Hi, Freddie. Hi. So there's a, like, you might think there's like a general principle. It's kind of a truism that if somebody offers me two things, then I want to pick like the better one of the two.
You know, better in whatever respect is relevant for my circumstances or the choice that I'm in. Like if you offer me two pieces of cake, like I'll pick like... the kind I like better. And then you might think there's like a special case of that where the things I'm picking between are people.
But that similarly the truism still applies like you should pick the better one like for whatever you know for a job or for admission to a school or as your roommate you know pick the one that will be a better roommate. And like one way of thinking that's just what meritocracy is like pick the better person isn't that just truistic that you should do that. Well, I mean, let's think of better in the most expansive sense possible, right?
If we think of every individual being part of a collective that makes up all of society is favoring the interests of the better in the terms that you're probably thinking of in the terms of intelligence or ability or whatever. Is that actually better for society as a whole? Do we actually know for a fact that favoring the interests of people who are better in some domains is actually better for society?
writ large, because from where I'm standing, a society that has an absolute obsession with picking people for being better is in a state of crisis in almost every way you can imagine. I mean, even though our attempt at meritocracy is pretty feeble, we have been attempting it, and attempting it has given us things like the Trump administration. It's given us things like unfettered increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
It's given us things like spiraling inequality across our country. It's given us things like the opioid crisis. So to me, if you just take a look at a society that is obsessed with better, with choosing better, it has produced a decidedly not ideal current situation. And I think that perhaps there's a more expansive definition of better that says not better in terms of necessarily choosing people based on what they're good at, but rather choosing, rather impacting the life of every individual that we can in a way that helps them to flourish, not just individually, but in a way that is socially responsible.
I think that there is a different kind of better to pursue than the way that we pursue it. So you might distinguish, you said, you know, favoring the interests of the more intelligent or whatever. I think there are sort of two, in a way, two facets to meritocracy. One of them is the idea of a reward for merit.
So if you are smarter or, you know, whatever, then you deserve this kind of reward. And another idea might just be more of a functional idea. Like, you know, if I have a job, I want it to go to the best person, not because I have any desire to favor that person or to support their interests.
In fact. if I were somehow to privately know that having that job would make them miserable, I wouldn't care. I'd still want the best person.
Because I think, you know, whatever it is, whatever project it is that I'm doing locally, like I'm hiring a plumber or something like that, the plumbing will be better if I have a better plumber. And so in that second idea of meritocracy, it's not so much thought of rewarding or favoring, but of fulfilling whatever function that we have. you know, as well as possible.
We always fulfill that function better if we pick a person who's better at fulfilling that function. I mean, the question is, you know, are we actually that good, number one, at sort of fulfilling the function, picking the person who best fulfills the function? I think that, I mean, a big part of my book and one of the reasons I wrote it is precisely because in my experience, what we are selecting for in the mechanisms that we actually have in place to select the the person who is better at the second kind of meritocracy you're talking about, that system has become obsessed with certain kinds of academic quantitative indicators. And it is not clear to me that those academic quantitative indicators have actually been proven to be particularly great when it comes to selecting people into competitive positions. So take a look at Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley, a lot of that is people have been selected first they get selected out of high school with their grades and their SATs quantitative indicators they go to Stanford because they are so good at those quantitative indicators they excel at Stanford and they they put together more quantitative indicators that indicate that they can code or whatever and they show up in Silicon Valley. For a long time that was sort of the American pinnacle of success, but there's been a massive backlash to Silicon Valley in the last decade because people have begun to see, so the perfect example being Facebook, that there are an immense number of social problems and social ills that never appeared to even be discussed or thought about by these people who had been selected. because they were so good at coding, so good at design, etc.
They just seemed not to consider the social costs of what they were doing. And so one of the problems is when you become tunnel visioned and you fixate so closely on a narrow set of indicators that you think define the person's ability within your field, you lose sight of broader and, in my opinion, just as important or more important aspects of human character. like social responsibility, like kindness and compassion, like creativity, etc. So in a way we might say like suppose you were choosing a plumber, but instead of like picking the person who's best at plumbing, you might pick like the person who has a certain credential where that doesn't actually correlate with being good at plumbing, right? I would see that as like a failed meritocracy because you were sort of epistemically hindered from picking the best person.
You failed to pick the best person. Because you were, you know, your choice was tracking some other quality. Like, oh, it would be like in the cake case.
If I picked the cake that looked the prettiest, right? But it wasn't actually that tasty. So I would think of that as like a failed meritocracy. It would be failing on epistemic grounds because people didn't know how to track the relevant quality.
Is that how you would see it? I mean, yeah. I mean, look, I'm not worried that society is going to evolve in such a way so that people who are good at plumbing are no longer. advancing in the plumbing world. In other words, I don't identify that as being a real social problem.
What I do identify as a social problem is the kid who goes to school who might become an excellent plumber and who might be able to go to trade school and to become credentialed in plumbing and to use his ability to access the good life, to secure material security for himself and his family. But who doesn't take that path because our system teaches that kid that to become a plumber is something shameful, right? Because our system is so obsessive about its focus on things like Ivy League schools and on climbing the academic ladder that that kid sort of turns down plumbing and similar occupations out of hat because they are so disrespected within our academic system. That's what worries me. What worries me is that our system has become so myopically focused on particular types of signals for adjudicating meritocracy that it ends up, we end up with an inefficiency because people don't want to participate in things that aren't considered prestigious.
And word of the point, again, like, you know, it is not clear to me necessarily. that someone who is good at being a plumber is necessarily someone who is more deserving of the good life than someone who does not have that status. Right. In other words, look, I have to overexpand from the question, but I look at three levels of critiques of meritocracy. The first level is just meritocracy is good if you can achieve it, but it's not being achieved right now.
Even many conservatives will will grant you that that's the case in our system. So. meritocracy would be good if we if we could just get it and we can the second is that meritocracy cannot be achieved because uh at least in the in the sense that that i mean it because uh different people have different levels of uh baseline ability and talent at different things in the world and so uh they don't choose their environment that shapes them uh academically etc so we can't have a meritocracy in the sense of everyone having an equal chance that ascending the ladder because we'll never achieve it. But the third level is simply to ask, when we're talking about reward, when we're talking about how society hands out lifestyles and hands out material security, it's never been clear to me exactly what the fundamental principle is that says that we should necessarily reward people who are good at things more than people who aren't good at things.
Okay, let's take a step back. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Night Owls. I'm Agnes Callard. This is our first Night Owls of the 2020-2021 academic year.
And we're online probably for this whole year. Let me first have my interlocutor. Freddie, can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Freddie DeBoer. I am a writer and an academic, and I live in Brooklyn. Tyler, can you come up and introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Tyler Zimmer.
I'm the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Philosophy Department, and I'm also a faculty member in the Philosophy Department. I will be managing the question and answer part of the event. And I'm, I'll be interviewing in the chat here and there.
Okay, thanks, Tyler. So the way this is gonna go is Freddie and I are going to talk for like another, you know, half hour 40 minutes. And then we want to hear from you. So put your questions in the chat, you can see to ask a question question box. And maybe if you're adding a question, scroll through first and check whether your questions already been asked.
And And if it has, you know, bump it up. And hopefully you guys will be willing to come. Tyler will like call on you in the Q&A and come up and, you know, you just pop up on screen for a minute and ask your question. It's more fun for everyone if you actually can, you know, come and we can see your face and you can ask the question and then you can leave.
So, you know, be brave and do that. Even though it's a little, it's a little, I understand it's a little scary. And I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank Tyler for moderating and William Weaver, who's out there in the audience, my Night Owls co-conspirator. And I want to tell you that we're going to have another Night Owls on October 28th, on Democracy Should the People Rule with Matt Landauer, the Wednesday before the election.
So please come back for that. Okay. Thank you.
So in your book, you have this like description of a mother who's talking about her two children and she like, you know, sort of proud of one of the other, she's the other one's not that smart. And you say you were sort of shocked by this when you first heard it. But when you thought about it, it's like, yeah, you know, that's just a fact. And doesn't mean that the mother loves that one any less. And I was reflecting on this.
I have three children. And I'm not comfortable saying that like one of them is smarter than the other two. And I was thinking about why, why am I uncomfortable with this? And I honestly don't think it's because that if I concluded that one of them was more intelligent, I would think that that one had more moral worth than the other two. That is, I agree with you that intelligence does not correlate with moral worth.
And I don't think that somehow deep down I think it does or something like that. I think that would make a difference to me. Let me, and so I'm actually puzzled. Like why do I have this resistance to ranking my children in intelligence?
Here's one thought that I had, and you can tell me what you think, or if you have other theories about this, or if you just think I had somehow tacitly the moral war thing. I think that on some level, I think that if one of them were more intelligent, maybe that would give him an entitlement to rule. That is, we have somewhere in our heads the thought that the more intelligent should rule. Not that they deserve more, not that they deserve happier lives.
Um, but that we, in some way that is, uh, an entitlement to rule. And I think it's inappropriate for me to think of any of my children as rightfully ruling over any of the others. And so that's why I, that was my hypothesis about it. But so I, I'm interested in your thoughts about that. Yeah, I think that that's right.
I think that, um, I mean, you know, the, this, this notion goes back to the philosopher kings, you know, uh, and, um, and it's, uh, a commonplace. Um, you know, I mean, look, I'm, uh, I, It will not surprise most people to hear that I hate the Trump administration and can't wait for them to get out. But that's kind of a low hanging fruit in a discussion like this.
