The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  They are also increasingly self-aware. My students at Yale—the poster children for meritocracy—are more nearly overwhelmed and confounded by their apparent blessings than complacent or even just self-assured. They seek meaning that eludes their accomplishments and regard the intense education that constitutes their elevated caste with a diffidence that approaches despair. The vast majority hail from privileged families, and they recognize their overrepresentation and instinctually doubt that they deserve the advantages they enjoy. (Privilege so dominates the culture of elite universities that the small minority of elite students who come from modest backgrounds form support groups of “first-generation professionals” in order to ease their entry into an alien society.) These students have been nurtured, but also cultivated, coached, drilled, shaped, and packaged—all in an unrelenting quest to succeed at school and preserve their caste—and they scorn all this maneuvering for advantage and deride their own complicity in it. They are consumed by what a recent survey calls a “collective frenzy” to advance in the “prestige economy” that allocates income and status.

  My students, like their peers all across the meritocracy, are caught in a “collective anxiety” driven by fear of not measuring up. They doubt their past achievements and worry that the future will merely repeat a gauntlet that they have just run, only exchanging intensely competitive schools for equally competitive jobs. Even the meritocratic elite fears—inarticulately, but with good reason—that meritocracy does not promote its true flourishing, so that it will be wealthy but not well.

  HOW MERITOCRACY DIVIDES SOCIETY

  Meritocracy imposes these burdens jointly and in interlocking battalions, as variations on a shared theme, two faces of a single calamity. An integrated mechanism literally concentrates income and status, as meritocratic competition simultaneously excludes the middle class from credible opportunities for real advantage and press-gangs elites into an excessively intense pursuit of fruitless gain. Meritocracy thereby draws the elite and the middle class—the rich and the rest—into a close but hostile embrace. Meritocratic inequality inspires the hostility, entwining the classes in misunderstandings, friction, discord, and even open warfare. Meritocracy, that is, nourishes a systematic class conflict that deforms social and political life.

  The middle class experiences the elite as commandeering opportunities and advantages (education and work, income and status) that once rightfully belonged to it—as imposing a shameful and therefore unpardonable exclusion. The exclusion naturally breeds resentment and mistrust, directed against the ideals and institutions that meritocracy valorizes. The middle class increasingly regards elite schools, universities, and professional firms as alien places that at best indulge eccentric values and at worst impose those values on everyone else—as clubs, dominated by worthless book learning, political correctness, and arrogant self-dealing. Ironically (although following a profound inner logic), these resentments, borne of exclusion, often focus on the forms of inclusion that meritocracy exalts, including in particular—as in complaints about political correctness—the meritocratic embrace of a multicultural elite.

  The resentments, moreover, have direct and powerful—even world-changing—consequences. They enabled Donald Trump to become president of a wealthy, powerful, and famously optimistic nation by relentlessly attacking the status quo, repudiating what he calls “the Establishment,” and blaming the state of the country on a corrupt alliance of meritocratic elites and cultural outsiders. Trump’s dark vision replaces the American dream with what his apocalyptic inaugural address—painting a nation in deep decline, overrun by poverty, crime, and economic decay—called “this American carnage.” His imaginative world and express language (“America First”) evoke the frustration and anger of the Great Depression at home and, abroad, of nations devastated by economic crisis and humiliating defeat in total war. A powerful and prosperous society does not typically behave like one laid low by defeat and humiliation. Meritocratic inequality, and the resentments that it produces, explain why America did.

  The resentments in which Trumpism traffics, and the repudiationism that it pursues, express the spiritual burden of life at the bottom of the meritocratic caste order, among what Trump’s inaugural address called “the forgotten men and women of our country [who] will be forgotten no longer.” These groups most thrill to Trumpism’s endeavor to replace the narrative of progress that dominates conventional American politics with one of rescue—to the prospect that Trump might “Make America Great Again.” Nearly two-thirds of whites without a BA reported that Trump’s similarly dark and angry speech at the Republican National Convention reflected their feelings about the country. And nearly three-fifths of Trump’s Republican Party believes that colleges and universities are bad for America.

  Meritocratic inequality and class conflict also corrupt elites, including (again ironically) in ways that enable the Trumpist politics that the same elites despise. The fact that middle-class children are effectively excluded from advantage does not guarantee inclusion for rich children. And as meritocratic inequality sharpens hierarchy to a spiky-fine point, even the privileged confront a precarious existence. Elites desperately fear losing caste, and their anxiety naturally isolates them and breeds condescension toward the middle class. Moreover, elites know that meritocracy favors their caste and they suspect that, although they cannot explain how, the same forces that burnish the gloss on the elite spread a pall of gloom over the middle class. No matter how pure their motives and how scrupulous their victories, meritocratic elites are implicated, including through achievements that they admire, in inequalities that they deplore.

