Reading a book called "The Meritocracy Trap" by Yale Law School Professor, Daniel Markovits, and having watched Michael Sandel's series of lectures at Harvard, in which he finally crystalizes his major objection to the idea of "meritocracy" as the psychological and social damage done by the idea--that meritocracy means the losers are made to feel they deserve to be losers and are unworthy--I was struck by how very prosaic and fundamentally banal the product of thought from these two ultra-elite professors really is.
Professor Markovits had a stellar career at Yale in math, graduating summa cum laude and then off to Oxford and the London school of economics where he got degrees in "econometrics" and other stuff before returning to Yale, where he got his J.D.
But when you read his book, you find yourself saying: This is what all those highfalutin degrees gets the writer and the reader? Somewhere in the muddle of his argument the professor finds that meritocracy is responsible for deaths of desperation, a decline in life expectancy among non college educated white men, and stagnation in central Michigan near Lake St. Clair.
Not getting into Yale did all that to those dying Midwesterners in those stagnant communities in the Rust Belt.
He employs a case study--a bartender who found he could live better in a small, stagnant middle class town in Michigan than he could in Seattle, where he felt like a loser compared to the high tech rich guys working at Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing. Yes, professor, as so many of us knew already, you can live better on less money outside the glamour cities, where rents and mortgages are set by the upper 1%.
So far as I've got into his book, Dr. Markovits seems to blame the Ivy League and elite institutions for the ills of meritocracy, rather than the clueless titans of industry who make a B.A. degree a requirement for jobs which should not require a college education at all.
As so many of us know, there are folks among our own friends and families who had the experience of being better at their jobs than those who were hired to manage them simply because those incompetent hires had a college degree.
General Electric wanted to make my friend a manager because, after 15 years on the line doing ultra high tech welding on airplane engines, he knew more than any of his managers, and all the managers kept going to him to find out how to organize the production line. When they called him in to promote him to management, they discovered he never did finish at the University of New Mexico and so, for want of that diploma, they couldn't promote him. He shrugged and said, "Fine, I like being a union worker." He retired at age 54, after 35 years with the company, with a good pension, well before any of his siblings, all of whom had advanced degrees and professional careers. He sits in front of his computer in his den watching the graphs and curves of his investment instruments, including several Vanguard accounts, and he travels with his wife all over the world.
His story reminds me of that classic Thomas Hardy poem, "The Ruined Maid" about the woman who laughed off the socially prescribed mores defining success and saw the truth by rejecting what society said was merit:
The Ruined Maid
And I think of my son's high school girlfriend, who was a star student, and the daughter of a mother who was a Yale graduate and who wanted her to go to Yale.
She chose to transfer from an Ivy League school to join my son at a lesser institution, Vanderbilt, where he had spent a desultory first year, struggling to keep up his grade point average. When she arrived, she told him to stop studying more than he had to in any given subject. He would get fascinated by some topic and read beyond the assignment, leaving less time for other demands. "No," she told him, "You've done what you need to do for your 'A' in zoology, now move on and do enough in the next subject for an 'A' there. this isn't about learning or fun or getting deep into things. This is about grades."
From the time of her arrival, my son got nearly straight "A's" and he graduated magna cum laude and got into Columbia P&S, a very elite medical school. He did that by hardening into cynicism and he was a star there, as he reverted back to his tendency to get absorbed in subjects which fascinated him and he won the prize for best student in surgery and went on to become a vascular surgeon, a specialty which put to use some of his great strengths. We had despaired of his ever graduating college.
The former girlfriend went on to get a PhD at Yale. But her ultimate career is instructive. After all those glittering academic prizes--she had as stellar a summa cum laude career as one could have--and then on to Yale, what did that mean for her ultimate financial and career fate?
She went to work for the federal government, as had her mother before her. The former girlfriend worked briefly at Ft. Dietrick, in a virus lab, but the went on to a more administrative job with the Department of Health and Human Services.
So how much does that elite education really determine the economic fate of American generations? Markovits and Sandel think the meritocracy is pervasive and fate determining--like the university admissions process in Japan, where you either leap up into the stratosphere because you have got into the University of Tokyo, or you wind up stuck in the middle with the hoi polloi, working every day, living with your wife and her parents in an apartment at the outskirts of the city.
Of course, those graduates of the U. of Tokyo are also living with their wives and children with her parents in crowded apartments, but they are living in better neighborhoods.
Which makes me wonder what happens to all those wunderkind folks whose wedding announcements (advertisements) you read in the New York Times. That woman who graduated from Princeton, went on to study at the Sorbonne for a degree in semiotics, and then Cambridge in philosophy and corporate anthropology and then a degree from Yale in public health and finally an MBA from Harvard. And she marries a guy who went to Princeton and then Yale Law and got a job with a fancy Washington, DC law firm, which is the actual source of their income, and none of those degrees earned by the wife mattered much to their status or income, because she now works for a non profit devoted to preserving architectural landmarks.
So, yes, the academic pedigree might buy a job at Goldman Saks or some fancy law firm, but how long does that last? As so many of these high achievers discover the wash out rate at these places is high, and they wind up working at less glamourous places, for less inspiring salaries.
Meanwhile, my HVAC guy visited my house this week, and the electrician is due any minute. And the plumber was in last week and all those guys live in New Hampshire in houses which are as roomy and comfortable as my own, but unlike me, they don't have diplomas from three different Ivy League institutions framed on their walls. I always ask them when they plan to retire and they tell me they could retire any time but they are having fun and they don't know what they'd do with their time that would be more satisfying.
I tell them about the Midwestern businessmen I meet on Viking tours and and they tell me they've been on Viking cruises and had fun, but they wouldn't want to live on a cruise boat.
And I have to agree with them.
Harvard is just down the road and the folks wandering those lovely green yards are convinced they are masters of the universe and in the drivers' seats. But I'm not so sure.
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