The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  residents of St. Clair Shores: See U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2012–2016, Educational Attainment, St. Clair Shores city, Michigan, and Palo Alto city, California, accessed July 19, 2018, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF.

  half that of the average city: Bishop, The Big Sort, 132.

  large metropolitan areas: See Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, “Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940–1990,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000): 1287–1315, accessed July 19, 2018, http://econ2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ321/orazem/costa_dual-career.pdf. Hereafter cited as Costa and Kahn, “Power Couples.” Similar trends arise internationally. Across the planet, roughly a quarter of all people with a two-year college education or more live in the world’s hundred largest cities. And the share of residents of these cities to have this much education doubles the share of the population worldwide and grew by a sixth (from 18 to 21 percent) in just the decade between 2005 and 2014. See Emily Badger, “A Quarter of the World’s Most Educated People Live in the 100 Largest Cities,” Washington Post, July 18, 2014, accessed July 19, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/07/18/a-quarter-of-the-worlds-most-educated-people-live-in-the-100-largest-cities/?utm_term=.2e8e2e0ce30c, and Ugne Saltenyte, “One Quarter of the World’s Educated Population Resides in Just 100 Cities,” Euromonitor International, July 15, 2014, accessed July 19, 2018, https://blog.euromonitor.com/2014/07/one-quarter-of-the-worlds-educated-population-resides-in-just-100-cities.html.

  zip codes in the top 1 percent: See Murray, Coming Apart, 78, 82, 87, and Appendix B. See also Charles Murray, “Charles Murray, Author of Coming Apart, Examines Demographic Shifts in This New Decade,” Debate This Book, April 25, 2013, accessed July 19, 2018, http://debatethisbook.com/2013/04/25/charles-murray-author-of-coming-apart-examines-demographic-shifts-in-this-new-decade/.

  high school degrees only: A longitudinal study based on data from the years between 1979 and 1996 found that 19.2 percent of young adults with just a high school education moved states, while 36.6 percent of college graduates and 45.0 percent of people with more than a college education moved to a different state. See Yolanda K. Kodrzycki, “Migration of Recent College Graduates: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, New England Economic Review, January–February 2001, 15. See also Costa and Kahn, “Power Couples”; Bishop, The Big Sort.

  an axis of economic segregation: See Costa and Kahn, “Power Couples”; Bishop, The Big Sort, 130–33.

  forbidden by law: See, e.g., Janelle Jones, “The Racial Wealth Gap: How African-Americans Have Been Shortchanged out of the Materials to Build Wealth,” Economic Policy Institute, February 13, 2017, accessed July 19, 2018, https://www.epi.org/blog/the-racial-wealth-gap-how-african-americans-have-been-shortchanged-out-of-the-materials-to-build-wealth/.

  racial differences at midcentury: In 1960, 34.5 percent of African Americans owned their own homes, for example; 34.9 percent of low-income families do so today. See U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Housing, “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Ownership Rates,” accessed October 31, 2018, www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/ownrate.html; Felipe Chacon, “The Home Ownership Gap Is on the Wane,” Trulia, August 10, 2017, www.trulia.com/research/homeownership-gap/.

  In 1970, the unemployment rate for African Americans was 9.2 percent; in 2017, the unemployment rate for low-income Americans was 13 percent. See Robert W. Fairlie and William A. Sundstrom, “The Racial Unemployment Gap in Long-Run Perspective,” American Economic Review 87, no. 2 (May 1997), www.jstor.org/stable/2950936?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents; Janet L. Yellen, “Addressing Workforce Development Challenges in Low-Income Communities,” Federal Reserve, March 28, 2017, www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/yellen20170328a.htm.

  a 5 percent chance: See Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 69, no. 2 (April 2004): 162.

  “two nations”: Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil; or, The Two Nations (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 149.

  vulnerable and insecure: See, e.g., Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2012), hereafter cited as Hayes, Twilight of the Elites, and Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), hereafter cited as Hacker, The Great Risk Shift.

  defend their position: See, e.g., Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).

  the midcentury unity of ideals: See Chapter 7.

  “the problem of our age”: Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth,” in The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962 [originally published by the Century Company, New York, 1900]), 14.

  “If all the cleavages”: See Robert Dahl, Democracy in the United States: Promise and Performance (Skokie, IL: Rand McNally, 1972), 309.

  “the continuing responsiveness”: Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 1.

