The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  Rising inequality is not driven principally by villains, and moralistic attacks on bad actors neglect morally complex but massively more consequential structural wrongs. Indeed, the commonplace objections to rising economic inequality undermine themselves. When critics embrace meritocracy in principle, they ensure their own impotence and in fact buttress the inequality they purport to condemn. The moralists are the real trivializers. And only arguments that underline rising inequality’s meritocratic bona fides confront the true depth and breadth of the problem.

  Meritocracy is not the solution to rising inequality but rather its root. Meritocracy’s inner logic has become undemocratic and opposed to economic equality. Even when meritocracy operates precisely as advertised, it promotes the dynastic succession of status and wealth and turns a ratchet that increases economic inequality. Ordinarily decent people, responding reasonably to economic and social forces that they do not control and cannot escape, produce outcomes from which very few people benefit and that still fewer celebrate.

  The central tragedy of the age reflects meritocracy’s triumph. Meritocracy—not by betraying its ideals but rather by realizing them—imposes a caste order that equality’s champions should condemn. And combating inequality requires resisting the meritocratic ideal itself.

  TWO

  THE HARMS OF MERITOCRACY

  Middle-class children born at the close of the Second World War, before meritocracy’s rise, received a warm welcome from an openhearted, rapidly expanding world. Median incomes nearly doubled between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, so that even children who never joined the elite were virtually certain to grow richer than their parents. Good fortune, widely shared, spreads beyond individual households and families to wash over a culture. At midcentury, thriving middle-class communities deployed their new wealth to invent an entirely new way of life.

  Middle-class prosperity even put a physical stamp on the world. Cities transformed, as car ownership reduced distances and construction raced to keep up with the middle class’s exploding demand to own houses. Villages and rural communities became suburbs, and suburban life assumed a previously unimaginable affluence. Over the 1950s, a previously sleepy resort town like St. Clair Shores, Michigan, transformed into a thriving suburb of prosperous Detroit. A local bowling alley owner remembers that in those days, his pinboys would leave their childhood jobs on their eighteenth birthdays and present themselves at one of the Big Three automakers, to be hired at $100 per week, the equivalent of perhaps $40,000 a year today. Their union jobs, moreover, effectively guaranteed lifelong employment, and if the young men proved good workers, they would be trained into tool- and diemakers or other skilled tradesmen and eventually paid the equivalent of nearly $100,000 per year, with benefits. Midcentury workers could achieve all this, moreover, without any formal education beyond high school.

  This “privileged working class,” as the business owner still calls it, made St. Clair Shores rich enough to sustain the twenty-seven-story Shore Club Highrise Apartments and Marina, which was built starting in 1962 overlooking Lake St. Clair. Similar new developments blanketed the country, connected by new roads, and a new social as well as physical world was born. Midcentury American workers succeeded so profoundly that they remade the American class structure, rising up to give themselves a new name and building a broad middle class that could represent and dominate society writ large. John Kenneth Galbraith would make middle-class prosperity into the theme of his classic midcentury book The Affluent Society.

  Today, meritocracy again transforms middle-class life, only now for the worse. The middle class has not become poor; indeed, economic growth probably makes it richer today than it was at midcentury. But the contemporary middle class is nevertheless much worse off on meritocracy’s account. Where the midcentury middle class thrived and grew, meritocracy now bequeaths it a stagnant, depleted, and shrinking world. And where the midcentury middle class dominated the national imagination, meritocracy now exiles it from the heart of economic and social life and confines it to economic hinterlands and cultural backwaters.

  St. Clair Shores illustrates the new world also, in all its tangled and conflicted complexity. The town faces no acute deprivation and suffers no obvious injustice or oppression: median family income in St. Clair Shores, at just under $70,000, almost precisely matches the national median, which nearly triples the poverty threshold, while poverty, at about 9 percent, falls below the nationwide rate. Children play in well-tended yards on tree-lined streets of modest—three-bedroom, eleven hundred square feet—but well-built and immaculately maintained one-story houses, which become slightly larger (and often acquire a second story) nearer the lake that gives the town its name. St. Clair Shores encourages good husbandry, giving awards for beautification and issuing citations for even minor neglect, such as flaking paint or feeding birds in the front yard. Residents embrace this vision of civic life: a councilman proudly reports that the town sustains over thirty volunteer municipal boards, commissions, and committees. Summer in St. Clair Shores begins with what people claim is the largest Memorial Day parade in Michigan, headlined in 2018 by Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan and also featuring Al Sobotka, who drives the Zamboni for the Detroit Red Wings. Summer ends with a classic- and hot-rod-car cruise down Harper Avenue. Residents, reflecting on this portrait, say that the middle-class values of the 1960s still dominate the town.

  This way of life, for all its apparent controlled steadiness, leaves St. Clair Shores with little to look forward to and much to fear. Meritocracy is slowly dismantling what the midcentury economy built.

