Daniel Markovits (on meritocracy)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Markovitz and I'm.

joined by Lily Markovitz. In this scenario, are we his brother and sister? Parents. Wow.

Wouldn't you be proud if Daniel was your baby boy? So proud. I like this man so much. I don't know if he'll listen, but if he listens, I want him to hear right now. I so enjoyed meeting him.

How was the flight? Oh, it was totally easy. Okay. I mean, one of the things, I flew into Burbank. Oh, we love a Burbank flight.

named Daniel or Dan. I love your, it's like Hogwarts. That's what I said. Did you? Yeah.

was written on a typewriter. You know, it used to be. Now it's just got my running shoes. Oh,

wonderful. Do you collect this kind of thing? Like antique-y? No, I just use it till it wears out and then I buy another one. You would agree.

2023.. But it is perfect. It exactly is carry-on size on every airline. Oh, wonderful. And you probably know this as a tall guy.

me. Oh yes, yes, yes. I do struggle with that a bit. If it's not that heavy, it's easier just to carry it. Yeah, I would agree with that.

that last. Okay. Where do you think that comes from? It's a good question. My parents probably did.

goodness. What city in Germany would you be going to? Well, some in Germany. So in Germany, we went to Berlin, but also to Flensburg. But hold on, you went to Berlin pre-'91,.

fall of the wall. Yes, totally. Wow. I lived in Berlin, 85, 86, when the Chernobyl disaster.

happened. Would you go to Checkpoint Charlie and just scope it out, or were you too young? No,

I would go to the East a lot. Wait, you were allowed- So you were allowed over. Actually, as an American passport holder, because of the treaty that ended the Second World War, you had the freedom of the city. So the Russians couldn't keep you out. And so you could go over, but others could go over too.

or physics students as kids? You were mathy. I was on the math team. Something happened in high school. But once we got on that trajectory where I was in two classes at once, pre-calc and

trig or something, I was like, what am I doing? What are you doing with this? You're not going to be a mathematician. I get that. But do you remember the CRC handbook of chemistry and physics?

War II, right? They were the high watermark of pharmacological compounds. They invented methamphetamine, 100% coke. Bayer is aspirin. Bayer is Bayan.

moving around that much? Well, first of all, when you're a kid, your world is the only world. So you don't really think that way. I was one of five. Oh, okay.

We spent a lot of time in England. That kind of explains your matriculating there. That's right.

It was also kind of a compromise. My mother's German, my father's Jewish. Germany in the 1970s was maybe not the most popular place. So England was kind of a compromise. Well, these leather.

goods feel very English. They do. Yeah. So maybe it's reminiscent of that. Well, we both said,

or I said Hogwarts. Hogwarts, you said Hogwarts. Where did you guys grow up? Atlanta. Atlanta.

programmer, yeah. I like Atlanta. It's nice. I feel like it's gotten nicer and nicer, but really, I think it's just that the older I get, the more I go into the city when I'm home, because otherwise we just stayed in the suburbs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

go there a lot in my teen years doing car shows for General Motors, and that and Nashville have both made quantum leaps forward. Where would you be when you were in the States? Austin, Texas. First Palo Alto, California, then Austin, Texas. Oh, we love Austin.

My father is a law professor. My mother, I guess her job, is a law professor, but she was sort of a socialist legal theorist who then became a socialist legal historian. Oh, no, kidding. Just.

like it ended. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. That is one of my earmarks. I'm going to earmark that question for you towards the end, but Austin's a lovely place. Austin is really great.

kid there, it was one of the places where you could live well for cheap, and so that meant it attracted a whole bunch of people who liked doing interesting and fun things, but didn't care a lot about money, and that made it incredibly appealing. And there's five universities. There's a lot of universities around there. There's Texas Instruments. There's all kinds of stuff there.

heard the highest percentage of doctorate degree holders in the country. That could be. How do you?

choose Yale for undergrad? Not very intelligently. I apply to a bunch of places, and I go on some college tours, and I had spent, when I was a child, a couple very happy years in England at Oxford when my parents were there as visitors, and Yale kind of looked like Oxford. That makes sense. Likely modeled after, or no?

and at that point, are you aiming at a career in math in some capacity?

I don't think so. When I start college, I think I want to be a physicist. maybe. Okay. Do you have idols at this age?

Yeah, that is preferable. That made a big difference to me.

Yeah, it's almost like a big-time wrestler. Yeah. But then also, there were a bunch of scientists. I had sort of read a little bit in the history of physics. So you liked Einstein and stuff, I imagine?

Yes. And they had proven themselves at their apex effectiveness with the atom bomb. Yeah. This isn't theoretical,

this is just one of war. And also, there was this sense, I think it's kind of still the sense, although I don't really keep up with this stuff, that a lot of the theories they developed was. this is the way it actually is. Finally. Right.

instruments. We can't really measure more or sample more.

We're going to need a new idea, I think, but I don't really know, obviously.

Right. Medicine has that problem a little bit, too, I think, where it's like, no, we already figured out cholesterol. We know what causes it, too many egg yolks. And then people just refuse to hear any outside information. It's like, no, we already know, we already did that.

