Two faces of a single calamity: how the war against inequality backfired dramatically

In 2015, Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, delivered a commencement address to that year’s graduating class in which he attacked the idea of meritocracy. It was, he said, a gilded cage that imprisons the elite and leaves the rest feeling excluded and undervalued. For Markovits to make these remarks at one of the cathedrals of the meritocratic church — students at Yale typically score above the 99th percentile in the nationwide Law School Admissions Test — was a kind of heresy and it attracted enough attention for him to secure a book deal. Four years later, The Meritocracy Trap is the result.

It is essentially a fleshing out of the argument he made in 2015, although he says in the acknowledgments that he’s been thinking about the subject for two decades. For Markovits, meritocracy didn’t begin with the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854, which made entry into the Civil Service dependent on competitive examinations, but is a more recent phenomenon. At least it is in the United States, which is the focus of this book.

To hear Markovits tell it, meritocracy is the serpent that ruined the pastoral idyll that was America in the middle of the last century. Not that everything was rosy in the garden. He’s careful to note that racial prejudice was widespread in the 1950s — he describes racism as America’s ‘original sin’ — as was discrimination based on ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. But among the white, church-going masses, class differences were minimal and, for the most part, the nation was infused with an air of democratic equality that created a sense of mutual belonging.