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Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Markovits
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Figure 6 from Reardon, Sean F. 2011. Figures 5.7 and 5.8. “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations,” from Whither Opportunity, edited by Duncan, Greg, and Murnane, Richard. © Russell Sage Foundation. Reprinted with permission of Russell Sage Foundation, 112 East 64 Street, New York, NY 10065.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Markovits, Daniel, 1969– author.
Title: The meritocracy trap : how America’s foundational myth feeds inequality, dismantles the middle class, and devours the elite / Daniel Markovits.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019007519 (print) | LCCN 2019017772 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735222007 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735221994 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Middle class—United States. | Intellectuals—United States. | Equality—United States.
Classification: LCC HT684 (ebook) | LCC HT684 .M33 2019 (print) | DDC 305.5/50973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007519
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Cover design: Darren Haggar
Cover images: (hook) MicroStockHub / Getty Images Plus; (star) shaneillustration / Getty Images
Version_2
For Sarah
and
our children
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
Part One
Meritocracy and Its Discontents
ONE. THE MERITOCRATIC REVOLUTION
TWO. THE HARMS OF MERITOCRACY
THREE. THE COMING CLASS WAR
Part Two
How Meritocracy Works
FOUR. THE WORKING RICH
FIVE. THE MERITOCRATIC INHERITANCE
SIX. GLOOMY AND GLOSSY JOBS
Part Three
A New Aristocracy
SEVEN. A COMPREHENSIVE DIVIDE
EIGHT. SNOWBALL INEQUALITY
NINE. THE MYTH OF MERIT
CONCLUSION: What Should We Do?
Acknowledgments
Figures and Tables
Notes
Index
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Merit is a sham.
An entire civilization resists this conclusion. Every decent person agrees that advantage should be earned through ability and effort rather than inherited alongside caste. The meritocratic ideal—that social and economic rewards should track achievement rather than breeding—anchors the self-image of the age. Aristocracy has had its day, and meritocracy is now a basic tenet of civil religion in all advanced societies.
Meritocracy promises to promote equality and opportunity by opening a previously hereditary elite to outsiders, armed with nothing save their own talents and ambitions. It further promises to harmonize private advantage and public interest, by insisting that wealth and status must be earned through accomplishment. Together, these ideals aspire to unite all of society behind a shared vision of hard work, skill, and deserved reward.
But meritocracy no longer operates as promised. Today, middle-class children lose out to rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.
Meritocracy harms the elite as well. Meritocratic schooling requires rich parents to invest thousands of hours and millions of dollars to get elite educations for their children. And meritocratic jobs require elite adults to work with grinding intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their educations in order to extract a return from these investments. Meritocracy entices an anxious and inauthentic elite into a pitiless, lifelong contest to secure income and status through its own excessive industry.
Finally, meritocracy now divides the elite from the middle class. It drives the middle class to resent the establishment and seduces the elite to cling to the corrupt prerogatives of caste. Meritocracy ensnares the society that both classes must share in a maelstrom of recrimination, disrespect, and dysfunction.
Meritocracy’s charisma disguises all these harms, making it difficult to accept—indeed, seriously to consider—that meritocracy itself lies behind them. Even the angriest critics of the age embrace the meritocratic ideal. They charge that corrupt elites only pretend to reward achievement but actually favor their own. By indicting individual bad actors for failing to honor a meritocratic ideal in practice, they reaffirm meritocracy in principle.
But in fact, social and economic structures, rather than personal vices, cause the disaffection and discord that increasingly overwhelm American life. Whatever its original purposes and early triumphs, meritocracy now concentrates advantage and sustains toxic inequalities. And the taproot of all these troubles is not too little but rather too much meritocracy.
Merit itself has become a counterfeit virtue, a false idol. And meritocracy—formerly benevolent and just—has become what it was invented to combat. A mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. A caste order that breeds rancor and division. A new aristocracy, even.
MERITOCRACY’S FALSE PROMISES
I am a meritocrat: a product and now an agent of the constellation of forces that these pages lay bare.
In the summer of 1987, as meritocracy gathered steam, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed northeast, to attend Yale College. I then spent nearly fifteen years studying at various universities—the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, Harvard University, and finally Yale Law School—picking up a string of degrees along the way.
Today, I teach at Yale Law School, where my students unnervingly resemble my younger self: they are, overwhelmingly, products of professional parents and high-class universities. I pass on to them the advantages that my own teachers earlier bestowed on me. In all these ways, I owe my prosperity and my caste to elite institutions and to the training and employment that they confer.
