The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  People who feel that they have worked: Ran Kivetz and Yuhuang Zheng, “Determinants of Justification and Self-Control,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 135, no. 4 (2006): 572–87, https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.135.4.572.

  support for economic redistribution declines: Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos, “Corruption, Inequality, and Fairness,” Journal of Monetary Economics 52, no. 7 (October 2005): 1227–44, https://doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.jmoneco.2005.05.003.

  “When people can see”: N. Gregory Mankiw, “Yes, the Wealthy Can Be Deserving,” New York Times, February 15, 2014, accessed November 18, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/business/yes-the-wealthy-can-be-deserving.html. This effect applies even at the very top of the distribution, to block even progressive taxes aimed narrowly at the super-rich. A rare case in which the next 19 defeated the top 1 percent in a political dispute over taxes presents the exception that proves the rule. In the most recent reforms of the estate tax, the merely rich sought to increase the amount exempted from the tax, while the super-rich sought to reduce the rates at which the tax applied, or to eliminate it entirely. (This is natural: estates left by the merely rich will fall overwhelmingly within the higher exemption, making rates unimportant compared to the exemption, and estates left by the super-rich will massively exceed virtually any exemption, making the exemption unimportant compared to the rates. Indeed, in 2015, fewer than five thousand estates owed any tax at all, and in 2013, the average size of an estate that paid the tax was $22.7 million. Brian J. O’Connor, “Once Again, the Estate Tax May Die,” New York Times, February 18, 2017, accessed October 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/your-money/taxes/once-again-the-estate-tax-may-die.html.) Save for a fleeting repeal in 2010, the merely rich won the recent political battles: the exemption to the estate tax has increased even as the rates applied above the exemption have not fallen. For more on the politics of the estate tax, see Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  unjustly abuse industrious workers: For related observations, see Skidelsky and Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough?, 191–92.

  Lyndon Johnson once described the Great Society as “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents . . . where the city of man serves . . . the desire for beauty and the hunger for community . . . where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” LBJ Presidential Library, “Social Justice Gallery,” accessed October 15, 2018, www.lbjlibrary.org/exhibits/social-justice-gallery. Today, Paul Ryan divides society into “makers,” whose work ethic serves the common good, and “takers,” who exploit the programs that LBJ established. Nick Baumann and Brett Brownell, “VIDEO: Paul Ryan’s Version of ‘47 Percent’—the ‘Takers’ vs. the ‘Makers,’” Mother Jones, October 5, 2012, accessed October 15, 2018, www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/paul-ryans-47-percent-takers-vs-makers-video/. (Ryan would later express regret at the formulation. See, e.g., Paul Ryan, “Speaker Ryan on the State of American Politics,” March 23, 2016, www.speaker.gov/press-release/full-text-speaker-ryan-state-american-politics [inactive]. But the regret attaches more to style than to substance, and Ryan continued to dismantle the welfare state.)

  Economic inequality’s meritocratic turn explains both sides of this rhetorical contrast. Johnson could draw a sharp distinction between the “quality of . . . goals” and the “quantity of . . . goods” because the midcentury economy associated income with unearned rents. Meritocratic inequality, by contrast, associates income with industry and therefore with virtue. This dissolves the contrast that Johnson relied on and erects the contrast Ryan evokes.

  accords to the industrious: Conservatives especially disdain progressive intellectuals—including writers and professors—whose incomes do not match their educations and who moralize loudly but enviously against the wealth of a commercial class that they (clinging to the wreckage of aristocratic values) regard as inferior. See, e.g., David Brooks, “Bitter at the Top,” New York Times, June 15, 2004, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/bitter-at-the-top.html. Edward Conrad, a former venture capitalist and conservative writer, calls the type “art-history majors,” which he uses as a “derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life.” Adam Davidson, “The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy,” New York Times, May 1, 2012, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/romneys-former-bain-partner-makes-a-case-for-inequality.html. The derision suggests that the working rich, for their part, may mirror the intellectuals’ income envy, only now taking aim at the freedom and leisure that intellectuals still enjoy, untaxed.

  “My neighbor has a cow”: See, e.g., U.S. Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Russian Foreign Policy: Proliferation to Rogue Regimes: Hearings Before the Committee on International Relations, 106th Cong., 1st sess., 1999, 35 (statement of Representative James Woolsey).

  middle-class envy is exhausted: Arthur C. Brooks, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise (New York: Basic Books, 2012).

  grasping rather than magnanimous: Moderate egalitarians especially succumb to just this fear. For example, former treasury secretary Larry Summers recently worried that “unless one regards envy as a virtue, the primary reason for concern about inequality is that lower- and middle-income workers have too little—not that the rich have too much.” Summers, “The Rich Have Advantages.”

  launder the currency of middle-class desire: The phrase “launder the currency of desire” borrows from Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limit of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2011), 56.

