423: The Meritocracy Trap: How the Myth Feeds Inequality with Daniel Markovits
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Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2020
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
The Meritocracy Trap: How the Myth Feeds Inequality
with Daniel Markovits
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Every year I live outside the U.S. I’m able to better understand my culture simply due to my physical distance from it. I notice things like promiscuous use of peanut butter and cinnamon in American foods, the endless sports and war metaphors in colloquial language, the ubiquitous nostalgia for the post-World War II family life, and the universal belief that every underdog has a chance to go all the way up.
Meritocracy.
Study hard, work hard, and show up year-after-year, and you can be just about anything you want to be. In the 1950s, that was somewhat true. Today, the schism between the have and have-nots is so vast that in many cases, no amount of hard work or earned street cred will give you equal access to opportunity.
If you're dealt an unlucky hand, as most people are, your options are limited by gatekeepers you’ll never meet, schools and jobs you’ll never have access to. More perplexing still, if you’re dealt a lucky hand, as I was, and if you play your cards right, you enlist into a lifetime of self-sacrifice, ridiculously long work days, and an almost guaranteed inability to enjoy the so-called privileged life you lead.
Why? Because you’re working all the time.
Meritocracy, like any ideology, sounds amazing on paper, but falls flat in the real world. It’s as mythical as a unicorn. Catch me if you can. On this week’s show, you’ll meet researcher and writer, Daniel Morkovits, who shares his findings on just how broken this meritocratic system is today.
Listen & Learn:
- How average CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978 while typical worker compensation has risen only 12% during that same time
- How elite education, more than any other factor, acts as the gating factor into the ruling class
- How the best universities brag about sub-10% acceptance rates, essentially engineering an elite class
- How middle-level jobs are getting completely eliminated by technology leaving only the ruling and working classes on either end of the spectrum
- How the meritocracy myth is not just unfair, but potentially dangerous as it threatens the safety and happiness of both the haves and have-nots.
Links & Resources
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Daniel Markovits holds degrees from Yale, London School of Economics and Oxford. He’s on the faculty at Yale Law School, where he publishes on the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioural economics. His latest book is, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | After living abroad now for 17 years I always say that every year that goes by I feel more and more American |
| 0:10.0 | Even though I haven't been in the States and so so long and is probably not true. |
| 0:14.4 | I'm probably not more and more American and yet I really hold on to my roots which I think is very typical of an expatriate |
| 0:20.8 | experience. For me one of the core ideologies of American culture is |
| 0:25.5 | meritocracy this idea that if you work hard you can pull yourself up by your |
| 0:30.1 | bootstraps you can be anything you can be born on the south side of Chicago and you can end up in the White House you can be born your anything is possible the world is your oyster regs to riches anyone can do it and if you |
| 0:45.5 | roll back the clock in the US you go back 20 30 50 years the further you go back the |
| 0:52.0 | more true this is to some extent you can't go too far back, |
| 0:55.0 | but let's say you go back 50 years, there really was a relatively equal access to opportunity, |
| 1:01.8 | specifically in the form of education, which is what we'll be talking about today. |
| 1:06.2 | If you look at the landscape of America today, we don't have equal opportunity, we don't have equal access to education |
| 1:14.1 | someone born on the eighth mile let's use that same example and somebody born in |
| 1:17.4 | Pacific Palisades they just have very very different access to education which |
| 1:22.2 | very quickly stacks and compounds access to to the point where the haves and the have-nots, the difference in 1950 or 60 or 70 compared to today |
| 1:38.0 | are just so dramatic the amount of education, wealth and power that the haves have, compared to what the have-nots |
| 1:46.0 | don't, creates this schism where we have civil unrest, where we have crazy political polarization where we have violence where we just |
| 1:54.5 | seems like nobody understands each other and maybe that's fundamentally true. |
| 1:58.9 | The challenge is what do you do when things become this polarized what do you do when |
| 2:04.4 | things are this split what do you do when there just isn't equal opportunity |
| 2:09.1 | it just isn't happening I certainly don't have the answer to that question, but I think it's an important |
| 2:15.0 | one to chat about my guest on this week's show is Daniel Markovitz who has written a book called |
| 2:20.4 | the meritocracy trap all about this myth that you can in fact pull yourself up by |
... |
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