And we understand about DNA, and we've mapped the genome. Right. Done. The other book that I remember reading as a kid, The Double Helix, the book about how partly they steal the idea from a woman who doesn't get credit. As it should be.

focused on this thing, DNA, and we're kind of ignoring the epigenome. Yeah, all that stuff. Everything that now we're starting to look at.

Turns out to be really a big deal. Now, I have no business having this theory.

because I'm not smart enough to have it and I'm not a physicist, but I do wonder out loud sometimes if the essential flaw of it all is that we are still singularly focused on a truth or a law. We're looking for that one unifying thing that will allow us to predict everything. And I find that to be the problem in almost any academic pursuit, which is there's the belief that there's one thing as opposed to maybe everything's on a continuum of some sort. I don't know. I don't know if we're chasing the wrong thing.

there's the natural world and then there's the human world. And I think you might even be right about the natural world, but in the natural world, there's some reason to be attracted to the idea that a good explanation is a simple explanation.

Right. Ocam's razor. Exactly. But in the human world,

not sure that's attractive at all. Or useful, right? Yeah, right. So think about morality or ethics. The Greeks had this idea, the unity of the virtues, that the virtues should all fit together.

Does that mean that they weren't making room for contradiction within the virtues?

They weren't making room for contradiction. They weren't making room for the fact that you could be really good in one way and really bad in other ways. And, even more than that, they weren't making room for the possibility that to have one virtue is to foreclose others. I have a very dear friend who for a while was a prosecutor, an unbelievably just and upright man, but he could also be merciless. And to be just requires you sometimes to be merciless.

have them at once. That's a little bit. what's maddening about the left-right political debate is simply both virtues need to be explored. And at best, it's going to be some ratio that we like in that day, which will also evolve. We're trying to service a couple of ideals in this country that are contradictory in some way.

so often at odds. I think liberty and equality are often deeply at odds. In the academic tradition, there was a philosopher named Ronald Dworkin who thought they all fit together.

Really quick, Monica, if you haven't already figured out, not did? he just do mathematics, but he ended up picking up some philosophy PhD. So we've transitioned into philosophy.

I know, which I prefer over math, just personally.

Well, me too. Okay, sorry, I interrupted you.

No, no, but so he thought they all fit together. And he thought he had an account of how they all fit together. And I just think that can't possibly be true. If you live in the world, you see that when you give people freedom, including even things like this hot button issue right now, freedom of speech, you give people freedom of speech, they're going to start saying things that are going to be both immoral and deeply offensive, and also harmful to some other people. And if they get to say them too loudly and too often, it's going to exclude those other people in some meaningful way.

Right, right.

And my view is reasonable. people can disagree about how to resolve that tension.

Well, they're very hard to weigh. It's like, even if you committed to, like a utilitarian approach to it, to even measure what harm will be prevented by having free speech against what is now currently known as harm that it's causing, the future is so unknown. Everything that we now, I say this all the time when my wife and I are talking about, it's like any ideal you have currently at some point, was an anthem to what the state wanted. The notion that we're going to come to some set of ideals and morality that are going to stand the test of time is preposterous. And we have to have a door open for you to come out and go, hey, gay people aren't actually spawn of Satan.

That's right. And I think it also goes the other way around, which is that when we look at people in the past who held views and expressed views that we today rightly regard as not just offensive, but cruel and malign and depraved, there's still lots of reasons to pay attention to what those people said and did. They had a lot of other wisdom, a lot of other skill, even greatness. And the future will look on us as we look on them.

Yeah. It's so arrogant for us to be like, oh my God, look at them. We shouldn't listen. The same thing's going to happen.

And to throw out everything. they said. Yeah. That just happened recently, where it was like, well, hold on. Yes, this person's a scumbag, but additionally, they were brilliant at this.

Yeah, maybe. I think Cosby's a hard case for the following reason. So much of his art's appeal was connected to Bill Cosby's personal appeal.

Totally agree. He's a bad example. I would say Picasso would be a better example.

Picasso, I think, was terrible to women. Yes. Yes. And I don't think we're going to throw Picasso out. And Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, and I'm sure, was a racist.

Okay. These are great counters. Do you agree, though, that art is-?

Much more vulnerable. Yes. Yeah. And I think it's partly because we're much more, both rightly and wrongly, insecure about the humanities.

Yes. We don't really know if we think it's a worthy pursuit.

I think the way in which we're rightly insecure is that because the humanities are so deeply entwined with our culture and our tradition, valuing the conventional humanities does mean that we're going to continue to exclude all kinds of other cultures and traditions that the dominant tradition just oppressed. And so we have good reason for a kind of a skepticism about the inherited wisdom in the humanities, because we want to open ourselves up to a whole series of voices that that wisdom was keeping out.

Surely. Yeah.

But on the other hand, that doesn't mean they're not vital and central, and it doesn't mean that the inherited tradition isn't great. And it's very hard, I think, to balance those things.

Well, but you find out, the inventor of penicillin was, again, a serial killer. We're still going to use penicillin. I would argue Michael Jackson's making a billion people happy a day. I hate what he did, but it's, to me, as impactful on this planet as penicillin might be.

I had a friend years ago, he used to talk about different kinds of art, and his view was that there's certain kind of art that just has an immediate happiness impact. So Michael Jackson's music is like that. Often music is like that. And so for that kind of art, it's a little bit like penicillin in that it just undeniably works. You don't need training, you don't need to develop your taste, and that's hard to throw out.

somehow connected to the art. That's the Cosby example. It's hard to watch that man be joyful.

