A Postliberal Review of "The Meritocracy Trap"
Part One
Inequality is all the rage on the Right. Whereas conservatives of the last two generations seemed unable to conceive of any domestic policy other than cutting taxes (mostly for the rich), today’s New Right seeks to lift up the middle class through means such as tariffs and industrial policy (to protect domestic manufacturing workers), deep cuts in immigration levels (to protect wages), child tax breaks or subsidies (to make it easier to raise a family or be a stay-at-home mom), and anti-monopolistic policies (to break up large tech companies). Many embrace higher minimum wages and/or labor unions. The New Right seeks a stable, dignified life for workers and families.
This post is part of a two-part series on a leftist about income inequality: The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feed Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite.[i] The author, Daniel Markovits, is a professor at Yale Law School. To sum it up: Markovits rejects entirely the claim of America’s elite that their power and wealth are justified by their “merit.” “Meritocracy” is the belief that “advantage should be earned through ability and effort rather than inherited alongside caste” (ix). Meritocracy began to dominate in the middle of the twentieth century as American ivy-league schools, previously the abode of (often mediocre) scions of the WASP elite, opened themselves up to intelligent students of all backgrounds. Median SAT scores rose steadily at the ivies throughout the 1960s. From there, meritocracy spread to all sectors of the economy and is now the reigning moral narrative for how wealth and privilege should be allocated.
The Meritocracy Trap is a screed against inequality—but an intelligent screed that goes beyond typical leftist arguments. As a man of the Left, Markovits holds that income inequality unfairly oppresses the poor. So far, so much Elizabeth Warren. But he proceeds to argue that “meritocratic” inequality harms both the “winners” and the losers of meritocratic competition. His critique parallels the New Right’s rejection of elitist claims and has much to teach conservatives worried about inequality.
The first entry in this two-part series will describe the contents of the book. The second part offer thoughts about it from a postliberal conservative perspective.
The Harms of Inequality
For Markovits, the harms of meritocracy come in several forms. He chooses to highlight the ways in which meritocracy exploits the middle class, rather than the lower classes, who were already doing poorly prior to the rise of meritocratic competition. Meritocracy, on his view, simply expands the scope of oppression to include the vast majority of Americans.
Meritocracy harms the non-elite above all. The Meritocracy Trap catalogs the usual complaints: social mobility has stalled, incomes have stagnated, and fewer people are working at all. It is harder and harder for average people to make a living or buy a nice house. Whereas meritocracy claims to expand “opportunity” to larger numbers of people—and did do so in its early days—it now closes off opportunity. Middle-class families, for instance, cannot afford to buy an elite education for their children—including the expensive extracurricular activities he claims are necessary to gain entrance—even as they watch ordinary public schools stagnate. Meanwhile, the salaries of elite workers—high-level lawyers, bankers, hedge fund managers, doctors, CEOs, tech wizards, and the like—soar ever higher above the average income.
Meritocracy’s impact reaches beyond the purely economic. By making “achievement in school and work,” which is unavailable to the middle class, “into the soul of honor,” it offends the dignity and self-respect of the nonelite (xiv). Without good jobs, marriage and birth rates fall, and substance abuse skyrockets. In much of America, large parts of the middle and working classes fail to achieve basic markers of what used to be considered a normal life.
Economic Changes
Meritocracy is a cause and a consequence of titanic transformations in the global economy. Markovits argues, persuasively, that the middle has fallen out of the job market. Whereas the mid-20th century economy featured an abundance of positions requiring moderate expertise, such as middle managers or skilled factory workers, the job market is now bifurcated between high-skill (and high-paying) jobs and routine but undemanding jobs. There is no more rising up the company ladder, complete with a gold watch at retirement.
Even many professional jobs serve to deepen inequality. The ultrarich hire armies of lawyers, bankers, and accountants to grow their assets and shield them from taxation—what Markovits calls the “income defense industry.” The super-rich now often pay a lower percentage of their wage in taxes than the middle class. They hire luxury doctors to work on call and eat at exclusive (and fabulously expensive) restaurants.
Why the shift?
According to Markovits, the trend away from medium-skilled jobs is part of long-term trends. The Industrial Revolution replaced skilled artisans with low or mid-skilled factory workers who made decent wages, but this trend has reversed. Markovits argues that “computers, robots, and other new technologies” have shifted “the center of production away from mid-skilled and toward super-skilled labor” (9). Factory floors are no longer filled with people but with robots designed and guided by a small cadre of elite workers. Smartphones and laptops allow elite managers to oversee work remotely, seven days a week, thereby eliminating the need for onsite personnel. Computer codes written by highly educated programmers replace workers. The jobs that make money increasingly require skills that most people lack.
Over time, as the middle falls out, the percentage of jobs that are routine and boring (which Markovits calls “gloomy”) mushrooms, while the high-skilled (“glossy”) jobs grow slowly or not at all. The latter are generally more interesting, and always more remunerative, than the former. In this version, however, the elite must work very hard, and to be very productive, to earn their riches.
