It's great to welcome to the program today.
Daniel Markovits is a professor of law at the Yale Law School and also author of the
book The Meritocracy Trap How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle
Class and Devours the Elite.
Daniel, so great to have you on today.
It's a real pleasure to be here.
Thank you for doing this.
So maybe maybe just to start with let's start with what what maybe is the top line story
that's often told, which is the great thing about America is that it's a meritocracy.
Everybody has a chance at making it if they are whatever enough committed enough if they
want it enough, regardless of background or economic status, et cetera.
How can we evaluate the truth or falsity of that sort of top line story?
Yeah.
Great.
So what you've done is you've identified what makes meritocracy so attractive.
It seems like it gives everybody a fair shot at success if they just have the hard work
and talent.
And it seems that it produces an elite that's really capable because it's proved itself
in competition.
And for a while, meritocracy worked that way in its early years.
It broke up an old hereditary aristocracy.
But then what happened is that people who got to the top through meritocracy themselves
turned out to have an almost unbounded taste and talent for training their children.
And so the elite today invests so much more in educating its children than anybody else
can possibly afford to do.
And education works, which means that when you measure young people based on their academic
accomplishments, it's the kids of rich parents who do best.
And meritocracy then perpetuates itself and creates a new kind of aristocracy just based
on degrees rather than breeding.
And that sort of assumes that there is at least some Zero-Sum nature to elements of
our society and the economy.
Right.
I mean, if one wanted to play devil's advocate, they could say great.
Once someone through their work achieves, they become good at training their kids and
their kids are there, then that's fine.
As long as everybody else is not disadvantaged as a result of that, then it would still be
OK.
Right?
So I think there are two there are two responses to that.
That's I think that's a powerful point.
The first is there is inevitably some zero sum competition so that education is a rank
good.
And the value of my education depends on how much education the person behind me in the
job line has.
But the other deeper point is that this new elite has fundamentally reconstructed the
way our economy works, the way we deliver services, the way we make goods, so that the
new economy privileges specifically the narrow set of elite skills that fancy educations
give and devalues all other skills so that the rich today, when they succeed more, nearly
push everybody else down than drag draw everybody else up.
So if we concede that certainly we don't have a full meritocracy, I think before we explore
some of the specifics in more detail, it might be interesting to consider would have would
a true meritocracy really be the ideal?
And we can approach that from a few different perspectives.
But maybe just I'll start with that question.
What what would be good about an actually meritocratic society and what might be not
so good?
Yeah.
So from my perspective, I want to be clear.
A full meritocracy would not be the ideal.
It would be more nearly a nightmare.
What would be good about it, though?
And it has some good things, is that it would undermine all sorts of hierarchies and inequalities
that are morally awful hierarchies based on race or caste or gender or sexual orientation
or ethnicity.
Those are all despised by meritocracy.
And one of the reasons why meritocracy is so attractive is that it works to undermine
those.
On the other hand, what it would also do is it would create a new hierarchy based on training,
based on how much training your parents could buy for you.
And it would produce incredibly unequal outcomes.
And if there's one lesson of the book that I think is really important to drive home,
it's that the idea that equality of opportunity can make unequal outcomes.
OK.
Is a moral mistake.
And what we need is more equality of outcomes in our world.
Can you say more about that?
Because it might mean that we have, even though my audience is mostly on the left.
I think that there's probably a range of opinions in terms of the degree to which equality of
opportunity would be the goal versus equality of outcome.
Can you talk a little bit more about because equality of outcome can mean a lot of different
things and maybe as to contextualize it.
One of the things that seems immutable in.
Humanity is that there is rarely exact distribution in any field or venture that mirrors the makeup
of society, whether it's in terms of gender, race, age or whatever.
Right.
So if we start with that reality, equality of outcome can sound pretty scary in some
ways.
Yeah, sure.
And it's also important to say I'm not and I don't think anybody's serious is in favor
of absolute equality of outcome.
You know, the way in which, like pro crustless used to chop people off if they were too long
for the bed, he stuck them in that.
That's a deeply dangerous notion.
But right now, we have so much inequality around that it's hard really to recognize
how extreme it is.
The richest one percent of Americans today control a greater share of the nation's income
and wealth than, for example, a comparable elite did in ancient Rome during the era of
imperial decadence.
So we have inequality of outcome that is just extravagantly skewed.
And when that happens, elites use whatever selection mechanism there is to privilege
their own kids.
And so when you get sufficiently big inequality of outcomes, you can't have equality of opportunity.
Just to give you a way of thinking about that very quickly in our country today.
If you take the difference between what a typical one percent household invest in educating
its children and what a typical middle class household invests.
So not a poor household, but a middle class household.
And every year you take that difference and you put it in the S&P 500 to create an inheritance
that will go to the rich kids when their parents die.
That would be, well, north of 10 million dollars per child.
And that produces a massive skew in who gets ahead.
And it's driven by the inequality of outcomes in the prior generation.
And that's unjust.
Has this been a change in the last 20 or 30 years?
And by that I mean a change in the direction of less conspicuous spending by the very rich.
Let less about things that immediately show wealth, like what to watch his or expensive
cars or whatever the case, but a type of spending on education and upbringing that maybe has
a more pervasive effect in perpetuating inequality.
Well, I think two things have happened.
And the underlying driver of this is the rich have just gotten so much richer.
So one thing that's happened is the rich are actually spending more on consumption and
luxury kinds of goods than they used to.
But because they're not now so many rich people, they don't stand out in the same way.
There are whole enclaves.
There are a whole superstructure is built to service rich consumption.
They're increasingly someplace they have separate airline terminals for the richest passengers.
So you don't see them.
But it's also the case, as you say, that no part of consumption inequality has grown faster
than inequality and spending on education.
Mm hmm.
And it's absolutely enormous.
When we think about so to go back a little bit, because I think this might be an interesting
area.
And, oh, I should mention, we've been speaking with Daniel Markovits.
We're gonna go to a break on the TV, radio and podcast episode, but the conversation
will continue in full on our YouTube channel,