Right, you can't like it anymore. Agreed. He is the piece of art. It just becomes much harder.

Yeah, because it's not like you're watching and you're like, oh, I feel bad watching. You actually feel bad watching, like your body doesn't like it anymore, and then it becomes easy. I would say I also think part of it is ego. I think when we see a painting, and this is so wrong, I don't know why our brains do this. We think, I bet there's a world in which I could do something like that.

You're always a little suspicious that we might all have been fooled by this.

It's just lines. I could do that maybe, but I definitely can't create penicillin. Like, we're smart enough to know that we have limitations in science, but we think we can make art.

Is that maybe because you're just good at art?

No, I'm horrible at art. So actually, I don't. I look at things and I don't understand how-.

Like, I see it, I'm like, I could never do that.

Yeah.

Right, but I'm guilty of this. Until I had gone to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and stood in the room where he had made an exact replica of a very realist painting, and then morphed it over the series of six paintings into cubism, until that moment, I was like, I don't know, cubism is just kids fucking drawing.

Like, did people just make it up?

I guess that's a side of a face, but it took me actually seeing that to give it up. So I've been guilty of it.

I can see that.

And with art versus, I'm on the same page, but if I'm going to step in the shoes of someone who's like, no, no more Michael Jackson. To them, it's because we have so many other options of things to listen to. Whereas in science, you wouldn't say, I guess we're throwing out penicillin, because there isn't an equal to that. We have to have it.

Yes. And I also, for the record, understand when the artist is still alive and profiting, and you're potentially fueling their abuse. That's like a side, like if Michael Jackson was still alive, I think I might have a different opinion. But at this point, in Picasso and all these flawed people. Okay.

So this is a little embarrassing, but that was the plan.

Oh, that's wonderful.

Getting an academic job can't be a plan. It's a hope, but the market is rough and irrational. So it couldn't have been a plan to end up with the particular job that I have. But I had this sense. So you asked me about math and science, like I was interested in it, but two things happened.

Oh, was that totally demoralizing?

That was just demoralizing to me, because I was like, I'm not any Nobel Prize winning physicist. And the idea that you could be one of the great physicists and then an even greater physicist could like do your life's work in an afternoon, I was like, I'm out. And the other thing, and this, I think, depends on your character, if you're a mathematician or a physicist, your work life and the rest of your life are totally separate. So the things that you think about on your job have no relationship or bearing.

Yeah. Like at a dinner party, you're a drag.

At a dinner party. Yeah. Unless you're otherwise very interesting. Right. But also just the kind of things that I do now.

Do you have the protocol in your house? Because it is developed in ours, which is, let me be clear. I'm not promising. we're going to that restaurant tomorrow. I'm saying, yes, that's an option.

All the time. All the time.

And they lie. They also go, you promised.

Especially when they were younger. All the time.

Yes. Yes. We're in that stage right now. Eight and 10..

Yeah. They love promises.

Well, they know it's a mortal sin to break. They leverage it.

So I think it's not just that. I think it's actually really profound in the following sense. You're the parent. And so you are going to determine what happens. And even if you promise, you're still going to determine what happens.

I see. Yeah. Yeah.

And as kids grow up, they want to be like the authority figure. Yeah. Control. Control. And not just control about what will happen, but control about what's right and wrong.

Yes. So you're entering into a contract, right?

And they care about the respect, not just the ice cream that you promised. Yeah. And so I think that's.

why they really care about promises. That's a good thing to remind yourself as a parent. They're not actually flipping out about the ice cream. They're flipping out about the injustice that you broke this contract. And we all have a deep sense of justice.

Exactly. You hope your kids have a sense of justice.

Right. I only have one measly degree in anthropology, but I know about justice. What kind of anthropology did you do? Cultural, unfortunately. I did so many electives in physical, and I probably just should have done physical.

I'm getting totally interested in anthropology these days and sociology.

It's having a real moment. Yeah. One of the things that annoyed me about anthropology, I've said it on here before, is there wasn't, in 2000, when I graduated, much application for it. You could go and be culturally relative and understand how a system works. And that was about it.

Yeah. Also, it feels like, and you'll know this better than I do, but for a long time, anthropology was connected in a certain way to colonialism. And it was the study of the exotic other. It's increasingly becoming the study of us. And in the study of us, it both has less baggage, but also it's a really powerful way of understanding what the hell's going on around here.

Yeah. Why are we doing all this stuff? we do? What is the vestigial thing that we're being driven by? still?

In three ways. The first is, whenever we moved around. when I was a kid, I always went to whatever school the local state assigned me to. And in Austin, I graduated from a high school, which was a public high school. inside Austin, was not the fancy public high school.

All the mechanisms.

And also why the gap has grown and is growing.

So survivor's guilt, number one.

Yeah. Or maybe also just the fact that when you study promising and your kids make promises, you find that interesting. And so also reflecting on your own experience. Yes. The only reason I'm resisting survivor's guilt is that my friends from high school are doing fine.

Well, because it sounds pitying and you don't want to do that.

That's not the view I have of them.

