 Let me welcome you let me welcome everyone to their future Gems forum. I'm very very glad to see and hopefully hear from you all today My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator host and chief cat herder And I'll be leading you through the next hour of conversation Mr. Mark of its has a really interesting idea He says that we were founded in the principle of meritocracy But the mechanisms for doing that have changed they've been suborned and now in fact We are creating and recreating and strengthening a new aristocracy So in order to talk about this, let me welcome Professor Mark of its Thank you so much for having me Be here. Oh, thank you so much for making the time. I really appreciate it. Are you in New Haven right now? I am indeed. Oh good. Good, and you're enjoying summer, which is a precious thing. Yes, it's you know Someone you know academics estivate Your creatures who sleep the summer and I sleep the winter Well, that's true of some that's true of some and but here at the forum we never rest we never asleep I Wanted to thank you for contributing this book to our national conversation You make a very fierce a very strong argument before we get into the argument. Let me ask besides Estivating what's what's gonna be occupying most of your mind and most of your time for the next year Maybe teaching this phone working a new book. I'll be teaching this fall I'm at the moment actually working on some practical things concerning They are funding and distribution for a potential vaccine for the coronavirus So this is a practical a practical effort I'm about to start another book though, which will be on growth as an economic and personal ideal and We'll express some skepticism about it That's interesting. That's interesting. There's been a lot of talk this past couple of months about the degrowth agenda or about the circular economy More than a few people are citing that great adage growth for growth's sake is the ideology the cancer cell, right? Yes, exactly Exactly. Well, it sounds like this is gonna be a great book We will all all best to it and we're looking forward to seeing it. I'm well. I'm hoping that I can write it, you know It's uh, it has many excellences. It does not yet have the excellence of existing Well, I think of it as a Conceptual excellence exactly I have I have so many questions for you based on the book and based on the topic and Friends if you're new to the future transform I usually lead off with a couple of questions just to get the ball rolling But then each of you will have questions and comments either based on what professor Markovic says Or based on your sense of the book or your sense of the idea and believe me There's got a lot of ideas here quite a lot to think about So let me just begin A key claim of your book is that we are as I just said in introduction Experiencing the kind of recreation of an aristocracy in American society and yet so much of our culture is premised on the idea of meritocracy that The box office rewards the best movie that academia like Yale University rewards the most intellectually gifted the market is all about Surfacing the best quality products and so on. How do how do we get here? How can how do you square these two? Good, so You're right that meritocracy has this kind of allure. It's almost the common sense of our age Whatever else people think they think that it's both just and serves the public interest if people get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than say on their parent social class For a while meritocracy actually function in that way and and that's because in the early Years of our meritocracy the older lead, which was really a hereditary early on breeding Was to be blunt not particularly hard-working and not particularly smart And so if you allow people to get ahead based on their accomplishments outsiders got ahead and and that's what the early meritocrats Wanted and valued and argued for But what has happened is that the new elite that was itself made by meritocracy Could hardly be more different from the old hereditary elite in that it's filled with people who have an almost boundless taste for and skill at training their children and So the new elite the meritocrats of each generation invest Extraordinary amounts of skill and also extraordinary just amounts of money in educating their children and giving their children education that not just poor kids But also middle-class kids can't match So just to put a number on this and then I'll stop talking for the moment If you take the difference between what is invested in educating a typical child of a 1% or professional household and What is invested in educating a typical middle-class child in America and take that difference and every year put it in the S&P 500 to create a trust fund to be given to the child on the death of the parents as a traditional inheritance That quantity would be well in excess of ten million dollars per child. Oh, and that's a form of inherited privilege run through meritocracy I See I see that's that's a stark number Friends I've got a couple of questions to follow up on that right now a bunch of you have been putting in questions in comments in the in the chat box Professor Markovitsa we have a like a rogue librarian who says that she worked in some Yale collections back in the day So that's a that's a nice question to see So at some point we turn to a literal meritocracy and then that meritocracy has become an aristocracy by in effect pulling up the bridge pulling up the ladder beneath them as they ascended and Education forms a key component of that. Let me let me ask a basic question about that in in the United States We have publicly funded K through 12. That is universal It's universally accessible through all kinds of measures We have an enormous post-secondary sector of colleges and universities Which is extraordinarily diverse geographically very very distributed. We have an elaborate system of financial aid Everything from loans and scholarships and grants. We have a testing apparatus multiple tests Which are designed to to winnow out people based on their academic excellence We have you know an enormous commitment to this how Is it simply that the the very wealthy has have managed