The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  Indeed, the narrow elite has become so small, and the competition to join the elite so intense, that the tournament begins afresh in each new generation, as no one is ever comfortably “established” in the meritocracy. Class anxiety dominates life at the top—from childhood, through youth and university, to career building and parenthood—as superordinate workers and their children live under the inescapable threat of failing to measure up and being expelled from the elite. In a dark irony, meritocracy renders rank itself precarious. The contrast between the meritocrat’s slippery path to extravagant wealth and the earlier aristocrat’s complacent birthright security and entitlement could hardly be starker. Meritocracy enables dynastic succession, but it imposes a heavy human tax on its dynasties.

  As an entire civilization centers its economic life around the immense training and enormous industry of a tiny elite of its people, the weight that each superordinate worker must carry grows. Meritocracy concentrates production in an elite that is literally too narrow to shoulder the burden. This form of production exploits those who supply overburdened and alienated labor in order to enter and remain inside the meritocratic inner sanctum.

  THE BURDEN OF HUMAN CAPITAL

  None of this is an accident. Instead, the elite’s effortful striving reflects an adjustment to a new economic necessity, itself occasioned by meritocracy’s inner logic. The new elite simply cannot realize its income and status without devoting itself, almost single-mindedly, to competitive training and work.

  The old elite held its wealth in land and (later) factories. Land and factories can produce rents, or profits, without requiring any specific labor from their owners and often without requiring the owners to work at all. An aristocratic rentier might therefore acquire income idly. Low-paid tenants or workers provided all the labor, and the leisured aristocrat kept the lion’s share of the profits. Physical and financial capital liberates its owners.

  By contrast, the wealth of the new meritocratic elite consists in its own training and skills. In a sense, the meritocrat remains fundamentally a rentier. She owns an asset: her embodied training and skill, or human capital. Like every rentier, the meritocrat extracts profits, or income, from her capital by mixing it with labor. The rich do not possess a secret to effort that the rest lack. Rather, an hour’s superordinate work from an elite doctor, lawyer, banker, or manager produces more value than an hour’s work by an unskilled laborer, holding effort constant, because each unit of the superordinate worker’s effort mixes with capabilities built through massive prior investments in training. Meritocracy sustains enormous wages for superordinate workers not on account of any extraordinary effort but rather on account of the economic value of this immense stock of human capital.

  The forms of capital held by meritocrats and aristocrats have nearly opposite effects on their lives, and in particular on their freedom. Unlike land or factories, human capital can produce income—at least using current technologies—only by being mixed with its owners’ own contemporaneous labor. (Even where a superordinate worker leverages her skill and training by hiring others to mix their labor with her human capital—as a partner at a law firm might hire associates to elaborate her legal intuitions, or a manager might hire production workers to implement her plans—she can mix her human capital productively with other people’s labor only if she herself works intensively alongside them.) The rich now work so compulsively because this is the only way to exploit their peculiar kind of wealth. Human capital more nearly enslaves than liberates its owners.

  The imaginative requirements of living off of human capital further burden the meritocratic elite—in ways at once less tangible than long hours and more profoundly disturbing. As a maturing meritocracy roots both income and status comprehensively in human capital, competition becomes more immediately and inescapably personal. The meritocratic tournament dominates the culture that frames both the external environment and the inner life (the hopes and fears) of every meritocrat. People who are required to measure up from preschool through retirement become submerged in the effort. They become constituted by their achievements, so that eliteness goes from being something that a person enjoys to being everything that he is. In a mature meritocracy, schools and jobs dominate elite life so immersively that they leave no self over apart from status. An investment banker, enrolled as a two-year-old in the Episcopal School and then passed on to Dalton, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, Harvard Business School, and finally to Goldman Sachs (where he spends his income on sending his children to the schools that he once attended), becomes this résumé, in the minds of others and even in his own imagination.

  Every owner who exploits an asset purely as a means to an end alienates himself from that asset’s true nature and intrinsic worth. Even a traditional rentier, who administers his estate purely to gain income, betrays the feudal bonds that once tied an aristocrat to his land. As Chekhov worried in The Cherry Orchard, the quest for profit “devours everything in its path and so converts one kind of matter into another.” The ancient orchard that gives the play its name yields its greatest rents by being cut down to make way for holiday villas—which is to say through its own absolute destruction and the destruction of the way of life that it once sustained.

  But an owner of land or factories—especially a new owner, who rejects feudal values (a son of serfs, in Chekhov’s play)—might reasonably absorb or even disregard these costs. Indeed, the profits that a rentier extracts free him to devote his personal energies to his authentic interests and ambitions—in the arts, for example, or statesmanship, or even just high society—without worrying about his economic income or social status. Traditional wealth, held as physical and financial capital, does not just free its owner from the need to work; it also enables him to become more fully himself.

