Is Meritocracy a Sham? | Amanpour and Company

and my next guest is taking aim at the very structure that made him a success in his latest book the meritocracy trap Yale Law Professor daniel mark of it says the system that values hard work and promotes the American dream is in itself a sham he joins our Hari screen of us and to discuss his dramatic thesis that meritocracy in fact feeds inequality and undermines democracy it's kind of an implied equality of opportunity in meritocracy right there's this notion that I have just as good a chance as you and that's why we should all believe in this system in this construct right so that's the thing that I want to push back against exactly we have this idea that if you're judged on the merits there's equal opportunity for everybody the problem is that when some people have a lot more resources to train their children than other people then even when the kids get judged on the merits down the road those who got the most training will have the most merit and that's not because they're naturally smarter or more virtuous or harder working it's because their parents invested in them in a way in which nobody else's parents could and so that effect we can talk about all the ways in which it happens and how big it is but it's enormous and it has the consequence that now the rich and the richest kids win the meritocratic competition and everybody else loses you talk a lot about the gaps in education give me some examples of how that plays out so this starts long before people are even born if you look at the family structure of rich families in the family structure of middle-class and poor families rich kids are much much more likely to be born into families with both parents still in the household if you are a woman without a high school degree or even with a high school degree but no college degree in the United States today you will have roughly 60% of your children outside of wedlock if you're a woman with a graduate degree you'll have only 5% of your children outside of wedlock so right from the get-go kids of rich educated parents have both parents in the household and other kids usually don't and then the rich parents to start spending money on their kids you know typical public high school in the United States spends maybe fifteen thousand dollars a year per child to educate the kids a really poor high school might spend eight or ten thousand dollars a year so that's a gap of about five thousand dollars hmm but the top twenty private schools as measured by Forbes spend on average seventy five thousand dollars a year per child to educate their kids and all that money buys results it buys training it buys teacher attention it buys careful educational programs and when it comes time to take the SAT for example kids whose parents earn more than two hundred thousand dollars a year have two hundred and fifty point higher scores on average than middle-class kids even as middle-class kids have just a hundred and twenty five points higher on average than kids below the poverty line so the gap between the very wealthy and the middle-class is much higher than the middle class and the poor much higher twice as big on the SAT and on other measures the gap is even bigger and the gap between the rich and the poor is truly enormous culturally we seem to have bought into it some cultures more than others have Indian parents Asian parents they are into the meritocracy from the Gecko you know look if you just work hard we were immigrant parents here we want you to get this best opportunity the way through is to hit the books right I mean that's and at some levels they see role models that have made it to elite Ivy League academies and say great that was this person's ticket out she became a doctor he became a lawyer we have transcended our class I think there are two kinds of responses to that other than saying of course it's true for some people the first sort of response is it's not good to make social policy based on exceptional cases exceptional cases are charismatic for us they're inspiring for us but most of us are ordinary not exceptional and so if you want to have a fair society in a well-functioning society it has to be a society in which ordinary people in ordinary circumstances can do well the second is that there is a generational transformation here which is that the elite that is now middle age probably did win through that system partly because as you said at the beginning the old aristocracy was very unfair to lots of groups to people of color to immigrants Jews to Catholics and the old aristocratic you'll early skilled or hard-working so when meritocracy was invented it was a great way for those groups to use their natural ability and their industry to get ahead but what's now happened is the people who won that lottery and won that system are now the elite and they know how to train their kids like nobody's business and they out train and this is true now across ethnic groups across religions so the rich trained really well and really hard and their kids get ahead not because they cheat but because they're taught someone's watching this interview they're googling your name and they're saying look at this guy he's a professor at Yale Law School he's gone to all these good schools and meritocracy has worked for him he worked hard he went to the best of the best what's wrong with this so it's been great for me I want to be very clear about that whatever advantages I have I owe to exactly the system that I'm now attacking so this is not meant to be holding myself out as a role model for anything this is an argument about you know facts and logic I also do think though there are some parts of my own experience that that led me to this book I went to public high school in Austin Texas would now be called an urban public high school I went to high school with kids whose parents were not professionals my parents were who were just as smart as I was in ninth grade and I know that because we have a homework assignment they could do the problem and I I couldn't and now they're not nearly as wealthy or as credentialed as I am and the question is what's the difference and a big part of the difference is that over the course of the rest of my childhood I got a kind of support and training from my parents who knew how to train me that's much harder for middle and working class kids to get when their parents haven't gone through the system and don't know how to train so you were basically saying that you are a product of these massive sustained advantages that are structural that you had to academic parents that could help you you might have gotten breaks along the way from professors who might have given you the benefit of the doubt right both the benefit of the doubt and also just attention you know when I was I was a graduate of Yale College the amount of attention I got from my professors just training when I got