Being A Member Of The Elite May Be A Drag-- But Being A Slave Is Much Worse

You know the old refrain, "I work like a slave?" Don't use it anymore. There really are still slaves, actual slaves-- like the ones who built the pyramids, like the ones who built America...

Last week, the Boston Globe published a provocative essay by Jeff Jacoby, Slavery Then And Now. Jacoby bemoans the lack of awareness that slavery exists today.

“Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century,” observes Anti-Slavery International , which was founded in 1839 as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and is the world’s oldest abolitionist organization. Around the world today, tens of millions of men, women, and children are enslaved in different ways. About 25 million are trapped in forced labor, which is defined as “any work or service which people are forced to do against their will, under threat of punishment.” At least 8 million more people, especially in South Asia, are locked into debt bondage — a system of indentured servitude, in which they slave for little or no pay in order to reduce a debt.

“Often entire families have to work to pay off the debt taken by one of its members,” the anti-slavery society explains. “Sometimes, the debt can be passed down the generations and children can be held in debt bondage because of a loan their parents had taken decades ago.”





In a short film , Anti-Slavery International documents the awful, aching reality of brickmaking bonded laborers in India. Work in the kilns typically begins at midnight or 1 am, and entire families labor together for as much as 14 hours daily. Children account for about one fifth of the bonded-labor workforce. Most never get to attend school; many suffer ill health. “One of my sons is 14 years old, another is 9, and a third is 7,” one young mother says. “The children have to work at any cost-- what would they eat if they didn’t work?”

Chattel slavery hasn’t vanished from the world either. Across much of Africa, babies to this day are born into bondage and grow up as property owned by slaveholding families.

People born into descent-based slavery face a lifetime of exploitation and are treated as property by their so-called “masters.” They work without pay, herding animals, working in the fields or in their masters’ homes. They can be inherited, sold or given away as gifts or wedding presents. Women and girls typically face sexual abuse and rape, and often have to bear their masters’ children. In turn, their children will also be owned by their masters. 

According to the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, the only black chattel slaves in the world now are found in Muslim north and central Africa. More than 500,000 African slaves (by some estimates, more than 850,000) “are still bought, owned, sold, and traded by Arab and black Muslim masters in five African countries”-- Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Sudan.

...One-tenth of North Korea’s population is held in absolute bondage, the highest percentage of enslaved people of any nation on earth. More than 2.6 million people live under slavery in East Asia’s notorious hermit kingdom, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index , and the vast majority of them are forced to work by the government. The sheer evil brutality of North Korea’s slave-labor complexes is monstrous. They are hellholes where starving children are beaten to death for snatching a few kernels of corn, where three generations of families are enslaved together, and where relatives of escapees are tortured unspeakably.

Slavery in the 21st century also takes the forms of human trafficking, forced marriage, and domestic servitude. All told, more than 40 million victims are believed to be enslaved in the modern world. By all means, take the time to learn more about how slavery began in America four centuries ago. It was a terrible chapter in our history, and in some ways its effects are with us yet. But don’t get so caught up in studying slavery that no longer exists that you have no time to notice slavery that is still all too real. The scourge of slavery has yet to be wiped out. Human beings are shackled in the house of bondage yet, still groaning in their slavery and crying for help. 

Daniel Markovits is a Yale Law professor and author of The Meritocracy Trap. In his 2015 Yale Law commencement speech on the "Rat Race" he pointed out that "Elite lawyers’ real incomes have roughly tripled in the past half-century, which is more than ten times the rate of income growth experienced by the median American. Moreover, this explosion in elite lawyers’ incomes is not an eccentric or even isolated phenomenon. Instead, it fits into a wider pattern of rising elite labor incomes across our economy. You probably know that the share of total national income going to the top 1 percent of earners has roughly doubled in the past three decades. But its perhaps less familiar that fully four-fifths of that increase comes from rising wages paid to elite labor. And it may be more surprising still to learn that the top 1 percent of earners, and indeed even the top one-tenth of 1 percent, today owe fully four-fifths of their total incomes to labor. That is unprecedented in all of human history: American meritocracy has created a state of affairs in which the richest person out of every thousand overwhelmingly works for a living."

Elite lawyers’ incomes-- including when diluted by sabbaticals from private-public service-- will place you comfortably above the economic dividing line that comprehensively separates the rich from the rest in an increasingly unequal America. Perhaps most critically, your lawyerly skills will finance training your children-- through private schools and myriad other enrichments-- to thrive in the hyper-competition that you have yourselves, in effect, just won. This, then is where things stand. We have become a profession and a society constituted by meritocracy. Massively intensified and massively competitive elite training meets massively inflated economic and social rewards for elite work. You, in virtue of sitting here today, belong to the elite-- to the new, superordinate working class. This structure, whatever its virtues, also imposes enormous costs. Most obviously, it is a catastrophe for our broader society-- for the many (the nearly 99 percent) who are excluded from the increasingly narrow elite. There is an irony here. Brewster and others embraced meritocracy self-consciously in order to defeat hereditary privilege, … but although it was once the engine of American social mobility, meritocracy today blocks equality of opportunity. The student bodies at elite colleges once again skew massively towards wealth.

