AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND EQUALITY |

ISSUE 1 | 2021

AMERICAN JOURNAL
of LAW and EQUALITY

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART I
The Tyranny of Merit: An Overview

Michael J. Sandel*

It is tempting to see meritocracy as a friend to equality. In hereditary aristocracies and
caste societies, people’s fates are ﬁxed by birth. In meritocracies, by contrast, people can
rise; they can compete for desirable jobs and social roles based on their own merits. Mer-
itocratic selection also seems egalitarian when compared with other familiar alternatives:
bribery, nepotism, prejudice, discrimination. Hiring people based on their talents rather
than their connections treats them, it would seem, as equals. Of course, identifying talent
is not always easy, especially when some people have greater opportunities to develop and
demonstrate their talents than others. But this does not mean that meritocracy and equal-
ity are at odds. It simply means that a true meritocracy requires that everyone has a truly
equal opportunity to develop their talents.

In The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?,1 I argue that meri-
tocracy is not the friend of equality that it appears to be. To the contrary, meritocracy
today functions less as an alternative to inequality than as its primary justiﬁcation.

I. WINNERS AND LOSERS

My case against meritocracy is partly philosophical, partly political. The philosophical ar-
gument is about merit as a principle of moral desert: If everyone starts out with an equal
chance, then those who succeed deserve the rewards their talents bring. This principle,
plausible though it seems, is open to three objections. First, having the talents that enable

Author: *Michael J. Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, where he is the Anne T. and Robert M.
Bass Professor of Government. His most recent book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, is
the subject of this symposium. Sandel replies to his critics in Part II at the end of this symposium, https://doi.org/10.1162
/ajle_a_00025.

MICHAEL J. SANDEL, THE TYRANNY OF MERIT: WHAT’S BECOME OF THE COMMON GOOD? (2020).

© 2021 Michael J. Sandel. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00024

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART I

me to get ahead is not my doing; it is my good fortune. If everyone begins the race at the
same starting point, and if everyone has had equal access to good coaches, training facil-
ities, running shoes, healthy diets, and so on, the most gifted runners are most likely to
win. But being gifted is a matter of luck. So it is hard to see how the winners can claim that
they morally deserve the rewards society bestows on them.

Second, that I live in a society that happens to prize the talents I happen to have is also
a matter of luck. LeBron James is a great basketball player and reaps enormous rewards for
leading his teams to the NBA Finals. But those rewards reﬂect the fact that he lives in a
society, and at a time, when basketball is hugely popular. Had LeBron lived during the
Renaissance, his earnings (and fame) would likely have been less. People weren’t that in-
terested in basketball then; they cared more about fresco painters. The billionaire investor
Warren Buﬀett has made a similar observation about the luck and contingency that made
his fortune possible.2

These two points—about the contingencies of talent and the moral arbitrariness of
market demand for this or that talent—led thinkers as ideologically disparate as Friedrich
Hayek and John Rawls to reject meritocracy. Both rejected the idea that market rewards
reﬂect what people merit or deserve.3

To these two objections, I add a third—about the attitudes toward success that mer-
itocratic societies promote. Those who land on top come to believe that their success is
their own doing, the measure of their merit, and that those who lose out must deserve
their fate as well. This way of thinking brings out the dark side of meritocracy. It leads
to what I call “meritocratic hubris”—the tendency of the successful to inhale too deeply of
their success and to look down on those less successful than themselves. Such hubris is not
only morally unattractive; it also deepens the divide between winners and losers and is
corrosive of the common good.

One way to address this divide is to try to level the playing ﬁeld, so that everyone has a
truly equal chance to become a winner. But this cannot heal the inequalities of esteem that
meritocracies produce. For even if everyone had an equal chance to succeed, the divide
between winners and losers would persist. The real problem lies in the image of social life
as a competitive race—a race in which the successful believe, and have reason to believe,
that they have earned their success and the beneﬁts that ﬂow from it. Paradoxically, the
closer we come to achieving true equality of opportunity, the more plausible it seems—to
those who succeed and to those who struggle—that the winners have earned their success
and deserve its rewards.

For Warren Buﬀett on the role of luck, see Emmie Martin, Here’s Why Warren Buﬀett Says That He and Charlie
Munger Are Successful, CNBC (May 4, 2018), https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/warren-buﬀett-says-the-key-to
-his-success-is-luck.html.
See SANDEL, supra note 1, at 125–50.

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This argument against meritocracy was raised by Michael Young, the British sociolo-
gist who coined the term in a 1958 book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. Although we
have come to regard meritocracy as an ideal, Young considered it a dystopia; he warned of
the hubris it would breed among the successful and the demoralization it would inﬂict on
those who did not rise.4

Young’s case against meritocracy was about the moral psychology of earning and de-
serving, and the moral basis of social esteem. It was not, strictly speaking, about injustice.
But if he is right, the attitudes toward success that meritocracies produce make it hard to
redress inequalities of income and wealth through redistribution. For the more conﬁdent
we are that market outcomes track moral desert, the more powerful the presumption that
income and wealth should lie where they fall.

In recent decades, the meritocratic way of thinking about success gained prominence
in public discourse, even as neoliberal globalization brought widening inequality. In The
Tyranny of Merit, I show that these two tendencies are connected. It is as if the winners of
globalization want more than the winnings; they want to believe that they deserve the out-
size share of income and wealth that four decades of deregulation, ﬁnancialization, and
neoliberal economic policies have brought them.

Max Weber observed that

the fortunate [person] is seldom satisﬁed with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond
this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be con-
vinced that he “deserves” it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with
others. He wishes to be allowed the belief that the less fortunate also merely expe-
rience [their] due.5

Weber was reﬂecting on the religious conviction that success is a sign of God’s favor
and that suﬀering is a punishment for sin. A century later, proponents of neoliberal glob-
alization saw market success as a vindication of merit. Lawrence Summers, an economic
advisor to President Barack Obama, stated this brazenly: “One of the challenges in our
society is that the truth is kind of a disequalizer. One of the reasons that inequality has
probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that
they’re supposed to be treated.”6

4
5

MICHAEL YOUNG, THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY (1958); see SANDEL, supra note 1, at 30, 116–19, 152.
Max Weber, The Social Psychology of the World Religions, in FROM MAX WEBER: ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY 271 (H.H.
Gerth & C. Wright Mills eds., 1946); see SANDEL, supra note 1, at 39–42.
RON SUSKIND, CONFIDENCE MEN: WALL STREET, WASHINGTON, AND THE EDUCATION OF A PRESIDENT 197 (2011).

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART I

II.

THE RHETORIC OF RISING

Meritocracy as a political project found expression in the familiar slogan that everyone
should be able to rise “as far as their eﬀorts and talent will take them.” In recent years,
politicians of both parties reiterated this slogan to the point of incantation. Ronald Reagan,
George W. Bush, and Marco Rubio among Republicans, and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama,
and Hillary Clinton among Democrats, all invoked it.7

This rhetoric of rising has a certain egalitarian ring, for it emphasizes the importance
of removing barriers to achievement: whatever your family background, class, race, reli-
gion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, you too should be able to rise as far as your
talents will take you. Few would disagree.

But despite its seemingly egalitarian bent, the rhetoric of rising entrenched rather than
challenged inequalities of income and wealth. It did not propose to alleviate these inequal-
ities by reconsidering the economic policies that produced them. Instead, it oﬀered a
work-around: individual upward mobility through higher education. To workers frustrated
by stagnant wages and the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries, elites of the 1990s
and 2000s oﬀered some bracing advice: If you want to compete and win in the global
economy, go to college. “What you earn depends on what you learn.” “You can make
it if you try.”8

The elites who delivered this message failed to see the implicit insult it conveyed: if you
did not go to college, and if you are not ﬂourishing in the new economy, your failure must
be your fault.

It is no wonder that many working people turned against meritocratic elites. Those
who spend their days in the company of the credentialed can easily forget a simple fact:
most people do not have a four-year college degree. Nearly two-thirds of Americans do
not.9 So, it is folly to create an economy that makes a university diploma a necessary con-
dition of digniﬁed work and a decent life.

Elites have so valorized a college degree—both as an avenue for advancement and as
the basis for social esteem—that they have diﬃculty understanding the hubris a meritoc-
racy can generate and the harsh judgment it imposes on those who have not gone to

7
8

SANDEL, supra note 1, at 23, 67–71.
The line “What you earn depends on what you learn” was frequently used by Bill Clinton. “You can make it if you
try” was a favorite phrase of Barack Obama, who used it in presidential speeches and public statements more than
140 times. See id. at 23, 67–79, 86–87.
Id. at 89. In 2020, 37.5% of Americans 25 years of age and over had completed four years of college, up from 25%
in 1999 and 20% in 1988. U.S. Census Bureau, CPS Historical Time Series Tables, Table A-2 (2021), https://www
.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/educational-attainment/cps-historical-time-series.html.