to privatize their education to drive the kind of success or is there some other kind of mechanism that we need to know Well, first of all the distinction in public and private is complicated and somewhat artificial in our society in particular because of local funding of public schools So as many people in your form probably know better than I The average middle-class American school spends somewhere between 12 and 15 thousand dollars per pupil per year on educating its children A school in a really poor area might spend eight or nine thousand dollars per pupil per year But a school in a really wealthy area Including a public school a school say in Scarsdale, New York. Well, we'll spend thirty thousand dollars a year Educating its children and this is all inside the public system And this doesn't even take into account voluntary parental donations to things like the PTA and notice that the gap between 30 and 15 or 30 and 12 is Six or seven times as big as the gap between the middle class in the poor school In fact, the US is one of only three wealthy countries Which spends more per pupil per year on rich kids than poor kids in its public system So we're an outlier almost all wealthy countries direct their public subsidies for education Disproportionately to poorer children. We do not and in addition to this private schools Spend much much more if you look at the top 20 private schools in America according to Forbes magazine They spend on average about 70 to 75 thousand dollars per pupil per year And a lot of that spending is in fact public subsidy because they're organized as not for profits So alumni donations are tax deductible their endowments can grow exempt from tax and Just to give you a sense for the scale of that subsidy The richest private university in America per pupil is Princeton. The richest overall is Harvard But the richest per student is Princeton Princeton's tax exemption somebody recently calculated Amounts to a public subsidy of about a hundred thousand dollars per Princeton student per year Compare that to the public subsidy for Rudd Curz the State University of New Jersey, which is about twelve thousand five hundred dollars per student per year Or Essex County Community College, which is about two thousand five hundred dollars per student per year Princeton gets a public subsidy in the form of tax preference, which is 40 times as big as The public subsidy given to the local community college Not even though there are more kids at Princeton from the top 1% of the income distribution in the bottom half So it's a massive upside-down public subsidy of rich kids That's one of the things that we're producing in this country In the in the chat came a bit of a pointed question, which is what's Yale's public subsidy? Yeah, I don't know what Yale's public subsidy is actually, but it's gonna be large It's gonna be not quite as big as Princeton's But Yale is an extremely wealthy University I can tell you that there are more students at Yale College from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60% So Yale again disproportionately benefits rich kids So that's a good answer to my question Friends I have more to ask, but I think you're already starting to ask some so remember if you're new to this either Press the raised hand button if you'd like to join us on stage or Click the question mark if you'd like to give us a text question Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Simon Frazier asked about how school systems are funded Kathleen those are locally if you'd like to follow up on what the professor Markowitz has just outlined Followed by the other good question We have a great deep question typically from Tom Ames in Houston Just does education create social mobility or does it just reinforce inequalities? So I think that's a very deep question because I think the answer is it does both The question is for whom and which effect is more powerful so It creates social mobility in the sense that compared to the old types of aristocracies Which were based on race on gender on class education makes it possible for people to improve their social positions whereas you know A society in which to stay ahead you have to be a white christian man There are large segments of the population that are simply categorically excluded And education doesn't categorically exclude in that sense. It produces social mobility At the same time because education works It produces capacities and privilege A world in which those who have most privileged parents get the most education Also blocks Social mobility by giving those who have the most a leg up still further And you know, you see that writ large in some of the phenomenon I'm describing You see it writ small in the fact that things like the sat Which on the one hand mean that in principle anybody can score really well and get admitted to any college in the country On the other hand if people were admitted to colleges based exclusively on sat scores college populations would be richer More christian and whiter Than they are now and that's because those who have the most are best able to prepare for the test And do the best on the test So I think the question is are you interested in the outlier or are you interested in the middle of the distribution? The typical case and at this moment what education does is it provides mobility for the outlier And establishes hierarchy for the typical case So the middle is is put in the hierarchy and the extremes both the very low and the very high are supported Yeah, yeah Well, thank you Tom if you want to follow up with that on the video, let me know We have a another question that's just come in from Steve Covello He's an instructional designer in New Hampshire and we bring him up on stage Hello, Steve. Good to see you. Howdy. Hi, Steve. You can hear me. Okay. I hope you get you can I'm really glad to be here today. I'm so glad that that you were asked to speak because I just listened to your interview with sam harris Um the whole thing and I so I may be a little bit of the ahead of the narrative here And I was very eager to ask you this question now Your proposal for a one-time rich people tax or perhaps that's not right right way to put it for balancing What appears to be the