The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  “To make butter”: The French Laundry, Farmers and Foragers. See also Tanya Gold, “A Goose in a Dress,” Harper’s Magazine, September 2015, 75, accessed November 19, 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/a-goose-in-a-dress/3/.

  class-segregated airplane cabins: See generally Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling (London: Penguin Press, 2018).

  In Sigmona Park: See Mellnik and Morello, “Washington: A World Apart.”

  over those years: Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag, “Why Has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined,” Journal of Urban Economics 102 (November 2017): 79; and Phillip Longman, “Bloom and Bust: Regional Inequality Is Out of Control. Here’s How to Reverse It,” Washington Monthly, November/December 2015, accessed November 19, 2018, http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust. Hereafter cited as Longman, “Bloom and Bust.”

  between 1945 and 1979: Longman, “Bloom and Bust.”

  the country’s twenty-five richest metro areas included: Longman, “Bloom and Bust.”

  relatively evenly across cities: Bishop, The Big Sort, 130.

  a “single American standard of living” emerged: Longman, “Bloom and Bust.”

  knowledge spillovers: See Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 138–44. Hereafter cited as Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs. Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2012).

  resegregating by income: See Matthew P. Drennan, Jose Lobo, and Deborah Strumsky, “Unit Root Tests of Sigma Income Convergence Across US Metropolitan Areas,” Journal of Economic Geography 4, no. 5 (2004): 583–95.

  moving itself now marks eliteness: Between 1980 and 1999, nearly half (45 percent) of all young college graduates moved between states, with the vast majority of these (80 percent in the 1990s) moving to the twenty-one cities with the highest levels of technology and patent production. By contrast, merely 19 percent of young people with only high school degrees moved between states. Bishop, The Big Sort, 130–33. For further discussion, see Costa and Kahn, “Power Couples,” 1287–1315.

  living in the average city: U.S. Agriculture Economic Research Service, Rural Education at a Glance: 2017 Edition, Economic Information Bulletin 171, April 2017, 2, www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/83078/eib-171.pdf?v=0.

  in the years since: U.S. Agriculture Economic Research Service, Rural Education at a Glance: 2017 Edition, Economic Information Bulletin 171, April 2017, 2, www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/83078/eib-171.pdf?v=0.

  in many poor countries: For more information on brain drain’s economic effects, see Jagdish Bhagwati’s work exploring brain drain in various developing countries. Jagdish Bhagwati and Carlos Rodriguez, “Welfare-Theoretical Analyses of the Brain Drain,” Journal of Development Economics 2, no. 3 (1975): 195–221.

  certain cities and not others: Between 2000 and 2014, the share of middle-class households fell in 203 of 229 metropolitan areas considered in a recent study, even as the shares of lower- and upper-income households grew in 160 and 172 of the cities. See “America’s Shrinking Middle Class: A Close Look at Changes Within Metropolitan Areas,” Pew Research Center, May 11, 2016, www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/.

  more than 34 percent were college graduates: Bishop, The Big Sort, 131. For more information, see Berry and Glaeser, “The Divergence of Human Capital,” 417.

  have college degrees: “Educational Attainment of Population Ages 25 to 34,” Kids Count Data Center, last modified October 2017, https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/6294-educational-attainment-of-population-ages-25-to-34#detailed/3/10,55-56,58-61,64-77,79-84,86,88-94,96-109,9428-9429/false/870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35,18/5924,1265,1309,1304,1311/13091,13090.

  all average nearly 50 percent: See Paul A. Jargowsky, “Take the Money and Run: Economic Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” American Sociology Review 61, no. 6 (1996): 984–98. Hereafter cited as Jargowsky, “Take the Money and Run.” Bishop, The Big Sort, 131. Richard Florida, “More Losers Than Winners in America’s New Economic Geography,” CityLab, January 30, 2013, accessed November 19, 2018, http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/01/more-losers-winners-americas-new-economic-geograpy/4465/.

  fell by 15 percent: See Catherine Rampell, “Who Says New York Is Not Affordable?,” New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2013, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/who-says-new-york-is-not-affordable.html.

