TEDxSwarthmore - Barry Schwartz - Why Justice Isn't Enough

so there's something really bad about being the last speaker one is that everyone's exhausted which is there's a good thing in that and that is you're too tired actually to pay attention to what I say so I can get away with murder the other is that it's hard for me to say something that you haven't already heard said probably better than I'm about to say it nonetheless I'm going to press on and I I just want to call your attention to a a couple of things that um I'm going to say that I think resonate

with a piece of what Donna Joe said earlier uh and a little bit of what Paul star said when he was talking about the healthc care debacle okay so what makes a good Society that's the theme of today's Gathering and I think that whatever else a good Society requires a good Society should be a just society and that's what I want to talk about I want to talk about what we think a just Society is I want to talk about whether a just Society is actually possible and if not then what the hell should we

do so what got me thinking about this is a former student of mine from years ago called because his daughter was applying to college and she wanted to apply to Swarthmore and she wanted to come to Swarthmore and so he wanted to know what her chances were so we're chatting and I said well tell me about her she went to a great School she's got terrific almost straight A grades she got wonderful College boards she um was in lots and lots of extracurricular activities including several uh service projects and I said I said boy you

really must be proud of her she's exactly the kind of student we want so I could see him smiling through the telephone wire and he said so does that mean you think she'll get in and I said oh no absolutely not she's exactly the kind of student we want but there are dozens and dozens hundreds of students exactly like her she should get in but so should they and they won't all get in and I could see the smile turn to to a frown and and he said what the hell are we supposed to do

and I want to say a little something about what the hell we are supposed to do faced with a circumstance like this we want college admissions to be just we want college admissions to be fair is it possible for college admissions to be just and fair and is there anything we can learn about the difficulties that we face in selective colleges that we can apply to the uh Society at large and especially to the economy so that's the plan for this two hours that remains so let's begin by asking asking what Justice is and I'll

be and I I'll begin by saying whatever it is it's not that we're all agreed this is not what we mean by Justice then what do we mean by Justice there is a research project being conducted by a bunch of psychologists that's worth your uh inquiring into you can find the them on online at your morals no Spacey yourmorals.org and what they do is they ask people for all over the world all kinds of questions that are meant to tap into their moral commitments their moral intuitions their values and so on they've now asked questions

of well over 100,000 people and with lots and lots of interesting uh findings and one of the things they ask about is what people think it mean what Justice Means and what they find is that the overwhelming majority of their respondents at least in the US think that Justice is Equity okay now we know what Justice Means so the question of course is what does equity mean and I think that the respondents think that Equity basically means to things it means first that people should deserve what they get and second that people should get what

they deserve if we live in a society in which people people deserve what they get and people get what they deserve we live in an equitable society and that means we live in a just Society so is it possible to live in a society where people deserve what they get and where people um uh get what they deserve the first sentence it seems to me is all about people Merit about Merit we should live in a meritocracy uh it's not right to get to terrific tickets to the Springsteen concert because your brother-in-law is a concert

promoter it isn't right to get terrific tickets to tedex at Swarthmore because your roommate is one of the organizers at tedex Swarthmore it's not right to get into Yale because your mother is a Yale Alum and your grandfather wrote a very big check it is a no-brainer that this these kinds of practices violate sentence number one people are getting something they don't deserve deserve but how about sentence number two should people get what they deserve um this it seems to me is also not terribly controversial we'd all like to live in a society where people

get what they deserve the trouble is it ain't possible you train as a software engineer and you're a very competent software engineer and all you want is a job at Microsoft or Google or Facebook along with 150 million other perfectly competently trained software engineers and there won't be a job for each and every one of you just as there is not a place in colleges like Swarthmore for each and every person who deserves to go to a school like Swarthmore so Justice if this is what you mean by Justice is simply not possible and if

that's true the question that we need to ask is what other values can we appeal to if we are interested in creating a good or at least a better Society if we can't simply say that what we want in a society is that it be just well let's think a little bit more about academic Justice do people deserve what they get the people who get into swor and Harvard and Princeton and Yale and you know the ones um people just like you do they do you deserve it do you deserve to be here well the

answer is yeah you do uh with a couple of exceptions of course I can at least say that at swore being a good quarterback is not an exception um given how selective these institutions are admitting less than one in 10 applicants and given how applicants self- select I think it is reasonable to assume that virtually every single person who comes to a school like this deserves to be here uh you know there's an occasional admissions mistake but by and large we can say that people deserve what they get but do people get what they deserve

well here all I can say is you must be kidding in fact I just found out three days ago that the daughter of this former student and friend of mine is on the waiting list now if the admissions people want to do something about it let me know and I'll I'll actually tell you the name of this person um the trouble is that being excellent is just not good enough you have to be more excellent than your friend and his friend and her friend and everybody's friend and what that does as you probably have experienced

is that it induces people to find ways to game the system so that they can look better to the people who are judging them gain the system how take SAT prep courses for a drillion dollar take the SATs 100 times have a professional edit your college essay there are lots and lot do all kinds of extracurricular activities that you have no interest in whatsoever because you imagine that they will look good to somebody who's reading your folder we all know how to game the system many of you have done it uh admissions people of course

think they can see right through it so here's one example of the pressure that this puts on you starting even as a nursery school kid and I know that some of your parents have at least thought that if they didn't say it or this so the question is what are we supposed to do how do you solve the problem that there are far more people who deserve to be in places like Swarthmore than can fit do we just throw up our hands do we keep on ratcheting up the standards convinced that this is the this

