Yale Law Professor: Meritocracy Doesn’t Work

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And my next guest is taking aim at the very structure that made him a success. In his latest book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits says the system that values hard work and promotes the American dream is, in itself, a sham. He joins our Hari Sreenivasan to discuss his dramatic thesis, that meritocracy, in fact, feeds inequality and undermines democracy.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: There’s kind of an implied equality of opportunity in meritocracy, right? There’s this notion that, I have just as good a chance as you, and that’s why we should all believe in this system and this construct.

DANIEL MARKOVITS, AUTHOR, “THE MERITOCRACY TRAP”: Right. So that’s the thing that I want to push back against exactly. We have this idea that, if you’re judged on the merits, there’s equal opportunity for everybody. The problem is that, when some people have a lot more resources to train their children than other people, then, even when the kids get judged on the merits down the road, those who got the most training will have the most merit. And that’s not because they’re naturally smarter or more virtuous or harder-working. It’s because their parents invested in them in a way in which nobody else’s parents could. And so that effect, we can talk about all the ways it happens and how big it is. But it’s enormous, and it has the consequence that now the rich and the richest kids win the meritocratic competition, and everybody else loses.

SREENIVASAN: You talk a lot about the gaps in education. Give me some examples of how that plays out.

MARKOVITS: So, this starts long before people are even born. If you look at the family structure of rich families and the family structure of middle-class and poor families, rich kids are much, much more likely to be born into families with both parents still in the household. If you are a woman without a high school degree, or even with a high school degree, but no college degree, in the United States today, you will have roughly 60 percent of your children outside of wedlock. If you’re a woman with a graduate degree, you will have only 5 percent of your children outside of wedlock. So, right from the get-go, kids of rich, educated parents have both parents in the household, and other kids usually don’t. And then the rich parents just start spending money on their kids. A typical public high school in the United States spends maybe $15,000 a year per child to educate the kids. A really poor high school might spend $8,000 or $10,000 a year, so that’s a gap of about $5,000. But the top 20 private schools, as measured by “Forbes,” spend on average $75,000 a year per child to educate their kids. And all of that money buys results. It buys training. It buys teacher attention. It buys careful educational programs. And when it comes time to take the SAT, for example, kids who parents earn more than $200,000 a year have 250-point higher scores on average than middle-class kids, even as middle-class kids have just 125 points higher than kids below the poverty line.

SREENIVASAN: So the gap between the wealthy and middle class is much higher than the middle class and the poor.

MARKOVITS: Much higher, twice as big on the SAT. And on other measures, the gap is even bigger. And the gap between the rich and the poor is truly enormous.

SREENIVASAN: Culturally, we seem to have bought into it, some cultures more than others. Indian parents, Asian parents, they are into the meritocracy from the get-go. Look, if you just work hard, we were immigrant parents. We want you to get this best opportunity. The way through is to hit the books.

MARKOVITS: Right.

SREENIVASAN: Right? I mean, that’s — and at some levels, they see role models that have made it to elite Ivy League academies and say, great, that was this person’s ticket out. She became a doctor, he became a lawyer, we have transcended our class.

MARKOVITS: I think there are two responses to that, other than saying, of course, it’s true for some people. The first sort of response is, it’s not good to make social policy based on exceptional cases. Exceptional cases are charismatic for us. They’re inspiring for us. But most of us are ordinary, not exceptional. And so if you want to have a fair society and a well-functioning society, it has to be a society in which ordinary people in order ordinary circumstances can do well. The second is that, there is a generational transformation here, which is that the elite that is now middle age probably did win through that system, partly because, as you said at the beginning, the old aristocracy was very unfair to lots of groups, to people of color, to immigrants, to Jews, to Catholics. And the oldest aristocrats were not particularly skilled or hardworking. So, when meritocracy was invented, it was a great way for those groups to use their natural ability and their industry to get ahead. But what’s now happened is, the people who won that lottery and won that system are now the elite. And they know how to train their kids like nobody’s business, and they out-train. And this is true now across ethnic groups, across religions. So the rich train really well and really hard. And their kids get ahead, not because they cheat, but because they’re taught.