But it's fair, I think, because I have tremendous survivor's guilt of my friends all growing up. So many of them had enormous potential, equal to mine. For numerous reasons, they didn't realize any of that. And I think it's okay for me to not assess where their station in life is and feel compassion, but rather what they wanted. Now, if everyone you went to school with in Austin is exactly where they wanted to be, great.

And that's not true. But the other side of this is also true. There are lots of ways in which my friends from high school, they're not as rich. They don't get as much respect from strangers.

They're not an armchair expert.

There you are. There you are. Exactly. Yet. Yet.

Right. Jokes on us often.

They're not as stressed. They have hobbies.

Yeah. They might be closer with their children.

They live close to their parents. So I wanted to understand that side of it too.

Maybe questioning your own destination or where you landed, and is this everything I thought?

Yeah, I should be very clear. In my case, although I did not go to a particularly fancy or privileged high school, my parents were both professors. And so I did not come from a hardscrabble background. So it's not a question of like my own journey. My own journey is pretty boring.

Yes. But in your own mind, you had fantasies of what a law professor at Yale would be. And then you arrive there and you go, I'm grateful for this. I enjoy this. But you evaluate a little bit, right?

Yeah, that's right. I wonder if this is something, especially when I was younger, I was a great admirer of certain thinkers. And I had this feeling that when they had finished their great book, they sort of had this sense, yeah, I've done it. This is what it's like. And I would tell this to my wife and say, you know, I bet you, the next morning they got up and they were kind of confused and they kind of thought, ah, I don't think that's quite right.

Your wife would say that or you would say that?

She would say that. You're wrong. They don't have this moment of purity and epiphany.

Well, they look in the mirror and they're like, fuck, is that tooth rot?

Yeah. All that thing, right? Their back hurts. They got indigestion. Their wife kissed.

Very much so.

Oh, the third was much more academic, which is that I had written some papers in a particular philosophical tradition about economic inequality.

Have you read The Broken Ladder, by chance?

No. Sounds like I should have.

It's an incredible book about income inequality that I probably would have rejected before I read it. And I think it's one of my favorite books I've ever read.

Oh, wow. Okay, I will get it.

Yeah, it's really, really good. I'm embarrassed, I don't know the fucking author. Keith Payne?

Keith Payne. All right, all right. I'll get that on my Kindle for the flight home.

Can I tempt your palate for one second? It talks about all this flight data. I'm going to mess these numbers up, but you'll get the gist of it. In airplanes where people board and walk through first class on their way to coach, those flights have like a 5x incident rate of physical violence on the plane. If they enter in the middle and you can see first class to the left, but you turn right and go, it's like 2x.

Yeah.

And the point he makes, which I love, is, you would be tempted to frame this as a case of the haves versus the have-nots, but it's important to recognize these are all haves. These are people that are already on an airplane.

Right. And also, flying coach is actually fine.

Yes, if you don't know about first, it's great.

If you don't know about first class, you know, it's kind of annoying and your feet hurt. If you're tall, you're kind of jammed in. But nobody would call this suffering.

It's not horseback across the dust bowl.

It's just relative.

It's just relative.

And the book makes a great case. It says that relativity is so important in this mix that people who are above the poverty line, but live right next to great wealth, have lower health outcomes, lower educational attainment than people who are objectively below the poverty line, but surrounded by other people. And it's like, well, that's a head fuck, right?

Yeah. There are these two books by Pickett and someone else, The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, which are also books about the effect of inequality in itself, both on individual lives and consciousnesses and on social organizations. Inequality is bad, it turns out.

And it's almost maddening to me.

In some sense, it sounds like a banality to say inequality is bad. But another way to think about it is this. Imagine you have a society in which there are a bunch of people who make $50,000 a year, and there are a bunch of people who make $100,000 a year. And now you've got an extra million dollars to give out. It seems as though there may be lots of reasons to give it to the people with $50,000..

Wow. Wait, we have to talk about my white elephant.

Oh, yeah.

Last year, I went to a white elephant party with a bunch of our friends.

The 12th time you've been to it.

A million times. All of our friends, so people who know each other well, respect each other. There's all kinds of gifts happening at this party.

You can steal gifts. That's really relevant.

Yes.

Do you have to bring something? Everyone brings something. You bring something and everybody takes something.

You pull a number. You go, pick up. You go. third. You open this thing.

So you want to be left twice.

Virtually, yes. Although, you can only be stolen twice. Exactly.

Things get frozen. So it's like strategic. It's fun.

That's really complicated. Yeah.

Yes. And it's really funny and fun.

It's so fun and funny.

You prefer the known to the unknown.

That's right. So I like to pick from what I've seen out there. And there were two presents out there that were cash. And I took one.

She also makes the most amount of money of anyone there.

That's not true. That's not true.

OK.

But you're in the top half of the distribution.

Top one percent. OK.

Yes. I'm in the top percentage of earners, I guess. But also, should be said, everyone there has money.

He's doing fine.

Is middle class and above. So I took the money. And there was an audible sound that flew across. And I wanted to just throw the money.

People were repulsed. Back.

Yeah. It's crazy. And then crazy stuff starts happening in your head. We're like, well, I brought this. And that's more than this amount of money.

So I'm not coming out ahead here.

Exactly. And why is everyone so mad?

I'm so generous.

