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Although intensive parenting has increased in many societies in recent decades, it is most pronounced in places where inequality is greatest, such as the United States and South Korea, and less prevalent in countries such as Sweden and Japan, where inequality is less acute.
In spite of their economic and social advantages, they experience among the highest rates of depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints, and unhappiness of any group of children in this country. When researchers look at kids across the socioeconomic spectrum, they find that the most troubled adolescents often come from affluent homes.
Compared with the general population, full-time college students are “2.5 times more likely to meet diagnostic criteria of substance abuse or dependence (23% vs. 9%),” and half of all full-time college students report binge drinking and abuse of illegal or prescription drugs.71
The suicide rate among young people (ages 20–24) increased 36 percent from 2000 to 2017; more now die from suicide than homicide.74
Those who tend the levers and pulleys of the meritocracy machine are not unaware of its human costs. In an honest, insightful essay about the risk of burnout, Harvard College admissions officers worried that those who spend their high school and college years jumping through hoops of high achievement wind up as “dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long boot-camp.” The essay, first published in 2000, is still posted, as a kind of cautionary tale, on the Harvard admissions website.
“You jump through this huge hoop of getting into Harvard,” a first-year student told The Harvard Crimson, “and you just want to jump through more to get this adrenaline going again.”
At one well-known law school, faculty members are instructed not to tell students when grades for the previous semester will be released, as experience has shown that advance notice of this momentous event generates too much anxiety.
Rethinking the role of higher education is important, not only to repair the damaged psyches of the privileged but also to repair the polarized civic life that meritocratic sorting has produced.
In seeking to dismantle the sorting machine that Conant set in motion, it is worth noticing that the regime of merit exerts its tyranny in two directions at once. Among those who land on top, it induces anxiety, a debilitating perfectionism, and a meritocratic hubris that struggles to conceal a fragile self-esteem. Among those it leaves behind, it imposes a demoralizing, even humiliating sense of failure.
“You sometimes have the nasty feeling that you could take all the thousands of [applications] … and you could throw them down the stairs, pick up any thousand, and produce as good a class as the one that will come out of the committee meeting.”
Over the past fifteen years, the total amount of student loan debt increased more than fivefold. By 2020, it exceeded $1.5 trillion.98
Sawhill points out that economically advanced countries spend an average of 0.5 percent of GDP on active labor market programs. France, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark spend more than 1 percent of GDP on such programs. The U.S. spends only about 0.1 percent—less than we spend on prisons.101
Lasch makes the broader point that the egalitarian character of American society in the nineteenth century was less about social mobility than about the general diffusion of intelligence and learning across all classes and vocations.106 This is the kind of equality that meritocratic sorting destroys.
There is no reason to suppose that aspiring nurses and plumbers are less suited to the art of democratic argument than aspiring management consultants.
Ungenerous to the losers and oppressive to the winners, merit becomes a tyrant.
From the end of World War II to the 1970s, it was possible for those without a college degree to find good work, support a family, and lead a comfortable middle-class life. This is far more difficult today. Over the past four decades, the earnings difference between college and high school graduates—what economists call the “college premium”—has doubled. In 1979, college graduates made about 40 percent more than high school graduates; by the 2000s they made 80 percent more.1
In the late 1970s, CEOs of major American companies made 30 times more than the average worker; by 2014, they made 300 times more.
As the circumstances of work for those without meritocratic credentials became bleak, growing numbers of working-age men dropped out of the labor force altogether.
Of Americans whose highest academic qualification was a high school diploma, only 68 percent were employed in 2017.
Such deaths, which had been mounting for more than a decade, were especially frequent among white adults in middle age. For white men and women aged 45–54, deaths of despair increased threefold from 1990 to 2017.9 By 2014, for the first time, more people in this group were dying of drugs, alcohol, and suicide than from heart disease.10
But by 2016, more Americans were dying each year from drug overdose than died during the entire Vietnam War.
Case and Deaton discovered that “the increase in deaths of despair was almost all among those without a bachelor’s degree. Those with a four-year degree are mostly exempt; it is those without a degree who are most at risk.”
If you have a bachelor’s degree, your risk of dying in middle age is only one quarter of the risk facing those without a college diploma.14
By 2017, men without a bachelor’s degree were three times more likely than college graduates to die deaths of despair.
quotes W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in 1935: “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.” Unlike African Americans, white working-class citizens were “admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best public schools.”25 This “public and psychological wage” is what today goes by the name of “white privilege.”
Liberal elites who “feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism” are right to condemn the racism.26 But they fail to see how attributing “white privilege” to disempowered white working-class men and women is galling; it ignores their struggle to win honor and recognition in a meritocratic order that has scant regard for the skills they have to offer.
