Meritocrats Of The World, Disunite!

American ​“meritocracy” has become a trap for people at both ends of growing income inequality, in the view of a Yale law professor who has made a name for himself diving deep into the data.

Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, writes about economic and social inequality and the dysfunctions of our educational system. In his book The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (Penguin Press, 2019), he argues that the idea of meritocracy serves no one in our society — not the striving middle and lower classes, and not the elite. Clara Holahan, a junior at Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS), interviewed Markovitz about The Meritocracy Trap and its implications for our political and social future. The following transcript is edited for length.

Clara Holahan: It’s been about four and a half years since your book was published, and a couple more books, such as The Tyranny of Merit, have appeared on similar themes. Do you feel that the conversation has moved in the direction you hoped for?

Daniel Markovits: So, I think that the analytic conversation has. The central claims of The Meritocracy Trap are that education, and especially elite education, produces an enormous amount of inequality in our society. And that the way to solve that problem, or make that problem less bad, is not to double down on meritocracy, but to recognize that meritocracy is itself part of the problem.

I think when I first published the book, a lot of people and reviewers, frankly, thought that was a little nuts. And I think now, many people, maybe even most people, think that’s basically true.

The place where the conversation has not gone the way I hoped is with the solutions that I’ve proposed; they don’t look anywhere near being adopted. We have not made a massive new investment in democratic education, to educate people outside the elite. We have not put meaningful pressure on elite schools to increase their enrollments and to take more kids from outside of rich families. So I feel like the diagnosis has been largely accepted, but the cure is nowhere near happening.

Where do you think the pressure would come from to implement your suggested policies, like politicians, stakeholders in society? Who do you think would be the ones who need to advocate for this the most?

I think that the way in which the the pressure mounts has two parts. The first we’re starting to see more of, and that is when elite educational institutions — elementary schools, high schools, universities, graduate and professional schools — overwhelmingly serve kids from rich or elite families, the rest of society will no longer think of those institutions as benevolent, or as serving the general interest. They will start turning against those institutions, and that’s going to produce pressure for change.

We’re starting to see that, if you look at what most Americans think about whether colleges and universities are good for America, the share of Americans who think they’re good for America has gone way down over the past decades. That is going to be noticed inside elite universities and elite high schools and so on. So that’s one source of pressure. 

I think inside the elite, the incredibly intense competition does not help even rich kids. Rich kids get a huge number of advantages in this competition, and they’re much more likely to get into fancy high schools and fancy universities. But all that competition doesn’t make their lives go well. It doesn’t make them flourish. It doesn’t make them happy. It doesn’t make them ethically well grounded. It doesn’t serve their mental health and emotional well-being.

Rich kids and rich families are starting to notice that too. They are also starting to say, ​‘Hey, wait, this is not a good idea, even for us, although we seem to be winning.’ But they haven’t noticed it enough to push for a change.

You mentioned that a lot of Americans are now more against academic institutions. But in my opinion, it seems like the loudest critique comes from more of the right-wing people like Donald Trump and Elise Stefanik. Is that still helpful, in your opinion? Or is it more frustrating?

I think that is true. If you look at the data, Republicans are much more likely to say that colleges are bad for America than Democrats. But more people across the spectrum are starting to see things that way.

One of the things that is a real question about right-wing populism, particularly in America, is how much of it is driven by nativist and racist and other forms of bigoted sentiments, and how much of it is driven by class resentment against institutions and elites and professionals who are really doing a lot in structural ways to reduce the opportunities that the American middle class in American working class have. 

If you have my politics, insofar as right-wing populism is driven by class resentments, it’s a much less malign force than if it’s driven by bigotry. There were a surprising number of Trump/Sanders voters in America, people that would have voted for Sanders, but he wasn’t on the ticket. So they voted for Trump. So those are people, it seems to me, are noticing something real in the world and rebelling against it.

I don’t think supporting Trump is the solution. But I don’t think it’s bad that they’re noticing the problem.

Would you say that their energy or passion can be harnessed to support the policies that you suggested? Would they be willing to back these ideas?

You know, that requires political talent. One of the things that politicians often have a bad reputation for is that being good at politics requires being manipulative or dishonorable.

Another thing that real political talent does is to help people to understand what they kind of intuitively knew already. But to give it a positive and productive and benevolent and hopeful and improving expression, rather than a nasty and negative and angry one.

So yes, I think the right political talent will be able to speak to people who right now are angry, and voting in a politics of anger. And, you know, help them to articulate what they really feel, but connected to a positive program that makes everybody’s lives better. And the question we have is where that political talent is coming from. That’s an open question. 

If a lot of the future politicians would come from a highly educated, wealthy section of society, would that talented politician likely be a meritocrat themself?

That’s one of the things the book did not talk about enough. One of the things that meritocracy has done is it has kind of cannibalized the non-professional elite.

It used to be that there were lots of people who were naturally studious, they were interested in education. They were ambitious in a variety of ways. But they were cut out and were excluded from high-status institutions, because of their origins in one way or another, their race or their class.

So what happened? Well, they became union leaders, or they became local activists, or they became leaders in various civil rights or other causes. And they understood themselves as elites and leaders, but as against the dominant elite.

