Meritocracy Is Dead

Wed Mar 17 2004

There is a fantastic article by Brendan I. Koerner on the Village Voice's website about what he calls the 'ambition tax' -- how more and more, young Americans go into crippling debt to buy an increasingly long shot at the American dream, while the children of wealthy parents are able to have dream careers because they can afford to take on post-graduate education or unpaid internships rather than flipping lattes like the rest of us.

Koerner makes the rather apt analogy to the Japanese salaryman, which does remind me that I read somewhere recently of a trend toward Western-style "merit-based" advancement at Japanese companies, which is helping to make companies more competitive by encouraging new ideas, but also introducing a potentially devastating destabilizing element into Japanese society: if you find yourself in your 30s, fighting for territory with young turks who had more advantages than you did, what does that do to your view of the world?

I remember this being a huge theme in the U.S. back in the 80s and early 90s (such as I could notice it, being like 10 years old at the time): the shock of older corporate drones as they found themselves competing with, or managed by, young, cocky, over-educated and often over-privileged kids who came in and pretty much wiped their asses with the older workers' world. It's been such a part of American industry since then that it's not even talked about -- it's a sitcom joke now, the older guy who couldn't make enough of himself to escape being supervised by a 19-year-old.

It's funny because it's true.

There's something distinctly American about this -- this is where free-market capitalism completely overruns any sense of community or humanity, and gets right back to the kind of insecapable socio-economic Darwinism that we thought (or deluded ourselves into thinking) we'd killed in the U.S.

The ones with the best chance for success are already successful; if you are not successful, you cannot become successful. And only the strong survive -- while the rich indulge themselves, the poor are being punished for their poverty such that the distinction between poverty and middle-class is way fuzzier than it's ever been. It feels like class in this country is now as polarized as its politics: you're rich or you're poor, you're feeling the pinch or you're not.

These are, of course, generalizations -- the main theme I want to get at here is the new air of hopelessness surrounding the economy, as if hope is a luxury reserved for those whose bright futures are already bought and paid for. At the risk of getting political (and even more general), it's the classic Republican idea: since success is its own reward, poverty must be its own punishment. This is why the GOP hates welfare, arts grants and student aid.

My biggest worry/fear: that the problem is much deeper and more systemic than even this suggests, that the class differences are so profound that even with such welcome moves as Harvard's new policy to waive tuition for lower-income students, the lower-income kids who might benefit will be an aberration: that those people will be better off, but most people are still (relatively) fucked, and the easy road to power, glory and money is still most accessible to the rich kids whose Harvard tuition is charged to an Amex Black Card.

This concerns me not because there's anything wrong with being a rich kid, per se, but it hardly seems like the makings of a strong society. It starts to look suspiciously like pre-Revolutionary France or Russia, except for the fact that you can't really have a coup d'etat in a country this size, and as such we're fucked.