Nicholas Lemann
144 foreign affairs
fortunes not based on landownership.
And universities such as Harvard,
Princeton, and Yale were already well
on their way to being considered among
the best in the world, decades before they
had altered their admission policies.
A better way of thinking about the
change in Ivy League admissions is as a
chapter—and not one with “no histori-
cal precedent,” as Markovits claims—in
the never-ending recalibration of the
membership criteria for this particular
corner of the American elite. Owen
Johnson’s 1912 young-adult novel, Stover
at Yale, a bible of sorts for generations of
Old Blues, depicts a fanatically competi-
tive college culture but with a narrow
group of participants and a set of stan-
dards that attributed much less impor-
tance to academic achievement than to
factors such as “character” and “leader-
ship,” which were hard to define but
nonetheless palpable to the students at
the time. Kingman Brewster, Jr., the
president of Yale for most of the 1960s
and 1970s, whom Markovits credits with
bringing meritocracy to the university,
dialed up the importance of academic
criteria and tried to include groups such
as African Americans and women but
didn’t entirely scrap the old system, either.
Brewster used to say that the alternative
to the changes he was pushing was that
Yale would become merely “a finishing
school on Long Island Sound”—meaning
that he was preserving its importance,
not remaking the entire U.S. political
economy and opportunity structure.FINAL GRADE: INCOMPLETE
The Meritocracy Trap gives the impres-
sion that today, the superprosperous
one percent is essentially conterminous
with the new class of Ivy LeagueTHE BAD OLD DAYS?
Markovits is hardly the first writer to
notice that inequality is rising and middle-
class incomes are stagnating in the United
States. What’s distinctive about his
argument is the direct causal link he draws
between a change in the admission
policies of a handful of elite universities
and, a few decades later, a tableau of
vast, nearly hopeless social and economic
ruin. He regularly makes the connection
simply by using the phrase “meritocratic
inequality” as a synonym for “inequality.”
That certainly gets the reader’s attention,
but it’s also highly tendentious.
The first problem with Markovits’s
version of the world is that the pre-
meritocratic society he conjures up is
more a projection than a rigorously
established historical fact. He asserts that
in an earlier era, the elites were “dull,
sluggish, and inert” people who didn’t
work hard—“lazy rentiers who deployed
inherited wealth and power to exploit
subordinate labor.” The top universities
they attended were characterized by
“uncompetitive mediocrity.” Their
education “had no compelling purpose.”
These are pleasing thoughts if one
happens to be a meritocrat, but they are
very difficult to prove, partly because
pre-meritocrats were not evaluated with
standardized tests. American popular
culture in the pre-meritocracy period was
full of hagiographies of economic titans,
but they were self-made industrialists,
not landed gentry: Andrew Carnegie,
Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. Even
more plausibly aristocratic (but hardly
lazy) types, such as Henry Adams and
Edith Wharton, were exquisitely aware
by the early twentieth century that their
class’s preeminence was being threatened
by uncouth people with newly acquired