Middle-class stagnation, elite prosperity, and rising economic and social divisions all fit together, as meritocracy transfers wealth and privilege dynastically down through the generations. Each turn of the meritocratic ratchet drives inequality inexorably forward, and these effects, taken together, dominate rising economic inequality overall. The early meritocrats harbored false hopes. Meritocracy has become the single greatest obstacle to equal opportunity in America today.
THE END OF “STEADY GOOD”
A bartender at a popular marina restaurant in St. Clair Shores weaves all these threads together into a fabric of lived experience. After growing up in St. Clair Shores, he left for the West Coast, where he lived and worked in Seattle. Eventually, he returned—retreated—home, for a mix of reasons. Although he had earned more in Seattle, everything there was expensive, so that he was not sure that he could actually buy more, and (what is different) there were certainly many things on display in Seattle that he could not buy. Housing costs mattered especially, and in Seattle, prices were so high that he was entirely excluded from homeownership, not just at present but in any imaginable future. In St. Clair Shores, by contrast, virtually everything for sale is affordable for a middle-class family. The bartender can afford to shop in all the local stores and can eat out in all the local restaurants, including at Gilbert’s and, for that matter, at his own restaurant. He could buy a condo for perhaps $50,000 and then live effectively rent-free, while (a local real estate agent observes) a unionized autoworker married to a schoolteacher, or a nurse married to a physician’s assistant, might if they saved buy a house on the water, in the town’s most expensive neighborhood. Nothing in the town is out of reach.
A society tracks its economy, so that St. Clair Shores is also more culturally democratic than Seattle, and this social structure creates a veneer that covers up failure and exclusion. Seattle, like other large coastal cities, revolves around a national (even global) elite—the superordinate workers brought there by Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing. The bartender found himself priced out not just of consumption but also of membership and status there, so that, not being rich, he felt poor—excluded from a society built for the rich. By contrast, the middle class is at the center of life in St. Clair Shores. When asked who is important and why, residents (to a person) answered that status depends on commitment to the town rather than on education and jobs, or income and wealth; that community leaders are people who get involved, not people who are rich. Town leaders expressly reject the markers of status that dominate places like Seattle. “People don’t like the elite,” one says, and goes on to insist that “I’ve never hired anybody because of where they went to school or where they didn’t go to school.”
This makes status more widely available inside St. Clair Shores than in the larger world: “You can live here and feel successful for way less money,” a town leader observes on being told the bartender’s story, but in big coastal cities, “you can’t feel successful for more money.” Instead, failure and exclusion haunt life: “You’ve either made it or not, and then you don’t feel good,” she goes on to say. The bowling alley owner says simply that the bartender “felt middle class” here, and he might have added that “here” in St. Clair Shores is a middle-class world. “Steady good,” another prominent resident suggested, is better than “fleeting great.” It feels better to be at the center of your own poorer society than on the margins of someone else’s richer one.
At midcentury, St. Clair Shores could deliver on these democratic promises. Middle-class affluence meant that “steady good” in fact grew steadily better, and the dominant role that the middle class played across the country meant that being at the center of St. Clair Shores put a person in the center of American life, period, and (given American economic dominance) even credibly at the center of global society. Economic fundamentals supported middle-class culture, and the perspective from outside St. Clair Shores affirmed the perspective from inside it.
Today, meritocratic inequality steadily erodes this democratic logic, and the veneer that disguises middle-class exclusion is cracking and flaking, in St. Clair Shores as elsewhere. The economic and cultural drivers of American society lie farther and farther beyond the middle class. Every year, an innovation will spawn a new economic or cultural boomlet somewhere, and every year, it will never be in St. Clair Shores. As the larger meritocratic world moves forward, it loses respect for the town’s democratic order and middle-class values. Inside the town, life grows slowly worse—not yet wretched, but worn down and precarious.
Feelings of success inside St. Clair Shores become brittle—vulnerable to being shattered by outside perspectives—and the town struggles prayerfully to sustain a culture whose economic foundations are crumbling. To be middle class in a mature meritocracy is to be not just old-fashioned but backward-looking—committed to preservation rather than growth, and to a form of life that is inexorably in retreat; it is to protect a fortress that is both shrinking and decaying and that must fall, inevitably and soon.
St. Clair Shores, like the broader American middle class, is playing defense rather than offense. The town, which was once what one town leader calls a “very safe and controlled” space for the middle class, is, she acknowledges with wry understatement, becoming steadily less safe and less controlled.
