 Well, welcome to this session of the World Economic Forum 2021 Davos meeting. I'm Nairie Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government here at Oxford University. And today I'm in conversation with Michael Sandell, Harvard Professor of Political Philosophy, rock star teacher to crowds of tens of thousands of people who ever thought political philosophy could be so popular. His latest argument is about meritocracy. In his new book, The Tyranny of Merit, he provokes us to think about whether merit and deservingness justify our positions and our lifestyles. And that's an interesting topic for this discussion at Davos, a gathering of some of the world's most credentialed, most deserving and meritorious people. But let's stop and think for a moment. In 1950, the average CEO earned 20 times the typical worker of his or her firm. When the very first meeting at Davos took place, it was nearly double that. Today it's more than 200 times the salary of the average rank and file worker. Think about the fact that in the corridors of Davos when we meet in person, so many people are discussing comparing notes on their brilliant children who were at university at Harvard, at Stanford and at Yale. Michael Sandell points out that America's Ivy League universities take students, take more students from the top 1% of American earners than from the entire bottom half of the American population. Michael Sandell, speaking to this year's Davos participants, what is it that you most want them to take away from this conversation? Well, thank you, Nairi. It's great to, and an honor to be in conversation with you. I think the biggest takeaway, and it's provocative, I admit, is this. We gathered here at Davos are the beneficiaries of a meritocracy. But we are also living through a time when our politics is deeply polarized, when many of our fellow citizens are attracted to authoritarian populist figures who channel anger and resentment against meritocratic elites. And the argument of the book is that this anger, this resentment, these grievances are understandable. And they're understandable because in recent decades, the divide between winners and losers has been deepening not only because of the widening inequalities of income and wealth, but also because of changing attitudes towards success that have come with. Those of us who have landed on top have come to believe that our success is our own doing, the measure of our merit, and by implication that those who struggle, those left behind must have no one to blame but themselves. This is the dark side of meritocracy. Meritocracy is corrosive of the common good because, and we see this in our politics today, it generates hubris, meritocratic hubris among the winners, and demoralization, even humiliation among those left behind. And until we come to grips with this, until we find a way to address that sense of demoralization and disempowerment and humiliation, we're not going to put to rest the appeal and the source of support for the kinds of authoritarian populist politics that still are very powerfully present on the political horizon. Thank you, Michael. Today we're going to dive into those arguments, but just before we do, can we step back for a minute and tell us a little bit about you? Are you from one of these credentialed elite families with your pathway to Harvard professorship an easy one or is it that you've been thinking about this all your life? Well, I had all kinds of privileges and advantages growing up in an upper middle class background. I went to a public high school in West Los Angeles, California, but it was one of those public high schools like many around the country that are the beneficiaries of high property values and therefore high property taxes that can support good public education. And then I was fortunate enough to get a good education and to land, actually, Nairi and I were both Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. We both went to Bayley Old College, though Nairi, I emphasize to say, quite a few years after me. So we are, I suppose you could say products of the meritocracy and in my case, a beneficiary of the advantages that go to those who have the kind of background and upbringing that enables us to compete effectively for these kinds of privileges. And of course, part of the problem is that the meritocracy is far from perfect because affluent parents have figured out how to pass their privileges onto their kids. But it's not only that. It's also that even if we had a perfectly fair meritocracy, even if we had perfectly fair equality of opportunity, there would still be a problem, a dark side, to do with the attitudes towards success, to do with the tendency of the successful, to inhale too deeply of their success, to believe it's our own doing and to forget the luck and good fortune that helps us on our way. But even before we move to that argument, it's worth us pausing to think about how those opportunities have changed that in your and my lifetimes, we grew up in a world which was less unequal. And the very fact that the world was less unequal gave people more aspiration, let alone more livelihood to succeed. So can you take us back? Can we, you know, we think about the 1950s, the American dream, the G.I. Bill, the war on poverty and the idea of equality and equality of opportunity that many of the world's democracies saw. What happened to that? When did that die? I think the change happened most dramatically. Beginning in the 1980s, the equality of opportunity that you described was not only equality of opportunity, there was also a broad democratic equality of condition. I began the first 13 years of my life. I grew up in just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the American Midwest and the broad middle class of the 50s and 60s in the United States included public places, public institutions, common spaces, including public schools, but also public parks and public recreational facilities that brought people together across different class backgrounds. There were more class mixing institutions when I grew up than there are today. And beginning in the 1980s, when market thinking and market mechanisms were seen as the primary came to be seen as the primary vehicles for defining and achieving the public good, there was a kind of loss of the public spaces and common places that bring people together and across all walks of life. I think this is an important change in the lived experience of equality that goes beyond differences of income and wealth as such. One of the things you bring out in your book is it's