(Brief)Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

Preface:   The Detailed review of Sandel (2020) in the book by this title (and the later 2021 version Can We Find the Common Good) is done in “academic prose” akin to a journal paper.  The Brief review here was done with help from ChatGPT-5.6 Sol.  A Substack version is also available. So, in that AI is quite capable at integration, not thinking, the following is a review by ThinkingMe&IntegratorChat.  Also, this essay is not just a Review of Sandel (2020). It is also about  using Dual Interest Theory (DIT) in the search for a meritocratic liberalism that serves the individual good while also ensuring the common good. It is all about Empathy Merit. What think?

Sandel’s Problem and the DIT Lens

Michael Sandel asks what has happened to the common good in a society organized ever more strongly around merit. His target is not merit in the ordinary sense of wanting a competent plumber, physician, teacher, engineer, or public official. Merit in that limited sense is useful and often essential. The problem arises when a merit-based allocation system becomes a moral theory: winners come to believe that talent and effort make their success deserved, while those who do not rise are treated as responsible for their position. The result is what Sandel calls the tyranny of merit—hubris at the top, humiliation and resentment below, and an erosion of solidarity across the entire community. This review reads that argument through Dual Interest Theory (DIT), which makes the common-good problem analytically explicit. In DIT terms, meritocracy becomes tyrannical when ego-based self-interest and the individual good crowd out empathy-based shared other-interest and the common good.

DIT treats self-interest&other-interest, individual&common good, incentive&ethic, and profane&sacred as jointly operant rather than separable. The point is not to suppress merit, incentives, talent, effort, markets, or individual liberty. It is to temper them. A viable liberal order must enable individuals to develop talent, work hard, innovate, and gain from doing so while also recognizing that success depends on fortuitous circumstance, inherited capacities, institutions, infrastructure, other people, and a community that makes individual achievement possible. Sandel repeatedly reaches toward this conclusion without an explicit analytical model. DIT supplies the model: individual good is represented by path 0G, common good by path 0M, and a workable balance by path 0Z. Justice therefore cannot be reduced to maximizing one side and compensating for the damage afterward; it requires finding the good “&” balance in the first place.

Figures 1 and 2 represent the DIT lens used throughout the review. Path 0G in Figure 1 represents the strong pull of ego-based self-interest, material reward, and merit-oriented incentive. Path 0M in Figur2 2 represents the shared other-interest, moral sentiment, and common good. Path 0Z in both Figures is not a midpoint imposed from outside; it is the emergent balance in which each side conditions the other.

In Sandel’s language, one can think of the same problem in terms of  merit&grace. Merit matters on path 0G matters, but grace on path 0M reminds the winner that talent, effort, circumstance, social support, and what the community happens to value are never wholly self-created. In DIT terms, empathy—especially cognitive empathy brought into moral judgment—is what makes that tempering possible. Balance in the jointly operant merit&grace  must be struck on path 0Z.

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Figure 2 complements Figure 1 by showing the payoff space in which profane F (the money-valued, material, and merit side) is considered jointly with sacred S (the non-money-valued, ethical and grace side). The point is not a price cannot be attached to every moral good. Somethings are priceless, and grace one of them.

So, it is quite the opposite: value O often remains incommensurable with price P. The Other Forum gives such value a place to enter judgment and then influence the Market Forum. This is exactly the place where Sandel’s common-good argument fits DIT: Market value related to merit alone cannot decide the social meaning of work, desert, dignity, or contribution. It cannot achieve grace.

Why Merit Turns Tyrannical

So, Sandel’s central diagnosis is moral and cultural as much as economic. Rising inequality in income, wealth and the power it buys matters, but resentment cannot be explained by stagnant wages alone. The deeper injury is loss of recognition, dignity, and membership in a shared project. Workers who are told that anyone can rise if they acquire the right credentials such as a college degree and work hard enough are also being told something harsher: If they do not rise, the failure is theirs. Meritocracy therefore adds insult to inequality.

Winning encourages self-congratulation; losing becomes evidence of personal inadequacy. The meritocratic ethic “sanctifies the winners and denigrates the losers” (p. 42). Through the DIT lens, the imbalance is clear: path 0G becomes not merely a route to individual gain but a moral verdict, while path 0M—the shared ground on which people recognize one another as members of the same community—shrinks from view.