You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward.
Robert F. Kennedy, seeking his party’s nomination for president in 1968, understood this. The pain of unemployment was not simply that the jobless lacked an income but that they were deprived of the opportunity to contribute to the common good. “Unemployment means having nothing to do—which means having nothing to do with the rest of us,” he explained. “To be without work, to be without use to one’s fellow citizens, is to be in truth the Invisible Man of whom Ralph Ellison wrote.”
But what these voters want even more is a greater measure of contributive justice—an opportunity to win the social recognition and esteem that go with producing what others need and value.
It falls to politics to reconcile our identities as consumers and as producers. But the globalization project sought to maximize economic growth, and hence the welfare of consumers, with little regard for the effect of outsourcing, immigration, and financialization on the well-being of producers. The elites who presided over globalization not only failed to address the inequality it generated; they also failed to appreciate its corrosive effect on the dignity of work.
The value of our contribution depends instead on the moral and civic importance of the ends our efforts serve.
Aristotle argued that human flourishing depends on realizing our nature through the cultivation and exercise of our abilities. The American republican tradition taught that certain occupations—first agriculture, then artisan labor, then free labor broadly understood—cultivate the virtues that equip citizens for self-rule.
One day our society will come to respect the sanitation workers if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.43
In short, Hegel argued that the capitalist organization of work emerging in his time could be ethically justified only on two conditions, described succinctly by Honneth: “first, it must provide a minimum wage; second, it must give all work activities a shape that reveals them to be a contribution to the common good.”47
Unlike Smith, Keynes, and many present-day economists, Hegel and Durkheim did not see work mainly as a means to the end of consumption. Instead, they argued that work, at its best, is a socially integrating activity, an arena of recognition, a way of honoring our obligation to contribute to the common good.
Cass rightly points out that this way of framing the globalization debate casts the “highly skilled, college-educated ‘winners’ of the modern economy” as open-minded and their critics as closed-minded, as if questioning the free flow of goods, capital, and people across national borders were a kind of bigotry. It is hard to imagine a more condescending way of defending neoliberal globalization to those it leaves behind.55
The financial industry today looms large in advanced economies, having grown dramatically during the past several decades. In the United States, its share of GDP has nearly tripled since the 1950s, and by 2008, it claimed more than 30 percent of corporate profits. Its employees make 70 percent more than comparably qualified workers in other industries.57
This would not be a problem if all this financial activity were productive, if it increased the economy’s ability to produce valuable goods and services. But this is not the case. Even at its best, finance is not productive in itself.
What it means, in simple terms, is that the complex derivatives and other financial instruments devised by Wall Street in recent decades actually hurt the economy more than they helped it.
High-speed trading is not the only financial innovation of dubious economic value; credit default swaps that enable speculators to bet on future prices without investing in any productive activity are hard to distinguish from casino gambling. One party wins and the other loses, money changes hands, but no investment occurs along the way. When companies use profits to buy back shares instead of investing in research and development, or in new equipment, shareholders gain but the productive capacity of the company does not.
In 1984, as financialization was starting to take off, James Tobin, the distinguished Yale economist, offered a prescient warning of the “casino aspect of our financial markets.” He worried “that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity.”
Economically, it suggests that much financial activity hinders rather than promotes economic growth. Morally and politically, it reveals a vast discrepancy between the rewards the market bestows on finance and the value of its contribution to the common good. This discrepancy, along with the disproportionate prestige accorded those engaged in speculative pursuits, mocks the dignity of those who earn a living producing useful goods and services in the real economy.
Generally speaking, this would mean shifting the tax burden from work to consumption and speculation. A radical way of doing so would be to lower or even eliminate payroll taxes and to raise revenue instead by taxing consumption, wealth, and financial transactions.
Warren Buffett, and other critics of unproductive financialization,
All this finance has not made us more prosperous. Instead, it has deepened inequality and ushered in more financial crises, which destroy massive amounts of economic value each time they happen. Far from being a help to our economy, finance has become a hindrance. More finance isn’t increasing our economic growth—it is slowing it.
My proposal to replace some or all of the payroll tax with a financial transactions tax—a “sin tax,” in effect, on casino-like speculation that does not help the real economy—is intended as one way of framing such a debate.
Social well-being … depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It implies the existence, not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a high level of general culture, and a strong sense of common interests.… Individual happiness does not only require that men should be free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinction; it also requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture, whether they rise or not.4
The answer to this question depends on recognizing that, for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient; finding ourselves in a society that prizes our talents is our good fortune, not our due. A lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain humility: “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I.” Such humility is the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart. It points beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.