  Human capital works in almost exactly the opposite way. The very idea that a person might be capital treats the person as a means and so invites alienation: it trains the profit system’s devastating appetite on the people whose human capital produces rents. Meritocracy, moreover, applies this idea most intensively to the elite. It makes the elite worker’s talents, skills, and training—her own self, her very person—into her greatest economic asset, the overwhelmingly dominant source of her wealth and caste. In order to extract income and establish status based on this kind of wealth, the superordinate worker must comprehend herself in instrumental terms. To secure her eliteness, the superordinate worker must ruthlessly manage her education and labor—training to develop skills that others value, and then working intensively in jobs and at tasks again set by others. She must act, in effect, as an asset manager whose portfolio contains her own person.

  Meritocracy expands the commodification that Chekhov lamented with respect to land so that it now reaches human capital also. Indeed, meritocracy’s express language emphasizes that it commodifies elite training and work. The schools and universities that educate superordinate workers parcel training into standardized, measurable, and even rankable units (think of the U.S. News & World Report rankings)—literally degrees. And the elite labor market then bundles tasks into discrete jobs, which can themselves be ranked (think of lists of “top” banks, consultancies, and law firms, or measures of hours billed within firms) including, again most literally, by wages. (Goldman Sachs—the poster child for superordinate labor—has renamed its personnel department “Human Capital Management.”) Meritocratic production “devours” meritocrats, “converting” them from “one kind of matter” (people) “into another” (human capital). Meritocracy transposes the alienation that Chekhov’s aristocrat suffered from his estate onto the meritocrat’s relationship to his own person. And unlike the aristocrat, the meritocrat cannot turn to an alternative form of life to assuage or even cure his alienation.

  Indeed, mature meritocracy’s demands to exploit the self as an instrument of caste literally overwhelm elite life. Elite parents—reluctantly but self-consciously—allow their children’s education
s to be dominated not by experiments and play, but by accumulating the human capital needed for getting admitted to an elite college and, eventually, securing an elite job. Elite schools structure themselves around human capital accumulation, constantly adjusting their practices to the latest teachings of education science. Even where play is allowed, it ceases to be an end in itself and instead is subordinated to work. Sometimes play becomes a tool, used for teaching teamwork, for example, or the kinds of creative thinking that superordinate jobs will eventually demand. Other times, play is manipulated more ruthlessly still. At one elite elementary school, for example, a teacher posted a “problem of the day,” which the students were required to answer before going home but given no designated time to solve, with the express purpose of training fifth graders how to snatch a few extra minutes of work time by multitasking or by sacrificing recess. By these and myriad other means, meritocracy transforms childhood itself from a site of consumption into a site of production. Its product is the human capital of the future adult superordinate worker.

  Meritocratic adulthood similarly approaches work not as an opportunity for self-expression or self-actualization, but rather value extraction. A person whose wealth and status depend almost entirely on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job—far too much rides on training and work to indulge curiosity or pursue a calling or vocation. Moreover, as wages become increasingly concentrated among the very highest-paid workers, a smaller and smaller share of jobs and job types support top incomes. Someone who wants an elite income—or, critically, even just an income sufficient to buy his children the schooling on which their own eliteness depends—must do one of a narrowly restricted class of jobs, heavily concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Fewer than one in one hundred jobs, and virtually none in middle-class occupations—teaching, for example, or journalism, public service, or even engineering—pays even close to elite wages. And a person whose native interests lie in any of these fields, or indeed anywhere outside of whatever maximizes the return on her human capital, can pursue her calling only at the cost of sacrificing her own, and her children’s, caste.

  Far better, when confronted with such knife-edged choices, to forestall frustration by avoiding passionate commitments to begin with. This is why—in a pattern whose familiarity today disguises that it has no real historical precedent—elite workplaces are filled with people who would rather be doing something else but whose human capital has become too valuable (too essential to income and status) to squander on indulging personal ambitions: bankers who studied English or history in college, for example, or corporate lawyers who were inspired to go to law school by the American Civil Liberties Union or the Center for Individual Rights. It is also why the superordinate workers who yield this alienated labor nevertheless work at their jobs single-mindedly, and for almost all of their time. Meritocratic inequality might free the rich in consumption, but it enslaves them in production.

  A person who lives like this places himself, quite literally, at the disposal of others—he uses himself up. A life measured out in this way, as on a jeweler’s grain scale, proceeds under a pervasive shadow. At its worst, the meritocratic elite squanders the capacity to set and pursue authentic, intrinsically valued goals, so that honor is reduced to being useful without fuss. Even at its best, meritocracy invites deep alienation. Meritocrats gain their immense labor incomes at the cost of exploiting themselves and deforming their personalities. Elite students desperately fear failure and crave the conventional markers of success, even as they see through and publicly deride mere “gold stars” and “shiny things.” Elite workers, for their part, find it harder and harder to pursue or even to know genuine passions and to gain meaning through their work. Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry, never finding, or even knowing, the right food.

  Meritocratic production, by making elite workers rentiers whose incomes depend on exploiting their own human capital, renders work a site of suppression rather than expression of the superordinate worker’s true self. This is, in fact, the same alienation that Karl Marx diagnosed in exploited proletarian labor in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as technological developments render mid-skilled workers increasingly surplus to economic requirements, and at the same time place super-skilled labor at the very center of productive life, meritocracy shifts the classic afflictions of capitalism up the class structure. The increasingly superfluous middle classes assume the role once occupied by the lumpenproletariat, while alienated labor comes home to roost in the elite.