It helps explain Sandel’s account of populist discontent. He does not deny that immigration, cultural change, racial attitudes, globalization, and rapid technological disruption matter. His contention is that mainstream accounts often miss the humiliation generated when highly credentialed elites treat people lower on the meritocratic ladder as backward, uninformed, or simply unsuccessful. The grievance is therefore partly about social esteem. A politics that answers only with job training, more education, better information, or a promise of future mobility does not reach the moral wound. It may even deepen it by repeating the message that the individual must become more like the people already at the top.

DIT clarifies why this is politically unstable: When the common-good path 0M is neglected, people lose the sense that they are participants in a joint enterprise. Demagogues can then exploit the resulting resentment by promising to restore recognition --- or, even more commonly for said types, promise retribution and revenge --- even when demagogue based policies do little to alter the underlying distribution of dignity, power, or wealth.

Sandel’s history of merit sharpens the point. The old theological dispute between merit and grace becomes a secular dispute about whether success is earned or in important part gifted. The Protestant work ethic began with a tension between self-help and grace, but Sandel argues that merit eventually drove out grace; mastery and self-making displaced gratitude and humility (p. 41).

Modern meritocracy retains the moral logic even after God is removed: Success testifies to virtue, while failure appears deserved. DIT reads this as the profane swallowing the sacred. What should be one dimension of life—the use of talent and effort to pursue individual good—comes to define moral worth itself. The corrective is not anti-merit. It is the jointly operantt merit&grace: Use the incentive, and the merit in reacting to it, but temper the arrogance of self-love by acknowledging luck, dependence, shared institutions, and the standing of the other.

The Rhetoric of Rising, Credentialism, and the Sorting Machine

The “rhetoric of rising” --- the notion of mobility, the American Dream in motion --- is one of Sandel’s most effective formulations. For decades, politicians across the center-right and center-left have offered equality of opportunity and upward mobility as the principal answer to inequality: Work hard, play by the rules, get educated, and rise as far as your talents will take you. The promise sounds generous because it rejects hereditary aristocracy. Yet it does not ask whether the rungs of the ladder have become too far apart, whether the jobs left on the lower rungs carry adequate pay and social esteem, or whether everyone must rise in order to live with dignity. A society can be perfectly mobile in theory and still be badly unequal. Indeed, a perfected meritocracy can become more psychologically severe because it tells those who remain below that the sorting was fair and their rank therefore reflects their worth.

Credentialism intensifies the tendency. Higher education came to be presented as the universal solution to wage stagnation, deindustrialization, and globalization. The political message became: The economy is changing; therefore acquire more schooling and compete on better terms. Sandel’s objection is not to education itself. It is to turning the college degree into a moral and political sorting device. Most citizens do not hold four-year degrees, yet a growing share of political and professional authority is exercised by the people who do. Practical wisdom, civic virtue, judgment, skill, and contribution to the common good do not map neatly onto academic credentials. When the credentialed begin to equate “smart” with worthy and “uneducated” with deficient, meritocratic sorting migrates from labor markets into social status and democratic life.

The university admissions system becomes Sandel’s “sorting machine.” Elite colleges promise mobility but are deeply shaped by family income, tutoring, test preparation, legacy advantages, and the capacity of already successful families to organize childhood around admission. The result can injure both sides. The people sorted out receive a humiliating verdict. The people sorted in face relentless striving, perfectionism, anxiety, and the temptation to believe that admission proves deservingness. Sandel therefore proposes ideas such as a lottery among qualified applicants, greater support for community colleges, technical and vocational education, and a broader educational mission oriented toward morally reflective citizenship rather than ranking alone.

The DIT interpretation is straightforward: Education should develop the individual on path 0G while also developing the capacity to reason about and contribute to path 0M. The social sciences and especially the humanities are essential, in order to assure a civic education about the  essential role of the common good. In effect. both cognitive and affective empathy must be nudged, brought into play with moral and ethical judgment: It is about stirring talk, talk, and deliberation  about the content of the shared with the other-interest, the content of the common good. Such educational considerations about what is shared belong in the educational production function just as surely as skills and credentials.

Technocracy, Markets, and the Missing Other Forum

Meritocracy is reinforced, in Sandel’s account, by technocracy and market-friendly globalization. Since the 1980s, both conservative and liberal politics increasingly treated the Market Forum as the main location for solving social problems. Government was often asked to imitate the market --- even moving to unjustified privatization of public function ---  and policy arguments were framed as matters of efficiency, incentives, expertise, and “smart” design. Sandel’s criticism is not that facts or expertise are irrelevant. His point is that public questions are rarely technical questions only. Health care, labor policy, excessive loading of the atmosphere potentially leading to human induced climate change, taxation, trade, education, and financial regulation all involve judgments about what citizens owe one another and what kinds of contribution a society wishes to honor. A technocratic vocabulary can make such moral questions disappear.

