The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  These stories describe workers who do little besides working and addressing the essential needs that must be met in order to remain able to work. No amount of income and wealth can compensate for the burdens such hours impose on human flourishing, all things considered. Whereas additional income and consumption yield incrementally less and less well-being, additional hours spent working impose incrementally greater and greater burdens to well-being, as they force workers increasingly to cut essential activities out of their lives.

  Superordinate workers increasingly understand this. The reports that those who now work over sixty hours per week wish, on average, that they worked twenty-five hours less document the vanguard of a broad and deep experience of elite overwork. Eighty percent of men and nearly 90 percent of women who work over fifty hours per week report that they would prefer to work fewer hours. Similarly, men with some graduate education or more report that they work 11.6 hours more per week than they would ideally like, and male managerial, professional, and technical workers again report nearly twelve hours of weekly overwork. For elite women, the overwork is still more extreme: women with some graduate education work nearly fifteen hours per week more than they’d like, and managerial, professional, and technical women report thirteen weekly hours of overwork. (Non-elite workers, remarkably, report significantly less overwork: both men and women with less than a high school education report only about five hours of overwork per week.)

  In less formal settings, and less polite moments, elites treat the idea that high incomes might compensate them for their hours as frankly absurd. One young professional recently compared his income-and-work package to being paid $3 million to fight Mike Tyson. Others in the overworked elite call their work effort “sick and insane,” say that theirs is “not a life,” or “no way to have a child.” The most graphic complaints are more gripping still. Analysts at banks such as JPMorgan and DLJ compare the demands of their jobs to the Bataan Death March, to slavery, and to the Holocaust. That the comparisons are offensive does not gainsay the experiences that generate them. Superordinate workers today routinely yield the kind of hours that labor reformers condemned as cruel and inhumane when they were worked in the past by the poor.

  Finally, meritocrats do not just work too long and too hard; they also work in the wrong style—with the wrong motives and at the wrong tasks.

  Work pursued authentically, as a vocation that reflects the worker’s true interests and ambitions, can be a site of self-expression and self-actualization. After a point, long hours will make a mess of life no matter how work is constructed: constant hundred-hour workweeks are incompatible with being a spouse, parent, friend, or any kind of enthusiast, regardless of how work is imagined. But the idea of a vocation retains its power to humanize work nevertheless, enabling work to express rather than to alienate the worker’s personality. A vocation integrates work with the other parts of a person’s life, into a unified whole.

  Meritocratic inequality increasingly precludes superordinate workers from pursuing work as a vocation. In this way, meritocracy makes skill into a fetish for elites also—an object of powerful desire that provides only shallow satisfaction even when it is obtained. Elites, trapped in the paradox of human capital, have too much invested in their skills—they hold too great a share of their total wealth as human capital—to be able to afford authenticity at work. When work dominates income, and industry dominates status, a worker who indulges ambitions and tastes other than the market’s—who ignores wages and works for other ends—again expels himself (and his children) from the elite. Meritocratic success demands that elites yield not just immense but also alienated labor.

  This effect has become so powerful that elites now dress their alienation up in the garb of authentic ambition, making status itself into their goal. This allows elite employers to exploit what one recent investment banking recruit calls elite workers’ “desire to find the ‘Harvard’ of everything,” and another calls a “Princeton-like job,” by encouraging a culture in which those who forsake high-paying jobs in favor of leisure or freedom or even meaningful work are perceived as settling, as less ambitious, as “less smart.” At the same time, jobs that provide meaningful work but little pay—teachers, public servants, even the military and the clergy—have all suffered dramatic declines in social status over the course of meritocracy’s career.

  But alienated labor remains so no matter how prayerfully embraced. The language of superordinate life in the end admits this: the very idea of work/life balance, so prominent among meritocrats today, presumes that work involves not vocational but alienated labor.

  The meritocracy trap ensnares the elite in a twist of fate. The old associations between leisure and status, industry and subordination—the norms behind Veblen’s leisure class—established a kind of collective bargain among the elite, a code of conduct that protected against overwork, exploitation, and alienation. By privileging leisure over the consumption of material goods, these norms protected the elite’s time and attention. And by casting industrious work devoted to financing material consumption as degraded, they encouraged the elite to devote itself to authentic interests, sustaining the idea of a vocation.

  The ideology of leisure constituted a kind of high-caste guild, which protected the elite not just against outsiders but also against itself—by helping the leisure class to avoid or at least dampen a mutually destructive one-way ratchet of ever-greater and endlessly more exploitative industry.

  In order for meritocratic inequality to arise, the ideology of leisure had to be broken. The glossy jobs of the new polarized labor market simply cannot fulfill their economic function unless those who do them are trained to immense skill and are psychologically willing and socially encouraged to work very, very hard. The remaking of elite culture to replace leisure with industry as the badge of honor is the master innovation, which enables and sustains all the others.

