Daniel Markovits on the (De)Merits of Meritocracy
Bob Zadek: Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, always the show of ideas, never the show of attitude. This morning, I am bristling with enthusiasm and excitement to get into the subject matter. The subject this morning is what one would imagine to be a universal good: meritocracy.
Don’t we all aspire to live in a world where everything we get we earned because we deserve it? Don’t we like an an environment where nobody is cooking the books and where nobody is getting more than they deserve? Isn’t that what the fight about college entrance and getting into the best college and joining the elite in society is about? Isn’t this about people should get there on the merits, with no affirmative action and perhaps even no legacy admissions. Isn’t that what we all believe? This is a universal positive, right?
Our guest this morning takes issue with that core belief. Daniel Markovits, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, will help us understand why that is a false belief and why a meritocratic system is actually causing us economic, social, and perhaps political harm. He has questioned something we have taken for granted for so long.
His book, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle class and Devours the Elite. Wow. All that from what we all believe to be a public good. Daniel, welcome to our show this morning.
D. Markovits: Thank you so much for having me on. It’s a real pleasure to be here.
The Downside of Meritocracy
Bob Zadek: Now, Daniel, you have now caused me to question a core and passionately held belief. It makes me worry what other beliefs of mine I might have to rethink. Help the audience to catch up with me and help us understand what the core thesis of your book is and what is wrong with meritocracy.
D. Markovits: Great. So let’s start with where you started, which is this idea that meritocracy is common sense, that the thought that people should get ahead based on their own accomplishments and not their parents’ social class, seems right in a basic way. There are two problems with that idea. One is that because people who have gotten ahead in that way now have enormous amounts of income and wealth and enormous skill, they can devote to training their children in a way nobody else can afford to do. Middle class kids just can’t match that. So when you try to test people on college entrance exams, the rich kids are going to do the best on the test because they’ve had the most preparation and the most training.
That means that testing people and admitting them on the merits in fact excludes almost everybody but the rich. If you look at the Ivy plus colleges in America today, there are more students at those colleges from households and the top 1% of the income distribution than the entire bottom half. So that is one really big problem that meritocracy causes.The other really big problem is in the world of work, when you have these super educated people come into the workplace, they change the way companies operate. The way we make things and the way we deliver services in ways that favor the very rare particular training that these people have, they capture all of the productivity for themselves and reduce the job opportunities for everybody else. So what meritocracy is doing is it’s privileging one set of people and excluding almost everybody else from the ease of income and status in our society.
Bob Zadek: As you have been speaking, I’ve been taking notes. I have a couple of comments. It ends up being an almost an aristocracy. But, implicit in your presentation is the assumption that everybody would aspire to have a life where you start in kindergarten and you are groomed from kindergarten on to replace Jamie Dimon as chairman of JP Morgan and you are on a life trajectory where you work hard, study hard, focus only on one thing — becoming chairman of JP Morgan or similar jobs — and you get there, and after a lifetime of hard work and privileged education and working long hours, you get there and you call that the elite.
I call that kind of pathetic. Who in the world would want that? Well, maybe the children of the elite don’t want it, but their parents don’t give them a choice. So there’s a social concept here where the children are forced into a life that their parents think is good for them, but the rest of the country says, “Those poor sons of guns. Those poor kids, they have to live a life I would never want to live.” So by calling it elite gives it universal desirability that I don’t know that it’s true.
D. Markovits: Yeah. I agree with you completely about that. The part of the subtitle of the book about “devouring the elite” is exactly this idea that the kind of a life in which you’re groomed but also sort of twisted and pressured and demanded from your whole life to get something that may not be that great to have is not a way to live. Well, I agree with that entirely. But I also think that this system is really not good for the middle class.
And let me take finance as an example. Let’s just take a part of finance that probably all of us have some experience with, which is the home mortgage finance. So the central figure in home mortgage finance 50 or 60 years ago was the loan officer — this is somebody who worked for a local bank and this was a middle class person. This was somebody who had some college education and his job was to evaluate individual borrowers, homeowners, and houses to make sure that loans were prudently made and that the borrowers could repay the loans. The loans were issued by banks and the banks would issue the loan. They would hold the loan and they would service it for the whole life of the loan. And so you had somebody who was a loan officer who was a respected person who exercised judgment and got a wage for being a loan officer that he could raise a family on. Today the loan officer pretty much doesn’t exist in that form anymore. Loan officers in banks today are form-filler-inners.