So if you look at the Obama administration, the Obama administration was filled with the smartest people in the room. It was just famously his data and analytics teams, for example, was filled with people who came with the most sterling and impressive academic credentials that we have in the world to hand out. And yet the Obama administration also oversaw a drone war, which killed hundreds of civilians, including hundreds of children.
The fact that his administration was so smart and prevent that the Obama administration also did not pursue bankers and and others who were involved in illegal activity in the run up to the financial crisis caused an enormous. an enormous hardship in this country in which from which we're only just now beginning to recover really in some ways. So all the intelligence in his administration didn't compel them to do that.
Obama also didn't bail out individual homeowners who were underwater on their mortgages, even though the banks that sold those mortgages were all bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, but there was no bailout from normal people. So forget about the Trump administration and the the pack of clowns that have been there, even in the smartest administration we've ever had, there was a failure to address fundamental political problems. And Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton prior to being the president.
And he was one of the most irredeemable racists in the history of the position. So the idea that the smart should rule and your fear about that, I think is very... well placed. Well, I imagine that was what my fear was a fear of.
But is your thought, I mean, one thought one might have there, right, is just that like, well, it's a super hard, this was a super hard problem. People did the best they could. The Wilson case, the racism case is slightly different, right?
But, you know, would we have been better off with less intelligent people? in office, like in the Obama case. So you might still think like, yeah, we should, you know, we should have the most intelligent people that we can, even though even the most intelligent people are going to screw up a lot of the time because the problems are so difficult, so intractable, something like that. Then there's a separate question of we want people with good moral qualities. But is your thought, no, we should just, there is nothing desirable about intelligence in a ruler.
No, I mean, look, Again, I'm not afraid that we're going to achieve a world where, you know, intelligence, nobody cares about intelligence at all in choosing a ruler because it's so deeply ingrained. We're probably going to see it no matter what. But that being said, one of the things I should have made clearer in my book is that typically when I'm talking about intelligence or academic ability, and I tend to prefer to say academic ability because it's less fraught.
I'm generally in the book talking about the. the kinds of intelligence that are rewarded under neoliberal capitalism. In other words, the kinds of intelligence that enable you to climb the ladder from a college into a career.
There are many other different kinds of intelligence that people can have than just that kind of intelligence, including, I would say, moral intelligence, right? Which, again, I would... expect and hope that somebody with moral intelligence would say, no, we shouldn't incinerate children for the extremely dubious benefits of potentially limiting terrorism in the borderlands of Pakistan, right?
So part of my critique is not just that intelligence is not, it's not that intelligence is bad, but rather that our perception of intelligence has become so specific and so skewed towards a... particular reductive vision that I would associate with American academia and, you know, quantitative educational indicators. Good. So I was trying to define intelligence to myself as I was reading your book.
And I was thinking that one way to think about it might be cognitive utility, that is your utility to others in virtue of properties of your mind. Like that's a way to think about intelligence. And then Like if the set of functions that you're asked to perform is like relatively narrow, the set of functions in relation to which you're assessed is relatively narrow, then that would be like a narrow conception of intelligence. Right. Whereas if we see someone's function as partly being like, you know, intelligence can be manifested in humor.
It can be manifested in athletic achievement. Those are like different functions. Right. That their mind can be asked to perform. And so one question that was really running through my head in your book is like, why?
do we see this kind of thinning out of the concept of intelligence and focusing not only on school but actually on a subset like on stem kind of there's a you know even within academia there's kind of um and i had a thought about that um and like you know uh your the answer you just gave is like well this is what's rewarded under neoliberal capitalism this question is like why is it why is that rewarded um and the thought that i had was that um Maybe it's characteristic of capitalism that there's this kind of desire to keep options open and defer choice until later. And so like. essentially, you want to have like a kind of generalized cognitive utility, right? You don't want to be too specific, like not humor, not music, not art. And, and often like, you know, something like achievement in STEM, for example, because they're like in your book, you note that there are these weed out classes, right?
There are That is a kind of general sign of like having some kind of cognitive ability where it's not non-specialized. So there's a particular valuing that we seem to place in something like non-specialized cognitive ability that exceeds that of others. Yeah. Does that seem right to you?
Yeah. I mean, the way that I would probably define it is abstract analytic ability, analytical abilities. That definitely the idea that you want to be fungible in terms of where you can apply your cognitive talents, I think, plays a role in there.
I think the broader question that you were asking of why, why has this form of intelligence become so prized? You know, in general, I believe that economic forces drive culture. And I think that a huge amount of this is just the collapse of the job market for people.
uh without a college degree um you know uh in the last several decades of the 20th century the american economy changed uh for a long time it had been possible to you know get a job at the factory at the edge of town you know go to the plant and own a home put a couple kids through college have a car you know have a two-car garage you know um and uh starting in the mid 70s and and later that started to dry up and famously the job market for people with only a high school diploma fell off a cliff due to both globalization and automation. And so I think a lot of this is just bound up in a profound anxiety of being left behind, like a lot of people's brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles were, observing that lifestyle, that way of life, go to get a union job in a factory somewhere. That just... imploded. And I think that that created a profound anxiety.
I also think that, I mean, you know, the GI Bill passed in the mid-1940s, and you had hundreds of thousands of servicemen coming home who needed to find a way to make an economic living after World War II. I think that that fundamentally changed the character of American college, because, you know, it's always important to remember that Up, you know, even less than 100 years ago, college was just a finishing school for the money to leap, right? Like the our association now with education and getting a job was not nearly as tight as tight back then, because most of the people, almost everybody in college already came from money.
So I think that this is economics has a lot to do with it. And I think that it's really bound up in a profound anxiety and fear about. It's a very punishing job market for people without degrees. You talk in your book about a lot of educational reforms that don't work.
And it seems to me like one educational reform that would be awesome and would obviously be awesome is if we could make the job of teacher more attractive. Why can't we do that or why don't we do it or what would it take to do it? So in fact, I mean, not only do we not make it more attractive, we're making it less attractive. I mean, I want to be perfectly clear about this. The school reformers'vision of education reform is fundamentally broken.
And here's why. The claim of the ed reform people, the neoliberal ed reformers, the charter school people, the Bill Gates Foundation, et cetera, their vision of education is that, you know, our students aren't learning because we have a talent gap with our teachers our teachers aren't talented right so you say okay well what are you how do you with if you have a talent problem then you need to make the profession more attractive not less but they're not doing that in fact they're doing the exact opposite because you're on a relentless quest to destroy teacher tenure and take away one of the greatest uh benefits of being a teacher right uh But if you're part of the reason why teacher tenure exists is because it's a non-monetary compensation, right? If you're a poor school district, you want to be able to attract teachers. You can't spend more money.
What you can do is make it harder to fire the people who have been there for a while. So right now, we're attempting to get rid of teacher tenure and teacher unions, which are some of the strongest incentives to become a teacher in the first place. And so how are you going to solve a talent problem that way? What they say is that we'll have some sort of grand bargain where we'll trade tenure and teacher's unions in exchange for more money.
But nobody has any idea where that money is going to come from. American. K-12 education is overwhelmingly funded by local taxes and it's just unthinkable that we would across the country raise local taxes sufficiently to pay teachers significantly more. So the whole thing is a mess.
It would be nice to be able to make life better for teachers. To me, you start with that by stopping to try the assault on their tenure and on their unions. Good.
But I'm interested in one step further, like, you know, like the job of, I don't know, CEOs don't have tenure. And there are lots of high profile jobs that don't have tenure. And they're sort of and they pay a lot.
A lot of those jobs pay a lot. But but they also like have a lot of prestige. Why doesn't the job of teacher just have more prestige?
What would it take for it to have more prestige? Well, it's not it's not very high paying. And in America, to a tremendous degree, prestige correlates with with how much money you make. I mean, you know, this is a mercenary society and teachers don't make that much.
Also, professors don't make that much. We make more than teachers, but not that much. But professor is a high prestige job. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're associated with a higher education system, which.
Except accepting hardcore conservatives who have recently turned on the academy a great deal. Polling shows that higher education is one of the institutions, American higher education is one of the institutions Americans trust the most. I mean, I would say that part of the reason why teachers aren't respected, perhaps not in the way that they used to be, is, again, we've had a decades long assault on our current crop of teachers. I mean, if you listen to what. the school reform movement says.
In order to fix our schools, we have to fire on the order of hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country and replace them. Now, I can get into it about replacing them. I won't.
But I mean, if you've had this brutal assault from the political class, from our think tanks, from policy types, from politicians for decades on people and saying our schools are sites of failure. None of our children are learning. We can't close any of these performance gaps.
It's not surprising if that profession would lack prestige. Also, a really big part of this is that teachers, teaching has traditionally been considered a woman's occupation. And women's occupations are always disrespected.
Compare nurses to doctors, right? I mean, doctors have more prestige than nurses. for no reason other than the fact that doctor is coded as male and nurse is coded as female.
You think that's the only reason? I mean, I think it's the reason that makes the most sense to me. It's the Occam's razor reason. It's the most simplistic and most direct reason.
I mean, yeah, doctors also make more money. I wonder whether your principle about people not deserving things for their own. like merit or intelligence or whatever, whether that extends to admiration. So sometimes I see someone, you know, I see sort of feats of intelligence.
I might see them in an interview. I might see someone just responding in a really intelligent way. And I admire that. And I think, yeah, they deserve my admiration.
And so like a lot of the time, one of the, like one of the big things that people get from that is like, kind of displays of merit is the admiration of other people. Do you think that that's also undeserved, given that they didn't choose the qualities that led them to be able to perform those meritorious actions? I mean, I don't think it's undeserved, but I also think the stakes are so much lower, right?