  The characteristic afflictions of the superordinate worker—exhaustion and alienation—follow this innovation as night follows day. Just at the historical moment when virtuous industry might sustain a just reward, work (especially elite work) has become alienated. Just when the prospect of a vocation would be more attractive and valuable to the elite than ever before, a transformation in the nature of work has made the concept itself almost quaint. The inner logics of meritocratic competition and reward—and the social economy of meritocratic status—tend inexorably toward alienated self-exploitation.

  Meritocrats therefore suffer as well as gain from rising economic inequality and never recover the full measure of aristocratic advantage, and superordinate workers are not masters of the universe so much as high-class conscripts. Condemned to intensive and alienated labor by their own ascendancy. Collateral victims of their own success.

  Part Three

  A New Aristocracy

  SEVEN

  A COMPREHENSIVE DIVIDE

  William Jefferson Clinton and George Walker Bush were born within fifty days of each other in the summer of 1946 and would eventually become the forty-second and forty-third presidents of the United States.

  Although both men reached the presidency, they came from different segments of midcentury society. Bill Clinton’s family was middle class. His father was a traveling salesman who died in an auto accident just before Clinton was born. His mother returned home to study nursing (before remarrying, to a car dealer), and the young Clinton was raised by his grandparents, who ran a small grocery store.

  George Bush’s family, by contrast, was unquestionably rich, even patrician. He was born while his father (of course himself a future president) was a student at Yale University. And Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush (who would become a U.S. senator), was at the time a member of the Yale Corporation and a partner at the prestigious and profitable bank Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.

  These vast nominal distinctions between the two families made astonishingly little difference to the lived
experiences of the two boys’ childhoods.

  On the one hand, although the Clintons were anything but rich, this did not substantially determine the shape of the young Bill Clinton’s life. His childhood home, at 117 South Hervey Street in Hope, Arkansas (which his grandparents had rented beginning in 1938 and then bought in the year Bill was born), belonged to a stable middle-class community near the vibrant center of a small town. The Clintons’ modest frame house stood across the street from the larger brick house of Vince Foster, whose father was a prosperous real estate developer, and despite the economic distinction between their families, the two boys naturally became lifelong friends. As a child, Clinton made use of the opportunities that his hometown provided: he received an excellent formal education at a public high school that prepared him well for college; and he joined vibrant civic associations, including the American Legion’s Boys Nation, where he served as a student senator and traveled to Washington, meeting President Kennedy and triggering a lifelong interest in government service. Eventually, Clinton attended an elite private college with the aid of scholarships, and further scholarships helped him attend Oxford University and Yale Law School, where he met Hillary Rodham, who came from a richer family, and whom he eventually married.

  On the other hand, although the Bushes were unquestionably rich, this again had only a limited impact on the young George Bush’s day-to-day experience. The family’s fortune was small by today’s standards, and they lived accordingly. Bush’s childhood home, at 1412 West Ohio Avenue in Midland, Texas, was a modest fourteen hundred square feet and stood, like Clinton’s, in a stable middle-class neighborhood. Bush’s childhood church was economically integrated. He met his decidedly middle-class wife, Laura, a librarian, at a backyard barbecue. Laura Bush would wear an off-the-rack dress at her wedding (as did Hillary Clinton), and George and Laura would honeymoon relatively humbly, in Cozumel, Mexico.

  Clinton and Bush were both born fully members of an American society that was more economically integrated than it had ever been before and that would, due to the economic boom and civil rights revolutions of the postwar years, become more broadly integrated also. Rising wages and powerful unions gave blue-collar workers a central place in midcentury American life. Moreover, the GI Bill drew a generation to college who would not otherwise have attended, opening up a wide path from blue-collar origins to a white-collar future.

  The economic elite, for its part, enjoyed only moderate incomes. The income ratios not just of CEOs to production workers but also of doctors to nurses, lawyers to secretaries, and bank presidents to bank tellers were all between one-half and one-twentieth of their present levels. Moreover, these comparatively modest incomes faced comparatively immodest taxes—at top marginal rates above 90 percent throughout the 1950s, compared to perhaps 40 percent today. Finally, the elite was not just modest but also geographically dispersed, as wages across regions converged between 1950 and 1970.

  These economic facts produced social habits and norms that established points of connection between the elite and middle class and sustained an economically integrated midcentury American culture.

  The midcentury elite enjoyed few avenues along which to distinguish itself through high living. The luxurious extravagances that today’s economic elite habitually indulge simply did not exist, at least not at any scale. The most expensive restaurant meals in a major American city in the early 1960s probably cost only about twice what an average restaurant meal cost then, the most expensive wines that might readily be bought cost only the equivalent of $50 in today’s money, and the most expensive cars cost less than twice the price of an ordinary car. Houses also followed suit. The average house in one of the “toniest” neighborhoods in the country cost just twice the average price of all new houses built in a typical midcentury year. Even midcentury design, by embracing modernism, simplicity, and mass production, elevated a middle-class aesthetic to the pinnacle of good taste, including among elites.

