Who Deserves More
Why the wrong people are winning the most important battle in America — and how we fight .
We Must Bring a Deservingness Story to a Deservingness Fight
I’ve lived both sides of America’s deservingness story.
Growing up, my family needed help. My mom spent her life serving others in customer service, restaurants, and schools. She was treated like a potential criminal every time we turned to the government. I remember her fear that we might not eat because she’d missed a checkbox on a form. When we asked for help, we weren’t met with respect. We were met with suspicion.
Years later, I walked into Yale on a full ride, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Suddenly, I wasn’t just treated as intelligent — I was treated as good. Worthy of trust, admiration, investment.
It was praise for me. Celebration at me. Just a handful of years after blame at us, shame towards us.
The change wasn’t in me. It was in the story the world told about me.
That story — who deserves what, and why — is the most powerful force in American politics. More powerful than any policy paper. More powerful than any campaign platform. More powerful than any corporate lobby. It decides who gets a hand and who gets left behind, whose suffering is a crisis and whose is a character flaw.
And for decades now, the people who should be fighting hardest over that story have been refusing to show up.
The people who benefit from the rest of us not getting what we deserve — they figured this out a long time ago. They understood that Americans don't judge things on their merits. We evaluate the moral standing of the world around us through our understanding about who deserves what. So they told a story about who deserves what and why.
We know the story. Welfare queens. Takers versus makers. Handouts for people who won't help themselves. Unskilled workers. Lazy, cheating, liars who depend on the government for what they should do for themselves. All accusations hurled at my mom.
Their story is not true. But it is effective.
Because it spoke the language. Americans’ moral compass is guided by perceptions of effort, responsibility, and contribution. They told a story of how effort, responsibility, and contribution justify their privileges and others’ pain.
Meanwhile, we have not mounted a proper defense. We, the people not getting what we've earned, have watched deservingness do its damage. We've watched it gut the programs our taxes fund and we're entitled to. We've watched it turn poverty or instability into a moral verdict. We've watched it justify decades of theft, whether as wage suppression, rigged financial systems, or taxes that ask more from a school teacher than a billionaire financier.
People on our side decided the whole concept was toxic. Deservingness and the claims that bolster it became words to avoid: we chose to not speak in terms of effort, responsibility, contribution — merit, productivity, skill. Meritocracy became a myth to debunk.
The people who were supposed to be fighting with us retreated to the language of systems, structures, and rights. They talked about inequality as a technical problem — academic measurements, policy mechanisms, and program design.
They thought they were being more sophisticated.
But they were surrendering.
Because you don’t get to opt out of deservingness. Americans decide who gets what based on who they believe deserves it. That’s not going to change because a think tank published a report about structural barriers. It’s not going to change because an economist explained that poverty is systemic. The question “who deserves what?” is always operating. If you refuse to answer it, they will answer it for you.
And they have. For decades.
Deservingness is the battleground. It is how justice and equality are won or lost in the United States. It is how we fight for the fair distribution of resources. We judge every policy — if not every single thing that happens to every single person — by whether we believe people got what they deserve.
If you try to kill it — if you tell people that the whole system is a lie, that what you do does not matter — you will lose them. Not because they’re naive. Because we want to believe our actions matter. We want to believe our work will be rewarded and help earn us the life we want to live.
Consider what this means for the people doing the work
You work hard. They call it unskilled. You show up every day. They call it not enough. You hold everything together. They call it replaceable.
Effort, responsibility, contribution. These words govern our world. But whose effort counts? Whose responsibility is honored? Whose contribution gets called essential — and whose gets called unskilled?
These terms are not objective truths.
They are weapons in a fight.
And right now, only one side is using the arms at their disposal.
We cannot keep failing to bring a deservingness story to a deservingness fight.
So, what is our deservingness story?
The plain truth.
We do not have to search far. We do not need to craft a narrative. We do not need to devise the right message.
The truth is all we need.
People built our country. People sustain it every day. People grow and serve the food we eat, teach the generations that are our future, and transport the products we rely on. People care for us when we are in need. People work until their body aches, until their mind hurts, and until they have no choice but to have less to give. The wealth that makes America the wealthiest country in the world — people made it. The beauty and connection that makes our wealth worth anything — people create it.
People earned what they have and deserve more than they get.
Merit is not a myth. It’s been misassigned.
We built a system that depends on people it refuses to respect. So when a person's body breaks down from decades of manual labor, when a new innovation strikes and a person's skills become outdated, when a corporation finds a path to greater profit elsewhere — we discard the people we once depended on.
The moment a person is no longer as profitable as they once were, our system throws them away.
The harm our systems inflict on people is a result of our failure to tell the truth about what they deserve.
We've spent decades rewarding asset ownership over people’s work, distant abstractions over direct service, consultation over contribution. We tell people to work hard — and then deny fair reward to the people whose work holds things together. These facts are destroying us.
The scale is shocking. Since 1975, $80 trillion has been diverted from 90% of American workers to the top 10%. Over a career, that compounds to nearly $1 million per worker. A Millennial has already lost over $500,000. A Gen Z worker entering the labor force today is already falling behind at the same rate.
These are not abstractions. These are empty savings accounts, unpurchased homes, unborn children.
This is theft.
Millions of people, every day, do not get what they are owed because we have failed to bring a deservingness story to a deservingness fight.
I know because I watched it in my own family.
My mom's partner Joe — the closest thing I have to a father — spent years in manufacturing and warehouse jobs until those jobs vanished. Outsourcing. So he shifted to call centers. He became a manager. He adapted and kept working. Then, those jobs disappeared too. Automation.
My mom spent her life in customer service, restaurants, and schools. Alongside, she did the work that never showed up in any paycheck at all: raising children, holding a family together, making a home out of not enough. None of it was paid what it was worth.
They don’t want anyone to tell them they’re worthy. They don’t want to hear that they’re disadvantaged and need charity. They don’t want to be studied, surveyed, or saved.
They want their country to give back what they deserve.
