David Brooks Blames Meritocracy For Income Inequality

David Brooks is a guest instructor at Yale this semester.  Apparently, this has helped him to explain income inequality.  It has also led him to conclude that there is no solution for income inequality.

According to Brooks,  incomes are unequal because elite universities suck up smart people from around the country and they prepare them to take high paying jobs.  Unless one graduates from one of these elite institutions it is almost impossible to get a high paying job.  In other words, meritocracy is the cause of income inequality.  Progressives, like President Obama, want to mitigate inequality by expanding opportunities for people to attend elite institutions.  It worked for him and his wife and they believe it can work for others.  Increasing educational opportunity is not a solution, according to Brooks, because it only reinforces meritocracy which is at the root of income inequality.

The other progressive, or liberal approach to income inequality, is income redistribution.  Washington has been attempting to make the tax system more progressive but that can't work either.  It does not fix the upstream problem of meritocracy which is the source of income inequality.

Brooks concludes his essay by displaying his non-partisan and objective approach to the inequality problem.  He concludes that Republicans don't have a solution, and that the liberal approach of expanding opportunities to enter elite institutions, and become part of the meritocracy, can't work either.  There is no potential solution to the problem in Washington, so we might as well give up on any efforts reduce income inequality.

David Brooks supports his argument about meritocracy as the cause of income inequality by referencing a book which reports that only graduates of elite universities are able to get professorships in our colleges.  It is certainly true that most colleges would like to recruit the most talented professors that they can find, and that many of them graduated from elite colleges.  Colleges are rather special places where academic skills are highly valued.  Academics is the business of a college, but professorships at universities is not the major source on income inequality in the US.

Every nation has elite colleges and every nation has income inequality.  The US has one of the highest levels of income inequality, and one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the industrialized world.  Other nations do a better job of using tax policy and greater access to higher education to increase social mobility and reduce income inequality.  David Brooks should visit some of these countries when he finishes his gig at Yale. He should also look back in US history.  We have had the same elite universities pumping out graduates for years.  How can this kind of meritocracy explain rising income inequality?