  The elite similarly did not, because it could not, avoid the middle class by retreating into physical, social, or cultural spaces that might set the rich comprehensively apart from the rest. The America of the 1950s was filled with institutions that bridged the anyway small divide between the middle class and the rich. The Boys Nation that brought the middle-class Clinton to meet President Kennedy was not unusual. Any number of massive national civic membership organizations (the American Legion, the Freemasons, the Farm Bureau, the United Methodist Women, and so on) all drew members from across class lines, including into leadership positions. Overall, the elite and middle class largely shared a single, integrated society. At midcentury, all of America resembled St. Clair Shores.

  Moreover, Americans at midcentury self-consciously recognized that their economic order had merged the rich into the rest, and they embraced the ideals behind the merger and celebrated their classless society, including in popular culture. Fortune magazine, describing the daily lives of America’s “top executives” in 1955, trumpeted that a typical member of this elite “lives on an economic scale not too different from that of the man on the next-lower income rung.” The magazine, moreover, could back up its claim with details ready from experience. For example, Jack Warner, the “operating boss” of a paper firm that in 1954 produced five billion paper sacks and served one-fifth of the entire U.S. market, “live[d] in an unpretentious brick house on a 120-foot plot in Tuscaloosa, near the University of Alabama campus.” And when Bill Stephenson became president of the largest banking chain in the Northwest, he “bought a new Ford, which he still drives; Mrs. Stephenson drives a three-year-old Buick. The Stephensons were obliged to do a little more entertaining, but they stayed right on in their seven-room house, and continued to get along quite satisfactorily with a part-time cleaning woman.”

  Fortune concluded that these cases constituted a trend. “The executive’s home today is likely to be unpretentious and relatively small—perhaps seven rooms and two and a half baths”; similarly, “as executives’ homes have dwindled in size, so have their parties,” and “the large yacht has also foundered.” The material modesty through which the elite merged into the middle class had become so well established at midcentury as to set a norm, which subjected violators to criticism bordering on mockery. Fortune expressly contrasted the socially integrated midcentury elite with its higher-living and socially detached pre-Depression predecessor. Indeed, the magazine took its hostility to conspicuous luxury personally: “The executive who feels, as apparently Robert R. Young does, that to be completely happy he needs a forty room ‘cottage’ in Newport and a thirty-one room Oceanside villa in Palm Beach is a rare bird these days,” the magazine wrote, before adding that “the fact that Young paid only $38,000 for his Newport place, Fairholme, which cost Philadelphia banker John R. Drexel nearly a quarter of a million dollars to build in 1905, demonstrates the decline in the market for such outsize mansions.” Stephenson himself made the point more diplomatically, but with no less force: “‘Top executives . . . are not expected to get off the beam,’ he says, meaning they are expected not to emerge obtrusively from the background.”

  Economic fundamentals produced cultural practices that reached deeply and broadly into people’s lives, to influence not just how they lived but also how they thought about how they lived, building an imaginative field. As the sociologist William Julius Wilson has observed, there was at midcentury simply “no evidence of class effects on [American social structure] that could rival the effects of race.” Throughout the Great Compression, the rich merged more or less seamlessly into the middle class. Insofar as income did insert a seam into American society, it lay between the middle class and the poor.

  Outside of poverty, economic inequality at midcentury presented a social blur. Fitzgerald’s remark that the very rich are different from ordinary people might have appealed to romantics or nostalgists, but by midcentury, Hemingway’s dismissive rejoinder stated the unvarnished truth. As Clinton and Bush ill
ustrate, and their broader social context demonstrates, the only real difference between the rich and the rest at midcentury was that the rich had (modestly) more money.

  INSERTING A SEAM

  Matters look very different today.

  Economic inequality now threatens to divide America against itself. Inequality threatens, in other words, to break the mechanisms through which American capitalism once sustained social solidarity and instead to transform America into a caste society.

  Economic inequality is not the only axis of subordination in America. Racial bigotry—America’s original sin—endures, and race remains one of American society’s fault lines, which class cannot displace. But class, deployed alongside rather than to replace race, now provides an organizing principle for social and economic stratification that has comparable power (as Wilson himself has acknowledged). The earlier observation that class now has a greater effect on academic achievement than race—an effect so great that it matches the race effect under Jim Crow—highlights just one case in point among many. The comparison should not obscure race, but it does shine a light on class.

  The bright line that meritocratic inequality now inserts between the elite and the middle class (displacing the midcentury blur) is no mere metaphor but instead captures concrete and measurable facts. The middle class is literally shrinking: the share of all households that might sensibly be called “middle class” has fallen by nearly a fifth from its peak, and the share of total income captured by middle-class households has fallen by roughly a third. These trends explain why an absolute majority of Americans are no longer middle class and why the surviving American middle class no longer stands out for its wealth. The decline of the middle class reverberates across all of American society: the center of the American economic distribution—whose mass at midcentury pulled the distribution and the society together—is no longer holding.