Again, like my, you can obviously admire who you choose. And if you see things that like shows a sharp mind and you find something that is delightful about that, Absolutely, you should admire them. But admiration doesn't pay the bills.
You know what I'm saying? Like, I mean, my concern, my fundamental concern with all of this is because Whether or not you are considered smart in the narrow sense that we define it means the difference between whether you live in Park Slope, is an affluent, bougie family of four in a brownstone and send your kids to a $30,000 a year private school. And on the other end of the spectrum. If you live in a decaying rust belt city where you got a living by with a phony disability claim and you're addicted to OxyContin. I mean, the stakes of who how we hand out reward are incredibly high.
And that all starts with school. It all starts with education. And I mean, the one thing, though, with like those two different faiths, let's say, right, that people could have the high road. the high fate and the low fate, you could just take all the language of reward and dessert out of that.
And you could think, look, some people get really awesome stuff in life. Other people don't get as awesome stuff. And that's always been the way it has been throughout history.
Human beings have never lived in any other way than that. And it's definitely a mistake. And this would be the person agreeing with you.
It's a mistake to think that the people who get on the high road earned it or deserved it. They didn't. You know, a lot of luck is fate and chance.
But such a person wouldn't necessarily, like, think there was, you think there's a huge problem, right? And such a person doesn't think there's a huge problem, but they agree with you that the people on the high road didn't deserve it. So it seems to me like maybe not a lot hangs on this question of whether or not there's a false idea of dessert. But my question is. Isn't that notion of dessert a fundamental linchpin of the justification, the moral justification of the system?
Ask a conservative why he shouldn't have to pay taxes that will go to, for example, funding a homeless shelter. Ask the conservative why. And he says the reason why is because I myself am a self-made man.
I went out there. I worked hard. I was smart.
I. got myself to the station where I am, and it's unfair for someone to take away from me for that reason, right? The justification of the system is based on the idea that the person is self-made.
It's based on the idea that the individual can control their fate. I mean, think about it from a, you know, a John Rawls sort of veil of ignorance sort of thing, which you willingly enter into a system if you didn't know if you were going to be one of the ones. who is lucky enough to be able to ascend to that high station. So the conservative believes that he's in absolute control of his destiny.
And that is the justification for a system that hands out such unequal reward, that everybody can determine for themselves whether or not they're going to get what they're going to get. And my opinion is that that's not true. Right. So I'm imagining a weird conservative who just agrees with you. and says, yeah, what you've taught me is that the system cannot be justified.
And to speak of justification and desert here is a mistake. And it's not unjust either. It's just like the genetic lottery.
There's then that genetic lottery trickles outward further. And like life's kind of a lottery and it's mostly chance and we don't control it. And there's no big injustice or anything that should be, we should be intervening.
And this isn't unfair. It's not wrong that the one person gets a ton of awesome stuff. And the other person gets bad stuff. That's not immoral.
That's the mistake I used to make when I used to think that the system could be justified. Let's see what you're saying. I would respond to that person by lighting their house on fire.
And I would say, hey, some houses just light on fire. It's not it's not justified. There's nothing justified about the fact that your house is burning down. But somehow it's just light on fire. It can't be changed.
And, you know, we shouldn't bother to have a fire department because, hey, you know, that's the luck of the draw. That's the way that it works. That's the basic thought pattern of that conservative that you're talking about. So your thought is there is something like dessert.
People do like deserve because at some points in your book, you say, like, I just want to get rid of this idea of people deserving or earning certain things. But in fact, you do believe in that. You just think the dessert isn't tied to any other property like intelligence.
Is that right? I mean, in this, I believe in dessert in the sense that I believe that everyone deserves certain minimal material conditions that are tied to well-being. I believe that Everyone deserves housing, food, water, clothes, education, health care, etc., in common with a lot of lefties.
In that sense, I believe in deserves. What I'm not, when I try to chip away at the sort of the notion of desert, I'm trying to attack this sort of, you know, this sort of base conservative justification of a system based upon. the idea that I got this for myself, I earned this myself, I made this happen myself, therefore the fruits of that are justified, right?
And I think that just the notion of dessert just becomes such a immensely multivariate idea once you start to stack all the things that go into what happens to make one person or another success. The tiny little individual emotions or moments that turn someone from being a success to a failure. Those moments in life which we don't even know, we can't even begin to track. I mean, dessert just becomes this impossible discussion.
It becomes something that you can't possibly wrap your mind around. And so I would like to have less of it in our discussions of should people have things. Do you think there are any contexts, sorry that I'm just jumping around with questions, but I kind of want to cover a bunch of territory and then the students will follow up. Do you think that there are any contexts in which competition actually brings out the best in people and motivates them to do more and better things than they would in a non-competitive situation? Sure.
Yeah. So one of the responses I've gotten to the book, again, for more right-meaning people, is the idea that, look, if you get rid of meritocracy, people aren't going to excel. People aren't going to thrive. They're not going to strive.
They're not going to do their best. I do think there can be opportunities for playful and fun competition and low stakes competition that compels people to do their best but i also think that it's a very strangled definition of human endeavor to think that people do things only with an eye towards reward right only with an eye towards winning the competition i mean if you look at the internet okay uh i can right now if i want go on to a website and download the information for a 3d printed part to a uh uh 30-year-old video game console so that I can fix my video game console. The person who made that part, who made that design, didn't get a dime from it, labored on it for hours, and yet used their expertise and built that piece and created it with no monetary compensation whatsoever. I mean, I think the internet is like the death knell in the idea that human beings only create things and work hard because of monetary reward, because people on the internet are constantly expending immense effort for nothing else than to please other human beings.
I think that people have, you know, look, people have hobbies that are work, you know, I mean, woodworking is a profession, but it's also a hobby that some people really want to get into. And they would do it more if they didn't have their nine to 540 hour a week job, right? People are self motivated to create. There is a fundamental artistic and creative impulse in the human being. And so can competition, you know, within particular contexts be a useful motivator?
Sure. I'm not opposed to competition. But the kind of competition that we have in high school for entry into elite colleges, elite college admission game. Is just to me just the most unspeakably cruel ringer to put a bunch of 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 year olds through. It is just incredibly I mean, it's so much harder to get into college than it was when I was applying to college 20 years ago.
It is the. Elite colleges are not increasing their enrollments despite the fact that the population of teenagers goes higher and higher. So the competition becomes fiercer and fiercer.
And I think people really sacrifice their emotional lives when they're teenagers and when they should be experiencing life to the most. But they can't because they have to constantly be caught up in this brutal status competition to get into these colleges. That is an example of a competition that I don't think has any useful utility. So, you know, you said people don't only do things with an eye towards economic reward, and you cited the internet as like this refutation of this idea. But earlier, you said you believe that fundamentally economics drives culture.
So how are those claims consistent? Can you ask that again? Yeah.
So on the one hand, you say, you know, people don't only do things with a view towards economic reward. That's not the fundamental explanation of what motivates people. People pursue their passions and their interests.
But then you also think that economics drives culture. Yeah. So can you just talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I'm a Marxist.
And so the idea that base determines superstructure, not the other way around, is pretty fundamental. I think that, look, like your behavior as an economic being, right, is always entangled in the fundamental economic conditions under which you live. right so for example the category of the disaffected PhD student who never got a tenure-track job and is angry at the world is is a product of a particular time you know there's only ever been one generation of PhDs that had full of academic employment which was during the height of the Cold War right so if you were if you lived in that time you likely were gonna get that job and not be there to suffracted PhD student Right.
So your your status as a human being, including your emotional status, is going to be affected by the conditions that are around you. But there are times when human beings defy that that pressure to conform to the economic moment and work to, like I said, do a lot of stuff, create a lot of things that they create 100 percent without economic reward. I don't think it's necessarily contradictory if you think that are. Where we are relative to each other, our positions within the economic system are the product of forces that are well beyond our control.
But in our free time, we can access the part of ourselves that is motivated to create. It's a line from your book. You say, and you're sort of observing our culture, we use academic performance as shorthand for a person's overall value.
human value, watch strangers exchange the names of colleges they went to even decades after the fact. In that moment, there's an instant sizing up, an assignment on the pecking order that is no less real for being unvoiced. As petty as they may be, tacit hierarchies of value between people are a major part of adult social life.
And you refer to this as the culture of success. Is this something that is changeable about human beings, or is this just fundamental to what human beings are? It might be fundamental.
I mean, I would love to think that it's not. The thing is, is like, look, I'm in Brooklyn, okay? There's a certain social scene that is associated with Brooklyn. And it's within Brooklyn social culture, you have a lot of people who have succeeded very, very well within the cult of within the academic sorting system.
including many people with schools that are as prestigious as, for example, the University of Chicago, so extremely elite institutions, all those people have ironized the idea that they care about where they went to college. OK, if you ask them about it, you know, they'll always come up with some self-deprecating thing to say. There's always a deflection.
It's always a way to minimize that. But it's always still there. It is always there. You can come up with the funny way to tell people that you went to Harvard, but when you tell people you went to Harvard, it affects how they look at you, including me.
And I just wrote a fucking book about why I shouldn't care about whether you went to Harvard. That's very deeply set in the thing. Again, if the whole culture changed in the way that I wanted it to, if the economic situation changed in the way that... people felt free to fail in education.
If we worked together to stop treating intelligence as the most important attribute that there is, then maybe that could change. But it's hard to see based on my own experience in the social world. In the book, you point out that there's a trade off between higher standards for schools and like higher dropout rates. And and like, you know, lower graduation rates.
