The Meritocrat Who Wants to Unwind the Meritocracy

Mr. Markovits argues, is that elites have set their children up to out-achieve everyone else, then justify their rewards as stemming solely from “merit.”

The notion of merit in and of itself is flawed. Everyone I know with a fancy job came from an educated and relatively well off family. Nothing about their life is about simply their hard work.

I agree with the problem that people who are missing out on the extensive support and training for college which only a few families can afford are at a big disadvantage(although many people have very productive and intellectually challenging careers without going to the top few schools). However, I don't think the best solution is to take people who have missed out on this and throw them into these elite schools. If they do have money and interest in improving the inequities in preparation, they can create programs to remedy this. For preparation. Extensive ones. By analogy-- there are certainly inequities in preparation for elite sports teams. You don't fix that by requiring the sports teams to take a fixed fraction of people who are not prepared as well. You create programs to help people prepare better earlier on. You want more people prepared to learn and contribute at the high level these places operate. Shoving people in with insufficient preparation sets them up to fail. Those who are teaching at these schools already have full-time jobs, too. They likely want to help, but cannot take the place of a focussed and appropriately qualified set of educators.

I think it would help to understand how Mr. Markovits defines meritocracy. If it’s entirely on the basis of using standardized testing to determine admission into colleges, I can see his point to some degree. But if he’s decrying the fact that people who work harder or smarter, who have greater resilience, a greater tolerance for risk, greater cognitive, communication and analytical ability, and greater drive than the average person should be handicapped a la Harrison Bergeron, then his thesis is deeply flawed. And we know it’s flawed because societies that have attempted to equalize outcomes have consistently failed to do so despite their best efforts.

Is data meritorious? Is scarcity? Perhaps demand? The simple fact in the presumption of merit as an attainment or birthright is that the truths of social hierarchies resist easy meritorious presumptions. Merit, well defined or not, too often synthesizes itself with entitlement, offering to those without either the emotive angst to test what they cannot have, to destroy that which will not pass their test. High bars, an elitist assumption of meritocracy, is a misnomer presumed by those often locked inside its rules, as Markovitz implies. Society doesn't need high bars or significant barriers to be saturated with a sense of entitled merit. We see this in gangs, in academia pre K through post G, break rooms, political parties and in churches. The bar's height is only as high as the honor among the thieves. I look forward to reading the book to see whether my assumptions, stated here, have value. Do these filter into what seems a focus on aristocratic thought? Or will the book's thought paradigms be too specific to blanket the non-meritorious, inglorious segments of our social structures that also leverage this model (to our society's long-term harm). I am intrigued, says the former truck driver, construction laborer, IT Director, deli owner and eclectic entrepreneur.

"Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges. Hardworking outsiders no longer enjoy genuine opportunity." That's from the Professor's article in The Atlantic. This assumes that all hardworking outsiders want to be part of the financial, tech, and legal elite. It's been said in this article's comments, as well as in most the recent opinion piece by David Brooks: not everyone wants to be part of that, and those who are not part of that are not "lesser" beings. Just a personal anecdote: one of my closest friends made it Silicon Valley despite the odds... went to a state school for undergrad/grad, from a lower SES, and a female. After several years of working in SV, she became so disillusioned and realized it was not what it was all hyped up to be. She mentioned how she enjoyed the high salary, but not everything else that comes with it. Once another opportunity opened up, she took it and moved to Utah. She no longer has the bragging rights of working and living in SV, but her quality of life has improved while still doing meaningful (as well as well-paid) work. She is by no stretch of the imagination a "loser" for bailing out on SV. What I got out of her stories: this crazy cutthroat race only really exist on the coastal cities. Too much emphasis on status, brand names, etc. It's no coincidence that those indicted in Operation Varsity Blues are from the coasts.

Is anyone actually surprised by this. I know white shoe lawyers who work just as much as senior partners as they did when they were associates. Most of the highly compensated career tracks are the same. Consulting, banking, law and medicine all exact an enormous toll on those who seek to work in the upper echelons. More than being revelatory, I think books like this act as reminders to each generation of these truths about work and career. A friend authored a career book in which she laid out exactly how much of your soul a company owns at what price. It describes the classic Faustian bargain many of us make. "I'll burn my books, ah Mephistopheles"

Just returned from a five-week business trip to Asia. It was so refreshing to be back among 2 billion meritocratic "opportunity hoarders."

Will definitely have to read the book. But let me offer this in the meantime: By all means let merit be recognized, nurtured, harnessed, and celebrated. But let there also be practical limits on the monetary rewards and power it brings to individuals and classes, a stable, respectable floor for all, regardless of merit, and societal norms that promotes this. Ideally, knowing that you are good at something, with the respect of others you respect in your field, should be incentive enough.

Meritocracy : an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on class privilege or wealth. Meritocracy without status is the solution.

Meritocracy rewards elitism which feeds mediocrity. Just to get some terms straight: -Meritocracy means having a set of tests or hurdles which, if you cross them at an early point in your life, get you access to greater opportunities to earn money and control resources. Meritocracy does not mean "giving resources to those who prove they're good at managing them". That's a marketplace: If you don't have a fixed hurdle and age range for proving merit, then you can solve a problem, create value, look for someone who wants the value you've created, and let them to pay more to get it than you spent to create it. That's good for all. Elitism means believing that serving the interests of the elite is the best way to serve the interests of society as a whole. Meritocracy rewards elitism because the elite at any point in time can always increase the odds that their children will cross the necessary bars at the prescribed ages. That leads to mediocrity because 1. the offspring are not actually better at creating value than anyone else; and 2. the things you have to do to cross the hurdles at the prescribed age keep you from learning new stuff, or really useful stuff We think the modern world is unusual, but it depends who you're comparing us to. The wealthy of Europe in the Middle Ages also worked themselves to exhaustion with war and intrigue, and were just as susceptible to losing everything if they let up on the pressure. The US once showed everyone a better way.