  “We are Wall Street”: Quoted in Freeland, Plutocrats, 53.

  Chapter Five: The Meritocratic Inheritance

  “Getting admitted to college”: Nicholas Lehman, The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), 141. Hereafter cited as Lehman, The Big Test.

  Yale, for example: Geoffrey Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution: How Two Yale Presidents and Their Admissions Directors Tore Up the ‘Old Blueprint’ to Create a Modern Yale,” Yale Alumni Magazine, December 1999, accessed November 18, 2018, http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/99_12/admissions.html. Hereafter cited as Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “that the admission”: Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 407; Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  coat-and-tie dress code: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “a beetle-browed”: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “happy bottom quarter”: Kabaservice writes, “Indeed, while private school students made up more than 60 percent of the Class of 1957, they made up less than half of the membership of Phi Beta Kappa and one-sixth of the membership of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society. The largest feeder schools (Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss, and St. Paul’s), which Griswold considered the epitome of academic excellence and which collectively sent approximately 200 students (or 20 percent of the class), each accounted for only one of the 64 members of Phi Beta Kappa. Other traditional feeder schools such as Groton, Hill, Kent, St. Mark’s, St. George’s, and Taft contributed no members to Phi Beta Kappa at all.” Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  academic honor rolls: Elite Harvard undergraduates in the 1930s, for example, “lived in private apartments, attended by butlers and maids, in a district called the Gold Coast, went to debutante balls in Boston, did not customarily attend classes, and enrolled briefly in special tutoring schools at the end of each semester so they would be able to pass their exams.�
�� Similarly, gentlemen’s Cs abounded well into the post–World War II years. Lehman, The Big Test, 27.

  more than three to one: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  the country’s most prestigious university: Jacques Steinberg, The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), xii.

  first great successes: Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 177.

  by the late 1940s: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “the greatest change”: For Harvard’s SAT revolution at midcentury, see Murray, Coming Apart, 54–55. Note that though Murray alternates between calling the dean William and Wilbur, his name is Wilbur. For the remark by Harvard’s dean of admissions, see W. J. Bender, Final Report of W.J. Bender, Chairman of the Admissions and Scholarship Committee and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aids, 1952–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1960), 4.

  by 1955: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  Phillips Academy Andover: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “not intend to preside”: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “an intellectual investment banker”: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  on a meritocratic model: Following his time at Yale, Clark served as headmaster of the Horace Mann School, including during a time at which, subsequent reports revealed, there was widespread sexual abuse of students. For background into the allegations and Clark’s role at the time, see Amos Kamil, “Prep School Predators,” New York Times, June 6, 2012, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/magazine/the-horace-mann-schools-secret-history-of-sexual-abuse.html.

  ability and achievement: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  the ability to pay: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “who will benefit most”: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  turned their graduates away: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.” Kabaservice cites an article from the Yale Daily News. See Tom Herman, “New Concept of Yale Admissions,” Yale Daily News, December 16, 1965. That article, however, does not use the term “ingrown.”

  in 1968, for example: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  Yale’s biggest donor: Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 129.

  its median student’s SATs: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.” Another report of Yale’s SAT revolution appears in Murray, Coming Apart, 54.

  set a school record: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “a statement, really”: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution”; R. Inslee Clark, interview with Geoffery Kabaservice, Yale Manuscripts and Archives Library, May 13, 1993.

  “a Mexican-American from El Paso”: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution”; William F. Buckley Jr., “What Makes Bill Buckley Run,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1968, 68.

  “You’re talking about Jews”: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  “the privileged took pride”: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  some admit fewer than 5 percent: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard Database, last updated September 28, 2018, https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data; Richard Pérez-Peña, “Best, Brightest and Rejected: Elite Colleges Turn Away up to 95%,” New York Times, April 18, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-colleges-acceptance-rates-hit-new-lows.html. The “top-ten” for these purposes are the eleven universities that dominate the top spots of the strikingly stable U.S. News & World Report rankings: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Duke, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, the California Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth.

  have improved as well: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.” Kabaservice notes that the Yale faculty, particularly the science professors, were struck by the quality of students. The chairman of the chemistry department penned a letter to Brewster noting that “all of our staff who have had any contact with this year’s freshmen agree that someone has done a spectacular job of recruiting. We are accustomed to meeting excellent students in introductory courses but never in such numbers.”

  above the 99th percentile: These are necessarily estimates, because the colleges do not all publicly report medians or composite scores, rather than scores for each section of the test. For Yale, see “What Yale Looks For,” Yale University, https://admissions.yale.edu/what-yale-looks-for; for Harvard, see “Applying to Harvard,” Harvard University, https://college.harvard.edu/frequently-asked-questions; for Princeton, see “Admission Statistics,” Princeton University, updated July 15, 2018, https://admission.princeton.edu/how-apply/admission-statistics; for Stanford, see “Our Selection Process,” Stanford University, updated July 2018, http://admission.stanford.edu/basics/selection/profile.html.

  between its most and least skilled citizens: OECD, OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, OECD Publishing (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264204256-en, 118. Hereafter cited as OECD, OECD Skills Outlook 2013.

