The Meritocracy Trap Quotes

“American meritocracy has become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth, privilege, and caste across generations. A social and economic hierarchy with these comprehensive, dynastic, and self-referential qualities has a name: an aristocracy. And meritocracy does not dismantle but rather renovates aristocracy, fashioning a new caste order, contrived for a world in which wealth consists not in land or factories but rather in human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Meritocracy sustains dynasties by reconstructing the family on the model of the firm, the household on the model of the workplace, and the child on the model of the product.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Meritocracy’s promise of equality—the theory that anyone can succeed simply by excelling, because meritocratic universities admit students based on academic achievement and employers hire workers based on skill—proves false in practice.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Data sliced sufficiently finely begin once again to tell stories. The top 1 percent of the income distribution—representing household incomes in excess of roughly $475,000—comprises only about 1.5 million households. If one adds up the numbers of vice presidents or above at S&P 1500 companies (perhaps 250,000), professionals in the finance sector, including in hedge funds, venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and mutual funds (perhaps 250,000), professionals working at the top five management consultancies (roughly 60,000), partners at law firms whose profits per partner exceed $400,000 (roughly 25,000), and specialist doctors (roughly 500,000), this yields perhaps 1 million people. These are surely not all one-percenters, but they are all plausibly parts of the top 1 percent, and this group might comprise half—a sizable share—of 1 percent households overall. At the very least, the people in these known and named jobs constitute a material, rather than just marginal or eccentric, part of the top 1 percent of the income distribution. They are also, of course, the people depicted in journalistic accounts of extreme jobs—the people who regularly cancel vacation plans, spend most of their time on the road, live in unfurnished luxury apartments, and generally subsume themselves in work, encountering their personal lives only occasionally, and as strangers.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“The traditional way of thinking about the conflict between the rich and the rest—as a battle between capital and labor—no longer captures what is really going on.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Clark cast Yale’s new admissions standards as “a statement, really, about what leadership was going to be in the country and where leaders were going to come from.” The old elite understood this and tried to fight back. Yale’s admissions officers received frosty receptions at prep schools that had once embraced them. Alumni grumbled—as in William F. Buckley’s complaint that the new standards would prefer “a Mexican-American from El Paso High . . . [over] . . . Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.” A rump of Yale’s corporation resisted: when Clark made a presentation to the corporation about constructing a new American elite based on merit rather than birth, one member interjected, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“First, private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless they draw at least half of their students from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And second, schools should be encouraged (including through public subsidies) to meet this requirement by expanding enrollments.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“The richest 1 percent of Americans contribute more to political campaigns than the bottom 75 percent combined.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“First, private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless they draw at least half of their students from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And second, schools should be encouraged (including through public subsidies) to meet this requirement by expanding enrollments. Together, these reforms would exchange meritocracy’s exclusive, narrow, and profligately educated elite for an inclusive, broad, and yet still well-educated replacement. The reforms would spread the wealth that the meritocratic inheritance now concentrates, distributing “elite” education across a wider population and at the same time improving education generally by reducing the strain on resources outside the elite. In this way, they would dramatically shrink the educational gap between the rich and the rest.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“First, education—now concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents—must become open and inclusive. Admissions must become less competitive, and training less all-consuming, even at the best schools and universities. Second, work—now divided into gloomy and glossy jobs—must return mid-skilled labor to the center of economic production. Industry that is now concentrated in a superordinate working class must be dispersed widely across a broad middle class.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“When they focus on identity politics and poverty relief, progressives dismiss middle-class discontent as special pleading. For progressives, middle-class longing for the affluence and security that St. Clair Shores provided at midcentury—for unchallenged abundance—is just nostalgia for a form of life that is no longer viable, or even for lost (white, male) privilege. In effect, this tells the middle class that it cannot measure up.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Populists may not restore the middle class’s past glories, but they recognize that a form of life has been lost. They dignify the loss as a moral cost and place it at the center of their politics.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“The average finance worker now makes 70 percent more than average workers in other sectors (the college wage premium in finance nearly doubles that for other workers). And finance workers dominate the ranks of the really rich. Today, elite finance workers’ enormous incomes exacerbate economic inequality, increasing the needs that finance serves.