What a brilliant and necessary deconstruction of "the American dream" and how it turns the joy of effort I to a zero sum competition. This book should be required reading for politicians and corporate executives.

I had to read this for uni and I've tried twice now and I'm just not interested.

Last year, I had the incredible opportunity to hear Michael Sandel speak about his book The Tyranny of Merit, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. This thought-provoking book brilliantly unpacks the complexities of our current societal landscape, delving into the intertwined issues of populism, globalisation, and meritocracy. Sandel's analysis is both incisive and accessible, making it a must-read for anyone trying to understand the forces shaping our world today.

As someone deeply interested in Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB), The Tyranny of Merit provided me with a profound new perspective on privilege. Sandel challenges the conventional wisdom around meritocracy, revealing how it can often reinforce inequality rather than reduce it. This book has changed the way I think about success, privilege, and the social contract. It’s an eye-opener and essential reading for anyone who wants to engage critically with the world around them.

Reading this book captured so many of the thoughts I have had on the problems of society but offered something that wasn't remedial, like distribution of wealth or equality of opportunity, but instead tackles the fundamental issues of why those problems exist in the first place. The book starts with exploring meritocracy and how it has contributed to an undervalued and forgotten underclass who have been given the response of "you only have yourself to blame" for their struggles and giving rise to the far right populism we see today. It then goes on to discuss how we value work and how the market determines the value of a person's worth and wage, based on maximising the welfare of consumers. Sandel challenges this in his argument for a system of recognition and what humans contribute to the "common good". This means focusing on equality of condition instead of equality of opportunity. There were so many other brilliant discussions and ideas that no review here would successfully capture. A brilliant, well-written, easy to follow book, I would recommend this to anyone willing to challenge their notion that society should reward those who work hard and do well.

It's a good book that discusses different angles of meritocracy and how it could be corrosive to the common good through the lens of statistics, politics, philosophy. The arguments made are nuanced and comprehensively backed up by statistics and morality.

It is largely well-written. However, since the author references so many sources and jumps back and forth between these, I find it a bit difficult at times to keep track of the main point being argued for in a given section. It also sometime feels like the same point is being repeated over and over again but in a different flavour (for example, on the rhetoric of rising).

It's still overall a great book, but does take a bit more effort to read than other books of the same category because of the above reasons.