at least preserves a certain amount of justice and fairness even if it creates a kind of unhealthy competition among uh and pressure among high school students we seem to be stuck well actually we're not stuck and I solved this problem about a decade ago I did and I proposed the solution and there isn't a person on Earth who took me seriously especially not the admissions Folks at Swarthmore here's the way you it doesn't really solve the problem here's the way you amarate it it go it goes a long way here's how you amarate the problem

you make a decision about every applicant this applicant is good enough or not with standards of good enough varying depending on the school you're honest about that then you take all of the good enough applicants which in the case of schwar is probably five or six times as many people as we normally admit you take all of their name games you put them into a great big hat and then you admit people at [Applause] random so now all I have to do is wait until one of you who's applauding becomes the admissions director someplace and

we can actually try this now this doesn't solve the problem that everyone uh gets what they deserve nothing can solve that problem but there are benefits to it one benefit is that it will reveal the structural Injustice that currently EX exists in society for what it is we can't delude ourselves into thinking that the system is just when we know it is a coin flip that determines or a crapshoot that determines uh who gets in and who doesn't second this system is more just than the current system because the gaming of the system is disproportionately

used and disproportionately used effectively by rich people poor people can't take SAT prep courses 100 uh and take the SATs 100 times affluent people game the system effectively and there's actually evidence that the wealth distribution among students at places like Swarthmore has been increasingly distorted in the last 20 years in exactly the same way that the wealth distribution in American Society at large has this is not an accident and it's not only because middle class people can't afford for their kids to come is that middle class people's kids don't get in as much as they

should third it will take an enormous amount of pressure of high school kids and this I think will actually result in better students not worse ones because they can devote their time to doing the things they actually care about most significant and this Echoes something that Donna Joe said I think this is what's most important it will make Salient to each of us just how important luck is to the outcomes that matter in life we kid ourselves into thinking that what we get we earned and thus what we get we're entitled to and any one

who doesn't get what we got doesn't deserve to have what we have if you appreciate the role of luck in your own outcomes I think it will create much more empathy on your part toward people who are less lucky it will create an increased inclination to reach out and help people who were less lucky it will increase your desire to make sure that even the losers in this Lottery can at least get a good education somewhere now of course you all deserve your success but so do lots of other people who haven't and won't have

it justice is an important value but it is not the only important value Community solidarity compassion these are also important values and if we appreciate the limits of Justice it may induce us to cultivate uh these other values in ourselves and it may induce the instit tions within which we we work like say Swarthmore College to cultivate these values in the students that they train if people appreciated how much luck uh res influenced the outcomes of their own lives uh there might be fewer students getting degrees from ivy league institutions who went on to become

investment bankers which in my humble opinion is the most criminal waste of educational resources I could possibly imagine so this is how we fix College what do we do about the economy I can't think of Lottery Solutions to the economy do people deserve what they get in the economy now I'm a cynical is the next one about this of course not everyone who gets a lot deserves it but I do think that the number of undeserving Rich the number of undeserving successful people is smaller now than probably any time in our history because of the

unbelievable growth of global competition it is much much harder to lurk in the shadows as a mediocre or Worse provider of goods and services and survive competition will drive you out so I think it is probably mostly true that the people who succeed in the economy deserve what they get do people get what they deserve ha now now I think that there are several factors that began to be ushered in by the Reagan fer Revolution 30 years ago that have made this problem worse so let me put these back up these two sentences this problem

is worse now than it used to be but even though it's worse like selectivity like selective College admissions it is a problem that cannot be eliminated working hard and playing by the rules is simply no guarantee of any anything so one way one thing you can conclude from that is that my two sentences don't really capture what Justice should mean maybe Justice should mean that everyone who works hard in place by the rules gets to live a decent life that's possible but do you think that everyone who play who participates on a track team should

get a medal even after fifth grade right a point is reached where only the winners get medals and capitalism is like track the rewards go to the winners so unless you're prepared to abandon capitalism alt together and I know probably some of you are we will have to will have to appeal to values other than Justice when it comes to creating a good Society we should ask ourselves what responsibilities we have to other people what responsibilities do we have to stakeholders when a company moves offshore what responsibilities do we have to families that are thrown

into chaos because a family member has a serious illness and it is easier to ask ourselves questions like this in an openhearted way when we appreciate that financial success in our own life is a lot like getting into Harvard that a lot of deserving people will fail and the ones who succeed are lucky Elizabeth Warren a hero of mine who's now running for the senate in Massachusetts gave a speech that attracted an enormous amount of attention a few months ago and what she took on in that speech was the notion of the self-made person of

course that's not the actual expression but we live in a politically correct Community the self-made man she said is a myth there ain't no such thing we all owe debts of various kind to various people and various social institutions and so we ought to pay back our debts and be willing to see some of our success redistributed in various ways to support the society that's made our success possible I think she's completely right about that I think that's completely true but that's not my point my point is a little different I don't think that Community

solidarity and compassion and Care are about paying off a debt I don't think that parents are paying off a debt when they nurture their children and so what I have in mind is that we need to cultivate values of the kind that have us looking at our relations to other people more in the way that parents look at their relations to their children than in the way we've been accustomed to uh looking at our relations to other people and I think again this gets a lot easier if you appreciate the role of luck in everybody's

life so some of you may not have noticed but seems to be a presidential election campaign happening this is a year every four years when we have a real chance to ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be u and sometimes by accident that question actually is being asked in the current campaign do we want to continue to live under the fiction that people deserve what they get and people get what they deserve or do we want to acknowledge that American society is not remotely just in this sense and open ourselves up to

other values that will on the one hand face reality and on the other hand make us more Humane as a people thank you