140 foreign affairs
NICHOLAS LEMANN is Joseph Pulitzer II and
Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism at
and Dean Emeritus of the Columbia Journalism
School. His books include Transaction Man: The
Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American
Dream and The Big Test: The Secret History of
the American Meritocracy.
Unmerited
Inequality and the New Elite
Nicholas Lemann
The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s
Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality,
Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours
the Elite
BY DANIEL MARKOVITS. Penguin
Press, 2019, 448 pp.
A
bout 25 years ago, I spent a
memorable afternoon in London
with Michael Young, the author
of the strange 1958 dystopian novel in
the form of a dissertation called The Rise
of the Meritocracy, which introduced that
term into the English language. In the
United States, for years, people have liked
to insist that wherever they work or go to
school is a meritocracy, meaning, roughly,
that they understand it as an open compe-
tition in which the most deserving
succeed. Americans assume meritocracy
to be an unalloyed good; the term implies
a contrast to some past system or an era
when success went instead to lazy inheri-
tors, timeservers, or adept players of
office politics.
Young, however, wanted not to
celebrate meritocracy but to warn the
world against it. He had the detached
air of someone who has quietly noticed
everything, and a sense of humor so
bone-dry that most people missed it. By
the time I met him, he was Baron
Young of Dartington—an oft-noted irony.
But intellectually, he was a creature of
the post–World War II British Labour
Party, in which he served as an important
adviser on education, and of the impov-
erished East End, where he did his socio-
logical research. He had been involved in
the great expansion of the state-run
school system after the war, which was an
aspect of the broader socialist project
aimed at creating structured mass oppor-
tunity for the first time in British
history. It was in keeping with the tenor
of the time that this effort relied on
administering intelligence tests to masses
of 11-year-olds, who were then each
directed into what was, essentially, a
blue-collar or a white-collar educational
track and who would, when they were a
few years older, take another set of
exams that would anoint a small cohort
as bound for higher education.
Young assumed that this would be a
fair system—that what the tests meas-
ured was “merit,” something crucial and
immutable. But its results forced him
to confront the question of whether there
was any real moral difference between
the new, deserving upper class and the
older, undeserving one. He concluded
that meritocracy functioned as a justifi-
cation for a new and especially harsh
class system and that therefore he
preferred the old elite. As a socialist, his
primary commitment was not to equal
opportunity but to just plain equality,
and he foresaw that what he had decided
to call “meritocracy” would make equal-
ity harder to sell, since it would provide
a supposedly scientific justification for