I give. And then you feel disgusting for having all those feelings. I mean, it is crazy.

We worked through it. And she had a right to be bummed that everyone's so mad at her for doing what she should have done strategically. But then we were like, no, just imagine, Jeff Bezos is at the party and he takes the money. You're like, fuck you, Bezos.

Take the dog food. You are. But also, then I just don't want to go to the party.

Because then I can't play the game like everyone else.

Because you want to be able to get in the spirit. Yeah. Well, and the other funny thing about this, you say everybody in the party is doing fine. One of the really striking things about the kind of society that we've built is that, by and large, for most people, there's a sense in which everybody has the same stuff. It used to be that the rich people had windows.

Even when we were kids, still, if you had a big TV. Right.

You had a TV. Everybody's got a 50 inch TV. And if you look at things like the penetration of air conditioners or cars or washing machines. Cell phones. Right.

Social primates, our status.

All these things. Whereas it used to be, what the poor died of is starvation and overwork.

Right.

They just led totally different lives in that way. And to try to understand how that happened and what to make of it and how to respond to it is really complicated.

So let's talk about the system that existed before. Let me back up. Just so you know, my father-in-law sent me the David Brooks article. I loved it. I then got your book.

Yeah.

Relatively new, which is interesting because the country was based on a foundation of merit. Because I want to talk about what system existed before we have a meritocracy. And then I just think it's even interesting. We don't even have that word until the 60s.

Yeah, yeah. In Europe and in much of the world, we had an aristocracy. And so that was a hereditary form of privilege in which rich people didn't work.

And it was gross to you, right? We watch these historical period pieces and you come to find out it's actually distasteful to work.

Work was a degraded occupation. To work was to be humiliated. So when in Europe, there are parties like the English Labor Party, that was like a reclaiming of a word, in the same way in which, say, in our society, queer is the reclaiming of a word. It was the reclaiming of a word that was a term of degradation into a source of pride.

Oh, right. So you would be called a laborer and that would be a slur-ish.

Right. Or it used to be, even if you were a little bit of a laborer, think about the great houses, they had the tradesman's entrance.

Mm-hmm.

Because if you were in trade, you couldn't go in the front door. Yeah.

Make a mess. Yeah, exactly.

I think the US was a lot more complicated.

Wait, can we just put a couple of finer points on that? Because we're there. Yeah, so you didn't work and your wealth was predominantly land holdings.

Land holdings. And then at some point, eventually, it would be factories and machines and maybe certain kinds of financial instruments.

Right. But you would have virtually nothing to do with any of those things.

Yeah, nothing to do with any of it. And it's really important to realize, and this is a contrast I hope we come to at some point, if you hold your wealth in that form, your wealth makes you free. Because what you can do is you can take your wealth, you mix it with other people's labor, you exploit those people. You don't pay them quite as much as they produce.

You give them 10 acres of your thing. You can keep what you grow, but you got to grow all my shit.

Right. And you just take whatever surplus they produce and you keep it for yourself. So then you use it for whatever you feel like. That kind of wealth frees the rich person. And that's really important.

Right. So am I wrong in thinking that the founding fathers were kind of explicit about? they didn't want a class system? They didn't want nobility. They hated aristocrats.

Yes. So Jefferson talks about an aristocracy of talent, by which he means that people who have capacity, and he presumably also would have meant virtue and hard work, would therefore rise. Of course, you had to be male. You had to be white.

Yes, of course.

So they didn't really believe in equality. It's just, they thought all white people were aristocrats. Yeah. There's actually a totally interesting way in which, in that society, the relative equality among the white people was deeply connected, both causally, but also imaginatively and morally, to the race hierarchy.

So. is it true, then, that when slaves existed, most white people could just go, well, but I'm not that?

I think that there was that part of it. It was also the case that enslaved people, the opportunity for extraction was so great that white people could be relatively richer because they had the slack that they got by sucking it out of enslaved people.

Yeah, they almost were landowners in a sense.

In a sense. A lot of the wealth in the United States in 1820 was held in the form of enslaved people.

Yeah, the South had all the money.

So two points here. One, U.S. slavery gives slavery a bad name. The kind of slavery that existed in ancient Rome, for example, was much less malign than U.S. slavery.

I didn't know that.

Because in ancient slavery, slave was a status a person could have. And if you were a slave, you were a person. And that meant there were limits to what could be done to you. It meant you could buy yourself freedom. You could acquire freedom.

Yeah, it was more of a caste system. Yet they rejected that part.

There's a guy who's written a great book on this, called Aziz Rana, who's a professor at Boston College. He's written a great book about the way in which the enslavement of imported African people was the condition of the relative equality among the white population in America.

Okay, so we have this premise for white men. How does it evolve between 1776 and, let's say, turn of the century, 1900s?

In the early years of the republic, there's a relatively high degree of economic equality among the white population.

Well, when I read all these books about the tycoons and the patrician class, most of them came from nothing.

So many of them came from nothing. And in the early years, they weren't that rich. By the end of the 19th century, in the Gilded Age, because they get so rich, their privilege starts getting hereditary in a certain way.

Okay, so that's when we find our way back into hereditary...

Into something that looks a little bit like an aristocracy, which is broken in America by the stock market crash of 1929. The U.S. in the 20s actually looks a lot like the U.S. in the aughts. There's incredibly high inequality.