SREENIVASAN: Someone’s watching this interview. They’re Googling your name. And they’re saying, look at this guy. He’s a professor at Yale Law School. He’s gone to all these good schools. And meritocracy has worked for him. He worked hard, he went to the best of the best. What’s wrong with it?

MARKOVITS: So it’s been great for me. I want to be very clear about that. Whatever advantages I have, I owe to exactly the system that I’m now attacking. So this is not meant to be holding myself out as a role model for anything. This is an argument about facts and logic. I also do think, though, there’s some parts of my own experience that led me to this book. I went to public high school in Austin, Texas, would now be called an urban public high school. I went to high school with kids whose parents were not professionals. My parents were, who were just as smart as I was in ninth grade. And I know that because we have a homework assignment, and they could do the problem, and I couldn’t. And now they’re not nearly as wealthy or as credentialed as I am. And the question is, what’s the difference? And a big part of the difference is that, over the course of the rest of my childhood, I got a kind of support and training from my parents, who knew how to train me, that’s much harder for middle- and working-class kids to get, when their parents haven’t gone through the system and don’t know how to train.

SREENIVASAN: So you are basically saying that you are a product of these massive sustained advantages that are structural, that you had two academic parents that could help you. You might have gotten breaks along the way from professors who might have given you the benefit of the doubt.

MARKOVITS: Right, both the benefit of the doubt and also just attention. When I was an undergraduate at Yale College, the amount of attention I got from my professors, just training — when I got something wrong, they would call me up and say, listen, you couldn’t do that problem. Let me talk you through it. If I’m at University of Texas, my professor with 20 times as many students can’t do that. And education really works. And so the consequence of this is that the people who get the most of it do the best in the system that we have now.

SREENIVASAN: The Ivy Leagues are very, relatively speaking, small group of schools, when we look at the entire crop of people that graduate or enter higher education every year, right? They’re going to say, we are selective, we want the brightest, we’re not going to lower our standards to try to just diversify by socioeconomic class. We serve the public interest. What is wrong with the version of reality that they’re living in vs. what’s happening outside their walls?

MARKOVITS: So, I think there are two kinds of problems here. The first is just with what happens inside the Ivy League. And the Ivy League and the Ivy-plus colleges today, there are more students whose parents are in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than the entire bottom half. So these universities educate overwhelmingly very rich kids. The second thing is that, even though they function as clubs for the elite, they’re taxed as charities, so that alumni donations are tax-deductible, their endowments can grow without taxation. And that’s an enormous public subsidy. So, somebody recently calculated that Princeton’s tax exemption amounts to a public subsidy of $100,000 a year per pupil per student at Princeton. Compare that to Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. It gets public subsidies of about $12,500 a year. And Essex County Community College up the road gets public subsidies of about $2,500 a year. So the really rich kids at Princeton get a bigger public subsidy, 40 times bigger, than the middle- and working-class kids at the local community college. And that’s not a just system. The second point, I think, is also really important, which is that the graduates of these universities then go out into the work force, and they transform the labor market. They transform how jobs are done. They transform industries. They transform industries to favor exactly the kind of fancy educations that they have, so that what happens as a result of this in finance, in something simple, like taxicab driving, you get a world in which it used to be there were middle-class jobs, and now there are elite jobs and impoverished jobs. So taxi drivers used to be middle-class people. You could make a living, you could support a family as a cab driver. It was a skilled job. You needed to know the city. Then Uber comes in. And what Uber does is some very super skilled people with extremely fancy educations design technology that strips all the skill from the driver, and has them just follow apps, gets them paid much, much less. And now the driver, there’s no way they can rise through the Uber hierarchy to become an elite Uber manager. And they can’t afford to send their kids to the schools that elite Uber managers go to. And so you get the inequality in education driving a transformation of work that makes work on equal. And then you get the people who do well at work sending their kids to the fancy schools, and the system snowballs, and that’s not good.

