AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND EQUALITY |

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AMERICAN JOURNAL
of LAW and EQUALITY

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II
Reply to Critics

Michael J. Sandel*

I am grateful to the participants in this symposium for engaging so thoughtfully with my
book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?1 I want to congratulate
the editors of this new journal on launching a venue for fresh thinking about inequality
and thank them for commissioning this symposium for the inaugural issue.

I have learned a great deal from the essays gathered here and the rich array of chal-
lenges they oﬀer. In considering my response, I am struck by the fact the none of the ﬁf-
teen essays defends meritocracy against the principled objections that I (and many others)
have raised against it. No one argues, at least not explicitly, that the successful deserve the
rewards the market bestows on them, or that they would deserve such rewards if oppor-
tunities were truly equal. The essays focus instead on my diagnosis (c'est à dire., my claim that
meritocracy gives rise to grievances that fuel backlash against elites) and on the alterna-
tives to meritocracy, as an ideal and as a political project, that I propose.

I will address the challenges posed by my colleagues by identifying four themes that
appear in the essays: (1) meritocracy and work, (2) meritocracy and race, (3) meritoc-
racy and capitalism, et (4) meritocracy and liberalism. Organizing my reply according
to these themes inevitably means that I am unable to address all of the arguments and
insights contained in the essays. But I hope this thematic focus enables me to draw to-
gether and respond to some of the most important critical reﬂections the commentaries
oﬀer.

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?, est
the subject of this symposium. Sandel provides an overview of his book in Part I at the beginning of this symposium,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00024.

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_00025

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II

je. MERITOCRACY AND WORK

Several of the essays raise probing questions about the dignity of work: what constitutes
the dignity of work, does it oﬀer a promising basis for an alternative political project, et
if so, what would be required to achieve it? Kate Andrias ﬁnds my critique of meritocracy
forceful and compelling and agrees that a politics focused on the dignity of work is a de-
sirable alternative. But she observes that I do not adequately specify the policies that could
achieve this, and that I neglect the ways that corporate interests have deliberately and sys-
tematically undermined unions and collective bargaining. In her essay, Andrias points out
that the degradation of industrial work was “not an accidental byproduct of elites’ mis-
placed faith in education, technocracy, and market.”2 Beginning in the 1970s, she writes,
“employers aggressively moved capital overseas and ﬁssured employment relations, turn-
ing to subcontractors and independent contractors in a concerted eﬀort to reduce labor
frais, evade responsibility to their workers, and eliminate workers’ collective voice in their
jobs.”3

Workers fought back, but lost. Andrias makes the important point that the degrada-
tion of work is bound up with political power. Just as New Deal labor reforms were
achieved through political struggle, any attempt to renew the dignity of work in our time
will require organization, alliances, and a new struggle to wrest economic and political
power from corporate interests and their political allies. I agree. Andrias’s account is a nec-
essary elaboration of any project to renew the dignity of work. She is right to conclude that
my book “leaves for other scholars—and for workers themselves—the task of understand-
ing past and present struggles over the dignity of work and of elaborating what work with
dignity could look like”4 today.

Patricia A. Cain “needed no convincing” about the problems created by meritocracy
and about the political pathologies it inﬂames. She considers it “abhorrent for any of us to
think that we made it to the top because we deserve it”5 and oﬀers a moving litany of
instances of luck in her own life. But Cain is less convinced by the solutions I propose.
She worries that my discussion of the dignity of work focuses more than it should on paid
travail. This raises an important point. Any attempt to strengthen social recognition of and
esteem for those who make valuable contributions to the common good must look beyond
paid labor, which neglects some of the most valuable work of all—raising and caring for

3
4
5

Kate Andrias, Power Struggles—The Tyranny of Merit and the Degradation of Work: Comment on M. Sandel’s The
Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM. J.L. & EQUAL. 18 (2021).
Id.
Id. à 19.
Patricia A. Cain, Getting to the American Dream in 2021: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM.
J.L. & EQUAL. 22 (2021).

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children and families, as well as the many forms of public service and civic participation
that make for ﬂourishing neighborhoods and communities.

Cain also worries that I may be too ready to accept the underpayment of essential
workers and want simply to bolster their conﬁdence in the importance of their work. Ce
is a misreading. The dignity of work is not only or mainly a subjective matter of individual
morale; it requires that the economy be reconﬁgured in a way that confers material sup-
port and social esteem that honor the value of the contributions people make. For sani-
tation workers and home health care workers, this includes appropriate pay, health
beneﬁts, sick leave, pensions, and the like. For those who care for their children and fam-
ilies outside the framework of the labor market, this may include material support of other
kinds (par exemple., child subsidies or tax credits, publicly funded health care, éducation).

Cain comments that, as much as she believes we need a stronger safety net, The Tyranny
of Merit convinced her “that a safety net is not enough,”6 that we also need to ﬁnd ways of
recognizing people’s contributions to the common good. In diﬀerent ways, Deborah L.
Rhode and Daniel Hemel are less convinced by this idea.

I should say, ﬁrst of all, that reading Rhode’s generous commentary is a poignant ex-
expérience, knowing that she completed it shortly before her untimely death. Deborah was a
proliﬁc and pathbreaking scholar in legal ethics who, by the force of her arguments and
her example, broke down barriers in legal academia and the legal profession. Her essay in
this symposium, like her forthcoming book Ambition: What For?,7 displays her ﬁerce op-
position to inequality and the attitudes that sustain it. In her essay, Rhode writes that,
although she agrees with my critique of meritocracy, she thinks meritocratic ideals are
so deeply engrained that we should seek practical, “cost-eﬀective strategies for promoting
a more equitable future.” She proposes reducing child poverty and providing quality child-
care and preschool programs, investing in underfunded public schools and vocational ed-
ucation, reducing preferences that favor white and wealthy students in college admissions,
and generally shoring up the safety net for the least well-oﬀ.

