UnmeritedJanuary/February 2020 141
CASTE OF CHARACTERS
Young was sort of kidding about the
threat meritocracy posed. Markovits
most definitely is not. He attributes to
meritocracy a very high level of social
and economic damage—maybe not on a
level with what Soviet communism
wreaked in Russia, but not entirely out
of that range. The charge can’t be
evaluated without first defining “meri-
tocracy” precisely, which isn’t so easy.
Like all social systems, the one that
Markovits describes was made and not
born. His righteous rage against it is
powered by a sense of betrayal, or
promises unkept: as he puts it, “Despite
the motives that led to its adoption,
meritocracy no longer promotes equality
of social and economic opportunity, as it
was intended and expected to do.” But
historically, it was neither intended nor
expected to do that. The founders of the
system Markovits’s book examines did
not have the word “meritocracy” avail-
able to them, because Young hadn’t yet
written his book at the time when they
were devising it. They also did not think
they were addressing the problem of
opportunity in the United States. The
British Education Act of 1944 was aimed
at expanding the state-run educational
system. The American meritocracy,
launched at roughly the same time, had a
narrower purpose: to use iq tests as an
admission device for elite undergraduate
institutions, as a way of changing the
character of those schools and creating a
new breed of high-level technocrats.
If the system had a father, it was
James Bryant Conant, the president of
Harvard University from 1933 to 1953,
whom Markovits mentions only in
passing. It was Conant who arranged for
the sat, an adapted iq test, to becomeinequality. “To be good, a society must
have a fault,” he told me. The United
Kingdom’s fault was a class system based
on inheritance, which made the country
a propitious environment for midcen-
tury Labour socialism; the new meritoc-
racy that Labour was creating would be
much less propitious. The Rise of the
Meritocracy ends by telling us that its
author, a scholar named Michael Young,
has regrettably been killed in a bloody
mass uprising against the meritocrats.
In the current moment of global
populist, nationalist, and socialist revolts
against elites, this scenario seems pre-
scient. And yet in his new book, The
Meritocracy Trap, the legal scholar Daniel
Markovits rather ungenerously insists
that “Young’s satire missed its mark by a
mile.” By that, Markovits means two
things: that Young failed to understand
that meritocracy is itself actually based
on the circumstances of birth rather
than merit, and that his idea that meri-
tocracy was something to be avoided, not
embraced, never caught on. Quite the
reverse happened: in Markovits’s
maximally bleak view, meritocracy has
ruined American life. By presenting
itself as a means of providing equal
opportunity, it has preemptively shut
down opposition; it pushes inequality
to ever-higher levels; it serves as an
efficient mechanism for the inheritance,
rather than the upending, of privilege;
and it turns even its relatively small
number of beneficiaries into miserable,
relentlessly pressured workaholics who
have to expend most of their large
incomes on their children’s private
schools and tutors. Markovits’s picture
of American society is so lurid, so
inexorably dark, that it invites skepti-
cism more than it persuades.