Even when meritocratic work culture pampers the body, it attacks the spirit. Amazon’s offices may be less brutal—less physically grinding—than its warehouse floors, but they are nevertheless pitiless and inhumane. The firm’s “leadership principles” call for managers to have “relentlessly high standards” and to “deliver results.” To achieve this, Amazon requires managers to challenge each other “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting” and—borrowing a technique traditionally associated with cults and totalitarian states—to be “vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing.” As one worker observed, in an exposé of Amazon’s workplace culture, the firm’s combination of striving, criticism, and competition at work combined to ensure that “nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” Another recently reported a performance review in which his boss spent a half hour delivering an uninterrupted litany of skills not mastered and goals not attained, only to conclude, “Congratulations, you’re being promoted.”
Strikingly, other insider observers reacting to the exposé did not call claims about Amazon exaggerated or cast the company as an outlier. Rather, observers of elite work overwhelmingly found the account of Amazon expected, ordinary, unsurprising, and even banal. Other elite jobs—at tech companies, banks, law and consulting firms, and even large corporations and other “white-collar salt mines”—are not materially different. Burnout pervades the elite workplace.
In order to become part of the meritocratic elite, a person must be able to absorb the strains of self-exploitation gracefully, or at least grimly. The greatest successes go precisely to those who can sustain their intensity without disruption and without breaking down. Superordinate workers know this and make endurance a measure of their status, much as the leisure class once measured its caste by polish and refinement. Amazon tells managers that when they “hit the wall” on account of their work’s unrelenting effort and strain, the only solution is to “climb the wall.” An investment banker recently observed that “it’s hard to be a middle-level vice president and not spend 90 hours a week at the firm.” In the words of a Fortune 500 executive, aspiring managers who have demonstrated their skills and dedication face a “final elimination”: “Some people flame out, get weird because they work all the time. . . . The people at the top are very smart, work like crazy, and don’t flame out. They’re still able to maintain a good mental set, and keep their family life together. They win the race.”
All the material advantages that elite meritocrats enjoy cannot secure their flourishing or well-being. Even exceptional resilience cannot remove the bitter taste that victory inflicts on those who win the meritocratic tournament. An unhappy, even disconsolate affect increasingly dominates superordinate work and elite life. Roughly two-thirds of elite workers now profess that they would decline a promotion if their new job demanded yet more of their energy. And plaintive calls for work/life balance ring ever louder in elite workplaces.
Elite discontent is driving American meritocracy toward what might be called a “Vietnam moment.” When the U.S. government adopted a draft lottery that effectively ended college deferments and extended the burdens of fighting in Vietnam to rich families, the elite finally turned against the war. As the meritocracy trap closes in around elites, even the rich are turning against meritocratic inequality. As a dean of Stanford Law School recently observed in a letter to graduates, elite lawyers are caught in an intensifying ratchet: higher salaries require more billable hours to support them, longer hours require higher yet salaries to justify them, and each increase generates another in a seemingly endless cycle. Whose interests does this serve? he lamented. Does anyone actually want it?
A plea is not a plan, however: when promotions are offered, superordinate workers accept them and deliver whatever additional effort their new jobs demand, and work/life balance remains a pious slogan rather than a tangible program. The elite’s attempts to avoid meritocratic discontent are defeated by meritocracy’s economic logic: by the fact that an owner of human capital can get income only by exploiting herself, and by the carrots of glossy jobs and the sticks of gloomy ones. All the income and wealth that meritocracy confers on superordinate workers cannot promote freedom or flourishing. To the contrary, these nominal advantages in fact confine the elite ever more tightly inside the meritocracy trap.
THREE
THE COMING CLASS WAR
Aristocratic elites typically segregated themselves from the rest of the societies over which they ruled. Aristocrats traditionally owned things, performed rituals, and even wore clothes and ate foods that distinguished them from the masses. In some cases, laws (known as sumptuary codes) even mandated the distinctions, by forbidding non-aristocrats from owning or consuming aristocratic things.
The post–World War II American order dampened these distinctions, at least where economics was concerned. Race, gender, and sexuality divided society and imposed hierarchy and subordination in midcentury America, as they have done since the founding. But income and wealth mostly did not.
Palo Alto was not materially different from St. Clair Shores in 1960. Each town had its own local flavor: Jerry Garcia settled in Palo Alto as Bob Seger played the Crow’s Nest (East) in St. Clair Shores. But median incomes and house prices were similar in both towns. Both places, moreover, grew steadily: the Stanford Shopping Center opened in Palo Alto in 1955 to meet a rising demand for places to shop, just a few years before the Shore Club Highrise Apartments would be built to meet demand for places to live in St. Clair Shores.