differential and parental investment? Sounds to me at least like affirmative action in in some way Is your thesis here based on the idea that? At all in kinship with affirmative action And do you even see this as a as a viable solution or or is what you're proposing here to Compensate or balance things have nothing to do with something programmatic like affirmative action Great. So there's a there's a lot there Let me let me just give a little background Since I I guess probably a lot of people did not hear that other interview Um, one of the things that I've come out in favor of both in on that podcast into the new york times Is a one-time wealth tax in response to the coronavirus pandemic? Um, and the thought there is actually not specifically connected to education It's just that what the disease has done is exacerbate prior inequalities It's um, you know elites professionals can work from home can keep their jobs can keep their salaries Whereas middle and working class people both both lose their Economic base and put themselves physically at risk in doing their work And it seems like a fair way to start to respond to that is to have the most privileged people Pay a large portion of the economic bill for the relief packages that the pandemic is causing um at the same time I do think that we have created a world in which concentrations of privilege are absolutely enormous And they go to income they go to wealth they go to human capital and training along almost any dimension of measurement The share that the best off Are getting has grown and grown and grown and so I favor some form of redistribution That takes from those who have the most for the benefit not just of the worst off not just of the poor But also for the benefit of the middle class In order to produce a society and an economy in which the middle of the distribution is the leading force in our collective life um Is that related to affirmative action? Well, it will have consequences for racial inequality It will ameliorate racial inequality particularly in the middle of the distribution if by affirmative action You're focused particularly on race in america the racial wealth gap in this country is very very large um interestingly The interactions between race and class have become very complicated in recent decades so that um, if you look at for example for african-american men The income distribution The gap between the average income of the very richest white men and the very richest black men has been diminishing In recent decades Even as the gap between the income of the average white man and the average black man has not been diminishing much So that there's a complicated interplay between race and class and the forms of hierarchy that we have in our society And both of them are extremely powerful and independent drivers of stratification My own private politics Are that we should do a lot to reduce both forms of inequality But the argument of the book Is not You know, if I come to you as a scholar who's who's done certain kinds of work and published it That work has been principally on class not race And my views on race are more the views of a citizen than the views of an academic specialist That's a very very detailed answer a very nuanced answer. Um, steve, um, does that help? Yes, sir, uh, I think my only having mentioned Affirmative action was that as a concept for remedying what appears to have been a historical injustice Is a programmatic one as opposed to something which is Kind of one and done as far as redistribution is concerned So, I mean, that's really where my differential is here and trying to understand whether what you're talking about something is more Programmatic or whether it's more just sort of distribution driven So it seems like there's some kind of kinship between historical injustice both from a class standpoint and a racial standpoint But that the solutions for remedying that are not necessarily the same Yes Yeah, good. So on that front, um I I believe that the kinds of inequalities that have been building up are structural and systematic and therefore require Programmatic ongoing. That's where I was going interventions in order to reduce them um, the thing about the one-time wealth tax Was specifically keyed to the current pandemic Okay, which has this very peculiar quality, which is that Those who all who have the most are suffering the least and It's not clear what individuals can do in the name of solidarity To share the burden of the catastrophe If you're a doctor or a healthcare worker, there are things you can do but if you're a well-meaning privileged professional In your individual capacity, you don't have any particular skills that are suited to this moment And the thought was a one-time charge against the accumulated wealth of the most privileged Is an appropriate collective response To a calamity that is hitting everybody But that only some are really suffering from that was that was the idea there And it's in a way independent of whatever I may believe about education and class stratification in good times Interesting Steve. Thank you very much for that great question. Um, and thank you. Yes indeed We'll uh, we have a whole bunch of other questions. I've just been coming up. Um, so let me, uh Shift ground a little bit um to um Bring those up So, uh, we have a text questions that have come from keel doomsh And I want to make sure that we get to see them But it's actually a three-part question So I need to flash this on the screen kind of like flashcards. So here and let me just let me see how this goes um He says that uh, regarding schooling what you call meritocracy is in the fact that school accuracy This condition is caused by colleges controlling access to the job world with their degrees and alumni network All right, so that's part one school accuracy um, then he says yours Your solutions like forcing elite colleges to enroll more low-income students to step in the right direction But it doesn't get the core issue which is colleges controlling access to jobs All right, and then how finally the question The way to stop this is to make it illegal to hire by where someone went to school And to turn credentialing over to a third party similar to the cpa exam for