The Parable of the Belligerent Warriors: A Selection from Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap (2019)

“Imagine that a society is composed of farmers, who are nurturing and cooperative, and warriors, who are cunning and strong. For decades, the society lives in prosperous harmony with its neighbors, as farmers raise crops and warriors keep the peace, and both do well. Then, one day, some warriors commence a border skirmish and, through a stream of provocations, steadily escalate hostilities until eventually harmony has been replaced by pervasive and constant warfare.

Once the society has adopted a war footing, the farmers become increasingly unproductive and the warriors increasingly essential to preserving safety and welfare. The warriors now claim disproportionate status, wealth, and power, on the ground that they deserve private advantages commensurate to their disproportionate contributions to the public good. To which the farmers might answer that the warriors would not be so productive if they had not started the wars. The warriors’ true product must be offset by the general costs of the war, and especially by its suppression of farming.

The snowball mechanism behind meritocratic inequality casts middle-class workers in the role of farmers and superordinate workers in the role of warriors. Only after the rich have concentrated training in their children do the technologies of production adjust to fetishize elite skills. And superordinate workers who wish to justify their immense incomes on account of their productive merit will, like the warriors from the parable, falter over the observation that the elite would not be so exceptionally productive if it had not, through the intensive education it gives to its children, started the training war and set its consequences in motion. Like the warriors, the elite’s true product must be offset by the costs of meritocratic inequality, and especially by meritocracy’s suppression (through inducing innovation that fetishizes skill) of mid-skilled, middle-class production.

This raises a final and fatal analogy between contemporary meritocracy and the aristocracy of the ancien régime. It is easy to forget that aristocracy was, within the social and moral frames of its time, true to its name—it connected caste to a conception of virtue or excellence, and aristocratic elites disproportionately and indeed almost exclusively possessed virtue, so conceived. The ancien régime was discredited in the end not so much because aristocratic notions of heredity created a birthright lottery that violated equality of opportunity, but rather because the bourgeois revolutions unmasked the aristocratic conception of excellence and virtue as at best ridiculous and in fact a sham. . . .

The problem with economic inequality is not, as progressives commonly propose, that elites use force or fraud or some other form of bad faith to inflate their incomes in excess of their merit. Nor is the problem, as progressives also say, that elites have not earned the training (from parents, schools, and colleges) behind the skills and dispositions that superordinate labor requires. Indeed, no version of the thought that economic life strays from true meritocracy captures the basic wrong in rising economic inequality.”—Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (2019)