At Harvard College and here at Yale Law School, two places where students have skillfully and bravely compiled data that their universities suppress, as many students come from households in the top 1 percent as from the entire bottom half of the distribution. These facts will shock, as they are designed to do, but a moment’s clear reflection should render them unsurprising and even inevitable. The excess educational investment over and above what middle-class families can provide that children born into a typical one-percenter household receive is equivalent, economically, to a traditional inheritance of between $5 [million] and $10 million per child. Exceptional cases always exist-- as some of you sitting here prove-- but in general, children from poor or even middle-class households cannot possibly compete-- when they apply to places like Yale-- with people who have imbibed this massive, sustained, planned, and practiced investment, from birth or even in the womb. And workers with ordinary training cannot possibly compete-- in the labor market-- with super-skilled workers possessed of the remarkable training that places like Yale Law School provide. American meritocracy has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat, a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy of a kind, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.

The social and economic caste order in which we are now embedded-- including through our celebrations today-- demands that you comprehend yourselves on instrumental terms. Your own talent, training, and skills-- your self-same persons-- today constitute your greatest assets, the overwhelmingly dominant source of your wealth and prestige. To promote your eliteness-- to secure your caste, you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor.

Markovits' speech on the "rat race"-- the meritocracy-- is different from slavery, of course. Right? Yesterday The Atlantic published an essay on thriving in the hyper-competition that he wrote, How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition. His Yale students are, he wrote, "overwhelmingly, products of professional parents and high-class universities. I pass on to them the advantages that my own teachers bestowed on me. They, and I, owe our prosperity and our caste to meritocracy. Two decades ago, when I started writing about economic inequality, meritocracy seemed more likely a cure than a cause. Meritocracy’s early advocates championed social mobility. In the 1960s, for instance, Yale President Kingman Brewster brought meritocratic admissions to the university with the express aim of breaking a hereditary elite. Alumni had long believed that their sons had a birthright to follow them to Yale; now prospective students would gain admission based on achievement rather than breeding. Meritocracy-- for a time-- replaced complacent insiders with talented and hardworking outsiders."

Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.

Hardworking outsiders no longer enjoy genuine opportunity. According to one study, only one out of every 100 children born into the poorest fifth of households, and fewer than one out of every 50 children born into the middle fifth, will join the top 5 percent. Absolute economic mobility is also declining-- the odds that a middle-class child will outearn his parents have fallen by more than half since mid-century-- and the drop is greater among the middle class than among the poor. Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury.

Public anger over economic inequality frequently targets meritocratic institutions. Nearly three-fifths of Republicans believe that colleges and universities are bad for America, according to the Pew Research Center. The intense and widespread fury generated by the college-admissions scandal early this year tapped into a deep and broad well of resentment. This anger is warranted but also distorting. Outrage at nepotism and other disgraceful forms of elite advantage-taking implicitly valorizes meritocratic ideals. Yet meritocracy itself is the bigger problem, and it is crippling the American dream. Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.

But what, exactly, have the rich won? Even meritocracy’s beneficiaries now suffer on account of its demands. It ensnares the rich just as surely as it excludes the rest, as those who manage to claw their way to the top must work with crushing intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their expensive education in order to extract a return.

No one should weep for the wealthy. But the harms that meritocracy imposes on them are both real and important. Diagnosing how meritocracy hurts elites kindles hope for a cure. We are accustomed to thinking that reducing inequality requires burdening the rich. But because meritocratic inequality does not in fact serve anyone well, escaping meritocracy’s trap would benefit virtually everyone.

Hierarchy by Nancy Ohanian

Elite parents push their babies onto the elite path immediately and these kids start feeling the "meritocratic pressures" from early childhood, starting in elite kindergartens. Markovits wrote that "epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned of schoolwork-induced sleep deprivation. Wealthy students show higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than poor students do. They also suffer depression and anxiety at rates as much as triple those of their age peers throughout the country. A recent study of a Silicon Valley high school found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety."

The contest intensifies when meritocrats enter the workplace, where elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it. A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.

In 1962, when many elite lawyers earned roughly a third of what they do today, the American Bar Association could confidently declare, “There are … approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer. In 2000, by contrast, a major law firm pronounced with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable hours, “if properly managed,” was “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Because not all the hours a lawyer works are billable, billing 2,400 hours could easily require working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. six days a week, every week of the year, without vacation or sick days. In finance, “bankers’ hours”-- originally named for the 10-to-3 business day fixed by banks from the 19th century through the mid-20th century and later used to refer more generally to any light work-- have given way to the ironically named “banker 9-to-5,” which begins at 9 a.m. on one day and runs through 5 a.m. on the next. Elite managers were once “organization men,” cocooned by lifelong employment in a corporate hierarchy that rewarded seniority above performance. Today, the higher a person climbs on the org chart, the harder she is expected to work. Amazon’s “leadership principles” call for managers to have “relentlessly high standards” and to “deliver results.” The company tells managers that when they “hit the wall” at work, the only solution is to “climb the wall.”