Okay. Now, some other interesting things start happening. Tell me if there's one worth mentioning before the 60s and the Vietnam draft.

In a sense, the end of the Second World War and the challenge of communism is worth emphasizing in two ways. The first is, in Europe, the Second World War is really important because it destroys all the wealth. So one way in which the Second World War produces economic equality in Europe is all the rich people had all their shit destroyed. Okay, right.

Just wiped out wealth.

Destruction makes equality. In the U.S., that doesn't happen. But what happens in the U.S. is that the ideological needs of resisting communism, also coupled with the, as we said earlier on, when we talked about jazz and East Berlin, the need to do something about Jim Crow produces a series of ideological shifts that start measuring people based on their accomplishments and start being a little bit more inclusive. Because it's really hard to resist communism if you are, for the white population, a hereditary aristocracy and the white population are just oppressing the black population completely.

Is this, I've never even thought of this, but does the narrative get propagated? Do we start selling our system more and more because we have to, because there's an alternative afoot? Pre-Cold War and threat of communism, was the American dream as present in media and as propagandized? Or do we have any reaction to this threat where we've got a double down on the virtues of our system?

I mean, I think, Horatio Alger, so the rags to riches stories are present in the U.S. Prior. Prior to this. Okay. But there's a certain kind of law-based, constitution-based patriotism that comes only really after the First World War.

Into space.

In one lifetime, which took capitalism a long time. And so there were serious people who thought, uh-oh, they might out-compete us. And if we're going to fight back, we need an elite that is not inbred, is not lazy. We need the best elite we can get. And so meritocracy starts producing that too.

We've also just learned from World War II, we imported the minds we needed to win the war. We also had some very tangible proof of what that can do. to have that brain trust here. They stay in Germany, we lose.

Yeah, there's something to that.

Okay, now 60s come along and Vietnam comes along, and there are deferments issued for boys attending college.

Right.

And I would imagine at the time, the argument would have been, we need those minds for America to compete. Right now, looking back, it's like, well, that's fucking nuts. You just basically said people that aren't smart enough to go to college or didn't have the opportunity to go to college are expendable. It's rough. Now it's pretty black and white.

Yeah, I mean, that's actually a really good point. One of the things in the meritocracy trap book that I underplay is the importance of the Vietnam War and of those deferments in structuring the system. Partly because one thing those deferments meant, it was suddenly incredibly valuable to go to college.

Oh, it would save your life. Right.

Beforehand, you would go to college if you wanted to go because you wanted to study. You might go to college if you wanted certain jobs, but Detroit, you could get a job at GM straight out of high school. And if you'd worked hard and did well, you'd be a tool and die maker by the time you were 45.. You'd have the equivalent of $100,000, maybe a little more income. in today's money.

Even when my family was a vendor of General Motors in the 80s and 90s, the people at eighth level and above, they weren't elite college grads. They had gone to Michigan State and they had proved a great aptitude while working there, and they did move up.

Exactly. And so it wasn't obvious, I think, in 1955 that if you were ambitious, you needed to go to college.

It's hard for us in modern society to imagine that, that it was almost a fucking hobby to go do that.

You know, it should be said, even today, I don't have the numbers right now. I did once. But if you look at, say, big Swiss companies, a large number of big Swiss companies are run by people who didn't go to college because they have an apprenticeship system, as we used to have. You finish high school, you go join, you know, Seba, Geigy or whatever the chemical company is, or the pharmaceutical company, and you work your way up. And by the time you're 55, you're the person who runs the company.

Yes. Like a vaccine.

That's right.

That's right.

Totally. Yeah. Totally right. That makes it much more competitive to get in. I wonder if anybody...

Yes. Our college system at this point is still...

Is much more egalitarian.

Yes. And when does that start changing?

In the 60s and 70s. It changes, partly in response to deliberate policy. So at Harvard, it changes earlier, for example, than at Yale and Princeton. At Berkeley, it changes early. So in the 50s, these changes are starting to happen, say at Harvard and Berkeley.

Because it's fair to say that plenty of deadbeats went to Harvard back then, right?

Oh, yeah. In the 50s, the language was you didn't apply, you put yourself down for the college your father attended. Right. And Harvard was very interested in the happy bottom quarter of the class. And these were rich young men who never went to class, did not expect to get a job when they graduated, and were there just as a social club.

Right.

And then this changed. And partly it changed in response to policies of seeking more competitive, hardworking, academically inclined, academically accomplished students.

It's almost as if they were ahead of the curve and started recognizing they're a brand, and that the brand itself needed to be protected.

Yes. And also that their own social legitimacy in the system that we had, in competition with communism, in the shadow of American racism, depended on their being able to tell themselves a story and tell others a story about why the people who were there deserve to be there. Right. So at Yale, Kingman Brewster becomes the president, and he transforms this. He says at some point, I do not intend to preside over a finishing school on the Long Island Sound.

If you and I are alive in that moment, this sounds good to me. Yeah. I don't think it should be a fucking country club for rich kids.

I think that's right. What happens is, I've just done the research, so I know the history best. at Yale. He hires this guy, Inky Clark, who has, like this, waspy name, but turns out to be an immigrant's kid from Long Island. And he becomes the director of admissions.

Wow.

