The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

On the other hand, middle-class men traditionally dominated the jobs—quintessentially in manufacturing—that have been lost or seen wage stagnation in recent decades, even as many of the service jobs that have displaced them are conventionally done by middle-class women. (In fact, progress in diminishing the gender pay gap overall principally comes courtesy of declining wages for men without a college degree.)

  Moreover, poorer men are less successful than poorer women at acquiring the schooling needed to secure better jobs in a meritocratic labor market: men make up only 42 percent of college students from households with annual incomes below $30,000. Veblen’s logic still applies to the middle class, although with a darkly ironic twist: in middle-class families, working women represent the no-longer adequacy of the male wage.

  Together, these patterns entail that the wage gap between men and women has been growing among the elite even as it has been falling among the middle class and the poor. Indeed, among dual-earner households with incomes in the top quintile, just 29 percent of wives earn more than their husbands, whereas among dual-earner households in the bottom quintile, fully 69 percent of wives out-earn their husbands. This pattern actually helps account for declining marriage rates outside of the elite, as marriages are less likely to form when women out-earn men, an effect that accounts for 23 percent of the overall drop in marriage, and whose consequences are highly concentrated in the bottom of the economic distribution. In all these ways, meritocratic inequality penetrates even gender relations and the balance of economic power within the family.

  The divisions are so deep and pervasive that they reach not just domestic habits but also the ideals of domesticity under whose flags habits are performed. Indeed, meritocratic inequality induces the rich and the rest to imagine the present challenges and future hopes for marriage and domestic life in terms that make no contact.

  For the elite, the central marital question of the age concerns same-sex marriage. The rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage constitutes a triumph that foretells a bright future (although tempered, perhaps, by surprise at non-elite Americans’ willingness to accept marriage equality even while retaining traditionalist views on other matters of sexual morality, including most notably abortion).

  Non-elite Americans, by contrast, focus on—they cannot escape—the collapse of opposite-sex marriage. For them, the institutional foundations of family life are crumbling. And the question of whether or not a collapsing institution should be expanded to accommodate same-sex couples feels distant and almost academic.

  CULTURE

  Sigmund Freud, on being asked how a person might flourish, once answered “love and work . . . work and love, that’s all there is . . . love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” When meritocracy organizes work and family, it reaches back into the wellsprings of life and channels the rich and the rest into divergent streams. But notwithstanding Freud’s observation, people devote themselves to more than just love and work. They also worship, pursue politics, socialize, eat, shop, and amuse themselves. Collectively, these and other behaviors combine with work and family to construct a culture. And just as with family and with work, meritocratic inequality increasingly causes the rich and the rest to embrace vastly different cultures.

  Religions in the United States today are remarkably segregated by education and income. Anglicans/Episcopalians, Jews, and Hindus are roughly twice as likely as the national average to hold a college degree and to have household incomes greater than $100,000 and roughly a quarter as likely to drop out of high school and half as likely to have household incomes less than $30,000. (Presbyterians are only slightly less educated and rich.) By contrast, Jehovah’s Witnesses, National Baptists, and congregants of the Church of God in Christ are less than half as likely as the national average to hold a college degree or have household incomes greater than $100,000 and are roughly one and a half times as likely to have dropped out of high school or have household incomes less than $30,000. (Interestingly, Catholics closely resemble the national average in both income and education, perhaps because the Catholic Church’s long history, broad reach, and institutional footprint have produced many subdenominations within its ranks, permitting internal segregation.)

  Politics is also becoming increasingly segregated by caste, and the stark hostilities highlighted by Trump’s populism reflect much broader preexisting divisions.

  A student at Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the elite prep schools described earlier, recently answered a survey on elite values by commenting, “Morally, I’m a Democrat, but my wallet says I am a Republican.” The student knows his caste. Most broadly stated, elite Americans, regardless of political party, are more socially progressive and more economically conservative than their middle- and working-class counterparts.

  Widespread evidence underwrites the common wisdom that the rich are socially progressive. A meta-study of hundreds of broad surveys of Americans’ values concludes that Americans in the top fifth (roughly) of the income distribution display more liberal attitudes than their less well-off compatriots concerning homosexuality, abortion, and the separation of church and state (to name a few examples).

  The opinions of narrower economic elites are harder to document (as the truly rich are more difficult to identify and, once found, both busier and more concerned with privacy and less inclined to answer opinion surveys). But as scholarly interest in the narrow elite increases in tandem with rising inequality, a clearer picture of the cultural attitudes of the truly rich is beginning to emerge. This picture uniformly confirms that the narrow elite shares and even extends the broad elite’s progressive social views. One recent study finds that Americans who have attended graduate or professional school are six times as likely as those with a high school degree or less to hold “consistently liberal” views. The Phillips Exeter survey revealed that nine out of ten students identified as liberal on social issues. Finally, a pilot study focusing on truly rich Chicago households (mean annual income $1 million, mean wealth $14 million) again reveals distinctively progressive attitudes on a broad range of issues relating to religion, culture, and moral values.