They help borrowers fill in computer forms and the reason that is possible is the banks no longer service the loans that they originate. Instead, the loans get chopped up into securities and they get traded on wall street and they get traded, maybe not by Jamie Dimon, but by Jamie Dimon types — by super educated traders who work on Wall Street making huge sums of money.
As they make all that money, they have changed the way mortgage finance works in such a way as to make the middle-class loan officer no longer relevant or possible.
And so it’s not just the Jamie Dimon or the kind of work that elite Wall Street bankers do maybe isn’t so great for them, although they get very rich. It’s also that when we run finance by putting them at the center of finance. Nobody else has a good middle class job anymore. So they transform finance into a field that doesn’t support middle class workers. That’s happened across our economy. It’s the sort of explosion of effort and industry at the top that also deprives the rest of our society of good jobs. That’s a real problem, and that’s also connected to meritocracy.
Bob Zadek: Aren’t you really saying that the nature of the middle-class workforce is changing? The loan officer, an occupation that I interacted with because I’ve been doing finance my whole life. So I know exactly the person you’re talking about. He kind of looks like Jimmy Stewart a little bit in my brain. So we have that mythical loan officer who no longer exists and of course they do not.
But on the other hand, we have coders who do exist, which didn’t exist a long time ago and a coder is very much in demand. It is a middle-class job. It is kind of interesting work. And aren’t you talking about something that has happened throughout all of civilization, namely that jobs come and go and are replaced by other jobs. It simply is a question when jobs become no longer useful, it is the job of an individual to figure out a way to make an hour of his or her time valuable. That is a task we all have. Just like if you’re selling something, your job is to sell something that somebody else wants to buy or you will not make a sale.
D. Markovits: I think that’s fair enough. Jobs come and go and at some point it is the responsibility of the individual to do something that’s useful for society. But it’s also the case that it is important to ask which jobs are going and which jobs are replacing them.
If you look across our economy, what we have seen over the past 30 years is a massive increase in the pay for people who have the most education for jobs that require the most skill at the very top and actually a decent, not great, but non-trivial increase in wages for jobs at the bottom of the skill distribution and middle class jobs are disappearing. It’s not that they’re being replaced by other middle class jobs. You’re right that loan officers are going and coders are coming, but there aren’t as many coders as there used to be loan officers, or at least those categories of jobs. So the middle of the labor distribution is being destroyed by the kinds of technologies that we’re now embracing. And that means that you can’t retrain yourself because there aren’t as many jobs in the new category as there used to be in the ones that are disappearing. And that’s a huge problem for our society.
Bob Zadek: You write most persuasively about how in the 50s and 60s, the elite college admission system was anti-merit in that in those decades and the decades that preceded it, and how social pressure and perhaps economic pressure forced the admissions policies to focus much more on merit. And that process was a step backward in your opinion. Your book does a wonderful job and you do a wonderful job explaining that dynamic. Help us understand why the pressure to force universities to become more merit-based in their admissions has caused considerable damage to economic and social life in America.
D. Markovits: In 1950, elite college admissions were totally unmeritocratic. Elite colleges basically had alliances with prep schools and in that way with more or less aristocratic families. The sons of alumni just got in. In fact, if you are from a fancy enough family, the language of the day wasn’t that you applied for college, it was that you put yourself down for the college of your choice because you knew you were going to get in. Your dad got in, your dad was a Yale man, you were going to be a Yale man. And that was correctly in my mind (and I suspect also correctly in your mind) viewed as as not right — as unfair and also as a kind of inefficient because it meant that all kinds of people who weren’t very skilled or weren’t very hardworking or weren’t very ambitious got into these colleges and that wasn’t good for society either.
So, colleges remade admissions over the course of about a 30 year period. It came to different colleges at different times in which they started emphasizing academic accomplishment and they transformed their classes. So at Yale, where I teach, the average kid in the class of 1970 would have been in the top 10% of the class of 1960. The reason that meritocratic admissions were so good at breaking the old elite is precisely that the old elite was to be blunt, not very smart and not very hardworking. So if you started advancing people based on accomplishments, you would cut out their kids. The problem is that the new elite, the elite that was made by this system, is smart and hardworking and it has an almost infinite taste and an enormous capacity for training its children. The new elite invests in training as children.