Right. And so he's like, there's a new regime in town.

Is it still expensive?

It is still expensive, but it's a lot less expensive.

Okay. Relatively.

Yes. And eventually what happens at a small number of the most elite universities, and this starts happening in the 60s, is they start getting proud of having need-blind admissions. Even today, I think that this is something many Americans don't fully get. There are very few colleges that are really truly need-blind. In other words, when you apply, you do not, in your application, include any information about your ability to pay.

Oh, I didn't know what that meant.

At Yale, at Harvard, at Princeton, at Stanford, at a handful of schools, you have to be super rich to be able to afford to do this. They admit people without even looking at whether they can pay. Right. And then they put together financial aid packages.

Again, sounds great.

Right. Sounds great. At most colleges, even at most pretty good colleges, if you can pay, you're more likely to get in. So that starts happening. So these places transform the kind of thing that they are.

Right. And so I think now would be a great time to talk about the mechanism by which that happens. And this is just the investment that those people who graduated on a merit-based level, their investment, what they can make. This is hard to quantify.

It's partly a money investment. It even begins before they start investing money. So, for example, in 1970, women, regardless of their income or education, had about 10% of their children outside of marriage. Today, women with a college degree or more have only about 5% of their children outside of marriage. Women with a graduate or professional degree, I think, have only about 3% of their children outside of marriage.

Holy smokes. So a 15x difference.

And it turns out that for a host of reasons, it doesn't really matter whether they're married or not. But of course, if you have it outside of marriage, you're more likely also to actually be a single parent household. Having two adults, who are both earning money, who are bringing resources into the household, makes a big difference to the opportunities that kids have. So this starts even before kids go to school.

We just had Robert Sapolsky on. Stuff's happening in the womb. There's scarcity, there's trauma.

Yes. All this trauma really harms kids. There's a woman named Florencia Torche, who's a sociologist at Stanford, who did this incredible, dark, natural experiment. But she looked at women who were pregnant during the great earthquake in Chile recently. Oh, wow.

Yeah. It gives you an advantage.

And then the kids go to elementary school and then the high school. And then there are high schools that send 25% of the kids to Ivy Plus colleges. And just to give you a sense of the scale of this, a very poor public school district in America spends probably between $8,000 and $10,000 per pupil per year educating the kids who go there. A middle-class district spends maybe $12,000 to $15,000.. The most elite private schools spend over $75,000..

A kid.

A kid.

A year.

A year. Oh, my God. And notice that the gap between the rich and the middle class is 15 times bigger than the gap between the middle class and the poor. Yeah. And what this produces is enormous gaps between the rich and the middle class when they apply to college.

I'm gonna add two things. I just brought up Sapolsky. You will be the second person I've invited here that I hate your opinion, but respect you enormously. Sapolsky's most recent book is about determinism and a lack of free will. Fucking, hate it.

And you've been turned a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. I move, I move. Obviously, I hate your book. I hate the premise of your book, right? Because my personal story is one of coming from single mother, lower middle class, and then buying the house that we're at.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm curious, what percentage of these elite schools is made up by these kids? we're talking about? Children of the elite.

Yeah, so good. So let me answer that question. Then I want to talk about your story, if that's okay. Yeah, yeah. So the answer is that right now, there are lots of really elite colleges where there are more kids from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom half.

Wow. So the majority...

Well, I don't know, because there's also the middle. Now, one thing that these colleges have been trying to do is to get better about that. I don't yet have systematic data on this. I have anecdotal data and, just having been swimming in the water. What they're doing is they're trying to admit more kids who come from real lack of privilege.

I've had three jobs throughout high school.

But I had a really hard time, and I've overcome a lot, and I'm a really good bet. And on the other hand, if you go to Harvard Westlake and your parents are partners at Munger Tolls or run Warner Brothers, you can't tell a hardship story. No. But you do speak Chinese. Right.

You raised $10 million.

You probably have an app.

Right. And so you're impressive. Right. The person who gets screwed in this is the person who's the child of a firefighter and a nurse in Akron, Ohio, who doesn't really have hardship, but also is not squeezed full of accomplishments, because they went to the Akron public schools and they did well. So there's a real problem there.

Oh, yeah.

There's a sense in which they are wrong.

It's a baseless opinion. Right.

If you talk about public schools, I was talking to somebody recently who was on the faculty at UCLA. So you went to UCLA. UCLA's acceptance rate is now under 10%.

I'm not shocked. The starting grade point average was 4.03 when I went there.

And so if I'm a middle-class Californian, my kids probably aren't getting into UCLA. And I'm like, well, what the hell? I've got this public university. Yeah. My taxes are funding it.

Let's add in now the debt forgiveness, which I've weirdly fallen on the side of the people that are kind of against it. Because I think who's ultimately paying to relieve the debt of the people that will ultimately make more money than them and have more status?

There's a total argument against it. For what it's worth, my own view is that if I had that amount of money to distribute from the federal government, I would not distribute it in that way.

Right.

If the choice is between doing it and doing nothing, that's a closer call.

Right. But bang for the buck. These people are going to mostly dig themselves out of it. Yeah.

Well, I want you to talk about a story. But I do want to say, is part of it, though, this idea that you have to go to that school, that UCLA is, even though it's a public university. It's up there. It's so highly regarded. I mean, I wouldn't have got into Harvard.

