The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  Middle-class culture is losing its imaginative command over American society writ large. St. Clair Shores no longer represents the American ideal—Palo Alto has taken its place. Inevitably, therefore, the forms of solidarity that waxed at midcentury are now waning. Today, meritocratic inequality determines virtually all aspects of the lives of the citizens who live under it. The rich and the rest now work, live, marry and reproduce, and shop, eat, play, and pray differently and in largely separate social worlds. Inequality produces an internally cohesive and externally insulated elite class, whose lived experience is constructed by its meritocratic eliteness.

  Today, the rich and the rest each lead lives that the other could hardly recognize and cannot understand. Economic inequality comprehensively organizes both castes through patterns, practices, and worldviews that rarely intersect, interact only thinly and instrumentally, and grow increasingly distant, uncomprehending, and unsympathetic.

  WORK

  A chasm between compulsive overwork and enforced idleness increasingly separates the rich from the rest. Each group, moreover, adjusts its attitudes to render its circumstances tolerable, so that values diverge alongside facts. The rich valorize long hours as heroic (even masculine) and despise idleness. The rest, by contrast, disparage excessive devotion to work as a kind of narcissism. In this way, the economic divisions imposed by meritocratic inequality lead directly to moral conflict.

  Differences between elite and middle-class workplaces exacerbate this conflict. The rich and the rest might both work for a living, in the formal sense associated with the distinction between labor and capital. But they toil in different fields, on separate continents, even.

  Midcentury employers hired without much screening. The story of the pinboys in St. Clair Shores was typical. In the 1960s, the Ford Motor Company—a high-wage employer at the time—openly declined to screen job applicants at all, at least for blue-collar jobs: in the words of one of Ford’s managers, “If we had a vacancy, we would look outside in the plant waiting room to see if there were any warm bodies standing there. If someone was there and they looked physically OK and weren’t an obvious alcoholic, they were hired.” Even applicants for white-collar jobs received startlingly little scrutiny. For most midcentury workers, getting a job did not involve any application at all, in the competitive sense of the term.

  Midcentury firms, moreover, pooled workers of all skill levels. The dispersed managerial technology embraced at midcentury, in which workers from across the skill distribution worked side by side in jobs that blended seamlessly into one another, secured this result. Workplace training provided the relatively modest skills that workers needed to move up a firm’s hierarchy. Nor were workers sorted by skill across firms or even industries: recall that even finance workers were not appreciably more skilled, on average, than others. Indeed, the midcentury economy pooled the skilled and unskilled so pervasively at work that they were also pooled at home. In 1970, people with college degrees were “remarkably evenly distributed” across the country: between urban and rural locations, across geographic regions, and even within cities.

  Today, by contrast, the workplace is methodically arranged around gradations of skill. Firms screen job candidates intensively at hiring, and they then sort elite and non-elite workers into separate physical spaces.

  Only the very lowest-wage employers, seeking unskilled workers, hire casually. Middle-class employers screen using formal cognitive tests and lengthy interviews. And elite employers screen with urgent intensity, recruiting from only a select pool and spending millions of dollars to probe applicants over several rounds of interviews, lasting entire days.

  The screening works, especially at the very top of the meritocratic hierarchy. The matching of workers to jobs by skill and training levels has become steadily more precise over time. And the most elite employers (such as the most profitable law firms) hire overwhelmingly, and sometimes almost exclusively, from the most elite colleges and universities.

  Screening at hiring enables firms to segregate skilled from unskilled employees inside the workplace. Firms, moreover, have a strong incentive to segregate, as this enables them to embrace production techniques that specifically require skilled workers. The combination of means and motive has produced skill segregation with a vengeance.

  The gutting of middle management—and the elimination of the career ladders that once connected workers throughout a firm’s internal hierarchy—starkly segregates skilled managers from less skilled production workers within individual firms. Moreover, and more radically, American enterprise increasingly segregates skilled from unskilled workers into entirely separate firms. College-educated workers are increasingly unlikely to work for firms that also employ workers without college degrees.

  Indeed, not just firms but entire industries have come to specialize in either low-skilled or high-skilled workers. Retail and finance both pooled workers and emphasized middle skills at midcentury, but today retail exemplifies low-skilled work and finance exemplifies super-skilled work. The idea that a person might begin her career as a Walmart associate and end as a managing director at Goldman Sachs has become laughable. Even the leap from production to management within a single firm—on the model of Ed Rensi’s career at McDonald’s—has become implausible.

  Today, unskilled and skilled workers belong to separate tribes. Even the military no longer brings people from different class backgrounds together. The armed forces long drew citizens from all across society, and the mobilization in World War II and the subsequent GI Bill made military service a principal engine for social mobility. But today the military attracts virtually no one from the educated elite.

