Here are the topic questions for the book discussion for June 5, 2022
1. Is this a
controversial statement?
Page: 208 And it is in our role as producers, not consumers, that we contribute
to the common good and win recognition for doing so.
2. Did he
convince you that changes need to be made to college admission policies?
3. Do you have
stories to tell about the stress of getting into college and maintaining
good grades?
4. He mentions
several times the importance of job training. Did he convince you?
5. Besides job
training, what else helps job mobility?
6. Is globalization
one of the causes for the demise of our sense of community?
7. How much did
the Bush era bail out of banks fuel the anger of the populist movement?
8. Another theme
of the book is that we need to let all the voices be heard. Did he
convince you that we need to hear from the sanitation workers as well as the PhD
graduates?
9. Related to question #8 is a discussion about the value
of diversity.
10. Have we lost
our sense of community?
11. Did he
convince you that we can’t rely on markets to make the best decisions?
12. Did he
convince you that income inequality was a problem?
13. He discusses
the dignity of work. Did he convince you to change
the way you speak about workers—quit grading one as more valuable than another?
14. Let’s discuss the tyranny of merit. Did he convince you?
16.,
Do you think he explained why autocratic figures seem to be accepted by
the populist movements? Is it tied to nationalism and xenophobia as in other
fascist countries?
17. Do you
agree Trump’s populism was fake?
〰
That's the short version.
Here's the long version
1. Is this a controversial statement?
Page: 208 And it is in our role as producers, not consumers, that we contribute to the common good and win recognition for doing so.
2. Did he convince you that changes need to be made to college admission policies?
Page: 8 In all, Singer took in $25 million over eight years running his college admissions scam. The admissions scandal provoked universal outrage.
Page: 99 Governing well requires practical wisdom and civic virtue—an ability to deliberate about the common good and to pursue it effectively. But neither of these capacities is developed very well in most universities today, even those with the highest reputations.
Page: 99 And recent historical experience suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment, which involves moral character as well as insight, and the ability to score well on standardized tests and win admission to elite universities.
Page: 164 He would be surprised to learn that high school grades are better than SAT scores at identifying low-income students who are likely to succeed in college.
Page: 176 All told, forty-six colleges and universities now accept fewer than 20 percent of applicants.
3. Do you have stories to tell about the stress of getting into college and maintaining good grades?
Page: 181 Perfectionism is the emblematic meritocratic malady. At a time when young people are relentlessly “sorted, sifted, and ranked by schools, universities, and the workplace, neoliberal meritocracy places a strong need to strive, perform, and achieve at the center of modern life.”
Page: 183 cheating is not the only manifestation of grade obsession.
4. He mentions several times the importance of job training. Did he convince you?
Page: 19 Their anxieties are best addressed by job-training programs and other measures to help them adapt to the imperatives of global and technological change.
5. Besides job training, what else helps job mobility?
Page: 63 For the center-left liberals, equality of opportunity required more than the absence of discrimination; it also required access to education, health care, child care, and other services that enable people to compete effectively in the labor market.
Page: 129 Rawls would have the winners share their winnings with those less fortunate than themselves.
6. Is globalization one of the causes for the demise of our sense of community?
Page: 17 a version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary citizens feeling disempowered.
Page: 20 The market-driven version of globalization brought growing inequality. It also devalued national identities and allegiances.
Page: 108 Obama conceded that proponents of globalization “did not adapt quickly enough to the fact that there were people being left behind.”
Page: 197 Although the age of globalization brought rich rewards to the well-credentialed, it did nothing for most ordinary workers.
Page: 197 Productivity increased, but workers reaped a smaller and smaller share of what they produced, while executives and shareholders captured a larger share.
Page: 207 For example, the increased profits of companies and individuals who gain from globalization could be taxed to strengthen the social safety net and to provide income support or job retraining for displaced workers.
7. How much did the Bush era bail out of banks fuel the anger of the populist movement?
Page: 44 Risky and greedy behavior by Wall Street banks had brought the global economy to the brink of meltdown, requiring a massive taxpayer bailout.
Page: 90 Insisting on a Wall Street–friendly response to the financial crisis, they bailed out the banks without holding them to account,
8. Another theme of the book is that we need to let all the voices be heard. Did he convince you that we need to hear from the sanitation workers as well as the college professors?
Page: 20 technocratic in the sense that it drains public discourse
Page: 20 Meanwhile, the technocratic approach to governance treated many public questions as matters of technical expertise beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. This narrowed the scope of democratic argument, hollowed out the terms of public discourse, and produced a growing sense of disempowerment.
Page: 73 third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary citizens. Page: 105 allowing citizens to debate and decide what policies to enact.
Page: 106 awaken in the public a keener sense of the common good .
Page: 112 Questions about power, morality, authority, and trust are questions for democratic citizens.
Page: 192 An inspiring example is the demand made by the Knights of Labor, one of America’s first major labor unions, for reading rooms in factories, so that workers could inform themselves about public affairs.
9. Related to question #8 is a discussion about the value of diversity.
Page: 163 others reply that the ability to bring distinctive life experiences and perspectives to the classroom and the wider society is a merit relevant to a university’s mission. But the fact that our debates about college admissions are typically arguments about merit testifies to the hold of meritocratic ideals.
10. Have we lost our sense of community?
Page: 3 The country was not morally prepared for the pandemic. Amid the partisan rancor and mistrust came a plague that demanded the kind of solidarity few societies can summon except in times of war. Page: 6 Any hope of renewing our moral and civic life depends on understanding how, over the past four decades, our social bonds and respect for one another came unraveled.
Page: 59 The more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault.