And you say we should go for like lower standards and fewer dropouts. And I wonder why not go for higher standards and more dropouts, given that you also think like, you know, 12 year olds, I think should be allowed to leave school or that's a sort of proposal that you float in the book. And school isn't for everyone. So why not raise the standards and have lower graduation rates. Because I think it's a reflection of the fact that we're over credentialed, meaning that I think that the people who, say you're hiring for a job, you have your A tier of people based on where they went to school and their GPA and their activities and awards and stuff.
And then you had your B tier and your C tier. My admittedly completely unscientific. Belief is that you could get along with the C-tier people just fine.
So I was desperately searching for this citation and couldn't find it when I was writing my book. But I know I read this. A Harvard admissions officer or former Harvard admissions officer at that point said that 90% of the people at Harvard who applied to Harvard are perfectly capable of succeeding there. That the vast, vast majority of the people who applied to the institution would be able to thrive when they got there. And the selection of that 5% or whatever it is who actually get in is akin to a lottery.
You're basically choosing these people at random because everyone is so well credentialed. So my feeling is why not lower the standard and prevent some of the pain that's coming with it? Because again, as I say in the book, particularly things like algebra requirements in high school or organic chem requirements in college, these compel people to drop out all the time.
But in the book you say that's kind of a good thing. Like you kind of admire that, you know, that you give the example of the statistics class where the person's crying and at first you think it's bad, but then you think it's good because they're actually just telling people whether they can succeed or not. So, like, why not just do that across the board, just raise standards.
And have less credential inflation. Oh, I mean, look, if the girl crying outside of her first year engineering class was able to pass that class because they lowered the standards, I don't think that there's a great deal of social harm in this. There is absolutely immense social harm in the fact that in Arizona one year, 67% of Arizona high school students failed their required math requirement.
They could not reach their math requirement. Or here in New York, where we have something like 75 or 77% of our high school students pass the math section of the state standardized test, but the dirty little secret is that's because you only have to get a third of the questions right to pass right so that's an example of a system where you are not you are now not compelling those students to go through more uh psychological and emotional harm from having to redo their uh their math requirement by lowering the standard again and if we're if we are if we are actually if i'm correct and we're over credentialed then i don't see why uh what the harm is in in the short term lowering these standards in order to get more people through. If you're causing harm, let's mitigate that harm by lowering the standard. And I also think Andrew Hacker makes a really strong case in his book, The Math Myth, that these kids don't actually need to pass algebra, that it's not at all necessary.
So I'm going to ask one last question. And Tyler, maybe you can you know, get the first person queued up for their question. Just about the beginning of your book, you talk about the power of self-belief, that this idea that like we've overestimated the power of self-belief and that in our schools we have these motivational posters up saying like anyone can succeed and anyone can do great in school and we have this ideology of positivity. And I wonder whether that isn't just like hope, like that is we want our schools to be hopeful places, I want my kids to be hopeful about their, you know, doing well in a class that they might be struggling in. In general, we like try to think positive.
If someone has an illness, we like encourage them to think positive. Why isn't what you were calling the ideology of positivity or something, why isn't that just being hopeful where that's like a good thing? Because there's an obvious and clear dark side to that. If you've been indoctrinated into the view that you are the captain of your own ship, that if all you have to do is maintain a positive attitude and work hard and you will succeed, When you then go on to not succeed, right, then you are. to blame.
Only you can be to blame once you've accepted that, the idea that all you need to do is believe in yourself and you'll succeed. There's all kinds of fields in the world where success has an enormous random component because so much of it is based upon who you know or luck of the draw or whatever. If somebody decides she wants to be a pop star, that's a job with, you know, many, many, many times a number of people trying to get entry into that.
uh field and who actually make it um that's a perfect example of a field where you shouldn't believe that it's all in your hands because it's not and i think it becomes a real source of cruelty to tell to tell kids hey if you succeeded it must be because you didn't want it enough there's no limitations to you it has to be what uh some some fault in your in your in your determination or your grit or whatever good i hope we get more chance to talk about that but now we're going to move over to the q a And by the way, you may show up just like Tejo just showed up on the screen before we turn to him. That might happen to you. Just hang out there because we might still be answering the previous question.
And when we're ready for your question, I'll turn to you. So Tejo, please. Hi.
Hello. One thing. This is just before the question. I think it's kind of funny. Tejo, we're having trouble hearing you.
Oh, sorry. Can you not hear me? I'm It's not a great connection.
Are you wearing headphones? Oh, yeah, here. Try to take them off. Now you're muted.
Tyler, have you muted him? Oh, Miles has changed the input. No.
Okay, so you're muted for some reason, so maybe just type your question in the chat and I'll read it out. Or maybe it's in, oh, I see. Tejo actually asked, typed his question in the chat.
in the question box. So Tyler, is that what you were coming here to tell us? Yeah, I was just going to read Tejo's question really quickly.
Okay, go ahead and read it. So Tejo asked, is the argument against the notion of meritocracy itself or more the idea that any meritocracy applied in a non-idealistic world will produce a deeply flawed society? So I take it he's asking whether the argument is against meritocracy itself or...
meritocracy applied in a situation that's not ideal? Yeah, look, as I suggested earlier, there's different layers to the critique, and there's different of meritocracy. There's the obvious layer that many people have, which is that our meritocracy does not function as a meritocracy in the sense that it is not in fact rewarding people equally due to things like white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. uh that's that's level one level two is um uh we meritocracy couldn't work uh can't work because we all have different uh strengths and weaknesses and the system doesn't reward all strengths the same and uh uh as long as uh what we define as merit is sort of narrowly defined and only reflects certain people's strengths and not others It can't really exist as a system in which everyone has a fair shot, right?
Because again, I think fundamental to meritocracy or the justification to meritocracy is the idea that you control your position within the meritocracy. And then the third level is just why should it be the case that we give monetary reward, that we give rewards of social status and prestige to people for being good at things? Why should we favor the interests of the people who are good at things versus the people who aren't good at those things?
I think that that is there's some obvious rejoinders to that. But I also think that it's a background question and underneath question that doesn't even really get explored. People don't think to ask that question.
And I think it has to be asked and explored. Good. Scott, if you can hold on for once again, I just had a thought about this question, too, which is, you know, when I was.
Reading your book, Freddie, there was a line in there where you say something like, what could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled, like a full-on meritocracy or something, right? Where the idea would be, you know, to respond to Tejo, like actually the ideal meritocracy would be like even worse because then we'd really know, like there'd be something cruel about like your talent is like perfectly visible out in the world and like, oh, you're only down here. But a thought that I had about that is like, well, what do we...
What would it really mean for a meritocracy to be totally fully complete? And you might think that one requirement is that every possible human ability would have its occasion to shine, right? So for instance, in a world without any kind of like music, that would not be a perfect meritocracy because what about the people with musical talent who don't have any occasion to display their talent, right? And that an actual meritocracy wouldn't necessarily be like the one that like ranked all of us, but would be the one in which every possible human talent and ability had a stage or a place to manifest itself.
And then it's less obvious that the actual or full or ideal meritocracy would even be so hierarchical. It would be like a misconception, extremely variegated. So it partly depends on what one means by an actual or complete meritocracy.
I mean, yeah, go ahead. I guess I'm I'm Part of my interest in all of this is motivated by my deep belief that I'm not really good at anything. That's false. You're a great writer. And so I, thanks.
I, no, but it's like, I take the point you just made and it's interesting. I hadn't really thought about that before. I, it is like, so.
be suppose that we had this perfect meritocracy and you're not very high up in it but you knew the system was perfect now you couldn't even complain about your position right right like you're stuck in like i i deserve this this sucks but i deserve it that that would be so much worse to not be able to say i don't belong here get me out of here right it depends on whether you think in some sense everyone has some kind of talent So I believe everyone does, by the way. Okay. Okay. Can you guys hear me? Yes.
Thanks for patience. Yeah, no problem. So yeah, I saw Tejo posted in the chat. It was kind of ironic that we're using a meritocracy to figure out who gets to ask their questions. But my question is kind of returning to the basics.
So what do we mean when we say merit? You know, we've talked a little bit about intelligence, you know, performance on standardized tests. but it seems really context dependent.
So I'm curious to hear both of your thoughts on what merit is. I think it was Allen Ginsberg who wrote a poem, his poem Howl, who said, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. And I think my mind would be, I saw the best minds of my generation.
Working at Facebook in order to rig elections, right? It's like this merit is the merit that we're defining is getting people into positions where very often they're engaged in completely socially unjust bullshit, right? Like, you know, there's a bunch of like people who got PhDs in like astrophysics, but who would then go to work in investment banks as quants because the money is so much better. And so you're talking about somebody who went through this long process, this selection process from a very early age, being identified as one of the smart kids, getting into the good reading group, joining the gifted program, and then going to high school, working their ass off, doing the whole college application grind, getting into again, a Stanford, a Berkeley, or whatever, Caltech, and then going to Facebook.
and working on an algorithm to make people's click-through rate 5% higher, right? Like if the merit is, if we're defining the merit as something that like, we should be defining merit as something that leads to something of societal or social value, right? But the merit that we're rewarding is really just the ability to make money in a number of firms, like again, the investment banking world that have, shall we say, limited social utility? Yeah, I think the word merit in meritocracy is systematically ambiguous between two independent meanings that are just never clarified in these discussions.
And I sort of alluded to it earlier. One of them is that it is something like dessert or the basis for receiving some kind of reward. And the other is that it is the potential for fulfilling the function. So I think it has those two meanings.
That's my answer. Great. Thank you so much.