jobs and accounting Your thoughts Great. Thank you. Um, let me go backwards through the three parts And and I'll then end up at a point at which I think my views um Draw reasonable objections and criticism from all sides so so on the idea of Inserting an independent third party to break the link between interested colleges and employers um I'll set aside the question of whether it should be made illegal or not because That's a question of what the appropriate role of the state is In regulating private behavior and one might think it would be a really good thing if it didn't happen But it still shouldn't be made illegal That's a plausible view and and I don't want to pick up particularly the question about when the state should use law um We did that to some degree with the sat So that you know the way in which schools used to feed people to colleges Is through alumni networks In fact, the language of elite university admission in the 1950s was not that people applied to colleges It's that sons put themselves down for that was the language they used the colleges their fathers had attended And what the sat was meant to do was precisely what The question suggests which is break the self-interested power of schools to prefer their Their pupils with their alumni and get them into the next colleges and for a while the sat really worked at that So the as the sat gathered steam fewer and fewer prep school kids got into top colleges and universities Fewer and fewer children of alumni got into top colleges and universities And instead you got in based on the test and then what happened is what we discussed earlier Which is the new elite figured out that there are two ways to get a leg up One is through the old boy net And the other is by really training your children so they can do really well on the test And training your children to do well on the test is maybe a more burdensome way of privileging those who already have But it's no less effective And so my worry is that if we were to insert Some independent evaluating mechanism between colleges and jobs What would happen is that the colleges that Have the most resources Have the best ability to pre-select students for the capacity to do well at whatever the independent Evaluator measures Would now come to dominate the independent evaluator In just the way in which elite schools have come to dominate the sat And just to give you a sense for how incredibly powerful this effect is In a typical recent year There are roughly speaking 15,000 kids in america With a parent who has attended graduate of professional school whose sat verbal score hits the ivy league median If I ask you how many kids are there in neither of whose parents graduated high school Whose verbal sat hits the ivy league median The answer is it turns out the tail is so thin that statistical influence is unreliable But if you think out the numbers it's 32 32 32 So you have an independent agency the college board administering a test to try to select for people without Directly referencing where their parents went to school or what education their parents have And you have a situation in which Hundreds of times more kids of fancy educated parents Win at that system than kids whose parents don't have a fancy education So so I worry about that And this sort of leads back to the frame at the beginning of the tripartite question Which is My my view of these matters has this peculiar character Which is that I believe that elite education Actually imparts Something in those who receive it That others have a hard time getting What is something I want to be very careful about this Um because it's another part of my view that that thing is maybe not so valuable But it is rationally related to what employers want And so when employers hire kids from the fanciest schools What they're picking for is a set of capacities that they have designed the workplace to favor And it's not simply arbitrary discrimination Or simply privileging people in your network It's doing something that's economically rational And the problem is that we've made an education sector And a labor market which reinforce hierarchy in both So that we get a lot of inequality And the reason we get it is that education works as advertised Which is why the kinds of reforms that I'm interested in Don't just go to making allocation mechanisms fairer or more open But go to actually spreading out education across more people so that there are More investments in educating more people particularly more people whose parents aren't rich And and I that's the solution because on my view the problem is not that education doesn't work Is that it does work, but it's unfairly distributed Again the question distribution keel Follows up with a quick note in chat. Let me just read this Independent test would be infinitely preferable the college is controlling credentialing Which is a huge conflict of interest and I would anticipate Counselor that you would say that test could be subordined and gamed just like everything else I think that's the basic story that I want to tell and that's why you know, let's let's be clear about this If college admissions were based only on the sat Rather than including things like alumni preferences including things like where you went to high school Guidance counselors letters of recommendation Whether you play a sport The result would be less equal not more equal Which is not to say the system we have now is just or equal or fair Is just to say that the sat is one of the most gameable parts of the system He'll thank you for a fantastic idea for great provocation and Professor markov it's thank you for For diving into this keel has more comments, but we can return to this. I want to make sure that everybody gets a chance to To ask we've shared some resources by the way, we have um Professor markovitz was interviewed by uh sam harris. It's in his podcast called making sense episode 205 I put that in the chat box. I hopefully you can see it. I also put it on twitter So we can see that And then we have a david prinsky Points us to david larby's recent book a perfect mess the unlikely ascendancy of american higher education So again, thank you for that david Now we have another video question again If you're