THE MERITOCRACY TRAP

DANIEL MARKOVITS

Allen Lane, 464pp, £25

Of all the people you’d expect to launch a broadside against meritocracy, the Guido Calabrese Professor Of Law at Yale University would not be the obvious first choice. When Daniel Markovits attacked meritocracy in a 2015 commencement address there as ‘a gilded cage that imprisons the elite and leaves the rest feeling excluded and undervalued’, wrote Toby Young in the Spectator, it was ‘a kind of heresy’. In this book Markovits develops the argument. ‘ The Meritocracy Trap is an entertaining read, full of useful facts, and contains some penetrating insights into the shortcomings of what amounts to a secular religion, not just in America but across the West.’

Writing in the Times, Emma Duncan called meritocracy ‘shorthand for a system of allocating power and wealth based on achievement rather than inheritance’: ‘In this compelling and convincing analysis of the way power and wealth are allocated, he argues that meritocracy, far from being a means of raising brilliant hardworking people from humble backgrounds, is the most effective way for the elite to entrench its privilege that has yet been devised.’

‘Yes, we get it,’ John Staddon grumbled in Quillette though. ‘We are told many, many times that the middle class is dying, and meritocracy is to blame. We get it. A shorter book, with a less redundant text and fewer, more focused references, would have been a great improvement.’ He further faulted the book for its tentative approach to solutions: ‘[Markovits’s] recommendations are as modest as his theory is all-embracing.’ Young concurred, wondering if Markovits’s ‘anaemic proposals’ for redress ‘will be enough to slay the beast’. Meritocracy is bad, in other words – but we may be stuck with it.