One thing that meritocracy has done is it has opened up the dominant elite to lots of those people, and then co-opted them. That makes it much less likely that our society will produce a really progressive leader who hasn’t at some point passed through some set of institutions. It’s not impossible. It’s just harder, because those institutions are going to suck those people up. When you pass through those institutions, you get training, but your worldview also gets narrowed, and that may also make it harder.

Throughout the world right now, left-wing political parties are becoming the parties of the rich and well-educated. Whereas it used to be that left wing political parties were the parties of the working class. However, it’s not necessary, and it would be sort of self-importance and hubris for elite institutions to think it’s necessary.

Many of the current populist demagogues in American politics went through the elite institutions. Donald Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Do you think that their accusations against these institutions are just a ploy to get support from the poor, right-wing sections of the U.S.?

I don’t know what the rational motives are. I think there are some people who come through these institutions and feel disrespected and alienated from them and are genuinely angry at them. I think there are other people who are more cynical.

I’m open to the possibility that there are some people on the sort of populist right who are sincere about some of these criticisms. You know, someone who is like that, who is not a politician, but is on the more populist right is Oren Cass, who is the intellectual voice of a think tank [American Compass] that is sort of pro-labor, but is more of a right-wing conservative think tank. You should read his stuff. He’s interesting on these issues.

How do you think the COVID pandemic affected how people view the meritocracy, as it had very different impacts on the people in the country and across the world?

I hesitate to ask you to read myself, but Meira Levinson, who’s a professor of education at Harvard, and I wrote a piece in The Atlantic about what the pandemic did to schooling. The short story is that it enormously exacerbated pre-existing inequalities. Rich kids did fine in the pandemic, and everybody else really didn’t do so fine. We gathered data on this, and some of that data is summarized. I do think that it may turn out that our schooling system is more resilient than the people who worried the most thought it would be. I’m not sure.

Is there a one-sentence way to explain your understanding of the meritocracy to someone who might not be familiar with your ideas, to make them see its problems?

I think one of my objections is easier to see than the other. The simpler objection is that people think that meritocracy is the same thing as equality of opportunity. And that if you let people get ahead based on their accomplishments, then everybody has a fair shot. Whereas if you let people get ahead based on their race or their gender, obviously, some people don’t have a fair shot. The problem is that your accomplishments depend not just on your talent and your effort, but also on your training. And your training depends on how much other people invest in you. When we have an education system in which rich parents can invest much, much more in their children than anybody else can afford to do, then meritocracy will enormously advantage rich kids.

So a lot of the appeal of meritocracy is connected to equality of opportunity. But, in fact, in the system that we have now, meritocracy undermines equality of opportunity.

So I think that idea is relatively straightforward. The idea that’s a little less straightforward is that a meritocracy depends on an idea of what counts as merit. What’s the virtue? What makes you be considered the best? And that’s been different in different societies.

If you imagine a society of hunter gatherers, or an agrarian society, or even the industrial society that existed before the Information Age, the particular skills that the elite have today would have been largely worthless in those societies. What counts as merit is relative to lots of other decisions.

It turns out that some things that count as merit in our society are valuable only if there’s a lot of inequality. So the skills that make you extremely successful in finance, or in elite law, or in elite management, will be valuable only if there’s a lot of inequality. And so they can’t justify inequality because they depend on inequality.

So the two main problems with the meritocracy are the initial starting points — people aren’t actually given equal starting grounds — and then the reward system we have is very unequal. If those were sort of stripped away, if we could start from scratch, could the meritocracy, just as an idea, be successful?

One of the problems we have right now, is that being good at school, and having certain skills like test-taking, determine your whole life chances. That seems like it’s disproportionate and unbalanced and out of whack, and causes a lot of misery and inequality.

But if it turned out that being good at school just made you much more likely to get to be a researcher or being good at medicine just made you much more likely to get to be a doctor, and it didn’t also make you rich, that would be much less of a problem. There’s a certain sense in which people who are really good at things should be recognized for that. The problem with our meritocracy is that what it means to be recognized is to get enormously greater access to the general levers of power, status, prosperity, rather than just being recognized for being good at something.

What would your personal message be to students and future meritocrats?

My personal message is one of humility, which is that these are really difficult questions, and they’re personal questions. I don’t think telling other people how to live their lives is the right thing to do. So that’s the first part.

With that said, I think young people in this system are in a bind. If you are not in the elite, my main message is simpler: If you’re not in the elite, and you find that other people are getting ahead of you, it’s not your fault. And it’s also not the fault of immigrants or people of color. It’s the fault of a system that favors the elite. So if you’re outside of the elite, get angry, but get angry at the right thing, the thing that’s actually keeping you down.

If you’re in the elite, you’re in a tough position, because the system that is advantaging you is also harming you. Both things are true. It’s really hard to fight it one person at a time. My main advice there is to keep your perspective. Don’t feel too entitled, but also don’t chase every brass ring just because it’s put in front of you. Sometimes you’ll have a chance to give up a little status for freedom or what you care about. And often, that’s a good trade.