I am certainly in favor of these policies. But I do not believe they constitute a suﬃcient
response to inequalities of recognition and esteem. This is why I emphasize contributive
justice and the dignity of work. Hemel strenuously disagrees. He is wary of a politics that
aﬃrms the dignity of work, fearing that it leads to punitive work requirements for welfare,
as in President Clinton’s welfare reform. As Hemel acknowledges, I reject this approach.
En fait, I criticize the punitive conception of individual responsibility that led many con-
servatives and some liberals (including Clinton) to condition public assistance on showing
that those in need are needy “through no fault of their own.” This way of thinking reﬂects

6
7

Id. à 24.
DEBORAH L. RHODE, AMBITION: WHAT FOR? (2021).

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II

the meritocratic tendency to parse the distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving”
poor.8

Hemel argues, more broadly, that our dignity should not be tied to what we produce or
contribute but simply to our humanity. We should “construct an economic agenda oriented
around the widely shared intuition that all human beings are worthy of our respect and
our concern—regardless of . . . the salaries they command, or the marketable goods and
services they produce.”9 He favors a universal basic income as the best expression of re-
spect for human dignity and for the sake of respecting “individuals’ own allocative
choices.”10

I am ambivalent about a universal basic income. The best argument in its favor is that
it helps low-income citizens meet their basic needs. But it is no substitute for policies en-
suring food security, health care, housing, éducation, and decent public services. Nor can it
substitute for work (paid and unpaid) as a system of mutual contribution and recognition.
Some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs promote a universal basic income in hopes of buy-
ing oﬀ resistance to the world without work they imagine their robots and algorithms will
bring.11 Hemel does not make his proposal in this spirit. But respecting “individuals’ own
allocative choices” is not enough to draw us together as citizens engaged in a common life.
It is a consumerist ethic that misses the importance of contributive justice. In practice,
work often fails as a source of social recognition and esteem. But this is not a reason to
give up on the dignity of work; it is a reason to empower workers and to enlarge the re-
wards and esteem accorded those whose contributions are undervalued by the market.

II. MERITOCRACY AND RACE

Several of the essays pose questions about how race ﬁgures in my critique of meritocracy.
Echoing Frederick Douglass’s rhetorical question “What, to the American slave, is your
4th of July?,” Ifeoma Ajunwa asks, "Quoi, to the Black American, is the meritocracy?”12
She notes that one aim of The Tyranny of Merit is to diagnose the populist backlash that

8
9

10
11

See SANDEL, supra note 1, at 64–66, 146–50.
Daniel Hemel, Beyond the Dignity of Work: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM. J.L. & EQUAL.
36 (2021).
Id. à 37.
Jathan Sadowski, Why Silicon Valley Is Embracing Universal Basic Income, THE GUARDIAN (Juin 22, 2016), https://
www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/silicon-valley-universal-basic-income-y-combinator; Douglas
Rushkoﬀ, Silicon Valley’s Push for Universal Basic Income Is—Surprise!—Totally Self-Serving, L.A. TIMES,
Juillet 21, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rushkoﬀ-universal-basic-income-silicon-valley
-20170721-story.html.
Ifeoma Ajunwa, What to the Black American Is the Meritocracy? Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit,
1 AM. J.L. & EQUAL. 39 (2021).

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led to Trump’s election, and she ﬁnds my diagnosis compelling. But she also reads the
book “as reﬂecting the debates around aﬃrmative action and as oﬀering an indirect ex-
planation for our societal acquiescence to continued racial inequality in the United
States.”13

Ajunwa elaborates her reading, which I fully accept, by observing that meritocratic
arguments have animated the most prominent objection to aﬃrmative action in college
admissions. Those who oppose considering race as a factor in admissions often argue that
doing so violates the right of applicants to be considered according to merit. This argu-
ment asserts that applicants should be considered on the basis of academic promise alone,
and that those with the highest grades and SAT scores deserve to be admitted. But this
argument is ﬂawed in two ways. D'abord, grades and SAT scores reﬂect diﬀerences in family
background and educational opportunity, including diﬀerences of class and race. Deuxième,
even if these metrics were true measures of academic promise, and even if everyone had an
equal chance to achieve them, those admitted would still be mistaken in believing they
deserved to win admission, and that those turned away deserved to be rejected. Believing
that admission is earned as a matter of individual merit makes it hard for the winners to
acknowledge an obligation to redress historic (and continuing) injustices of race and class,
especially if this means accepting that their success is not wholly their own doing, but is
instead the result of various sources of luck and good fortune.

Khiara M. Bridges oﬀers another important example of how individualistic notions of
merit entrench inequality: by leading us to neglect structural explanations of poverty. Elle
agrees with my “basic diagnosis of our social and political malaise: the winners in our
society have wrongly concluded that they are self-made [et] that those who have not
succeeded have only themselves to blame.”14 And she shows how the mistaken notion that
the winners are self-made supports a morally blinkered view of poverty. Rather than ac-
knowledge and address the structural, systemic sources of poverty—policies that replace
middle-skill, middle-wage jobs with low-skill, low-wage jobs; a system of public-school
ﬁnance that produces good schools for wealthy kids and underfunded schools for poor
kids; a racialized system of criminal justice that leads to mass incarceration—Americans
tend to believe that poverty is the fault of the poor.

Drawing on her book The Poverty of Privacy Rights,15 Bridges argues that the appeal of
the individualistic account of poverty is that it enables the winners to interpret their suc-
cess as their own doing. Structural accounts of poverty, by contrast, would threaten the
self-satisfaction of the successful: “That our achievements may not be entirely earned—but

13
14

Id. à 43.
Khiara M. Bridges, The Tyranny of Race Blindness: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM. J.L. &
EQUAL. 47 (2021).
KHIARA M. BRIDGES, THE POVERTY OF PRIVACY RIGHTS (2017).

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II

may have been gifted to us, in some important sense, by forces outside of our control—is a
discomﬁting reality that many people, even progressive ones, may reject.”16

Bridges’s analysis helps us see how our failure to address the structural sources of
poverty is connected to the meritocratic conception of success. De plus, she shows that
this way of thinking about success is found not only among conservative critics of the welfare
state, but also among many liberals. This is a powerful illustration of the main argument of
The Tyranny of Merit.

