Your Success Probably Didn’t Come From Merit Alone
About this episode
Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom joins Klein to talk about writing across genres — academic, essay, newsletter, blog, social media — choosing the right 'speed' for each argument, and about the book she's writing on status. She argues that hierarchy determines whose ideas count: merit and beauty are treated as objective but reproduce inherited social order across education, work, race, gender and class. Web 2.0, she says, offered camaraderie but excluded many; the wider modern discourse creates a 'democratization of discomfort.' She links perceived status loss — not just material loss — to white 'deaths of despair,' political risk-taking and January 6, and describes digital platforms as making status contextual and transient, where micro-celebrity rarely converts into economic capital. The pair also discuss for-profit colleges, credentials, and how education became central to ideas of deservingness.