DIT gives the problem a precise form. The Market Forum is very good at evolving money-valued price P, but money-valued price P is not identical to  non-money value O, the moral, civic, environmental, and social value that citizens recognize in Other Forums. A schoolteacher, nurse, caregiver, tradesperson, parent, conservation worker, or public servant may generate substantial value O while both producing and receiving relatively modest price P. Conversely, a speculative financial activity can generate high private income while contributing little—or even negatively—to the common good. The mistake is to treat market reward as a complete measure of social contribution. Sandel’s distinction between the consumerist and civic conceptions of the common good maps directly onto DIT’s Market&Other Forum framing. A liberal, meritocratic order needs both. The market supplies decentralized information and incentives; democratic, civic, professional, familial, and community forums supply the moral judgment and find the ethical ground that markets cannot generate by themselves.

It is why DIT resists the simple market vs government framing, because is really about a joint effort in market&government.   Sandel shows how the center-left even often accepted the market as the core institution and then tried to soften its harshest effects through education, social insurance, or redistribution. And, while the center-right sometimes went along with tamping down the harsh results of market only choices, both center-righth&center-left did not go far enough. The deeper question—what should markets value, how should work be organized, what should not be left to price alone, and what kind of common life should the economy sustain— did not receive enough attention. Again, to emphasize, DIT makes clear it must be Market&Other Forum. The “&” is doing substantive work: neither side is sufficient, and each must condition the other. The common good is not the sum of privately maximized individual goods because interaction matters. Institutions, norms, and shared moral judgments change the incentives themselves and thereby change what the market produces.

Merit, Justice, Hayek, Rawls—and the DIT Alternative

Sandel’s comparison of free-market liberalism and welfare-state liberalism is especially useful for a DIT reading. Hayek framing commonly applied on the political right actually rejects the idea that market rewards correspond to moral desert; Hayek did not see the market as a tribunal that gives people what they morally deserve.  The political right often misrepresents Hayek on that point. Yet Hayek also resists redistribution based on a collective judgment of deservingness, fearing the coercive authority required to impose such a pattern.

Rawls --- often associated with welfare-state liberalism --- also rejects merit as a basis for desert, but for a different reason: even with genuinely equal opportunity, native talent and many of the conditions under which talent pays are morally arbitrary. A just society therefore cannot simply ratify whatever distribution the market produces. Inequalities must be arranged so that the least advantaged can live decently and participate as free and equal citizens (pp. 128–133).

DIT agrees with the rejection of market desert but pushes the analysis one step further. Hayek leaves too much of path 0M out of view, while welfare-state liberalism too often waits for path 0G to generate the distribution and then redistributes after the fact. DIT points instead to pre-distribution&redistribution, needing joint consideration of contributive&distributive justice. The rules of production, bargaining power, labor institutions, corporate governance, taxation, education, environmental standards, public investment, and social insurance all embody a shared ethic before the final income distribution appears. A just economy is therefore not simply a market followed by a welfare state. It is an economy whose market outcomes have already been tempered by the institutional expression of shared other-interest, as in higher respect for the labor force down the income ladder, and compensation commensurate with that higher respect.

Said framing provides a useful way to interpret Rawls’s “legitimate expectations.” Income need not be morally “deserved” in the grand sense. It can be legitimately expected under rules that citizens could reasonably accept without knowing where they themselves would land. DIT interprets such a process as an exercise in empathy: Cognitive empathy enables people to imagine positions other than their own; affective empathy can give motivational force to that understanding; moral judgment converts it into an ethic; and institutions embody the ethic in durable working rules. The resulting inequality need not be zero. DIT instead points to optimal inequality—enough differential reward to sustain incentive, innovation, responsibility, and effort, and reward merit, but not so much that hubris at the top and humiliation at the bottom undermine economic performance, democratic legitimacy, and social stability.

