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by Orou
2221 days ago
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Do you have any data you could share on the 10%/90% divide when it comes to working conditions? I assume you're talking primarily about compensation and benefits here. One of the interesting things about the American work system to me is that even high-status, highly-paid careers are still built around 60+ hour work weeks for many. The system doesn't seem geared towards life balance at all, it seems geared toward giving outsized rewards to workaholics for whom there is little going on in life besides their jobs. |
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Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor, has a recent book, "The Meritocracy Trap" that goes into your last paragraph. I heard about it on an interview with Ezra Klein (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show/e/6...), and Vox has a good summary of it (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...), with a section that is very similar to what you wrote:
> In order to win this competition, elites are forced to exploit their own talents and abilities. They spend their lives acquiring the degrees, skills, attitudes, and habits (i.e. “human capital”) that makes them valuable to elite educational institutions and employers. In doing so, elites, Markovits writes, transform themselves into “asset manager[s] whose portfolio contains [their] own persons.” This process damages the very identity of its participants.
> > [Elites] become constituted by their achievements, so that eliteness goes from being something that a person enjoys to being everything that he is. In a mature meritocracy, schools and jobs dominate elite life so immersively that they leave no self apart from status.
> In short, elites are shuttled into a life-long, endless competition that not only consumes their life quantitatively but qualitatively as well, leaving no room for self-expression, actualization, or discovery — only self-exploitation, value extraction, and endless anxiety.