Who Has Earned a Good Life?

Is success really earned? In this episode of American Socrates, we unpack the seductive myth of meritocracy. With the help of philosopher Iris Marion Young, we explore why "merit" is often unknowable, socially biased, and used to justify inequality. Along the way, we contrast views from John Rawls and Michael Sandel, explain how meritocracy harms working people, and offer a radical alternative: a society based on dignity, not ranking. If you've ever wondered whether hard work really pays—or why failure feels like shame—this episode will change how you see fairness and justice in everyday life.

Keywords: meritocracy, Iris Marion Young, justice and fairness, Rawls, Sandel, inequality, political philosophy, working-class ethics, American Socrates podcast

Transcript

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Let's start in a place we all agree should be a strict meritocracy. The classroom a teacher hands back a stack of math tests. One kid gets an A plus, another gets a C minus grades. Feels fair? Obvious. Even the A student must have studied harder.

They must have learned more. They applied what they learned to the math problems with greater accuracy than the C student. Maybe didn't try hard enough. That seems straightforward. That's how most of us believe merit works. You work hard, you follow the rules. You develop your talents, and you get to succeed. You get the good grade. The kids who don't shouldn't. It's what we're taught from the beginning.

School. Sports. Work. Happiness in life. We believe all should be handed out based on who earned it. Meritocracy isn't just a buzzword. Then. It's a promise that we've heard our whole lives. Even if you haven't heard that particular word before.

But let's look a little closer at those two kids. One of them has their own quiet room to study and parents who can help them with their homework. They have dinner waiting for them on the table. They get a full night's sleep every night. The other one shares a bedroom with three siblings. Their parents work part-time jobs in the afternoon, so they come home to chaos and a lot of insecurity. The lights got shut off last week, and now can we still say that the A plus that the one kid received was measuring merit versus the C, the other one received?

Or does it also reflect something of their opportunities, their privileges, their ability to work, not their ability to know, but whether they're socially allowed to have a space to learn at all? This isn't about excuses. It's about what we're actually measuring. When we hand out these rewards and say that they've been earned or deserved. If merit is real, we should be able to define it. We should be able to measure it. We can agree on its terms, and if we can't, well, then we face a serious problem. That's what political philosopher Iris Marion Young argued: meritocracy is not just unfair in practice, but unknowable in principle.

You can't separate someone's talent or effort from the context in which they live. And when we try, we end up just reinforcing the biases that we already have. So today we're going to gently but firmly poke a hole in one of our most cherished myths. Not to take anything away from your hard work, but to ask, what are we really rewarding when we supposedly reward merit?

Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert.

Most people don't walk around saying, I believe in meritocracy. But they do believe in fairness. And for many of us, meritocracy just feels like common sense. It's the story we grew up with, the one where we're told by teachers and parents and coaches and bosses. It goes something like this. If you work hard, if you play by the rules, if you develop that talent. Improve your skills. Work. Develop a strong work ethic. If you make good choices in return, you get to succeed. You get good grades. You get good jobs. You're the one who gets the raise. You're the one who gets the promotion. You get to live in the nice house. You get to own the boat. You get to take trips to the beach every weekend.

Because in a fair system, rewards go to those who've earned them, who merited them. The flip side, of course, being that those who don't get those things are thought to deserve their poverty, that they deserve their hardships. If you are poor, it is because you didn't do the hard work. It is because you were lazy. We hear that story early and we hear that story often. We carry it deep inside of us. It's the quiet promise behind every school test and every performance review.

It's the logic that keeps people grinding, even when they're exhausted, because they believe that effort is going to be noticed, that someone is out there watching and tallying up the points that eventually the cream will rise to the top and they're the cream. Sometimes it feels true. You work hard in a project. You get recognized.

Maybe you outcompete others in an interview and you land the job. You push yourself to learn a trade, to build a business, to finish a degree, and it all pays off. When that happens, it feels like proof that, yeah, the system is built on merit and that merit works. But what happens when it doesn't? Because it doesn't a lot.

What happens when someone else gets the promotion you were hoping for? When someone that you didn't think worked as hard as you, or doesn't have your same level of experience? What happens when you stay late every night? You helped out the team. You took initiative and you still got passed over for somebody else. And worse, what happens when the person who gets the job doesn't look like you? That's when people start whispering or shouting about reverse discrimination. That's when we say things like it should be about merit, not race or gender.

It's a powerful emotional response and it feels like something's been taking away from you. Like the rules were changed halfway through the game and somebody else then gets to cheat. Then maybe you felt that sting yourself, wondering why someone else was chosen when you believed you were the most qualified candidate. But that feeling, as real as it is, rests on a huge assumption that we all agree on what counts as merit. And we don't. We absolutely do not.

