Even where everyone would benefit from democratic renewal, achieving this coalition requires self-disciplined imagination. But meritocracy’s discontents leave the virtues that this generous and redemptive politics demands in short supply. Moreover, anxiety and bitterness block both the rich and the rest from recognizing that more immediately alluring alternatives merely seed a gathering storm. A very different coalition of manipulative oligarchs and resentful populists now threatens to repudiate meritocracy wholesale and to erect something considerably darker in its stead.
Blindness to this risk—on display when an uncomprehending America enabled Donald Trump’s rise—would constitute meritocracy’s final irony.
Part One
Meritocracy and Its Discontents
ONE
THE MERITOCRATIC REVOLUTION
For virtually all of human history, income and industry have charted opposite courses.
The poor worked immensely long and intensely hard. In 1800, the average English laborer worked sixty-four hours a week; in 1900, a typical American still worked sixty hours; and as late as the 1920s, blue-collar workweeks exceeded fifty hours. Virtually all these hours were drudgery and toil. The rising middle class would eventually temper both facets of working-class labor and assimilate many workers, but it abandoned neither. The manufacturing jobs that once built a flourishing middle class absorbed and exhausted the workers who did them.
The rich, by contrast, customarily led lives of extravagant and conspicuous leisure. High society, for centuries and even millennia, embraced elegant recreation, and the elite despised industry.
Low wages consigned workers inescapably to modest incomes. No amount of industry could make a nineteenth-century laborer even comfortably well-off. And while the post–World War II boom allowed mid-twentieth-century workers to earn their way into middle-class comfort, elite wealth remained flatly inaccessible.
The rich, for their part, paid for leisure using incomes derived from land, factories, or other capital, which they generally inherited. Both the rich and the rest owed their circumstances to accidents of birth rather than choices or accomplishments. Long after formal titles of nobility had passed into neglect or even been abolished, society remained in effect a hereditary aristocracy. You could learn how poor people were simply by asking how hard they worked.
Today, unprecedented social and economic arrangements reverse these age-old associations. Middle-class jobs are disappearing, and the workers who for centuries pulled the economy’s laboring oar work progressively less hard. The middle class is not idle—reluctant to work. Rather it is increasingly idled—denied opportunities to work. A profound technological transformation eliminates middle-class jobs and renders mid-skilled labor surplus to economic requirements. The total work hours lost through these trends approach the difference between the hours worked by men and by women at midcentury. The new order, that is, suppresses working- and middle-class employment today by about as much as sex discrimination suppressed women’s employment two generations ago. This deprives the middle class of the income and status that industry confers.
The new technologies do not eliminate work altogether. To the contrary, they actually increase the demand for super-skilled, elite labor. The once-leisured rich, in a stark contrast to the middle class, work harder than they ever have before, harder than the rest of society, and absolutely very hard. Prime-aged adults (men and women combined) with a BA or more education are less than half as likely to have abandoned the workforce than their counterparts with a high school degree or less. Moreover, when they are employed, elites work substantially longer hours than their middle-class counterparts, and they enjoy less leisure. Indeed, despite pervasive use of labor-saving household appliances, elites actually enjoy less leisure today than they did at midcentury.
Elite values and customs have adapted to suit these new facts. High society has reversed course. Now it valorizes industry and despises leisure. As every rich person knows, when an acquaintance asks “How are you?” the correct answer is “So busy.” The old leisure class would have thought this a humiliating admission. The working rich boast that they are in demand.
A revolution in wages completes the new work order. Middle-class jobs still cannot make a person rich. But the elite’s intense industry now generates colossal incomes. Top jobs commonly pay annual wages of $500,000, $1 million, or even $5 million, and a few pay $10 million, $100 million, or even $1 billion. Indeed, rich people today owe the bulk of their incomes to their labor, and work has become the dominant path to wealth. Moreover, elites get these high-paying jobs based on immense skill, won through rigorous training, and they keep their jobs through intense, competitive, and enormously productive industry. Today, asking how long people have studied and how hard they work reveals not how poor they are, but how rich.
This new regime radically transforms who gets and stays ahead. The new order rejects the aristocratic hierarchy that dominated the old. Instead, it embraces the meritocratic idea that economic and social advantages should track not breeding but rather ability, effort, and output, and that all three must be proved by success in ongoing competition, first in school and then at work.
Once, a leisured elite dominated and exploited a subordinate working class. Labor, moreover, constituted subordination—for slaves, for serfs, for indentured servants, and even for industrial workers (whose “labor” movement reclaimed an indignity as a marker of pride). Now the industrious rich dominate the rest. The leisured aristocracy that for millennia monopolized income and status has ceded the field to a new elite constituted through industry—not a sub-, but a superordinate working class.