  The transformation reveals itself most poignantly in memorials to the war dead. Nearly every major American university contains a wall inscribed with a long list of names of graduates who served and died in America’s wars, from the Civil War through the two world wars and the Korean War. The lists become much shorter thereafter, however. Elite ideological opposition to the Vietnam War, coupled with the college draft deferment, kept the rich largely out of that war, and the rich almost entirely sat out the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though they largely supported the war efforts. The trend is so powerful that during the 1990–91 Gulf War, more Yale students were murdered in New Haven than were killed in Iraq.

  When mid-skilled and super-skilled—middle-class and elite—workers are hired from distinct pools, chosen by different means, and segregated into separate firms and industries, the two classes inevitably come to embrace distinct and even competing cultures of work. Elite reverence and middle-class skepticism toward extreme ambition merely summarize or conclude pervasive differences in the life experience of work for the two groups.

  Elite jobs subject superordinate workers to alienating and exploitative demands. But (partly on account of their expansive intensity) these demands are framed in a language of fellowship rather than opposition, of collaboration rather than command. Elite workplaces increasingly embrace informality over decorum: first names have replaced titles, and clothing tends toward informality or at least personal self-expression (uniforms—even of the gray flannel suit variety—are unheard of). Elite employers, moreover, increasingly blur the line between work and life, creating a “private-sector social world” centered on the workplace. Most significantly, elite employers prize responsibility taking and encourage initiative all across the elite workforce—from the most junior employee to the most senior—and employees think of themselves working with rather than for their nominal bosses. Reciprocity rather than contempt structures elite work today.

  All these practices follow directly from meritocracy’s economic and ideological structure. Where skill creates value and industry constitutes honor, work naturally acquires the gloss that attends exploit. The gloss on elite jobs is shallow, but it is real, and elite workplaces are carefully curated to preserve their sheen.

  Non-elite
workplaces adopt almost precisely the opposite approach along each of these dimensions. Not just the pay but also the culture of non-elite work increasingly reflects mid-skilled workers’ subordinate status. Uniforms are common and serve to thwart self-expression and place workers in a hierarchy rather than to promote safe or efficient production (as craftsmen’s technical work clothes once did). A former factory worker describes the jobs now open to him as requiring “throwing on a goofy hat.” Workplaces rigidly enforce the distinction between work and life as employers tightfistedly limit break and personal time during the workday, and employers exercise increasing and in some cases—think of Amazon’s warehouse practices—near-total command and control over employees’ labor.

  The stripping of managerial functions from production workers further enforces their separation from the superordinate workers who now exclusively wield managerial prerogatives. Indeed, employers increasingly micromanage mid-skilled workers so completely that they in effect buy the workers’ outputs rather than their skill and effort. Accordingly, even as elite workplaces prize independence and initiative, non-elite workplaces reduce workers almost literally to tools deployed by management.

  In all these ways, the culture of non-elite work denies the merit of the workers who do it and reinforces the gloom that low pay also expresses.

  These distinctions collectively constitute a difference in kind between superordinate and subordinate workers. The difference becomes most pronounced at the extremes, which, although unusual, also display most clearly what is at stake in the run of common cases.

  On the one hand, at the elite’s very finest point in the extreme jobs described earlier, work completely subsumes life. The extreme worker looks single-mindedly to her productivity and the honor that she derives from it, and she throws all of her self into her work. The gloss of the extreme job is immensely bright but commensurately superficial, and the extreme worker’s flourishing is limited to the shallow and instrumental virtues that meritocracy describes.

  On the other hand, meritocracy flat-out banishes a large and growing class of subordinated persons from the status that work brings. Most conspicuously, the nearly 20 million people who have been imprisoned or carry a felony conviction—up from just 2.5 million in 1960—are excluded from all but the most marginal forms of employment and condemned to live under the gloomy shadow of the association between work and honor. This group is constructed through any number of racial biases, including in policing, criminal procedure, and the substantive criminal law, and it includes nonwhites and especially African Americans in such disproportion that mass incarceration and its consequences have been called the New Jim Crow.

  The meritocratic idea that industry confers honor sheds a revealing new light on the workings of this caste order beyond the prison. Where prior convictions preclude subsequent employment, meritocratic inequality performs an astonishing inversion of the American race order. When leisure constituted status, racial subordination was imposed, under slavery, through legally compelled labor. Now that industry constitutes status, racial subordination is imposed through legally enforced idleness.

  FAMILY

  Aristocrats once thought of themselves as above conventional morality and mocked the bourgeois propriety of middle-class sexual habits. Moreover, when the aristocratic elite did marry, parents gave little beyond wealth and pedigree to their children, who were typically raised by retainers or staff, and held at arm’s length. Finally, even after the aristocracy began to fade, an ornamental wife, as Veblen observed, remained one of the last effective status symbols of the old leisure class—by demonstrating that a husband possessed sufficient wealth to sustain the household without her labor.