  The elite’s economic conservatism is less familiar: it is hidden from popular view by a misconceived synecdoche that takes a few rich economic progressives—with high media profiles but eccentric views—to stand in for a broader economic elite that in general thinks quite differently. But the broader elite’s economic conservatism is no less distinctive or real.

  The broad survey of opinion among Americans from the top fifth of the income distribution that revealed distinctive social liberalism also revealed distinctive—indeed more distinctive—economic conservatism: the richest fifth of Americans are much more hostile than the bottom four-fifths to progressive taxation, economic regulation, and social welfare spending. Americans from the top tenth of the income distribution display similarly conservative economic views: when compared to median Americans, the rich are substantially more hostile to high top marginal tax rates, substantially more inclined to reduce capital gains and inheritance taxes, substantially less inclined to raise the minimum wage or increase unemployment benefits, and substantially more skeptical of government regulation of corporations and industry. The Phillips Exeter survey also revealed that three to five times as many students were conservative on economic issues as on social ones.

  Truly rich Americans are, if anything, more economically conservative still. The participants in the Chicago survey (of the top 1 percent) were less than one-third as likely as Americans overall to favor policies, across a wide range of specific measures, that are designed to secure jobs and increase pay for working-class Americans. They were only about half as likely to support various forms of government provision designed to secure health care and high-quality education (public schooling, college, and worker retraining) for all Americans. They were only about a third as likely to favor direct government redistribution to reduce income inequality. They harshly opposed i
ncreasing regulation of large corporations even as the broader population hugely favored it. And they were roughly four times as likely to think deficits the most pressing issue facing the nation and only roughly one-fourth as likely to think jobs the most pressing. Moreover, the very richest of the rich—the top one-tenth of 1 percent—tended to be the most conservative, favoring less economic regulation than the merely rich in the sample and tending distinctively to favor cutting domestic social welfare programs, including in particular Social Security.

  Finally, although opinion surveys of the super-rich remain rare, adjacent studies confirm the result that the extremely rich are extremely economically conservative: a recent experimental study reveals that students at Yale Law School (median parental income, roughly $150,000 annually; modal income from first permanent lawyering job, roughly $180,000 at the time of the study) are much, much more efficiency-minded and much, much less equality-minded than typical Americans. The students claimed to prefer Democrats over Republicans by a factor of ten to one, but Yale Law Democrats acted—in their reluctance to sacrifice efficiency to redistribution—like national Republicans. Yale Law School is not unusual in this respect. A broader survey found that attending a college with a wealthy student body more powerfully predicts a student’s economic conservatism than the student’s race, gender, religion, academic achievement, or professed motivations to make money or to gain knowledge. Indeed, the study concludes that wealthy colleges cause their students to become more economically conservative and that this effect is strongest among the richest students, even as a long train of evidence shows that elite colleges encourage students to develop progressive views on social questions.

  These divisions cumulate to compose a distinctive elite worldview, which separates the natural instincts and imaginative understandings of rich Americans from those of the rest. This worldview combines traditionally progressive ideals concerning privacy, diversity, and pluralism with traditionally conservative ideals concerning work, productivity, and individual responsibility. The rich are more likely than the rest to favor same-sex marriage, women’s rights, and affirmative action and to oppose school prayer and law-and-order policing, and they are more likely than the rest to favor low taxes and free trade, and to oppose social spending and labor unions. The worldview reflects what one commentator calls a “greater attraction of the free market to the affluent”—including both the free market’s indifference to religion and moralism and its hostility to government regulation and redistribution.

  Elite Americans, that is, are more inclined to embrace—and middle- and working-class Americans more inclined to oppose—what intellectual historians call classical liberalism (including in its narrower, more contemporary neoliberal variety). This ideology—which is just a roundabout way of saying that meritocratic hierarchies are okay while others are not—attracts elites from all walks of life. It led Steve Jobs famously to declare that “Silicon Valley is a meritocracy”; it leads Goldman Sachs to trumpet rather than hide its aggressive pursuit of wealth; and it leads Yale University to embrace its students of color but oppose unions among its staff and graduate students. Finally, the ideology unites elites across the partisan divide. Small wonder, therefore, that Donald Trump, who combines nativist populism and social conservatism with a hostility to trade and the free market, is so reviled among the meritocratic elite.

  Moreover, the rich and the rest increasingly part ways not just at worship and in politics but in their everyday pastimes also. To begin with, Americans whose annual household incomes exceed $100,000 spend 40 percent less time in passive leisure than do Americans whose incomes fall below $20,000. (Even among the unemployed, less educated men now spend roughly eleven more hours per week watching television and sleeping than more educated men.) By contrast, the rich spend longer exercising, with the top quintile devoting twice as many weekly minutes to exercise as the middle and five times as many as the bottom; and fitness has become a status symbol.