Yeah, sure. Okay. So we're waiting on some folks to come up and ask their questions. So I figured I'd just ask the questions at the top, which is to Freddie.
It's just, I think, we'll hear somebody. Should we? Okay, cool.
Let's defer to him. Yeah. Hi, Shwell. I can't hear you. I don't know what's going on.
Sorry. He said, I can't hear you. I don't know what's going on.
Okay, but anyway, I can't hear myself. So my question is also based on Professor Keller's notion that maybe competition will bring out the best outcome for the society as a whole. So how to really balance fairness and effectiveness?
I mean, if we don't adopt meritocracy, it's possible that the happiness in the society will be reduced. And just like on bureaucracy and organization, people need organization to accomplish big things, right? But organization also brings out a lot of drawbacks that draws many criticism. Like bureaucracy, you know, people complain it's ineffective, it's very ineffective. But it doesn't deny the fact that maybe the bureaucracy is the most effective way people can organize things.
People can accomplish bigger things that one man or group of people, disorganized people cannot accomplish. So I'm asking if we don't use, if we don't adopt meritocracy then the society might be less effective than a society that adopts meritocracy. So really the question is how to balance the...
fairness and effectiveness yeah uh i think that um look um again like i i don't i genuinely don't mean this to sound like an invasive response but my my fear that we're going to uh so attack the foundations of meritocracy that the positive that we don't get you know you know people don't build rocket engines anymore because they don't feel like they're going to be rewarded for i don't know why i said rocket engines whatever rockets if people uh people won't build rockets anymore because you know they don't feel like they're they they have is going to receive any reward that idea is so contrary to the world that we live in which is an absolutely brutal status competition all the time that i'm just not that nervous about it Right. I'm not quite sure exactly what the post-meritocracy world looks like, but people being good at things and doing things that they're good at is never going to go away. The question is, is do we create a system in which your fundamental economic, your fundamental material conditions are so tightly bound up with performance in a particular status competition?
Because that's what I'm describing. Right. I'm describing a system in which the stakes are incredibly high, in which the effects for those who end up on the bottom, as some people always will, as they must. I'm describing a system where the effects for those people are incredibly negative. They face truly, truly difficult life circumstances.
And so to perhaps evade your question. I just don't see that happening, that we're not going to have competition at all, that we're not going to have people being rewarded for being good at building a rocket ship. What I want to do is fix a sick society that has reduced the entirety of our perception or sometimes our perception of the value of a human being to their performance in a few sort of.
narrow fields of academia and capitalism. Jesus. Hey, can you guys hear me?
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks.
So I just wanted to thank you guys for selecting me to ask your question. This is actually something that I've been really interested in. So you mentioned like, Some individuals who have, I guess, less opportunity, I just want to note that, like, there are some individuals that just, like, just wouldn't be able to participate in this webcast, you know what I mean? Or, like, there are individuals who completely miss out on education altogether and then are valued less in a system that implements any sort of... meritocracy.
So what do you think is a resolve to that? Or how would you respond to that? You know, being that you've written an entire book on it? Yeah, to the just to the fact that there are people who can't even participate in the discussion that I'm trying to have, because they've been excluded by the by the very system that I'm discussing. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Um, let me answer that in a roundabout way. So So Recently, a judge ruled that California public colleges can't use the SAT in their admissions process anymore.
And somebody emailed me and said, I'm sure you'll love this. And in fact, I don't. In fact, it's quite the opposite.
As strange as it may sound, it might sound. The idea behind getting rid of the SAT is that. People feel like it'll make things more diverse if we move to what's called holistic admissions, which is you look at the applicant as an individual and you look at things like their activities and their sports and the things they do, and you weigh those more highly than their quantitative indicators.
The problem with this is that there's absolutely no clear notion of why it would be the case that Moving to holistic admissions would actually result in a more diverse institution. I mean, what is the argument for why that is true? If anything, we can imagine exactly the opposite, which is that rich people, affluent people, have even more ability to influence and to game the system under holistic admissions.
Because think about it. Who can go to Ecuador and build houses for a summer, a poor student or a rich one? Who can join the polo team? Because remember, in college admissions, it's better to be OK at a weird sport than merely good at a common sport, right?
Who's going to be able to get an internship working in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a high school student, whatever? All those things are more available to people who are more affluent, right? And in fact, whatever its problem, there's tons of problems with the SAT, but whatever its problem is, in fact, the SAT has always been, the people who benefit the absolute most from the SAT are gifted Black students, because it's one of the absolute only ways for them to identify themselves and raise out of their certain current circumstances.
Why am I telling you this right now? It's really hard. to come up with systems that don't exclude in the way that you're discussing, right? I am promoting this book.
I am doing podcasts, and I have a piece coming out in a newspaper in a couple days. And all of this is stuff that we can probably assume predominantly is consumed by people who... are already part of the whole edifice that I'm talking about.
And of course, I'm a part of the cult of smart. I have a PhD, right? I'm here giving this talk.
So it's a roundabout way of saying it's really hard to break the barriers that you're talking about, that the social inequalities present themselves in a variety of forms and often defy well-meaning reforms like getting rid of the SAT. And there's no easy solution to sort of breaking the bubble. All I can try to do is make my work as accessible as possible. And hopefully enough people will buy it that it will become available to everybody who wants it.
That's my best answer. Hi, Jessica. Hi.
So my question was sort of, I think going back to Agnes'truism at the beginning that like given two choices, you would want to choose the best of the two. If we're using that as like our definition of meritocracy, that might like lead us into certain like local maxima, but not global maxima. And so do either of you think that this is like one of the problems with meritocracy where when we're choosing like sort of as you brought up, Freddie, of like.
you know, in high school, if you don't get to take good enough classes to get into a good college, and after the good college, if you don't pass the interviews to get a good job, that sort of shuts you out early on. I don't know, what are your thoughts on people who like would have become more meritorious at the if they had been given all of those opportunities? Yeah, I mean, we should never let a critique of meritocracy in total prevent us from making a critique of the meritocracy that we actually have.
And Yeah, I mean, look, people get really bent out of shape because they think that I'm leaving people behind when I say, hey, some people have more ability than other people. The whole point of the book is to stop leaving them behind, is to create structures in society that don't leave them behind. But I truly believe that were we to dramatically loosen high school and college standards. And we would be giving people, like, for example, the Common Core, which, well, again, I could get into that if you want to, but if we were to dramatically loosen high school and college standards, we would give students more outs.
We would give people more ability to navigate the waters of their academic career. And so if they can, if organic chem is a wall that's preventing someone from getting farther in their education, get rid of organic chem. Right. Let us define let the student define what they're good at.
Take classes that speak to their individual underlying strengths and and enable them to to pursue things that are actually meaningful and useful to them and that they're good at. It's the best we can do, I think. I want to speak to this question about the local Maxima, because it's something that I see.
Hi, Connor. Just hold on for one second. because I thought this was a great question about a way in which I think I see in my own field that competition can be kind of a bit self-destructive, which is that it produces uniformity. So like, if you just look at like job applicants and philosophy, you know, like grad school applicants and philosophy, when people are polishing themselves up to a sort of hyper degree in order to like, you know, appeal to a certain group of assessors.
they tend to go by like, you know, what they predict those people are going to want to see from them, right? And people tend to converge on those predictions. And so you get like a whole bunch of applicants who look really similar. They're all super smart and they're all super, super impressive, but like none of them are very weird.
And so that's sort of like a local maxima problem, right? You end up with like, you can pick the best of that group, but maybe under a different system, you would have had a different set of choices, right? And you would have had people freed up. to do more creative, more adventurous work.
And so that's one place where I see that competition can be counterproductive in terms of efficiency in that it can conduce towards a uniformity among the people who compete. And you're still picking the maximum, but you're picking from a narrower selection pool, a narrower set of traits or qualities. Yeah. And I would just add to that, in a situation like the tenure track job market, where so many people are so qualified and it's like, you know, pulling the name out of the hat and you're going to get somebody immensely qualified. What ends up determining who gets the job is often like the most trivial thing possible.
Like I didn't like the way she didn't laugh at my joke, the campus visit, you know, like just all the weird little ways that people find and disqualify people. But that's what ends up happening when everybody is so qualified and in such intense competition. Connor.
Hi. Hi there. So this might be taking the discussion in a completely different direction, but I'm wondering, so part of what at least one of the conceptions of meritocracy that you were talking about a little bit earlier is that individuals seem to be given what we think or their due. So... It might be that we award or reward some individuals for being extremely productive in society, but also, conversely, we might be interested in punishing or condemning those who are not productive or who take away from society's value.
So I wonder if meritocracy is a failure. What grounds do we have to justify punishment, whether it's social or legal or some other form of sanction? So there is a anthropologist, I believe at Stanford, and I believe his name is Richard Sapolsky.
It could be Robert Sapolsky. So he is a hardcore determinist. And I'm not saying that I am a determinist, but... I'm determinist curious, sort of.
So by determinist, I mean, Robert Sapolsky, thank you. By determinist, I mean, he doesn't believe that we have free will. He doesn't believe that anything that we do is because of a choice we make, that we are acted on by outside forces. And it's all a mix of our biology, our genetics.
our neurobiology, our life experience, the way we were conditioned as children, our prenatal environment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Part of the problem, what makes this stuff so hard, and one of the reasons why I kind of viscerally don't like the idea of meritocracy is I just don't agree with the assumption that we can meaningfully decide who has really succeeded based on their own merit rather than on the conditions that brought them there, right? There's so much stuff, so much stuff that goes into our own success that it becomes impossible to look at the situation and say, this is moral because of the outcome, because really, who knows, right?