new to this you can see how easy it is for us to display text questions or video questions So to give you an example of one of those video questions brought up We'll bring up a long time friend of the program the personal friend and just a delightful human being Roxanne riskin also from connecticut. So let's see if we can add her to the show Hello, Roxanne Brian. Thank you for those kind words Hi Roxanne, how are you? I want to be from connecticut right now, but Thank you professor. You have really um enlightened me in a various uh in various ways and um My question is a contrarian question And I want to ask you if you've heard about rich shaming and How you will address students um who have privileged parents being discriminated against That's part one and Do you think it's really necessary to shame rich people who care about their kids academic education great, um so A couple points about this. Um It's a part of the argument of the meritocracy trap There are two parts of the argument that are relevant to this question The first is that the kinds of inequality that we're facing now Can arise and mostly do arise Without any individual persons doing something vicious or immoral They arise instead because We have a system in which as you say Parents want to support their children and want to help their children and parents who are wealthy and have means Will naturally deploy those means to the benefit of their kids And it's not a part of the book to argue that that's somehow disgraceful or terrible It does have terrible consequences for our society And so we're in a situation in which when ordinary people behave In the ways in which ordinarily decent people do The result is awful, but that doesn't mean that any one of their individual behaviors Is worthy of sort of private moral condemnation. There are no villains in this story And part of the idea of the book is that to be politically serious about structural reform Is not to focus on individual villains or private moral vices But instead to focus on structure And structure is what drives the way ordinary people behave A second point of the book is that this system actually is not in the human interests of the elite Because the rich kids in some sense benefit from All the education that's bought for them But it's no fun to be a rich kid in america today And go to schools that require hours and hours of homework and have tutors And testing coaches and be evaluated all the time And the system is so competitive that although having privilege is almost necessary for success It doesn't guarantee success. So the privileged are constantly worried that they're going to lose too And so this system doesn't even serve the human interests of the elite And it's not that I think if you're in the middle class in america, you should have much sympathy with the elite Um at the same time the fact that it doesn't serve the human interests of the elite Mean that the rich also have a reason to change the system Now you can't change the system one person at a time If a single rich family decides this is an unfair system It's not a good system and decides to pull out of the rat race. The result is that their children will lose and no one's to do and Parents who love their children don't want that Even as parents know that if they participate in the result in the rat race The result is that their children will be run ragged and overwhelmed And lose many of their authentic interests and also won't do well And this is why structural reform is the answer. So it's a system change. It's a system change. It's a system change This must take decades to change. Yes It's a generational project. It's not a project for one year Well, thank you Absolutely. Thank you Roxanne, thank you for the great question. Um, you really that's That clarifies a great deal. Um, and uh, and thank you again for being a great supporter of the program Of course Speaking of a video and uh, we have another guest who or another participant who wants to join us on stage This is uh, another person with a great name, brian. Unfortunately, he's got a terrible spelling error in it But otherwise we're welcoming him to the program. Uh, this is brian mulligan Hello brian Hi folks, uh, can you hear me? Okay? Perfect. How are you? I'm from slago in ireland. I have uh, listen I I think this is a great topic. I've only become recently aware of the difficulties with meritocracy Uh, but I suppose my question here is I'm a little bit puzzled about why you're suggesting There should be significant transfer of wealth from the rich to the middle class I think research and well-being and happiness would show that there's diminishing returns on wealth And that when you get up from the bottom into the middle class You're not going to get much happier if you get more wealth Um, and that really I feel that This discussion is focusing too much on the rich and what they have rather than pulling up the poor And that's also illustrated by the fact that we're talking so much about elite universities When in actual fact the solution to the problem I would see it is is for the rich to help the poor and this is through primary school education and secondary school education Because we know community college can get you into the middle class So I think we're spending too much time worrying about what the elite are doing with their kids Let them go to these universities because we can be perfectly happy Going to a third grade university our kids will be fine And if they go to community college or if they get a trade We're focusing too much on the rich and elite universities. Great. Thank you for that. Um, Let me give a three-part answer The first part is one place in which I agree with you entirely is that We should not focus on universities exclusively. Um, but on the the entire life cycle of training so Primary school middle school high school pre kindergarten. So the training that two and three year olds get Um, especially in the united states, but also in The uk ireland. I know less. Well Um, there are enormous disparities in the training that rich and middle class people give their children Throughout the life cycle of training and we should focus all the way through we should also incidentally focus on adult