  The general formulation requires much filling in. On the one hand, simply counting votes—even when all votes get the same weight—cannot on its own sustain a democracy. Opinion polls might add up citizens’ preferences, but without democratic institutions—political parties, campaigns, debates, and a political press—the polls merely balance private preference. They cannot sustain or guide a collective choice. On the other hand, the processes of collective engagement that democracy requires necessarily enable some citizens—who are advantaged, or even just skilled or trusted, and therefore unusually persuasive—to exert vastly greater influence over public affairs than others (even if all votes are counted equally and thus retain the same direct impact on elections). The very processes needed for politics to sustain collective choices thus undermine individual equality. Almost all of the deepest puzzles in democratic thought trace back eventually to this dilemma. For the distinction between influence and impact over democratic decision, see Ronald Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 3: The Place of Liberty,” Iowa Law Review 73, no. 1 (October 1987): 1–50.

  the bottom 75 percent combined: The richest 1 percent of Americans supplies over half of all campaign contributions (the richest quarter of a percent supplies about a third). Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 242 (citing Lynda Powell and data from the Congressional Campaign Study, but there is no full reference). Hereafter cited as Gilens, Affluence and Influence. In 1990, the richest quarter supplied nearly three-fourths of campaign contributions. The poorest fifth accounted for only one-fiftieth of campaign contributions. See Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Michael Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 194. See also Henry E. Brady, Sidney Verba, and Kay Lehman Schlozman, “Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 2 (June 1995): 271–84, and Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), hereafter cited as Bartels, Unequal Democracy.

  collectively contributed $176 million: Twenty backed Democrats and 138 backed Republicans. See Nicholas Confessore, Sarah Cohen, and Karen Yourish, “The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election,” New York Times, October 10, 2015, accessed July 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/2016-presidential-election-super-pac-donors.html?_r=0.

  promoting free-market policies: See generally Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). By broadcasting their intentions, the Koch brothers could use their money to exert influence long before the first dollar was spe
nt. See Matea Gold, “Koch-Backed Network Aims to Spend Nearly $1 Billion on 2016 Elections,” Washington Post, January 26, 2015, and later “Correction,” accessed August 1, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/koch-backed-network-aims-to-spend-nearly-1-billion-on-2016-elections/2015/01/26/77a44654-a513-11e4-a06b-9df2002b86a0_story.html. Progressive billionaires also spend lavishly. Tom Steyer planned to spend over $100 million on the 2018 midterm elections. See Edward-Isaac Dovere, “Tom Steyer’s $110 million Plan to Redefine the Democrats,” Politico, July 31, 2018, accessed August 1, 2018, www.politico.com/story/2018/07/31/steyer-democrats-millions-midterms-751245.

  98 percent of the increase: Whereas there were roughly seventy-five hundred registered lobbyists in Washington in 1981, there are roughly thirteen thousand today. See Matthew P. Drennan, Income Inequality: Why It Matters and Why Most Economists Didn’t Notice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 31. Hereafter cited as Drennan, Income Inequality. Drennan cites Lee Drutman, “The Business of America Is Lobbying: The Expansion of Corporate Political Activity and the Future of American Pluralism” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2010), 141, https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1mh761v2/qt1mh761v2.pdf?t=mtgaay.

  exceed $3 billion: See Lee Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8. Hereafter cited as Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying.

  spend perhaps ten times as much: See Jeffrey Milyo, David Primo, and Timothy Groseclose, “Corporate PAC Campaign Contributions in Perspective,” Business and Politics 2, no. 1 (2000): 83.

  as recently as the late 1990s: See Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying, 11–12.

  the tax deduction for charitable giving: See Marianne Bertrand et al., “Tax-Exempt Lobbying: Corporate Philanthropy as a Tool for Political Influence,” NBER Working Paper No. 24451 (March 2018), accessed July 20, 2018, www.nber.org/papers/w24451.

  the Walton Foundation: See, e.g., Motoko Rich, “A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools,” New York Times, April 25, 2014, accessed July 20, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/us/a-walmart-fortune-spreading-charter-schools.html; Valerie Strauss, “The ‘Walmartization’ of Public Education,” Washington Post, March 17, 2016, accessed July 20, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/17/the-walmartization-of-public-education/?utm_term=.01a53a2035db.For more on philanthropy as a form of political power, see, e.g., Iain Hay and Samantha Muller, “Questioning Generosity in the Golden Age of Philanthropy,” Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 5 (2014): 635–53; Lenore Ealy, “The Intellectual Crisis in Philanthropy,” Society 51, no. 1 (February 2014): 87–96; Kenneth Saltman, “From Carnegie to Gates: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Venture Philanthropy Agenda for Public Education,” in The Gates Foundation and the Future of U.S. “Public” Schools, ed. Philip Kovacs (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 1–20; Robin Rogers, “Why Philanthro-Policymaking Matters,” Society 48, no. 5 (September 2011): 376–81; Ben Williamson, “Mediators and Mobilizers of Curriculum Reform: Education Policy Experts of the Third Sector,” paper presented at the University of Stirling School of Education, December 5, 2012; Georgia Levenson Keohane, Social Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century: Innovation Across the Nonprofit, Private, and Public Sectors (New York: McGraw Hill Education, 2013); and Amy Brown, “Philanthrocapitalism: Race, Political Spectacle, and the Marketplace of Beneficence in a New York City School,” in What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 147–66.

  Elections begin: See, e.g., Nicholas Confessore and Jonathan Martin, “G.O.P. Race Starts in Lavish Haunts of Rich Donors,” New York Times, February 28, 2015, accessed July 20, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/us/politics/gop-race-starts-in-lavish-haunts-of-rich-donors.html.

  every day in office: See Ezra Klein, “The Most Depressing Graphic for Members of Congress,” Washington Post, January 14, 2013, accessed July 20, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/14/the-most-depressing-graphic-for-members-of-congress/?utm_term=.072d62e69b40. Hereafter cited as Klein, “The Most Depressing Graphic.”