SREENIVASAN: You point out in the book a distinction between an excellent vs. a superior education system. Play that out for us.

MARKOVITS: Yes. So, excellence, as a concept, has two properties. The first is, it’s a threat concept, not a rank concept. So when we say that someone’s excellent, if someone else is better at something, that doesn’t make the first person not excellent anymore. So when you’re excellent, you’re good at something, you can do something worthwhile. And the second thing is that excellence is tied to an evaluation of what it is you’re good at. It makes sense to say you’re an excellent doctor. It doesn’t make sense to say you’re an excellent torturer, or you’re an excellent fraudster. So there’s this kind of a substantive ethics of excellence. Superiority, on the other hand, is different in both respects. Superiority is a rank concept, so that, if you’re better than I am, I’m no longer superior. And we can talk about being superior without mentioning whether the thing I’m superior at is worth doing or not. And so our education system, because it’s become meritocratic, because its competitive, has abandoned the idea of excellence, the idea of making people good at things that are worth doing, and embraced the idea of superiority, making people better than others at competitions, without looking as to whether those competitions are particularly valuable or not. That’s why the Ivy League now, for example, produces such enormous number of people who go into finance, which is the quintessential superiority game. There’s no evidence that modern finance benefits society, but it makes those who do well at it incredibly rich. And you got to be better than the next guy. And a place like Yale or Princeton or Harvard, the top two jobs that people go into out of these universities are finance and consulting.

SREENIVASAN: So how do you restructure our education system?

MARKOVITS: You would put a lot of pressure on elite schools and universities, not just Ivy League universities, but from kindergarten up, to educate many, many more students and to focus much less intensively on rich kids. So the Ivy League today spends about twice as much per student per year as it did in 2000. There’s no reason that these universities couldn’t take twice as many students. There’s no reason that elite private schools, which have student-teacher ratios that are twice as favorable as public schools, couldn’t double their enrollments. And one way to do this is to tell these institutions, again, from kindergarten up through graduate school, that, if you don’t admit more students and admit more economically diverse students, you lose your tax exemption. The second thing you could do is various interventions in the labor market in order to encourage people to make and hire people for mid-skilled jobs, particularly changing the Social Security tax system, so that it no longer favors elite workers over middle-class workers.

SREENIVASAN: You’re also saying that this actually — this system, the meritocratic system, does not work for the elites.

MARKOVITS: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: Explain that.

MARKOVITS: Yes. So, earlier, we talked about the fact that having rich parents is almost a necessary condition for getting ahead in our society, because you need them to invest in your education as only rich parents can do. At the same time, our education system has become so competitive and our workplace has become so competitive that having rich parents isn’t close to a sufficient condition, so that even if you have all the privilege in the world, unless you’re willing to cheat and can get away with it, you may not get in. If you look at a place the University of Chicago in the 1990s, there was a year in which it admitted something like 70 percent of its applicants. Last year, I think the University of Chicago admitted about 6.5 percent of its applicants. Stanford admits it fewer than 5 percent of its applicants. What this means is…

SREENIVASAN: Well, they brag about that.

MARKOVITS: They brag about that. Yale brags about the fact that our admissions rate is the lowest it’s ever been, our yield is the highest it’s ever been. And what it means, though, concretely, even for rich kids, is that if you ever made a big mistake in your childhood, you’re not getting in. If something went wrong, if you fell in love and ignored all your studies for your sophomore year of high school, you’re not getting in. If you took a chance on taking some classes that were too hard for you and did really badly, you’re not getting in. And what that means is that the elites are privileged by all this training, but they’re also enslaved and tortured and twisted and oppressed by all of the training and competition that they have to get into them and surmount in order to stay ahead. And so this is not a good system for the rich either.

