This structure, whatever its virtues, also imposes enormous costs. Most obviously, it is a catastrophe for our broader society—for the many (the nearly 99 percent) who are excluded from the increasingly narrow elite.
Christopher Shay, writing in The Nation says that Meritocracy is making us miserable
Daniel Markovits explains to The Nation how elite education is destroying the middle class and exacerbating inequality.
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"Merit is a sham,” Daniel Markovits writes in the first sentence of his new book, The Meritocracy Trap. But, for Markovits, our system of elite education and glossy jobs is not fraudulent in the way many of us think. The main problem isn’t that Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or the Ivy League are greedy, blinkered, or inept.
We don’t need to cleanse our meritocracy of undeserving people or upgrade our meritocrats; we need to dismantle the whole system.
Even when it works, Markovits argues, meritocracy is a primary driver of inequality in America. . .
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Jennifer Schuessler writing in The New York Times on 09 September 2019
The Meritocrat Who Wants to Unwind the Meritocracy
In “The Meritocracy Trap,” Daniel Markovits delivers a fierce indictment of a system he says is undermining democracy and making everyone miserable.
NEW HAVEN — In 2015, the graduating class at Yale Law School, as custom has it, elected one of its professors to give the commencement address. And when the day came, the speaker, Daniel Markovits, got onstage and told the students, more or less, that their lives were ruined.
“For your entire lives, you have studied, worked, practiced, trained and drilled,” he declared.
And that rat race was far from over, at least if graduates wanted to maintain their, and their children’s, place in the “new aristocracy” of merit.
“To promote your eliteness — to secure your caste — you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor,” he said.
“To live this way,” he continued, “is, quite literally, to use oneself up.”
The speech turned the audience at the most elite of elite law schools on its ear (even if it likely knocked few off their post-graduation paths). And now Mr. Markovits is taking his message to the masses, with a big new book arguing that the meritocratic ideal has not only fed rampant inequality and hollowed out the middle class, but also threatens democracy itself.
_________________________________________________________________________________Yale Prof. Daniel Markovits on Meritocracy:
A Gilded Cage that Ensnares the Rich & Excludes the Rest
Published on Jul 7, 2018
Yale Commencement Speech in 2015
This structure, whatever its virtues, also imposes enormous costs. Most obviously, it is a catastrophe for our broader society—for the many (the nearly 99 percent) who are excluded from the increasingly narrow elite.
“Elite lawyers’ real incomes have roughly tripled in the past half-century, which is more than ten times the rate of income growth experienced by the median American. Moreover, this explosion in elite lawyers’ incomes is not an eccentric or even isolated phenomenon. Instead, it fits into a wider pattern of rising elite labor incomes across our economy. You probably know that the share of total national income going to the top 1 percent of earners has roughly doubled in the past three decades. But its perhaps less familiar that fully four-fifths of that increase comes from rising wages paid to elite labor. And it may be more surprising still to learn that the top 1 percent of earners, and indeed even the top one-tenth of 1 percent, today owe fully four-fifths of their total incomes to labor. That is unprecedented in all of human history: American meritocracy has created a state of affairs in which the richest person out of every thousand overwhelmingly works for a living.”
“Elite lawyers’ incomes—including when diluted by sabbaticals from private-public service—will place you comfortably above the economic dividing line that comprehensively separates the rich from the rest in an increasingly unequal America. Perhaps most critically, your lawyerly skills will finance training your children—through private schools and myriad other enrichments—to thrive in the hyper-competition that you have yourselves, in effect, just won.
“Elite lawyers’ incomes—including when diluted by sabbaticals from private-public service—will place you comfortably above the economic dividing line that comprehensively separates the rich from the rest in an increasingly unequal America. Perhaps most critically, your lawyerly skills will finance training your children—through private schools and myriad other enrichments—to thrive in the hyper-competition that you have yourselves, in effect, just won.
This, then is where things stand. We have become a profession and a society constituted by meritocracy. Massively intensified and massively competitive elite training meets massively inflated economic and social rewards for elite work. You, in virtue of sitting here today, belong to the elite—to the new, superordinate working class. This structure, whatever its virtues, also imposes enormous costs. Most obviously, it is a catastrophe for our broader society—for the many (the nearly 99 percent) who are excluded from the increasingly narrow elite. There is an irony here. Brewster and others embraced meritocracy self-consciously in order to defeat hereditary privilege,
… but although it was once the engine of American social mobility, meritocracy today blocks equality of opportunity. The student bodies at elite colleges once again skew massively towards wealth.”
“At Harvard College and here at Yale Law School, two places where students have skillfully and bravely compiled data that their universities suppress, as many students come from households in the top 1 percent as from the entire bottom half of the distribution. This structure, whatever its virtues, also imposes enormous costs. Most obviously, it is a catastrophe for our broader society—for the many (the nearly 99 percent) who are excluded from the increasingly narrow elite. . The excess educational investment over and above what middle-class families can provide that children born into a typical one-percenter household receive is equivalent, economically, to a traditional inheritance of between $5 [million] and $10 million per child.
Exceptional cases always exist—as some of you sitting here prove—but in general, children from poor or even middle-class households cannot possibly compete—when they apply to places like Yale—with people who have imbibed this massive, sustained, planned, and practiced investment, from birth or even in the womb. And workers with ordinary training cannot possibly compete—in the labor market—with super-skilled workers possessed of the remarkable training that places like Yale Law School provide. American meritocracy has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat, a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy of a kind, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.”
“The social and economic caste order in which we are now embedded—including through our celebrations today—demands that you comprehend yourselves on instrumental terms. Your own talent, training, and skills—your self-same persons—today constitute your greatest assets, the overwhelmingly dominant source of your wealth and prestige. To promote your eliteness—to secure your caste, you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor.”
Yale Prof. Daniel Markovits on Meritocracy: A Gilded Cage that Ensnares the Rich & Excludes the Rest.
Credit: Yale Law School, "Tailspin - The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall—and Those Fighting to Reverse It" by Steven Brill
… but although it was once the engine of American social mobility, meritocracy today blocks equality of opportunity. The student bodies at elite colleges once again skew massively towards wealth.”
“At Harvard College and here at Yale Law School, two places where students have skillfully and bravely compiled data that their universities suppress, as many students come from households in the top 1 percent as from the entire bottom half of the distribution. This structure, whatever its virtues, also imposes enormous costs. Most obviously, it is a catastrophe for our broader society—for the many (the nearly 99 percent) who are excluded from the increasingly narrow elite. . The excess educational investment over and above what middle-class families can provide that children born into a typical one-percenter household receive is equivalent, economically, to a traditional inheritance of between $5 [million] and $10 million per child.
Exceptional cases always exist—as some of you sitting here prove—but in general, children from poor or even middle-class households cannot possibly compete—when they apply to places like Yale—with people who have imbibed this massive, sustained, planned, and practiced investment, from birth or even in the womb. And workers with ordinary training cannot possibly compete—in the labor market—with super-skilled workers possessed of the remarkable training that places like Yale Law School provide. American meritocracy has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat, a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy of a kind, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.”
“The social and economic caste order in which we are now embedded—including through our celebrations today—demands that you comprehend yourselves on instrumental terms. Your own talent, training, and skills—your self-same persons—today constitute your greatest assets, the overwhelmingly dominant source of your wealth and prestige. To promote your eliteness—to secure your caste, you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor.”
Yale Prof. Daniel Markovits on Meritocracy: A Gilded Cage that Ensnares the Rich & Excludes the Rest.
Credit: Yale Law School, "Tailspin - The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall—and Those Fighting to Reverse It" by Steven Brill
