This article is a reading note by Guo Kai, a member of the China Finance Forty Forum (CF40). By discussing American education in two books, "Meritocracy Tyranny" and "Meritocracy Trap", the author thinks about popular social topics such as "inner volume" and "chicken baby".
"Meritocracy" refers to a society that does not care about origin, appoints people on the basis of merit, and whether a person's success depends on his own talents, efforts and achievements, rather than the wealth, class or race of his family.
"Inner volume" describes a state of continuous evolutionary improvement that appears to have progressed on the microscopic scale, but is at a standstill on the macroscopic scale, and all microscopic evolutionary improvements are similar to zero-sum games from the macroscopic scale.
But in the United States, when meritocracy meets inner volumes, it becomes a toxic combination, highlighted by education.
Both "Meritocracy" and "The Virtuous Trap" reflect that meritocracy seems to allow everyone to become talented by hard work, but this is actually an illusion in a divided society. As the income distribution gap in the United States has widened and socially divided over the past 40 years, meritocracy seems fair, but instead it has become a tool for solidifying class and advantage. The anxiety of American parents is not that their children will not receive a good education, but that they are afraid of social stratification.
The prescriptions of the two books point to a high degree of overlap — reform education and reinvention efforts. But in Guo Kai's view, the two books expose the shortcomings of meritocracy far more than this prescription, because the root of the problem seems to lie in the division of American society, and the roots of social differentiation are far more complex than the education and work that the two authors are mainly concerned with.
Anxiety about their children's education seems to be the state of many Chinese parents. Guo Kai stressed that if China is to avoid the "meritocracy" or "meritocracy trap" encountered by the United States, it needs to always maintain a fair, just, mobile and secure society.
The Inner Volume of American Education – Two Books Reflecting on Meritocracy
Text | Guo Kai
Figure / Photo Network
Meritocracy, also known as meritocracy, refers to a society that does not care about origin, appoints people on merit, and whether a person's success depends on his own talents, efforts, and achievements, rather than the wealth, class, or race of his family.
In a large sense, China's college entrance examination can be regarded as a meritocracy system, everyone is equal in front of the examination papers, and whether the college entrance examination can be successful depends on the candidate's own talent, efforts and achievements, rather than the wealth, class or race of his family.
Involution describes a state of seeming progress in evolutionary improvement on the microscopic scale, but stagnating on the macroscopic scale, and all microscopic evolutionary improvements are similar to zero-sum games from the macroscopic scale.
Some people believe that the college entrance examination model of some Chinese students is the inner volume, students are becoming more and more refined in the preparation of the exam, the score of the college entrance examination is getting higher and higher, and the competition for the college entrance examination is getting earlier and earlier, but in the end, there are still so many students who can be admitted to the "985", "double first-class" and "211" colleges and universities.
So, what does meritocracy have to do with inner volumes? Relationships are in education. When meritocracy meets inner volumes, it becomes a toxic combination, highlighted in education. This is the impression I got after reading the books "The Tyranny of meritocracy" and "The Trap of Meritocracy" recently.
The author of the previous book is Harvard University "Internet Celebrity Professor" Michael Sandel, who taught "justice" classes to undergraduates at Harvard University for a period of time also became popular in China. The author of the latter book is Professor Daniel Malkowitz of Yale Law School. Both professors, both professors at America's top universities, themselves and their students are typical winners of meritocracy, but invariably use negative terms like "tyranny" and "trap" to describe meritocracy.
Of course, they are talking about American education and are not related to China, but the issues they point out deserve attention.
Phenomenon: Anxiety about education in American society
Sandel's "Meritocracy" begins with the college admission fraud case that shocked the nation in 2019. Here's something like this:
A man named William Singer charges money from wealthy families (ranging from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars), including celebrities and Hollywood stars, such as Emmy Winner Felicity Hoffman, who starred in "Desperate Housewives", and Lori Lugelin, who starred in "Full House of Joy", and then Singer bribed invigilators (thereby helping students get high scores on the SAT), or bribed sports coaches (thereby helping students qualify as sports students). Helping the children of these families to be admitted to prestigious schools such as Yale and Stanford is called "walking through the side door". William Singh has been in the business for more than 8 years, and the business has a revenue of $25 million.