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college. Such attitudes fueled the resentment against elites that Donald Trump was able
to exploit.10

When Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020, he became the ﬁrst Dem-
ocratic nominee for president in 36 years without a degree from an Ivy League university.
This may have helped him connect with the blue-collar workers his party has struggled to
attract in recent years. But the fact that a Democratic presidential candidate from a state
university was such a novelty shows how pervasive the credentialist prejudice had become.
By 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, the Democratic Party had become more
attuned to the interests and outlook of the college-educated, professional class than to
the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base. This may help explain why main-
stream Democrats of the Clinton–Obama era did little to reverse the widening inequality.
The white working-class voters who supported Trump are not the only people ill-
served by the meritocratic focus on higher education as the solution to their troubles.
Working people in communities of color have also been neglected by a political project
that gives scant support and social esteem to those who aspire to jobs that do not require a
college degree. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking
African American in Congress, oﬀered a devastating critique of his party’s meritocratic
turn. Clyburn, whose endorsement of Biden in the South Carolina primary rescued Biden’s
struggling candidacy and set him on the road to the nomination, saw Biden as represent-
ing an alternative to the relentless credentialism that had alienated working people from
the Democratic party.

“Our problem,” Clyburn said, “is too many candidates spend time trying to let people
know how smart they are, rather than trying to connect with people.”11 He thought Dem-
ocrats had put too much emphasis on college education. What does it mean “when a
candidate says, you need to be able to send your kids to college? Now how many times
have you heard that? I hate to hear that[;] . . . I don’t need to hear that. Because we’ve got
people who want to be electricians, they want to be plumbers, they want to be barbers.”12
Although he did not put it quite this way, Clyburn was pushing back against the merit-
ocratic political project that had unwittingly disparaged working-class voters and opened
the way to Trump.

If meritocratic attitudes toward success have deepened the divide between winners
and losers; if individual mobility through higher education is too feeble a response to in-

10
11

SANDEL, supra note 1, at 26.
How Rep. James Clyburn Settled on Endorsing Joe Biden for President, ABC NEWS (Feb. 26, 2020), https://abcnews
.go.com/ﬁvethirtyeight/video/rep-james-clyburn-settled-endorsing-joe-biden-president-69231417.
Id. I ﬁrst came across Clyburn’s quote in Elizabeth Anderson, The Broken System: What Comes After Meritocracy?,
THE NATION, Feb. 23, 2021, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/sandel-tyranny-merit/ (interview by Galen
Druke, FiveThirtyEight, with Rep. James Clyburn).

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART I

equalities of income and wealth; if the rhetoric of rising has become, for many, less a
promise than a taunt, what is the alternative?

We should begin by acknowledging that mobility cannot compensate for inequality.
Any serious response to the gap between the rich and the rest must reckon directly with
inequalities of power and wealth, rather than rest content with the project of helping peo-
ple scramble up a ladder whose rungs grow farther and farther apart. This requires shifting
the terms of public discourse. Broadly speaking, we should focus less on arming people for
meritocratic competition and more on aﬃrming the dignity of work. We should ask what
policies would ensure that Americans who do not inhabit the privileged ranks of the pro-
fessional classes can ﬁnd work that enables them to support a family, contribute to their
community, and win social recognition for doing so.

III.

THE DIPLOMA DIVIDE

Part of the solution requires rethinking the role of higher education.13 Selective colleges
and universities now serve as arbiters of opportunity, conferring the credentials that a
market-driven meritocracy rewards. But converting universities into sorting machines
entrenches inequality. Aﬄuent parents have ﬁgured out how to pass their privilege on
to their children—not by bequeathing them vast estates, but by equipping them to com-
pete in the meritocratic tournament and to win admission to top colleges and universities.
SAT scores are closely correlated with family income. So too is access to internships; music
lessons; training in sports such as squash, lacrosse, sailing, rowing, fencing, golf, and water
polo; travel to perform good works in distant places; and other activities that burnish
college applications.14

At Ivy League and other highly selective universities, there are more students from
families in the top one percent than there are students from all families in the bottom half
of the income scale combined. Only three percent of students on elite campuses come
from low-income families (bottom quartile). Most young people from the bottom half
of the income scale attend a two-year college or none at all.15