ADDING INSULT TO INJURY
Even as it renders middle-class workers literally redundant, meritocracy also valorizes industry and despises idleness. The middle class that built midcentury America in its own image therefore becomes, under meritocracy, an underclass—deprived not just of economic value but also of virtue and social standing. In this way, meritocratic inequality attacks not just pocketbooks but also hearts and minds, hitching the moral insult of declaring middle-class workers worthless to the economic injury of stagnant middle-class wages. Meritocratic ideals express and validate the insult and, furthermore, demand that the middle class embrace its own abasement. The meritocracy trap imprisons the imagination, casting economic exclusion as an individual failure to measure up and blocking the middle class from collective consciousness of the harms that meritocracy imposes. Meritocracy remakes the middle class as a lumpenproletariat.
Stagnation harms those who are stuck, receding opportunity saps energy and optimism, and enforced idleness draws contempt, invites indolence, and nurtures frustration and anger. It does not matter much that the middle class is caught in a place that might otherwise seem satisfactory, especially when it sees elites drawing increasingly farther ahead and out of reach.
The two-pronged meritocratic assault on income and on status unravels the middle class. When communities lose middle-class manufacturing jobs, for example, not just earnings but also marriage and fertility rates fall, and mortality rates (especially among middle-aged men) rise. Families break apart: women with a high school education or less bear more than half of their children outside of marriage (compared with just 3 percent for women with a college degree or more). Children struggle in school. And adults strain simply to survive.
Mortality rates reveal the meritocracy trap’s psychic harms with almost incredible starkness. For two straight years now, midlife mortality has risen in America and life expectancy has fallen, especially for middle-class whites. This is flatly astonishing—actually unprecedented. Under ordinary conditions, only large wars, economic collapse, or epidemic disease can kill enough people to cause sudden increases in a population’s mortality. The last two-year decrease in life expectancy in the United States was due to epidemic influenza in 1962–63. But today, mortality is rising apart from any of these causes, and in a middle class that consumes more and bears a smaller labor burden than any in history. Middle-class Americans are dying, in large numbers, without material reasons.
The imaginative burden of meritocracy explains the mystery. The causes of death expose this sinister burden. Middle-class American adults are dying from indirect or even direct self-harm, as they—literally—som
atize the insult of their meritocratically justified exclusion. The billboards along I-94 East from Detroit to St. Clair Shores prominently include advertisements for Narcan, a medicine used to “stop opioid overdose,” and Macomb County, where St. Clair Shores lies, recorded seven times as many drug-related deaths in 2016 as in 1999. The opioid epidemic extends far beyond St. Clair Shores. Suicides, overdoses, and alcohol abuse (having increased between three and five times faster among less educated than among more educated adults) now kill Americans at rates roughly equivalent to the AIDS epidemic and account for rising mortality overall. In these and myriad other ways, the idleness that the meritocracy trap imposes on an economically superfluous middle class has exacted over a million “deaths of despair” over the past decade.
The conventional belief that meritocracy promotes meaningful work and widespread opportunity is misleading. Indeed, the common view gets things almost exactly backward. Meritocracy’s champions contend that meritocracy breaks the old link between inequality and poverty. But in fact, meritocratic inequality excludes everyone outside of an increasingly narrow elite from the top schools and jobs, and meritocracy deprives the middle class of social and economic opportunity. Similarly, meritocracy’s champions insist that it connects advantage to desert and so makes economic inequality morally innocuous and even admirable. But in fact, meritocratic inequality’s self-righteous insistence that social and economic hierarchies are justified renders them especially poisonous and cruel for those outside the chosen elite.
The burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on the middle class may be measured by counting its dead.
THE EXPLOITATION OF THE ELITE
The evils that meritocracy visits on the elite are less obvious, and the wealthy are anyway not natural objects of sympathy. Nevertheless, today’s meritocrats live much less well than did their aristocratic predecessors. The gloss that meritocratic inequality spreads over life at the top is not deep or humane, but shallow and even merciless.
An epidemic of effort consumes the meritocratic elite. Superordinate work pervades elite life virtually from cradle to grave. Elite effort begins in early childhood, where meritocratic parenting and education self-consciously aspire to instill the skills that superordinate work will later demand. Elite schools, both private and public, make such extreme demands on their students—three hours of homework a night in middle school and five hours in high school are not unusual—that the Centers for Disease Control has warned of schoolwork-induced sleep deprivation. An endless stream of supplemental training, provided by tutors, coaches, and test preparation services, further besieges rich children outside of school.
Unremittingly intense labor also extends deep into adulthood, spanning the life cycle of a superordinate career: the mature elite do the extreme jobs. Law firms do not just demand billable hours from associates, but also obsessively track every partner’s contributions to hours billed—one updates the online database through which partners can review one another’s contributions (by smartphone) every twenty minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Bankers are expected to “ratchet up” their dedication as they advance through the hierarchy. Top managers, in the words of a senior executive at a Fortune 500 firm, are “the hardest working” people in their companies, getting and keeping their jobs because they “out-work the others . . . out-practice them . . . [and] out-train them.”