something wrong they would call me up and say listen you couldn't do that problem let me talk you through it if I'm at the University of Texas my professor with 20 times as many students can't do that and education really works and so the consequence of this is that the people who get the most of it do the best in the system that we have now the Ivy League's were very relatively speaking small group of schools when we look at the entire crop of people that graduate or enter higher education every year right they're gonna say you know we are selective we want the brightest we're not going to lower our standards to try to just diversify by socioeconomic class we serve the public interest what what is wrong with the version of reality that they're living in versus what's happening outside their walls so I think there are two kinds of problems here the first is just with what happens inside the Ivy League in the Ivy League in the Ivy Plus colleges today there are more students whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution than the entire bottom half so these universities educate overwhelmingly very rich kids the second thing is that even though they function as clubs for the elite there are taxed as charities so that alumni donations are tax-deductible their endowments can grow without taxation and that's an enormous public subsidy so somebody recently calculated that Princeton's tax exemption amounts to a public subsidy of a hundred thousand dollars a year per pupil per student at Princeton compare that to Rutgers the State University of New Jersey it gets public subsidies of about twelve thousand five hundred dollars a year an Essex County Community College up the road gets public subsidies of about twenty five hundred dollars a year so they're really rich kids at Princeton get a bigger public subsidy forty times bigger than the middle and working class kids at the local community college and that's not a just system the second point I think is also really important which is that the graduates of these universities then go out into the workforce and they transform the labor market they transform how jobs are done they transform industries they transform industries to favor exactly the kind of fancy education that they have so that what happens as a result of this in finance in something simple like taxicab driving you get a world in which it used to be there were middle-class jobs and now there are elite jobs and impoverished jobs so taxi drivers used to be middle-class people you can make a living you could support a family of the cab driver it was a skilled job you needed to know the city then uber comes in and what uber does is some very super skilled people with extremely fancy education as design technology that strips all the skill from the driver and has them just follow apps get them paid much much less and now the driver there's no way they can rise through the uber hierarchy to become an elite uber manager and they can't afford to send their kids to the schools that elite uber managers go to and so you get the inequality in education driving a transformation of work that makes work unequal and then you get the people to do well at work sending their kids to the fancy schools and the system snowballs and that's not good you point out in the book a distinction between an excellent versus of superior education system Oh play that out for us yeah so excellence as a concept has two properties the first is it's a threshold concept not a rank concept so when we say that someone's excellent if someone else is better at something that doesn't make the first person not excellent anymore so when you're excellent you're good at something you can do something worthwhile and the second thing is that excellence is tied to an evaluation of what it is you're good at it makes sense to say you're an excellent doctor it doesn't make sense to say you're an excellent torturer or you're an excellent fraudster so there's a kind of a substantive ethics of excellence superiority on the other hand is different in both respects superiority is a rank concept so that if you're better than I am I'm no longer superior and we can talk about being superior without mentioning whether the thing I'm superior at is worth doing or not and so our education system because it's become meritocratic because it's competitive has abandoned the idea of excellence the idea of making people good at things that are worth doing and embrace the idea of superiority making people better than others at competitions without looking as to whether those competitions are particularly valuable or not that's why the Ivy League now for example produces such an enormous number of people who go into finance which is the quintessential superiority game there's no evidence that modern finance benefits society but it makes those who do well at it incredibly rich and you got to be better than the next guy and you know a place like Yale or Princeton or Harvard the top two jobs that people go into out of these universities are finance and consulting so how do you restructure our education system you would put a lot of pressure on elite schools and universities not just Ivy League universities but from kindergarten up to educate many many more students and to focus much less intensively on rich kids so the Ivy League today spends about twice as much per student per year as it did in 2000 there's no reason that these universities couldn't take twice as many students there's no reason that elite private schools which have student-teacher ratios that are twice as favorable as public schools couldn't double their enrollments and one way to do this is to tell these institutions again from kindergarten up through graduate school that if you don't admit more students and admit more economically diverse students you lose your tax exemption the second thing you could do is various interventions in the labor market in order to encourage people to make and hire people for mid skilled jobs particularly changing the Social Security tax system so that it no longer favors elite workers over middle-class workers you're also saying that this actually this system the meritocratic system does not work for the elites explain that yeah so earlier we talked about the fact that having rich parents is almost a necessary condition for getting ahead in our society because you need them to invest in your education as only rich parents can do at the same time our education system has become so competitive and our workplace has become so competitive that having rich parents isn't close to a sufficient condition so that even if you have all the privilege in the world unless you're willing to cheat and can get away with it you may not get in if you look at a place like the University of Chicago in the 1990s there was a year in which it admitted something like 70% of its applicants last year I think the University of Chicago