Notwithstanding this agreement, Bridges takes me to task for what she calls my “un-
derestimation of the signiﬁcance of race in the story of Trump’s rise to power.”17 My
book acknowledges, bien sûr, that many voters were attracted by Trump’s racist ap-
peals. My argument is simply that racism is not the whole story. Focusing only on
the “basket of deplorables” account of Trump’s triumph misses something important:
mainstream elites of both political parties were tone deaf to the anger and resentment
of white working-class voters, who had been left behind by four decades of neoliberal
globalization, deregulation, wage stagnation, inequality, and diminished social esteem.
For meritocratic elites, attributing the disaﬀection of white working voters entirely to
racism is a way of letting themselves oﬀ the hook. It spares them the need to reﬂect
critically on how their globalization project, and its meritocratic way of ﬂattering the
winners, produced the inequalities and indignities that paved the way to Trump.

Bridges is no apologist for meritocratic elites. But she thinks I am too sympathetic to the
plight of the white working class. In a rhetorical ﬂourish, she describes The Tyranny of
Merit as “a love letter of sorts”18 to the people who supported Trump and brought democ-
racy to the brink. I would put it diﬀerently. My book is not a love letter to Trump supporters;
it is tough love for liberals. It brings liberals the hard news that their rhetoric of rising and
oﬀer of individual mobility through higher education is an inadequate response to the in-
equalities their policies produced. It is also self-serving, for reasons Bridges analyzes well.
I do think it is important to try to understand the economic and cultural grievances
of white working-class voters. A number of recent works do this well, without excusing
the racist sentiments with which these grievances are often entangled: Arlie Russell
Hochschild’s Strangers in a Strange Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,19
Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and
the Rise of Scott Walker,20 and Joan C. Williams’s White Working Class: Overcoming Class

16
17
18
19
20

Bridges, supra note 14, at 48–49.
Id. à 49.
Id. à 51.
ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD, STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: ANGER AND MOURNING ON THE AMERICAN RIGHT (2016).
KATHERINE J. CRAMER, THE POLITICS OF RESENTMENT: RURAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN WISCONSIN AND THE RISE OF SCOTT
WALKER (2016).

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Cluelessness in America.21 These studies in sympathetic understanding can help us imag-
ine ways of addressing the legitimate grievances that fuel authoritarian populist back-
lash, a danger that has not disappeared with the departure of Trump.

Camille Gear Rich and Omar Noureldin also fault me for failing to take adequate ac-
count of race, although in a diﬀerent domain. Their focus is not my analysis of the forces
that led to Trump’s election, but rather my account of how we conceive the value of work.
I do not “reckon with how America’s race and gender history and current racial strife
. . . True escape from the
fundamentally shape our valuation and recognition of work.
‘tyranny of merit’ requires an inquiry into how race and gender shape the meaning of
merit.”22

Rich and Noureldin observe that “work’s value, historically, has been tethered to the
race and gender of those who perform it.”23 This has a direct bearing, they suggest, on my
proposed solution, which is to focus less on arming people for meritocratic competition
and more on aﬃrming the dignity of work. Putting the dignity of work at the center of
public discourse, je discute, requires rejecting the assumption that the money people make is
the measure of their contribution to the common good; we should not outsource to mar-
kets the moral question of what counts as a truly valuable contribution. Plutôt, we should
reclaim this question for democratic deliberation.

Rich and Noureldin are sympathetic to this project, but they argue that it requires a
more direct engagement with the decisive roles of race and gender than I have oﬀered.
“Although Sandel gestures generally at race being a relevant social consideration, he has
not fully reckoned with how it shapes his proposed solution.
. . . What he misses is how
gender and racial bias have fundamentally structured our understanding of normal wage
travail, digniﬁed conditions, and social status.”24

Rich and Noureldin point out that the COVID pandemic revealed to many Americans

how our understanding of merit, deservingness, and value continue to be shaped by
unfair race and gender considerations.
. . . The pandemic ushered in a great cultural
and social reckoning about how the sometimes invisible low-status service work per-
formed by female Black and brown bodies, in fact, has extraordinary value, and often
does not occur in spaces that aﬃrm dignity.25

21
22

23
24
25

JOAN C. WILLIAMS, WHITE WORKING CLASS: OVERCOMING CLASS CLUELESSNESS IN AMERICA (2019).
Camille Gear Rich & Omar Noureldin, UN 2020 Perspective on Merit—One Intersectional Vision of a Racially Just
Society: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM. J.L. & EQUAL. 53 (2021).
Id.
Id. à 57.
Id. à 58.

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II

Elevating and acknowledging “the socially valuable labor performed by Black and
brown women will be critical if we are to dismantle traditional status hierarchies that
shape our views about merit.”26

I agree with this analysis and see it as an important aspect of any articulation of the
dignity of work. The frontline workers we celebrated as “essential workers” during the
pandemic had little choice but to expose themselves to risk, performing jobs for pay hardly
commensurate with the “essential” contributions they were making. In New York City,
seventy-ﬁve percent of frontline workers are people of color.27 Nationally, women of color
predominate in jobs, such as childcare and home healthcare, that are poorly paid and that
exposed them to substantial COVID risk. Nearly one-third of nursing assistants and home
healthcare workers are Black women. Nearly forty percent of childcare workers are people
of color, many of them women.28 Not surprisingly, people of color bore a disproportionate
share of COVID deaths. Among African Americans, the COVID death rate was forty-four
percent higher than among whites.29

Against this background of racial and gender inequality, heaping praise on frontline
workers for their sacriﬁce and devotion can be fatuous and insulting. As Rich and Noureldin
observe, “these workers were represented as patriotically desiring to go out and save us
tous,”30 even as they were not being provided with basic protective gear. Reading their essay
brought to mind a statement of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who described a
“nightmare” he had early in the pandemic:

What if the essential workers don’t show up? You have to have food, you have to
have transportation, the lights have to be on, someone has to pick up the garbage,
. . . What if they said, “You don’t pay me enough to put
the hospitals have to run.
my life in danger? I’m not doing it.” They showed up. They didn’t show up for a
paycheck.
. . . They showed up out of their honor, out of their values, out of their
dignity. That’s why they showed up.31

The pandemic made vivid the gap between the contributions of essential workers, es-
pecially women and people of color, and the way we honor and reward them. It scrambled

26
27

29
30
31

Id.
Quentin Fottrell, The Coronavirus Pandemic and Juneteenth: Black Americans Are Twice as Likely to Be
Hospitalized from COVID-19, MARKETWATCH, Juin 19, 2020, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/75-of
-frontline-workers-in-new-york-the-epicenter-of-coronavirus-are-people-of-color-and-black-americans-are-twice
-as-likely-to-die-from-covid-19-2020-06-01.
Jocelyn Frye, On the Frontlines at Work and at Home: The Disproportionate Economic Eﬀects of the Coronavirus
Pandemic on Women of Color, CTR. FOR AM. PROGRESS, Apr. 23, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues
/women/reports/2020/04/23/483846/frontlines-work-home/.
The COVID Tracking Project, ATL. MONTHLY GRP., Mar. 7, 2021, https://covidtracking.com/race.
Rich & Noureldin, supra note 22, à 63.
Fottrell, supra note 27.