  a handful of large cities: See Bishop, The Big Sort, 132. See also Costa and Kahn, “Power Couples,” 1287–1315. 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 one hundred largest cities. And the share of residents of those cities with this much education doubles that 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 November 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.

  variation in wages across regions: Bishop, The Big Sort, 134. See also Michael Porter, “The Economic Performance of Regions,” Regional Studies 37, no. 6 (2003): 549–78, 550, 551.

  nearly 30 percent for San Francisco: See Longman, “Bloom and Bust,” Figure 2.

  the ten worst-educated metro areas: Bishop, The Big Sort, 131–32.

  the least educated cities: See Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs, 107–11. See also Enrico Moretti, “America’s Great Divergence: The New Innovation Economy Is Making Some Cities Richer, Many Cities Poorer—and It’s Transforming Our Country,” Salon, May 12, 2012. Hereafter cited as Moretti, “America’s Great Divergence.”

  House prices and rents follow suit: Indeed, the ratios between per capita incomes in the tenth and ninetieth most expensive housing markets, after hitting a low of 1.36, have grown steeply since, to reach 1.61 in 2013. The relevant cities in 1976 were San Francisco and El Paso; in 2013 they were Boston and Cincinnati. See Anjli Raval, “Record Income Gap Fuels U.S. Housing Weakness,” Financial Times, August 12, 2014, accessed November 19, 2018, www.ft.com/content/1b294ed0-222b-11e4-9d4a-00144feabdc0.

  as recently as 2000: These figures combine data from two studies. See Laura Kusisto, “Renters Spent a Record-High Share of Income on Rent This Spring,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2015, accessed November 19, 2018, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/08/13/renters-spent-a-record-high-share-of-income-on-rent-this-spring/. See also Shaila Dewan, “In Many Cities, Rent Is Rising Out of Reach of Middle Class,” New York Times, April 14, 2014, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters-find-30-affordability-ratio-unattainable.html. The Dewan study finds slightly lower income shares for contemporary rents than the Kusisto study, presumably because it was done roughly a year earlier.

  rents increase by 0.6 percent: See Emily Badger, “A ‘Nationwide Gentrification Effect’ Is Segregating Us by Education,” Washington Post, July 11, 2014, accessed November 19, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/07/11/college-graduates-are-sorting-themselves-into-cities-increasingly-out-of-reach-of-everyone-else/?utm_term=.4629fe194009. Badger cites work by the economist Rebecca Diamond.

  today, only two-fifths do: See Mellnik and Morello, “Washington: A World Apart.” See also Sean Reardon and Kendra Fischoff, “Income Segregation in the United States’ Largest Metropolitan Areas: The Disappearance of Middle Class Neighborhoods,” Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, http://inequality.stanford.edu/income-segregation-maps. Hereafter cited as Reardon and Fischoff, “Income Segregation.”

  in rich and poor neighborhoods both dou
bled: See Mellnik and Morello, “Washington: A World Apart.” See also Reardon and Fischoff, “Income Segregation”; Richard Fry and Paul Taylor, “The Rise of Residential Segregation by Income,” Pew Research Center, August 1, 2012, www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/01/the-rise-of-residential-segregation-by-income/; Carol Morello, “Study: Rich, Poor Americans Increasingly Likely to Live in Separate Neighborhoods,” Washington Post, August 1, 2012, accessed November 19, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/local/rich-and-poor-grow-more-isolated-from-each-other-study-finds/2012/08/01/gJQABC5QPX_story.html?utm_term=.54bf100b47a6.

  over the past forty years: Between 1970 and 2000, the high school/college dissimilarity index rose from 0.16 to 0.24 by county and from 0.21 to 0.34 by census tract. See Douglas S. Massey, Jonathan Rothwell, and Thurston Domina, “The Changing Bases of Segregation in the U.S.,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 626, no. 1 (2009): 74–90, Figures 5 and 8. Hereafter cited as Massey, Rothwell, and Domina, “The Changing Bases of Segregation.”