not just a change in material inequality, it's values and the stigma. So with Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher came, not only the argument that to support the poor is to encourage them to keep being poor and therefore you should reduce welfare benefits, you should reduce opportunity in order to increase the incentive on them to succeed, but also the 80s was a time of introducing language which stigmatized the poor, welfare cheats, you know, the lazy and the indigent poor. And isn't that part of what your argument brings out? Yes, the idea of individual responsibility, the idea that we are responsible for our state in life. This is a healthy impulse and teaching up to a point because we want people to strive and to work and to cultivate their talents, but carry to access. This admirable ideal that we are responsible for our state has two damaging effects. One of them is the tendency to assume that those who struggle, those who've been left behind must be responsible for the fact that they have stagnant wages over the past four decades, for example. But is that their fault they're doing or is that largely to do with the changing shape of the economy for which we are collectively responsible? The other damaging effect of carrying the idea of individual responsibility for our state to an extreme is that those who flourish, those who land on top come to believe that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, and that they therefore deserve, morally deserve all the benefits that a market society bestows on the successful. And this is what gives rise to the toxic attitudes toward winning and losing that have polarized our politics, driven us apart and made a large spot of the population believe that elites are looking down on them believing that their failure is their fault. And it's from this toxic group of resentment and exclusion that arise the authoritarian populist figures like Trump who promise to re-revenge on those elites, those meritocratic and credentialed elites who've been looking down. This is a potent source of the anger that I think we overlook at our peril. But Michael, is the problem that the well-paid CEOs have too much of a sense of their own deservingness and pay themselves too much? Or is the problem that they're too individualistic in their sense of success and that they should be paying more attention and their sense of worth should be much more based on how their own workers are faring? Which side of it is that? At Davos, we hear a lot of arguments about stakeholder capitalism and the need for CEOs to start thinking more broadly about society. But are you saying slightly more sharply that they should be actually questioning their own position as well? It's not just their own sense of responsibility. It's their own deservingness as well. Both. I think it's both. Stakeholder capitalism is a very good and important first step. Because it can broaden our sense of responsibility for all of those who are impacted by corporate decisions, not only shareholds. That's important. But the second part I'm suggesting is equally important. This has to do with values and attitudes toward our own success. Because unless we question the idea that we, the successful, are morally entitled to all the benefits that the society has bestowed on us, unless we question that attitude, then even stakeholder capitalism, even more generous welfare state measures and safety nets, will be seen as a kind of gesture by those who deserve what they have. But in order to sustain of what they have, they need to make various investigations. The values and attitudes need to be rethought. One of the attitudes that's missing from our collective public life is humility. The humility that comes from recognizing the role of luck in life. And that comes from recalling our indebtedness for our success. To parents, to teachers, to neighborhoods, to communities, to our country, to the times in which we live. So this is why I think it's not possible to address the polarization and the inequality that we're all talking about, including here at Davos. It's not really possible to address that successfully without also asking about values and attitudes, including the way we understand the sources of our own success. And whether it really is our own doing, or whether there's a lot of luck and a lot of indebtedness that go into enabling some of us to flourish and others to struggle. In your book, you talk about, because a lot of discussion this week at Davos has been about this polarization of society. And you talk about an American society that almost only comes together in shopping malls to consume together, to spend together. And you say that that's not the public good. I think you quote Robert Kennedy. What for you is the public good? Well, I mean, and it's a fair challenge if not the meritocratic ethic. If not, I call it the rhetoric of rising. The great many politicians and political parties have dealt with the deepening inequality by saying, don't worry about stagnant wages. If you go to university, if you get a degree, then you can rise as an individual. So part of the problem is we've offered as a response to the inequality. Individual upward mobility through higher education, what you earn will depend on what you learn. This is a political slogan, though, almost a mantra that has become familiar. But what this misses is the importance of recognizing the dignity of work, the dignity of work performed by people who may not have a university degree. And it's worth remembering that even in well educated societies like ours, most people do not have a four year university degree. In the United States, nearly two thirds don't. And it's similar figure is true in Britain and in most European countries. So it's falling to create an economy that sets the condition of dignified work in a decent life, a university degree that most people don't have. Now you asked about Robert Kennedy, and this is one of my favorite expressions of the dignity of work as a civic aspiration. Fellowship, community, shared patriotism. Robert Kennedy said, these essential values do not come just from buying and consuming 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. What's galling about the inequality of our time when compounded by these the meritocratic hubris that goes along with these attitudes towards success. What's galling is not only the economic inequality. It's the sense that the work that many people do isn't honored, isn't respected, isn't recognized as a valuable contribution to the common good. I think this is the deepest source