less productive and extracting profits that way, up-skill workers and have them be more productive and extract profit that way.
Healthcare is a great example. Somebody once said to me, a consulting type, that a striking thing about healthcare is that the one part of the healthcare sector that has made major gains in efficiency in the United States over the past three decades is fitness clubs.
And they deliver healthcare without elaborate technology to many people in a way that, it turns out, has been substantially improved over the past 30 or 40 years, both in its outcomes and its cost structure. This is a place people go anyway. Dental technicians can be trained relatively effectively to monitor your heart rate, your blood oxygenation, your blood pressure.
And at a relatively low cost, using workers who are not super-elite doctors but are paid a reasonable wage, can deliver extremely important healthcare information to people at scale and in a cost-effective way. And those are the sorts of things that innovation should be focusing on. January 09, To acknowledge the role of luck requires the successful to insist less on the idea that their success is wholly their own doing. MarketWatch: You go even further, and suggest that we should leave college admissions at prestigious universities to a lottery, choosing the new class at random from a pool of qualified applicants.
Sandel: Luck is already present in the process, but its role is obscured. The point of the lottery proposal is to make more evident the role that luck plays by formalizing it.
MarketWatch: The college admissions scandal, as you note, exposed the seedy underbelly of the college admissions rat race. But is the meritocracy the villain of the story, or is it that in America, money can trump merit? Sandel: It is both. Even if you supposed the SAT could be what it was originally believed to be — a test of pure aptitude, untainted by privilege, background, upbringing and education; an instrument of fairness; a test of pure brainpower or aptitude.
Then would it be a fair way of allocating places in the university? I would say no. Because if it is testing native intellectual endowment rather than what one has learned, why is that any less morally arbitrary or the product of luck than the family into which one was born?
MarketWatch: But what is wrong with a university trying to admit the smartest, most capable students out there? Sandel: I am not blaming universities as the primary culprits. That seems like a folly, a recipe for frustration and resentment. Meritocracy is not, even at its best, an alternative to inequality. It is a justification of inequality. Sandel: What we really need is a political agenda that rethinks that, and that focuses less on the rhetoric of rising, less on arming individuals for meritocratic competition as if that were a solution to inequality, and we should focus more on the dignity of work.
Sandel: Encouraging people to go to college is a good thing. But I think we need to broaden our notion of what it means to support the various forms of education that people need to prepare themselves for the work they do, and the contributions they make.
We woefully underinvest in state colleges, in two-year community colleges, and in vocational and technical training. I think we should reconsider that steep hierarchy of esteem. This is actually more acute in the U. For all its faults, the current university system does fuel a certain amount of social mobility. Those are the schools in which seventy-three per cent of American college students— Many flagship public universities, such as the University of Virginia, have basically been privatized, and charge tuitions that are unaffordable to low-income students.
There are sixty thousand undergraduates in Ivy League colleges. There are four hundred and twenty-eight thousand students, seven times as many, in the Cal State system alone. Those students should be getting more resources. He cites the increased competition for admission to top schools, referring to a time, not that long ago, when the Ivy League accepted thirty per cent of its applicants. The figure is now around five per cent.
But low acceptance rates are a good thing. They mean that the pool is bigger. Applicants no longer need to have gone to Groton or be able to pay full freight to have a fair chance of getting in.
Commentators do not seem exercised about the admissions preference given to varsity athletes, but they are about the legacy preference. Eliminating that preference is a much less efficacious reform than it seems.
Most American colleges are not highly selective. According to Brint, no more than five to seven per cent of college students attend a school that admits less than half its applicants. The average admissions rate at four-year colleges is sixty-six per cent. At any college, many legacies would be admitted without the preference. In the more selective colleges, the legacy preference is supposed to be used to tip the choice between equally qualified candidates, so eliminating it turns the decision into a coin toss, meaning that half the time the legacy still gets in.
Some colleges rely on alumni loyalty in order to survive financially, and, in turn, to provide financial aid. Would they, too, be expected to eliminate legacy preferences? There is, finally, the question of whether we want the government to tell private universities whom they may and may not admit, beyond the stipulations of anti-discrimination law.
That could be a very slippery slope. The main significance of the legacy preference is symbolic. It represents, to many people, the perpetuation of privilege. Eliminating it would send a positive message about class. What it would not do is reduce income inequality. You would just be replacing one group of future high earners with a slightly different group.
The social effect would be minuscule. People also complain that college admissions is a black box. It is. But if the process were transparent, if everyone knew the recipe for the secret sauce, then applicants would game the system. And privileged students have more resources to get good at the game.
They try to game it as it is, so the recipe changes from year to year, as admissions officers figure out what to discount or to ignore when they review applications.
It can seem, from the outside, that every applicant is competing against every other applicant. In fact, colleges have many buckets to fill, and applicants are mainly competing inside their own buckets.
Stanford and Princeton do not look for future hedge-fund managers or corporate lawyers when they put together a class. They look for people who, among other things, will take advantage of the educational experience they offer. If we really want different kinds of people to get those jobs, maybe we should ask those firms to take half their new employees from the bottom quintiles.
The main purpose of the Ivy Plus universities and schools like them is not to credential young people. It is to produce knowledge. That is what university endowments support and what professors are paid to do. Would we be better off with less of this knowledge? He and other critics could be right that meritocracy, like free-market capitalism, generates inequalities naturally. There is at least one purely meritocratic industry in the United States: professional sports.
An athlete basically has to engage in illegal activity for attributes extraneous to ability to affect his or her career and even then.
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