The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  coined his term: Oxford Etymology Dictionary, s.v., “aristo-,” accessed October 2, 2018, www.etymonline.com/word/aristo-?ref=etymonline_crossreference; Oxford Dictionaries, s.v., “Merit,” accessed September 28, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/merit.

  “aristocratic democracy” or “democratic aristocracy”: The phrases are spoken by Lord Summerhays in Shaw’s play Misalliance. George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Fanny’s First Play (London: Constable, 1934).

  six of the past seven French presidents: “Alumni,” Portail Sciences Po, accessed September 28, 2018, www.sciencespo.fr/international/en/content/alumni. Nicolas Sarkozy attended but did not graduate from Sciences Po. Renaud Février, “Nicolas Sarkozy, diplômé ‘avec distinction’ de Sciences Po?,” L’Obs, April 12, 2013, accessed October 19, 2018, www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20130412.OBS7758/nicolas-sarkozy-diplome-avec-distinction-de-sciences-po.html. Charles de Gaulle helped establish the École nationale d’administration (ENA), an elite postgraduate training ground for civil servants. Peter Allen, “France Demands That Its Future Leaders Must Speak English,” Telegraph, February 15, 2015, accessed October 19, 2018, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11414245/France-demands-that-its-future-leaders-must-speak-English.html. Those who wish to enter the ENA strive to graduate from Sciences Po, the feeder university for the ENA. Mary Elizabeth Devine and Carol Summerfield, International Dictionary of University Histories (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998), 147.

  “upper classes [could] preserve their political hegemony”: Emile Boutmy, Quelques idée sur la création d’une Faculté libre d’enseignement supérieur (Paris, 1871), quoted in Piketty, Capital, 487. Paul Segal emphasized this historical background to me.

  Fabian English mind: See “Famous Fabians,” Fabian Society, accessed September 28, 2018, www.fabians.org.uk/about/famous-fabians [inactive].

  “virtue and talent”: “Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1813,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 6, 11 March to 27 November 1813, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 562–68.

  endured across generations: Land was unquestionably the dominant source of wealth in Europe throughout the ancien régime, and it remained so in the New World through the early years of the American republic. Land (and, in the South, slaves, who were economic complements to land) constituted between two-thirds and four-fifths of American wealth at the time of the Revolution and still composed roughly half of American wealth at the start of the Civil War. See, for example, Piketty, Capital, 141–42, 150–51.

  At the time of the American Revolution, land constituted 81.1 percent of wealth in New England, 68.5 percent in the mid-Atlantic region, and 48.6 percent in the South (with slaves constituting 35.6 percent). Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 98, Table 4.5. See also Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 14, Table 1.2. See also Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, Capital Is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700–2010, Paris School of Economics, July 26, 2013, accessed September 28, 2018, www.parisschoolofeconomics.com/zucman-gabriel/capitalisback/PikettyZucman2013WP.pdf (estimating that land and slaves constituted roughly two-thirds of American wealth in 1770 and half in 1850). Similarly, a study of inheritances in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, reveals that realty constituted more than half of the wealth in probated estates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel Dahlin, Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (Long Beach, CA: Frontier Press, 1987), 19; Langbein, “Twentieth-Century Revolution,” 722, 723n.4.

  “Wealth, in a commercial age”: Roscoe Pound, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922), 236.

  to husband its caste: These are new behaviors, as older elites did not invest in human capital with anything close to the same rigor or effectiveness. The winners of the early-nineteenth-century Georgia Cherokee Land Lottery, for example, who acquired the median wealth as a windfall, did not invest in schooling for their children, who did not enjoy greater literacy, income, or wealth than the children of non-winners. See Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph P. Ferrie, “Shocking Behavior: Random Wealth in Antebellum Georgia and Human Capital Across Generations,” NBER Working Paper No. 19348 (August 2013), www.nber.org/papers/w19348. More recently, the advent of meritocratic admissions could transform student bodies at elite universities so quickly because the incumbent elite lacked the capacity and inclination to train its children to succeed under the new regime.

  kept aristocratic lands in the family: Even the inheritance tax favors meritocratic succession. Because such a large part of the education expenditures that constitute the meritocratic inheritance are paid while rich children are still minors, they are exempted from the estate and gift tax. This literally exempts the meritocratic inheritance from the taxes that help to dissipate aristocratic fortunes.

  rendered the aristocratic version unsustainable: Meritocracy resembles aristocracy in one other way as well. The aristocracy of the ancien régime united economics, politics, and culture around a single organizing ideal: hereditary landedness sustained material production, underwrote political power, and constituted moral and social virtue, all through a single, integrated mechanism.

  The Industrial Revolution and then the rise of the knowledge economy shattered this unity, producing, for perhaps two centuries, separate, distinct, and competing sources of (and sometimes even freestanding) economic, political, and cultural power. Land remained a significant source of wealth, and breeding remained a significant source of cultural status, well into the twentieth century. In the meantime, industrialization created immense fortunes based on physical capital, and these fortunes came in time to assert themselves politically and culturally as well. Finally, in the twentieth century, a professional class, including on account of administering both private and public bureaucracies, also began to assert itself, especially culturally and politically. Competition among hierarchies tends to flatten the gradient of each, and it is therefore no coincidence that the relative equality of the Great Compression came at a time when all three hierarchies—of land, of machines, and of skill—retained some power.

