Michael Goodwin raises some valid fears regarding our society’s penchant for ignoring the difficult, complicated and disappointing in our efforts to coddle, encourage and edify. However, there are a few fallacies in his argument. Firstly, Goodwin fails to define what he means by success and failure. Secondly, he neglects to establish effective filters for differentiating between the two.
Goodwin fails to provide a rubric for both the concepts of success and failure, and his argument requires that we agree with his distinctions. It is unclear whether success is measured by degrees of safety, social capital, academic degrees or financial stability. Similarly, it is unclear whether failure is measured by degrees of poverty, lack of education or geographic isolation. When Goodwin mentions social promotion, analyzing the sobering statistics requires a tongue-in-cheek perspective: although seventy-five percent of New York City high school graduates require remedial work to make up for inadequacies in previous education, no policy analyst would solely blame the student; instead, the school system is clearly the flawed institution, and government administrations are meant to account for such shortcomings, as in the well-intentioned vein of No Child Left Behind.
Such social nets will not go ultimately unchallenged. The college graduate who works hard to maintain a competitive GPA, takes difficult courses and invests in extracurricular activities will be rewarded when an impressive résumé is presented to future employers. The college graduate who ignores classes and neglects work will perhaps graduate, but certainly won’t be looked upon favorably when applying to competitive employment positions. In this scenario, failure is indeed an inevitable outcome for the former case, and eventually a rewarding one. This challenges what I understand Goodwin to be saying; the core of his argument seems to be not so much that there is an increasing absence of failure, but rather that failure goes unpunished. This is an invalid assumption. The high school student who graduates unqualifiedly will need remedial work. The person who buys a cheap but unreliable car will need to compensate for a bad purchase. In this way there seems to be no shortage of failure; failure might simply be described differently in the economic equation: if either buyer or seller perceives the short end of the fiscal stick, the ground will have to be made up eventually.
At what level in the social ladder should failure as a filtering mechanism be instated? Should there be a lottery system to determine who is allowed to continue on to middle school, for the sake of improving the caliber of output? Should marketplace exchanges be capped each day in order to encourage a frenzy of early efforts and cutthroat strategies, for the sake of increasing market capital? If Goodwin’s call for failure for failure’s sake is played out this way, its natural product will not be success, but anarchy, and so the question is an entirely personal one. The American democratic system allows plenty of room for the freedom to fail—the question is, for how long?
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