  The town’s southern neighbor and former cultural and economic engine, Detroit, has suffered decades of relentless deterioration, culminating in the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. It will never recapture midcentury affluence: the manufacturing jobs that made the midcentury middle class are largely gone, and no one in St. Clair Shores thinks that they are coming back. The wellsprings of midcentury wealth have dried up.

  The present-day economy, moreover, neither attracts firms established elsewhere to move to St. Clair Shores nor stimulates start-ups, so that the town enjoys very little new economic investment. St. Clair Shores sustains few glamorous or otherwise truly elite jobs, and workers there lack opportunities to advance into management or the professions. Fewer than a quarter of the adults in St. Clair Shores hold a bachelor’s degree and fewer than one in ten hold a graduate or professional degree. There are therefore virtually no really rich people in St. Clair Shores, at least by national standards. A local businesswoman and civic leader uses annual incomes of $300,000 to $400,000 to illustrate the very richest few people in town—a tidy sum, to be sure, but outside the top 1 percent.

  The economic energy and social dynamism that suffused St. Clair Shores at midcentury have dissipated, and the town’s commercial culture now stagnates. Its architecture—Arts & Crafts cottages and midcentury modern ranches—has worn well, but there are no stylish new buildings to complement the older ones. There are no fashionable or trendy shops, restaurants, or clubs in town, and there is nothing really expensive, extravagant, exciting, or novel to do. Instead, residents seeking a night out go to places like Gilbert’s Lodge, where hamburgers (served since 1955) cost $12 and deep-dish pizza a little more. (These prices, a local schoolteacher says, mean that “people going to Gilbert’s are probably more of the top” of the town’s society.)

  St. Clair Shores feels preserved rather than blossoming. (When Gilbert’s burned down a few years ago, the owners rebuilt a copy, down to the model train running in the rafters and the trophy animal heads on the walls.) Preservation, moreover, chiefly depends on the accumulated income that older (and now-retired) workers gained and saved in the midcentury economy. The forces that preserve the town are losing ground. The St. Clair Shores Public Library, which plays a central role in the town’s cultural life, has roughly a third fewer staff members than it used to, and tight budgets have
reduced the library to relying on part-time and inevitably short-term workers. The library increasingly depends on private charity to meet its basic needs, and a staff member reports that the reading room still uses tables bought in 1971 (although the desk chairs were finally reupholstered a few years ago).

  Even if St. Clair Shores just about sustains its current residents decorously in their established habits, its fragile condition does not allow them to grow more prosperous or to experiment or evolve, and it is not a place that people move to or even visit much. The town’s population peaked in 1970, and it has lost nearly a third of its residents since then. The now-fading Shore Club—with unrenovated apartments and ramshackle common spaces—remains to this day by far the tallest building in town. And the Shore Pointe Motor Lodge, which opened in the boom years to serve the holidaymakers and other visitors who once flocked to Lake St. Clair, is still the only hotel in town.

  Meritocracy consigns middle-class communities throughout the country to the same fate as St. Clair Shores. The job losses in Detroit’s auto industry—which account for stagnation in St. Clair Shores—have equivalents all across American manufacturing, and these have cost the country nearly ten million middle-class jobs. More generally, super-skilled, superordinate workers have displaced mid-skilled, middle-class workers from the center of economic production. Across all economic sectors, innovations cause middle-class jobs to give way to a few glossy and many gloomy ones, so dramatically that the immense incomes paid in the glossy jobs account for the bulk of the rebalancing of income in favor of the elite and against the middle class, and therefore also for the bulk of elite income growth and middle-class income stagnation. As the incomes of the top 1 percent have tripled, the median real income has increased by only about a tenth since 1975, and median incomes have effectively not increased at all since 2000.

  Meritocracy’s champions insist that its hierarchies are benevolent and just: that inequality without deprivation is harmless, and that inequality that tracks industry is innocent. But the lived experience of the middle class tells a different story. Meritocracy debases an increasingly idled middle class, which it shuts off from income, power, and prestige. Moreover, even as the meritocracy trap locks an idled middle class out of the income and status conferred by work, meritocracy itself makes industry essential for status. Meritocracy therefore also subjects middle-class Americans to powerful imaginative burdens. By declaring its inequalities just, meritocracy adds a moral insult to the economic injury of middle-class stagnation. This insult carries enormous additional costs.

  THE EROSION OF OPPORTUNITY

  Meritocratic inequality damages opportunities as well as outcomes.

  A middle-class child in St. Clair Shores will attend passable but unremarkable public high schools and achieve undistinguished SAT scores—almost precisely tracking national averages—in a world that increasingly concentrates the returns to education in a narrow cadre of exceptional students. Graduates mostly go on to attend local colleges—Macomb Community College (which runs radio and television advertisements that still encourage high school students to enter skilled trades), Wayne State, and Michigan State. Some students, online message boards reveal, aspire to the University of Michigan. But there is no culture of high academic or professional ambition in the town, virtually no St. Clair Shores students even apply to the Ivy League or to other really elite colleges, and (residents say) actually attending such a college is so rare that a student who did so might make the local paper.

