The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Sociological Curate’s Egg

Meritocracy is, according to Markovits, the only game in town. It’s a rigged game, of course, in which winners win because they have won before. Thomas Piketty’s analysis of the inevitability of capital concentration applies as much to social capital as it does to monetary and physical wealth. Advantage is given to the advantaged. To those who have will be given more. This is the argument of The Meritocracy Trap. But I think there is a less visible if no less desperate game that is culturally just as important. Not taking this into account makes the book myopic and misleading.

Markovits believes that everyone plays, and that everyone loses in his game. According to him, Meritocracy means “middle-class children lose out to rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work.”But also, “Meritocracy entices an anxious and inauthentic elite into a pitiless, lifelong contest to secure income and status through its own excessive industry.” So that “meritocracy now divides the elite from the middle class. It drives the middle class to resent the establishment and seduces the elite to cling to the corrupt prerogatives of caste.” Merit is a dirty word; it is toxic, lacks virtue, and is politically incorrect.

I think Markovits makes some valuable observations about modern society. But I also think he claims too much for his theory of the Meritocracy and it’s cultural dominance. At the insistence of my wife, I have just spent six months watching the 215 episodes of the US television series The Middle. The Middle is a saga of a middle class white American family, the Heck’s, played out over nine years in a middling sized town in the geographic middle of the continent. It is well scripted, consistently well-acted, sociologically authentic... and entirely tragic. But not as the result of the influence of the Meritocracy.

According to the series, in agreement with Markovits, the middle is not a comfortable place to be. The Heck Family is squeezed between the criminal underclass of the town, by whom they are threatened, and the local petty capitalists, by whom they are employed, and therefore also threatened. Although working (at one point the adults have four jobs), and living in a respectable suburb, the family exists on an economic razor’s edge. Even the slightest perturbation in the routine of the household - a faulty appliance, a loose roof tile, a minor medical emergency - throws it out of economic orbit. When the kitchen sink self-destructs, they do the dishes in the bathtub for several months because they haven’t the funds (or the energy) for repair.

The one word description of their existence is ‘hapless.’ They neither plan nor attempt to anticipate the future. They live on a diet of junk food and short-dated groceries from the local discount store. Mother is affectionately incompetent, Father is emotionally unavailable and resigned, the Children are self-centred, continuously squabbling oddballs who respond, usually too late, to the demands of their own lives by blaming the parents. Both family life and the house itself are in a constant state of chaos. They obey the law, pay their taxes, attend church, and are civil to the neighbours, even the unlikeable ones.

For the most part, the family are effectively alienated from the social and economic competition of modern life. Although the parents have been to university, their attendance at a state-run institution was motivated by convention rather than ambition. Father is content as the manager of a small quarry, Mother as a sometime (incompetent) used-car salesperson and dental receptionist who tries to scam the system in trivial ways, usually unsuccessfully. The children are similarly unmotivated either toward academic advancement or economic improvement. They each have their ‘interests’ but no signs of maturing purpose. Their children, in turn, will have the same attitudes (as revealed in the last episode).

This is multi-generational life entirely outside the Meritocracy. The Meritocracy thinks of the Heck family as the losers, or more accurately since they are not competitors, Meritocracy’s collateral damage, who don’t appear to know that there is a sociological game afoot in which they have no chance of competing much less winning. Their apparent haplessness is really ignorance of how the meritocratic world works. Theirs is a self-perpetuating world of unexpected event and unplanned response. They feel vaguely downtrodden by the system but can’t be anymore articulate about their condition, neither to themselves nor to their children. They know their failure but can’t pinpoint its origin and are not concerned more than that.

These people are objectively disadvantaged but not in terms of the usual genetic reasons - race, gender, physical deformity, ethnicity, or natural gifts. They are marginalised as non-participants who have no experience in the game. Able to ‘get by,’ but unable to hope much less aspire to anything else. As such they are the essential foundation of 21st century capitalism, the modern proletariat. Without them the Meritocracy would cease to function as a coherent society. The race for exam results, certificates, degrees, professional titles, and other credentials goes on in a parallel world around them while they flip burgers, answer phones, and sell plumbing supplies.

“Meritocracy speaks in terms and settings so consistent that they fashion a distinctive language, repeated across contexts, again and again—a form of life, familiar to every citizen of the age,” says Markovits. Well, yes and no. The Meritocracy does speak a language of passion, and personal service, and commitment, and human betterment. This is how players of the game recognise each other. It is the equivalent of the Latin of the medieval clerks who were expected to maintain certain articles of faith and express them in the correct way.

But to non-players, the modern laity as it were, such language is meaningless gibberish. Non-players are interested in a steady job not a vocation. They have little interest in saving the world, just paying for their small part of it. By the time non-players realise that the language actually means something, it’s too late to enter the game. They are trapped outside it as much as the players are trapped inside.

Players strive; non-participants float. Each, or at least some proportion of each group, endures their own sort of hell. The first, various sorts of disillusionments and disappointments; the latter, a fog of cultural bewilderment made bearable by non-brand beer and the rituals of American civil religion. But both are where they want to be. As with the old industrial class structures, there is little miscegenation and a considerable pride in one’s ‘roots.’

So if The Middle does contain important insights into modern sociology (and I obviously think it does), Markovits has made an analytical faux pas. Not everyone has been seduced by the promises of the Meritocracy. And those who haven’t been are perfectly alright with that. They live in a world that is a lottery rather than a contest, in which Providence not Competence is the ruling force. And there is a certain comfort in that, an almost Zen attitude that everything will somehow work out as the dice are rolled over and over again.

I doubt if anyone is in a position to decide which is the superior fate - to be controlled by one’s own ephemeral ambitions or by chance. The significant point is that there are at least two ideologies in operation, two games, not one. This is the source of the obvious political polarisation in America. Each considers the other to be adhered to by losers. Markovits characterises one of these ideologies well but ignores, or perhaps can’t even see, the other which is captured in The Middle.

America has more than one founding myth. Before the Enlightenment Deism of the majority of colonial American leadership, and even before the self-creationist Arminianism of the Methodists of the First Great Awakening, and the Baptists of the Second, the strict Calvinism of Puritanism held that striving for betterment was a blasphemous activity. One’s duty was to play out one’s given hand in obedience to divine directives. The thought that merit could improve one’s lot was a heresy. America was founded as a theocracy, a city on a hill of divine resignation. The Heck family, and, I suspect, many other Red State families, are living remnants of this more ancient American myth.

Markovits seems unaware of these other myths of origin and their continuing effects in modern life. Perhaps his lifelong immersion in Meritocracy, in which grace is self-created rather than doled out without any rationality from elsewhere, has created a condescension toward alternative ideologies that limits his understanding of a tragedy not his own. His book is a curate’s egg therefore - good and bad in parts.

View all my reviews