Like, who knows how we all got to be there? And so it's kind of an evasion of your question, but that's because I don't have a good answer. I don't know how we build that society if we think like Robert Sapolsky does, and I kind of do.
Jennifer, if you can hold on for a minute, I just wanted to say something about this, because I think this question about the difference between reward and punishment, that those are different spaces, is a really good one. Because you might think we could honor and in some sense reward people. for certain kinds of extraordinarily meritorious activity without thinking it's justified to punish them, to punish anyone really. Like that is you might think people can be responsible for their sort of achievements without thinking that they're like that responsible for their failures. One way to think about this would be like sports.
Like I think obviously sports, there's like a genetic component, right, to being good at a sport. There's things like, you know, agility and height and et cetera, right? But to me it's also obvious that athletes work super super hard to be excellent and like that they You know I would say like they a lot of them a lot of the most of most of the most of the time if they're not cheating Or whatever like they deserve Their accolades and success because they worked super hard Which is not to say that those of us who don't achieve those things deserve like that.
I deserve to be an athletic failure I don't think I deserve to be an athletic failure. Like I think I just wasn't born with what it would take to to succeed. And so I don't think I should be punished or shamed or, you know, for like not my failure to achieve in the athletic domain.
But I think it's still okay to think that the athletes for whom one of their necessary conditions they were not responsible for, there were other necessary conditions of their sex they were responsible for. And so the fact that we honor and reward, et cetera, them, how much we should reward them is a separate question, but that we do that, to me, that's still appropriate and fitting. And so we could have it on the positive side, but not the negative side. Jennifer.
Hi. Thanks. My question is this. We can agree that the metrics we have in place right now to assess merit in order to substantiate whatever meritocracy we have are not that good at doing that.
SAT, GRE, law school scores, things like that. Is there any metric? that is possible to achieve that function?
And if not, is the problem in the measurement or in meritocracy? The problem is how we do meritocracy or how we set people as candidates. Why not both, right? In other words, like, yeah, again, like I was suggesting a minute ago, every measurement is going to have...
is going to have all kinds of noise in it, right? In other words, every measurement is going to be dependent in large measure on things that were not controlled by the person who is being measured. And that's true of the people who win and true of the people who lose.
So if we think that if we're trying to come up with a system to justify, can justify itself, then It becomes really hard once we are expansive in our definition of the things going into the metric, then it becomes really hard to say, yeah, this is fair, right? Because meritocracy is a vision of a system that is supposed to be fair, not just to produce excellence, right? But again, I want everyone to enjoy certain kinds of material flourishing. So I am a Marxist. It is a misconception that Marxism is about equality.
Marxism has nothing to do with equality, rather about an end to exploitation. And if we could ensure a certain minimum level of, again, housing, clothes, food, water, education, health care. If we could ensure that I don't care what the system on top, if that is it has a meritocratic element, I can live with it.
I can I can deal with that. I'm not sure it's the best thing in the world. I'm not sure it's the most justified thing in the world. But really, for me, it all comes down to what is the system that we're lying on top of? Because right now we're lying on top of a brutal capitalist competition.
So I want to raise kind of like. the possibility that really is a conceptual question here about whether we could ever, there could ever be something that we would measure that would work. And like for a couple of different reasons.
I mean, one of them is just like, arguably what we're trying to measure is something like virtue, which is an ethical property, and it's not going to be correlated with any natural property. That's one problem. But a separate problem is this old, you know, problem of social science that every measure becomes a target, right?
So whenever you try to measure the problem with attempting. there's a problem with attempting to control people who know that you're trying to control them and who are paying attention and who are going to manipulate the data to in order to succeed right and so they're essentially going to decouple the measure from what it used to be a measure of it's going to become coupled to like their power to produce that measure right and so it does seem like unless you can keep the system secret somehow um secret meritocracy would not have this problem right but The problem is that, you know, every measure becomes known by the people who are being measured by it. And they will find people are very ingenious and they find ways to produce that outcome without having it be correlated with what you were trying to track.
That seems to be a very deep problem in kind of any measure. I mean, so you're talking about Campbell's law, you know, and a perfect example of Campbell's law is is the high school graduation rate. America's high school graduation rate has never been better than it is right now.
We have seen significant improvement. It is at an all-time high. Absolutely none of the other underlying educational indicators suggest that this should be true, right?
Test scores have not changed in any way that would demonstrate that there actually is an increase in ability. What happened is that people were so relentlessly focused on graduation rate that of course schools and lawmakers and everybody involved in the system said graduation rates got to come up, got to come up, got to come up. So it came up in a way that subverted the measures initial point of being. And that's exactly the sort of thing, like anything that we, any metric that we pick, if people know what it is, it's going to become distorted, just like you said. Hey, Lauren.
I have a quick question. I think you touched a little bit on this when you were discussing this holistic college admissions thing. And my question is, if we don't have some emphasis on meritocracy, even at the risk of the meritocracy becoming very competitive and even aggressive, do we run the risk of just defaulting to whatever hierarchies were in place before meritocracy, whether that's class, even something like race?
Um, you know, because, for example, when you use an example of education, um, If you're sort of pitching this very intense college admissions meritocracy related way of thinking at people. Are there people who are in poorer areas, if they were not exposed to that, they might not have opportunities that potentially come from that. And if we were to lessen that, could they be hurt?
And could just the old hierarchies just restart themselves? Yeah, of course they can. You know, we as human beings always have to be in mortal fear of the possibility of a re-entrenchment. to feudal, you know, or aristocracy, or just, you know, New England old money, or all of the old sorting systems that were explicitly not meritocratic. I mean, look, the Ivy, the major Ivy League universities for decades were involved in an active and explicit conspiracy to exclude Jewish students, despite the fact that those Jewish students were some of the highest performers in the country, right?
So we don't even have to go that far back, right? That's in the 1920s, that's true, that's 100 years ago. So absolutely, we have to worry about these new, excuse me, those old hierarchies coming back into place.
You know, I believe that there's such a thing possible as a classless society that will, it's something that could be built right now on planet Earth. obviously that would be very very hard but um i i also think that any time you make an attempt to improve how people are sorted in the uh in your social hierarchy um you're always going to be subject to unconscious biases and to uh unintended consequences that can potentially cause problems i mean certainly some of the attempts at a class of society in this world's history uh certainly did not achieve such a class of society so I think we just we have to be careful. And you're absolutely right that that's something to be feared.
Since we have a second, I'm going to throw in a question. Would you be OK with charter schools if there was no selection issue, if they couldn't kick people out and couldn't control what they selected? Because a lot of your argument against charter schools in your book is based on like they fudge the data by being able to select their students. No, I'm opposed to charter schools as a matter of solidarity with teachers and their unions. I the.
teachers unions have been abundantly clear that charter schools, no matter what the scenario is, charter schools always end up, even if they say they don't, end up taking funds away from public schools. Here in New York, there's been a scandal of charter schools getting to take over entire floors of public schools rent-free, which of course reduces the resources for those schools. I fundamentally don't believe that a market mechanism is going to solve the problems with our education system. The justification for charter schools is that, well, the market will intervene. The schools that perform better will be the ones that attract the best students.
And that way we'll figure out which institutions are the best. But in my opinion, the schools that are perceived to be the best are those who which have the selection mechanisms in place. So yes, even after absent that selection issue, I don't see a justification for charter schools if we don't believe that a market mechanism is going to work, and I don't.
Vaughn. Cool, right. Can you guys hear me?
Yep. Yeah. So, Freddie, it sounds like your attack on meritocracy is not meant to be understood in a vacuum.
It's meant to be understood as a corrective to what we have now. And that if we somehow got into a situation where we were too unmeritocratic or cared too little about merit, you would make the opposite case. Is that right?
I mean, so I will cop to this. The number, the biggest critical response to my book The number one thing that most people say is that the part where I describe the problem is far more convincing than the part where I describe the solution. And I will cop to that.
I will. I will. No contender on that. I think that that's true.
You're absolutely right when you say that my attack on meritocracy is happening in context of where we actually are now. I acknowledge, I think. I think Agnes and others have laid out really good reasons to be cautious about attacking meritocracy. But, you know, I'll burn that bridge when I come to it, you know.
In other words, like once we tear down all the stuff that I really don't like in our system, and there's a lot of stuff I really don't like. After that, you know, I will deal with the problem of how to motivate people to. to excel in a system that's not meritocratic, right? Like just let's get rid of this pernicious system that teaches kids that they're stupid for no reason first. And then I'll worry about the rest.
But that was a generous way to interpret what I'm saying. And I appreciate it. Maccabee.
Hey, yeah, my question was like, is any like... side of the political spectrum, like, I mean, this is probably the answer I joined kind of late. Like, do you guys think any side of the political spectrum is like inherently a meritocracy?
I was sort of saying in the chat, like, I think any capitalist society is sort of a meritocracy, or at least it tends to be like, what they call perfect capitalist society is because the whole point is, if you're more talented, I think, then you should get more. I'm not sure. But yeah, that's my question. Yeah. So I think that's important.
I think like the idea that like there are people and you are right to associate them with a more capitalist, more conservative sort of perspective. There are people who are just like, yeah, people who are more talent. Like I say, talent is handed out genetically or by other means that we don't control, at least. And some people say, yeah, sure.
I don't care. People should still get people who are talented should still be rewarded. It doesn't matter if.
if giving out the talent is fair or not. So, yeah, I mean, I definitely think that the more conservative side of the aisle, I mean, everybody to a degree is implicated in meritocracy. Conservatives are critics of our current meritocracy because they so distrust the higher education system and see it as corrupt and as indoctrinating students.
