Letting go of the myth

Something I wrote in a column last week made people angry.

I called meritocracy a myth. From where I sit, having spent decades now writing about the unluckiest Americans, that is blindingly obvious. In this country, the cream doesn’t always rise to the top.

Hard work doesn’t pay off for millions of people who bust their guts trying to make ends meet. Most of the folks who struggle are where they are not because of anything they did or did not do, but because of choices made by others long before they were born.

But some people reacted as if I’d stood up in church and said God does not exist. Questioning meritocracy leads us straight to communism went one of the arguments. I think?

Anyway, for all of you believers out there, I have a book to recommend. It’s called “The Myth That Made Us.” It’s by

Jeff Fuhrer, an economist and former director of research at the Federal Reserve of Boston, and it’s really good.

In it, he examines some of our sacred truths: That success goes to those who work hard; that we live in a land of opportunity, and in a meritocracy where individual effort is appropriately rewarded; that we should keep government out of the way and let markets work their magic; that racism never existed, or no longer affects outcomes for people of color.

Fuhrer, now a fellow at the Eastern Bank Foundation, used to buy into parts of that myth himself. But then, some 15 years ago, the Fed in Boston began looking closely at what was going on in former industrial cities in Massachusetts, and he got the chance to have long conversations with many people who were doing everything they were supposed to but were still struggling.

“A good 40 percent of the population are not making it,” Fuhrer said in an interview. “They’re not able to afford basic necessities, and the more we let this fester the more we will see a fractured society, and that can lead to problems we don’t want to contemplate.”

Fuhrer lays out our predicament: This country is home to increasing income inequality, a massive wealth gap, lousy wages for many jobs, and vastly lopsided outcomes when it comes to housing, health care, education, criminal justice, and banking.

All of that is easy to explain if you view poor people as being somehow to blame for their predicaments, if you believe everybody gets equal opportunities, and that the market, not government, is the best vehicle through which to run a society.

The myth absolves everybody else of responsibility for fixing inequality.

“We have a ready-made philosophy to rationalize our hard-heartedness and stinginess,” Fuhrer writes, “to say nothing of outright racism.”

His book dismantles that philosophy. For example, he reexamines Horatio Alger’s Gilded Age stories to show they were actually morality plays in which virtuous protagonists were rewarded, not for hard work and bootstrapping, but by divine intervention and wealthy benefactors.

He traces the many ways in which African Americans were excluded from the New Deal, the GI Bill, labor protections, and housing programs that benefited mostly white Americans, allowing them to build generational wealth while other families have struggled.

And he turns over the ways in which the profit motive has become a kind of religion that allows some companies to send their workers home without enough money to live on, while corporations maximize shareholder value and avoid their fair share of taxes.

The book is not an argument against capitalism, but for a system that works for everybody. Getting there means putting an end to blaming people who struggle and making it easier for them to succeed, with better access to early childhood education, minimum wage increases, health care, more affordable child care, and paid family leave. He also advocates, convincingly, for sizable baby bonds that could be used for education or housing and for reparations to correct centuries of racial injustice.

Many will balk at those last two. Maybe we’ll get there one day. But there are so many ways we can be better right now.

It starts with recognizing our peculiarly American mythology for what it is: A comfort, and a convenient excuse.