The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  prefer to work fewer hours: Jacobs and Gerson, The Time Divide, 65–66.

  nearly twelve hours of weekly overwork: Jacobs and Gerson, The Time Divide, 68.

  thirteen weekly hours of overwork: Jacobs and Gerson, The Time Divide, 68.

  five hours of overwork per week: Jacobs and Gerson, The Time Divide, 68.

  fight Mike Tyson: Will Meyerhofer, “Not Worth It,” The People’s Therapist, April 13, 2011, accessed November 18, 2018, https://thepeoplestherapist.com/2011/04/13/not-worth-it/#more-3292 (Meyerhofer worked at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell).

  “sick and insane”: Ho, Liquidated, 115.

  “not a life”: Cynthia Fuchs Epstein et al., “Glass Ceilings and Open Doors: Women’s Advancement in the Legal Profession,” Fordham Law Review 46 (1995): 385.

  “no way to have a child”: Rhode, Balanced Lives, 14.

  to the Holocaust: See Ho, Liquidated.

  “less smart”: The quotations come from Ho, Liquidated, 44, 56.

  Chapter Seven: A Comprehensive Divide

  the forty-second and forty-third presidents of the United States: “Timeline Guide to the U.S. Presidents,” Scholastic, accessed October 1, 2018, www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/timeline-guide-us-presidents/.

  ran a small grocery store: Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Vintage, 2005), 4, 8–18.

  Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.: Kitty Kelley, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 42, 80.

  whom he eventually married: Russell L. Riley, “Bill Clinton: Life Before the Presidency,” Miller Center at the University of Virginia, accessed October 6, 2018, https://millercenter.org/president/clinton/life-before-the-presidency.

  middle-class neighborhood: “About the Project,” George W. Bush Childhood Home, Inc., accessed October 1, 2018, www.bushchildhoodhome.org/about.

  Cozumel, Mexico: Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart (New York: Scribner, 2010), 94–96.

  a white-collar future: Over 20 percent of veterans surveyed either would not or probably would not have gone to college but for the GI Bill, which provided a “ticket of admission to the middle class that quickly rivalled the union card as a significant economic lever of upward mobility.” William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 31–32.

  one-twentieth of their present levels: See Chapter 1.

  perhaps 40 percent today: Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “How Progressive Is the U.S. Federal Tax System? A Historical and International Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 3.

  between 1950 and 1970: Bishop, The Big Sort, 130. For further discussion, see Berry and Glaeser, “The Divergence of Human Capital.”

  an ordinary car: Murray, Coming Apart, 27–28. See also Kathleen Leonard Turner, “Commercial Food Venues,” in Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life, ed. Helen Sheumaker and Shirley Teresa Wajda (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO), 112–13; “How Much Cars Cost in the 60s,” The People History, accessed October 7, 2018, www.thepeoplehistory.com/60scars.html.

  a typical midcentury year: Murray, Coming Apart, 26.

  including among elites: Kristina Wilson, Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 2004), 14–17.

  including into leadership positions: Bishop, The Big Sort, 225. The place in civil society that these membership organizations once held is today roughly occupied by professionally run advocacy groups, whose supporters are often segregated by class and, in any event, do not interact much (and certainly not with their managers). For further discussion, see Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 291.

  “lives on an economic scale”: Duncan Norton-Taylor, “How Top Executives Live (Fortune 1955),” Fortune, last modified May 6, 2012, accessed November 19, 2018, http://fortune.com/2012/05/06/how-top-executives-live-fortune-1955/#. Hereafter cited as Norton-Taylor, “How Top Executives Live.”

  “live[d] in an unpretentious brick house”: Norton-Taylor, “How Top Executives Live.”

  “bought a new Ford”: Norton-Taylor, “How Top Executives Live.”

  “The executive’s home today”: Norton-Taylor, “How Top Executives Live.”

  “The executive who feels”: Norton-Taylor, “How Top Executives Live.”

  “‘Top executives . . . are not expected’”: Norton-Taylor, “How Top Executives Live.”

  “no evidence of class effects”: William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Vintage, 1997), 195. Hereafter cited as Wilson, When Work Disappears.

  which class cannot displace: Powerful statements of the view that white supremacy remains the dominant ideology in American life include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), and Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

  (as Wilson himself has acknowledged): Wilson observed, for example, that toward the end of the Great Compression, in the mid-1960s, “class began to affect career and generation mobility for Blacks as it has regularly done for whites.” Wilson, When Work Disappears, 195.

  just one case in point among many: For example, roughly 35 percent of African Americans owned their own homes in 1950; roughly 39 percent of Americans in the bottom income quartile do today. U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Housing, “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Ownership Rates,” last modified October 31, 2011, www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/ownrate.html; “Data by Issue: Homeownership and Housing,” Prosperity Now Scorecard, https://scorecard.prosperitynow.org/data-by-issue#housing/outcome/homeownership-by-income (2016 data). Similarly, in 1954 the unemployment rate among African Americans was roughly 10 percent; in 2009, the unemployment rates among the bottom four deciles of the income distribution were roughly 12, 15, 19, and 31 percent. Drew Desilver, “Black Unemployment Rate Is Consistently Twice That of Whites,” Pew Research Center, August 21, 2013, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times-and-bad-black-unemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/.