  Marx’s knife takes an added twist. The elite, acting now as rentiers of their own human capital, exploit themselves, becoming not just victims but also agents of their own alienation. Once more, the elite should not—they have no right to—expect sympathy on this account from those who remain excluded from the privileges and benefits of high caste. Yet superordinate workers suffer worse than luxury’s disappointments, and the human burdens of alienation remain real and weighty, wherever they fall. Where physical and financial capital frees its owner from the pressures to satisfy others, human capital focuses and concentrates all of these pressures insistently on the person who owns it.

  The contrast between the meritocrat’s bright, unreal path to extravagant wealth and the earlier elite’s complacent birthright security and entitlement could hardly be starker. Where the traditional wealth allowed the aristocrat to be more truly himself, new wealth—held as human capital—condemns the meritocrat to losing her authentic self entirely. Meritocracy imposes a spiritual affliction on superordinate workers, condemning them to existential anxiety and deep alienation. No quantity of income and status can relieve it.

  WHITE-COLLAR SALT MINES

  Even elite accomplishments reveal suffering and strain—the self-suppression that meritocratic competition exacts from elites. A recent applicant to Yale College, seeking to signal her intellectual seriousness and devotion to study, used her college essay to boast that once while speaking to an especially admired French teacher in high school, she urinated on herself rather than break off intellectual conversation in order to go to the bathroom. The pressure to broadcast accomplishment so pervades elite college culture that students give the practice names—for example, Stanford’s “Duck Syndrome,” chosen on account of the contrast between a duck’s smooth glide when viewed from above water and the frantically churning legs that propel the duck below. And a respondent to a recent Harvard Business School survey of elite executives proudly insisted, “The 10 minutes that I give my kids at night is one million times greater than spending that 10 minutes at work.” Ten minutes!

  Meritocracy’s deformations of the elite self also show a starkly tragic face. Palo Alto, California, for example—where four-fifths of adults hold a BA, over half hold graduate or professional degrees, and median family income nearly triples the national median—presents a model of meritocratic schooling. The town spends nearly twice as much per student on education as St. Clair Shores; the average student at Palo Alto’s public high schools, Palo Alto High (or “Paly”) and Henry M. Gunn High, scores in the top 10 percent nationwide on the SAT; and over 60 percent of graduates attend elite colleges, while forty graduates a year go to Stanford alone. But children in Palo Alto tragically succumb to the tensions that they must endure to achieve these meritocratic “successes.” Paly and Gunn have in recent decades produced multiple suicide clusters and suffer ten-year suicide rates four to five times the national average. The suicides sometimes throw themselves in front of trains, and one student described the Caltrain warning whistle, heard in classrooms roughly every twenty minutes, as “like the cannon that goes off in The Hunger Games every time a kid dies.”

  The suicide clusters at Palo Alto’s high schools are not unusual. Students at wealthy high schools generally now show higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than those from poor backgrounds, and they suffer
clinically significant depression and anxiety at rates double or triple the national average. These trends produce enormously high absolute levels of distress. In a recent study of another Silicon Valley high school, for example, 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety. College students, similarly, are twice as likely to have been diagnosed with depression today as they were at the turn of the millennium. Colleges again confront suicide clusters, and a task force on mental health established by the University of Pennsylvania in response to a wave of suicides there recently drew a direct connection between the meritocratic pressures that students come under and “demoralization, alienation, or conditions like anxiety or depression.” A broader report, produced by a consortium of elite educators (including from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education) laments the “competitive frenzy” surrounding admissions and warns that competition poses a direct threat to applicants’ mental health.

  Adulthood brings the elite no relief. The high tension that pervades meritocratic work stretches the elite to shrill anxiety, and even to the point of snapping. Superordinate workers—in Palo Alto, in New York, and across the country—work with frenzied intensity. Indeed, the meritocratic workplace intensifies the pressures inside the meritocracy trap, even to the point of assuming a physical expression, written on the elite body. A junior banker from New York, for example, reports flying to meet a client in spite of a sinus infection, rupturing his eardrum on the flight, and then completing his meetings with a bleeding and deaf ear, before rushing to the emergency room on landing back at home. A former lawyer similarly tells of the time when an associate in his firm passed out in the middle of a conference room, and the remainder of her team called an ambulance and, after the paramedics took her away, returned straight to work. (The associate eventually made partner, and observers treat her collapse as contributing to the promotion, by conspicuously demonstrating her commitment to her job.) Bankers have in some cases worked themselves literally to death, as when an analyst at Goldman Sachs was found dead from a high fall after repeated troubles concerning overwork. These accounts—right down to the gore—betray a monomaniac commitment to using, even abusing, oneself that is more familiar among elite athletes: they are white-collar versions of the NFL player Ronnie Lott’s decision to amputate a broken finger because surgery and a cast would have forced him to miss a crucial game.