The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  Zuckerberg’s giving away his fortune therefore will not deprive his daughter of any essential element of caste. To the contrary, it might even promote her caste by insulating her from the temptations to idle decadence that accompany great inherited wealth and that have notoriously led other young heiresses to ridicule and social decline, especially where social and economic arrangements have eliminated the avenues for honorable exploit that earlier elites enjoyed. By disinheriting his daughter, Zuckerberg promotes her ambition and dignity and protects her against a dissolute life.

  It is therefore no surprise that Zuckerberg is anything but outlandish or alone in his giving. To date, five of the ten richest people in America, and nearly 170 billionaires worldwide (representing nearly 10 percent of the world’s total), have signed Warren Buffett’s and Bill Gates’s giving pledge to donate the majority of their fortunes to philanthropy, either within their lifetimes or upon their deaths. The economic and social transformation from a society led by a hereditary, leisured elite to one led by the working rich has transformed what would once have been bizarre into something rational and even admirable. Zuckerberg’s gift embraces rather than rejects the reigning social and economic order.

  The web of meritocratic ideals that support Zuckerberg’s choice today is just as thick and dense as the aristocratic ideals that would once have condemned it. The new rich do not just happen to work hard or for high wages, nor do they work industriously merely because they happen to prefer owning expensive things to having free time. Instead, the rich now pursue intense and remunerative work reflectively and for its own sake, and elite society organizes and consolidates these attitudes into a distinctive worldview (which drives both the Facebook Foundation and Zuckerberg’s hopes for his own daughter).

  Veblen’s leisure class has been displaced not just in economic fact but also in social norms—the old elite culture of leisure has been replaced by a new elite culture of industry. Just as aristocracy once did, so meritocracy now sustains economic practices and moral principles that reciprocally support each other, in equilibrium patterns. (The new norms even allow the rich to square filial loyalty and civic duty and, like Zuckerberg, to pass their caste down through the generations openly and in good faith.)

  Industry has become as mandatory for the meritocratic elite as leisure once was for aristocrats. Today, elites boast, and even complain, of their business from social necessity, as a shield against any suggestion that they might be idle or unsought-after, that their labor might be in greater supply than demand. An advertisement for the Wall Street Journal reads, “People who don’t have time make time to read the Wall Street Journal.”

  These formulations, and the attitudes behind them, have infected the ideology of the elite. When law students were recently asked to report the maximum weekly work hours that they would accept, the mean student answered 70, and some students reported being willing to work “as many [hours] as necessary” or, more concretely, 120 weekly hours. (I have not once—literally never—encountered a Yale Law student who justified or even explained poor performance on the ground that studies should not encroach unduly on leisure; and in anonymous surveys of incoming Yale freshmen, 80 percent said that academics would take priority over extracurricular activities, and none—not a single one—has said that social life would be significantly more important than studying.) The students, moreover, do not outgrow this ideology when they enter the workforce. To the contrary: over half of people surveyed who work over 60 hours per week openly self-identify as workaholics. And I have also never heard—again, not once—a partner at a major law firm complain of slacking in her office. Actually bragging about idleness, in the vein of Bertie Wooster, would be unthinkable.

  Intense work is now a symbol of excellence and dynamism, of being committed, as one investment banker explained, to doing “whatever it takes to get things done.” The “extreme workers” described in the Harvard Business Review therefore “wear their commitments like badges of honor” and advertise their extreme industry “on their sleeves.” Sometimes they do so literally. Whereas financiers once wore fine and fragile clothes to signal that they did not work, an investment banker now tells an anthropologist that Wall Street professionals “shouldn’t wear suspenders because it looks like you spent too much time on your appearance, and you are supposed to just work hard. You shouldn’t be wasting time putting on suspenders in the morning.”

  Exploit has been reconstituted as industry, completely reversing Bertie Wooster’s inclination to treat work as leisure. Many of today’s most intensive and remunerative jobs, including pursuits as varied as management and sport, were once gentlemen’s vocations or hobbies, subject to strict social norms limiting the effort and intensity with which they might be pursued. Even celebrity—fame for its own sake, the purest form of exploit—is now framed as a form of industry, with effort openly and notoriously displayed on social media for all to see. And time itself has come to be imbued directly with economic value, including among elites who (unprecedentedly) can now bill and be paid by the hour. Lawyers and consultants, especially at the toniest firms, compete for logging the most billable hours and trade fables (and even tall tales) of immensely long hours as a disciplinary tool.

  The meritocratic elite clings to its industry, stoically accepting that enormous incomes entitle employers to extract almost unbounded effort, and urging that their enormous effort justifies these incomes. They pray that their industry and income might reciprocally launder otherwise intolerable exertion and inequality.