13
14

In this and the following paragraphs, I draw upon SANDEL, supra note 1, at 164–77.
SANDEL, supra note 1, at 10; Andre Perry, Students Need a Boost in Wealth More Than a Boost in SAT Scores, THE
HECHINGER REPORT (May 17, 2019), https://hechingerreport.org/students-need-a-boost-in-wealth-more-than-a
-boost-in-sat-scores.
SANDEL, supra note 1, at 166–67; Raj Chetty et al., Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational
Mobility 1 (Nat’l Bureau of Econ. Rsch., Working Paper No. 23618, July 2017), https://opportunityinsights.org/wp
-content/uploads/2018/03/coll_mrc_paper.pdf; see also Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1 Percent
Than the Bottom 60. Find Yours, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18
/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html; Anthony P.
Carnevale & Stephen J. Rose, Socioeconomic Status, Race/Ethnicity, and Selective College Admissions, in AMERICA’S
UNTAPPED RESOURCE: LOW-INCOME STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION 106 tbl.3.1 (Richard B. Kahlenberg ed., 2004).

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Moreover, higher education is not the engine of upward mobility we take it to be. The
economist Raj Chetty and a team of colleagues calculated mobility rates at some 1,800 U.S.
colleges and universities—public and private, selective and nonselective. They asked how
many students at these institutions arrived poor (from families in the bottom quintile) and
rose to aﬄuence (top quintile) as adults. The answer: about two percent.16 This is due
mainly to the fact that so few students from low-income families attend four-year colleges
in the ﬁrst place. Higher education is like an elevator in a building that most people enter
on the top ﬂoor.

Important though it is to broaden access to elite colleges, we also need to lower the
stakes of the frenzied competition to get in. We should invest far more than we do in
those forms of learning that most people rely upon to prepare themselves for the world
of work—state colleges, two-year community colleges, and vocational and technical train-
ing. According to Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, we spend
$162 billion per year helping people go to college, but only about $1.1 billion on career
and technical training.17

This striking disparity not only constricts economic opportunity for those who can-
not aﬀord or do not aspire to a four-year degree, it also reﬂects the meritocratic prior-
ities of those who govern. Although nearly two-thirds of Americans do not have a
bachelor’s degree, very few of them serve in the U.S. Congress. Ninety-ﬁve percent of
members of the House and all Senators have four-year degrees. Over half of Senators,
and more than a third of House members, are lawyers, and many others have advanced
degrees.18

It has not always been this way. The well-educated have always been disproportion-
ately represented in Congress, but as recently as the mid-1980s, ﬁfteen percent of House
members and twelve percent of Senators did not have a college diploma.19

One consequence of the credentialist tide is that the working class is now virtually
absent from representative government. In the United States, about half of the labor
force is employed in working-class jobs, deﬁned as manual labor, service industry,
and clerical jobs. But fewer than two percent of members of Congress worked in such

16
17

SANDEL, supra note 1, at 168–69; Chetty et al., supra note 15, at Table II.
SANDEL, supra note 1, at 190; ISABEL SAWHILL, THE FORGOTTEN AMERICANS: AN ECONOMIC AGENDA FOR A DIVIDED
NATION 114 (2018).
SANDEL, supra note 1, at 97; CONG. RSCH. SERV., R45583, MEMBERSHIP OF THE 116TH CONGRESS: A PROFILE (updated
Dec. 17, 2020), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45583.pdf; Jennifer Senior, 95% of Members of Congress Have a
Degree. Look Where That’s Got Us, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/opinion
/politicians-college-degrees.html.
SANDEL, supra note 1, at 97; CONG. RSCH. SERV., supra note 18, at 5.

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART I

jobs before their election. In state legislatures, only three percent come from working-
class backgrounds.20

Which brings us back to the failure of mainstream parties and politicians to address
the rampant inequality of recent decades. The age of globalization brought rich rewards to
the well-credentialed but did nothing for most workers. From 1979 to 2016, the number of
manufacturing jobs in the United States fell from 19.5 million to 12 million. Productivity
increased, but workers reaped a smaller and smaller share of what they produced; execu-
tives and shareholders captured a larger share. In the late 1970s, CEOs of major American
companies made 30 times more than the average worker; by 2014, they made 300 times
more.21