Palo Alto and St. Clair Shores illustrated the age. Wages across regions converged between 1950 and 1970, and college graduates were “remarkably evenly distributed” across the country: between urban and rural locations, across geographic regions, and even within cities. The elite and the middle class married and parented in the same ways, ate the same foods, watched the same television and movies, and even owned the same things, right down to the brands that made them and the stores that sold them: Americans bought 90 percent of their cars from Ford, Chrysler, or General Motors (whose most expensive models cost perhaps twice the price of an average car), half of their appliances from Sears, and a third of their watches from Timex. Postwar capitalism created a society that was not just politically but also economically and socially democratic. Quite possibly for the first time in recorded history, the rich and the rest lived the same lives and even had the same stuff.
Midcentury Americans self-consciously embraced this democratic merger and celebrated their classless society, including in popular culture. Economic fundamentals produced cultural practices that reached deeply and broadly into people’s lives, to influence not just how they lived but also how they thought about how they lived, establishing an imaginative field. F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, in a short story, that “the very rich . . . are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway, in a short story of his own, had a character reply, “Yes, they have more money.” With respect to economic inequality at midcentury, Hemingway was right and Fitzgerald wrong. The rich merged seamlessly into the middle class, and insofar as income did insert a seam into American society, it separated the middle class from the poor. Outside of poverty, economic inequality at midcentury presented a social blur. Economic distinctions did not disappear entirely, to be sure. But they became so small that the postwar decades are commonly called the Great Compression.
Today, meritocracy reinstates aristocratic distinctions, as meritocratic inequality resolves the social blur that once blended the rich into the middle class through small differences of degree into a razor-sharp line that separates the rich from the rest by a difference in kind.
The ratio of one-percenter to median incomes is now double what it was at midcentury, even as incomes in the middle and bottom quintiles have converged. Moreover, meritocratic inequality’s effects on the lives of both the rich and the rest are not limited to income, understood as an abstract dollar sum. T
he rich and the rest now marry separately: 25 percent of American marriages are today composed of two college graduates (compared to 3 percent in 1960). The rich and the rest parent differently and in profoundly divergent domestic circumstances: women with a high school education or less now bear more than half of their children outside of marriage, for example, which is roughly twenty times the share for women with a college degree or more. The rich and the rest enjoy different pastimes: the rich spend so much less time at passive leisure than the rest and so much (two to five times) more time exercising that whereas “prosperous” was once a euphemism for “overweight,” fitness is now a status symbol. The rich and the rest worship different gods, or at least congregate in different religions: High Church Protestants, Jews, and Hindus are unusually rich and educated, Low Church Protestants are unusually poor and uneducated, and only Catholics mirror all of society. The rich and the rest also inhabit different worlds online. An exhaustive analysis recently studied Google data on searches initiated in both the most and least prosperous counties in the country (ranked according to an index that includes income and education). The study revealed that the searches most correlated with prosperity include digital cameras, baby joggers, Skype, and foreign travel. By contrast, the searches most correlated with deprivation included health problems; weight loss; guns; video games; and the Antichrist, hell, and the Rapture.
Even geography now separates the rich from the rest. Palo Alto has left St. Clair Shores behind. Median incomes in Palo Alto now almost triple those in St. Clair Shores, and median house prices are roughly twenty times as high. Palo Alto’s residents are three times more likely to hold a BA and five times more likely to hold a graduate or professional degree than residents of St. Clair Shores. The next neighborhoods over extend the isolation of the elite: Palo Alto is embedded in Silicon Valley, as St. Clair Shores is embedded in Detroit.
Similar gaps are opening across the country. Regional wages generally have diverged in the most recent four decades, and a vast educational divide has opened up between town and country: by 2000, the percentage of young adults with college degrees in rural areas was half that of the average city. College graduates, moreover, converge on a few particular and distinctive places, so that nearly half of couples in which both partners are highly educated live in large metropolitan areas. The convergence is greatest at the very top: three-quarters of the participants in a recent survey of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale alumni live in zip codes that rank in the top 20 percent on an index of income and education, half live in zip codes in the top 5 percent, and a quarter live in zip codes in the top 1 percent. The elite, moreover, did most of the traveling that caused this sorting, as young college graduates are more than twice as likely to move between states as young people with high school degrees only.
This makes perfect sense: moving far from home is exciting and even life-affirming for a superordinate worker whose sense of self comes from his job, but it is only frightening and isolating for a middle-class worker, condemned to dead-end jobs, for whom self-esteem stems from communal ties. Nevertheless, the experience of moving—for work, and to certain cities—has itself become a marker of eliteness, an axis of economic segregation.
