Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
A wealth tax on the super-rich and “distributive justice” for the less well-off are certainly front-and-center issues in today’s roiling politics across the Western democracies. But what stirs passions even more is the struggle for social recognition, esteem, prestige, honor and respect. In other words, the perception of a sense of dignity, regardless of where people land in the pecking order.
In philosophical terms, Hegel long ago understood that, since identity is established inter-subjectively, the lack of recognition by others would lead to “a struggle for recognition” as a key driver of history.
This has been evident in recent years, not only in the left-behind white working-class precincts of the Rust Belt and rural plains of flyover states that gave rise to the MAGA movement, but in its symbiotic twin of race and gender identity politics that seized university campuses and other institutions in the heyday of woke politics.
One of the few contemporary philosophers who pays attention to this dynamic is Michael Sandel, the recipient of this year’s Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. For him, the counterpart to distributive justice is “contributive justice” — the positive recognition of a person’s contribution and role in society.
While I was at Harvard University recently to record a forthcoming “Futurology” podcast with Sandel on the “vulnerability of the liberal neutral state,” he also sat down for another discussion with Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu on behalf of Project Syndicate, where they plumbed this topic, among others. You can watch the video here
“A lot of the sense of grievance and anger and resentment abroad in the land that has fueled the populist backlash against elites is about contributive justice,” Sandel observed during their discussion. “It is about the sense among many working people that enormous rewards, but also prestige, goes to those who manage money, let’s say, rather than those who produce valuable goods” on the factory floor or provide the daily services that keep the economy humming. While the latter may be looked down upon as unambitious underachievers or even cultural deplorables, the former “sit atop the hierarchy of regard.”
For Sandel, “this undermines the dignity of work in the traditional sense because people want to feel that work is not only a way of making a living … but also a way of contributing to the common good, to the economy and winning respect for doing so.”
Briefly during the pandemic, he recounted, “we saw this when those of us holding meetings on Zoom and working from home couldn’t help but recognize how deeply we depend on workers we often overlooked — delivery workers, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, home health care providers, childcare workers. We celebrated them. Banners thanked them. It could have been a moment for a broader public debate about how to bring their pay and recognition into better alignment with the importance of their contribution.
“But the pandemic receded, and the moment was lost, and we went back to business as usual.”
To all this, Acemoglu raised the key question of how contributive justice might be registered.
“The difficulty I have with both social status and contributive justice is, obviously, society decides them, but in a very organic way. If we decide that the current meritocratic equilibrium really doesn’t give due status or sense of dignity via contributive justice to large swaths of the population, how can we change that — especially when the market is there as an anchor” for determining the social regard in which one is held? “But even if the market wasn’t such a strong anchor, how could anybody change that sort of sense of contributive justice, because it’s very much an organic process?”
Sandel replied: “You’re right, of course, that the market provides a kind of default, unreflective answer to the question of the value of this or that contribution to the economy and to the common good. The labor market delivers an answer every day.
“And it’s easy to slide into the assumption that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the economy,” at least under certain assumptions about competitive conditions. “But is that really true? Even the most ardent laissez-faire economist, on reflection, would be hard-pressed to defend the idea that the money people make is a true measure of the value of their contribution.
“Even the most ardent laissez-faire economist, on reflection, would be hard-pressed to defend the idea that the money people make is a true measure of the value of their contribution.”
“By that measure, we would have to say that the value of a successful casino mogul’s contribution to the economy and to the society is 5,000 times greater than that of a nurse or a school teacher, or for that matter, a physician or a hedge fund manager. Do we really think that that’s the case morally?”
Breaking Bad
By way of example, Sandel referenced the TV series “Breaking Bad.” The main character, Walter White, had two careers. He started out as a high school chemistry teacher, didn’t make much money and was struggling to make ends meet. He even had to wash cars after school.
“He changed jobs and became the best meth cook and dealer. He made millions more as the meth cook than he did as a high school teacher. But would anybody say the value of his contribution was far greater as a meth cook? No, because on reflection, we all are able to make qualitative moral judgments, maybe not precisely, and with some disagreement, over the value of this or that social role,” Sandel posited.
That may be true, but how do we collectively arrive at that judgment? Acemoglu asked.
“Collectively, we think firefighters contribute much more to society than their wages, but perhaps beggars and thieves don’t,” Acemoglu observed. “But here is the problem. Thanks to the influence of market ideology, much of society starts thinking that, actually, people’s incomes are a true reflection of their contribution.