  When class and race intersect, their cumulative effects become enormous. For example, among black men born in 1960, high school dropouts have a 59 percent chance of going to prison at some point in their lives, whereas college graduates have a 5 percent chance. See James Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” 25 (on file with author). See also Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman, “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 621 (2009): 221–42.

  fallen by roughly a third: The share of households has fallen from 61 percent to just under 50 percent, and the share of income has fallen from 62 percent to 43 percent. Pew Research Center, “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground.”

  no longer middle class: Pew Research Center, “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground.” For further discussion, see Marilyn Geewax, “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class,” National Public Radio, last modified December 9, 2015, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477/the-tipping-point-most-americans-no-longer-are-middle-class.

  no longer stands out for its wealth: Here see David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, “The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest,” New York Times, April 22, 2014, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html?_r=0. Leonhardt and Quealy use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to show that around 2010, median incomes in Canada and Norway overtook those in the United States and that median incomes in almost every other rich nation have been catching up rapidly over the past three decades.

  a kind of narcissism: M
arianne Cooper, “Being the ‘Go-To Guy’: Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the Organization of Work in Silicon Valley,” in Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds, ed. Naomi Gerstel, Dan Clawson, and Robert Zussman (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 26; Williams, White Working Class, 37–38.

  “If we had a vacancy”: Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy, Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy (New York: Free Press, 1996), 19. See also Daron Acemoglu, “Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market,” Journal of Economic Literature 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 41, https://doi.org/10.1257/0022051026976. Hereafter cited as Acemoglu, “Technical Change.”

  not appreciably more skilled, on average, than others: See Chapter 6.

  even within cities: Berry and Glaeser, “The Divergence of Human Capital,” 415–16.

  separate physical spaces: Moreover, the increases are greatest among high-wage, technology-intensive employers: a recent study of nearly three thousand firms found a robust correlation between the intensity of applicant screening on the one hand and, on the other, the levels of formal education, self-reported skills, and extent of computer use among a firm’s employees. Steffanie L. Wilk and Peter Cappelli, “Understanding the Determinants of Employer Use of Selection Methods,” Personnel Psychology 56, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 117–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2003.tb00145.x. See also Acemoglu, “Technical Change,” 41.

  hire casually: For example, Sports Plus, which in the 1990s paid assemblers between $5.50 and $7.00 per hour, still hires in the casual fashion one employed by Ford. Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy, Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy (New York: Free Press, 1996), 47. See also Acemoglu, “Changes in Unemployment and Wage Inequality,” 1270.

  formal cognitive tests and lengthy interviews: These innovations were introduced in the mid-1980s by firms such as Honda of America and Diamond Star Motors, and are now widely used by employers seeking mid-skilled workers. Acemoglu further discusses this in his work, saying, “These are high-wage employers, with somewhat higher real wages than Ford in the 1960’s, and the first two are in the same industry as Ford. All three companies spend substantial resources on recruitment and hire only a fraction of those who apply. The first two use formal cognitive tests, including mathematics, aptitude, and English tests, as well as a series of lengthy interviews. The third company employs more intensive interviews but no formal tests. The interview process in all three companies is quite costly as it involves a large number of fellow employees and managers, but they view this as a worthwhile activity.” Acemoglu, “Changes in Unemployment and Wage Inequality,” 1270.

  lasting entire days: Rivera, Pedigree, 31–34.

  steadily more precise over time: The share of workers who possess precisely the education level required for their jobs increased between 1976 and 1985, for example, and the extent of the education gap for mismatched workers (the average excess years of schooling possessed by overeducated workers) declined. Acemoglu, “Changes in Unemployment and Wage Inequality,” 1271–72, Table 1. Daron Acemoglu’s work tests the robustness of this result against effects concerning the changing composition of the workforce, e.g., a rise of young workers who tend to be overeducated.

  entirely separate firms: Acemoglu, “Technical Change,” 7–72, 48–49.

  without college degrees: Bishop, The Big Sort, 135.