Sandel’s discussion of market value vs moral value reinforces the same point. Frank Knight’s skepticism about equating market price with ethical worth is well placed: Satisfying effective demand says little by itself about the human significance of the product or the justice of the distribution that results. DIT, however, moves beyond the “vs” frame and looks to “&” as in market(priceP)&moral(valueO) value.  It does not conclude that economics must remain silent about the moral dimension. It argues that a broader economics can include it by recognizing the shared other-interest and the institutions through which moral judgment enters choice. Price P can then be influenced by value O, and value O can influence price P. A market outcome on path 0Z is different from a market outcome on path 0G because the former has been shaped by working rules, ethical norms, and social judgments about what may reasonably be produced, consumed, rewarded, or constrained. The same is true of path 0M, wherein the domain of profane influences the sacred, merit influences grace.

Recognizing Work: From Distributive to Contributive Justice

The strongest part of Sandel’s positive argument is his turn to the essential need for the dignity of work. The problem of inequality is not exhausted by how much money people receive. People also want to be needed, to contribute, to feel part of something bigger, and to receive social recognition for contributing. Sandel calls this contributive justice. In DIT terms, distributive justice concerns much of the price P payoff to individual good, while contributive justice brings value O and the common good directly into view. A worker can be inadequately rewarded in both domains: Wages can be too low, and the work can be treated as socially inferior even when it is essential to the community. The meritocratic system compounds the injury when it implies that low market pay reveals low social value.

It helps explain Sandel’s attention to the erosion of the dignity of work, stagnant earnings among many non-college workers, the widening gap between executive and ordinary-worker compensation, and the “deaths of despair” literature. His claim is not that every social pathology has a single economic cause. It is that a society organized around meritocratic sorting deprives the people sorted out of a ready basis for self-respect. The old promise of mobility cannot substitute for being able to lead a decent life whether or not one rises. The remedy therefore must be more than transfer payments. Transfers can be necessary, but a society must also structure production so that ordinary work pays adequately  --- reflecting greater respect for the talents and the hard work in the down the income ladder work --- is seen as useful, and connects the worker to a larger shared enterprise.

Sandel’s discussion of finance illustrates the difference between market reward and social contribution. Financial activity can perform indispensable functions by allocating capital and managing risk. But when financialization becomes dominated by speculative trading, rent extraction, stock buybacks, bail outs of banks that took huge risks, or transactions that mainly move money rather than support productive investment, very high compensation can coexist with a weak contribution to the common good. The tax system is therefore not morally neutral. Taxes and subsidies express judgments about what a society wishes to encourage, discourage, and finance. DIT would frame the issue not as hostility to markets or wealth but as a requirement that market reward be interpreted in the larger joint domain of market&moral value. A high price P does not by itself establish high value O.

Beyond the Tyranny: A Meritocratic Liberalism That Works

Sandel ultimately asks liberal societies to move beyond equality of opportunity toward a broad equality of condition: People who do not become wealthy or prestigious should still be able to live with decency and dignity, develop their abilities, receive social esteem for useful work, participate in a shared culture, and deliberate as citizens about public purposes (pp. 223–225). This is not a call to abolish differences in talent, effort, income, occupation, or achievement. It is a call to stop treating said differences as a complete moral ranking of persons. The American Dream should therefore mean more than the chance to climb. It should also mean that people can live worthwhile lives whether or not they reach the top.

The DIT lens sharpens that conclusion into the idea of a meritocratic liberalism that works. Merit is essential. Liberalism without scope for initiative, effort, responsibility, entrepreneurship, achievement, and reward would lose a major source of freedom and economic dynamism. But meritocracy without empathy becomes tyranny because it interprets success as self-authored desert and failure as deserved inferiority. The better system operates in a jointly operatn merit&grace. Grace here need not be theological. It can represent the recognition that every person is embedded in a web of inherited capacities, social relationships, public goods, institutions, ecological systems, and fortuitous events. That recognition creates humility at the top and preserves dignity on all rungs on  the ladder.

In that sense, Sandel’s argument is also an argument for rebuilding the Other Forums of democratic life. Facts matter, expertise matters, markets matter, and incentives matter. But citizens must also deliberate about ends, not merely optimize means. Public discourse must ask what kind of work deserves esteem, what inequalities are reasonable, what obligations attach to wealth, what goods should be protected from market valuation, and what institutional rules enable each person to have meaningful liberty and dignity. DIT describes the motivational capacity required for that process as empathy-with the other. The point is not sentimental sympathy. Cognitive empathy allows one to understand another person’s position; emotional empathy can deepen the motivation to take it seriously; reflective moral judgment turns that understanding into a shared ethic; and institutions stabilize the ethic in working rules.