Economic hardship and the income gap were not the only source of worker distress.
These harms were compounded by a more insidious injury: the erosion of the dignity of
work. By valorizing the “brains” it takes to score well on college admission tests, the sort-
ing machine disparages those without meritocratic credentials. It tells them that the work
they do, less valued by the market than the work of well-paid professionals, is a lesser
contribution to the common good and so less worthy of social recognition and esteem.
It legitimates the lavish rewards the market bestows on the winners and the meager
pay it oﬀers workers without a college degree.22

The ﬁnancialization of the economy has reinforced this demoralizing message. As
economic activity has shifted from making things to managing money, as society has
heaped outsize rewards on hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers, the esteem
accorded work has become fragile and uncertain. At a time when ﬁnance has claimed
a greater share of corporate proﬁts, many who labor in the real economy producing use-
ful goods and services have not only faced stagnant wages and uncertain job prospects,
they have also come to feel that society accords less respect to the kind of work the
working class does.23

This way of thinking about who deserves what is not morally defensible. But over the
last several decades, the idea that the money people make is the measure of their contri-
bution to the common good has become deeply embedded.

Meritocratic sorting helped entrench this idea. So did the market-friendly version of
globalization embraced by mainstream parties of the center-right and center-left since
the 1980s. Even as globalization produced massive inequality, these two outlooks—the

22
23

SANDEL, supra note 1, at 97; NICHOLAS CARNES, THE CASH CEILING: WHY ONLY THE RICH RUN FOR OFFICE—AND WHAT
WE CAN DO ABOUT IT 5–6 (2018).
SANDEL, supra note 1, at 197; ANNE CASE & ANGUS DEATON, DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM 152,
161 (2020); SAWHILL, supra note 17, at 86, 140–41.
I draw here on SANDEL, supra note 1, at 198.
I draw here on SANDEL, supra note 1, at 30.

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meritocratic and the neoliberal—narrowed the grounds for resisting it. They also under-
mined the dignity of work, fueling resentment of elites and prompting political backlash.24

IV. CONTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

To contend with inequality, we need to reconsider meritocratic attitudes toward success
and neoliberal conceptions of the common good. The pandemic suggests a possible start-
ing point. Those of us with the luxury of working from home during the pandemic have
come to recognize how deeply we depend on workers we often overlook—delivery
workers, warehouse workers, supermarket cashiers and grocery store clerks, utility
workers, nurse assistants, childcare workers, home care providers. These are not the best
paid nor the most honored workers in our society. But now we see them as “essential
workers.” This could be the moment for a public debate about how to reconﬁgure the
economy to bring their pay and recognition into better alignment with the importance
of their work.25

Such a reconﬁguration involves more than familiar debates about how generous or
austere the welfare state should be. It requires deliberating as democratic citizens about
what constitutes a contribution to the common good and how such contributions should
be rewarded—without assuming that markets can decide these questions for us.

Such deliberation would carry us beyond debates about distributive justice (how to
distribute income, opportunity, and the good things in life) to debates about contributive
justice (how to create conditions that enable everyone to contribute to the common good
and to receive honor and recognition for having done so).

A political agenda focused on the dignity of work needs to address contributive as well
as distributive justice. Policy proposals to increase the purchasing power of working- and
middle-class families, or to shore up the safety net, important though they are, will not by
themselves address the anger and resentment that now run deep. This is because the injury
that most animates the grievance of working people is to their status as producers. Only a
political agenda that acknowledges this injury can speak eﬀectively to the discontent that
roils our politics. For it is in our role as producers, not consumers, that we contribute to
the common good and win social recognition and esteem.26

Robert F. Kennedy put it well half a century ago: “Fellowship, community, shared
patriotism—these essential values . . . do not come from just buying and consuming

24
25

I draw here on SANDEL, supra note 1, at 198.
In this paragraph and the next, I draw upon Michael J. Sandel, Are We All in This Together?, N.Y. TIMES,
Apr. 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opinion/sunday/covid-workers-healthcare-fairness.html;
see also SANDEL, supra note 1, at 205–12.
See SANDEL, supra note 1, at 208–12.

