Inequality and meritocracy

Yesterday Atrios made this astute observation:

Lots of people in this country are basically born on 2nd and 3rd base and then manage to stay there for the rest of their lives. And many of them look down on those who start at home plate and fail to hit a home run.

This brought to mind an excellent essay about college admissions that appeared in the New York Times Book Review the Sunday before last. It's by Keith Gessen, the brilliant young literary critic who is one of the forces behind n+1. The whole phenomenon of college admissions fascinates me, because college admissions is in many ways one of the few overt manifestations of the otherwise often invisible American class system.

Anyway, the passage in Gessen's essay that really struck me was this, where he points to

the permanent sense of entitlement the admissions game provides. Winners can plausibly claim they participated in a brutal competition (even if many potential competitors were never told about it). So we owe no one anything. Many of the people I went to school with became doctors, public advocates, television writers who bring laughter to the American people. But most of them became, like my friend who believed that getting into Harvard was the hardest thing in life, investment bankers. We meritocrats have not, generally speaking, used our fantastic test-taking abilities to build a more equitable world. In fact, buoyed by a sense of the fairness of the process, we may have done the reverse.

One of the most pernicious effects of America's so-called meritocracy is indeed the attitude of smug entitlement it often produces. And that kind of attitude is by no means limited to Harvard grads. A distressingly large number of people in our society seem to believe that going to college is proof that they're "smarter" than their non-college-educated fellow citizens, and therefore more deserving of respect, status, and the comforts of middle-class life.

Of course, not going to college is no cause for shame, any more than attending college should necessarily be a cause for pride. In the U.S., low income is likely to be a huge barrier  to going to college, even among the highest scoring students.

I saw this entitled attitude was on display in spades during the 2005 New York City transit strike.  I remember how some commenters on the blog of the late, great Steve Gilliard expressed disgust and incredulity that people who didn't even go to college (i.e., transit workers) had job security, decent benefits, and salaries of 50 or 60K a year. How dare they! Gilly, of course, had no patience for that crap, and passionately, exhaustively, argued with those commenters, explaining just how and why they were deeply and utterly wrong. But it was disturbing nevertheless, because many of those anti-transit worker folks had seemed to be perfectly good, Bush-loathing, Iraq-war-hating liberals.

The counterpart to the smug entitlement of the "winners" in our society is the shame and self-loathing of the losers. In her recent book about unemployment, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the feelings of inadequacy and self-blame of those who, through no fault of their own, lost their jobs. New York Times Louis Uchitelle reported similar attitudes in the laid off workers he interviewed for his book.

The left in this country has a huge task on its hands: to chip away decades of individualistic, right-wing, propagandistic bullshit and explain to Americans how power and the class system work in this country. We need to get through to them about how utterly arbitrary the whole process is, and how where one ends up on the economic ladder tends to be overwhelmingly a product of where one started out in the first place.

Above all, we desperately need to instill some humility and compassion into our overclass -- and some good old-fashioned pride and fighting spirit into the rest of us.

Comments

[aimai]

Kathy G,
I well remember that comment thread over at Steve Gilliard's place and that very interesting discussion of just how fragile the lives of the lower class have to be before the upper class feels safe to enjoy their upper classness.

And I agree with the post on harvard--with the admission that I"m a harvard grad myself and a third generation legacy to boot. But I have a slightly different take on it in that I went to private highschool too and I thought at the time that it actually made the kids I went to school with *more concscious of privilige* and of their own privilige. You could never fool yourself into thinking that you were at your fine private highschool because you were the smartest. YOu knew you were there because of money. And to my mind that ex tended to your university experience even though all the hoops that you had to jump through gave the illusion that you had tested in. I think the real upper class is under no illusion that they live in a meritocracy, its the middle class that clings to that notion.
aimai

[Elizabeth]

If you haven't read the recent Brookings paper on the interaction between education and mobility, it's definitely worth checking out:
http://www.economicmobility.org/reports_and_research/mobility_in_america?id=0010

[Divorced one like Bush]

During a discussion with a teacher who was on strike, they commented that teaching was the most important job there was. I said No. The most important job is proven every time the trash man strikes in NY.

They understood my point.

[sleepy]

i appreciate anyone who discusses higher education in terms of income inequality. it doesn't happen nearly often enough. kudos and thanks.

one important facet that you didn't touch on is the debt racked up by those members of the middle and lower-middle classes who do mannage to attend and graduate from private four-year colleges. tuition has skyrocketed to absurd heights, and this allows higher education to protect the wealth of the upper crust while simultaneously throwing tens of thousands of once middle-class families into massive debt before their child has even paid income tax.

this also ties in with the whole speculative loan nonsense that's currently ripping our economy to shreds. (how else do you explain lending $20,000 a year to someone who's never held a full-time job?) the tuition/student loan bubble will burst in the next decade, and just like the housing bubble, the government will bail out the banks, while thousands of debt-ridden college grads (and dropouts) will be forced into bankruptcy. fun times.

thoughtful stuff. keep up the goodness.

[Jim Pharo]

"We need to get through to them about how utterly arbitrary the whole process is, and how where one ends up on the economic ladder tends to be overwhelmingly a product of where one started out in the first place."

This is the hole we fall into all the time. "We" don't need to "get through" to anybody. Americans know perfectly well how arbitrary the system is -- all they need is leadership that gives them permission to reject the marketing campaign the rich are perpetually engaged in that promotes the falsehood that rich people deserve to be rich and poor people deserve to be poor (especially poor black people).

If we run right at the objective of "getting through to these people," we will be easily dismissed as latte-drinking, elitists, etc. The key is to run right at rich people, calling BS on their BS.

[Kathy G.]

Thanks, all, especially to Elizabeth for linking to that Brookings report -- it's right up my alley in terms of my research interests.

[Jonquil]

My 17-year-old daughter, who just passed through the gauntlet of terror, said that all the college-admission chatboards are seething with hatred toward "affirmative action" and toward the poor kids with lower scores who got slots when the privileged kids didn't. She said there's a lot of racism coming out, too.

It's a meritocracy except when I lose...