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our conception of whose contributions matter most. The surge in public support for the
Black Lives Matter movement that occurred in the midst of the pandemic may reﬂect this.
As Rich and Noureldin suggest, many now seemed to recognize “that Black and brown
people who worked to keep society functioning through service jobs required more from
their fellow citizens in the form of dignity. This was a proposition that exceeded market
logic and exceeded their role as workers.”32

Whether this proposition leads to a more just valuation of the work performed by
women and people of color remains to be seen. But Rich and Noureldin help us see that
social value and market value do not necessarily align, especially when markets are em-
bedded in racial and gender hierarchies. How to value work is fundamentally a political
question.

III. MERITOCRACY AND CAPITALISM

The Tyranny of Merit oﬀers an interpretation of our political condition. Like all interpre-
tations, it has a normative bent. It explains and criticizes, both at the same time. It shows
how meritocratic ways of thinking about success have gone hand in hand with the neo-
liberal version of capitalism that has unfolded in recent decades, and how meritocratic
attitudes toward success have rationalized the inequalities this capitalism has produced.
It also argues that meritocracy is a ﬂawed ideal and that understanding its defects can help
us understand the political backlash against mainstream parties and credentialed elites.

Some contributors to this symposium argue that I misidentify the beliefs that animate
the populist backlash. Others take issue with my account of the dignity of work and do not
see it as a promising political project. But a few contributors raise a diﬀerent kind of
objection—that I wrongly focus on political discourse, attitudes, and rhetoric rather than
on material interests.

Robert L. Tsai sees a tension between two diﬀerent criticisms of merit running
throughout the book—criticism of “unequal material conditions” and criticism of “status-
based consequences of a meritocratic ethic.”33 He thinks that most of the time, I do my
best “not to choose between these two kinds of injuries.”34

Tsai is right that I do not choose between them. The reason is that, in a market-driven,
meritocratic society, material inequalities are bound up with status inequalities. Tsai wants
to sort out the causal connection between the two: does income inequality give rise to
meritocratic justiﬁcations, or does meritocracy encourage and entrench income inequality?

32
33

Rich & Noureldin, supra note 22, à 64.
Robert L. Tsai, Can Sandel Dethrone Meritocracy? Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM. J.L. &
EQUAL. 72 (2021).
Id.

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II

My answer is both. Meritocratic attitudes and economic inequalities are mutually reinforc-
ing. In recent decades, they have become a package deal. Any serious attempt to reduce
inequalities of income and wealth would need to challenge the notion that the rich are rich
because they are more deserving than the poor. And any serious attempt to diminish the
hold of the meritocratic success ethic would need to reconﬁgure the economy, not only
through redistribution but also by making money matter less. This would require, among
other things, the creation of class-mixing public spaces and institutions (possibly includ-
ing universal national service) that would draw the aﬄuent from their privatized isolation
into the common life of democratic citizenship.35

Mark Kelman oﬀers another version of materialist critique. He redescribes the anger
and resentment of white working-class men as “negative feelings” that are “superstructural”
and simply “derivative of underlying economic conditions.”36 He prefers a “materialist”
account of white men’s support for Trump to an “idealistic” account of resentment. Ac-
cording to Kelman’s materialist account of politics, viewing Trump supporters as angry
and resentful, whether for reasons of elite condescension, white supremacy, cultural exclu-
sion, or lost privileged status, misses their fundamentally economic motivations.

Even if purely materialist considerations could explain white working-class voters’
support for Trump in 2016, it is hard to see how materialist motivations could explain
their continued support for him in 2020 (after it became clear that his policies did little
if anything to improve their economic condition). And it is implausible, to say the least, à
think that the Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol were motivated only by
“materialist” considerations, rather than by a toxic brew of ideas, attitudes, and beliefs.
The chilling iconography of the Confederate ﬂag inside the Capitol building and a gallows
and noose outside it left little doubt that this was something darker than a protest against
wage stagnation.

Daria Roithmayr does not dismiss the signiﬁcance of political rhetoric or insist on the
distinction between materialist and idealist explanation. But she argues that I “misdiag-
nose the problem as meritocracy rather than neoliberal capitalism.”37 The core problem
job loss. Meritocracy is just the sideshow.”38
is “capitalism and . . .
I think this distinction is too sharply drawn. Meritocracy and neoliberal capitalism
today are integrally connected; meritocracy rationalizes and entrenches the inequalities
neoliberal capitalism produces. I do not claim that this connection is necessary, as a matter

SANDEL, supra note 1, at 224–27.

35
36 Mark Kelman, Shaky Diagnoses and Ambiguous Treatments: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit,

1 AM. J.L. & EQUAL. 91 (2021).
Daria Roithmayr, Humble Pie Is Cold Comfort: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM. J.L. &
EQUAL. 104 (2021).
Id. à 105.

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of abstract logic. But for the past four decades, the market faith and the meritocratic faith
have emerged together, dialectically, as the deﬁning project of mainstream American pol-
itics. Neoliberal capitalism made some people rich and others poor, but meritocracy cre-
ated the divide between winners and losers. And it is this divide, not income inequality
alone, that gives rise to the demoralization, resentment, and humiliation that Trump and
other authoritarian populists are able to exploit.

