UnmeritedJanuary/February 2020 145
based on hours worked (which is how
Markovits suggests that all meritocrats
are paid) and instead consists of bonuses
based on measurable economic perfor-
mance—traders, fund managers, and the
like? What about meritocrats who have
somehow managed to do something they
enjoy that doesn’t pay boatloads of
money? What about meritocrats whose
children go to college but not to Ivy
League schools? Readers of The Meritoc-
racy Trap might be surprised to learn
that 65 percent of Yale’s current sopho-
more class went to public school and that
only 11 percent were admitted owing to
a “legacy affiliation,” such as being the
child of an alumnus.
Outside the tight confines of elite
education, the broader social order that
Markovits calls “meritocracy” comprises
three distinct concepts that he lumps
together: equality (that is, how evenly
distributed income and wealth are),
mass mobility (whether conditions are
improving for the whole society), and
circulation mobility (how efficiently
socioeconomic status is passed on from
parents to children). It’s possible that
changes in elite college admissions
would affect none of those, because the
numbers involved are too small to move
the needle in a country of more than
325 million people. Other possible causes
of the “great compression” of income
inequality during the third quarter of the
twentieth century include high marginal
tax rates on the rich, widespread union-
ization, and a heavily regulated economy
that made what is now called “disrup-
tion” difficult. During that period, mass
mobility was driven by a growing
economy and a substantial expansion in
access to higher education, mainly in
the relatively unselective public univer-graduates and that all of them face the
kinds of punishing work schedules main-
tained by Markovits’s former students
who bill 2,000 hours a year at white-shoe
law firms. They dominate the business
world. Their money and status are a
reward for their superiority—“no prior
elite has ever been as capable or as indus-
trious as the meritocratic elite”—and
therefore, “to deny that meritocrats earn
and deserve their income seems to
require denying that anyone ever earns
or deserves anything.”
A theory is supposed to be predictive
and testable, but Markovits often falls
into the post hoc fallacy when presenting
evidence for his: if anybody does any-
thing amazingly productive, it must mean
that person is a meritocrat, regardless of
his or her educational background. He
claims, for example, that “the cascading
innovations behind the managerial revolu-
tion did not arise spontaneously. Instead,
they were all—every one—generated
from within meritocracy, by... workers
coming out of America’s newly merito-
cratic schools and universities.” Because
his meritocrats apply their nearly
superhuman talent and resources to the
fullest extent to raising their children in
a meritocratic hothouse, whatever they
have, the next generation will surely
have, too.
The mind teems with objections to
these extravagant assertions. Aren’t there
any members of the one percent who
inherited their money, or who started
their own businesses, or who invest for a
living? Aren’t there people who work at
the Wall Street and Big Law bastions
that Markovits identifies with meritoc-
racy who didn’t go to Ivy League schools?
What about people whose main compen-
sation does not take the form of salaries