I recently read The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits. It had a strong affect on me, in part because my life’s work has been so deeply enmeshed in the meritocracy he describes. I went to Stanford, I taught at elite private high schools, and I own an test prep company that caters to the very wealthy. My life is squarely in the meritocracy.
But I am not exactly elite in the sense he uses the term. I don’t make millions a year and work 80 hour weeks. I didn’t go to an elite undergrad institution. Our household is probably in the top 5% of earners, but that’s not really the problematic area he addresses, which is the top 1% and even the top .1%, where incomes and assets have far outpaced everyone else — including us. I see the top 1%, I know many of them, and so I know exactly who he is talking about. So much of what he says about them rang so true, and much of it applies to me and my family as well, so it was bound to be a challenging book for me.
I won’t get into details — you should read the book — but the main argument is that the meritocracy, which started out with the best of intentions in the 1950’s, has created a caste system — a real aristocracy— in which the elite meritocrats educate their children to become similarly elite. They outspend and outtrain their kids so much that the middle and lower classes simply have no chance to compete. I’ve experienced all of this first hand for decades, so I know how true it is.
This leads to all kinds of cascading effects, ranging from the ever increasing complexity of the legal and financial systems to the polarization of our political system (and the rise of Trump et al) to the skewing of labor toward either massive complexity on the high end or utter tediousness one the low end, and subsequent income disparities. Every aspect of our lives and society are affected by the way the elites become elite.
Markovits proposes a range of policies that can remedy the situation, mostly aimed at flattening the educational playing field through taxation and other wealth redistribution strategies.
But I am left wondering what to do myself. I don’t feel I’m in a position to influence policy at that level. Maybe I can run for school board and work on it in some way there.
I don’t feel I have much of a choice in my daily life right now— I can’t just quit my company. Money is a thing that matters.
It’s hard to think of a way to make money that doesn’t in some way, mostly large ways, participate in the meritocracy. Yes, test prep is pretty bad. But I don’t know what else I can do that’s much better.
I’ve thought about how to offer test prep to a wider range of students, Including low income students, and that’s a work in progress, but what I’ve thought of won’t really change the situation very much at a fundamental level. Really the only way to do that is at the political level. And I don’t have a lot of hope, given that state of our politics, that that will happen any time soon. I hope I am proven wrong.
Maybe I’ll just have to run for school board. If anyone has other ideas, I’m all ears.
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