“How can you and I be certain that we are right and the remaining 300 million people are wrong? We shouldn’t have that power ourselves.”
“What I’m suggesting,” Sandel replied, “is that we need to deliberate as democratic citizens about big questions of value, including contested ones, including how properly to value the contributions of this or that job. … Broadly speaking, are we confident that care workers in our society are properly valued by the market? …
“We could and should have public deliberation about how to bring their pay and recognition, if it falls short of what we consider to be socially important, into a better fit with what they do. Some may disagree over those valuations,” Sandel noted, but “what is the alternative? There is an alternative, and this is what we’ve done in recent decades: to outsource our moral judgments about the value of contributions to markets.” But markets can get things wrong, Sandel added.
“I think we have to recognize that markets measure some important outputs and important dimensions of contributions,” Acemoglu agreed, “but not all, and they can be misaligned, and they can be mistaken. But this is my dilemma. I completely agree with your emphasis on contributions, social status and how the market is not a perfect anchor.
“But I’m afraid that the next anchor we may end up with is the one that’s valued by intellectual elites.”
Acemoglu continued: “I’ve always found it very problematic that opera is viewed as a higher art form and should be heavily subsidized, though it is consumed by people who are very well educated and very wealthy already; whereas, say, heavy metal music, which came out of working-class pubs, isn’t subsidized and is taxed. That is a contributive judgment that intellectual elites make.”
“So I’m always afraid [about what will result] if we give the intellectual elites too much power to decide what is the right contribution.”
What Money Shouldn’t Buy
“I would not say that intellectual elites should be the arbiters, certainly not the sole arbiters of value,” Sandel argued.
“I think democratic citizens generally should be. We’ve been talking about care workers being underpaid and under-recognized. But let’s also look at the other end, the high end.
“Part of the debate, the political debate we should have, is whether the outsized rewards and recognition and deference and valorization accorded to those who sit astride these speculative financial industries are warranted. And there’s been a lot of deference, first to hedge fund managers and Wall Street, and more recently to tech entrepreneurs, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of esteem.
“This is an area that is ripe for public deliberation. Maybe one way of contending with the misallocation of social honor and esteem would be to change the rules.
“Maybe one way of contending with the misallocation of social honor and esteem would be to change the rules.”
“We speak of markets as an anchor, but the market consists of a whole bunch of rules that could be otherwise, and we would still have markets. The rules enable hedge fund managers or those on Wall Street to accumulate, not only enormous financial rewards, but also to enjoy the kind of prestige that goes with it, with being patrons of philanthropy in virtue of their rewards.
“But what should be the rules governing stock buybacks, for example? What should be the rules governing financial transactions of a speculative kind? Should they be taxed or should they not be? If we believe in the dignity of work, can we justify taxing labor at a higher rate than earnings from capital gains and dividends?
“These are all familiar policy issues that we typically debate from the standpoint of distributive justice. That’s important. But these debates also bear on and should be conducted with respect to contributive justice, honor, recognition and esteem.
“If we organized the market itself, even before we get to distributive justice, if we organize the market in ways that prohibited some of the practices that enable these outsized rewards — pre-distribution, some call it — then maybe the successful wouldn’t seem so Olympian in their success. Simply because what counts as the rules governing the market anchor could be revised with an eye to that allocation of reward and honor.”
Acemoglu chimed in: “Capitalism is a word I hate, not just because it’s highly ideological, but because it creates the impression that there is just one kind of market economy. But there are many different ways of organizing markets, and there are many different ways in which we can limit what are the marketed goods versus goods that are allocated through other mechanisms, including social status, family, community, etc. that are important determinants of both financial, economic inequality and status or contributive inequality.”
To which Sandel rejoined: “Part of what’s happened during the same decades we’ve been discussing, when the divide between winners and losers has widened, is that the role and reach of markets has expanded into aspects of life, including health and educational and personal relations and journalism and law and media, where it has corrosive effects and drives out important non-market values worth caring about.
“This is more than an argument about what money can’t buy. It is about the moral limits of markets, the idea that we’ve drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. A market economy is a tool, a valuable and effective tool for organizing productive activity, but a market society is a place where everything is up for sale, where markets have no bounds.
“So the case to be made is what money shouldn’t buy.”