training an extremely important and under emphasized and extremely damaging development in Adult education in the anglo-saxon world in particular Has been the destruction of workplace training So that it used to be that adult workers in the us in the uk Got substantial training on the job through their employers And that that training dramatically improved their earnings power And also their discretion and social position over the course of their adult working lives And that training has been almost entirely stripped out of large firms and small firms and that's extremely costly So at that point I agree with you entirely. This is a story about the life cycle of education Not about the four years in college The place I want to push back is two parts one. Why am I focused on the elite? and two why am I focused on the middle class rather than the poor and and There are related answers to that first of all I want to absolutely acknowledge that the worked off in a society are the poor And it's a perfectly plausible moral view. It's it's my own moral view That those who have the greatest claim concerning economic justice are the worst off So that there's a lot of reason to focus on the poor always has been always will be Nevertheless, here are two things that are true, particularly in the u.s. Also in the uk first Poverty has been going down In 1960 in the united states The poverty rate probably was about 33 The official poverty statistics weren't calculated in the u.s. Until the early 1960s Most recently now before the pandemic the poverty rate in the u.s. Was about 11 and a half percent Still unconscionably high But much much lower than it was at the middle of the last century At the same time the concentration of income and wealth at the top has been going up So that the share of national income captured by the richest one percent of households is over twice as big now as it was in 1960 in fact The most recent census report Simultaneously reported historic lows in the poverty rate and historic highs in the concentration of income among the rich And so one of the reasons to focus on the rich Is that this is where the economic growth is? This is where the inequality is And what's happened has been a massive transfer of advantage Away from the middle class a little bit towards the poor and mostly towards an incredibly narrow elite And that's been extremely destructive for our economic social and political order It has also been extremely destructive of middle class well-being If you look at the data gathered by ann case and angus deaton for the u.s Midlife mortality for middle class people has been going up even before the pandemic It's actually been going up in the uk also And it is demographically unheard of for mortality to go up absent war economic collapse or epidemic disease and yet between 2015 and 2019 In both britain and the u.s Midlife mortality has been going up and it's been going up in the middle class And the sources of this rising mortality have been drug addiction overdose alcoholism and suicide forms of direct and indirect self-harm And the diagnosis of the meritocracy trap book Is that the reason for that is that we have a form of structural inequality and structural exclusion Which means that middle class people not only poor people also poor people Cannot get advantage in a society that increasingly concentrates income and status in a narrow elite and that meritocracy Then characterizes the results of this exclusion as an individual failure to measure up So that the middle class is not just economically excluded from advantage But also morally insulted And told that it's the source of its own failings And that that combination of economic injury and moral insult Is the source of the incredibly damaging self-harm that is driving rising mortality So I think it's perfectly morally proper to remain Primarily committed to alleviating the greatest need which is in the poor But the distinctive forms of inequality that our societies suffer And the distinctive harm of the age is to the middle class And that's why I think we need to focus on closing the gap between the rich and the middle class That's a fantastic answer Brian would you would you like to respond? Well, what occurred to me as you were talking is that maybe the middle class is a very broad definition that you sort in the middle class and typically I would have my perception I suspect the perception in the uk and ireland of middle classes in the and in the us is somewhat different But my perception of the middle class would be those that have enough money and You know Are able to take care of their kids their family have shelter or whatever are able to get by And a lot of the problems of the middle class are often to do with what would you say? Issues with regards to status or other issues that they really shouldn't have if they Took a different attitude to life perhaps and being jealous of the rich could be one of those so what i'm saying is that so But then again if if we're talking about a broad middle class You can see somebody at the lower end of the middle class that are in genuine financial hardship Even though the working core type of So maybe my generalization or the generalization of the middle class is part of the problem here Well, so I think the extreme version of this point There is a big gap between particularly the southern england london and south of london conception of the middle class Is one in which the middle class is what americans would call the professional class These are office workers mind workers degree-based workers And they are Characterizing contra-distinction to the aristocracy which is an old-fashioned hereditary elite Whereas in u.s. English what the middle class means is effectively everybody between the 30th percentile of the income distribution And somewhere around the 90th or something like that. That's the broad middle class That's the group that i'm talking about here. It is an interesting feature of the english usage that Many people in england who call themselves middle class Are able through this form of language To disguise the fact that they are in fact now the elite And I think part of your question is driven by that sensibility That there's something odd going on