Daniel Markovits

An economic transformation, lasting several centuries, has caused the human capital of free workers to become the single greatest economic asset in the rich nations of the world. This has set in motion a series of epochal moral, social, and political transformations whose full effects are being felt only today. The internal economic inequality that increasingly plagues rich nations is among the most important of these. No thoughtful person can applaud the new economic inequality. But it remains intensely difficult to say just in what ways and for what reasons it is wrong. The nature and causes of economic inequality have been transformed since the middle of the last century, and familiar progressive moral and political arguments against economic inequality no longer suit current conditions. Perhaps most importantly, meritocracy today exacerbates inequality. Meritocratic education, in particular, gives economic inequality a snowball character. Prior inequalities engender new ones, of ever-increasing size. Aristocracy and meritocracy are commonly considered opposed, even opposite, ideals. According to the common view, where aristocracy entrenches fixed accidents of birth, meritocracy promotes equality of opportunity. And where aristocracy allocates advantage according to morally arbitrary heredity, meritocracy allocates advantage to track morally meaningful contributions to the social product, or common good. In fact, the meritocratic achievement that we celebrate today, no less than the aristocratic virtue acclaimed in the ancien régime, is a sham. What is conventionally called merit is actually an ideological conceit, constructed to launder a fundamentally unjust allocation of advantage. Markovits argues that meritocracy is merely aristocracy renovated for a world in which the greatest source of prestige, wealth, and power is not land but skill – the human capital of free workers.