  Even after adjusting for longer work hours, the rich spend more time alone and less time socializing than the rest. When they do socialize, high incomes allow them to choose their companions, gravitating toward friends (5.2 more evenings spent with friends per year for those in the top income quartile than the bottom) even as the rest favor family and neighbors (4.6 more evenings spent per year with family and 8.3 more evenings per year with neighbors in the bottom income quartile than in the top).

  Indeed, the rich and the rest have very differently constructed social networks: rich networks are broad (national and even international) but shallow and cater to “a mobile, even migratory” or “cosmopolitan” self, while working- and middle-class networks are narrow but deep and cater to a “rooted self.” Even activities as basic as cooking and conversation now divide the rich and the rest. Elites cook novel foods to impress people whom they would like “to know better,” often for purposes of professional networking; the middle class, by contrast, cooks familiar food to share with family and long-standing friends. And the rich tend toward formal and polite conversational habits, while the rest are proudly straightforward and direct.

  The rich and the rest also pursue strikingly different hobbies. The earlier report of behavior online reveals just how far apart their preoccupations have grown, as the rich distinctively search for tech, fitness, and travel while the poor distinctively search for chronic ailments, guns, and religion. Virtual pursuits find parallel expressions in the real world. Student organizations at the elite University of California at Berkeley and the middle-class Louisiana State University introduce the extent of the difference. Student organizations at Berkeley that have no counterparts at LSU include Amnesty International, the Anti-Trafficking Coalition, Building Sustainability, the Environmental Sciences Student Association, and the Global Student Embassy; student organizations at LSU that have no counterparts at Berkeley include the Oilfield Christian Fellowship, the Agribusiness Club, and the Wargaming and Roleplaying Society.

  CONSUMPTION

  The differences between the rich and the rest reach even the banal everyday of consumption—the clothes, appliances, cars, electronics, and so on that people own, the services that they use, the foods that they eat, and the businesses from which they buy all these things. Banal, but important. Household consumption in the United States amounts to nearly 70 percent of GDP, and consumer goods therefore fix the tone for society writ large.

  At midcentury, that tone was egalitarian: the middle class could afford its blossoming lifestyle, and good taste (and even virtue) required the rich to emulate the middle class. Today, by contrast, consumption segregates the rich from the rest, and both tastes and morals increasingly affirm luxury. The separation is so complete that the brands a person buys now reveal more about her income than about her race.

  For most of human history, elites owned and consumed different things from the masses, not just in degree but in kind. In feudal orders, land ownership was restricted to a narrow caste, and ownership constituted elite status. Indeed, absolute land ownership was a distinctive prerogative of the monarch-sovereign who sat at the pinnacle of the elite. Moreover, sumptuary laws regulated myriad other forms of consumption, for example by forbidding all but the elite from wearing lavish fabrics or colors and eating opulent foods.

  The bourgeois revolutions inaugurated a long erosion of this consumer caste order (indeed, some sumptuary laws sought to hold back the tide, taking express aim at public displays of commercial rather than aristocratic wealth). Early-twentieth-century capitalism accelerated the process, so that by midcentury, the caste distinction between the consumption habits of the top and the middle had effectively dissolved.

  With respect to land and houses, federal government programs supporting home buyers had raised homeownership rates from 44 percent in 1940 to 63 percent by 1970. (There has been no further substantial increase since then.) And cars, refrigerators, ranges, clothes washers and dryers, and air conditioners were by the 1980s al
l widely dispersed throughout the middle class. Midcentury Americans bought the same modest cars and watches, and ate out in the same modest restaurants. They even bought the same brands from the same stores. In the 1970s, three out of every four adults entered a Sears store at least once a year, and half of American households had a proprietary Sears credit card.

  Tastes and even morals grew to endorse these economic facts. The midcentury homes that built St. Clair Shores and countless similar suburbs, and the modernist furnishings that filled them, self-consciously relied on materials, designs, and techniques that suited the modest affluence of a broad middle class rather than the luxurious rich or the thrifty poor. Even the cars that made suburban life feasible were deliberately designed and built to suit middle-class budgets. Henry Ford’s famous practice of paying his workers enough so that they might become his customers equally importantly required him to build mass-market rather than exclusive cars, whose quality and price made his workers want and be able to afford them. By midcentury, the aesthetic models behind these practices had colonized culture and become moralized. Their force was so powerful that it applied even inside the elite, as when Fortune ridiculed the few midcentury business leaders who—whether in Newport “cottages” or Palm Beach villas—continued to try to live in the style of the Gilded Age.

  Today, meritocratic inequality reverses this trend. Consumption inequality—understood in terms of raw dollar sums—strikingly tracks income inequality, including at the very top of the distribution. Moreover, consumption divides the rich and the rest beyond the numbers. Middle-class and elite consumers buy increasingly different things from different stores. They even pay for them in different ways.

  On the one hand, thrift goods, which appeal to people who struggle in economic inequality’s shadow, increasingly dominate middle-class consumption. Thrift retail sells conventional consumer goods to households that are forced to economize. And thrift finance enables a middle class whose stagnant wages no longer match its needs to fund consumption through borrowing.