The meaning of Sandel's example is multiple, it reflects the fierceness of admission to famous schools in the United States, it reflects that money can make ghosts grind, and it reflects the anxiety of American parents about their children's education, so that in order to enter famous schools, they can do whatever it takes.
Markowitz's "The Meritocracy Trap" gives the example of a kindergarten in Manhattan that costs more than $50,000 a year, but parents are still rushing to make the kindergarten less than 5 percent, lower than Harvard and Yale. As a result, most families have to hire "education consultants" who can cost as much as $6,000 to help design their plans in order to increase the probability of admission. Usually these consultants will recommend that a family apply for 10 kindergartens, write an additional "love letter" to the preferred 3 on the basis of providing normal application materials, and carefully analyze the characteristics of these 3 kindergartens, so that the application materials and "love letters" can leave a deep impression on the kindergarten. Reading this, the anxiety of American parents fearing that their children will lose at the starting line immediately jumped on the paper.
Why are American parents so anxious? So much so that from the beginning of kindergarten, fierce competition must begin, and even risk breaking the law to help children get admitted to good universities. If it is only for children to get a good education, it seems difficult to explain, after all, the United States is rich in educational resources, there are many good schools, and the fierce competition should not seem to be so high.
Why: Meritocracy under social differentiation has led to the solidification of the American class and the infighting of education
Ivy League universities in the United States are highly hierarchical places. For a long time before World War II, elite schools such as Harvard and Yale basically admitted students according to family origin, with very few poor people, few Jews, even fewer people of color, and men and women separated.
At that time, the students on the Campus of Harvard and Yale, most likely their parents were also graduates of Harvard and Yale, and most of them graduated from a few high schools that can be called "pit schools", and many of them may not have outstanding grades, but almost all of them have good backgrounds.
In other words, admissions to these Ivy League universities before World War II have strong traces of aristocracy and hereditary system (in fact, there are still some traces to this day).
Judging from the accounts of the two books, the great changes in college admissions in the United States later also originated from these two universities.
Sandel introduced in the book that the outbreak of World War II made the competition between countries in the field of science and technology become extremely fierce, and the legendary president of Harvard history, James Conandt (president from 1933 to 1953), believed that universities needed to change the practice of admissions based on birth, but should not ask about origin, select the best students to cultivate, he began in 1939 gradually began to Harvard to the current meritocracy of the admissions model, that is, the main according to the ability and performance of students to enroll students. The current "college entrance examination" SAT in the United States was first used as a reference test for Harvard admissions, and later slowly became a reference test for admission to all kinds of universities in the United States. Nobel laureate economist Tobin was one of the first civilians to benefit from this reform to have a chance to be admitted to Harvard.
Yale University then welcomed its own legendary chancellor, Kingman Brewster (president from 1963 to 1977), who also shifted the Yale aristocracy's admissions model to a meritocracy.
The transformation of Harvard and Yale has led to a shift in american higher education to meritocracy, and the vast majority of students enrolled in top universities are now among the best high school students.
Admitting students based on ability rather than birth is undoubtedly a huge step forward, and it also gives ordinary people the opportunity to change their destiny through hard work, and there are many people who do change their destiny. The aforementioned Tobin is one, as are former US Presidents Clinton, Obama, and so on, and there are countless examples of this.
But both Sandel and Markowitz point out that as the income distribution gap in the United States has widened and society has been divided over the past 40 years, meritocracy seems fair and seems to give the people at the bottom the opportunity to change their destiny, but in fact it is only another way to solidify the class and create an educational infernal system in a different way than aristocratic or hereditary system.
Both books refer to the fact that at top colleges and universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, there are more students from the top 1 percent of households than all families with incomes of 50 percent or less combined. Two-thirds of Ivy League students come from families with top 20 percent income. The meritocracy did not give too many people at the bottom a chance to turn around.
Markowitz's writing is more intense. This inequality, he said, begins with the choice of marriage, the starting line of competition is not kindergarten at all, and there is a gap when the child is not even a fertilized egg.
What does this mean that in 25% of couples in the United States had a college degree in both spouses in 2010, compared with 30% of the adult population in the United States? Basically, if you have gone to college and married to a university, and if you have not gone to college and have not been married to a university, there will be a huge gap in the income and education level of the family before birth.
This gap widens as children grow up, with parents who have gone to college spend an average of one hour more time a day than parents who have only attended high school, reading more books for their children and taking them to exhibitions, galleries and art classes.
