What’s the matter with meritocracy? Just about everything, argues Professor Daniel Markovits of Yale Law School in The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. The competitive process by which our society has come to assign tasks, rewards, and esteem is a “colossal wreck” that “serves no one’s interests.” It causes “near-universal harm” by inflicting a host of ills on winners, losers, and the shrinking ranks of everyone in between.
The book does not lack for useful strengths. It puts forth an astute and mostly accurate picture of our country’s evolution from mid-20th-century unity to our present fault lines. Markovits plausibly assigns a pivotal role to the rapid proliferation of college graduates, who made up less than 10% of the population before World War II and now constitute more than 25% (with another 25% attending college without obtaining a degree). This rise in the supply of highly educated people decisively influenced the direction of the economy by “induc[ing] the innovations that would make their skills valuable and raise the wage premium that they enjoy.” The new “glossy jobs” in finance, the media, business, public management, and the professions delivered higher pay, interesting challenges, and job advancement to workers equipped for complexity and flexible thinking. Simultaneously, secure “middle-skill” opportunities, especially in manufacturing, dwindled. Workers without a bachelor’s degree made do with “gloomy jobs”—humdrum, routinized, lower-paying, and less prestigious.
Unlike the old hereditary aristocracy, our new educated elites are expected to work hard and put in long hours to attain and maintain their glossy jobs. The less educated, in contrast, are relatively underemployed. Another hallmark of the status quo is that the winners and losers in the new economy appear to deserve their fate and so to lack legitimate grounds for dissatisfaction or complaint. But in fact, according to Markovits, there are many perfectly legitimate reasons to be disgruntled.
Read Full Article »
