The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

by Daniel Markovits

Meritocratic inequality might free the rich in consumption, but it enslaves them in production.

A recent applicant to Yale College, seeking to signal her intellectual seriousness and devotion to study, used her college essay to boast that once while speaking to an especially admired French teacher in high school, she urinated on herself rather than break off intellectual conversation in order to go to the bathroom. The pressure to broadcast accomplishment so pervades elite college culture that students give the practice names—for example, Stanford’s “Duck Syndrome,” chosen on account of the contrast between a duck’s smooth glide when viewed from above water and the frantically churning legs that propel the duck below.

But the principal mechanisms behind snowballing meritocratic inequality involve individually innocent choices—to educate children, to work industriously, and to innovate—that accumulate and feed on themselves, in ways that cause collective harm. Highlighting individual actions ignores the deeper structures within which people act. Emphasizing personal morality neglects politics.