It also explains why neither laissez-faire individualism nor an all-encompassing collectivism provides the answer. One overweights the self-interest side; the other can suppress the individual side in the name of an asserted common good. DIT instead searches for a homeostatic attractor in individual&common good on some better path 0Z. The location of that balance cannot be known ex ante and frozen permanently. It evolves, and is discovered and revised through experience, evidence, empathy, and public reasoning. In economic terms, the aim is optimal rather than extreme inequality; in political terms, maximum feasible individual liberty within empathy-based working rules that sustain the common good; in Sandel’s moral vocabulary, humility, solidarity, dignity, and contributive justice.

Metaeconomics Postscript

Through the DIT lens in looking to the matter of merit,  two questions need to be answered rather than one:

Ego Merit: How talented and competent are you, and what did you achieve?

Empathy Merit: How talented and competent are you, what did you achieve, and how does that achievement arise from and contribute to the shared conditions in which everyone must live?

Ego Merit is the problematic kind of merit identified by Sandel. DIT suggests the solution to the problem rests in Empathy Merit, which is merit arising from talent, effort, competence, and contribution tempered by empathy-based shared other-interest. It recognizes that achievement deserves appropriate reward and recognition while also recognizing luck, interdependence, the dignity of others, and obligations to the common good.

Competence remains nonnegotiable. It is only that Empathy Merit asks us not to turn competence into a claim of superior human worth or unlimited moral desert.

The differences in Ego&Empathy Merit --- which really are jointly operant --- are summarized in Table 1.  And, the “&” idea in DIT is represented in the table, which is far more than a grammatical convenience, but rather does essential work:

Ego Merit: merit without the “&.”

Empathy Merit: merit&grace, competence&humility, incentive&ethic, individual&common good, and, writ large, profane&sacred.