In this way, Markovits contradicts Thomas Piketty. Piketty’s thesis is that, because capital produces higher gains than labor, the gap between rich (who own capital) and the poor (who own only their labor) grows inexorably in the absence of external shocks. This gap, he thinks, can only be narrowed by destructive events such as wars or confiscatory taxes on capital and wealth (it might reassure you to know that his policy platform includes only the latter). For Markovits, by contrast, elite status is linked to high-paying jobs, which nowadays depend on labor, not capital. This is why the rich spend so much time training their children to follow in their footsteps, rather than just giving them an inheritance.
Meritocracy Harms the Rich
Meritocracy also harms the elite themselves. Because meritocrats must build their wealth rather than inherit it, they must spend much of their lives preparing for and engaging in intensive training and competition for good schools and jobs. Children of elites undergo a grueling schedule of school, tutoring, and extracurricular activities, all designed to ensure acceptance at a top school. Children of meritocrats are “tense and exhausted,” poised to shatter under the strain (xv).
Once they graduate and attain a high-income job, elites must work long hours 6-7 days a week. Markovits notes that the ultrarich now work more than anyone else, in sharp contrast to the pattern in aristocratic centuries. Leisure—once a sign of privilege—is now the badge of the non-working poor.
Elites endure this punishment because they feel they have no choice. “As winners more nearly take all, the battle to win intensifies. Elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it” (34). Having won the race to the top, meritocrats (and their children) fear losing what they have gained. This instinct is almost primal: humans fear losing what they already have more than failing to gain what they do not have. Markovits argues that, due to the intense effort required to attain and maintain elite status, elite workers come to identify themselves with their achievements, rendering any other lifestyle literally unthinkable (37).
Meritocratic Society
Markovits documents the growing class distinction between the elites and the rest. In 1950, rich people and ordinary people shared many stores, neighborhoods, restaurants, and hobbies in common. Nowadays, these groups share almost nothing in common: they shop at different stores, buy different brands, live in different neighborhoods. The rich used to interact with the middle class; today they live segregated lives.
By dividing the elites from the middle class, who resent its unfair advantages, meritocracy stokes class warfare. Markovits explains the rise of Trump (whom he despises) as a result of rising nativism and populism which themselves constitute a backlash against meritocratic inequality. Moreover, elites, anxious about losing their status, “disdain middle-class habits and values as a defense mechanism to ward off self-doubt,” worsening class divides (xviii).
Meritocracy Isn’t Necessary
Meritocrats are likely to respond that their work is hyper-functional and thus necessary to sustain today’s unprecedented levels of wealth. But Markovits argues that inequality is unnecessary. While the meritocrats displaced an inefficient and unskilled WASP elite in the 1950s and 1960s, their presence now prevents economic shifts to make all workers more efficient. In other words, elite workers only seem hyper-productive because the entire economy has been distorted to rely on their labor. Meritocrats artificially induce a demand for their own labor, which would otherwise be unnecessary.
To be more specific—although Markovits doesn’t prove his point well enough in the end—the “current state of technology … causes the labor market to fetishize elite skill,” and “superordinate workers as a class prevent everyone else from working the ways—using the alternative technologies—that would be optimate without them” (266). Technology simultaneously makes some workers more efficient but other workers less efficient, creating the illusion that the former are responsible for a huge boost in productivity. Markovits points out that no such productivity boost can be observed in the economy as a whole. (He offers no advice for how to create alternative technologies or what that kind of economy would look like.)
Solutions
So, what can fix the problem? Not more meritocracy, as critics of meritocracy tend to call for. Harping on isolated examples where the elite violate the principles of meritocracy, as if these were the cause of middle-class immiseration, only further buttresses the ruling class from criticism. (After all, most elite workers do in fact work very hard, as Markovits proves.)
Markovits proposes several reforms to change the economy. First, he calls for education to become “open and inclusive” by making admissions “less competitive” and the training less “all-consuming” (275).
Second, we should take measures to slow the transmission of inherited wealth across generations. Markovits wants to tax inheritances and university endowments and strip colleges of their tax-exempt status as charities (unless they admit primarily students from the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution).
Third, Markovits says that we need to promote mid-skilled jobs. We should require mandatory review of policy changes to assess whether will alter the ratio between high-skill and medium-skill jobs (280). “Health care can be delivered a few specialist doctors who deploy high-tech machines and deskilled technicians, or by a mass of mid-skilled GPs and nurse practitioners” (280). These proposals are treated very superficially, with scant elaboration and not even a hint of how to enact them. Perhaps that is why Markovits cautions that it “will take generations to dismantle” meritocracy (275).
Fourth, Markovits wants to reform the payroll tax system to stop incentivizing high-skilled workers. Right now, the Social Security payroll tax only affects the first $160,200 of a worker’s pay. This gives companies an incentive to find high-salary workers, since they don’t pay Social Security taxes on anything after that number (although they continue to pay a smaller fee for Medicare). Removing the income cap on Social Security payroll taxes would fund the social security system and promote mid-skilled jobs.
Finally, the government can directly promote mid-skilled jobs by means of wage subsidies to employers who hire mid-skilled workers.
Conclusion
Markovits has produced a useful attack on today’s elite class. His book is repetitive and lacks convincing argumentation on some important points. Some important considerations he simply ignores. Still, anyone interested in inequality in America should give it a chance. In this post, I have tried to describe his arguments fairly. In the next post, I will point out areas of agreement and offer some critiques.
[i] Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feed Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (New York: Penguin, 2019).