The meritocratic elite that this regime establishes is composed of a core that captures the incomes just described (perhaps 1 percent of households) and a larger penumbra that works in the social and economic orbit of these incomes (perhaps another 5 or 10 percent). Meritocracy constructs this elite through two movements. Each involves a contest or tournament. Together, they build and then set the meritocracy trap.
First, meritocracy transforms education into a rigorous and intense contest to join the elite. It concentrates training in the narrow, super-educated caste that wins the competition for places and grades at the top schools and universities. Second, meritocracy transforms work to create the immensely demanding and enormously lucrative jobs that sustain the elite. It fetishizes skill, centering both industry and pay around a narrow caste of superordinate workers.
Both faces of meritocracy—elite education’s intense and competitive training and elite work’s immense industry and outsized rewards—have become so ingrained that they seem natural and even inevitable. It is difficult to imagine life without them. But both faces in fact are strikingly new. The story of their rise opens a window into the meritocratic machine, and a close study of their reign exposes meritocracy’s discontents.
MERITOCRATIC TRAINING
Elite education used to be anything but intense. For much of the twentieth century, through the late 1950s, elite universities overwhelmingly awarded places based on breeding rather than merit. The Ivy League did not admit nor even pursue the “best and the brightest” so much as sustain and burnish the social patina of America’s leading families. Even graduate and professional schools selected their students by astonishingly casual means. A midcentury graduate of Yale Law School, for example, recently told an oral historian that he came to Yale after Jack Tate, then dean of admissions, told him at a college fair—straight away, and on the basis of a single conversation—“You’ll get in if you apply.”
Things began to change in the middle of the twentieth century. Presidents James Bryant Conant at Harvard and (slightly later) Kingman Brewster at Yale, seeking to open up, expand, and energize the American elite, expressly rejected aristocratic exclusion and rebuilt college admissions to emphasize achievement rather than breeding. By 1970, the cordial alliances among established families, schools, and college
s that long sustained a genteel elite had all been broken. A fierce rivalry now determines who attends America’s best universities. The change, moreover, rang in a revolution—a difference of kind rather than just degree—that has transformed the basic character of elite education.
Admissions officers have exchanged casual assessments of social suitability for intensive and rigorous talent screening, and applicants have exchanged family traditions favoring one or another college for a coldblooded pursuit of status, as measured by university rankings.
The earlier example illustrates the transformation. Over fifty thousand candidates a year now apply to American law schools, and perhaps three thousand of these apply to Yale, the top-ranked school. Yale Law School now takes admissions anything but casually—three faculty members independently evaluate each file—and following this process, Yale admits about 8 percent of applicants (making the admissions competition four times as intense today as it was at midcentury). The median admitted student received an A average in college and scored above the 99th percentile on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Finally, applicants almost slavishly esteem status and enroll in the highest-ranked school that admits them. Roughly 80 percent of those whom Yale admits eventually enroll.
Yale Law School may present an extreme case, but it is not distinctive. Broadening the field leaves the pattern intact, indeed unaltered. The top five law schools—Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia—collectively admit about 15 percent of applicants. The median students at all five had A averages in college and LSAT scores in the top 3 percent. And although precise and definitive data are not available, a reasonable estimate suggests that of the roughly two thousand people admitted to these schools each year, no more than five—which is to say effectively none—attend a school outside the top ten.
The law school admissions competition does not represent an aberration or isolated moment in an elite student’s life. Rather, a top law school adds the final link in a long chain of rigorous schooling. Students at elite professional schools overwhelmingly earned their A grades at highly selective colleges: the admissions competition for places at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford is three times as intense today as it was just twenty years ago. Moreover, students at these elite colleges disproportionately attended highly competitive high schools and indeed highly selective elementary schools and even preschools. In other words, to secure a really elite education, a student must rank among the top fraction of a percent in a massive, multistage meritocratic tournament, one in which the competitors at every stage conspicuously agree about which schools constitute the biggest prize.
Every one of these schools, all along the chain, offers intensive training commensurate to its elite status. Top schools, that is, all make immense investments in their students’ educations: elite private schools spend as much as $75,000 per student per year (more than six times the national public school average), and elite colleges and graduate schools spend over $90,000 per student per year. The total excess investment that an elite education represents, over and above the investments made in middle-class schooling, amounts to millions of dollars.