  Today, the reverse is more nearly true. Meritocratic elites, both men and women, lead conservative personal lives and maintain distinctively stable marriages. They devote intense personal attention to raising children within these marriages. And a highly educated, successful wife elevates the social status of a male superordinate worker, while an un- or even undereducated wife produces status anxiety.

  Meritocratic inequality explains these changes. Meritocracy remakes elite families as sites for the production of human capital, in the next generation of elite workers. These forces have transformed elite families, which today differ fundamentally from middle-class families in their composition, legal structure, and domestic habits.

  Meritocrats’ distinctive tendencies to marry each other, to stay married, and to raise children within their marriages all serve the imperatives of dynastic succession. Educated parents, and especially educated mothers, are better able to train their children. Divorce is costly, both directly and because it distracts from superordinate work and complicates the task of raising high-achieving children, and it is therefore rarer among the rich than the rest. And children born out of wedlock compound these complications and are therefore almost unheard of.

  The elite’s domestic ideals, moreover, have adjusted to give emotional and even moral expressions to these meritocratic imperatives. Elite children carry the burden of dynastic succession, as their accomplishments become the vehicles for the parents’ meritocratic ambitions. Meritocratic competition even makes sibling rivalries discernibly more intense in elite than in middle-class households.

  Among parents, meritocracy dominates attitudes toward marriage itself. While professional and working-class couples were roughly equally likely to report being “very happy” in their marriages in 1970, today the share of “very happy” working-class marriages has fallen by a third even as the share of “very happy” professional marriages, after recovering from a dip in the 1980s, remains where it was. Similarly, the share of women with college degrees who agreed that “divorce is usually the best solution when a couple can’t seem to work out their marriage problems” fell by a quarter between 2002 and 2012. Meritocratic elites even tie sex distinctively to marriage: rich women do not just bear but also conceive children within marriages, and the abortion rate among rich women fell by nearly 30 percent over the past two decades, even as it grew by nearly 20 percent among poor women.

  Marriage, that is, retains a distinctive ideological power for meritocrats. Elites may reject traditional morality and affirm sexual freedom as matters of abstract political principle. But they live distinctively chastely, as nonpracticing libertines.

  Moreover, elite families engage their communities in increasingly distinctive ways. Extracurricular activities, for example, were conceived, in the late nineteenth century, “precisely . . . to teach soft life skills to working-class Americans.” But although they served this function through the mid-twentieth century, they are again increasingly dominated by elites. Between the 1954 and 1986 birth cohorts, the gaps between the shares of twelfth graders from the highest and lowest socioeconomic status quartiles to participate in nonsports extracurricular activities, to participate in sports, and to captain sports teams grew by 240, 40, and 130 percent respectively.

  Similarly, the differences between the number of days rich and poor children spend attending religious services and volunteering in community affairs both roughly tripled. And the differences in the shares of each group to report that “most people can be trusted” also tripled, while a generalized measure of social connectedness (constructed from answers to survey questions about loneliness, friendship, and interpersonal support) grew immensely for the top quartile and effectively not at all for the bottom.

  Elite families—both parents and children—are increasingly more academically, vocationally, and emotionally invested and engaged in the meritocratic social order than non-elite families.

  Even the gender dynamics of elite families are distinctive, although in surprisingly complex and even counterintuitive ways. Elites are socially more liberal than other Americans and therefore more likely to reject traditional gender norms that insist a woman’s place is in the home, as wife and mother, and even to scorn the sexism of middle America. But the
economic structure of elite households is distinctly at odds with their ideals (much as elite sexual practices disregard the elite’s abstract sexual morality).

  On the one hand, the most elite, highest-paying jobs in the economy belong among the most male-dominated. Only about 14 percent of the top executives (and just about 8 percent of the highest earners) in Fortune 500 companies are women, and more than a quarter of these companies have no women in top management; Wall Street remains overwhelmingly male-dominated; women make up only 18 percent of equity partners at American law firms; and the gender pay gap among doctors has widened in recent years.

  The intense personal involvement that elite education now demands, when overlaid on gender norms that distinctively bind mothers to parenting, rationalizes these patterns. The hours that superordinate work requires are incompatible with bearing (let alone raising) children. Elite women therefore no longer stay home to signal their leisure, as Veblen imagined, but rather to labor intensively at training their children. Employers such as Facebook and Apple will pay tens of thousands of dollars to defray the cost of egg freezing in an effort to encourage superordinate women to delay childbirth and remain in the workforce. But the meritocratic imperatives of dynastic succession overpower these efforts.