Page: 75 If, however, the most fortunate members of society are indebted for their success—to good luck or God’s grace or the community’s support—then the moral case for sharing one another’s fate is stronger.
Page: 222 Global supply chains, capital flows, and the cosmopolitan identities they fostered made us less reliant on our fellow citizens, less grateful for the work they do, and less open to the claims of solidarity.
Page: 208 This cannot be achieved through economic activity alone. It requires deliberating with our fellow citizens about how to bring about a just and good society, one that cultivates civic virtue and enables us to reason together about the purposes worthy of our political community.
11. Did he convince you that we can’t rely on markets to make the best decisions?
Page: 20 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had argued that government was the problem and that markets were the solution.
Page: 136 he does not consider the possibility that the value of a person’s contribution to society could be something other than his or her market value.
Page: 138 As Knight points out, meeting market demand is not necessarily the same thing as making a truly valuable contribution to society.
Page: 139 Caring for people’s health is morally more important than catering to their desire to play slot machines.
Page: 140 Satisfying consumer demand is not valuable in itself; its value depends, case by case, on the moral status of the ends it serves.
Page: 213 Only an ardent libertarian would insist that the wealthy casino magnate’s contribution to society is a thousand times more valuable than that of a pediatrician. The pandemic of 2020 prompted many to reflect, at least fleetingly, on the importance of the work performed by grocery store clerks, delivery workers, home care providers, and other essential but modestly paid workers. In a market society, however, it is hard to resist the tendency to confuse the money we make with the value of our contribution to the common good.
12. Did he convince you that income inequality was a problem?
Page: 219 Often, however, moral judgments are implicit in seemingly value-neutral policies. For example, why should income from capital gains be taxed at a lower rate than income from labor?
Page: 22 Today, the richest 1 percent of Americans make more than the bottom half combined.|
Page: 73 When the richest 1 percent take in more than the combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population, when the median income stagnates for forty years, the idea that effort and hard work will carry you far begins to ring hollow.
Page 119 paraphrased: Critics of inequality support the inheritance taxes. Those that want to abolish the inheritance tax are endorsing hereditary privilege.
Page: 129 Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.”
Page: 130 This would depend on showing that we are indebted in various ways to the community that makes our success possible and therefore obligated to contribute to its common good.
Page: 141 In a just society, those who work hard and play by the rules are entitled to what they earn.
13. He discusses the dignity of work. Did he convince you enough that you might change the way you speak of workers—quit grading one as more valuable than another?
Page: 73 Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college;
Page: 103 Piketty speculates that the transformation of left parties from worker parties into parties of intellectual and professional elites may explain why they have not responded to the rising inequality of recent decades.
Page: 120 The populist protest against meritocratic elites is not only about fairness but also about social esteem.
Page: 144 But this is not the only way of interpreting the populist backlash against elites. The hubristic attitudes toward success that invite this backlash could well be fueled by the sense of entitlement that Rawls’s philosophy affirms, even as it rejects moral desert.
Page: 218 A political agenda that recognizes the dignity of work would use the tax system to reconfigure the economy of esteem by discouraging speculation and honoring productive labor.
Page: 210 One day our society will come to respect the sanitation workers if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.
Page: 198 Work is both economic and cultural. It is a way of making a living and also a source of social recognition and esteem.
14. The part of the book I had the most problem with was the tyranny of merit. What about you?
Page: 80 One of the most galling features of meritocratic hubris is its credentialism.
Page: 84 When senators questioned him about the alleged drunken sexual assault, describing how hard he worked during high school,
Page: 90 Having well-educated people run the government is generally desirable, provided they possess sound judgment and a sympathetic understanding of working people’s lives—what Aristotle called practical wisdom and civic virtue.
Page: 129 Some defenders of meritocracy worry that the only alternative to equality of opportunity is equality of result, a kind of leveling equality that would handicap the gifted to prevent them from gaining a competitive edge.
15. I’d like to rant about surveys that ask questions to elicit the answers they want than truly wanting to know answers.
Page: 74 As with all such surveys, the attitudes people express depend on how the question is framed.
16. Do you think he explained why autocratic figures seem to be accepted by the populist movements? Is it tied to nationalism and xenophobia as in other fascist countries?
Page: 17 The danger can be seen in rising xenophobia and growing public support for autocratic figures who test the limits of democratic norms.
Page: 18 This diagnosis of injured social status highlights the ugly features of populist sentiment—the nativism, misogyny, and racism voiced by Trump and other nationalistic populists.
Page: 71 But many working-class supporters of Trump, Brexit, and populist parties in other countries seemed less interested in promises of upward mobility than in reassertions of national sovereignty, identity, and pride.
Page: 72 Not all populist grievances against the established order were reactions against meritocratic hubris. Some were entangled with xenophobia, racism, and hostility to multiculturalism.
17. Do you agree Trump’s populism was fake?
Page 27; From the statepoint of economic fairness, Trump’s populism was fake. He proposed a health plan that would have cut health care for many working-class Americans and enacted a tax bill that heaped tax cuts on the wealthy.
Page: 101 No wonder Trump proclaimed, celebrating one of his early primary victories, “I love the poorly educated!”
Page: 199 Working-class men without a college degree voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.
Note: It seems clear that the unscrupulous are making blacks and gays the enemy to create discord so the working class doesn’t rebel against the rich
Page: 198 Since 2016, pundits and scholars have debated the source of populist discontent.
18. Other quotes to be discusses if we have time
Page: 108
Incentivizing people to act responsibly vs persuading them by a convincing argument
Page: 109
That the slogan implicitly relegates science to the realm of faith seems not to have diminished its popularity.