  Familiar maxims about privilege and its responsibilities still propose to align meritocratic inequality with the common interest, suggesting that if only the elite would behave well then all would be well. But as meritocracy’s burdens mount and meritocratic inequality increases, these platitudes lose their power. The magnanimous triumphalism that suffused elite life in meritocracy’s early years has given way to frightened and brittle arrogance.

  Fragile elites disdain middle-class habits and values as a defense mechanism to ward off self-doubt. Meritocrats lionize achievement, or even just distinction, and disparage ordinariness as a bulwark against rising insecurity. They cling to any attitudes and practices—ranging from the absurd (food snobbery) to the callous (corporate rightsizing)—that might confirm their merit and validate their advantage, to others and, above all, to themselves. These crimped and confused attitudes further aggravate middle-class resentments, and at the same time debilitate elites politically. To this day, elites remain too disenchanted to reimpose a sanguine vision on American politics, or even to sustain it among themselves. Meritocratic discontent empowers Trump’s dark populism to dominate the political imagination even among the elites who scorn it.

  THE PARADOX OF MERITOCRACY

  Meritocracy’s sparkle captures the imagination and distracts analytical attention. It dominates the self-image of the age, disabling criticism and corrupting critics. But scratch the surface to remove the sheen, and a deep well of discontent opens up below. Meritocracy’s discontents present a dramatic irony so deep that it looks, from inside the meritocratic order, like a paradox.

  Middle-class resentment against the elite appears misguided. Today, in principle, anyone can succeed. Education has never been as extravagantly funded or widely available as it is today, and even the most exclusive schools and colleges—which once admitted only white, Christian men and even within this group selected students for breeding—today base admissions on academic achievement. Jobs and careers have similarly dismantled outmoded chauvinisms and are now overwhelmingly open to effort and talent. Institutions that once confronted large classes of citizens with a wall of categorical exclusion now expressly admit anyone who can make it.

  The anxiety felt within the elite astounds especially. The training that goes into an elite degree has never before been as excellent, and gr
aduates have never been as accomplished. The social and economic advantages conferred by education have also never been greater. Elite graduates should be proud of their past and confident about their future status and income.

  Nevertheless, the complaints persist, multiply, and grow ever louder. As meritocratic inequality increases and meritocracy loses its charisma, rising elite anxieties join an older, more mature dissatisfaction, already well known to the American middle class. The grievances build because they connect lived experience to an important truth, fashioning a master key for diagnosing the troubles that dominate economic and social life today, both existentially in the individual person and politically in public life. Meritocratic inequality makes an otherwise bizarre picture of America credible and politically potent.

  Meritocracy’s discontents invite a structural attack on the incumbent regime, grounded in a criticism of meritocracy itself. Although they appear independent and even opposed, the oppression of the middle class and the exploitation of the elite share a common root. Through diverse means and following divergent pathways, the American elite, the American middle class, and America itself are all caught in the meritocracy trap.

  Like all really big things, meritocracy is difficult to comprehend from up close. After five decades of rising economic inequality, the elite and the middle class appear—unreflectively, at first blush—to inhabit separate worlds. According to the common view, there are now two Americas, one for the rich and the other for the rest. The loudest voices, on the left as well as the right, insist that the country—in economics, in politics, and even in social life—is coming apart.

  A step back opens a wider perspective and reveals that the common view is mistaken. The elite and the middle class are not coming apart at all. Instead, the rich and the rest are entangled in a single, shared, and mutually destructive economic and social logic. Their seemingly opposite burdens are in fact two symptoms of a shared meritocratic disease. Meritocratic elites acquire their caste through processes that ruthlessly exclude most Americans and, at the same time, mercilessly assault those who do go through them. The powerfully felt but unexplained frustrations that mar both classes—unprecedented resentment among the middle class and inscrutable anxiety among the elite—are eddies in a shared stream, drawing their energies from a single current.

  The Meritocracy Trap begins, in the manner of a doctor encountering a new disease, simply by setting out the symptoms of advanced meritocracy. Part One therefore chronicles meritocracy’s discontents and reports on the human costs of a caste hierarchy that simultaneously excludes most people and damages the few that it admits. The account aspires empathetically to describe the facts of life under meritocratic inequality, and the sentiments that these facts unleash, so that people, across the meritocratic divide, will recognize their lived experience and respond: “Yes. This is how things are for us.” Because meritocracy’s charisma disguises its evils, and thereby bewilders those who suffer its frustrations, recognition begins to bring release. The release provides relief even when newfound wisdom recommends uncomfortable self-examination and poignant self-reproach.

  Next, Part Two describes in detail how meritocracy works. This effort explains the social and economic arrangements—concerning income, education, and work—that meritocracy puts in place. It chronicles the means by which meritocratic developments have produced a vastly unequal distribution of advantage and exposes the mechanisms by which the ensuing inequality harms both the middle class and the elite. The argument shows, at each step, that these inequalities and burdens arise not on account of deviations or retreats from meritocracy but rather directly because of meritocracy’s successes, on account of its consummation. The inner movements of the meritocratic machine reveal the construction of the meritocracy trap.