Now at full flourish, meritocracy flies its flag conspicuously over the institutions that collectively ordain the elite. Harvard University, for example, calls itself “a haven for the world’s most ambitious scholars,” and Harvard’s mission statement adds that its purpose is not simply academic excellence but also to “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society,” so that they might learn “how they can best serve the world.” The firms that dominate employment among graduates of Harvard and other top schools carry the same arguments into the eli
te’s adult life. Goldman Sachs has been called “probably the most elite work-society ever to be assembled on the globe,” and the firm’s website advertises the “progress” that it promotes far outside the elite, for example by brokering investments that spark a “renaissance” in Newark, New Jersey, and a “resurgence” in New Orleans. This familiar script—repeated again and again—simultaneously trumpets the elite’s exceptional talents and reconciles hierarchy to the moral imperatives of democratic life, by connecting elites to the common interest as midwives to general prosperity.
These promises mark a revolution. Once, aristocrats got status by birthright, based on race or breeding, and abused undeserved privilege to hoard unjust advantage. Today, meritocrats claim to win their status through talent and effort—to get ahead fair and square, using means open to anyone. Once, lazy aristocrats produced little or nothing at all. They lived lavishly by exploiting other people’s labor. Today, hardworking meritocrats claim to pull their weight, insisting that their enormous accomplishments contribute fair value to the societies they lead.
Earlier hierarchies were malign and offensive. But meritocracy claims to be wholesome—both just and benevolent. True to its Latin etymology, meritocracy glorifies only earned advantage and promises to transform the elite to suit a democratic age—to redeem the very idea of hierarchy.
Meritocracy’s rituals reinforce these ideals by making them concrete and accessible, bringing the idea of deserved advantage to life. The graduation ceremonies that have become part of the rhythm of the American summer show how this works. At Yale Law School, commencement spans two splendid days. Luminaries, including Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, exhort graduates to follow their passions and to deploy their talents for the greater good. Professors dress in brightly colored caps and gowns made of wool, silk, and even fur. University officers wear bejeweled collars and carry ceremonial maces. A former dean dons the sumptuous costume of an honorary doctor of laws awarded at Bologna, the oldest continuously operating university in Europe.
These celebrations are neither wanton nor casual. Instead (like weddings), they promote serious purposes and carry profound meanings, both political and personal. The speeches reaffirm the meritocratic elite’s service to the common good. The medieval pageantry invests meritocracy with the remaining, inherited allure of the aristocratic hierarchies that it displaces—looking back in order to reach forward, repurposing old bottles to carry new wine. In a Gothic quad, as shadows lengthen across the summer afternoon, history feels present and alive. The university appears as a smooth band, stretching unbroken across the generations. Commencements connect a timeless past seamlessly to an inevitable future, absorbing the strains of transition and reassuring graduates who stand at the threshold of adulthood. Rituals render the future familiar, even before it arrives. They entrench meritocracy into the master narrative of modern life.
Meritocracy speaks in terms and settings so consistent that they fashion a distinctive language, repeated across contexts, again and again—a form of life, familiar to every citizen of the age. This gives meritocracy an enormously powerful charisma. Meritocracy’s luster captivates the imagination and arrests the gaze, to suppress critical judgment and stifle reform. By identifying itself with basic decency and insinuating itself into the assumed background of everyday experience, meritocracy conceals the harms that it now imposes on all who encounter it. Indeed, it makes alternative ways of awarding advantage seem absurd: unfair or corrupt, as when privilege is apportioned through prejudice or nepotism; or simply foolish, as if high positions might be assigned by lot.
But as meritocracy advances, its achievements impose a new and oppressive hierarchy, unrecognizable even a generation ago. An unprecedented and distinctively meritocratic inequality tarnishes a new gilded age. Elites increasingly monopolize not just income, wealth, and power, but also industry, public honor, and private esteem. Meritocracy comprehensively excludes the middle class from social and economic advantage, and at the same time conscripts its elite into a ruinous contest to preserve caste. Meritocratic inequality—the growing gap between the rich and the rest—bends America to an ominous arc.
As meritocratic inequality grows, and meritocracy’s burdens increase, its moral claims falter and its rituals lose their power. The meritocratic code’s grip over the imagination wears off, and resistance to its dogmas builds. Familiar bromides about earning advantage by promoting the general interest become unconvincing, and the rhythms of the past no longer soothe.
Instead, discontent over meritocratic inequality provides fertile ground for critical ideas. The most important is the idea that the afflictions that dominate American life arise not because meritocracy is imperfectly realized, but rather on account of meritocracy itself.
