Daniel Markovits > Quotes

“American meritocracy has become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth, privilege, and caste across generations. A social and economic hierarchy with these comprehensive, dynastic, and self-referential qualities has a name: an aristocracy. And meritocracy does not dismantle but rather renovates aristocracy, fashioning a new caste order, contrived for a world in which wealth consists not in land or factories but rather in human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Meritocracy’s promise of equality—the theory that anyone can succeed simply by excelling, because meritocratic universities admit students based on academic achievement and employers hire workers based on skill—proves false in practice.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“The traditional way of thinking about the conflict between the rich and the rest—as a battle between capital and labor—no longer captures what is really going on.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Data sliced sufficiently finely begin once again to tell stories. The top 1 percent of the income distribution—representing household incomes in excess of roughly $475,000—comprises only about 1.5 million households. If one adds up the numbers of vice presidents or above at S&P 1500 companies (perhaps 250,000), professionals in the finance sector, including in hedge funds, venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and mutual funds (perhaps 250,000), professionals working at the top five management consultancies (roughly 60,000), partners at law firms whose profits per partner exceed $400,000 (roughly 25,000), and specialist doctors (roughly 500,000), this yields perhaps 1 million people. These are surely not all one-percenters, but they are all plausibly parts of the top 1 percent, and this group might comprise half—a sizable share—of 1 percent households overall. At the very least, the people in these known and named jobs constitute a material, rather than just marginal or eccentric, part of the top 1 percent of the income distribution. They are also, of course, the people depicted in journalistic accounts of extreme jobs—the people who regularly cancel vacation plans, spend most of their time on the road, live in unfurnished luxury apartments, and generally subsume themselves in work, encountering their personal lives only occasionally, and as strangers.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Meritocracy sustains dynasties by reconstructing the family on the model of the firm, the household on the model of the workplace, and the child on the model of the product.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“The richest 1 percent of Americans contribute more to political campaigns than the bottom 75 percent combined.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“First, private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless they draw at least half of their students from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And second, schools should be encouraged (including through public subsidies) to meet this requirement by expanding enrollments.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Clark cast Yale’s new admissions standards as “a statement, really, about what leadership was going to be in the country and where leaders were going to come from.” The old elite understood this and tried to fight back. Yale’s admissions officers received frosty receptions at prep schools that had once embraced them. Alumni grumbled—as in William F. Buckley’s complaint that the new standards would prefer “a Mexican-American from El Paso High . . . [over] . . . Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.” A rump of Yale’s corporation resisted: when Clark made a presentation to the corporation about constructing a new American elite based on merit rather than birth, one member interjected, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“A complete meritocratic accounting of earned advantage is more expansive than this and traces income through its shallow sources back to its deep roots—to reveal that some income nominally attributed to capital in fact originates in labor and therefore should be counted as earned through effort, skill, and industry. An entrepreneur who sells founder’s shares in her firm, an executive who realizes appreciation after being paid in stock, and a hedge fund manager who gets paid a “carried interest” share of profits on funds she invests (but does not own) all report capital gains income on their tax returns. But all these types of income ultimately reflect returns to the founder’s, the executive’s, or the manager’s labor and, the meritocrat insists, are on this account earned. A similar analysis applies to pensions and owner-occupied housing. All this income is earned in a way that distinguishes it from the true capital income of the hereditary rentier who lives, at leisure, from returns on an inherited patrimony. Regardless of what the tax accounts say, therefore, accurate meritocratic accounting attributes all these types of income not to capital but to labor.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Outside of poverty, economic inequality at midcentury presented a social blur.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“First, education—now concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents—must become open and inclusive. Admissions must become less competitive, and training less all-consuming, even at the best schools and universities. Second, work—now divided into gloomy and glossy jobs—must return mid-skilled labor to the center of economic production. Industry that is now concentrated in a superordinate working class must be dispersed widely across a broad middle class.