  Once again, these patterns repeat throughout the country. Middle-class children today generally share their parents’ diminished prospects and are barely better represented at elite colleges than are poor children. At highly competitive colleges, students from households in the top quarter of the income distribution now outnumber those from each of the middle two quarters by nearly six to one. The skew toward wealth at the most elite universities is almost inconceivably greater still. At Harvard and Yale, more students come from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half. Since only about one in ten Americans holds an advanced (post-BA) degree, the middle class remains locked out of just about all graduate and professional schools.

  Meritocratic inequality demotes the middle class—diminishing not just outcomes but also opportunities—specifically because of meritocracy itself. Meritocrats, more than any elite that has come before, know how to train; indeed, they know training better than they know virtually anything. Meritocrats therefore cannot resist investing their massive incomes in giving their children elite educations unlike anything that middle-class parents can possibly afford. Meritocracy’s inner logic makes it inevitable that intense education, provided to children while their parents are still alive, becomes the essential mechanism for the dynastic transmission of caste.

  Nevertheless, the size and scope of elite investments in education astonish. Top public schools, located in rich districts and funded by real estate taxes on expensive houses, spend two or three times as much per student per year as middle-class schools do, including in St. Clair Shores. These investments buy literally extraordinary educations. Where St. Clair Shores middle school students might share a music teacher, who travels from school to school to teach 750 students a week, from a cart and without a music room, rich schools boast facilities that ordinary schools would not even dream about: a high-tech weather station in Newton, Massachusetts, for example, and, in Coronado, California, a digital media academy equipped with 3-D printers. More broadly, and probably more consequentially, the extra money available to rich schools pays for more and better teachers. A careful study of one large county revealed that principals of schools with richer students possess a full year’s more experience on average than those of schools with poorer students, teachers possess nearly two years’ more experience on average and 25 percent more master’s degrees, and first-year teachers (who commonly struggle as they learn their craft) are less than half as common.

  Elite private schools, which typically draw 80 percent of their students from the top 4 percent of the income distribution (like a gated community, a teacher in St. Clair Shores observes), invest still more extravagantly, spending as much as six times the national public school average per student. These schools possess truly astonishing facilities, with campuses that look, feel, and function like universities rather than schools. Elite private schools also employ more than twice as many teachers per student as public schools do. These teachers are themselves elite and extensively educated: fully three-quarters of the teachers at the prep schools that Forbes ranks as the twenty best in America hold advanced, which is to say post-BA, degrees.

  The elite’s massive investments in education succeed. The academic gap between rich and poor students now exceeds the gap between white and black students in 1954, the year in which the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. Economic inequality today produces greater educational inequality than American apartheid once did. Educational inequality separates the rich not just from the poor but also, increasingly, from the middle class. The academic achievement gap between rich and middle-class schoolchildren, for example, is now markedly greater than the achievement gap between middle-class and poor children. By the time children apply to college, the differences are greater still and focus more specifically on the exceptional performance of elites. Rich children now outscore middle-class children on the SAT by twice as much as middle-class children outscore children raised in poverty. The elite out-train the middle class by so much that depressingly few children from non-elite households overcome caste to perform at elite levels. Only about one in two hundred children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median.

  These unequal patterns arise inexorably through meritocracy’s inner logic. Meritocracy’s promise of equality—the theory that anyone can succeed simply by excelling, because meritocratic universities admit students based on academic achievement and employers
hire workers based on skill—proves false in practice. The emphasis on excellence, whatever its motivation in principle, in fact produces admissions competitions and labor markets in which people from modest and even middle-class backgrounds cannot succeed. Exceptional cases always exist, but in general, children from poor or even middle-class households simply cannot compete in the battle for places at elite universities with rich children who have imbibed massive, sustained, planned, and practiced investment from birth or even in the womb. Workers with ordinary training, in turn, cannot compete with the immensely skilled and enormously industrious workers produced by the elite training.

  These patterns, taken together, dramatically confine social mobility. Only one out of every hundred children born into the poorest fifth of households, and fewer than one out of every fifty children born into the middle fifth, will ever become rich enough to join the top 5 percent. A poor or middle-class child therefore faces longer odds against climbing the income ladder in the United States than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark (and mobility in the last four of these countries more than doubles, and in some instances triples, that in the United States). Absolute economic mobility is also dwindling. The odds that a middle-class child will out-earn his parents have fallen by more than half since midcentury—and the decline is greater among the middle class than among the poor.

  A cycle of exclusion ensues. Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege super-skilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse. Meritocratic labor incomes, in turn, enable elite parents further to monopolize elite education for each successive generation of children. Meritocracy therefore creates feedback loops between education and work, in which inequality in each realm amplifies inequality in the other. The rising gap between elite and middle-class wages measures the scale of meritocratic outcome inequality. The gap between elite and middle-class investments in education cashes out the scale of the dynastic transfer and of meritocratic inequality of opportunity. Together, these sums fix the strength of the meritocracy trap’s exclusion.