You might think merit means showing up early, keeping your head down, hitting your targets, basically doing whatever is asked of you. Someone else might value creative thinking or emotional intelligence or initiative. A hiring manager might be prioritizing collaboration or resilience or life experience that reflects a different customer base. Maybe they're trying to build a team with a wider range of perspectives, because that too is valuable to a business. That too can be strategic. There's no one right answer here. And so your loyalty to the company might not merit you the promotion, because it's not what they're looking for at that moment.

So the uncomfortable truth is that merit isn't objective. It's always defined by someone and often by someone in power. Meaning who gets to say what counts? A teacher, perhaps, in the classroom. Your boss at work. A judge in the courtroom. And naturally, that's where things start to get a little fuzzy. And that fuzziness often hides behind the word fair. This is why meritocracy feels natural, but acts politically. It feels fair, but it often just reflects existing biases and a diverse society.
The idea that there's one universal standard for talent for worth and ability. That idea starts to break down. I'm not saying effort doesn't matter. It really does. But we're asking, what are we really rewarding when we say someone deserves success? And who gets to decide what deserve really means?

That's the door that Iris Marion Young is going to open for us. And once we step through it, the whole architecture of meritocracy starts to look really different. So let's say we accept that different people define merit differently. Some see it in measures and metrics like test scores, rubrics, sales targets, and degrees. Others are going to see it in things like soft skills, a person's ability to communicate, their leadership, their creativity, and whether they make people feel comfortable or not.

There's a whole industry of would-be gurus out there selling you ideas on how to get ahead in someone's particular version of merit, but that will only work for some people, because other people's values are going to be different for different things. We still want to believe that there's something solid underneath all of that. Some universal scale, some objective measure, something that we can simply point to and say that person earned it and that person didn't. But Young is going to tell us that the scale doesn't exist. That goal is impossible. She isn't saying the system is unfair in practice. She's saying it's unknowable in principle. And that's a much deeper claim.

According to Young, merit is epistemologically flawed, meaning that it's not something we can know in any reliable or objective way. It's entirely subjective and fluid and changes moment by moment when any of us goes to evaluate someone else's merit. We never actually measure a person's isolated effort or their talents. We're always measuring effort as it appears in a specific social context to us.
In that context, what we value, what we expect, what we happen to notice, is shaped by the particulars of our culture, including our biases, our class privilege, our gender norms, the power that we happen to hold in our society.

Think of a job interview. Two candidates walk in. One is confident. They're well-spoken. They make direct eye contact. The other one is quieter, a little awkward, but deeply thoughtful. One is well-dressed in a pinstripe power suit, the other one disheveled in a wrinkled ensemble. Which one seems more qualified to you? Which one feels like a better fit for your company? It's going to depend right on that company's particular culture. On the hiring manager's unconscious preferences. On assumptions baked into what professionalism is supposed to look like. If you believe that all business people should be wearing expensive suits and be dressed impeccably, then you're going to hire the first candidate. If you believe that sometimes the people who are more eclectic, who dress differently, who avoid the cliches of a power suit, then you're going to hire the second candidate. Now let's layer that in with more kinds of complexities like race, their accent, their gender presentation, their physical ability, even their age. And suddenly the idea of evaluating who's better or more deserving starts to look a lot less clean.

Young is going to argue that when we think we're rewarding merit, we're often just rewarding our familiarity. We can't really rely on merit because we can't actually evaluate that. So we rely on social comportment. Does this person look like the kind of person I imagined for this role or not? If not, then they don't belong here. If so, then they do. We mistake comfort then with competence or polish with intelligence. Likability with value. But we still think we're judging them on their merits.

Meaning most of us don't even realize we've switched over. We think we're being objective when we're really being biased. Specifically, Young is going to ask, how do we determine merit? And she's going to say that we do it based on three conditions.

The first one, she says our qualifications must be defined in terms of technical skills and competence, independently of and neutral with respect to values and culture. By technical competence, she means competence at producing specified results. So what she's looking for here is whether or not we can prove that what makes you more qualified to someone else is actually related to the knowledge and skills, and not to other qualities like the amount of wealth you were born into or your connection to them personally.

The second condition, she says, is to justify differential job privilege. The purely technical skills and competencies have to be job-related, and that they operate as good predictors for excellent performance in whatever position we are considering. Here are the skills and knowledge that you possess actually relevant and good predictors of excellence in this job. In other words, we're not looking for someone who's necessarily technically competent in this job. We're looking for someone who maybe could find new markets. You know, that could mean I'm hiring a woman as opposed to a man, because I've got ten men and they're all excellent, but I don't have any women, and I need some in order to appeal to my female customers. So there are different things that they could be looking for, different skills and knowledge in this. And we need to know that whether what they're looking for is a good predictor or not.