But they are also... deeply, deeply invested in the notion of the self-made man. And liberals tend to be, you know, the kind of affluent liberals whose opinions you read about tend to be in favor of the meritocracy because they succeeded within it, right? So they tend to be more likely to be defensive about it. Hi, Brandon.
Hello, can you hear me? Yeah. Rich, if you can just hold on for a minute, we'll do Brandon's question and then yours. Oh, maybe you'll come back. Okay, Brandon, go ahead.
Okay, my question, I agree that the competition among high schoolers and admissions for college is toxic, but isn't that just a problem with how we value elite schools rather than the institutions themselves? The U.S. has like a surplus of colleges right now, so it seems the urge to lower standards at elite institutions. actually plays into the overemphasis on elite institutions. Like in a perfect world where we don't only value people because they're smart, where the cult of smart doesn't exist, we still have elite institutions, or maybe not elite, but institutions meant to cultivate like higher level academic achievement. So I think you're absolutely right about that second part about there will still be institutions Even after we could dismantle the call to smart institutions like Yale's and Harvard's and things like that.
I want to say Erosion of standards is not just beginning in undergraduate colleges at elite universities Standards have always been absurdly low at undergraduate programs at elite universities. I mean, this is one of the dirty secrets of the college game. It's almost harder to fail out of Harvard than it is to get into Harvard, okay? Because that hurts their numbers.
They don't like it. Undergraduate grade inflation is through the roof in elite institutions. And the perception of an institution as elite has almost nothing to do with the actual, like, you know, educational quality of the undergraduate program, right? An elite college's reputation is, has a huge to do to deal with, with, uh, how old it is is a huge criterion.
It's the caliber of its researchers, so its faculty's research profile, the competitiveness and caliber of their graduate programs, the size of the endowment, all these things play into the perception of eliteness, if that's a word, I would argue more than undergraduate education ever did. Rich. Hi. Well, hi.
First of all, thanks for this fascinating discussion. When it started, I wasn't even sure I understood what it was going to be about, but I have a much better understanding now. My question kind of goes back to some of the questions we've been discussions earlier about what is the definition of meritocracy?
What is merit? And I offered the example that a dog show really is a very classic definition of a meritocracy because there is a specific criteria for each different breed and each individual is judged against that. So you even are able to compare different breeds against each other. So to me, the idea behind meritocracy is to define what the criteria are that we're going to measure, that we're going to use.
And once we have a set of criteria, then we could decide how to define the meritocracy. America today is basically a capitalistic meritocracy. And one of the things we might want to do is figure out how to move it to a more moral meritocracy. So how do we do all that is my question.
Well, brother, I've got a book for you to read. So I think that, look, I think that there's an economic side and a cultural side. I truly believe, setting aside what my ideal society would look like, let's go with the far more realistic.
If the United States instituted a Scandinavian style social democratic state that had things like sovereign wealth funds, that had things like single payer health insurance and Medicare for all, that had things like guaranteed child allowances that in general was far more redistributive so that you have a raising of the floor and a through taxation squashing of the ceiling once you've created a society like that I think that the manic competition status competition starts to starts to erode that once people become convinced that they can provide for their families, even if they fail in that system, then you will start to see less obsession with success in that system. It's also going to take a lot of us examining our biases, our sort of unexamined biases. I don't know if you saw the debate between Trump and Biden, but when Biden said you have to be smarter about the coronavirus, you know, you have to be smarter about the coronavirus.
Trump lost his mind. He just went crazy. He said, don't talk to me about smart.
And he attacked Biden for having gone to the University of Delaware. So he didn't have good grades, right? That's that, that visceral reaction right there, like that, how dare you attack my intelligence? That's the call to smart.
That is the inculcated, deep seated sense that to attack someone's intelligence is to attack their very being. And Again, the major reform has to be economic, but we also have to teach our kids to be afraid to not be afraid to fail. We have to be adamant with them that our esteem for them is not at all dependent upon their performance in school.
So quick, two quick thoughts, Shivan, then we'll get to your question. So one of them is that, like, you know, the sense we have that. our ways of grasping, measuring, and aiming for intelligence are too straight-jacketed, too narrow, that we're in some sense ignoring and dismissing, not cultivating a whole bunch of really important forms of intelligence that we talked about earlier, moral, humor, etc.
That in a way supports the idea that there could be like a deeper cult of smart that would be true, where like Trump's instinct there would just be correct, that... it would be a deep offense to insult someone's intelligence in that, in the sense, if we could properly grasp what intelligence was, where the thought there is like, your intelligence is somehow kind of, you know, you're the idiosyncratic way that your thinking works, and that could possibly be deployed for some good in the world or something like that. And so, um, So it's interesting that maybe one of the mistakes that we're making is that we are holding on to valuing that idea of intelligence, even when we have thinned it out too far.
We thinned out the concept of intelligence too far to being like this kind of abstract calculative ability or something like that. Maybe I'll stop there and save my other point because I want to hear from Shiv. Sure.
So I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase, a rising tide lifts all boats. So I'm curious as to whether you can view meritocracy as being a means to some end? Like, could meritocracy, although bad in its own right, help us achieve a certain goal of, a certain utilitarian goal of maximizing the collective utility across a society? And, you know, I'm just going to cite some statistics here. In the poorest countries in the world today, a life expectancy is greater than the life expectancy in America in the year 1900. So is, should we attach so much significance and importance to status?
or should we be willing to say other things matter in addition to status and that's why we should not uh fully invent the meritocracy if you understood everything i said there i i think that i did yeah um so uh there is little question that uh uh we've become vastly more productive uh under this regime of uh globalized capitalism over the last hundred years. That is not an anti-Marxist argument, that's in fact a pro-Marxist argument because Marx said capitalism has to develop the world before we can socialize it. But to pick one, to add another statistic in, you know, in the 1930s, one farmer could grow enough food in one year to feed four people for one year. Now, one farmer in one year can grow enough food to feed 125 people for one year.
So we have vastly increased the productive capacity of the world. To me, that is an argument to say, look, we're so incredibly productive, this is an opportunity now to spread that more widely. The problem is rising tide lifts some boats, but not all boats.
And in fact, I would argue that the post Reagan The last 40 years of American economic history, where the share of profits from economic growth for the middle class and lower class has remained completely flat, where we haven't seen real wage growth for the middle and lower classes in 40 years, demonstrates that. I also would look at a place like China, where China has obviously a complicated... economic system. But China has had incredible improvements to the overall standard of living. And yet there are still hundreds of thousands of, it should be hundreds of millions of people in China who are subsistence farmers, who make incredibly small incomes in a year.
So, you know, in common with a lot of lefties, I would say, rising tides lift some boats and our responsibility is to force the system so that the rest of the boats that aren't getting lifted do get lifted up. But I see what you're saying about the relationship to meritocracy. I'm just not sure that we need meritocracy for flourishing. I'm not sure that we need meritocracy for economic flourishing, for technological flourishing, for scientific flourishing, et cetera.
I could be wrong. Hold on one second, because I just want to ask Freddie a question about this. about the, you know, this line capitalism has to develop the world before we can socialize it. How do we know when we've developed it enough? Like, what is the sign of it being the time?
I'm going to defer to far better read Marxists than myself. I mean, look, the short answer is-Do Marxists know the answer to that question? Like, it might be an empirical question.
There are opinions, of course. The question, the short answer is no, there is not a known time. It's not like Mark said, 2035 is the year when you guys are going to be able to do it.
I would say that when I look around at my own country and I look at the immense opulence at the top, when I look at the fact that billionaires have added hundreds of billions of dollars to their incomes and to their net worths, during a pandemic in which it's been a total economic collapse for many millions more. I see a society in which there is an enormous amount of headroom for taking from up here and bringing down here. Does that mean that we have the capacity today to completely socialize society?
I'm not sure, but I know that I'm willing to try. Yeah, but there's always been like immense wealth at the top, right? So that's not a change.
there could even be more now, right? But there's just, there's just a question of like, what would be the, like, I would think this would be like the number one question for Marxists. It's like getting a clear criterion of when have we developed enough?
And I do think someone raised in the chat environmental questions of like, maybe our development of the world is starting to destroy the world. That would be a sign. I mean, I'm sure you've heard the phrase fully automated luxury communism, but that's the That's the goal, you know, with the robots do it all for us and we can just chill all day. Okay, Bendy, hi. Hi, I had two questions in the box and I'm not sure which one I was chosen for.
but i i guess sure um the first question i put in the box was just um you you talked about the overvaluing of education and the over credential system we have and you you blamed it on like capitalism and neoliberalism but you didn't really connect those dots for me and it feels like there's so much like government regulation and government like subsidy in education that it feels to me like you can't really disentangle that signal of like this is the market producing this very clearly. So I was just curious how those dots connect. Let's say you're someone who wants to take the most high percentage chance at becoming rich in this country.
There are ways to become rich that work for some people, like becoming an NBA star or becoming a pop star or becoming a movie star. or winning the lottery. But those are all low percentile attempts, right?
Those are all things that don't carry with them a very high chance of success. If you want to have the highest percentile chance, you do things like you go get your MBA from an elite institution like the University of Pennsylvania, where President Trump got his MFA. I believe he studied there anyway.
And then you go and you get a job at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or some other investment bank, and you work your way up. And within 10 years in the firm, you're making the seven figures. Or additionally, another way you can do it is you can become a hotshot coder coming out of, again, a school like Stanford or Caltech or MIT. You demonstrate your ability to code and your ability to come up with novel solutions to computing problems.