All these workers give harder, longer, and more intensive effort than they want to. Superordinate workers overwhelmingly say they would sacrifice income to gain leisure. Those working over sixty hours per week report that they would, on average, prefer twenty-five fewer weekly hours. They say this because, systematic studies report, work interferes with their capacity to maintain their homes, to form strong relationships with their children and good relations with their spouses, and even to have a satisfying sex life. It is therefore no surprise that one commonly hears the overworked elite speak of their “time famine.” The flat, unyielding length of elite work hours engulfs the lives of superordinate workers.
Moreover, the meritocratic elite yields this immense effort under conditions of intense competitive strain. Meritocratic competition now pervades elite life. Evaluations that were once quarantined to exceptional moments like college admissions season or promotion to partner or managing director now infect every step of a meritocrat’s career. Every year, from preschool through retirement, includes some contest or assessment that filters, tracks, or otherwise influences his opportunities.
Elites first confront meritocratic pressures in early childhood, when they are conscripted into a competition for grades, test scores, and school places. The most competitive preschools admit fewer than one in ten applicants. Rich parents in cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco now commonly apply to ten kindergartens, even as each application requires running a gauntlet of essays, appraisals, and interviews—all to evaluate four-year-olds. Applications to elite private elementary and high schools repeat the ordeal, and in places where meritocratic elites congregate, top public schools are equally or even more competitive. Nearly thirty thousand students take the entrance exam for Manhattan’s eight elite specialized high schools, for example, competing for just over five thousand places. College simply extends the pattern. Elite universities that just a few decades ago accepted 30 percent of their applicants now accept fewer than 10 percent (and whereas the University of Chicago admitted 71 percent of its applicants as recently as 1995, Stanford admits fewer than 5 percent today).
Superordinate work renews the contest and projects it deep into adulthood. Law firms now ruthlessly separate even their partners into tiers based on contributions to firm profits (and income spreads within the partner ranks can reach twenty to one), and the firms expel even top-tier equity partners who stop generating enough business, a practice unheard of a generation ago. Banks distinguish between merely nominal managing directors and “participating managing directors” or “partners,” or between ordinary directors and “group heads”; and an annual “bonus day,” which allots performance-based pay, determines the success or failure of every banker’s year. Large corporations distinguish between ordinary managers and the C-suite, and even CEOs get their compensation principally as performance-related pay and face an aggressive market for corporate control. Their incomes and even jobs depend as never before on beating competitors and delivering stock price growth.
At the same time, the contests themselves have become transformatively more severe. In schools, a 30 percent admissions rate establishes a strenuous competition, but one in which a responsible candidate from a supportive family enjoys a reasonable prospect of at least one success. Admissions rates below 10 percent create a competition in which nearly any misstep disqualifies a candidate, so that success demands a single-minded willingness to sacrifice in the service of ambition and requires luck even then. At work, a strenuous but manageable competition to make partner or join management has been replaced by an overwhelming competition to reach the very top, highly exclusive tiers—the management committee, the C-suite—of an ever-pointier hierarchy.
These transformations again follow meritocratic inequality’s inexorable inner logic. Rising top incomes and the growing gap between the rich and the middle class produce carrots and sticks that together rationalize the severity of meritocratic competition. Elite children strain themselves in meritocratic schools and elite adults accept the relentless rigors of the meritocratic workplace because the returns to gloomy jobs are so low, the returns to glossy jobs are so high, and so few jobs are glossy. As winners more nearly take all, the battle to win intensifies. Elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it.
Meritocracy fundamentally remakes elite life: at home, at school, and at work, beginning in childhood, and extending through retirement. Elite training now bends rich families to its discipline, insistently demanding demonstrable achievement. Where aristocratic children once reveled in their privilege,
meritocratic children now calculate their futures—they plan and they trim, through rituals of stage-managed self-presentation, in familiar rhythms of ambition, hope, and worry. Where aristocratic parents once consigned their children to benign neglect and devoted themselves to adult life, meritocratic parents arrange their households around giving their children the greatest possible chance of winning the educational tournament. Elite work similarly bends rich adults to its discipline, insistently demanding intensive production through the whole of adult life. Meritocracy traps elites in an all-encompassing, never-ending struggle. Every colleague is a competitor. At every stage, the alternative to victory is elimination.
The meritocratic tournament inverts the conventional associations between income and status on the one hand and security on the other. Meritocracy introduces ever more distinctions specifically at the top of its hierarchy, and at the same time lengthens the social and economic ladder, so that the gaps between rungs increase as a person climbs up it. Meritocratic competition therefore grows most intense within the elite. The most successful students and workers also become the least secure, as smaller differences in performance produce greater differences in rewards at the top than anywhere else. Elite insecurity begins almost at birth and never ends—especially at the meritocratic ladder’s very highest rungs.
The Meritocracy Trap Page 6
