Meritocracy Has Merely Created a New Hereditary Aristocracy: A Selection from Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap (2019)
“The old aristocrats were vulnerable to meritocratic competition because they bred underachievers, but the new meritocrats raise overachievers and therefore dominate meritocratic competition. The principal source of the skew toward wealth among college students, and especially among students at the most competitive colleges, is academic rather than narrowly financial or even cultural. The skew toward wealth does not reflect a breakdown of meritocracy so much as meritocracy’s triumph. Towering educational inequality reveals the inner logic of meritocratic inequality in its dark action.
Finally, the meritocratic approach to dynastic succession confers one more advantage on the elite, which distinguishes the meritocratic inheritance from its aristocratic predecessor. Whereas inherited physical and financial wealth famously breeds temptations toward profligacy and therefore its own dissolution—hence the early-twentieth-century saying that a family might go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations—human capital resists being wasted by those who are given it. . . .
In all these respects, the meritocratic approach to dynasty building mimics the truly hereditary birthright aristocracy that for centuries dominated elite life. Education assumes the role in meritocracy that breeding played in the aristocratic regime, and superordinate labor takes on the role once played by hereditary landedness. . . .
The increasing monopoly that elite families exercise over pathways to income and status, and the increasing exclusion of not just poor but also middle-class children from elite training and thus also work, realize rather than retreat from meritocratic values: the dynastic character of privilege does not reflect the corruption so much as the consummation of the meritocratic regime. . . .
Educational inequality has increased markedly alongside rising income inequality. The gap between the test scores of high- and low-income students has grown by between 40 and 50 percent over the past twenty-five years, so that by the eighth grade, students from rich families are four grade levels ahead of those from poor ones. The achievement gap between rich and poor students in the United States today exceeds the present-day white/black achievement gap, which is three grade levels, and even exceeds the white/black gap that racially segregated schools produced at midcentury. International comparisons are equally shocking: the rich/poor achievement gap within the United States is now roughly the same as the gap between average academic performance in the United States and in Tunisia (whose GDP per capita is one-twelfth as great). . . .
The old rich—lazy rentiers who deployed inherited wealth and power to exploit subordinate labor—gave champions of economic justice an easy target. Widespread, grinding poverty gave egalitarian sympathies a compelling focus. And meritocracy offered egalitarians a powerful and effective cure for aristocratic inequality.
But arguments against exploitation lose their power when aimed at the hundred-hour-per-week lawyer, whose industry and exhaustion inoculate her against charges of inherited and unearned advantage, and who also exploits herself. Humanitarian concern loses force when poverty is reduced and the main claims of economic justice are made on behalf of the middle class. And when progressives embraced meritocracy as a remedy for hereditary privilege, they fired the engine that now drives inequality’s increase. The familiar arguments that once defeated aristocratic inequality simply do not apply to an economic system based on rewarding effort and skill.
Meritocracy’s rise over the past half century has opened a new frontier in human experience, with no historical precedent. At the same time, meritocracy has pulled the rug out from under economic equality’s champions. The past no longer provides a reliable guide to understanding the present, as received moral principles and new economic stocks simply do not align. Traditional diagnoses of economic injustice misfire at every turn, and meritocracy, which was supposed to cure inequality, has itself become the source of the disease. . . .
The traditional way of thinking about the conflict between the rich and the rest—as a battle between capital and labor—no longer captures what is really going on. Instead, the dominant sources of individual top incomes lie in superordinate labor. The overwhelmingly greater part of the recent increase in the top 1 percent’s aggregate income share is attributable not to a shift of overall income away from labor and in favor of capital, but rather to a shift within labor income, away from the middle class and in favor of elite workers. . . .
American meritocracy has become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth, privilege, and caste across generations. A social and economic hierarchy with these comprehensive, dynastic, and self-referential qualities has a name: an aristocracy. And meritocracy does not dismantle but rather renovates aristocracy, fashioning a new caste order, contrived for a world in which wealth consists not in land or factories but rather in human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.
Industry displaces breeding as the ground of privilege, and meritocratic education displaces aristocratic inheritance as the central dynastic technology. Elite skills are hard-won in the new order, and superordinate workers’ industry is real, just as breeding and manners once set aristocrats genuinely apart. Like aristocracy, moreover, meritocracy purports to construct a social order that is not simply unequal but justly unequal. And as aristocracy’s ideals once did, so meritocracy’s claims about virtue and desert today persuade not just the privileged elite but also—ambivalently and unhappily, to be sure—the many whom meritocracy excludes.
But merit’s allure is an illusion. Because the meritocrat’s skills are valuable only against a backdrop of prior economic inequality, efforts to justify inequality based on the value, or merit, of these skills succumb to the fallacy of circular reasoning. Like the aristocratic values that it replaces, merit is not a natural or universal virtue but rather the upshot of prior inequalities. Merit is an artificial construction, built to valorize the exploitation of human capital, and, in this way, to launder an otherwise offensive distribution of advantage.”—Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (2019)