By the age of three, a child whose parents are professionals will hear 20 million more words and know 49% more words than children of the same age whose parents are not professionals.
Highly educated parents beat their children less often, and the probability of graduate school parents hitting their children is only half that of college-educated parents, which is one-third of high school parents, which will make children more cheerful, confident and self-disciplined.
By the age of five, the children of the top 10 percent of families in the United States will learn 37 months more math, 25 months of reading, and 29 months of science than the children of the bottom 10 percent of families. These are just the gaps before entering elementary school.
After attending primary school, the gap in education will widen even wider. Children of the rich can choose private schools or live in good school districts and attend good public schools, while the poor have far fewer options.
Markowitz lists a set of data in the book: A poor child living in a poor school district in a poor state receives an average of about $8,000 a year in education. An average middle-class child living in a mid-state secondary school district can be converted into $12,000 in education per year. The average annual education for a middle-class child in a rich state can translate into $18,000. The average annual education budget for a rich child in a rich state can be converted into $27,000. A child from a very wealthy family who attends a good private school can get an average of $75,000 a year in education. These are just gaps in schooling.
All kinds of arts and sciences training off campus, a variety of expensive sports that will be considered when enrolling in Ivy League universities, and expensive one-on-one tutoring, the gap between rich families and poor families is even greater, just look at those who practice hockey, fencing, equestrianism and travel abroad to study, engage in charity, there are a few poor children, every entry in the resume of the Ivy League university application may be piled up with money.
Therefore, both Sandel and Markowitz believe that meritocracy seems to allow everyone to make the most of their talents as long as they work hard, but in a divided society, it is actually an illusion, and meritocracy has become a tool for solidifying class and advantage.
One of the basic assumptions of the so-called "American Dream" is that anything is possible and that the poor can start from scratch. But in fact, social mobility in the United States is not only far less than that of a fast-growing country like China, but it is not high even in developed countries, but countries like Denmark with a more equal distribution of income are more socially mobile, that is, a person's achievements are less affected by their origins.
Sandel's book cites a set of figures where a person who was born in the lowest 20 percent of the U.S. income has only a 4 percent chance of entering the top 20 percent of U.S. incomes as an adult, but he/she has a whopping 43 percent chance of remaining at the bottom 20 percent of income in adulthood. Starting from scratch is not impossible, but in China or Denmark the odds of success are higher than in the United States.
Social differentiation, combined with meritocracy, makes education not only a teaching and educating person, but also an alienation tool for social stratification. The education of teaching and educating people can make everyone better, and the education of social stratification will become a zero-sum game, so there is an inner volume of education.
The anxiety of American parents is that they are afraid that their children will not receive a good education, and that they are afraid of social stratification. It's just that parents who are anxious about education are probably still the best in society, and more people are the silent majority, their despair manifested in the "death of despair" (that is, death from suicide, alcoholism and drugs), and their anger has made Trump and Brexit. In a campaign speech, Trump shouted to his supporters: I love people who are not well educated! This is not only pandering to his constituents, but also directly mocking meritocracy.
The result: America's conceited and anxious elite and angry and desperate underclass
The difference between "Virtuous Tyranny" and "Virtuous Trap" is actually quite large, and ideologically speaking, I personally feel that "Virtuous Tyranny" is higher than "Virtuous Trap". Sandel was a professor of philosophy, who lectured on Kant, Bentham, and Rawls every day, and wrote more thoughtful and normal books.
Sandel has a very counterintuitive, but very powerful view in his book The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Meritocracy tears society apart more than hereditary or aristocratic systems. The logic goes like this:
Under hereditary or aristocratic systems, people in the upper classes take advantage of each other, but they know in their hearts that they can enjoy these things because they are born well, not because they are harder or smarter. Although people in the lower classes have been repeatedly exploited and unable to change their fate, they also know in their hearts that they are suffering only because they are not born well, not because they are not working hard or are not smart. Under such institutional arrangements, although unfair, people in the upper class will not feel that everything is deserved, and people in the lower class will not feel that they are worthless.