The third condition, she says, that has to be met is that for merit criteria to be applied justly, performance and competence must be judged individually. It makes very little sense to judge someone's contribution to the group effort. If you can't pull out exactly what their individual contribution was. A good example of this might be janitors in an automotive plant, are contributing something to the manufacture and sales of automobiles. What they're contributing is a little hard to tease out. They clean up the floor after the guys who are building the car do the work, but that obviously contributes something. Otherwise, they're just a waste of money and they would never have been hired. So, how much should they get paid as a percentage of the manufacturing sale or the sale of the car? is really hard to determine.

Young doubts these three conditions can be met simultaneously. She outlines four problems with them. One is that most jobs are too complex and multifaceted to allow for the precise identification of their tasks, and thus measurements of levels of performance. You know, if you're a fry cook at McDonald's, it might seem like it's so simple. But the reality is, is there's a lot that needs to be taken into consideration that isn't actually that easy to measure, like when to drop so many burgers, how to keep an eye on sales trends, and many other things like that that a good worker would need to know and be able to do.

The second one is, in complex organizations, it's often not possible to identify the contribution that any individual makes precisely because the workers cooperate in producing an outcome. We spoke about this just a second ago, where I said that the janitor is contributing something to the overall production of cars, but it's really hard to tell exactly what it is they are contributing and how much value that should entail.

The third reason, she says, is that many jobs require wide discretion in what the worker does and how best to do it. Workers routinely contribute little to the actual making of things, but they must be vigilant and, say, tending the machines. So perhaps someone who works at the same automotive plant's entire job is just working maintenance on those machines. Again, they're paid somehow out of the sales of the automobiles, but they don't actually build any of the automobiles. They just make sure that the machines that do build them are all running at capacity. So how much is the value of that labor worth compared to other labor that builds things?

The fourth thing she says about merit. Why we can't understand merit is that the division of labor in most large organizations means that those who evaluate workers' performances often are not familiar with the actual work process itself. This is something known as a task-discontinuous hierarchy. Basically, your supervisor has never done your job and doesn't actually know what it is that you need to be able to do in order to do it. And yet, it is their job to evaluate how well you're doing that job. That's a major problem. So in the end, we can't judge people on merit. 

So we default to measuring them on their social comportment according to Young. That is, we're looking at their general attitude. We're looking at how well they comply with the rules. We're looking at how they appear to us, their self-presentation. We're looking at how cooperative or friendly they are. We look at things like that. And this is going to lead us to judging them based on sexism, on classism, on racism and many other things. And so we don't get a clean picture of what a person's merits, and we end up judging them primarily on these other aspects. So if you're with me so far, you probably accept the idea that merit isn't as clean or as objective as we like to think.

You understand that effort and ability are shaped by things beyond our control?Still, you're uncomfortable just tossing the whole idea aside, aren't you? And you're not alone. That's exactly the impulse that led John Rawls, one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century, to build a theory of justice that could make some room for fairness without pretending that we all start from the same place. In his famous book, A Theory of Justice, Rawls proposes a thought experiment.

Imagine you had to design the rules of society, but you didn't know where you would end up in that society. Rich or poor, smart or not, healthy or disabled, you have no idea. So from behind this veil of ignorance, what kind of system do you think you would create? What do you think would be fair? Rawls argues that if we're designing society fairly from that neutral perspective, we'd allow at least some inequality, but only if it was to the benefit of the least well-off. We'd let people earn more for working hard or, say, inventing things. Sure, but we'd also guarantee that everyone had access to the basics their education, their health care, their housing, their dignity. In this way, Rawls keeps a role for merit, but he builds in guardrails around it. He's tried to say, yeah, some people will still end up with more than others, but that inequality has to be justified by how it helps everyone, especially those people at the bottom.

Michael Sandel, a political philosopher who studied Rawls, asks a different kind of question. Even if we could perfectly measure merit. Is that the right foundation for a just society? He tells a story that might sound familiar. A high school senior applies to a top university. He's got perfect grades. He's got a well-stacked resume. He's got glowing recommendation letters, but he doesn't get in. Someone else gets in. Maybe someone from an underrepresented minority background. And the rejected student thinks, okay, but I deserved it more. And that's the problem, Sandel says. Not just that people feel entitled, but that our whole society encourages them to believe that they are, in fact, entitled, that their success was somehow a result of their virtues, their hard work ethic, the fact that they did get straight A's. That means that they deserve this place. The cruelty of it is that when things go well, people do believe that they have earned it. That it was purely a result of their efforts. They didn't have any privileges at all. And when things fall apart, when they lose their job or they can't afford school or they struggle with addiction, they blame other people. This was not my fault I was robbed. My boss screwed me over. Something like that. We do this whether or not it's true. And so success is a terrible indicator, then, of true merit or of justice.