One of the most telling signs of this demoralization is what the economists Anne Case
and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair.”39 They coined this term to describe the mount-
ing incidence of death caused by suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease.
Among white men and women aged 45 à 54, deaths of despair increased threefold from
1990–2017.40

What might account for this grim epidemic? A revealing clue can be found in the ed-
ucational background of those most vulnerable to it. Case and Deaton discovered that “the
increase in deaths of despair was almost all among those without a bachelor’s degree.
Those with a four-year degree are mostly exempt.”41 Here then is another advantage of
the well-credentialed. Par 2017, men without a college diploma were three times more
likely than college graduates to die deaths of despair.42

Those who attribute white working-class unhappiness to material privation might sus-
pect that the underlying cause of deaths of despair is poverty, not humiliation and the loss
of social esteem. But Case and Deaton have found that the dramatic increase in deaths of
despair is not explained by an increase in poverty. Something more than material depri-
vation is inciting the despair, something distinctive to the plight of people struggling to
make their way in a meritocratic society without the credentials it honors and rewards: “A
four-year degree has become the key marker of social status, as if there were a requirement
for nongraduates to wear a circular scarlet badge bearing the letters BA crossed through by
a diagonal red line.”43

Roithmayr insists that Case and Deaton “attribute these deaths to the ﬂaws in capital-
ism”44 and that “[t]hey say little about meritocratic rhetoric or even humiliation at the
hands of elites as an underlying cause.”45 In fact, cependant, the demoralization a meritoc-
racy inﬂicts on those without a college degree is central to their account. In explaining
deaths of despair, they repeatedly cite Michael Young’s critique of meritocracy, aussi

39
40
41
42
43
44
45

ANNE CASE & ANGUS DEATON, DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM (2020).
Id. à 40, 45, cited by SANDEL, supra note 1, at 199–200.
Id. à 3.
Id. à 3, 57–58; SANDEL, supra note 1, à 200.
CASE & DEATON, supra note 39, à 3, 133, 146; SANDEL, supra note 1, at 200–01.
Roithmayr, supra note 37, à 104.
Id.

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as the more recent critiques that Daniel Markovits and I have oﬀered.46 For example, ils
write that “there is a dark side” to meritocracy “that was long ago predicted by Michael
Jeune,
. . . who invented the term in 1958 and who saw meritocracy as leading to social
calamity.”47

The elite can sometimes be smug about their accomplishments, attributing them to
their own merit, and dismissive of those without degrees, who had their chance but
blew it. The less educated are devalued or even disrespected, are encouraged to think
of themselves as losers, and may feel that the system is rigged against them. Quand
the fruits of success are as large as they are today, so are the penalties of failing the
tests of meritocracy.48

Unlike Roithmayr, Case and Deaton do not see a clear separation between the dam-
aging eﬀects of neoliberal capitalism and the demoralizing eﬀects of meritocracy: “Being
left behind ﬁnancially is a key part of the story, but it is only the beginning. When we use
the term deaths of despair, the despair is much broader, and much worse, than just ma-
terial deprivation.”49

If Case and Deaton are right, as I believe they are, meritocracy is not a “sideshow” but
at the heart of the problem. Contending with inequality requires both reconﬁguring the
economy and reconsidering the harsh ethic of success that divides us into winners and
losers.

IV. MERITOCRACY AND LIBERALISM

Several of the commentaries take up, from diﬀerent points of view, the relation of meri-
tocracy to liberalism. Jennifer Hochschild illuminates the complex ways that meritocratic
arguments ﬁnd expression in politics. She begins by identifying the audience the book

47
48
49

CASE & DEATON, supra note 39, at 3–4, 53–55, 68, 148, 252, 265 n.3, 265 n.14, 269 n.9, 269 n.10, 269 n.11, 269 n.15,
290 n.33. They have also discussed meritocracy in explaining deaths of despair in articles and interviews
subsequent to the book. E.g., Anne Case & Angus Deaton, Life Expectancy in Adulthood Is Falling for Those
Without a BA Degree, but as Educational Gaps Have Widened, Racial Gaps Have Narrowed, 118 PROC. NAT’L
ACAD. SCIS., e2024777118 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024777118; Anne Case & Angus Deaton, Deaths
of Despair and a Nation in Crisis, AM. INT. (Juin 3, 2020), https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/06/03
/deaths-of-despair-and-a-nation-in-crisis/; Angus Deaton, Republic of Equals, PROSPECT (Jan. 4, 2021), https://stag
.prospect.pbc.io/economics-and-ﬁnance/us-inequality-wealth-divide; Princeton University Press Ideas Podcast
Interview with Anne Case, Mars 2021, https://press.princeton.edu/sites/default/ﬁles/ﬁles/2021-03/Ann%20Case
%20Transcript.pdf.
CASE & DEATON, supra note 39, à 3.
Id. at 3–4.
Id. à 149.

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seeks to challenge, even if against the current: well-educated elites, especially liberals and
Democrats, who alienated many working-class supporters of the Democratic Party by em-
bracing a meritocratic solution to the inequality and wage stagnation their neoliberal eco-
nomic policies produced. Hochschild rightly points out that “meritocracy is the province
of neither left nor right,”50 but can be found, in diﬀerent versions, across the political
spectrum. And not all Democrats see a fair meritocracy as the primary answer to inequal-
ville; Bernie Sanders (et, for the most part, Elizabeth Warren) did not embrace the rhe-
toric of rising, but contended directly with inequalities of income, wealth, and power.

Although she does not put it in quite these terms, Hochschild’s analysis suggests that
one way of distinguishing liberals from progressives in contemporary American politics is
that liberals see individual upward mobility as the answer to inequality (hence, their em-
phasis on perfecting equality of opportunity), whereas progressives address inequality by
proposing structural reform of the economy. Hochschild also raises the important ques-
tion whether, in the long-standing struggle against inequality, meritocracy has switched
sides. An ethic that began its career as a “left-wing challenge to traditional methods of
and justiﬁcations for inequality—ancestry, course, genre, priestly anointing”51—has now
lost its radical impulse and become a source of hierarchy and complacence.