  Employers, they say, have “the right to expect [top employees] to work hard,” so that it would be “unreasonable” for elite workers to “insist” on a “nine-to-five, five-day-per-week work schedule.” Long work hours are what one prominent commentator called “a fair trade for . . . inflated salaries.” In the words of another finance worker, clients “pay us lots and lots of money to be at their disposal 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

  Conversely, extreme hours, approaching the limits of human endurance, underwrite elite claims to deserve salaries that similarly approach the limits of the economy’s capacity to pay. The Harvard Business Review’s extreme jobbers “consider their over-the-top efforts . . . a reflection of character . . . [so that t]o them, a 70-hour workweek is about proving their worth.” And prominent conservative economist (and former chair of Harvard University’s economics department) Gregory Mankiw argues that superordinate workers should enjoy enormous incomes because they have earned them, as what he calls the “just deserts” of their industry.

  These claims have a dark side also, as the meritocratic elite do not just respect and admire industry but also disrespect and even despise idleness and leisure. Investment bankers complain about the “outside [non-elite] world,” in which “people leave work at five, six p.m. [and] take one hour lunch breaks” and “just are not motivated in the same way” as they are. More concretely, Lloyd Blankfein (who was paid tens of millions of dollars for serving as the CEO of Goldman Sachs) recently argued that the unnecessary idleness of premature retirement counsels raising Social Security’s retirement age.

  Industrious work and long hours constitute the eliteness of the working rich; busyness has in itself become “the badge of honor.” The social order that Veblen discerned, which had been stable across a millennium, has within a century been turned on its head: aristocrats yield to meritocrats, and the leisured elite gives way to the superordinate working class. Zuckerberg’s hopes for his daughter reflect the social order into which she has been born.

  Once, leisure constituted high status; labor “was, after all[,] the name of the subordinate class.” Even the left agreed, as the working class, in the labor movement, reclaimed its subordinated name as a political ideal. Alexey Grigoryevich Stakhanov, a record-setting hardworking Soviet coal miner, became the poster child for the effortful productivity of the socialist worker.

  Now, meritocratic habits and norms have transformed b
oth the rich and the rest. The baton of industrious effort has been largely detached from the increasingly redundant middle class and passed up the income ladder. This merger of industry and honor explains why the middle class experiences its enforced idleness as insulting and even degrading and why the working rich commit to epidemic industry that the pursuit of mere wealth cannot rationalize.

  Today’s Stakhanovites are the one-percenters.

  POVERTY AND WEALTH

  Every economy may be described in terms of two kinds of inequality: high-end, which concerns the gap between the rich and the middle class; and low-end, which concerns the gap between the middle class and the poor. Economic inequality can therefore grow and shrink at the same time, as rising high-end and falling low-end inequality occur together. When this happens, the shape of maldistribution alters. For most of human history, including at the middle of the last century, inequality and injustice centered on poverty. Today, they center on wealth.

  At the end of the Second World War, a “collaboration between big business, big labor, and big government” remade American society, literally creating the modern middle class. The median real income for American men, for example, rose from $25,700 in 1947 to $41,836 in 1967 (in 2018 dollars), and the number of American households that owned their home rose over 40 percent between 1940 and 1960. By the late 1950s, when Galbraith published The Affluent Society, the prosperity of the middle was widely felt and had penetrated the self-image of the age—in St. Clair Shores and throughout the country.

  Not all Americans were well represented by big business, big labor, or big government, however. Racial minorities and women would have to wait several decades before their claims of justice received a serious hearing, and LGBTQ people would have to wait a half century. Moreover, the poor also had no stake and no say in any branch of the triumvirate that governed midcentury America and were, as Galbraith observed, a “voiceless minority,” a “silent presence . . . left out of this middle-class idyll.” The middle-class boom dramatically reduced high-end inequality, but low-end inequality and poverty both endured.

  In 1962, as the top 1 percent’s income share approached an all-time low, another book, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, entered this scene. Harrington was a graduate of Yale Law School and a socialist, although democratic and staunchly anticommunist. Arthur Schlesinger once called him “the only responsible radical in America.” Harrington had spent much of the postwar middle-class boom immersing himself in the circumstances of America’s poor. The Other America reflected this immersion. The book described, in vivid detail, what one reviewer called “alarming . . . pockets of despair and hunger in the depressed areas of the United States.” Poverty denied many citizens what Harrington said were “the minimal levels of health, housing, food, and education that our present stage of scientific knowledge specifies as necessary for life as it is now lived in the United States.” The book’s “angry thesis,” as another reviewer said, was that “behind the glittering façade of America’s ‘affluent society’ lies a ghetto of loneliness and defeat populated by the poor.”

  Harrington claimed that the ghetto was massive, comprising between forty and fifty million citizens whom material deprivation made internal exiles, cast out from the affluent society and in this sense almost harmed by the middle-class boom. He could not be precise, because the U.S. government did not collect poverty statistics until 1963–64 (after Harrington’s book became famous). But Harrington could be sure that poverty—grinding, material deprivation—overwhelmed a substantial share of Americans. And when the official statistics debuted, roughly a quarter of the population still lived in poverty.

  In any event, these statistics were for Harrington a means rather than an end. “I would beg the reader,” he wrote, “to forget the numbers game. Whatever the precise calibrations, it is obvious that these statistics represent an enormous, an unconscionable amount of human suffering in this land. They should be read with a sense of outrage.” Harrington aspired to be “an American Dickens” and in this way “to record the smell and texture and quality” of pervasive poverty in the midst of affluence.