there and that lots of people who call themselves middle class Are the beneficiaries of these trends not the victims of them and and I agree particularly with respect to to english english Usage and I suspect that irish usage is in that way quite similar Thanks very much. Thank you ryan. Thank you for the great question and have a good night I'm glad you could make it here We have friends. We are actually coming close to the end of the hour And I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to Ask their questions. We have a stack of them coming in Um, and I want to bring to the stage uh meg tufano from ansiak university She has a great title of the affiliate professor of critical thinking So let's see if we can bring meg up Hello meg. Hey, hi, how are you? I'm very well. Thank you so much my question Now I have two questions because when I asked the first question you said other things but my first question is couldn't you solve this by making Every child in the united states get the same amount of money in their primary and second education Get rid of the of the property tax craziness I mean that would like seemingly instantly Embrace a lot of what the problems are. I live in apalachia So my rigid my 20 years ago when I started teaching I taught at community colleges with students who lived in their cars And it was so normal. It was so normal That it's hard to describe To someone who grew up in washington dc. I never even realized people could live like that um and They do and they have an incredible grip second question I'm going to ask and I'm going to let you answer the first question but second question is you used education and training interchangeably and I think maybe we could make a huge difference in all of the problems going on at university top level conversations if we would Redress What the difference is I Most of the jobs that you are trained for or can be trained for Maybe you don't need a humanities degree. Maybe you don't need a bachelor of liberal arts. Maybe you need a certificate I don't know But there are that argument is being something We were talking about it and somehow it disappeared um, and you just conflated both words, so I have those two questions could we solve the same thing by just Yeah, practically changing the financing of primary and secondary schools and How should we think about? training And education great so for me those are both fantastic questions. Um on the first It would it would be an enormous step towards fairness and social and human flourishing if we radically equalized expenditures on education for all kids um But That's almost impossible to do In our social and economic order because The deep structures of our federalism Make local financing of education difficult legally to undo And the political economy produced by this education structure Makes it politically almost impossible to upend The amount of political and legal power concentrated in the public school districts That now over fun Is enormous And this is one reason why it turns out to be a politically feasible project To reduce or even eliminate the gap between what the public system spends on poor kids and middle-class kids But it is simply not a politically feasible project directly to eliminate The ability of rich parents to spend more than the average on their kids education And one of the things I try to do in the meritocracy trap Is to produce a series of arguments and mechanisms That will attack that effectively over time Without requiring that we effectively abolish local control over school finance All at once, which I regard as desirable but not politically feasible Okay, and that's a political judgment and it's also a legal judgment and I could be wrong From your from your lips to god's ears That i'm wrong about that because you're right. It would be a much better system um Politically easier than taking money from rich people but but you know, I'm not a marcher Well, we can we can you know, we this is a longer conversation, but that that's what the judgment is about and and and on the second point about education and training look um There's a a shallow and a deep version of that question The shallow version of that question focuses not just on the education versus training distinction But on the fact that we lump education into large units, which we call degrees and um micro credentialing Is a way of parceling out education in smaller chunks Where the smaller chunks are more rationally related To the skills and tasks that people will need to do in order to convert their education slash training Into income on the labor market And there are lots of reasons to believe that if those chunks can be Individuated and delivered. This would be a more fair and equal system There is a long-term problem, which is that trends in automation both of machines and of code Mean that more and more of the smaller tasks will no longer need to be done by people at all And the thing that actually will be marketable translatable into wages on the labor market Will be abstract high level and creative conceptual thought And that is harder to micro credential Um with respect to the deeper difference between education and training I agree with you education is a humanistic enterprise That goes to developing a certain set of existential attitudes Towards the condition of the person who has it Whereas training is an economically rationalizable exercise Which goes to building human capital so that the person's skillset commands a higher wage in the labor market One of the things that has happened in our society as elite labor comes to dominate top incomes Is there's a huge pressure to think of all schooling in terms of training? And this distorts universities schools And colleges all throughout the status hierarchy in a series of ways that are undesirable from the perspective of education I actually have a I have a piece coming out in the three penny review about exactly this idea Yeah, the idea my my students arrived in my classes When I taught freshman They're looking for meaning They're looking for contact Right. They're looking for significance. Right. That makes me significant What they're getting now. I mean, I'm not sure always but what they're getting a lot is science Can't