You gesture to this earlier when you talk about going to a fancy preschool where you’re starting to get taught in preschool and prepared, you know in preschool you get prepared to get into elementary school, elementary school, you get prepared to get into middle school and middle school. You get prepared to get into high school. In high school, it’s college. And these elite schools today spend some times as much as $75,000 per child per year on educating their students compared to a national public school average of maybe about $15,000 a year. And all that education, directed by skilled people who are trying to get as much training into kids as possible, creates these hyper-educated kids. And as you say, it’s not good for the kids. I’m not a fan of it even just for the kids. But it also means that if you don’t have that training, you can’t compete.
And then because we believe in meritocracy and we say people get ahead based on their own accomplishments, then if you’re in the middle class and you don’t get ahead, society tells you the reason you didn’t get ahead. It’s your own fault. You didn’t measure up, when in fact the reason you didn’t get ahead is that the system was rigged against you because the rich were training their children so much more than your parents could afford to train you. That’s unfair. It’s inefficient. And it’s social and politically destructive.
Bob Zadek: The assumption is that unless you get into an elite school, you’re at a profound competitive disadvantage. Therefore, only those who get into elite schools have the advantage they need and they propagate. The statistics are you point out in your book and they’re widely publicized anyway, that we are in a society now where the elite marries more elite and therefore it’s all this inbred kind of an aristocracy. It behaves like an aristocracy. They marry within their class and therefore it becomes a pretty much of a closed loop.
Let’s take law — you and I are in that profession. There’s an implication that if you don’t go to an elite law school, you don’t get a job at Milbank, Tweed or Cravath or one of the premier law firms, you are stuck.
Implicit in that is that those lawyers who do get into those law firms, and I’m just picking law because I know it are somehow better off. And I will say I interact with lawyers. I’m just taking lawyers again as representative, but I interact with lawyers all the time and I find that the lawyers who are not in the elite seem to have richer and fuller lives. They are blissfully happy. Their needs are being met, their children are being fed and clothed and educated and they live pretty gosh darn good lives.
You point out in your book that in fact this is detrimental to the elites as well. So the premise is that elite is kind of the wrong label. That suggests somehow better, I would say they sure are different and the lifestyle is different, but I challenge that it’s better and a lifestyle people should necessarily aspire to.
D. Markovits: I think I agree with you about that actually. First of all, the most profitable law firm in America right now is Wachtell.
Bob Zadek: Herb Wachtell was my New York practice professor at NYU.
D. Markovits: Okay, excellent, excellent. So you know, they have profits per partner now I think in excess of $5 million a year. Something like 80% of the partners at Wachtell graduated from law schools that are conventionally ranked in top five. So basically the only way to get into Wachtell is to go to a very fancy law school. They work all the time, enormous billable hours.
Bob Zadek: Yuck!
D. Markovits: I don’t think they’re very well. I agree with that completely. This is not a form of flourishing. And actually if you ask people in those firms, would you rather work less and get paid less? They say “yes.” Now they don’t do it, but they say “yes.” And if you look at the details of life in these firms, it really is tough. So another firm I have inside information on maintains a database which keeps track of all of the revenues collected, attributable to every partner in the firm. There is an app you can put on your smartphone that allows you to check that database from anywhere in the world. The database gets updated every 20 minutes. So every partner can check in real time every other partner’s contribution to the firm’s profits. Oh my God. Imagine what that does to the pressure to bill hours and make money.
I agree with you. This is not a good life. I also agree with you that there are lots of lawyers out there who are not working at places like that who do pretty well and have satisfying professional lives and make a perfectly respectable living can provide for their families.
The worry I have is this: first of all, I don’t know that law is that representative that even lawyers outside Wachtell are going to be because they’ve graduated from professional school in the top 5% of the education distribution and there are fewer and fewer jobs that give you control over your work and a decent income in the rest of the economy. But even within law, one of the things that’s happening is that the way in which lawyers work is changing so that fewer and fewer lawyers are going to be able to be paid.
We’re getting things like algorithmic document review, LegalZoom, and outsourced lawyering. There is a lot of outsourcing of lawyers now to common law educated lawyers in India. These are ways that are going to make it much harder for lawyers outside of the very top echelons to compete. It is going to be harder and harder in the next generations down to have the kind of career in law that you’re describing.
That’s partly because the lawyers at the very top are inventing new ways of doing legal practice that make their own skills incredibly valuable and mean that if you’re not at the very top firms, your skills are a lot less valuable. And again, you have this problem that this system devours the people that Wachtell who get really rich but do not have lives that are to be envied and at the same time excludes the rest of the profession from enough meaningful work and enough income to live the kind of lives that they’d like to live. That’s a microcosm of what’s happening throughout the economy.