Of the ﬁfteen contributors to this symposium, Sarah Song comes closest to defending
meritocracy as a principle of justice. Against my argument that the meritocratic ideal is
ﬂawed, Song writes: “Perhaps the real problem is our failure to live up to the ideal.”52 I
agree that we fail to live up to the meritocratic principles we profess, most notably in higher
éducation. As I point out in the book, more than seventy percent of those who attend the
hundred or so most competitive colleges in the United States come from the top quarter of
the income scale; only three percent come from the bottom quarter.53 “Faced with such
facts,” Song asks, “why not renew our commitment to the meritocratic ideal and work harder
to ensure more qualiﬁed students from low-income families can go to college?”54

51
52

Jennifer Hochschild, Gauche, Droite, and Meritocracy: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM. J.L. &
EQUAL. 108 (2021).
Id. à 109.
Sarah Song, Diagnosing Democracy’s Discontent: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM. J.L. &
EQUAL. 112 (2021).
SANDEL, supra note 1, à 166. A study of the top 146 highly selective colleges and universities found that seventy-
four percent of students came from the top quarter of the socioeconomic status scale. Anthony P. Carnevale &
Stephen J. Rose, Socioeconomic Status, Race/Ethnicity, and Selective College Admissions, CENTURY FOUND. 106
tbl.3.1 (Mar. 31, 2003), https://tcf.org/content/commentary/socioeconomic-status-raceethnicity-and-selective
-college-admissions/. A similar study of the 91 most competitive colleges and universities found that seventy-two
percent of students came from the top quarter. Jennifer Giancola & Richard D. Kahlenberg, True Merit: Ensuring
Our Brightest Students Have Access to Our Best Colleges and Universities, JACK KENT COOKE FOUND., ﬁg.1 (Jan.
2016), https://www.jkcf.org/research/true-merit-ensuring-our-brightest-students-have-access-to-our-best-colleges
-and-universities/.
Song, supra note 52, à 112.

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We should certainly work harder to broaden college access for students from low-
income families. Everyone should be able to cultivate their intellectual gifts and aspirations,
and no one should be held back due to poverty or prejudice. But the meritocratic ideal is
about more than removing barriers to achievement; it is about attributing moral desert to
those who prevail in a fair competition. According to the meritocratic ideal, if chances are
equal, the winners earn, and therefore deserve, their winnings. It is this presumption of
desert that makes meritocratic societies prone to hubris and humiliation, and that deepens
the divide between winners and losers.

Song, it turns out, does not defend meritocracy in this sense. Plutôt, she endorses
John Rawls’s theory of justice, lequel, as Song acknowledges, “is premised on a rejection
of moral desert.”55 Rawls rejects meritocracy on two grounds: ﬁrst, my having the talents
that enable me to succeed is not my doing but my good fortune; et deuxieme, that I live in a
society that values the talents I happen to have is a happy coincidence, not something for
which I can claim credit. My critique of meritocracy draws upon both of these consider-
ations, and is indebted, in this respect, to Rawls (and to Hayek, who also rejects meritoc-
racy on these grounds).56

Despite her sympathy for meritocracy, Song seems to accept these principled argu-
ments against it. What she cares about more, if I read her correctly, is equality of oppor-
tunity and the chance to rise, although she uses these terms interchangeably with
meritocracy. Par exemple, she writes that, if we consider public universities such as the
Université de Californie, Berkeley, where she teaches, “we can see what is good about
the meritocratic ideal.”57

The students from low-income families that graduate from Berkeley exemplify true
meritocracy in action. Through hard work and eﬀort, they are indeed rising and
improving their prospects in life. Instead of jettisoning equality of opportunity, nous
need to renew our commitment to it, reinvesting in public education so more students
from disadvantaged backgrounds can rise.58

UC Berkeley and some other public colleges and universities do a better job than many
private universities of enrolling low-income students and propelling them up the income
scale. But this achievement does not vindicate the widely held view that higher education—
public or private—is an engine of upward mobility so potent that it can serve as society’s
primary response to inequality. Par exemple, although UC Berkeley is less class-skewed

55
56
57
58

Id. à 113.
See SANDEL, supra note 1, at 125–46 (discussing Rawls and Hayek).
Song, supra note 52, à 114.
Id.

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than Stanford (its wealthy, privately endowed neighbor), low-income students are not
plentiful on either campus. At Berkeley, 7.3% of students come from the bottom quintile
compared with 4% at Stanford. Berkeley’s mobility rate is higher than Stanford’s, mais
both are surprisingly modest. At Berkeley, 4.9% of students arrive poor and rise to
aﬄuence as adults (compared to only 2.2% at Stanford).59

I agree with Song that we should not “jettison” equality of opportunity. Breaking down
barriers is a morally necessary corrective to injustice. But it is important to recognize that
equality of opportunity is a remedial principle, not an adequate ideal for a just society. Nor
is mobility an adequate answer to inequality. Colleges and universities propel only a tiny
fraction of their students from poverty to aﬄuence, and most Americans do not attain a
four-year degree.60 Even a society more successful than ours at providing upward mobility
would need to ﬁnd ways to enable those who do not rise to ﬂourish in place and to see
themselves as valued contributors to the common good.

Sanford Levinson and Sophia Moreau oﬀer generous yet challenging commentaries
that question my call for a politics of the common good. Although sympathetic to my
critique of meritocracy, they worry that my alternative to market-deﬁned merit is at odds
with the value pluralism that liberalism aﬃrms. Levinson points out that notions of the
common good have long been disputed. In our own time, economists deal with the ap-
parent incommensurability of people’s preferences by asking how much they are willing
to pay for this or that good. Rather than conceive the common good as an ideal indepen-
dent of people’s preferences, economists focus on “revealed preferences,” the willingness
of consumers to spend their money to gamble in a casino, say, rather than to attend “a
morally edifying production of King Lear.”61 To second-guess such revealed preferences
in the name of virtue or the common good, Levinson suggests, runs the risk of coercion.
If we “accept the reality of a social and political world that includes quite diﬀerent
‘comprehensive’ views of how best to live one’s life,”62 we should not embody any particular

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, Juillet 2017), https://www.nber.org/papers/w23618; see also Economic Diversity
and Student Outcomes at America’s Colleges and Universities: Find Your College, N.Y. TIMES (interactive tool, data
on University of California, Berkeley, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of
-california-berkeley; data on Stanford https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/stanford
-university).
SANDEL, supra note 1, à 89, 168–69; Chetty et al., supra note 59, at Table II. Dans 2020, 37.5% of Americans twenty-
ﬁve years and over had completed four years of college, up from 25% dans 1999 et 20% dans 1988. U.S. Census
Bureau, CPS Historical Time Series Tables, 2021, Table A-2, https://census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo
/educational-attainment/cps-historical-time-series.html.
Sanford Levinson, Exhortation, Transformation, and Politics: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit,
1 AM. J.L. & EQUAL. 126–27 (2021).
Id. à 127.