Honestly, I suspect most of these comments are not from young people. Times have changed. I'm in my 20s and when I was in school, it felt like none of the emphasis was on learning and all of it was on "achieving". Every year there was more and more tedious work - more testing, more paperwork, requiring students to do a "portfolio" before they graduate. None of it helped, it just made everyone stressed and miserable. It's no wonder young people have increasing rates of anxiety and depression. But nobody takes a child seriously if they complain about homework. But as it turns out, homework has doubled since the 1980s. Testing has increased drastically as well. Kids are being raised in a pressure cooker environment, where the only thing that matters is their function as human capital. The great irony is that this doesn't produce merit. It produces effective economic units. I read an article from a writing professor that said that contrary to the stereotypes, he found his incoming college students not to be entitled, but defeated. The quality of their writing had declined over time, because now students defaulted to bland, formulaic writing. They were afraid to take any risks, because jobs, internships, and scholarships were all dependent on maintaining grades. The actual learning and improvement was secondary. Those who rise to the top are not actually the most capable, but the best at playing this game. Everything is an extension of career-building.

I applaud Mr. Markovitz’ major contribution to the library and contemporary discussion; haven’t read the book yet, but I certainly look forward to doing so. There’s a deeply philosophical theme in the whole idea of “meritocracy” and how it’s playing out in modern America. I, too, am the son of academics and went to a public high school where we were all “just part of the gang.” My background is somewhat similar, with degrees in mathematics, physics, and engineering (no Oxford, though). I see a strong divergence in attitudes between the aristo-meritocracy and the blue-collar meritocracy of my (our?) youth. And it really all comes down to ego. The more ego gets in the way of egalitarianism, the more “meritocracy” starts to look like “privilege.” I have to say I was pretty disappointed in David Brooks’ tandem column and the whole notion of “dual meritocracies;” one for elites and another for everyone else. You either have a meritocracy or you don’t, and it’s pretty clear which direction we’re headed.

How about we quit thinking of the Ivy League as so elite? It admits those who play the game well, and some families and schools are really extremely intent on getting their children in (one friend even investigated the interests of the admissions officer and got her child involved in the program). The kids I know who are in the Ivies are reasonably smart and great kids, but the ones I’m most impressed with are going to state schools.

I guess I don't see meritocracy as he does. I find that lawyers and MBAs for example, have no merit to speak of. I suppose that is a view I get from an affinity for Institutional Economics via Veblen, but to me the real merit is in the creativity of the people who contribute to society. A good example is Gary Kildall, who developed nearly all the foundational software for microprocessors, especially the bios and CP/M, the OS from which DOS was reverse engineered and fenced to Microsoft in order to win an IBM contract in a major intellectual property theft that set the application of the microprocessor back by at least ten years. (An excellent reference is They Made America by Harold Evans, which gained more credibility than other published documentation by winning a libel suit that proved its history of Kildall's accomplishments.) As Veblen noted, this is typical of notable entrepreneurs who steal, not develop, and destroy capitalism. There are numerous examples of creative engineers, scientists and mathematicians who contribute, along with other sorts of artists. But the good ones seldom become super wealthy or powerful, though they may work very hard. It is noteworthy that after starting in mathematics this author went on to completely nonproductive pursuits. Law, for example, contributes nothing to society but control for the aristocrats. The author mistakes highly paid non-producing elites for those with merit while those with productive merit go unrewarded.

Isn't meritocracy an expectation of a society that hopes to become better than its past? If so, why shoot it down? Our whole march toward becoming an engineering, medical and technology hub was precisely we went the way of merit and not despite it. Our legal and financial institutions are some of the most robust in the world because we demanded excellence from its population, not despite it. So why water down all of that because an academic feels that he has to address an inner genie? Or is the argument instead that elite schools need to become more inclusive ?

"Then he remembered an article a friend sent him about the growing number of Major League Baseball players whose fathers also played professional ball." And Markovits is an academic who was raised by two academics. This all reinforces the position that you are influenced by what you see growing up. If your dad was an actor, NBA player or lawyer, your first idea of what you want to do in life may be that. If you're raised by a single parent in a bad neighborhood where school is just a place to go during the day then you'll probably think that's all there is to life. Just dumping young adults like that into elite schools is setting them up to fail. They needed mentors early on to let them know the life they see isn't the only one out there. I think it's less meritocracy and more lottery. A child raised by parents/family in a stable environment with time and money to invest in them will ALWAYS have the upper hand against kids who lack that. Better school funding and increased teacher pay can go a long way but if the home/neighborhood environment is awful they're still coming out behind. I don't know the answer to that.

I have some high achieving conservative friends who, over a glass of wine, like to shake their fists and, with a quavering voice, say things like, “What about merit?” But someone who rises up from more challenging circumstances has obviously garnered more merit than someone who had to struggle less and reached the same level of achievement. And let’s not forget that the stick that is implicitly held up as its measure is ultimately ticked off in dollar signs. So “merit?” That word has depth and complexity. What if we reduce this argument to a word that is as cheap and thin as it sounds, “value.” But even that could interpreted as non monetary value. How about we reduce the argument further to a word that cuts to the core of what is being discussed. “Money.” We live in a moneytocracy where all sorts of other virtues are automatically heaped upon those who have money; and where money is, circularly, de facto proof that they are deserving of having those virtuous merits heaped upon them. So let’s drop the idea that this is about merit.