Bob Zadek: The subtext of your book is the phenomenon you describe, which is that meritocracy kind of creates an inbred closed loop society where the elites capture more and more of the economy. There is a concentration of wealth at the top. A lower percentage of the population controls a higher percentage of the wealth. And that, of course, is in your book assumed to be very bad. There are lots of bad qualities to it and it damages the social fabric.
We’ve heard complaints from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren that the system is rigged and frankly, I kind of agree. However, I say it is rigged against the elites, and we are all smugly enjoying the benefits of how the elites got sucked into a lifestyle which benefits us by producing higher quality goods and services at lower and lower prices. They do all the work and we the non-elites get all the benefit. How’s that for starting the half hour, Daniel?
D. Markovits: That’s a great way to start. I’m going to push back pretty directly on that thought. So the kind of economy we have now is really good for most Americans as consumers. Prices are low, there is lots of quality and variety to buy from, etc., but it is not very good for most Americans as workers. That’s a problem.
So let’s look at retail as a very concrete example. Retail used to be a middle class industry in America. Most sales were made in small stores, not chains. Often they were owner operated — one or two branches. And working in one of those stores gave you a fair amount of responsibility. It was not an easy job. It was an interesting job. You got paid a middle class wage because you had to be the stockist, you had to be a sales person, you had to do some accounts.
You were working at a pretty varied, pretty skilled set of tasks if you were a retail worker in America in 1950, 1960, 1970, even the early eighties. Today, retail is dominated by Walmart and Amazon. These are places that are incredibly cheap, but working as a Walmart worker or working as an Amazon warehouse worker is not a well paid job. It’s not a job that gives you a lot of control over your work. It’s not a job that gives you a lot of discretion and it’s a job that doesn’t pay enough to raise a family.
So this is a sector of the American economy that is really good for consumers and really bad for workers. This is a value judgment now. What I just stated were facts, but now these are values. I would prefer a society in which everybody paid a little more for what they bought at the store, but also had jobs that paid higher wages and gave them control over their work and gave them dignified and interesting tasks to do in their days. That’s a trade-off that I would take given my values and the system that we have is pushing in the opposite direction.
Bob Zadek: But of course we live in more or less a democracy, and the marketplace is simply another form of democracy.
People can vote at least three different ways. They can vote in a ballot box — the least effective way to have your will be followed. You can vote with your feet, leave one state whose policies you disagree with to another state whose policies you are more comfortable with. Or you could vote with your dollars.
Every time you make a purchase you make a vote. And Daniel, unless you reject the concept of freedom, of doing what you want, if Americans collectively thought that was a situation needed to be changed, then there would be stores and service providers who say, “We charge more because we want to create a good middle class life for our employees and the only way to do that is to charge more. So you Americans who buy our clothing and our food because in doing so you are voting for a better middle class life for our workers.” But people don’t vote that way with their dollars.
D. Markovits: I have two kinds of responses to that. One of which involves a certain kinds about the facts and one of them involves certain kinds of values. The one about values is, there can be all kinds of collective action problems in which each of us individually will always go for the cheapest good. We know that whatever we do individually isn’t going to affect the system that we face.
But if we get together, we might all prefer a world in which we coordinate so that stores pay their workers more and charge us a little bit more. It’s just that we can’t do it one at a time. And that’s why I think government is important. But that’s different from the libertarian position on this. I understand. The second is a claim about facts. And here I think we probably can agree, which is that in fact what has happened is that there are a whole series of government policies — regulations in effect — that make life hard for small stores and massively privilege big stores and massively privilege big stores that don’t pay their workers very well.
There are various kinds of tax regulations, both state sales tax, there are data regulations which allow big stores to exploit data that they’re never taxed on. There are supply chain and trade rules. All of these favor enormous companies. So I think, in fact, one of the reasons why we’ve moved from the smaller stores to the Amazons of the world is not that the market has worked as some natural or inevitable or uncoordinated libertarian institution. It’s that our government has favored the big stores in ways that libertarians should object to. And the result is an inequality that people on the left should also object to. So this is a place where I think the lesson right can actually come together.
Bob Zadek: Daniel, if I were sitting next to you, we’d be hugging right now and I’d be welcoming you into the program. You’re exactly right. Government often interferes with the market and rejects the democracy of people spending their own money the way they want. You’re exactly right. You mentioned a few of them in your book and in some of your public appearances. It was clear you reject, as I do occupational licensing, which is a barrier to entry into many occupations.
My show has often railed against occupational licensing. You reject, I would presume, communities that impose certificates of need that don’t allow a competitor to come in and open up a moving company because the existing moving companies don’t want the competition. So you’re exactly right. Government has grotesquely distorted the marketplace.
In your book you pointed out that the elites, in going to the elite schools, get an enormous government subsidy. So government does an inverse wealth transfer from the middle class to the wealthy through tax deductions on your contributions to colleges and the like. So you point out that the government has stacked the deck against the middle class. I might ask you to expand upon that and help our listeners understand your observations about how the government has been somewhat of a demon. The government has contributed to the problem in their policies.
D. Markovits: I think one place which we’re probably going to disagree is that I think it’s inevitable for the government to get involved in regulating markets. The question for me is, “should government regulate markets in a way that favors most people and favors equality and favors the middle class? Or should government regulate markets in ways that favors the rich?”
But I think the point of which we’ll agree is that the government as it happens now is intervening in lots and lots of ways that favor the rich.
Bob Zadek: Our tax system right now makes middle-class labor the highest tax factor of production. Our income tax is not very progressive — it’s progressive, but it’s not very progressive. Especially when you take into account the fact that lots of the highest paid people can structure their income, so they get capital gains treatment, which working people can’t do.
Our wage tax system is not progressive at all. Our wage tax system taxes the first $130,000 roughly of income at a very high rate and after that it goes almost to zero. Our tax system is a real thumb on the scale against the middle class.
That’s so irrational because neither political party is taking the position that the regressive tax system ought to get the attention. Too many people benefit from the existing system.
D. Markovits: The people in, in our politics right now who are taking that position are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. You may not like things about what they’re saying, but they want to tax wealth and they want to tax top incomes and they want to reduce taxes on the middle class. There may be other good reasons for a libertarian or even a centrist liberal to be skeptical of them. But that’s part of their program.
Bob Zadek: One of the important points you make in the book that I want to cover is income inequality and why income inequality is per se bad. Why is it bad for there to be a concentration of wealth in the upper classes? Because I don’t necessarily agree that the fact that a few people have a lot of wealth and power is bad for society as a whole, but you make some pretty compelling reasons for why it is.
D. Markovits: I think that this is a really hard question. Why should the rest of us care as long as we’re doing okay? That is a really hard question.
I think that there are two kinds of answers.
One is just historical. If you look at societies that have concentrated wealth and income at the very top across all of human history, starting from ancient Rome to Czarist Russia, and into the British empire, going to the United States in the 1920s — societies that concentrate income at the top turn out not to end very well. Too much income concentrated at the top produces revolutions or social weakness and then failure in international competition by losing wars effectively. The one exception to that rule really actually the United States in the 1920s — we managed to unwind our income inequality and wealth inequality in a relatively peaceful way. That is just a historical trend. And if you’re worried about social stability and decay and revolution, you should worry about concentrated wealth.
The other place we may disagree, because there’s a value judgment involved, is that I view concentrated income and wealth — when they get big enough — as forms of political power. So if I’m a billionaire, I have enormous control over the state, partly because I can make political contributions, I can lobby, but partly also just because $1 billion in a regime of private property lets me kind of draft the government in my service. When I deploy that money, I’m deploying public force, which will protect my property. That’s a form of political injustice. If you have my values, that is a problem. That’s not so true if there’s not enormous concentrated wealth. So that’s another reason to worry about enormous concentrated wealth.
Bob Zadek: You mention America in the 20s and earlier than that, and Czarist Russia. There was a concentration of wealth. The problem wasn’t the of wealth at the top. In my opinion, the problem was the poverty at the bottom. The fact that so many people were subsistence or below and that foments, of course, anger, dissent and revolution. But that doesn’t describe today’s society. While there is a concentration of wealth at the top, the people who are in the 99% are not doing so badly between the income they earn and the benefits that they get under the existing system.
Don Boudreaux, a brilliant economist at Mercatus always likes to point out that the average lower middle class person lives a life that Cornelius Vanderbilt could only dream about but didn’t live. So, an American middle class or below person today lives better than Vanderbilt did in absolute terms.
“What is the minimum amount of money that you would demand in exchange for your going back to live even as John D. Rockefeller lived in 1916? 21.7 million 2016 dollars (which are about one million 1916 dollars)? Would that do it? What about a billion 2016 — or 1916 — dollars? Would this sizable sum of dollars be enough to enable you to purchase a quantity of high-quality 1916 goods and services that would at least make you indifferent between living in 1916 America and living (on your current income) in 2016 America?
