Steps on the Columbia University campus, 2020. (Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images) The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the glaring contradictions in American higher education. State research universities ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By Thomas Frank THE MERITOCRACY TRAP How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles ...

Daniel Markovits explains to The Nation how elite education is destroying the middle class and exacerbating inequality. Daniel Markovits.(Photo by Stephanie Anestis) “Merit is a sham,” Daniel ...

Daniel Markovits, the newly appointed Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School, works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral ...

The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits (Penguin Press, 448 pp., $30) The Meritocracy Trap, by ...

In each corner is a a professor of law at Yale University, and the battle is over the future direction of the country. Anthony T. Kronman’s “The Assault on American Excellence” and Daniel Markovits’ ...

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. WHY FOLLOW? Update your preferences in Account Settings Markovits is Guido Calabresi professor of law at Yale Law School and the ...

In 1958, sociologist Michael Young wrote a dark satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy. The term “meritocracy” was Young’s own coining, and he chose it to denote a new aristocracy based on ...

One way to tell the history of the last millennium or so—the way Alexis de Tocqueville did—is to describe a transition from aristocracy to democracy. In the old days, some people had the goods, some ...

Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? “Merit is a sham,” Daniel Markovits writes in the first sentence of his ...