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“In 1883, Paul Lafargue (who was Karl Marx’s son-in-law) wrote a tract promoting The Right to Be Lazy. In the first decades of the twentieth century, on the heels of early victories in the fight for a forty-hour workweek, some labor unions began to push to reduce work further. Calls for a thirty-hour week became increasingly prominent, and some of the more radical unions sought still shorter hours (the Industrial Workers of the World even went so far as to print T-shirts calling for a “four-day week, four-hour day”). Disinterested observers took these calls to be expressing a serious proposition. No less than John Maynard Keynes, writing around 1930, predicted that technological innovation would effectively eliminate long (or even moderate) human hours and labor effort for the masses, imagining that a three-hour workday might be possible within a century. Keynes and others hoped that these developments would usher in something approaching a utopia—a new world in which everyone might enjoy a form of life that, in their world, only elites could afford. These hopes were natural in their time. Work remained drudgery, and leisure still constituted honor. The idea that through industrialization, machine power would relieve the working classes of the yoke of their labor naturally captivated hopeful dreamers. Much of what was predicted has in fact come to pass, although not in the way that was expected, and with results more nearly ruinous than utopian.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Labor also dominates stories of elite income at the next rung down. Although only three hedge fund managers took home over $1 billion in 2017, more than twenty-five took home $100 million or more, and $10 million incomes are so common that they do not make the papers. Even only modestly elite finance workers now receive huge paydays. According to one survey, a portfolio manager at a midsized hedge fund makes on average $2.4 million, and average Wall Street bonuses exploded from roughly $14,000 in 1985 to more than $180,000 in 2017, a year in which the average total salary for New York City’s 175,000 securities industry workers reached over $420,000. These sums reflect the fact that a typical investment bank disburses roughly half of its revenues after interest paid to its professional workers (making it a better three decades to be an elite banker than to be an owner of bank stocks). Elite managers in the real economy also do well. CEO incomes—the wages paid to top managerial labor—regularly reach seven figures; indeed, the average 2017 income of the CEO of an S&P 500 company was nearly $14 million. In a typical recent year the total compensation paid to the five highest-paid employees of each S&P 1500 firm (7,500 workers overall) might amount to 10 percent of S&P 1500 firms’ collective profits. These workers do not own the assets—the portfolios or the companies—that they manage. Their incomes constitute wages paid for managerial labor rather than a return on invested capital. The enormous paydays reflect what prominent business analysts recently called a war between talent and capital—a war that talent is winning.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“just as toil was the antithesis of dignity in an aristocratic world that worshiped leisure, so idleness has become the antithesis of dignity today in a meritocratic world that worships industry.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Harvard Business Review calls the extreme job: a job that involves “physical presence at [the] workplace [for] at least ten hours a day,” a “large amount of travel,” “availability to clients 24/7,” “work-related events outside [of] regular work hours,” and an “inordinate scope of responsibility that amounts to more than one job.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Technological innovation has indeed relieved the working and middle classes of much of the old burden of labor. Childhood and retirement take up larger shares of life than they used to, and participation in the labor force has fallen among adults of prime working age. Jobs themselves also require fewer hours than they used to, at least outside of the elite. The sixty-plus-hour weeks that dominated working-class life in 1900 are therefore almost unheard of today, and even forty-hour weeks are rarer for middle-class workers than they were at midcentury. Moreover, unskilled and even mid-skilled labor has become almost incomparably less physically strenuous and less dangerous than it once was. At the same time, middle- and working-class Americans are wealthier than ever before. Overall, the bottom two-thirds of the economic distribution today expends massively less labor effort than its predecessors did, under less arduous work conditions, even as it enjoys material comforts that they could hardly have imagined. These developments do not perhaps go quite as far as Keynes and others imagined, but they make considerable strides in the utopian direction. If utopia remains far out of reach, then, this is because Keynes and others got their predictions about values—about how the future would measure honor—almost totally wrong.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“It makes the elite worker’s talents, skills, and training—her own self, her very person—into her greatest economic asset, the overwhelmingly dominant source of her wealth and caste.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Today, work divides Americans, in a labor market epitomized by Walmart greeters and Goldman Sachs bankers.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“When fewer workers produce more, wages rise.