Education works, and these enormous investments pay off. Study and testing foster diligence and ambition, and training builds skills. Harvard Law School’s dean welcomes incoming students with the promise that “no law school better prepares lawyers, public servants, and leaders for a changing world,” and at Yale Law School, a recent dean told each graduating class that they were “quite simply, the finest new law graduates on the planet.” These claims might appear boastful and even narcissistic. But, astonishingly, the claims assert concrete, determinate, and determinable facts, which are proved in the two-sided admissions competition for places and students. Demonstrating these facts has dominated elite students’ entire lives. For nearly three decades, Yale Law School graduates—and indeed graduates of every top college and professional school, in every field—have studied, worked, practiced, and drilled. They have been continually inspected. And finally, they have been selected. This, after all, is what it means to join the meritocratic elite.
The lifelong education that culminates in an elite advanced degree, and also the competition to get the training and obtain the degree, have never been as intense as they are today. Finishing schools that certified breeding and polished manners have transformed into rigorous training centers that select for accomplishment and build skills. An elite degree therefore represents relentlessly demanding, ambitious, and successful training. And no prior elite has ever been as capable or as industrious as the meritocratic elite that such training produces. None comes close.
MERITOCRATIC WORK
Meritocratic work extends the patterns of meritocratic education through adult life. Elite jobs mirror the intensity and competitiveness of elite schools and fetishize the skills that these schools provide. At the same time, the income and status that the top jobs bestow on superordinate workers match the labor effort these jobs require. Both the demands and the rewards of elite work are greater today than they have ever been before.
The elite’s work habits—the rhythms of a rich person’s day—were once as relaxed as elite schooling. This was no accident. The aristocrats possessed few special abilities and no taste for industry. They therefore lacked both the means and the motive to take over work. And so the midcentury economic order naturally and even necessarily put middle-class workers at the charismatic center of making and selling things and also of financing and managing the firms that made and sold them. Mid-skilled, middle-class labor dominated virtually all sectors of the midcentury economy. Mid-skilled industrial workers famously dominated manufacturing; mid-skilled local, independent merchants dominated retail; mid-skilled community bankers, loan officers, and stockbrokers dominated finance; and mid-skilled middle and line managers dominated the administration of virtually all American firms. The old aristocracy instinctively ceded the labor market to the middle class; a leisured elite invited middle-class industry.
No longer.
While aristocrats naturally gave work over to the middle class, meritocracy’s superordinate workers possess both the skills and the inclination to work industriously. They unsurprisingly attract economic attention. Over the past forty years, computers, robots, and other new technologies have changed how goods are made and services delivered. These disruptive technologies (invented by interested innovators and tailored to suit skills that meritocratic education makes newly available) shift the center of production away from mid-skilled and toward super-skilled labor.
Automated industrial robots, for example, replace mid-skilled manufacturing workers with super-skilled workers who design and program the robots. Innovations in distribution, warehousing, and e-commerce displace middle-class independent merchants with subordinate Walmart greeters and Amazon warehouse workers at the bottom, and super-rich owners of megastores—including the world’s richest family (the Waltons of Walmart) and the world’s richest person (Jeff Bezos of Amazon)—at the very top. Derivatives and other new financial technologies allow elite workers on Wall Street to dispense with middle-class community bankers, loan officers, and stockbrokers. And new management techniques allow top executives and CEOs to discard middle and line managers and to exert immense powers directly to organize and control production workers. These and countless other parallel innovations simultaneously exclude middle-class workers, whose skills they render superfluous, and elevate elite workers, whose skills they make economically essential. Collectively, they displace work away from the middle class and onto the elite, to create the superordinate working class.
Today’s lawyers illustrate and document these patterns. In 1962 (when elite lawyers earned a third of what they do today), the American Bar Association could confidently declare that “there are . . . approximately 1300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer. Today, by contrast, a major law firm pronounces with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable
hours “if properly managed” is “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Billing 2,400 hours requires working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., six days a week, without vacation or sick days, every week of the year. Graduates of elite law schools join law firms that commonly require associates and even partners to work sixty-, eighty-, and even hundred-hour weeks.
Lawyers, because they must track billable hours in six-minute intervals, record an experience that all top workers share. Elite finance workers once kept “bankers’ hours”—originally named for the ten-to-three business day fixed by banks from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth and later used to refer more generally to any light work. Elite managers, for their part, worked as “organization men,” cocooned by lifelong employment in a corporate hierarchy that rewarded seniority above performance. Today, investment bankers work “17 hours a day . . . seven days a week,” in the words of one, “until midnight or one a.m. every night, including weekends, full-day weekends, and then probably pulling an all-nighter every week or every other week,” in the words of another. Similarly, the organization man has given way to what the Harvard Business Review calls the extreme job: a job that involves “physical presence at [the] workplace [for] at least ten hours a day,” a “large amount of travel,” “availability to clients 24/7,” “work-related events outside [of] regular work hours,” and an “inordinate scope of responsibility that amounts to more than one job.”
The Meritocracy Trap Page 3
