Let’s focus instead, Sandel writes, on the inequity that creeps in without breaking any rules.

What, he wonders, if the highly educated harden into a hereditary aristocracy? And what if this occurs under a flag of fairness, during a time when B.A.s and higher degrees are ever more closely tied to income and prestige? Let’s set aside the case of rich parents who bribe corrupt officials or donate huge sums to get their child into a good college. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Sydney Opera House in Australia and a 14,000-seat outdoor stadium in Seoul, South Korea. Some have called Sandel a “rock star moralist.” Without guitar or shiny shirt, the soft-toned but hard-hitting Harvard philosophy professor has packed St. What do grades and degrees tell us, Sandel asks, about the widening gap between rich and poor, proud and humiliated, trusting and suspicious, opponent and devotee of Donald Trump? “The Tyranny of Merit” is like a brilliant response to that misguided but well-meaning math teacher from the viewpoint, as it were, of a kid in some back-row seat of any classroom in a Rust Belt, prairie town or inner-city school in America. “I typically shuttled between the second desk and the fourth or fifth,” Sandel recalls, and at age 14, “I thought this was how school worked.” As their G.P.A.s shifted with the dramatically announced results of every quiz, so did the seating. Sandel’s teacher seated students in precise order according to their grades. In an eighth-grade math class at Pacific Palisades junior high in the late 1960s, Michael J. THE TYRANNY OF MERIT What’s Become of the Common Good? By Michael J.

The tyranny of meritocracy