And you get a job at a firm looking for someone who is a creative coder. And again, you can be right out of college making in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's not me who is saying that the system is rewarding people who go through the education system. It's that the institutions that are handing out... Rewards in the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars are institutions that are pursuing those people through the education system, right?
Goldman Sachs does not have a, you know, just walk up and apply with the high school diploma policy. Neither does Google. Right. And so when I say that the system, that the that this obsession with intelligence is coming from capitalism, I'm simply saying looking at the system and saying.
What is rewarded and what are people working hardest to do? Because a lot of people are working hardest to get in those kinds of positions because they're rewarded so heavily. So that would be my response. Joshua, hi.
Hi. So I don't know which question, I put two questions up. I don't know which one. You choose.
You choose which one you like better. That's like choosing my children or something. Well, okay, well, I'll give you both and you choose which one you want to answer.
How's that? Okay. So one is sort of maybe more of a historical question, not so much a philosophical one, which is maybe meritocracy, you know, or our fixation with it is sort of like a brainwashing that arises from our nation or our tribe wanting its members to compete. for the sake of benefiting the tribe so that those are the sort of the top of the heap of the tribe or nation kind of get more power or can compete or whatever and maybe that applies to corporations as well i mean i think it kind of does um and then the other question i had was just about meritocracy and blind peer review of academic articles and so forth uh so in other words uh peer-reviewed articles that are more genuinely meritocratic because they're blinded? Oh, no, just whether or not you think that it's a valid thing to have.
I'm happy to talk about the peer review question. Go for it. So that actually is, you know, earlier when I spoke about the local maxima, like... In my field, philosophy, if I just look over the past 50, 60 years, work has gotten less adventurous, less exciting, kind of a higher standard of excellence in the sense of a lot of precision, a lot of technical chops. Polish.
Polish, just more similarity between papers. And so the effect of competition, I think, is to. introduce yet to raise the bar of excellence, but to also introduce a lot of homogeneity, and to suppress a lot of weirdness and creativity, that the result of that is that it's hard for me to believe that most of the stuff being written now will be read in even like 10 years, as opposed to like a few things from like, you know, I was reading a paper from like 1975 the other night. about like why do we empathize with fictional characters?
It was just original fun. It was not that precise, but like I still wanna read it now. Whereas like the stuff I'm writing, I think people are like not gonna wanna read. The stuff that I've published in journals, like it's sort of too tight and narrow and too much molds itself to the goal of competing against the other papers that are competing for that.
I mean, I would just say like, One thing that is a huge part of getting a peer-reviewed paper published is signaling and demonstrating that you are a part of the community in which that journal belongs with the vocabulary that you use. You show I am an X, Y, or Z person. I am a person from this particular subfield.
Through your references, who you reference, who you cite. and the vocabulary that you use, the buzzwords that you use. Now, is that merit? I don't know. Maybe it's a perfectly fair thing to do to select people based on their ability to signal their in-group status.
But it certainly is, I think, a little bit askance from what most people would think of as being merit. So, again, all... always the question becomes what does merit actually mean and to what extent is that merit actually socially desirable? Madeline. Okay, hi.
I feel like this is something you've already touched on a bit, but during this conversation I felt like I kind of feel some parallels with like the current police or prison abolition movement and I think one of the reasons why that movement is becoming more popular, at least with people I know, is because I think not only is it about dismantling a system, but it also provides a very radical and hopeful view for the future. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about if you have a radical or hopeful view for a future without meritocracy, or what that would look like. I have pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will. If you ask me, Are things gonna get better in the way that I want them to in my lifetime?
I don't know. I find that the Black Lives Matter movement that you've been describing to be incredibly vital and important and necessary. I don't know if it's gonna succeed. I really don't know if there's gonna be any real substantive change. But I do know that the people within that movement are rebelling against the system that has failed them, right?
like the system that we are talking has failed them uh and uh uh millions of african americans are immediately excluded from uh from entry into uh the academic sorting game because of things like uh uh being born into poverty because of things like exposure to lead because of things like uh uh biased admissions committees all kinds of things that environmental things that exclude them. And so I think that any assault on meritocracy is going to have to involve people from those marginalized communities because they have the most visceral and most obvious reason to reject the system as it is now. I hope for the best.
I hope for the best. I don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, so I'm going to answer that question too.
That's a great question. And I think, Madeline, you're so right about how important it is for there to be something, like, in the way that you imagine the future, where you have some concrete grip on how the future might become better. I do personally feel like down the line at some point humanity better figure out prison abolition. But in terms of my own sense of what makes me helpful, it's related to something Freddie talked about earlier about the internet.
If I had been a University of Chicago professor 50 years ago, like, I would have just a philosopher here. I would have just thought it's fine to like teach my students, be here at the university, be enclosed in this little world. And to me, like now I'm living in a culture because of the internet where that doesn't seem okay to me.
Like it doesn't feel like enough, you know? And I, my next book that I'm writing is going to be like a public philosophy book. It's not only for academic philosophers and I do a bunch of public writing and that it's not like, oh, this is a moral duty where I'm fulfilling it.
But and I hate it. I like it. But the point is, I think it wouldn't have occurred to me.
None of it, it wouldn't have been a space for it. And I was recently reading this book by Tolstoy called A Confession, in which he has this sort of midlife crisis, in which is a sort of philosophical, you know, what is the meaning of my life? And he is looking at these peasants, these sort of illiterate peasants. And he's like, I wish I were like them.
I wish I were an illiterate peasant, because then I wouldn't have this existential crisis. And I, I sort of, had this flip thought which is like well we don't think of illiteracy as being okay anymore like in Tolstoy's day right lots of people were illiterate people are still illiterate now but it's we have this kind of you know at least in the United States right kind of educational system that says like everyone should be literate but there was a time when that wasn't true and I feel like there's a there's a pair there's a corresponding fact about just ideas and thought and reflection someone earlier in the question said not everyone can access this which is true but a lot more people can access this than would have been able to access anything that I could produce you know 50 years ago and so I'm what I'm really hopeful about is that we are moving into a society in which something like philosophical critical reflection on one's own life and on one's kind of cultural inheritance just becomes just something that everybody has that is available to everyone that is um uh is thoughtlessly available to everyone in kind of the way that literacy is. That's my, you know, my dream and my big hopeful idea.
Hey Tyler, are you going to read someone's question? I'm actually going to ask a question. I think we have time maybe for one more question.
I was just going to ask a question. Yeah, oh yeah, this will be the last question. So I, for a reason that I can't go into like test grading, like the grading system, the A through F grading system that we use. in the United States. And actually, I'm told, somebody told me, I don't know if this is true, that it's like the origins of it have something to do with agriculture and the way that like agricultural products are graded or something like this.
Of course, that alone doesn't give us a reason to reject it. But I just wonder, does the critique of meritocracy have anything to say in the short term about the grading system? Should it be abolished, especially in higher ed?
I'm just curious. So I am aware of a couple opportunities to abolish the traditional grading system. And as I understand it, they were met with absolute fury on the part of parents who did not want the grading system to be messed with.
Because, of course, they all assume that their kids are going to be the ones who are going to perform the best on that metric. There is always this problem with you get rid of the metric because it is problematic. And then something else takes its place.
So just like I said earlier about getting rid of the SAT, getting rid of the SAT might get rid of the SAT's particular problems, but it's not going to get rid of the underlying reason of why we want the SAT in the first place. There are hippie schools that people go to that don't give grades. I mean, those exist.
It's difficult to draw conclusions about their educational efficacy because they are overwhelmingly drawing from an affluent student body. These are almost always well-to-do parents sending their kids to these things. But the particular A through F system is completely arbitrary.
And I agree that it's often quite annoying and dumb. Yeah, I just had a thought about grading too. I mean, I sort of feel the same way. And I feel like for me as a teacher, you know, it's a little bit like the point about comparing my children's intelligence.
Like, I feel that way about my students too. I don't want to be in the business of comparing my students. And in effect, grading forces me to do that. And there's this way in which like, what I'm trying to do is educate each student as well as I possibly can, right? And I might give them comments on their work and show them, here's what you did badly, here's what you can do better, right?
But grading, part of what feels like it's going on there is that my work teaching is being plugged into a larger system. right, that it has to serve. where outsiders are going to look at it and are going to sort of use my class to compare my students.
And I don't like that. I don't like that I have to be plugged into that system. So if somehow the grading were just a way of conveying information to each student about like how much better they did the last time, I would be totally fine with it.
But it is the fact that it implicitly in a background way instrumentalizes what's happening in my classroom. That's what makes me unhappy about it. Freddie, I want to give you the last word. Final thoughts. Yeah, I would just say that I think the most direct way I can summarize the central part of the book is simply this, which is that we have every time we have observed education, we have always observed a distribution of ability.
Some people do good. Some people don't do bad. The American policy apparatus has tried to defy that fact for decades.
In other words, the. think tanks and the media and the politicians act as though there's a world in the future where all students get straight A's. And the basis of my book is to argue, number one, that that's not going to happen, because there's always going to be distribution of ability. But number two, that suppose that happened, what would that tell us about the value of these children? What would that tell us about their inherent human value?
I would say that it wouldn't tell us anything at all of use. And instead, we should begin to be thinking about how we can engender in our kids creativity, compassion, kindness, depth, right? Receptivity to new information, all kinds of values that have a great deal of meaning and which we can treat as something to inculcate in our children, in our culture, once we get past our obsession with school. Thanks, Freddie. Thank you so much, Freddie, for being here and talking to us.
Thanks to everyone who came and please join us in a couple weeks for Should the People Rule? Bye, everyone. Good night.