Table 1.   Resolving the Ego Merit Problem with Empathy Merit

Ego Merit	Empathy Merit
Core motivation: Merit is grounded mainly in ego-based self-interest. I strive, compete, achieve, and win.	Core motivation: Merit operates within self&other-interest. I strive and achieve, while recognizing my dependence on and effects upon others.
Meaning of merit: Talent + effort + achievement establish merit.	Meaning of merit: Talent + effort + competence matter, but merit is tempered by empathy-based ethic and contribution to the common good.
View of success: I earned it.	View of success: I helped earn it, but I did not create the conditions of my success alone.
Moral desert: Success tends to become evidence that the winner deserves the reward.	Moral desert: Achievement justifies recognition and reward, but does not establish unlimited moral desert.
Role of luck: Luck, circumstance, inheritance, institutions, and timing fade into the background.	Role of luck: Fortuitous circumstance—talent, family, teachers, institutions, timing, market demand—is explicitly acknowledged.
The self-made person: The successful person is imagined as largely self-made.	Interdependent person: No one is fully self-made; achievement is jointly produced with other people and the common good.
Merit&grace: Merit tends to drive out grace.	Merit&grace: Merit is consciously tempered by grace—gift, fortune, humility, and belonging.
Market value: Market reward is easily treated as evidence of social value.	Market&social value: Market value matters, but does not fully measure contribution to society.
Money value: High income is readily interpreted as evidence of high contribution.	Money&non-money value: Contribution includes dignity, care, trust, knowledge, civic value, environmental value, and other non-money goods.
View of winners: Winners are talented, hard-working, smart, and therefore deserving.	View of winners: Winners may be talented and hard-working, but should also recognize luck, dependence, obligation, and limits to deservingness.
View of those below: Failure suggests insufficient talent, effort, responsibility, education, or adaptability.	View of those below: Lower market rank does not establish lesser human worth, lesser dignity, or lack of valuable contribution.
Emotional result at the top: Hubris, self-congratulation, entitlement, and sometimes disdain.	Emotional result at the top: Humility, gratitude, responsibility, and empathy-with those occupying other positions.
Emotional result below: Humiliation, resentment, loss of esteem, and the sense of being judged a failure.	Emotional result below: Dignity, recognition, belonging, and assurance that worth does not depend on reaching the top.
Equality: Emphasizes equality of opportunity—everyone should have a chance to compete.	Equality: Keeps equality of opportunity, but adds Sandel's equality of condition—a decent and dignified life whether one rises or not.
The ladder: Justice means making the ladder easier to climb.	The ladder: Justice also asks how far apart the rungs should be and what life is like for people who remain on each rung.
Inequality: Large inequalities can be justified if competition appears merit-based.	Optimal inequality: Some inequality sustains incentive and achievement, but excessive inequality damages dignity, reciprocity, efficiency, and social stability.
Education: Education becomes the primary sorting mechanism for determining who merits advancement.	Education: Education develops competence and prepares people for citizenship, moral reflection, empathy, and contribution to shared life.
Credentials: Degrees become proxies for intelligence, merit, and sometimes personal worth.	Competence: Credentials are useful evidence of some kinds of competence, but practical knowledge, craft, judgment, experience, and civic contribution also count.
Dignity of work: Work is valued mainly through wage, productivity, and market demand.	Dignity of work: Work has both economic value and contributive value—the human need to be useful, needed, and respected.
Justice: Focus tends toward distributive outcomes generated by competition and markets.	Justice: Ccontributive&distributive justice operate jointly: fair income matters, but so do recognition, participation, and useful contribution.
Incentive: Incentive is treated as the principal driver of productive behavior.	Incentive&ethic: Incentives remain essential but are tempered by the ethic concerning what ought to be produced, rewarded, and sustained.
Economic actor: The person resembles the self-interested Econ of Single Interest Theory (SIT).	Human actor: The person is the DIT Human balancing ego-based self-interest & empathy-based shared other-interest.
Market: The Market Forum is treated as the chief judge of contribution and reward.	Market&Other Forum: Markets coordinate exchange, while democratic, civic, professional, family, and community forums help establish ethical boundaries and common-good values.
Expertise: Those with superior credentials and technical knowledge gain authority to make decisions.	Expertise&democracy: Expertise matters, but experts remain participants in democratic deliberation rather than substitutes for it.
Facts: Technocratic competence can imply that getting the facts right settles the issue.	Facts&ethics: Facts constrain reality, but public choices also require moral judgment about purposes, fairness, dignity, and obligations.
Leadership: Successful leaders demonstrate that they are the smartest or most capable people in the room.	Leadership: Competent leaders also demonstrate humility, cognitive empathy, listening, judgment, and awareness of dependence on others.
Common good: Often presumed to emerge from the sum of successful individual pursuits.	Individual&common good: Individual good and common good are jointly produced, interdependent, and nonseparable.
Political effect: Hubris above + humiliation below can fuel resentment, anti-elite populism, and authoritarian appeals.	Political effect: Recognition, dignity, reciprocity, and belonging strengthen solidarity and democratic legitimacy.
System tendency: Meritocracy gradually becomes a hierarchy whose winners can rationalize their position as deserved.	System tendency: Merit remains dynamic and useful, but institutions continually temper concentrated advantage and protect broad participation.
DIT diagnosis: Too much weight on ego, self-interest, incentive, individual good, and market value.	DIT solution: Restore homeostatic balance in ego&empathy, self&other-interest, incentive&ethic, individual&common good, merit&grace.

DIT gives the Sandel  “equality of condition” more muscle

Sandel claims that a good society needs an “equality of condition” under which people who do not reach prestigious positions can nevertheless live with dignity. But that phrase leaves open what produces that condition.

DIT clarifies that:

Equality of condition cannot be sustained by Ego Merit alone because Ego Merit continually recreates the status hierarchy that undermines it. Equality of condition requires Empathy Merit: cognitive empathy-with the circumstances of others, reinforced by emotional empathy and reflective moral judgment, producing an empathy-based ethic that becomes embedded in working rules.

The causal chain becomes:

empathy-with → empathy-based ethic → working rules → equality of condition → dignity & belonging

So, most important implication is: 

Sandel's problem is not merit. It is Ego Merit. His solution points toward, but does not fully theorize, Empathy Merit.

Samdel calls for humility. DIT makes clear that Humility is an outcome. Empathy is part of the mechanism that produces it.

Overall, the bottom line:

The task is not to replace meritocracy with something that ignores talent, effort, and competence. It is to move from Ego Merit to Empathy Merit—from merit grounded mainly in self-interest and moral desert to merit tempered by shared other-interest, humility, dignity, and the common good.

The notion of Ego Merit&Empathy Merit  converts Sandel's largely philosophical diagnosis into a more explicit behavioral and institutional mechanism.

And, now you know the rest of the story, made sense with DIT.  Try DIT.  You might like (D)IT.

References

Sandel, Michael. J. The Tyranny of Merit:  What's Become of the Common Good?  New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020.

Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit:  Can We Find the Common Good? Paperback/Kindle. New York: Picador, 2021.