The Atlantic：对“优胜劣汰”的反思.pdf

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition
-miserable-winners/594760/
Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable.
Maybe there’s a way out.
SEPTEMBER 2019 ISSUE
Daniel Markovits
Professor at Yale Law School and the author of The Meritocracy Trap
Updated at 4:38 . ET on September 4, 2019.
In the summer of 1987, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed
northeast to attend Yale. I then spent nearly 15 years studying at various universities—the
London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, Harvard, and finally Yale Law
School—picking up a string of degrees along the way. Today, I teach at Yale Law, where my
students unnervingly resemble my younger self: They are, 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 l