And are doing great. Yeah.

So part of it is this overall mindset.

Yeah, I think it's really hard. There's a lot of data that show that a very small number of colleges and universities have their graduates dominate the narrow American elite.

I memorized one figure coming into this conversation, which is of the 9,200 or 9,600 sent to millionaires, people with $100 million or more. Of those 9,000, plus, 35%, are from eight universities. And so part of you could go, well, that's a bummer. But also for me, who likes my story, I'm like, well, but 65% didn't.

I mean, that's looking at such a specific group, calling that success.

And partly the 100 millionaires are going to be people who either are crazy capable, have a crazy high tolerance for risk, or are crazy lucky.

Or a combination of.

Probably are.

Maybe all three.

But if you look at the partnerships of, say, the five most profitable law firms, over half of those partners went to only 10 law schools.

Really?

All right. If you look at who is a managing director or partner, or whatever the relevant title is now at Goldman Sachs, dominated by a very small number of colleges. If you look at who is at McKinsey or who is increasingly running the biggest companies, these are people who've gone through a very small number of institutions.

And there's compounding forces, which is the gap between the incomes at that strata, have also 10Xed what they were in the 80s.

Right. The other part of this is that there are fewer and fewer just good jobs.

Yeah.

Right.

There used to be just a whole army of jobs where, you know, like there are 15 rungs on the ladder. You get to rung nine.

Yeah, that's great.

11 is a little better, but it's not clear. depending on how much you value life versus work. I don't know what the trade-off is.

Right. If you're picking between 170 and 240 grand a year and it's 30% more work.

Exactly. But what started to happen instead is that all the rungs from like six to 13 are gone. Uh-huh. And so you're either stuck at five, where you're really precarious, or you're at 14 or 15.. And that's a huge problem for a society and a civilization.

Yeah.

Let's... I do want to get back, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me. Because, like the other part of this, and this is hard, it feels like it's almost an un-American thing to say, but I think it's really important, which is that we want an academic system, an educational system, and a form of work, a labor market, in which ordinarily talented people can do well.

This is the best thing about Letterman when we interviewed Letterman. He has a scholarship at Indiana University or wherever. he went for average students. Right. You gotta have like a 2.0 to get his scholarship.

Right. Because you're a decent, not just morally decent, but also well-functioning society. Most of us are ordinary. You want a way of living in which, if you're ordinary, your life is good.

Yeah.

And this is where I also think science is helping us. right now. We're shining a light on these. We're starting to acknowledge the pride that someone should have for being smart. We're recognizing like, you were born with it.

Yeah. The environment also is a huge part of this. We see this physically. The American elite is thin and fit and healthy. Good skin, well-dressed.

Yes.

It does. So this is what I really like about the book is I think you're fair to everybody. So the nobility of 1700s England, where they went duck hunting for a living and went on fox hunts, or whatever they did, to entertain themselves, pretty groovy life. You point out no one's really winning in this. If you look at what this elite, that everyone's jealous of, what their actual life is like, as opposed to work being repugnant and the goal being a life of leisure, these people are working far more hours than anyone else.

Right.

You've got a lot of data in here about how miserable these people's lives actually are.

The place where the data is strongest is with the kids, because the kind of training that you need in order reliably to get into Harvard these days, coupled with the fact that Harvard admits 3% to 4% of its applicants-.

You just read 3.1 last year or something.

...means that if you're a junior in high school, you fall in love and your partner dumps you and you can't concentrate for six months and you get a bunch of Cs, you're not going to Harvard.

Oh, he's fucking nuts. You're getting a car accident.

Exactly. You get mono at the wrong time. Like you smoke a little too much pot for a few months before you realize, hey, maybe this isn't for me. Whatever these things are-.

There's no allowance for that.

So that's really tough. There's lots of data that kids in hyper-competitive, hyper-performing high schools are now, in the public health jargon, for things like anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, at-risk kids.

There's been a rash of suicides at these super elite schools around here that I certainly didn't see on the same level at my middle-class school.

Right. The kids I went to high school with, we were pretty happy. Some of us were more ambitious than others and we figured we'll be seniors, we'll sit down, take these tests. Somebody bought me one of those books and I read the SAT prep book and that marked me out as somebody who was doing extra. Neurotically obsessed.

Yeah, you need a neural link into a robot that executes everything you've gathered in your head, but we don't have that.

We have it a little bit. So I always tell my law students, that's called associates.

Yes.

Right, right, right.

What the partner does is they mix their skill, their human capital, with the associate's labor, and they take a cut. And that's why the associates, they still make a lot. They only make $200,000, $400,000 a year. But the partner makes $4 million to $6 million a year. Right.

So let's just be clear too. So, 200 years ago, if you would have lined up the 100 richest people on the planet, certainly 90 plus would have been landowners.

Yeah, and zero would have worked.

And now, generally, all the people in that upper strata have actually worked and made that money.

With their own talent, skill. I mean, they've had luck. They've had help. But think about Zuckerberg, Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.

I'm reading Elon Musk's biography right now. This person has not stopped working for more than 20 minutes in the last 30 years.

All these people, nobody's self-made, but they're more self-made than inherited.

Yes. Yes, yes. They're not trust fund.