  respectively since 1970: The average poor family lived in census tracts that were 14 percent poor in 1970 and 28 percent poor in 1990, and the average rich family lived in tracts that were 31 percent rich in 1970 and 36 percent rich in 1990. The neighborhood sorting index of class segregation rose roughly 25 percent between 1970 and 1990 (from .34 to .42); the geographic isolation index for college graduates doubled between 1970 and 2000 (rising from .13 to .28 at the county level and from .19 to .36 at the level of the census tract). See Murray, Coming Apart, 69. See also Massey, Rothwell, and Domina, “The Changing Bases of Segregation,” Figures 5 and 8. Massey also reports that the high school/college dissimilarity index rose 50 percent between 1970 and 2000 (from .16 to .24) at the county level and from .21 to .34 by census tract. Another prominent measure of neighborhood economic segregation experienced a similar 20 percent rise over the 1970s and 80s. For further discussion, see Jargowsky, “Take the Money and Run.”

  doubled and increased by one-fifth, respectively: The average poor family lived in census tracts that were 14 percent poor in 1970 and 28 percent poor in 1990; and the average rich family lived in tracts that were 31 percent rich in 1970 and 36 percent rich in 1990. See Massey, Rothwell, and Domina, “The Changing Bases of Segregation,” Figures 5 and 8.

  reaching 74 percent: See New York City Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, Upper East Side Community Health Profile 2006, www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/data/2006chp-305.pdf [inactive].

  by income and education: See Murray, Coming Apart, 72–73.

  most educated 5 percent of zip codes: See Chapter 3.

  Elite professional school graduates: See Murray, Coming Apart, 78, 82, 8, 315–20. See also Charles Murray, “Charles Murray, Author of Coming Apart, Examines Demographic Shifts in This New Decade,” Debate This Book, April 25, 2013, http://debatethisbook.com/2013/04/25/charles-murray-author-of-coming-apart-examines-demographic-shifts-in-this-new-decade/.

  more political clout: See Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs. See also Moretti, “America’s Great Divergence.”

  inequality of dollar income: See Rebecca Diamond, “The Determinants and Welfare-Implications of U.S. Workers’ Divergent Location Choices by Skill: 1980–2000,” American Economic Review 106, no. 3 (2016): 479–524.

  others like themselves: See Bishop, The Big Sort, 130. See also Arlie Russel Hochschild, “I Spent 5 Years with Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You,” Mother Jones, October 2016, accessed November 19, 2018, www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar-supporters/, adapted from Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land.

  are generally disappearing: An experimental study that gave some families a voucher to move from higher- to lower-poverty areas found that children who moved before they turned thirteen had annual incomes in their twenties that were 31 percent higher than the incomes of a control group. See Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” NBER Working Paper No. 21156 (May 2015). See also David Leonhardt, “In Climbing the Income Ladder, Location Matters,” New York Times, July 22, 2013, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. See also Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren, “The Equality of Opportunity Project,” accessed October 17, 2018, https://opportunityinsights.org/.

  elite government workers: See Mellnik and Morello, “Washington: A World Apart.”

  Stanford, Columbia, and Oxford Universities: Alia Wong, “A Public-School Paradox,” Atlantic, August 10, 2016, accessed November 19, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/08/a-public-school-paradox/495227/. See also Michelle Cottle, “Being Chelsea Clinton,” Atlantic, July 2016, accessed November 19, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/being-chelsea-clinton/485627/.

  Avenue Capital Group: “Avenue Capital and the Clintons: A Two-Way Street,” New York Times, November 3, 2006, accessed November 19, 2018, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/avenue-capital-and-the-clintons-a-two-way-street/.

  his own hedge fund: “Hedge Fund Rising Stars: Mark Mezvinsky,” Institutional Investor, accessed October 28, 2018, www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b14zb9g44397wg/hedge-fund-rising-stars-marc-mezvinsky; Matthew Goldstein and Steve Eder, “For Clintons, a Hedge Fund in the Family,” New York Times, March 22, 2015, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/business/dealbook/for-clintons-a-hedge-fund-in-the-family.html?_r=1; Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nate Schweber, “State Secret: Chelsea Clinton’s Wedding Plans,” New York Times, July 16, 2010, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/fashion/18CHELSEA.html, hereafter cited as Stolberg and Schweber, “Chelsea Clinton’s Wedding.”