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“For every 1 percent rise in the ratio of college graduates to nongraduates in a city, rents increase by 0.6 percent.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“On the one hand, the most elite, highest-paying jobs in the economy belong among the most male-dominated. Only about 14 percent of the top executives (and just about 8 percent of the highest earners) in Fortune 500 companies are women, and more than a quarter of these companies have no women in top management; Wall Street remains overwhelmingly male-dominated; women make up only 18 percent of equity partners at American law firms; and the gender pay gap among doctors has widened in recent years.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Meritocracy’s essential logic concentrates advantage and then frames disadvantage in terms of individual defects of skill and effort, as a failure to measure up. This explains the otherwise mysterious anger and contempt that increasingly overwhelm society: the populism that engulfs politics, even during an economic expansion, and the self-inflicted deaths (from addiction, overdose, and suicide) that increase overall mortality, even without plague or war.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“just as toil was the antithesis of dignity in an aristocratic world that worshiped leisure, so idleness has become the antithesis of dignity today in a meritocratic world that worships industry. Gloomy jobs beget gloomy lives, and the bitter despair and resentment that the meritocracy trap imposes on the middle class draw from roots embedded deep in meritocratic inequality’s economic and social logics.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“just as toil was the antithesis of dignity in an aristocratic world that worshiped leisure, so idleness has become the antithesis of dignity today in a meritocratic world that worships industry.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“A closer look at still more refined educational elites amplifies this pattern. BAs from even modestly higher-ranked schools boost incomes by 10 to 40 percent more than BAs from lower-ranked schools and nearly double the rate of return on the tuition. Super-elite BAs generate still greater income boosts, more than doubling the gains produced by an average BA, and the top incomes from super-elite schools more than triple the incomes of the top earners with average BAs. (The highest-paid 10 percent of Harvard graduates average salaries of $250,000 just six years after graduation.) A recent broader survey reports—incredibly—that nearly 50 percent of America’s corporate leaders, 60 percent of its financial leaders, and 50 percent of its highest government officials attended only twelve universities.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“A closer look at still more refined educational elites amplifies this pattern. BAs from even modestly higher-ranked schools boost incomes by 10 to 40 percent more than BAs from lower-ranked schools and nearly double the rate of return on the tuition. Super-elite BAs generate still greater income boosts, more than doubling the gains produced by an average BA, and the top incomes from super-elite schools more than triple the incomes of the top earners with average BAs.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Children from the richest fifth of households are roughly seven times more likely than children from the poorest fifth to end up in the top quintile of the income distribution as adults, roughly nine times more likely to end up in the top quintile of the wealth distribution, and roughly twelve times more likely to end up in the top quintile of the education distribution.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Today, work divides Americans, in a labor market epitomized by Walmart greeters and Goldman Sachs bankers.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Jeff Bezos, who is the founder and CEO of Amazon and the richest person in modern history, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and in the firm’s early days recruited employees from among American Rhodes Scholars studying at Oxford.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“When fewer workers produce more, wages rise.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Even as meritocracy abolishes the hereditary privilege that sustained aristocratic dynasties, it embraces in education a new dynastic technology of its own. The new elite receives a meritocratic inheritance that transmits privilege, and excludes the middle class from opportunity, as effectively as the old elite’s birthright used to do.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Eight of the ten richest Americans today owe their wealth not to inheritance or to returns on inherited capital but rather to compensation earned through entrepreneurial or managerial labor, paid in the form of founder’s stock or partnership shares. A slightly broader view reveals that the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans has also seen its center of gravity shift away from people who owe their wealth to inherited capital and toward those whose wealth stems (originally) from their own labor. Whereas in the early 1980s, only four in ten of the Forbes 400 were predominantly “self-made,” today nearly seven in ten are. And whereas in 1984, purely inherited fortunes outnumbered purely self-made ones in the list by a factor of ten to one, by 2014, purely self-made fortunes had come to outnumber purely inherited ones.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“By one estimate, the poverty rate in 1949 was 40.5 percent.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“The National Review essay that called white working-class communities “economically . . . negative assets” added that “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“High Church Protestants, Jews, and Hindus are unusually rich and educated, Low Church Protestants are unusually poor and uneducated, and only Catholics mirror all of society.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite