The Hell of Meritocracy

Today, meritocracy doesn’t actually challenge hierarchy but grounds it and allows for its reproduction. But liberals and leftists have different ideas about how to break the cycle.

Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite is an investigation of the sources and structure of hierarchy in the United States today, and a moral argument to undo it. According to Markovits, meritocracy no longer undoes hierarchy but grounds it and allows for its reproduction. And he provides an unprecedented national case study of how the new meritocratic system of ascendancy and subordination has come to work, with brilliant sociological detail. Elements of Markovits’s analysis, notably his…

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• Omkar Gadewar

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