  from the educated elite: The pattern has become so extreme that the military itself now worries about the educational level of its recruits. The Pentagon has thus bemoaned that the “propensity to enlist is lower for high quality youth, youth with better educated parents, and youth planning to attend college.” John T. Warner, Curtis J. Simon, and Deborah M. Payne, Enlistment Supply in the 1990’s: A Study of the Navy College Fund and Other Enlistment Incentive Programs (Ft. Belvoir, VA: Defense Technical Information Center, 2001), 21–22. See also Bishop, The Big Sort, 137.

  more Yale students were murdered in New Haven than were killed in Iraq: See John Nordheimer, “Son of Privilege, Son of Pain: Random Death at Yale’s Gates,” New York Times, June 28, 1992, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/nyregion/son-of-privilege-son-of-pain-random-death-at-yale-s-gates.html; Paul Gunther, “The End of Shared Sacrifice Set in Stone: Yale as Metaphor,” Huffington Post, December 6, 2017, accessed November 19, 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-gunther/the-end-of-shared-sacrifi_b_6124098.html.

  centered on the workplace: Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 121. For further discussion, see also James B. Steward, “Looking for a Lesson in Google’s Perks,” New York Times, March 15, 2013, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/business/at-google-a-place-to-work-and-play.html.

  “throwing on a goofy hat”: Tan Chen, “The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy.”

  the association between work and honor: Eberstadt, “Where Did All the Men Go?” According to one researcher’s statistics, incarceration has quadrupled within the past forty years. Sarah Shannon et al., “The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People with Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010,” Demography 54, no. 5 (October 2017): 1804–5, Table 1.

  the New Jim Crow: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

  middle-class sexual habits: In the late eighteenth century, aristocratic society began rejecting puritanism. See Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  without her labor: Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 34.

  rarer among the rich than the rest: See Chapter 5.

  almost unheard of: See Chapter 5.

  middle-class households: Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 45, 55–57, 76–77.

  remains where it was: In 1970, 73 percent of educated and 67 percent of working-class white Americans reported “very happy” marriages; today the share among professionals remains roughly the same, while the share among the working class has fallen to roughly 50 percent. “Men Adrift: Badly Educated Men in Rich Countries Have Not Adapted Well to Trade, Technology or Feminism,” The Economist, May 28, 2015, accessed November 19, 2018, www.economist.com/news/essays/21649050-badly-educated-men-rich-countries-have-not-adapted-well-trade-technology-or-feminism.

  fell by a quarter between 2002 and 2012: The question was asked in the National Survey of Family Growth. Forty-two percent of college-educated women answered “yes” in 2002; just 31 percent did in 2012. Helaine Olen, “Think Divorce Is Miserable? Look How Bad Life Can Get When Divorcees Try to Retire. Especially When They’re Women,” Slate, March 18, 2016, accessed November 19, 2018, www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bills/2016/03/how_divorce_exacerbates_the_retirement_crisis_especially_if_you_re_a_woman.html.

  nearly 20 percent among poor women: “The Tissue Trade: Dislike of Abortion and Support for Planned Parenthood Should Go Together,” The Economist, August 1, 2015, accessed November 19, 2018, www.economist.com/united-states/2015/08/01/the-tissue-trade. See also Peter Schuck, One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking About Five Hard Issues That Divide Us (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 110.

  “precisely . . . to teach”: Putnam, Frederick, and Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps,” 22.

  by 240, 40, and 130 percent respectively: Putnam, Frederick, and Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps,” 16–17, Tables 6–8.

  both roughly tripled: Putnam, Frederick, and Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps,” 17–18.

  “most people can be trusted”: Putnam, Frederick, and Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps,” 19.

  not at all for the bottom: Putnam, Frederick, and Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps,” 20.

  scorn the sexism of middle America: Tan Chen, “The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Econom
y.”

  no women in top management: Carbone and Cahn, “Unequal Terms.” See also Rachel Soares et al., “2012 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Executive Officers and Top Earners,” Catalyst, December 11, 2012, www.catalyst.org/knowledge/2012-catalyst-census-fortune-500-women-executive-officers-and-top-earners.

  remains overwhelmingly male-dominated: Alexander Eichler, “Gender Wage Gap Is Higher on Wall Street Than Anywhere Else,” Huffington Post, March 19, 2012, accessed November 19, 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/19/gender-wage-gap-wall-street_n_1362878.html; William Alden, “Wall Street’s Young Bankers Are Still Mostly White and Male, Report Says,” New York Times, September 30, 2014, accessed November 19, 2018, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/wall-streets-young-bankers-are-still-mostly-white-and-male; and Andy Kiersz and Portia Crowe, “These Charts Show Just How White and Male Wall Street Really Is,” Business Insider, August 25, 2015, accessed November 19, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-bank-diversity-2015-8.