Although the essence of the meritocracy is still social stratification and class solidification, the narrative of the meritocracy is a story of striving to be strong and knowledge changes destiny. Under the meritocracy system, the winner will feel that everything is deserved by himself, that he can succeed because he is smart and hardworking, that he can rely on himself, and that you cannot succeed like me because you are not smart enough and hard enough. The loser must not only accept the result of failure, but also accept the ruthless fact that his failure has nothing to do with people, because he is not smart enough and hard enough to do so, and failure is also deserved.
Therefore, under the narrative of meritocracy, the winner will become conceited and gratitude for the society, environment, system and luck that can make him successful, and the loser can only be angry and desperate, because the hero of the meritocracy system does not ask the provenance, and he fails to succeed because he cannot do it, and there is no excuse to comfort himself.
Sandel further pointed out that in the context of social differentiation, the government cannot expect to paint a meritocratic cake on the wall to solve the problem. He felt that politicians who took the third way (Clinton, Blair, Obama, and Hillary) were caught up in meritocracy, believing that providing more and fairer educational opportunities would solve the distributive injustices of society as a whole, and pinning their hopes on technical solutions to complex political and social problems by relying on the excellent graduates of the Ivy League to find technical solutions, which he believed were all misguided.
And their party abandoned the traditional role of speaking for ordinary workers by embracing meritocracy, fueling rather than weakening further divisions in society, so much so that Hillary Clinton said after losing to Trump: I win 2/3 of the GDP of the United States, so where I win is optimistic, diverse, dynamic and moving forward. Sandel's words are almost on the lips: This is why you lost the presidential election, because you only have the conceit of the elite, there are no ordinary people who are angry and desperate in your eyes, and Trump knows those people better than you.
Markowitz's The Virtuous Trap argues that both winners and losers are victims of meritocracy.
Markowitz made such an interesting observation, before the meritocracy, the rich class was also the leisure class, living leisurely, and identity and family property could be passed down from generation to generation. It is the poor who work hard, because only by working hard can we make ends meet.
After the meritocracy, things are completely reversed. Elites grow up studying and working in extremely stressful and highly competitive environments, and their assets are no longer the land or capital of the past, but their own labor. Long, intense work is both a way for the elite to prove themselves and the fate of those who earn money by selling their labor. Moreover, because labor cannot be passed on to future generations, effort cannot be passed on to future generations, and meritocracy does not allow for the "hereditary inheritance" of status in morals, the elite must cultivate offspring very intensely in order for future generations to retain their position as elites, which creates great anxiety.
The non-elites have become idle under meritocracy, but their idleness is not voluntary, not dignified, but their work is no longer needed and no longer respected, and they cannot lift their spirits, because nothing seems to change. It doesn't matter whose job they were robbed of, what matters is that they lose the dignity of their lives, and all that's left is anger and despair.
Both Meritocracy and The Virtuous Trap quote Princeton economists Angus Die Tyrone and Anne Keys' book Death of Despair, because those who die by suicide, alcoholism, and drugs are highly concentrated in whites who have not attended college, and the rise in mortality from death in despair has led to a continuous decline in life expectancy in the United States over a three-year period from 2014 to 2017, the first in more than 100 years. In 2016, the U.S. died of drug overdose more than the U.S. died of the entire Vietnam War. The number of people who die every two weeks in "desperate deaths" is higher than the number of deaths in the United States in the 18-year war in Afghanistan. In 2017, 158,000 people died in the United States in "desperate deaths," the equivalent of three fully loaded Boeing 737s crashing every day.
The "death of despair" is an extreme manifestation, and it is precisely because of the extreme that it is not the white people who did not go to college who did not work hard enough to choose to give up on themselves.
The way out: reforming education and reinventing work
The prescriptions of "Virtuous Tyranny" and "The Virtuous Trap" are highly overlapping, that is, to reform education and reshape work, although the specific drugs used in the two books are very different.
For education, Sandel proposed a way to break the stratification of education and elite conceit under the meritocracy: on the basis of meeting certain standards, casting lots to top universities.
Sandel's reasoning is simple: First, there is not so much difference between students. He felt that among the high school students who applied to Harvard and Yale, if they were randomly admitted to the top 30 percent, the selected students would not make much difference.
Second, this reduces the "arms race" for college applications, because the current situation is that a high school student must create a very perfect and characteristic resume to have a chance to go to the best university, and the results are transmitted layer by layer, and finally the starting line of competition moves forward to kindergarten or even earlier. According to his plan, as long as a high school student meets certain criteria, there is a hope of admission, and it is random admission, so that many excessive "arms races" are unnecessary.