  Finally, Part Three unmasks meritocracy—to expose a new form of aristocracy, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of income and wealth is not land but labor. Meritocracy claims to be fair and benevolent, to align private interest and the common good, and to promote freedom and opportunity for all. In fact, however, meritocratic social and economic inequality betrays the values that meritocracy’s stated principles endorse and that its rituals extol. Like aristocracy once did, meritocratic inequality now comprehensively organizes the lives of people caught inside it. And like aristocracy, meritocratic inequality establishes a durable, self-sustaining hierarchy, supported by feedback loops between meritocracy’s moving parts. Merit itself is not a genuine excellence but rather—like the false virtues that aristocrats trumpeted in the ancien régime—a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.

  ESCAPING THE MERITOCRACY TRAP

  The Meritocracy Trap was conceived inside meritocracy’s institutional machinery—indeed, in one of the rituals that shore up meritocracy’s charisma—and it is steeped in all the complexities and ironies that meritocracy invites.

  In May 2015—one month before Donald Trump descended into his lobby to announce that he would run for president—the graduating class at Yale Law School asked me to deliver its commencement address. Like many others, I had been thinking about economic inequality, and so I determined to contrast the bloated opulence that elite graduates inherit with the diminished and devalued portion allotted to the rest of America. I had in mind to confront the graduates with a conventional morality tale—a stern warning against temptations to exploit their degrees for narrowly private gain, combined with a pious invocation to serve the public good.

  But as I sat down to write and imagined actually speaking to students I knew—whose undoubted privileges produced afflictions alongside advantages—the righteous impulse deserted me, to be replaced by something stranger: a curious amalgam of powerful empathy and sinister foreboding. Although I could not then see through meritocracy’s paradoxes to resolve them, a new emotional posture and organizing frame for my remarks emerged. People are more benign than the common view supposes, but circumstances are much more malignant.

  The pieties embraced by meritocracy’s champions and the sanctimonious anger wielded by inequality’s critics both misjudge the challenges that we face. Our anxieties concerning meritocracy and economic inequality are warranted, but they cannot be resolved by identifying villains or even righting clear wrongs. Rather, they reflect a deep and pervasive dysfunction in how we structure and reward training and work—how, in a basic and immediate way, we live our lives. This diagnosis attacks no one, but it should discomfit everybody.

  The diagnosis, although uncomfortable, also kindles hope for a cure. We are trained to think of economic inequality as presenting a zero-sum game: to suppose that redistribution to benefit the bottom must burden the top. But this is not such a case. Meritocratic inequality does not in fact serve anyone well, and escaping the meritocracy trap would therefore benefit virtually everyone. Emancipation from meritocracy would restore middle-class Americans, now cut off from dignity and prosperity, to full participation in social and economic life. Emancipation would invite the elite, now entangled in strained self-exploitation, to trade a diminution in wealth and status that it can easily afford in exchange for a precious increase in leisure and liberty, a reclaiming of an authentic self. And emancipation would heal a society that meritocracy has made oppressive and mistrustful.

  The problem remains how practically to escape the meritocracy trap: how to broker the politics and design the policies required to reestablish a democratic social and economic order. This is no easy task. If the book’s diagnosis is correct, then meritocratic inequality stems from economic and social forces whose depth and power resemble those at play as industrial capitalism displaced feudal agriculture two centuries ago. And if a time traveler could explain to a well-meaning English king or prime minister in 1800 that, by 1860, the forces of industrialization would so disrupt the social order and generate such inequality as to drive the life expectancy of a child born in urban Manchester down to levels not seen sinc
e the Black Death, there would quite possibly have been no way to stop the decline.

  Nevertheless, we are more self-aware and more effectual than past generations. If we come to understand that meritocratic inequality produces near-universal harm, then we can muster the political will to cure it. And if we can muster the political will, we enjoy more degrees of policymaking freedom and a greater capacity to influence events. The book proceeds from the faith that political understanding—concerning structural forces rather than just moralistic recriminations—is a necessary condition for intelligent and effective action. It aspires to leverage understanding into a politically potent force for change and also to propose concrete policies that will reclaim a more equal, democratic economic and social order.

  These hopes invoke virtues—clarity of mind and the capacity to convert understanding into effective action—that are themselves commonly associated with meritocracy. And there is no contradiction in thinking that meritocracy might solve its own problem, unlock its own trap, to recover its original, democratic promise and refashion an open, fair society whose elite does well by promoting the public good.

  On the other hand, a hope is not a plan. To escape the meritocracy trap, politics must overcome all the vulnerabilities and bad incentives that meritocracy enshrines in public life. Both the rich and the rest must learn to see through the anxieties—from populist and nativist resentment through small-minded competitiveness and arrogant condescension—that currently divide them. Both classes must recognize that their distresses, and even their antagonisms, share in meritocracy a single source. And both classes must join in a coalition in which each eases its own afflictions by empathizing with, and even shouldering, the meritocratic burdens that now afflict the other.