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conception of the good life in public policy or law. Levinson worries that too robust a
notion of the common good would violate this liberal precept.

In a similar vein, Moreau wonders whether a shared vision of the common good is
“attainable in democratic societies where people diﬀer so deeply in their visions of what
matters in life.”63 She cites two daunting practical obstacles to public deliberation about
contested moral questions. One is the lack of the widespread civic education that would be
needed to equip large numbers of people to engage seriously with one another’s argu-
ments. The other is the prevalence of “post-truth politics,” a willful indiﬀerence to facts
that makes reasoned discussion impossible.

Beyond these practical obstacles, Moreau raises the principled objection that bringing
contested moral questions into public discourse may be at odds with value pluralism. Elle
therefore proposes a more modest alternative: the idea that “every person’s life is just as
valuable as every other person’s life.”64 (This is similar to Hemel’s proposal to substitute
human dignity for the dignity of work: we should consider “all human beings [comme] worthy
of our respect and our concern,”65 regardless of what they produce or what they contribute
to the common good.) “All that we need to agree on,” writes Moreau, “is that nobody
should be treated as though they were below others . . . . And we can agree upon this even
si . . . we do not have a shared understanding of what is best for us, as a community or a
city or a country.”66

Levinson and Moreau rightly detect that my case against accepting the market’s def-
inition of merit runs afoul of the liberal resolve to set aside contested notions of the good. je
have long argued that it is not possible or desirable for government to be neutral toward
competing conceptions of the good life. This argument has special force when it comes to
asking how we should value people’s various contributions to the common good. If we
want to question the market’s verdict on the social value of this or that job, how can
we possibly avoid asking what contributions matter most? And how can we answer this
question, or even debate it, without touching on contested conceptions of “what is best for
us, as a community or a city or a country”?

If we want to say the market is wrong to attribute greater value to a hedge fund man-
ager than to a nurse or a schoolteacher, we can’t be nonjudgmental. We have to show why
healing the sick or teaching the young is worthier than betting on the future prices of
derivatives. Such judgments are contestable and open to argument. Some will argue, pour
example, that ﬁnancial speculation helps the real economy by deepening the liquidity of

Sophia Moreau, What’s Needed for Equality of Condition? Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM.
J.L. & EQUAL. 133 (2021).
Id. à 137.
Hemel, supra note 9, à 36.

64
65
66 Moreau, supra note 63, à 138.

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credit markets or improving information about future prices; or that hedge fund managers
invest the hard-earned pensions of nurses and schoolteachers and so make a vital contri-
bution after all. But these are the questions we need to debate, and decide, democratically.
And these are questions about the common good.

Daniel Markovits, one of the most trenchant contemporary critics of meritocracy, concernant-
sists this conclusion. His important book The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Founda-
tional Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite67 shows
how meritocratic hierarchy perpetuates itself, and how well-educated elites have bent the
direction of innovation and technology to make their high-skilled labor all the more re-
munerative. But Markovits thinks I underestimate the appeal of a market meritocracy as a
response to the problem of value pluralism. Like Levinson and Moreau, he worries that my
politics of the common good would challenge market deﬁnitions of merit at the price of
bringing intractable disagreements about values into public discourse. A market meritoc-
racy, despite its ﬂaws, avoids this problem by establishing “a shared frame of value that
ﬁxes what things are worth.”68

Markovits observes that I reject “the idea that prices reﬂect value or measure any

meaningful sense of worth.”69 And he aptly identiﬁes the heart of my argument:

Market meritocracy fails to rationalize [I would say “fails to justify”] hierarchy not
just for the familiar reason that people don’t deserve their merit but also for the less
familiar, but more sweeping, reason that the market’s conception of merit is itself
ungrounded—that the price of things tells us nothing about what they are really
worth.70

Markovits proceeds to challenge this position, sort of: “Although Sandel is not wrong
to think that market prices fail to measure moral worth, his target is considerably more
ideologically compelling, and also more resilient, than he credits.”71 In explaining the ideo-
logical appeal of markets, Markovits reveals the deep aﬃnity between market thinking and
liberalism:

Market prices command allegiance because they address a profound and troubling
problem. People value diﬀerent things for diﬀerent reasons, and the depth of their

69
70
71

DANIEL MARKOVITS, THE MERITOCRACY TRAP: HOW AMERICA’S FOUNDATIONAL MYTH FEEDS INEQUALITY, DISMANTLES THE
MIDDLE CLASS, AND DEVOURS THE ELITE (2019).
Daniel Markovits, The Common Good or the Good of All? Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, 1 AM.
J.L. & EQUAL. 141 (2021).
Id.
Id.
Id. à 142.

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disagreements about ultimate value—what Rawls has called the fact of reasonable
pluralism—means that they cannot turn to deliberation to resolve this value conﬂict
by weighing the reasons behind it. Markets owe their ideological power to the fact that
they sidestep this diﬃculty, establishing prices as a shared frame of value by aggregative
rather than discursive mechanisms that operate not through judgment so much as will.
Sandel’s critique of market value neglects this fundamental contribution. It is one thing
to unmask the inadequacies of market valuations, but quite another to elaborate a
credible alternative that is a moral match for the pluralism that gives market measures
of value their enduring charisma.72

This is a powerful account of the deep appeal of markets; beyond their ability to deliver
the goods, markets seem to spare us the need to engage in controversial debates about how
to value goods and social roles. Like liberal principles of justice, markets let us to agree to
disagree.

