Hi, it's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Today, a talk about the dark side of meritocracy.

You know, the idea that the cream always rises to the top. Well, philosopher Michael Sandell says the truth is the attitudes about winners deserving their wins and losers deserving their losses is responsible

for the worst of our political divides. In his TED 2020 talk, he proposes what we should rethink

in order to give everyone more opportunity. Here's a question we should all be asking.

What went wrong?

Not just with the pandemic, but with our civic life.

What brought us to this polarized, rancorous political moment?

In recent decades, the divide between winners and losers has been deepening, poisoning our politics,

setting us apart. This divide is partly about inequality, but it's also about the attitudes toward winning and losing that have come with it. Those who landed on top came to believe that their

success was their own doing, a measure of their merit, and that those who lost out had no one to

blame but themselves. This way of thinking about success arises from a seemingly attractive principle.

If everyone has an equal chance, the winners deserve their winnings.

This is the heart of the meritocratic ideal.

In practice, of course, we fall far short. Not everybody has an equal chance to rise.

Children born to poor families tend to stay poor when they grow up. Affluent parents are able to

pass their advantages onto to their kids.

At Ivy League universities, for example,

there are more students from the top 1% than from the entire bottom half of the country combined.

But the problem isn't only that we fail to live up to the meritocratic principles we proclaim.

The ideal itself is flawed. It has a dark side.

Meritocracy is corrosive of the common good.

It leads to hubris among the winners

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