146 foreign affairs
Nicholas Lemann
middle-class parents probably believe.
Anyway, isn’t shoring up the middle
class, rather than providing access to
membership in the elite, Markovits’s
larger mission?
Rising inequality and the stalled
progress of the middle class are the
preoccupying problems of American
society today, and most of the possible
solutions offered by politicians, intellec-
tuals, academics, and activists don’t
involve meritocracy at all. Markovits
suggests changes in the notoriously
regressive payroll tax and redistributing
work in ways that support “mid-skilled
production.” But these fall far short of
the grand effort, on the scale of the New
Deal, that he plausibly insists would be
necessary to address the situation
successfully. Because he is so focused on
selling the distinctiveness of his ap-
proach, he tends to ignore or under-
rate the many other possible remedies
that are part of the national conversa-
tion right now. These include enhanced
antitrust policies (a concentration of
economic power and inequality go
together), wealth taxes, higher income
tax rates in the top brackets, and signifi-
cant enhancements to the basic welfare-
state package of public education, health
care, and old-age pensions. Ninety
percent of young American adults now go
to college, but their completion rates are
parlously low—60 percent for those
pursing a bachelor’s degree and 30
percent for those pursuing an associate’s
degree at a community college. Both
those degrees are strongly correlated with
higher lifetime incomes and lower
unemployment rates. Enhancing teaching
and advising so as to improve college
completion rates would be a good way to
expand opportunities for most Americans.sities that the great majority of U.S.
students attend. Circulation mobility in
the United States, contrary to American
mythology, has never been appreciably
higher than in Europe, and it hasn’t
changed much over the years.
OUTSIDE THE IVORY TOWER
If one believes that the overall social and
economic conditions of the United States
have been produced by meritocracy, then
it’s natural to look to meritocracy as the
zone where reforms should take place.
Markovits proposes to solve the larger
problems of the country by taking away
private universities’ tax deductions unless
they draw half their students from the
bottom two-thirds of the income distri-
bution; he believes this would force them
to expand their enrollment. The narrow-
ness of this remedy is a sign of how
little space the nonelite, non-university
world takes up in Markovits’s vision.
There is very little politics or economics
or history in The Meritocracy Trap—only
the cascading effects of changes in elite
college admissions, which explain practi-
cally everything.
Even within higher education, Mar-
kovits’s scope is strikingly limited. Public
universities, plagued by low graduation
rates and large cuts in funding, might be
a plausible place to look if one wants to
enhance opportunity and promote
equality, but they are hardly mentioned
in the book. “The thought that a generic
ba constitutes a general ticket of admis-
sion into the elite is... a midcentury
idea,” Markovits writes dismissively. But
the data clearly show that getting any
college degree meaningfully improves
one’s life chances and that the difference
in value between an elite degree and a
“generic ba” is less than most upper-