  (unsurprisingly, in Manhattan): Stolberg and Schweber, “Chelsea Clinton’s Wedding”; Michael W. Savage, “Chelsea Clinton Marries Marc Mezvinsky in Rhinebeck, N.Y.,” Washington Post, August 1, 2010, accessed November 19, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/31/AR2010073103041.html; Cathy Horyn, “Chelsea Clinton’s Gown Spoke Beyond the Silence,” New York Times, August 1, 2010, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/fashion/02dress.html; “Chelsea Clinton Is Buying a $10.5M 4BR in NoMad,” Curbed New York, accessed October 28, 2018, https://ny.curbed.com/2013/3/14/10264238/chelsea-clinton-is-buying-a-10-5m-4br-in-nomad.

  specially commissioned for the occasion: “Jenna Bush Wedding Kept Low-Key,” Denver Post via Associated Press, May 9, 2008, accessed November 19, 2018, www.denverpost.com/2008/05/09/jenna-bush-wedding-kept-low-key/.

  not in any way exceptional: Even the private security that follows them as children of presidents is just an extreme case of private security—in the form of doormen, office guards, university policy systems, and gated communities—that protects the elite quite generally. The private security industry is growing at a rapid rate, with security systems integration and consulting growing the fastest. “Gains in Security Service Demand Will Be Supported by the Real and Perceived Risk of Crime and by Accelerating Economic Activity,” Freedonia Group, accessed October 20, 2018, www.freedoniagroup.com/industry-study/private-security-services-3268.htm

  other advanced economies: See OECD, OECD Skills Outlook 2013, 235, Figure 6.9; 238, Figure 6.10; 240, Figure 6.12; 241, Figure 6.13. With respect to pessimism, for example, college graduates are less than one-third as likely as nongraduates to believe that robots and computers will eliminate their jobs within the next five years. See Frank Newport, “One in Four U.S. Workers Say Technology Will Eliminate Job,” Gallup, May 17, 2017, www.gallup.com/poll/210728/one-four-workers-say-technology-eliminate-job.aspx.

  than students from richer ones, for example: See Kevin Carey, “The Ivy League Students Least Likely to Get Married,” New York Times, March 29, 2018, accessed November 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/29/upshot/c
ollege-marriage-class-differences.html.

  past experience of class: See Chapter 5.

  “Yale has the ability”: Jon Victor, “New Website Bolsters Financial Aid Protests,” Yale Daily News, March 8, 2016, accessed November 19, 2018, http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/03/08/new-website-bolsters-financial-aid-protests/.

  absorb the strains of this dilemma: A growing ecosystem of nonprofits seeks to support first-generation and low-income students through college graduation, responding not only to financial but also to cultural threats to college persistence. The Posse Foundation, for example, creates “posses,” or cohorts of their peers, to offer social/emotional support to one another at elite colleges. The KIPP charter school network now also runs a KIPP Through College program, in response to finding that many of its high-achieving graduates were dropping out, partially for cultural reasons. See Posse Foundation, “About Posse,” www.possefoundation.org/about-posse; “KIPP Through College,” Knowledge Is Power Program, www.kipp.org/approach/kipp-through-college/.

  is their core mission: Lani Guinier discusses these questions by elaborating the tensions among “sponsored mobility” (working within the meritocratic system to boost a few low-income students), “contest mobility” (typical meritocratic admissions with no boost), and “structural mobility” (disrupting the admissions system more severely in ways you might propose). See Lani Guinier, “Admissions Rituals as Political Acts: Guardians at the Gates of Our Democratic Ideals,” Harvard Law Review 117 (2003): 113–224.

  “I feel like I have changed sides”: John Somes, “Working It Out,” in This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, ed. Barney Drews and Carolyn Leste Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 304.