Meritocracy, Again

 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

BY THOMAS HARDY

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'

And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —

"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —

"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem

To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —

"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

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.

How Koftkino in Elite Colleges and Institutions Led to Varsity Blues

 

When I was in training at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, the gleaming palatial hospital on the chic upper East Side of Manhattan, I was well aware that there had been 30 applicants for every internship spot in this program. Most of the interns selected had graduated from Ivy League medical schools and we were constantly told how fortunate we were to be trained by famous, exalted faculty like Fred Plum, chairman of Neurology and author of the standard textbook on coma, and Charles Christian, chief of Rheumatology, and Maria New, the endocrinologist who described the biochemical basis for an important adrenal disorder and Thomas Killip who invented the cardiac care unit and who did important work in congestive heart failure.. Before them, a parade of faculty had written their textbooks at Cornell, Edward Hook in Infectious disease, author of a famous textbook, Graham Jeffries,who wrote the basic textbook in gastroenterology and then these luminaries were plucked off by other institutions where they became the chairman of departments of medicine.

The stellar faculty, presumably, attracted stellar interns and residents (housestaff), maybe some of them even dreamed of being launched into stellar careers by these faculty mavens.

So, to be at THE New York Hospital was an honor, a status conveyed by that elusive thing called "prestige."  If you were wearing the white uniform bearing the blue New York Hospital logos, you were among the elite. It was like playing for  the New York Yankees.

But when I found myself in the emergency room, admitting some CEO of some Wall Street firm who had vomited stomach blood all over himself after a drinking binge, and was now busily  passing malodorous maroon stools, I began the note I had to write in the medical chart with the standard, "It is an honor and a privilege to be allowed to participate in the care of this patient..." 

Not infrequently that scene from David Lean's movie "Dr. Zhivago" floated up in my mind where Zhivago visits the apartment of a woman who is the lover of a very important Moscow businessman and heavy hitter who has swallowed poison in a suicide attempt and Zhivago's professor of medicine has been called to see this woman, summoned from a party at Zhivago's house. As they drop the tube to drain the poison from her stomach, the professor looks across the bed at Zhivago and says, "This is the practice of medicine. Nothing too heroic or inspiring. Medical practice in the real world: It stinks."

Had I been doing the same thing four miles down First Avenue at Bellvue Hospital for the indigent, I would have likely become depressed and I would have wondered why I had worked so hard in college to get into a good medical school, if the actual practice of medicine was so banal, repulsive and discouraging. Street people wandered the halls of Bellvue and some even lived in the tunnels underneath the hospital.  But doing the same thing with my highly select colleagues at the Great White Tower, this was heroic; this was, in some sense, an honor and a privilege. 

Now, with the perspective of age, I can see what was going on in my head was what the Germans call "koftkino" which roughly translates into "head cinema."

The movie running in my brain was I was part of some elite group, a strike force. This was before any TV shows like "ER" or "Scrubs" or anything beyond soap opera depictions of doctors. MASH had just come out, the first movie to suggest doctors could be randy or irreverent. 

But I don't think medical school is unique. I suspect college and the whole elite college thing is more of the same, and the "Varsity Blues" scandal of parents buying places in "elite" colleges for their offspring through the expedient of paying coaches to "recruit" their kids for teams. And to the parents, it must have all seemed just playing the system: After all, it's perfectly legal and ethical for David Koch to contribute $10 million to Harvard just before his daughter applies. So what's so different, if you don't have $10 million but you do have $40K to buy a place for your kid?

What I really liked was the remarks made by one of the daughters whose father had bought her a place at USC or UCLA or somewhere saying she really didn't think she would go to class or do assignments; she was more looking forward to going to football games in big stadiums and to fraternity parties. So that was the cinema in her head.

And I have to say, looking back, for me and for most of my classmates, I cannot see that college was transformative beyond giving me a chance to simply re invent myself and become a grind and a nerd which is what was required for getting into medical school.

But it was not a case of meeting the sons and daughters of important people who then opened up opportunities for me to enter the upper class, leaping up from my ordinary and middle class origins. 

Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful for that 4 years of focusing on myself and my own interests and development, and it was salutatory  to have professors who actually knew their own fields thoroughly, unlike my high school teachers who were only a chapter or a page ahead of their students in the textbook.

But do these colleges make any real difference in the trajectory of the lives of the vast majority of students who attend them?

Doubtful.