Before addressing this argument, a small word in my own defense: Although Markovits
is right that I don’t address this alluring aspect of markets in The Tyranny of Merit, I do so
in my previous book, What Money Can’t Buy:73

Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they
satisfy. They don’t ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier,
. . . They don’t discriminate between admirable preferences and base
than others.
ones. Each party to a deal decides for himself or herself what value to place on the
things being exchanged. This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart
of market reasoning and explains much of its appeal.74

So Markovits and I agree that markets promise to enable us to contend with value
pluralism without bringing our moral diﬀerences into public discourse. But can markets
deliver on this promise? And would a public life that gave up on deliberation about con-
tested values be desirable? My answer to both questions is “no.” Markovits’s answer seems
to be a hesitant “yes.”

“[W]here intractable pluralism renders discursive agreement impossible,” he writes,
“price commensuration is the best—the most public—account of the good on oﬀer.”75
He elaborates this view with an ode to the price system, ideally conceived. Price commen-
suration, by which he means aggregating and coordinating preferences without assessing
or discussing them,

Id.

72
73 MICHAEL J. SANDEL, WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY: THE MORAL LIMITS OF MARKETS (2013).
74
75 Markovits, supra note 68, à 142.

Id. à 14.

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implements an important conception of the formal equality of persons, really a
conception of equality of status. Prices reﬂect an egalitarian balance among all
persons’ values.
. . . Money becomes a universal measure of value: each person
values money for what it can buy them at prevailing prices, and prices are set from
everyone’s perspective.
. . . Price commensuration thus constitutes a freestanding
value frame.76

Markovits calls this seemingly nonjudgmental feature of markets “price commensura-
tion’s moral achievement.”77 The achievement, as he sees it, is “that it can establish a for-
mally egalitarian resolution to otherwise intractable value disagreement—a shared public
perspective on commercial exchange.”78

This highly moralized notion of markets goes well beyond their service to utility and
eﬃciency. Markovits connects the “moral achievement” of markets to “the familiar ideal of
freedom of contract. That ideal aﬃrms the broad scope of markets as a matter of principle,
often grounded in anti-paternalist ideas about individual sovereignty.”79 In short, abiding
by the valuations that competitive markets generate is an expression of freedom, a way of
respecting everyone’s right to live according to their own values.

But what about the fact that markets often seem to get it wrong, as when they tell us
that what hedge fund managers do is hundreds of times more valuable that what nurses
and teachers do? Or when they tell us that a high-frequency trader, or a billionaire casino
mogul, contributes far greater value to society than a physician? Or that those who raise
and care for their children (outside of paid employment) contribute little if any value at
tous? Or else that the value of their contribution corresponds to the paltry pay of a childcare
worker? And what about the fact that, among full-time workers, for every dollar earned by
white men, Hispanic women earn only 54 cents and Black women only 62 cents?80 Fait
this mean that their value to society is less?

Markovits would say no; he readily acknowledges that actual markets misjudge merit.
But he accounts for these misjudgments as distortions of the valuations that a “perfectly
competitive pure exchange economy”81 market would reveal. He enumerates the distortions:

Actual markets, bien sûr, depart from the ideal and price things in ways that reﬂect
investment and production and also, critically, politics and power. Regulations ﬁx

76
77
78
79
80

Id. à 143.
Id.
Id.
Id. à 144.
Jocelyn Frye, On the Frontlines at Work and at Home, CTR. FOR AM. PROGRESS, https://www.americanprogress.org
/issues/women/reports/2020/04/23/483846/frontlines-work-home/.

81 Markovits, supra note 68, à 144.

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HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II

what qualities and quantities of goods may be traded, Par exemple; unions and
capitalists insert themselves in exchange relations to exercise pricing power; and cen-
tral banks ﬁx the price of money and hence of all else, y compris, critically, the wage.82

But this litany does not describe distortions of an economy; it describes what an econ-
omy is. Markets, especially markets that deﬁne the value of work, are inescapably political,
which is to say they are also inescapably discursive. The valuations they produce are, et
should be, open to political argument and contestation.

The reason for this is not only that monopolies, règlements, and central banks distort
prices; it is also that the raw material on which the price system does its work consists of
preferences and desires that are themselves susceptible of critical evaluation. Some people
make a fortune catering to the demand for casinos, or producing mind-numbing reality
television shows, or persuading people to consume copious amounts of sugary sodas.
Others make a modest living caring for the elderly. The market misjudges the social value
of these contributions because it takes no account of the qualitative worth of the wants and
desires that prices “commensurate.”

Consider too the insight of Rich and Noureldin: the way we value various jobs often
depends less on the services they provide than on the race and gender of those who
historically have performed them. Janitors made more than maids because janitors were
men and maids were women. The distinction between custodians and janitors often
signaled diﬀerences in race that accounted for diﬀerences in pay and respect. Care work,
a growing part of the service economy, is underpaid because it has historically been con-
sidered women’s work.

Challenging the market’s deﬁnition of value requires what Rich and Noureldin call a
“discursive shift.”83 Possibilities that seem beyond the pale in one discursive frame may be
conceivable in another. The idea that markets are not the measure of our merit is one such
possibility. Rich and Noureldin cite the Black queer theorist Audre Lorde, who “tells us
that the master’s tools . . . will never destroy the master’s house, but only lead to more
oppression. Sandel, it appears, agrees.”84 I do.

Markovits writes that, for all its defects, “the ideological power of market valuation
endures . . . and continues to cast a wide spell.”85 He is right, but it is time to break
the spell.

Although he concedes that market valuations are mistaken, Markovits worries that our
disagreements about values are too intractable to debate in public; market-deﬁned merit,

Id.
Rich & Noureldin, supra note 22, à 61.
Id. à 59.

82
83
84
85 Markovits, supra note 68, à 144.

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AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND EQUALITY |

ISSUE 1 | 2021

however ﬂawed, is the only game in town. But this gives up on deliberation too quickly.
The fact that people disagree about moral questions does not mean that persuasion is im-
possible. Sometimes, an argument—or an experience like a pandemic—can change our
minds. We cannot know until we try.

In any case, nothing is more intractable than the partisan rancor and polarization we
now face. The market meritocracy has created a society of winners and losers, poisoned
our politics, and set us apart. Perhaps it is worth seeking an alternative, even if this means
trying to reason together about contested conceptions of merit, valeur, and the common
good.

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