  This roughly triples: See Klein, “The Most Depressing Graphic.”

  said to resemble telemarketers: See, e.g., David Jolly, interview with Norah O’Donnell, “Dialing for Dollars,” 60 Minutes, CBS, April 24, 2016.

  “If you’re a lobbyist”: See James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: Mick Mulvaney’s Confession Highlights the Corrosive Influence of Money in Politics,” PowerPost (blog), Washington Post, April 25, 2018, accessed July 20, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/04/25/daily-202-mick-mulvaney-s-confession-highlights-the-corrosive-influence-of-money-in-politics/5adfea2230fb043711926869/?utm_term=.0bf524639cc0.

  whose views they promote: See Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (February 2006): 69–84. For lobbying in general, see Beth Leech, “Lobbying and Interest Group Advocacy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Congress, ed. Frances Lee and Eric Schickler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Beth Leech, “Lobbying and Influence,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups, ed. Jeffrey Berry and L. Sandy Maisel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). See also Anthony Nownes, Total Lobbying: What Lobbyists Want (and How They Try to Get It) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  “in effect . . . subsidized”: Motoko Rich, “A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools,” New York Times, April 25, 2014, accessed July 20, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/us/a-walmart-fortune-spreading-charter-schools.html. Similarly, the Gates Foundation’s belief that smaller schools foster competition produced over three hundred small schools in New York City in a decade. See Jessica Shiller, “City Prep: A Culture of Care in an Era of Data-Driven Reform,” in Critical Small Schools: Beyond Privatization in New York City Urban Educational Reform, ed. Maria Hantzopoulos and Alia Tyner-Mullings (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2012), 4.

  Similar examples may be multiplied almost endlessly. In Illinois, a challenger with strong anti-union views recently unseated an incumbent governor after just ten people made donations equal to the incumbent’s entire campaign budget and one family contributed more than the incumbent received from 244 labor unions combined. The new governor at once promoted an aggressively anti-union agenda. See Nicholas Confessore, “A Wealthy Governor and His Friends Are Remaking Illinois,” New York Times, November 29, 2015, accessed July 20, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/us/politics/illinois-campaign-money-bruce-rauner.html.

  stabilize commodity prices: See, e.g., Edward Wyatt and Eric Lichtblau, “A Finance Overhaul Fight Draws a Swarm of Lobbyists,” New York Times, April 19, 2010, accessed July 26, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/business/20derivatives.html, and Binyamin Appelbaum and Eric Lichtblau, “Banks Lobbying Against Derivatives Trading Ban,” New York Times, May 9, 2010, accessed July 26, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/10lobby.html. The effort bore fruit, and proposed outright bans on certain forms of derivatives trading were weakened into partial restrictions. See Edward Wyatt, “For Securities Industry, Finance Law Could Bring New Light to Derivatives,” New York Times, July 15, 2010, accessed August 1, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/business/16deriv.html?action=click&contentCollection=Business%20Day&module=RelatedCovera®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article.

  committing tax fraud: See 26 U.S.C. §§ 1441(c)(11) and 871(j).

  only minimally responsive to the 70th: Gilens, Affluence and Influence, 82. (The regression coefficient for the 70th percentile is small and not statistically significant.)

  ignores the shared preferences: Gilens, Affluence and Influence, 84–85.

  the Rule of Law: For more on the income defense industry and its relationship to the rule of law, see Jeffrey Winters, Oliga
rchy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18–19. Hereafter cited as Winters, Oligarchy.

  The trusts and estates bar: In 2003, there were roughly sixteen thousand lawyers in the United States who specialized in trusts and estates. See David Cay Johnston, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everyone Else (New York: Portfolio, 2003), 5.

  The total revenues: See Ben Seal, “The 2018 Am Law 100 by the Numbers,” American Lawyer, April 24, 2018, accessed July 20, 2018, www.law.com/americanlawyer/2018/04/24/the-2018-am-law-100-by-the-numbers/.

  the revenues of the big four: Ernst and Young reported combined global revenues of $31.4 billion for the financial year ending June 30, 2017. “EY Reports Strong Global Revenue Growth in 2017,” EY News, September 5, 2017, accessed July 20, 2018, www.ey.com/gl/en/newsroom/news-releases/news-ey-reports-strong-global-revenue-growth-in-2017. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported revenues of $37.7 billion for the financial year ending June 30, 3017. PwC’s Global Annual Review 2017, accessed July 20, 2018, www.pwc.com/gx/en/about/global-annual-review-2017.html. Deloitte reported making $38.8 billion in the fiscal year ending May 31, 2017. “Deloitte Announces Record Revenue of US$38.8 Billion,” press release, Deloitte, September 14, 2017, accessed July 20, 2018, www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/global-revenue-announcement.html. KPMG reported making $26.4 billion in the financial year ending September 30, 2017. KPMG International Cooperative, 2017 International Annual Review, accessed July 20, 2018, https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2017/12/international-annual-review-2017.pdf.