  Other midcentury writers shared these sensibilities and corroborated the picture that The Other America painted. Gabriel Kolko’s Wealth and Power in America: An Analysis of Social Class and Income Distribution, also published in 1962 and often read together with Harrington’s book, provided unemotional and even clinical but intense detail: the average poor family, Kolko wrote, had “no telephone in the house, but . . . makes three pay calls a week. They buy one book a year and write one letter a week. The father buys one heavy wool suit every two years and a light wool suit every three years; the wife, one suit every ten years or one skirt every five years. . . . In 1950, the family spent a total of $80 to $90 [about $850 in 2015 dollars] on all types of home furnishings, electrical appliances, and laundry equipment. . . . The entire family consumes a total of two five-cent ice-cream cones, one five-cent candy bar, two bottles of soda, and one bottle of beer a week.”

  For these Americans—and there were enough to constitute a mass rather than a fringe—middle-class affluence remained out of reach, and St. Clair Shores another country.

  THE WAR ON POVERTY

  The Other America received respectful reviews on publication, but it drew only a modest readership and appeared at first to have no broader impact. Reviewers predicted low sales, and Harrington himself—saying that he would be happy to sell twenty-five hundred copies—traveled overseas to Europe soon after publication.

  But in January 1963, Dwight Macdonald featured the book in a fifty-page New Yorker review entitled “Our Invisible Poor.” The review, the longest of its kind in the magazine’s history, was “more widely read than the books it discussed” and captured the public imagination. It also captured the attention of the political elite, and in particular of President Kennedy’s economic adviser, Walter Heller, who gave some combination of Harrington’s book and Macdonald’s review to the president himself.

  Kennedy took their lessons to heart. “I believe,” Schlesinger later wrote, “that The Other America helped crystallize [Kennedy’s] determination in 1963 to accompany the tax cut by a poverty program.” While it is unclear if President Kennedy actually read the book, it was “widely assumed in Washington that he had.” Certainly, Kennedy’s 1963 State of the Union message took a page out of the book and reported that thirty-two million Americans were living on the “outskirts of poverty.” And in April 1963, Kennedy proposed to establish a National Service Corps, with a message that began, “Poverty in the midst of plenty is a paradox that must not go unchallenged in this country.” He might have added that the paradox put his own government’s moral authority at risk: how could a society that condemned its poor to avoidable material misery and social exclusion legitimately expect them to remain loyal to its institutions and to obey its laws?

  On November 19, 1963, Heller received a commitment from Kennedy to include an antipoverty measure in the administration’s 1964 legislative program. Kennedy was assassinated three days later, but the antipoverty initiative was the first economic idea that Heller raised with the newly sworn-in President Johnson. The program appealed to Johnson’s New Deal sensibilities, as he put it, and his first message to Congress, on November 27, 1963, proposed to “carry on the fight against poverty and misery, and disease and ignorance, in other lands and in our own.” The popular press took up the call to arms. In his first State of the Union message, on January 8, 1964, President Johnson declared his now-famous “unconditional War on Poverty in America.”

  The most important thing to understand about the War on Poverty is that it reduced poverty. Victory was not complete, unconditional, or even sufficient, of course, and poverty remains real and scandalous. The War on Poverty stalled in the late 1970s, and poverty has worsened in recent years, as it always does following economic downturns. But the War on Poverty’s core achievements have more or less endured, inclu
ding in the face of rising economic inequality.

  Even in the shadow of the Great Recession, poverty is by any measure both narrower and shallower than in the past, and abject poverty remains unrecognizably less broad or deep. The downturn hit the poor hard, but there were no breadlines this time around. Indeed, poverty today remains dramatically less severe than it was even during the post–World War II boom and the midcentury Great Compression, which progressives romantically champion as the peak of economic justice in America. Rising economic inequality today is driven overwhelmingly not by poverty but by concentrated wealth.*

  The official poverty rate dropped steeply through the 1960s, from 22.4 percent in 1959 to a low of 11.1 percent in 1973. The poverty rate has been fluctuating between 11 and 15 percent since then (and the most recent available data, for 2017, report a poverty rate of 12.3 percent). The actual reduction in poverty is almost certainly much greater. A Supplemental Poverty Measure, conceived in 1992 and officially sanctioned in 2011, reports that poverty has fallen by substantially more than the Official Measure. Other, unofficial metrics record still more dramatic declines. One prominent radical recently proposed that income poverty, properly calculated, has fallen to below 5 percent.

  An alternative approach to poverty, which follows Harrington’s injunction to look to the lived experience of the poor and measures poverty directly in terms of consumption, reports a still more dramatic reduction. Consumption poverty rates have not been tracked for as long or as reliably as income poverty rates. But the best available data suggest that consumption poverty has fallen from about 31 percent in the 1960s to perhaps as low as 4.5 percent by 2010. Deep poverty—the share of people living at half or less than half of the poverty threshold—is also markedly less when measured in terms of consumption rather than income. Whereas the official (income-based) deep poverty rate in 2009 remained about 6 percent, deep consumption poverty had fallen to below 1 percent.