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“A closer look at still more refined educational elites amplifies this pattern. BAs from even modestly higher-ranked schools boost incomes by 10 to 40 percent more than BAs from lower-ranked schools and nearly double the rate of return on the tuition. Super-elite BAs generate still greater income boosts, more than doubling the gains produced by an average BA, and the top incomes from super-elite schools more than triple the incomes of the top earners with average BAs. (The highest-paid 10 percent of Harvard graduates average salaries of $250,000 just six years after graduation.) A recent broader survey reports—incredibly—that nearly 50 percent of America’s corporate leaders, 60 percent of its financial leaders, and 50 percent of its highest government officials attended only twelve universities.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Even as meritocracy abolishes the hereditary privilege that sustained aristocratic dynasties, it embraces in education a new dynastic technology of its own. The new elite receives a meritocratic inheritance that transmits privilege, and excludes the middle class from opportunity, as effectively as the old elite’s birthright used to do.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Meritocracy promises to promote equality and opportunity by opening a previously hereditary elite to outsiders, armed with nothing save their own talents and ambitions. It further promises to harmonize private advantage and public interest, by insisting that wealth and status must be earned through accomplishment.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“The average finance worker now makes 70 percent more than average workers in other sectors (the college wage premium in finance nearly doubles that for other workers). And finance workers dominate the ranks of the really rich. Today, elite finance workers’ enormous incomes exacerbate economic inequality, increasing the needs that finance serves.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“First, private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless they draw at least half of their students from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And second, schools should be encouraged (including through public subsidies) to meet this requirement by expanding enrollments. Together, these reforms would exchange meritocracy’s exclusive, narrow, and profligately educated elite for an inclusive, broad, and yet still well-educated replacement. The reforms would spread the wealth that the meritocratic inheritance now concentrates, distributing “elite” education across a wider population and at the same time improving education generally by reducing the strain on resources outside the elite. In this way, they would dramatically shrink the educational gap between the rich and the rest.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Meritocracy promises to promote equality and opportunity by opening a previously hereditary elite to outsiders, armed with nothing save their own talents and ambitions.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Eight of the ten richest Americans today owe their wealth not to inheritance or to returns on inherited capital but rather to compensation earned through entrepreneurial or managerial labor, paid in the form of founder’s stock or partnership shares. A slightly broader view reveals that the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans has also seen its center of gravity shift away from people who owe their wealth to inherited capital and toward those whose wealth stems (originally) from their own labor. Whereas in the early 1980s, only four in ten of the Forbes 400 were predominantly “self-made,” today nearly seven in ten are. And whereas in 1984, purely inherited fortunes outnumbered purely self-made ones in the list by a factor of ten to one, by 2014, purely self-made fortunes had come to outnumber purely inherited ones.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“Meritocracy makes the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street into arenas for elite ambition. Innovators in these places can remake the life-world, transforming the internet (at Stanford and Google), social media (at Harvard and Facebook), finance (at Princeton and Wall Street generally), and a thousand other smaller domains. But a middle-class child, consigned to the backwaters of the meritocratic order, will more likely be buffeted by the next great invention than build it. Meritocracy banishes the majority of citizens to the margins of their own society, consigning middle-class children to lackluster schools and middle-class adults to dead-end jobs.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“just as toil was the antithesis of dignity in an aristocratic world that worshiped leisure, so idleness has become the antithesis of dignity today in a meritocratic world that worships industry. Gloomy jobs beget gloomy lives, and the bitter despair and resentment that the meritocracy trap imposes on the middle class draw from roots embedded deep in meritocratic inequality’s economic and social logics.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

“A closer look at still more refined educational elites amplifies this pattern. BAs from even modestly higher-ranked schools boost incomes by 10 to 40 percent more than BAs from lower-ranked schools and nearly double the rate of return on the tuition. Super-elite BAs generate still greater income boosts, more than doubling the gains produced by an average BA, and the top incomes from super-elite schools more than triple the incomes of the top earners with average BAs.”
― Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite