Episode 455: Daniel Markovits
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How Meritocracy Has Become the New Aristocracy
Discover how the American dream of meritocracy, rather than being a ladder to success, may actually be fueling inequality, eroding the middle class, and even harming the elites it was meant to reward.
Our guest today is Daniel Markovits, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law. Markovits publishes widely and in a range of disciplines, including law, philosophy, and economics.
Greg LaBlanc sits down with Daniel in this episode to discuss his influential book, 'The Meritocracy Trap.' Listen as they inquire into the historical and structural reasons behind this phenomenon, the heritability of elite status through education, and the challenges of reconciling societal norms with economic realities. They also touch upon the precarious status of non-elite workers in the face of technological advancements and the cultural shifts needed to address these systemic issues.
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Episode Quotes:
How leisure took priority over income before the 17th century
23:30: This idea of seeking to maximize your income and viewing your wage as the price of your leisure is quite new historically. Until the 17th century or so, people thought of their income as, in some sense, secondary to their virtue. And they wanted to earn enough money or make enough money to be able to fund socially appropriate consumption. And after that, they preferred the combination of less money and more leisure over the combination of less leisure and more money. And you see this because when wages went up, the labor they yielded went down.
What did the founding fathers fail to foresee in this new type of aristocracy?
02:43: Meritocracy allocates income, status, and general advantage based on accomplishment. There are two obvious inputs into a person's accomplishment: their natural talent and their effort. But there's a third input, and this is the one the founders, I think, didn't really foresee. The third input is the extent of the person's training.
Is inequality more transmissible than it was in the past?
12:08: I think it's more transmissible for two reasons, maybe three. First, human capital might survive the war, whereas physical capital gets destroyed. Second, this mechanism of elite transmission has a happy side effect if you're a dynasty: the way in which you give your children wealth also gives them the skills and character to keep their wealth. Whereas if you just give your children a bequest, when you die, they could be wastrels and free it away.[12:47] And then the third, which I think is really important, and this matters a lot to what we do about this, is that because we still in some way associate labor income with merit and virtue, elite labor income is extremely resistant to political redistribution.
Are the economic elites using DEI for their own economic privilege?
16:38 [Daniel Markovits]: The DEI is, in a fundamental way, consistent with the meritocratic vision.
16:43: [Gregory LaBlanc]: Right. I mean, that's why elites can all agree that diversity is a good thing and that we need to knock out any kind of remaining obstacle to achievement.
16:53 [Daniel Markovits]: The darker side of this. And the thing that I think when populists, including right-wing populists and some sort of nativist populists, complain about elite commitments to DEI, the thing I think that they're not wrong about is that economic elites use their commitment to diversity. Partly, they genuinely believe in it for the reason that it's morally required, but at the same time, they use it instrumentally to justify their own economic privilege.