admitted about six and a half percent of its applicants stanford admits fewer than 5% of its applicants what this means is they brag about they brag about that Yale brags about the fact that our admissions rate is the lowest it's ever been our yield as the highest it's ever been and what it means though concretely even for rich kids is that if you ever made a big mistake in your childhood you're not getting it if something went wrong if you fell in love and ignored all your studies for your sophomore year of high school you're not getting in if you took a chance on taking some classes that were too hard for you and did really badly you're not getting in and what that means is that the elites are privileged by all this training but they're also enslaved and tortured and twisted and oppressed by all of the training and competition that they have to get into them and surmount in order to stay ahead and so this is not a good system for the rich either okay it's it's gonna be hard for a taxi driver just feel that pity for the somebody who's in the back of the cab or any millions of dollars as a partner to law firm why is their life tough so I get that and I think we need to distinguish between two kinds of sympathy there's kind of political sympathy which is a reason for people to make sacrifices for others and then there's a kind of existential sympathy which is just the recognition that everybody's life is the only life they have and you can be owed nothing by anybody and be a proper object of political scorn and yet deserve existential sympathy and the reason why this is important is that the system that we have will not get undone unless we can persuade the elites that it's not working for them either and so the argument that this system is oppressing the rich isn't made by me because I have great sympathy for the rich but because it's true and if they can come to believe it's true then they're gonna be much more amenable to a politics and a policy that will unwind the inequality that we have there's something in our psyche that it's an incredibly strong narrative that we convince ourselves especially if we've gone through these meritocratic systems if you are that surgeon or whatever if you are that banker that has specialized invested in it you say wait a minute this is something that I have earned someone is trying to take it away from me either through taxation or you're asking me to you know gave everybody else a chance that they didn't go through these hoops they didn't Heys they didn't have to put those long hours right i suffer'd i think that's exactly right a couple books have recently been written by political scientists and historians surveying concentrated wealth at the top across societies across all of history across all of space and these are careful scholars so they wouldn't put this as crassly as i am but one way to summarize those books is that in all of human experience if you look at the societies that have concentrated wealth and privilege as powerfully and as narrow elite and elite as the united states has today across all of experience is only one case in which that's been unwound without losing a war succumbing to a revolution so elites cling to their privilege and they have to be forced out of it that's why I'm making this argument that this kind of privilege doesn't benefit even the rich you're saying if they are not able to be persuaded it will happen one way or another it will happen one way or another and it will happen in a way that is bad for everybody or it can be brought about in a way that in fact serves the real human interests even of the rich you talk a little bit about what's happening politically right now - there's a quote I want to read progressives inflame middle-class resentment and trigger elite resistance while demagogues and charlatans monopolized and exploit meritocracies discontents meritocratic inequality therefore induces not only deep discontent but also widespread pessimism verging on despair are we there now well I think we certainly are at the pessimism and approaching the despair phase and I think the mechanism that you described is is exactly the one I want to emphasize which is that we think about where we began when we began with the idea that meritocracy is a virtuous system that gives everybody a fair shot at success and then we describe the ways in which the rich by education for their children that is really a form of structural exclusion of the middle class in the working class now what meritocracy says if you're middle-class and working-class it says the reason you didn't get ahead is that you individually failed to measure up that it's your problem you didn't work hard enough you're not talented enough when in fact it's that there was a structural system that excluded you but if you're told your own struggles are your fault and your inadequacy then a demagogue who comes in and says no no the system is against you is going to be extremely appealing and what's happening in our politics now is that the anger of people who are excluded structurally and then the economic injury is coupled with a moral insult they're told it's their fault are understandably frustrated and lashing out and they're lashing out in politics and they're are lashing out and they're personalized the opioid epidemic is very much related to this this is a kind of self medication for people who are deprived of opportunity and then told it's their fault so a lot of these problems are the result of the extremely dark internal moral and psychological workings of the kind of inequality that we have and your Markowitz thanks so much listen thank you so much for this it's been a real pleasure [Music] you

Channel: Amanpour and Company

Views: 228,718

Keywords: Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap, Hari Sreenivasan, The American Dream, college access, SAT, test scores, public school, private school, Yale Law School, wealthy

Id: BLEvJUNfyBY

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Wang_Dangler]

Bad headline, as it really isn't the question being asked. Meritocracy itself isn't a sham, but our system, that purports to be a meritocracy, is a sham.

The book is about the ways in which the wealthy have created systemic protections enabling them to exploit opportunities, while excluding those same opportunities for the rest of us. They can do this very efficiently by exploiting tax deductions, enabling them to redirect would-be tax dollars to Ivy League institutions and their own children's education at the expense of the rest. At Princeton, this amounts to a public subsidy of about $100k per student, while the public school Rutgers gets a paltry $12,500 per student.

If your parents can afford giving you an extravagant elite education, then you will get your ticket to participate in the meritocracy they maintain and exploit all the ripe opportunities within. If not, then good luck driving Uber.