say anything by definition. It can't say anything about meaning contact significance So there's this Fight it's been going on since the 60s whenever science took over the university, but In the daughter technology, which has all the money But but the but the human part Yeah part that is my my purpose um was the purpose of the university and What I think when you said about uh, all of those people middle-class people So many people. Oh my god an Appalachia is a nightmare. Um, the number of people dying from fentanyl, I think it's called Anyway, I mean the drug problem is overwhelming, but it's a despair problem. Yes and so and so what's weird is that Education is really addressing that, you know Meaning contact significance usually you're not in despair if you have a sense of meaning If you feel contact if you have a sense of significance about your life So I think that that is essentially a description of the humanities I still can't figure out why these people going to Princeton and Yale and Harvard with these phenomenal professors and lecturers and Princeton teacher Anyway, my point is it I don't understand why they are getting the better jobs When what is different about their education mostly Is that they are having very high level discussions about meaning contact significance. Is it because they Are less in despair I mean, I don't know. I'm asking that as an open question. I have no idea I don't see the line. I don't see the connection from a Business man's point of view What what is he getting more of when he hires a graduate of Princeton as compared to a graduate from somewhere else? I I personally know too many people in too many universities And I don't see some dramatic magical thing that Somebody from Harvard. I mean the unibomber went to Harvard. It doesn't mean anything to me. But anyway, that's a discussion for a long discussion for another day like I I hate to To pause this, but we are actually at the end of our hour And we're a little over and you have asked such a great question The chat box is just rippling with with responses and professor Markowitz I want to give you a chance to answer that giant ball of question before we go Well, I don't want to trespass any more on people's time. Um I think Rather than try to argue one side of the question. I just want to In in essence repeat it. There is a deep issue here And the deep issue is this Does all of the fancy schooling that the rich give their children Cause the children to have a series of capacities That employers have reason to pay for Or instead Does it simply give them a network? That makes them valuable My my position which is an awkward one. I believe it to be true, but is an awkward one Is both that it actually gives them capacities which employers have reason to pay for and That the system that produces this kind of education Is unjust and destructive So usually you have people who think the system is unjust and destructive And they believe that fancy education is just a network Or you have people who believe that fancy education produces real capacities, but the system is groovy And I am on on opposite sides of that set of questions in in in a position that makes my view Assailable from both left and right as it were That's that's a feature of the view whether right or not. Um, but but you've accurately characterized something important about the argument But you've uh, you you've managed to offend everybody. It seems um professor markovitz, but you've done the opposite with uh with our crowd Meg thank you so much, uh for the for great You in person Pleasure I I admire I envy your students already Indeed, uh professor markovitz. Let me just ask one last question Besides your new book, which we will return you to writing now How else can we keep up with you? How else can we follow your your thinking and your work? um if people want I tweet occasionally so Uh ds markovitz. I never tweet about my own work. I've made a decision. I would never tweet out my own work But I do tweet out Pretty systematically Other people's work that I come across that is related to questions of education and justice nice, um, so that I'll I'll that it's it's a place people can go and Get links to to what I regard as good articles for what that's worth Like uh a lot um bs markovitz gotcha Um and your next piece is coming out in the uh three penny review I have something coming on the three penny review. There are a couple other things That are probably going to come out in the popular press in one way or another But I'm about to you know dig a deep hole in this new book And uh and see what comes Understood. Well, the rest of us are really looking forward to you getting out the other side of that hole and You have to bring you back to the program because you've been fantastic Well, I've been very very grateful to you for setting this up and to everybody for asking such fabulous questions. Thank you. Thank you Everybody stay safe. Please Indeed. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. But don't go away folks because uh, we I just want to share some notes about What's coming up? Uh, and let me just second professor markovitz's praise of you. Thank you all for these fantastic fantastic questions For the next two months remember, we have a whole series of great topics coming up If you just want to go to tinyworld.com slash forum summer You'll find links to the next Five or six programs So you can join us for those everything from high flex to vault 2020 planning the student experience the demographics improving teaching Just go to tinyworld.com slash forum summer Or if you're already subscribed to our email list, so get these as they come up Uh, if you'd like to keep talking about these fantastic questions about schoolocracy and meritocracy about credentialing And how to create reform We continue these conversations in many places including on linkedin including the slack channel including a facebook group But above all on twitter just use the hashtag FTE or tweet at me brian alexander In the meantime, we're over time. Let me thank you all for a great conversation. And let me again Second the uh, our professor's comments, please everyone stay safe in this extraordinary time Take care. We'll see you online Bye bye