  The rise of the superordinate working class reunifies these hierarchies through the reciprocal mechanisms of training concentration and skill fetishism. These mechanisms are beginning to re-create the formal unity and cohesion of value and life achieved by the ancien régime, only now organized around a new substance—skill and labor rather than breeding and land. Super-skilled labor thus increasingly dominates not just income and wealth, but also politics (especially the politics of private influence) and culture.

  As it vanquishes competing hierarchies, meritocracy inevitably steepens its own.

  possessed the greatest virtue: Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). Aristotle reserved the term aristocracy for government by the virtuous few. Where a ruling elite lacked the virtue that it claimed, Aristotle called the government an oligarchy, which is a pejorative term. Dieter Rucht, “Oligarchy and Organization,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. George Ritzer (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).

  (which was nearly zero-sum): See John Plender, Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets (London: Biteback Publishing, 2015), 135. Hereafter cited as Plender, Capitalism. John Plender, “Capitalism: Morality and the Money Motive,” Financial Times, July 17, 2015, accessed September 28, 2018, www.ft.com/content/33d82de6-2bc3-11e5-8613-e7aedbb7bdb7?mhq5j=e1.

  “the interests of posterity”: See Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 20. See also M. L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

  both household an
d national affairs: This theme comes out, for example, in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1949). See also Jonathan Powis, Aristocracy (Malden: Blackwell, 1984), 80.

  did not yet exist: See, generally, Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: Dent, 1974).

  cast chivalry as ridiculous: Plender, Capitalism, 137.

  skewer aristocratic vanity and greed: Plender, Capitalism, 137.

  “third-generation Yale man”: See Chapter 4.

  aristocratic prep schools: See Chapter 5.

  an already completed revolution: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  artifact of the game that frames it: Pitching is nevertheless an immensely valuable skill within this frame. More than forty-seven active pitchers boast career wages (directly for playing baseball and without counting payments received for making advertising endorsements) exceeding $50 million. See SPOTRAC, accessed September 28, 2018, www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/earnings/pitching/.

  disappears altogether: Perhaps there exist skills that are sufficiently broad or generic that they avoid or at least hedge their dependence on a particular frame. When the American Jim Thorpe won the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, King Gustav V of Sweden told him, “You, sir, are the world’s greatest athlete.” Juliet Macur, “Decathletes Struggle for Any Recognition,” New York Times, September 2, 2007, accessed September 28, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/sports/othersports/02decathlon.html. The informal title has been acknowledged ever since, probably on account of the variety and hence generality of the athleticism that the decathlon’s ten disciplines demand. The competition is constructed to pick a winner who would thrive in almost any athletic competition. Meritocracy, by contrast, has developed to suit a very particular, highly peculiar set of economic and social conditions.

  Certainly, the training and capacities: A friend who saw a Harvard professor throw a boomerang once observed, “In a society of hunter-gatherers, you would be a gatherer.”

  artifacts of baseball: A frame-dependent virtue might receive a sort of noncontingent justification in terms of the goodness of the frame itself. And a grand folk tradition, extending from Walt Whitman through John Rawls, proclaims baseball’s intrinsic moral worth. Even in this case, there are reasons to treat the tradition as a conceit that should not be taken at face value. In any event, no analogous tradition proclaims economic inequality’s intrinsic moral worth.

  reorganize production optimally in her absence: A version of this measure has been proposed by John Roemer. See John E. Roemer, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). A similar idea also appears in Kenneth J. Arrow, “Political and Economic Evaluation of Social Effects and Externalities,” in The Analysis of Public Output, ed. Julius Margolis (Cambridge, MA: NBER, 1970), 1–30.

  (as they could do without her): This formulation masks substantial complexities, which are not essential to the larger argument and may be set aside. The root of the complexity is that the ability of other workers to pick up the slack when one worker withdraws her labor varies across contexts, for reasons that have nothing to do with meritocracy or snowball inequality.

  by the median household, for example: Philippon and Reshef, “Skill Biased Financial Development,” Figure 11.

  accelerating economic growth or increasing productivity: Per capita gross domestic product actually grew more quickly at midcentury than in recent decades of rising inequality: between 1950 and 1973, real GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.5 percent per year; between 1973 and 2007, real GDP per capita grew by just 1.93 percent per year. See Charles I. Jones, “The Facts of Economic Growth,” in Handbook of Macroeconomics, vol. 2, ed. John B. Taylor and Harald Uhlig (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2016), 3–69, Table 1.

  Similarly, the productivity of labor grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent between 1950 and 1969, compared to annual growth of 2.0 percent between 1980 and 2009 (growth rates calculated using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Major Sector Productivity and Costs, Nonfarm Business Labor Productivity (output per hour) series PRS85006092). And no decade since 1970 has produced increases in the productivity of labor as great as the 1960s. The productivity of labor grew by nearly 30 percent in the 1960s, and then by just 19 percent, 16 percent, 20 percent, and 25 percent in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s respectively (growth rates calculated using data form the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Major Sector Productivity and Costs, Nonfarm Business Labor Productivity (output per hour) series PRS85006092).

  Most significantly, total factor productivity—the portion of output not accounted for by conventional inputs (of capital and labor)—has again grown more slowly during the recent decades of rising economic inequality than it did during the relatively more egalitarian decades at midcentury: growing by just 0.9 percent annually between 1980 and 2009, compared to 1.0 percent between 1950 and 1969. (The dividing decade between the two eras, the 1970s, showed truly anemic growth.) See “Total Factor Productivity at Constant National Prices for the United States,” St. Louis Fed FRED, accessed September 28, 2018, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RTFPNAUSA632NRUG. This observation borrows from Acemoglu, “Technical Change.”

  All these data suggest that meritocratic skills, for all the returns that they yield superordinate workers, yield little or no net social product, or boost in total output as compared to a world that had carried midcentury America’s democratic regimes of training and work forward into the present. As the economist Robert Solow, whose work on economic growth won him the Nobel Prize, once wryly admitted, it is “somewhat embarrass[ing] . . . that what everyone feels to have been a technological revolution, a drastic change in our productive lives, has been accompanied everywhere . . . by a slowing-down of productivity growth, not by a step up. We can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Robert Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times, July 12, 1987 (reviewing Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman, Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy).

  Conclusion: What Should We Do?

  “a thousand years of successful German history”: The phrase comes from Alexander Gauland, the head of the populist Alternativ für Deutschland. See Guy Chazan, “Germany’s Increasingly Bold Nationalists Spark a New Culture War,” Financial Times, July 29, 2018, accessed September 28, 2018, www.ft.com/content/348a1bce-9000-11e8-b639-7680cedcc421.

  on-site gyms and nap rooms: See Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath, “Why You Hate Work,” New York Times, May 30, 2014, accessed September 28, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html?mcubz=0&_r=0.

  extend fertility later into life: See Anne Weisberg, “The Workplace Culture That Flying Nannies Won’t Fix,” New York Times, August 24, 2015, accessed September 28, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/opinion/the-workplace-culture-that-flying-nannies-wont-fix.html?mcubz=0.

  caring and communal engagement: Nearly a hundred presidents and chancellors of selective universities and liberal arts colleges have now signed letters disapproving college rankings and pledging to develop alternative (nonhierarchical) ways of communicating quality to students. The participation rate for U.S. News & World Report’s annual reputational survey of college leaders has fallen from 67 percent in 2002 to 46 percent in 2008. Similarly, a consortium of elite educators (including from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education) has recently released a report on college admissions—Turning the Tide—that aims to reduce pressure on applicants. Driven by what one observer calls the “competitive frenzy” surrounding admissions and the threat that the competition poses to applicants’ “mental health,” the report recommends dramatic changes. As one of its authors says, meritocratic university admissions have reached a “pivot point,” so that “it’s really time to say ‘enough,’ to stop wringing our ha
nds and figure out some collective action.” More concretely, Turning the Tide encourages admissions committees to deemphasize the quantity of applicants’ achievements—AP tests, extracurricular activities—in favor of quality. It also aims to refocus attention away from SAT scores and other competitive achievements in favor of ethical and cooperative accomplishments such as caring and communal engagement. Making Caring Common, Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good Through College Admissions, Harvard Graduate School of Education (2016). See Presidents’ Letter, The Education Conservancy, May 10, 2007, www.educationconservancy.org/presidents_letter.html. See Frank Bruni, “Rethinking College Admissions,” New York Times, January 19, 2016, accessed September 28, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/opinion/rethinking-college-admissions.html?mcubz=0. The words come from Richard Weissbourd, the faculty director of the group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education that contributed most substantially to Turning the Tide.

  cut down on long hours rather than alcohol: On living in the present, see Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Vancouver, BC: Namaste Publishing, 2004). On New Year’s resolutions to reduce work, see, e.g., Lucy Kellaway, “January Is for Cutting Down on Long Hours, Not Alcohol,” Financial Times, January 24, 2016, accessed September 28, 2018, www.ft.com/content/916fa2b0-c059-11e5-846f-79b0e3d20eaf; John Gapper, “Resolve to Kick the Addiction to Work Email,” Financial Times, January 4, 2017, accessed September 28, 2018, www.ft.com/content/6a4ec5c2-d1d7-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0.

  disdained his hard sell: Anonymous resident in conversation with the author, St. Clair Shores, Michigan, May 2, 2018.

  would stay the same or get worse: See “Nearly One in Five Female Clinton Voters Say Husband or Partner Didn’t Vote,” PRRI/The Atlantic Post-election Survey, December 1, 2016, accessed September 28, 2018, www.prri.org/research/prri-atlantic-poll-post-election-white-working-class.