If you were a 1916 American billionaire you could, of course, afford prime real-estate. You could afford a home on 5th Avenue or one overlooking the Pacific Ocean or one on your own tropical island somewhere (or all three). But when you travelled from your Manhattan digs to your west-coast palace, it would take a few days, and if you made that trip during the summer months, you’d likely not have air-conditioning in your private railroad car.” — Don Boudreaux, Cafe Hayek
So we are doing pretty gosh darn well and, therefore, if the rest of us have enough upward mobility, why does it matter that somebody has a lot more? I dare say, as I said earlier, I don’t think there’s very many people who would trade their life for the life you describe with passion and accuracy in your book — of the life of the elite with long hours, strained family life, and the pressures that come with it — even the pressures to maintain what you have. I don’t know that the middle class, even given the gap, which is a relative term, the gap doesn’t mean that the middle class is in need of a lot of help.
D. Markovits: I have a three part response to that. The first is to agree in a way that it is a striking fact about our current situation that right now the Bureau of the census just released data two months ago suggesting on the one hand that income concentration at the top has never been greater than it is now and yet on the other hand the poverty rate is near historic lows. That’s a striking dual phenomenon. That matters for the history because you’re quite right that all the previous societies in which concentrated wealth and income ended up in catastrophe also had a lot of poverty and maybe now is different. Maybe now really is different. That is something to take into account and to give us some comfort.
On the other hand, is that a bet that you want to take and have a lot of confidence in, especially given the following fact, that life expectancy in the middle class in the United States is starting to go down in substantial pockets of the population for the first time?
And in an unprecedented way that I say, if you look across all of human experience, life expectancy does not go down in situations where there’s no war, no plague, no famine, no economic collapse. But in the United States right now, life expectancy is starting to go down for pockets of the middle class. And it started to go down in significant measure because of what the economist Angus Deaton called “deaths of despair.” These are deaths caused by addiction, alcoholism, suicide, obesity, various forms of direct and indirect self harm. And the U.S. is not alone in this. A similar thing is happening in Great Britain. My diagnosis is that one reason why that’s happening is that we live in a system which concentrates wealth and status and privilege at the top.
And then our meritocratic ideology tells people that if you can’t get into the top, you’re not measuring up. And so it’s your fault — you’re a failure. That set of ideas, with the effect on life expectancy that I’ve just described, is a real reason to worry for the wellbeing and stability of our society, even if poverty is not as rampant as it used to be.
Bob Zadek: In understanding the thesis of your book, I said to myself that America has played a cruel joke on the elite and they are the victims — now, you point out they are victims of their own success. I equate that to how we give glory to soldiers or first responders. We elevate their social standing because if we can persuade people to become first responders and soldiers and protect the rest of us, we get a profound benefit by giving them that lofty social standing.
We are protected. When we can persuade the elites to work really long hours and to aspire to have all the material benefits of their hard work. We get enormous benefits. We get Amazon, we get new drugs, we get lower cost of goods. The joke is on the elites. I’m making your point but I’m emphasizing it: the victims in your book are not those who are “left behind,” but those who were persuaded to sell their souls to the devil and take that system for the benefit of all of us.
D. Markovits: There’s an old line about the difference between medical ethics and legal ethics, which is that in medical ethics there isn’t a doctor on the other side trying to kill the patient. While I agree that the system is not good for the elite, part of the argument of the book and part of the discussion we’ve been having today is that when the elite monopolize all this productivity and all this effort and all this income, I think that they also deprive the rest of America of meaningful jobs and productive work and income and status.
So it’s not just that they’re making inventions that make everybody’s life better. It’s also that they’re taking away possibilities and opportunities from everybody else. If that’s true, it’s not that the rest of America should envy the elite or should wish that they could work like this or so on. But it’s also the case that the elite is harming people and that’s part of what our public policy needs to address.
Bob Zadek: Tell us what your prescription for society would be.
D. Markovits: Two things we should do.
First, we should enormously open up education. We should have, across the educational system, the best schools and universities take two or three times as many students as they do now and so train many more people and give many more opportunities for middle-class kids.
Second, we should restructure our tax policy and our broader labor market policy to favor middle-class, middle-income, mid-skilled jobs. We should get rid of the penalty on middle income workers through the wage pack, and we should apply wage subsidies where needed.
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