  “stands out as having”: OECD, OECD Skills Outlook 2013, 118.

  validate its inputs: The difference in skills between citizens with a BA or more and citizens with less than a high school education in the United States is a quarter greater than the OECD average and fully a third greater than in Australia, Austria, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Japan, Norway, and the Slovak Republic. OECD, OECD Skills Outlook 2013, 117.

  “Whosoever hath”: Holy Bible, King James Version, Matthew 13:12. Note that the Gospel is at this point expressly addressing knowledge and wisdom, and the uptake of Jesus’s teachings.

  “Matthew Effect”: The name comes from Robert Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science,” Science 159 (January 5, 1968): 56–63. See also Annie Murphy Paul, “Educational Technology Isn’t Leveling the Playing Field,” Slate, June 25, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/neuman-celano-library-study-educational-technology-worsens-achievement-gaps.html.

  “revolution in family wealth transmission”: Langbein, “Twentieth-Century Revolution,” 722.

  The elite increasingly: See Robert D. Mare, “Educational Homogamy in Two Gilded Ages: Evidence from Inter-generational Social Mobility Data,” Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science 663 (January 2016): 117–39, and Robert D. Mare, “Educational Assortative Mating in Two Generations: Trends and Patterns Across Two Gilded Ages,” California Center for Population Research On-Line Working Paper Series, January 12, 2013, http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-CCPR-2014-015/PWP-CCPR-2014-015.pdf [inactive].

  two college graduates: See Murray, Coming Apart, 62. For further reference, see Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare, “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage from 1940 to 2003,” Demography 42 (2005): 621–46, reporting that both partners had sixteen or more years of schooling in 3.95 percent of married couples in 1960 and in 27.7 percent of married couples in 2000.

  over 5 percent in 2005: Jeremy Greenwood et al., “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings) 104 (May 2014): 348, 350. Hereafter cited as Greenwood et al., “Marry Your Like.” More generally, a regression that assesses the additional impact of the husband’s education on the wife’s, relative to the baseline year 1960, shows a steadily and substantially rising coefficient on the impact term; and the ratio of the actual shares of couples whose members possess identical education levels to the shares that would arise if marriage partners were randomly matched by educatio
n has dramatically increased.

  evenly balanced by gender: Princeton first admitted women in 1969, and Yale in 1969. Judith Schiff, “Resources on Yale History: A Brief History of Yale,” Yale University Library, http://guides.library.yale.edu/yalehistory; “Yale Will Admit Women in 1969; May Have Coeducational Housing,” Harvard Crimson, November 15, 1968, www.thecrimson.com/article/1968/11/15/yale-will-admit-women-in-1969/. It is hard to put a date on when Harvard College admitted women because of the existence of Radcliffe College, which admitted only women. Radcliffe College was opened as an annex to Harvard College in 1879. In 1963, Harvard degrees were awarded to Radcliffe students for the first time. In 1975, the two colleges merged their admissions. In 1977, “a critical date,” Harvard’s ratio of four men to one woman ended with “sex-blind admissions.” In 1999, Radcliffe officially merged with Harvard, and created the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Colleen Walsh, “Hard-Earned Gains for Women at Harvard,” Harvard Gazette, April 26, 2012.

  Before those years, these colleges graduated literally zero women. Today, women make up almost precisely 50 percent of the undergraduate student bodies at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and the top ten undergraduate colleges are 54 percent male and 46 percent female (or 51 percent male and 49 percent female, if West Point is excluded). For example, for 2015, Yale has a 51:49 male-to-female ratio; for 2014, the ratio was 48:52. David Burt and Emily Wanger, “Gender Ratio Flips for 2015,” Yale News, September 5, 2015; “Yale University Undergraduate Information—Student Life,” U.S. News & World Report, http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/yale-university-1426.

  Professional schools tell a similar, although slightly less stark, tale. Women constituted only about 3 percent in each Harvard Law School class between 1951 and 1965, for example. Today, the student bodies at the top ten law schools are 50 percent male and 50 percent female, the student bodies at the top ten business schools are 58 percent male and 42 percent female, and the student bodies at the top ten medical schools are 49 percent male and 51 percent female. These calculations are based on the U.S. News & World Report 2019 rankings: “Best Law Schools,” www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools; “Best Business Schools,” www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools; “Best Medical Schools,” www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-medical-schools/research-rankings.