SREENIVASAN: OK, it’s going to be hard for a taxi driver to feel that pity for somebody who’s in the back of the cab earning millions dollars as a partner at a law firm. Why is their life tough?

MARKOVITS: So I get that. And I think we need to distinguish between two kinds of sympathy. There’s kind of political sympathy, which is a reason for people to make sacrifices for others. And then there’s a kind of existential sympathy, which is just the recognition that everybody’s life is the only life they have. And you can be owed nothing by anybody, and be a proper object of political scorn, and yet deserve existential sympathy. And the reason why this is important is that the system that we have will not get undone unless we can persuade the elites that it’s not working for them either. And so the argument that this system is oppressing the rich isn’t made by me because I have great sympathy for the rich, but because it’s true, and if they can come to believe it’s true, then they’re going to be much more amenable to a politics and a policy that will unwind the inequality that we have.

SREENIVASAN: There’s something in our psyche that it’s an incredibly strong narrative that we convince ourselves, especially if we have gone through these meritocratic systems. If you are that surgeon or whatever, if you are that banker that has specialized invested in it, you say, wait a minute, this is something that I have earned. Someone is trying to take it away from me either through taxation, or you’re asking me to give everybody else a chance I they didn’t go through these hoops. They didn’t get hazed. They didn’t have to put all those long hours, right? I suffered.

MARKOVITS: I think that’s exactly right. A couple books have recently been written by political scientists and historians surveying concentrated wealth at the top across societies, across all of history, across all of space. And these are careful scholars, so they wouldn’t put this as crassly as I am, but one way to summarize those books is that, in all of human experience, if you look at the societies that have concentrated wealth and privilege as powerfully in as narrow elite, an elite, as the United States has today, across all of experience, there’s only one case in which that’s been unwound without losing a war or succumbing to a revolution. So elites cling to their privilege, and they have to be forced out of it. That’s why I’m making this argument that this kind of privilege doesn’t benefit even the rich.

SREENIVASAN: You’re saying, if they are not able to be persuaded, it will happen one way or another.

MARKOVITS: It will happen one way or another, and it will happen in a way that is bad for everybody, or it can be brought about in a way that in fact serves the real human interests even of the rich.

SREENIVASAN: You talk a little bit about what’s happening politically right now too. There’s a quote I want to read: “Progressives inflame middle-class resentment and trigger elite resistance, while demagogues and charlatans monopolize and exploit meritocracy’s discontents. Meritocratic inequality, therefore, induces not only deep discontent, but also widespread pessimism verging on despair.” Are we there now?

MARKOVITS: Well, I think we certainly are at the pessimism and approaching the despair phase. And I think the mechanism that you describe is exactly the one I want to emphasize, which is that, think about where we began. We began with the idea that meritocracy is a virtuous system that gives everybody a fair shot at success. And then we described the ways in which the rich buy education for their children that is really a form of structural exclusion of the middle class and the working class. Now what meritocracy says, if you’re middle class and working class, it says, the reason you didn’t get ahead is that you individually failed to measure up, that it’s your problem. You didn’t work hard enough, you’re not talented enough, when, in fact, it’s that there was a structural system that excluded you. But if you’re told your own struggles are your fault and your inadequacy, then a demagogue who comes in and says, no, no, no, the system is against you is going to be extremely appealing. And what’s happening in our politics now is that the anger of people who are excluded structurally, and then the economic injuries, coupled with the moral insult — they’re told it’s their fault — are understandably frustrated and lashing out. And they’re lashing out in politics. And they’re lashing out in their personal lives. The opioid epidemic is very much related to this. This is a kind of self-medication for people who are deprived of opportunity, and then told us it’s their fault. So a lot of these problems are the result of the extremely dark internal moral and psychological workings of the kind of inequality that we have.

SREENIVASAN: Daniel Markovits, thanks so much.

MARKOVITS: Listen, thank you so much for this. It has been a real pleasure.