Americans who work more than 60 hours a week report that they would, on average, prefer 25 fewer weekly hours. They say this because work subjects them to a “time famine” that, a 2006 study found, interferes with their capacity to have strong relationships with their spouse and children, to maintain their home, and even to have a satisfying sex life. A respondent to a recent Harvard Business School survey of executives proudly insisted, “The 10 minutes that I give my kids at night is one million times greater than spending that 10 minutes at work.” Ten minutes!

The capacity to bear these hours gracefully, or at least grimly, has become a criterion for meritocratic success. A top executive at a major firm, interviewed by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild for her book The Time Bind, observed that aspiring managers who have demonstrated their skills and dedication face a “final elimination”: “Some people flame out, get weird because they work all the time … The people at the top are very smart, work like crazy, and don’t flame out. They’re still able to maintain a good mental set, and keep their family life together. They win the race.”

A person who extracts income and status from his own human capital places himself, quite literally, at the disposal of others-- he uses himself up. Elite students desperately fear failure and crave the conventional markers of success, even as they see through and publicly deride mere “gold stars” and “shiny things.” Elite workers, for their part, find it harder and harder to pursue genuine passions or gain meaning through their work. Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.

...[I]gnoring how oppressive meritocracy is for the rich is a mistake. The rich now dominate society not idly but effortfully. The familiar arguments that once defeated aristocratic inequality do not apply to an economic system based on rewarding effort and skill. The relentless work of the hundred-hour-a-week banker inoculates her against charges of unearned advantage. Better, then, to convince the rich that all their work isn’t actually paying off.

They may need less convincing than you might think. As the meritocracy trap closes in around elites, the rich themselves are turning against the prevailing system. Plaintive calls for work/life balance ring ever louder. Roughly two-thirds of elite workers say that they would decline a promotion if the new job demanded yet more of their energy. When he was the dean of Stanford Law School, Larry Kramer warned graduates that lawyers at top firms are caught in a seemingly endless cycle: Higher salaries require more billable hours to support them, and longer hours require yet higher salaries to justify them. Whose interests, he lamented, does this system serve? Does anyone really want it?

Escaping the meritocracy trap will not be easy. Elites naturally resist policies that threaten to undermine their advantages. But it is simply not possible to get rich off your own human capital without exploiting yourself and impoverishing your inner life, and meritocrats who hope to have their cake and eat it too deceive themselves. Building a society in which a good education and good jobs are available to a broader swath of people-- so that reaching the very highest rungs of the ladder is simply less important-- is the only way to ease the strains that now drive the elite to cling to their status.

How can that be done? For one thing, education-- whose benefits are concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents-- must become open and inclusive. Private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless at least half of their students come from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And public subsidies should encourage schools to meet this requirement by expanding enrollment.

A parallel policy agenda must reform work, by favoring goods and services produced by workers who do not have elaborate training or fancy degrees. For example, the health-care system should emphasize public health, preventive care, and other measures that can be overseen primarily by nurse practitioners, rather than high-tech treatments that require specialist doctors. The legal system should deploy “legal technicians”-- not all of whom would need to have a J.D.-- to manage routine matters, such as real-estate transactions, simple wills, and even uncontested divorces. In finance, regulations that limit exotic financial engineering and favor small local and regional banks can shift jobs to mid-skilled workers. And management should embrace practices that distribute control beyond the C-suite, to empower everyone else in the firm.

The main obstacle to overcoming meritocratic inequality is not technical but political. Today’s conditions induce discontent and widespread pessimism, verging on despair. In his book Oligarchy, the political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters surveys eras in human history from the classical period to the 20th century, and documents what becomes of societies that concentrate income and wealth in a narrow elite. In almost every instance, the dismantling of such inequality has been accompanied by societal collapse, such as military defeat (as in the Roman empire) or revolution (as in France and Russia).

Nevertheless, there are grounds for hope. History does present one clear-cut case of an orderly recovery from concentrated inequality: In the 1920s and ’30s, the U.S. answered the Great Depression by adopting the New Deal framework that would eventually build the mid-century middle class. Crucially, government redistribution was not the primary engine of this process. The broadly shared prosperity that this regime established came, mostly, from an economy and a labor market that promoted economic equality over hierarchy-- by dramatically expanding access to education, as under the GI Bill, and then placing mid-skilled, middle-class workers at the center of production.

An updated version of these arrangements remains available today; a renewed expansion of education and a renewed emphasis on middle-class jobs can reinforce each other. The elite can reclaim its leisure in exchange for a reduction of income and status that it can easily afford. At the same time, the middle class can regain its income and status and reclaim the center of American life.

Rebuilding a democratic economic order will be difficult. But the benefits that economic democracy brings-- to everyone-- justify the effort. And the violent collapse that will likely follow from doing nothing leaves us with no good alternative but to try.

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