Third, he felt that this would break the illusion of the elite that success was all about their own efforts and not their luck. In fact, the admission process of top universities is full of randomness, and whether or not you can be admitted to top universities has a large component of luck, and the various successes in life actually depend on a little luck. If there is an element of luck in the success of the elite, then it should not be so conceited and there is no reason to look down on those who are less successful.
Markowitz's plan focuses on abolishing the school's tax-exempt status. Markowitz argues that since both schools themselves and donations to schools are tax-free in the United States, this is actually a huge tax incentive and subsidy for education. But this tax breakout disproportionately goes to good schools, especially good universities, and ultimately subsidizes not the poor but the rich, with the result that class and education polarization is exacerbated. Good schools have more and more money, and the students recruited are mainly rich children, who have high incomes after graduation and will continue to donate money to good schools. Poor schools, however, are unable to improve the quality of education because of insufficient funding, and the students in these schools are mainly civilian children.
For work, Sandel believes that the dignity of work, especially ordinary work, should be reshaped. Sandel pointed out that there were big problems with the perspective of supporting globalization in the past, mainly from the perspective of consumption. Globalization has made production more efficient, goods cheaper, and from a consumption perspective, the same money can buy more and better things, so it is concluded that most people benefit. Even those who have lost their jobs as a result of globalization are often seen as compensating for the losers of these globalizations.
Sandel said that in the first place, there has never been a real compensation for the losers of globalization. More importantly, this globalization, which is seen purely from the perspective of consumption, ignores the importance of work for people and the meaning of people as producers. Those who lose their jobs lose far more than income, they actually lose dignity, which is why there are so many "desperate deaths".
Therefore, to restore the dignity of work, even if it is an ordinary job, it is very proud. Sandel quotes a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. before his assassination: "If this society is to survive, our society will eventually respect sanitation workers, because after all, those who pick up garbage are just as important as doctors, and if sanitation workers don't work, the disease will spread wildly." All labor has dignity.
Markowitz's proposal is that more moderate-skilled jobs should be created. He felt that the current labor market in the United States was dominated by two kinds of jobs: the bright jobs of well-educated people and the hopeless jobs of uneducated people. He believes that the government should find ways, especially the use of tax levers, to create more middle-class jobs.
His main suggestion is that the payroll tax cap should be removed (the book says that the portion of the annual salary income of more than $132,900 would not be subject to a 13.4 percent payroll tax). The rationale is that the tax system is highly regressive, with people in glamorous jobs earning high incomes and a large portion of their income not paying payroll taxes. The tax burden on the middle class is heavy. This is not conducive to creating middle-class jobs. At the same time, additional tax revenues after the cap are lifted can be spent on creating more middle-class jobs. With more middle-class jobs, there will be no glitching jobs, and you will have to face hopeless jobs.
Personally, I feel that the exposure of the shortcomings of meritocracy and the meritocracy in "The Virtuous Tyranny" and "The Virtuous Trap" far exceeds the prescriptions given by the two authors, because the root of the problem seems to lie in social differentiation, which is far more complex than the education and work that the two authors are mainly concerned with. But in any case, reforming education and reshaping work is what it should be.
Anxiety about their children's education seems to be the state of many Chinese parents. A simple explanation is that Chinese have a tradition of attaching importance to education, and now the wealthier Chinese have the ability to invest more in education, and there is still a bottleneck in China's high-quality education supply, in other words, the growing demand for high-quality education and the supply of high-quality education in Chinese are not yet matched, so there are many capable families and students competing for limited high-quality degrees, which in turn leads to anxiety.
Judging from these two books, the above explanation still simply regards education as teaching and educating people, without considering that education can also be socially stratified. Anxiety over social stratification cannot simply be eliminated by increasing the supply of quality education. Education, if it has an inner volume, is only a manifestation of social stratification in a larger sense.
All families are "chicken babies", and the last thing that is deprived is the child's childhood, what is destroyed is the normal learning law, and the result is still a "zero-sum game", which is absolutely a huge waste and harm to the next generation from a social point of view.
Therefore, if China is to avoid the "meritocracy" or "meritocracy trap" that the United States encounters, it needs to maintain a fair, just, mobile, and secure society at all times.