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART I

goods together.” They come instead from “digniﬁed employment at decent pay,” the kind
of employment that enables us to say, “I helped to build this country. I am a participant
in its great public ventures.”27

The notion that work draws citizens together in a scheme of contribution and mutual
recognition also found memorable expression in a speech Martin Luther King, Jr., gave to
striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, shortly before he was assassinated:
“One day our society will come to respect the sanitation workers if it is to survive, for
the person who picks up our garbage is in the ﬁnal analysis as signiﬁcant as the physician.
For if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”28

What would it mean to put contributive justice and the dignity of work at the center
of political debate? Here are a few illustrative examples: we might reconsider the policy
of taxing income from labor at a higher rate than dividends and capital gains; adopt a
federal wage subsidy to ensure that low-paid workers earn enough to support thriving
families, neighborhoods, and communities; ban publicly traded companies from stock
buy-backs that boost share prices and inﬂate CEO pay; classify gig workers as employees
rather than independent contractors; promote sectoral bargaining so that fast food
workers, for example, can negotiate wages and working conditions industry-wide rather
than company by company; encourage the domestic manufacture of certain goods (be-
ginning with surgical masks, medical gear, and pharmaceuticals) rather than promote
outsourcing to low-wage countries; shift the burden of taxation from payroll taxes to a
tax on ﬁnancial transactions.

Measures such as these would reduce inequality to some extent. But my aim is not to
oﬀer a set of policy prescriptions; it is to suggest ways of prompting public debate about
what counts as a valuable contribution to the common good. Consider a ﬁnancial trans-
actions tax. Even ardent market enthusiasts would be hard-pressed to claim that the social
contribution of a high-frequency trader is hundreds of times more valuable than that of a
nurse, as their respective earnings would imply.

To know whether care workers are paid too little and high-frequency traders too
much, we need to ask, and to argue, about the value of their contributions. The growth
of ﬁnance in recent decades would not be a problem if it led to a corresponding growth of
new businesses, factories, roads, airports, schools, hospitals, and homes. But as ﬁnance has
exploded as a share of the U.S. economy in recent decades, less and less of it has involved
investing in the real economy. More and more has involved complex ﬁnancial engineering

Robert F. Kennedy, Press Release (May 19, 1968), in RFK: COLLECTED SPEECHES 385–86 (Edwin O. Guthman &
C. Richard Allen eds., 1993).

28 Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee (Mar. 18, 1968), Chapter 31:

The Poor People’s Campaign, KING INST., https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/publications
/autobiography-martin-luther-king-jr-contents/chapter-31-poor-peoples.

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AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND EQUALITY |

ISSUE 1 | 2021

that yields big proﬁts for those engaged in it but does not make the economy more pro-
ductive. According to one estimate, only ﬁfteen percent of ﬁnancial ﬂows now go into new
productive enterprises rather than into speculation on existing assets or fancy derivatives.29
Taxing ﬁnancial transactions and reducing payroll taxes would not only make the tax
system more progressive, it would express society’s judgment that work is more valuable
than casino-like speculation. It would reconﬁgure the economy of esteem by discouraging
extractive ways of making money and honoring productive labor. These proposals are
illustrative. My broader point is that renewing the dignity of work requires that we con-
tend with the moral questions underlying our economic arrangements—questions that
the technocratic politics of recent decades have obscured.30

One such question is what kinds of work are worthy of recognition and esteem. An-
other is what we owe one another as citizens. These questions are connected. For we can-
not determine what counts as a contribution worth aﬃrming without reasoning together
about the purposes and ends of the common life we share. And we cannot deliberate about
common purposes and ends without a sense of belonging, without seeing ourselves as
members of a community to which we are indebted.

Over the past four decades, market-driven globalization and the meritocratic con-
ception of success, taken together, have unraveled these moral ties. Global supply chains,
capital ﬂows, and the cosmopolitan identities they fostered made us less reliant on our
fellow citizens, less grateful for the work they do, and less open to the claims of solidar-
ity. Meritocratic sorting taught us that our success is our own doing, and so eroded our
sense of indebtedness. We are now in the midst of the angry whirlwind this unraveling
has produced. To renew our civic life, we must repair the social bonds the age of merit
has undone.

See SANDEL, supra note 1, at 216–18. On the role of ﬁnance, see RANA FOROOHAR, MAKERS AND TAKERS: THE RISE OF
FINANCE AND THE FALL OF AMERICAN BUSINESS (2016); ADAIR TURNER, ECONOMICS AFTER THE CRISIS: OBJECTIVES AND
MEANS 35–55 (2012); J. Bradford Delong, Starving the Squid, PROJECT SYNDICATE (June 28, 2013), https://project
-syndicate.org/commentary/time-to-bypass-modern-ﬁnance-by-j–bradford-delong. The ﬁfteen percent estimate
is by Adair Turner, Foroohar, supra note 30, at 7.
In this and the following two paragraphs, I draw upon SANDEL, supra note 1, at 221–22.

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