Sandel calls this the tyranny of merit. It turns every success into self-congratulation. And even if we don't blame others, every failure into shame. So instead of trying to perfect the system of rewards, Sandel wants us to rethink what we reward in the first place. He calls for a shift away from technocratic sorting, like tests and metrics and rankings towards a politics of humility and solidarity, a society where we don't just ask who's the best, but how are we going to treat one another regardless of what our status is?

Where Rawls wants to fix the game. Then Sandel wants us to step back and ask, why are we playing this game at all? And if we listen closely to both of them, they are circling around the same truth that Iris Marion Young has already shown that when you start to unpack merit, you realize it was never neutral to begin with.

It was never fair. So justice means something bigger than just ranking people more fairly. Let's say you're working a job. Maybe you've been there for years. You've shown up early. You've stayed late. You help others when they fall behind. You even pick up extra shifts. You do the grunt work. You've learned the ins and outs of this business. Then one day, it's someone else who gets promoted. Maybe they're younger. Maybe they have a degree. Maybe they just seem to click with the manager in a way that you never really did. You don't want to complain. But inside you feel burned. I earned that promotion, and that guy didn't. And maybe you're right. Maybe the system did screw you over. The hard pill to swallow here. Is that even when you win. You still don't really know why. You don't know if you got the promotion, whether it really was your work or your personality, or your timing, or your background, or your connection to the boss's son, or whatever.

Merit is impossible to isolate from all the invisible forces around us, from our race, from our gender, from our class, from our culture. Those don't just affect outcomes. They affect how people perceive you. They shape what bosses and teachers and society think success even looks like.

Remember earlier when I said that if you imagine what someone who fits in this role looks like, and then you try to hire someone who looks like that, if you can't see a black person doing that job, then you won't hire any black people for that role. Not because there's no qualified black people, but because in your mind, black people shouldn't be doing this kind of work. When you're struggling, this system of meritocracy ends up blaming you. It says that you're a failure and that your struggle is well deserved. But that's not any more true than the opposite.

Young's insight then is this that when we believe too much in merit, we turn society into a hierarchy of human worth. We sort people into categories like smart and dumb, hardworking and lazy, deserving and undeserving. And we forget that behind every resume, every mistake, every missed opportunity is a human being whose path was shaped by far more than they themselves even know.

This is especially brutal for working-class people, who are often told to just work harder or spend less or, you know, pull yourself up by the bootstraps. But the playing field is tilted. Some people start on third base and act like they hit a triple. Others never even get a chance to go to bat. And when those at the bottom are told, well, you didn't earn it. The myth of merit doesn't deny them opportunities. It just denies them their dignity.

Young doesn't give us a tidy solution to this either. She's not trying to replace one sorting system with another. What she says is more radical. She says that we need to start by meeting people's needs. We need to meet their need for housing, for health care, for education, food freedom, because they're simply human. We do not know whether they are going to merit it or not. But we have to take that chance on everybody.

In other words, we should focus on meeting everyone's basic needs first, since we often don't really know who's going to deserve what. And that's a hard shift for a lot of us. Most of we've been trained in our culture to let people die unless they earn the right to live. And we're being asked here to turn that around and say, no, no, no, no, no one has to earn the right to live. Everyone has the right to live. Some people get to be more successful than others. But everyone gets the right to live. 

So where does all of this leave us? We've taken apart the idea of meritocracy. Piece by piece. We've seen how it flatters the powerful. It blames the poor and hides all the structure that shapes our lives before we even get a chance to try. But to be honest, it's still a hard myth to let go of. The dream of meritocracy is seductive. It promises a fair society that promises control over your own life. You can rise or fall by your own hand, by your own merit.

It says, if I do everything right, I'll be okay. And we want to believe that. We want to think life is fair in that way, that the world is watching somehow, and that someone is always keeping score and that we can win, or at least not starve if we do everything right. But it's just not true. The upshot here is that maybe it doesn't have to be.

If the purpose of society isn't to sort the worthy from the unworthy. If it's not to decide who's earned food or housing or health care, if justice isn't about ranking people at all, then we can stop trying to justify inequality and start meeting people's needs. In a real democracy, that's where you have to start. Not with rewarding people, but with respecting them. Not with merit, but with dignity. If we build up from there, we can still reward hard work. We can still honor excellence, but we won't use those things to decide who gets to live a decent life and who doesn't. 

A just society doesn't ask who deserves care. It just gives it to everybody. So here's your challenge as you head back into your world this week. When you hear someone talk about earning their place, or when you feel the pull to judge someone for not trying hard enough. Pause and ask the question, What don't I see about their story? What would change if I started from a view of compassion rather than one of comparison? Because maybe the question isn't who deserves what? Maybe the question we should be asking is what kind of society do we deserve to live in together?

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