HOW MERITOCRACY OPPRESSES THE MIDDLE CLASS AND EXPLOITS THE ELITE
Meritocratic competition expels middle-class Americans from the charismatic center of economic and social life and estranges them from the touchstones by which society measures and awards distinction, honor, and wealth. Although meritocratic energy, ambition, and innovation have transformed the mainstream of human history, meritocracy concentrates these vibrant wellsprings of creativity in a narrower and narrower elite, farther and farther beyond the practical and even the imaginative horizons of the broad middle class.
Meritocracy makes the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street into arenas for elite ambition. Innovators in these places can remake the life-world, transforming the internet (at Stanford and Google), social media (at Harvard and Facebook), finance (at Princeton and Wall Street generally), and a thousand other smaller domains. But a middle-class child, consigned to the backwaters of the meritocratic order, will more likely be buffeted by the next great invention than build it. Meritocracy banishes the majority of citizens to the margins of their own society, consigning middle-class children to lackluster schools and middle-class adults to dead-end jobs.
Common usage often conflates meritocracy with equality of opportunity. But although meritocracy was embraced as the handmaiden of equality of opportunity, and did open up the elite in its early years, it now more nearly stifles than fosters social mobility. The avenues that once carried people from modest circumstances into the American elite are narrowing dramatically. Middle-class families cannot afford the elaborate schooling that rich families buy, and ordinary schools lag farther and farther behind elite ones, commanding fewer resources and delivering inferior educations. Even as top universities emphasize achievement rather than breeding, they run admissions competitions that students from middle-class backgrounds cannot win, and their student bodies skew dramatically toward wealth. Meritocratic education now predominantly serves an elite caste rather than the general public.
Meritocracy similarly transforms jobs to favor the super-educated graduates that elite universities produce, so that work extends and compounds inequalities produced in school. Competence and an honest work ethic no longer assure a good job. Middle-class workers, without elite degrees, face discrimination all across a labor market that increasingly privileges elaborate education and extravagant training.
Meritocratic exclusion reaches opportunities as well as outcomes, and meritocratic values add a moral insult to these material injuries. Even as it denies the middle class real opportunities for excellent schooling and meaningful work, meritocracy makes achievement in school and at work into the soul of honor. Meritocracy therefore frustrates efforts to satisfy the very standards that it announces, ensuring that most people will not measure up. Americans outside the elite know all this, and the dynamism in the elite only emphasizes listless weariness among the middle class. Even where material conditions remain tolerable, meritocratic inequality consigns the spiritual life of the middle class to an unbeatable, slow, devastating decline.
Meritocracy also no longer truly serves even the elite that it appears to privilege. It concentrates training and work that were once
spread evenly across society onto an elite that is literally too narrow to carry their weight. The same forces that deplete the middle class overburden the elite.
Aristocrats were born; but meritocrats must be made. The old, hereditary elite bequeathed its caste effortlessly to its children, by birthright. Each new generation of aristocrats assumed its titles and great houses automatically on the death of the old. Meritocracy, by contrast, requires families who wish to transmit caste down through their generations continually to build and rebuild privilege, as each generation must reestablish its eliteness afresh, by its own accomplishments. Meritocrats achieve this by raising children in a distinctive way. Whereas aristocrats lacked both the inclination and the capacity to train their children, meritocrats—especially women who sacrifice their own careers to do the work of meritocratic motherhood—increasingly devote their wealth and also their skills and energies to educating their children.
Rich children devote their days to absorbing this education. For fully a third of their lives—beginning at birth and extending deep into adulthood—children of rich parents benefit from and suffer through a training regimen whose planned intensity and ruthless demands would be unrecognizable to their middle-class counterparts today, or indeed to their own grandparents a half century ago. The framers of the U.S. Constitution required presidents to be at least thirty-five years old in order to ensure that only experienced adults would hold the office. Today, a thirty-five-year-old meritocrat can easily still be in school.
Elites grow more vividly strained as meritocracy matures, and today, even those at the top are beginning to turn against the intense, competitive training that makes them. The millennial generation—the first to have lived entirely inside the mature meritocracy—appreciates these burdens most keenly. Elite millennials can be precious and fragile, but not in the manner of the special snowflakes that derisive polemics describe. They do not melt or wilt at every challenge to their privilege, so much as shatter under the intense competitive pressures to achieve that dominate their lives. They are neither dissolute nor decadent, but rather tense and exhausted.
The Meritocracy Trap Page 1