of the anger in recent decades. We've failed to accord adequate respect to the dignity of work. We've assumed that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good, but this is a mistake. So I'm suggesting we shift in our emphasis, in our public discourse, from arming people for meritocratic competition toward renewing and affirming the dignity of work, including the work of those who may not have luscious credentials. And to be clear, Michael, for the adult CEOs, does that mean just paying people more? I mean, COVID's highlighted to us that the nursing assistants and hospital cleaners that keep us safe or our elderly relatives safe when they go to hospital with COVID, the bus drivers that get those nursing assistants to those hospitals to do that work, these are essential workers, but they're still very low paid and on very precarious contracts. So what is your message about the dignity of work mean for the CEOs who are part of this community? Well, the pandemic is very revealing in exactly the way you suggest, Mary. Those of us with the luxury of working from home can't help but recognize how deeply we depend on workers we often overlook, not only those heroic workers in hospitals caring for COVID patients, but just as you say, bus drivers, truckers, delivery workers, warehouse workers, home health care providers, daycare workers. And these are not the best paid or most honored workers in our society. And yet now we are calling them essential workers. So this could be the opening for a broader public debate about how to bring their pay and recognition into better alignment with the importance of the work they do. So this is a challenge for companies. It's also a challenge for politics and for public discourse to begin a debate. And there will be different responses across the ideological spectrum, but at least to begin a debate about how to reconfigure our economy, to reward in economic terms, but also to honor and accord dignity and recognition to forms of contribution to the common good that in our current system go under recognized and underappreciated. Now you're a professor at Harvard. Usually at Davos, Harvard hosts a reception as does Yale, as does Stanford, as does Oxford. These are the biggest receptions at Davos. It's a reminder that an education in one of these top universities gets you a long way in life. And it's shocking that you tell us that the Ivy League universities in the United States take more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 50% of America. So do you think your own university should do about that? What is it that Harvard should be doing about that? My worry is that we have converted, here's what I think broadly we need to do. We need to rethink the role of universities in higher education as the arbiters of opportunity in a meritocratic society. It's they, we've assigned the task of conferring the credentials and defining the merit that a meritocratic society will honor. Now, encouraging more students to go to university, that's a good thing, but casting universities as sorting machines for a meritocratic society is a damaging thing, not only for those who can't compete and who are left out and who don't get a degree and are consigned to jobs that are less honored and well paid. That's the unfairness we've been discussing and the resentment that breeds. But it's also damaging, I think, to the universities themselves. That we become sorting machines because the obsession with credentials and with networking crowds out the intrinsic goods that universities and higher education should cultivate in students. The love of learning, the ability to step back and explore, to figure out what one cares about and why, what passions are worth pursuing. I worry that our students have been put through through their adolescent years. Such a stress-strewn meritocratic gauntlet for high achievement, that those who survive, those who prevail, those who win admission are often injured in the process. We see this in very alarming levels of mental health challenges, anxiety, depression and the like, much of which comes from this intense pressure to succeed. But even short of that, students very often find it hard to break the habit of assembling credentials and networking and viewing education instrumentally. And I think that's beginning to crowd out the intrinsic educational mission of our universities. So the tyranny of merit, which I write, points in two directions. It oppresses those who are left out. But it also, in a way, damages and oppresses the universities and the students who survive, who seem to flourish, but who have so little space to explore, to reflect and to figure out what's worth caring about during their college years and why. But Michael, in the end, what does that mean for Harvard? Should Harvard just accept a random allocation of Americans? I mean, if you're not going to be a sorting machine, how on earth are you going to select who you're going to educate? Right. I would not say to take a random assortment. But I do have a provocative proposal in the book that Ivy League universities, which have vastly more applicants and well-qualified applicants than they can admit. More than 50,000 young people applied to Harvard this year. A great many of them could do the work, could do it well, could flourish, could help educate their peers in the process. I suggest that the admissions committee call out those who are not well qualified to perform at a high level. And that among the rest, the remaining 15 or 20 or 25,000, we do admission by lottery. I suspect the quality of discussion in my classroom would be equally lively and engaged and more important. I think that it might send a message to the young people who are admitted and to those who are not admitted, that there's a lot of luck involved in who gets in where, in who lands where. It would not be introducing luck, my proposal, for a lottery of the qualified. It would be highlighting the element of luck that is already present, but hidden through the sometimes quite harsh meritocracy that governs admission to a higher education. And for that matter, to the higher reaches of our social and economic life. What do you think about that, Nairi? Is that scandalous? Thank you, Professor Michael Sandel, a wake-up call, I think, for everyone at Davos this year to stop and think about not just to what degree they have benefited from luck and opportunity, but what that means about their duties towards others as well as the position that they hold at present. Thank you, Michael Sandel. Thank you all for joining us for this session.