UnmeritedJanuary/February 2020 143
worse than the plain fact of an aristocracy-
to-meritocracy-to-aristocracy dynamic
would indicate. The old aristocracy
presided over a “classless society,” he
writes, a near paradise of middle-class
prosperity and opportunity. The new
meritocrats, who on graduation quickly
become extravagantly paid “superordi-
nate workers” in fields such as finance
and law, have created “a stagnant,
depleted, and shrinking world” for the
middle class by redefining economic
value in terms that reward the kinds of
labor only they, the meritocrats, perform
and by pulling an increasing proportion
of all economic activity into their
purview and away from everyone else’s.
To Markovits, because of what the
meritocrats have done to American
society, there is hardly any difference
these days between the middle class and
the poor: “Meritocracy remakes the
middle class as a lumpenproletariat.”
The United States now features a
bipolar labor market, “epitomized by
Walmart greeters and Goldman Sachs
bankers.” And the meritocrats don’t even
get to enjoy feasting on the carrion of
the good society they have ruined,
because they are working too hard: “A
brilliant vortex of training, skill, indus-
try, and income holds elites in thrall,
bending them from earliest childhood
through retirement to an unrelenting
discipline of meritocratic production
that alienates superordinate workers from
their labor, so that they exploit rather
than fulfill themselves and eventually
lose authentic ambitions that they might
never fulfill.” A meritocrat can’t go into
“teaching,... or journalism, public
service, or even engineering,” because to
do so would mean “sacrificing her own,
and her children’s, caste.”in 2015, which he began by assuring his
listeners of their preeminence. “You
are sitting here today because you ranked
among the top three-tenths of one
percent of a massive, meritocratic compe-
tition,” he said, “in which all the com-
petitors conspicuously agree about which
is the biggest prize.” But the system
that produced them, he added, had been
“a catastrophe for our broader society.”
This blending of status consciousness
and stinging social critique is deeply
woven into the fabric of the institution.
The story Markovits tells isn’t so
different from the one that Richard
Herrnstein and Charles Murray laid out,
controversially, in The Bell Curve in
1994, except that Markovits vigorously
insists that the special qualities of merito-
crats result from their upbringing and
their own efforts rather than from inher-
ited traits. But in both versions of this tale,
there existed a baseline period, before
sat-based admissions, when Ivy League
students were not especially bright and
when, conversely, potential meritocrats
were scattered randomly across the class
system. Then came a dramatic change in
admission policies at elite universities,
which led to the displacement of the old
American upper class by a new, more
deserving one. The resulting meritocratic
elite efficiently replicates itself through
campus-based “assortative mating,”
ruthless residential and social self-
segregation, and high-pressure child-
rearing practices. Therefore, Markovits
writes, “American meritocracy has
become precisely what it was invented to
combat: a mechanism for the concentra-
tion and dynastic transmission of wealth,
privilege, and caste across generations.”
The consequences of these develop-
ments, in Markovits’s account, are even