THE MERITOCRATIC DIVIDE
Meritocracy divides society against itself. It remakes childhood and adulthood, the home and the office, in its own divisive image, and the rich and the rest now work, marry, parent, socialize, read, eat, and even worship differently and apart from each other. These differences cumulate, and the meritocratic divide becomes too wide for the imagination to bridge, so that the rich and the rest fall out of sympathy with each other.
All these developments play out meritocratic inequality’s inner logics. The rich find marriage partners in the schools and especially colleges that dominate elite youth. They then structure their adult lives to support the intense parenting and education required to pass their caste on to their children. Meritocracy even influences where the elite live. Physical capital is generally immovable and necessarily dispersed, so that a rentier elite naturally scatters throughout a country. Human capital, by contrast, is mobile and, critically, most productive when superordinate workers deploy their skills together, in close proximity. Meritocracy therefore induces the highly educated families that it creates to flee certain places and flock to others. In all these ways, and myriad others besides, meritocratic inequality comprehensively divides the rich and the rest, so that they each lead lives that the other can hardly recognize.
Although Hemingway may have won the argument with Fitzgerald at midcentury, meritocratic inequality increasingly vindicates Fitzgerald’s view. Whereas the midcentury economic model achieved an amazingly deep unity of interests and of ideals across the broad middle class, economic inequality now threatens to divide America against itself, as profoundly as race and gender once did.
Racism and sexism have deep roots in American history and endure today, of course. Both insert fault lines into society that class does not displace, and persistent racial inequalities of income and especially wealth demonstrate both that American racism operates independent of class and that racial subordination persists in fact even where it is forbidden by law. But class—considered in addition to rather than instead of race and gender—now provides an organizing principle for comparably powerful social and economic stratification. Indeed, class stratification today produces inequalities that resemble the inequalities that de jure racial segregation produced at midcentury. The earlier observation that the rich/poor achievement gap in school now exceeds the white/black gap under Jim Crow reports just one instance of a broader trend. Economic differences in homeownership rates and unemployment rates, for example, have also grown to resemble racial differences at midcentury. Economic inequality now organizes life even within racial groups: among black men born in the late 1960s, for example, high school dropouts have a 59 percent chance of going to prison at some point in their lives whereas college graduates have a 5 percent chance.
These comparisons should not obscure racial subordination, but they do shine a light on class. Class appears, in this light, comprehensively to organize American social and economic life under meritocracy. Borrowing from the Victorian politician and thinker Benjamin Disraeli (who described another, admittedly different caste system), one might even say that in the United States today, the rich and the rest comprise “two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
Comprehensive inequality poses a threat to American society that extends far beyond the distress that the meritocracy trap inflicts on individual people, on either side of the meritocratic divide. Midcentury social solidarity—the broad unities of interest and imagination that led Hemingway to believe that the rich were distinguished only by wealth—has been shattered by meritocratic inequality. Rising inequality renders the middle class vulnerable and insecure. Winner-take-all competition gives elites growing incentives to defend their position. And elite education reframes meritocracy itself as an obstacle to social mobility and middle-class opportunity. Furthermore, meritocratic inequality also undermines the midcentury unity of ideals. (This is meritocracy’s most profound threat to social solidarity, and the threat that is most deeply rooted in meritocracy’s peculiar structure.) Meritocracy connects income to education and, through education, to work, family, culture, and even place, giving economic differences new dimensions of quality as well as quantity. This comprehensive divide prevents the rich and the rest from even imagining an ideal of the common good that they might share across caste boundaries.
Andrew Carnegie, writing “The Gospel of Wealth” at the height of the Gilded Age, worried that “the problem of our age is the proper administration of w
ealth, that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.” Today, the meritocratic divide threatens to tear society apart, on account of its profound depth and comprehensive breadth. As the political theorist Robert Dahl observed at the close of the Great Compression, in a worry that has proved prescient, “If all the cleavages [in a society] occur along the same lines . . . then the severity of conflicts is likely to increase. The man on the other side is not just an opponent; he soon becomes an enemy.”
Meritocracy undermines social solidarity in just this way. When meritocratic inequality creates comprehensively isolated social classes, it invites class warfare.
A NEW RULING CLASS
Politics provides class warfare’s natural field of battle.
To begin with, meritocratic inequality rejuvenates an old motive for the elite to dominate political competition. Large fortunes encourage political meddling. Self-interest recommends that the rich engage politics as a means for defending their wealth. Altruism also directs the rich toward politics: once a person has bought everything that he wants for himself, it is only natural for him to turn his attentions to others. Moreover, meritocracy also inaugurates a new means for asserting dominance, creating a new supply of elite power. The skills, practices, and institutions that enable superordinate workers to dominate economic life also allow the elite to dominate politics, by controlling policy and by resisting the state when they cannot set policy directly. If democracy establishes what Dahl called “the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals,” meritocracy undermines democratic politics and constitutes superordinate workers as a new ruling class.
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