Digesting "The Meritocracy Trap" by Daniel Markovitz: And Bullshit Jobs

Intro?

It is hard if not impossible, to know what is going on. In 2003 William Gibson published "Pattern Recognition" a sci-fi set in the very recent past. A contrast to his cyberpunk novels, most famously "Neuromancer" from 1984 was set in a future, the 21st century.

I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction's best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going ... The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now. ~ William Gibson in an interview on CNN, August 26, 1997

Predicting the future, in some senses Nassim Nicholas Taleb showed to be trivially simple in his book "Antifragile" drawing on the Lindy effect, you simply subtract the fragile - generally the cutting edge technology, and you will have a robust picture of the future - in the future people will sit on furniture, read books, use cutlery, drink wine and beer, walk around as pedestrians, take baths etc. etc.

Compare this to how wildly inaccurate Back to the Future II's predicted future was, or Terminator 2: Judgement Day. What is tautalogically obscure is that it is impossible to predict the unpredictable by definition.

However, even the past is subject to speculation, Gibson's point in 1997 points to something that makes historicity somewhat manageable - we can get an understanding of the River valley civilizations because the present has more people with more technology than they did. So even limited by archeology, and civilizations like the Indus and Canal-Supe who did not leave behind clay tablets inscribed with cuneform, there's less data to comb over and less possibilities of what could happen.

But understanding what happened in my own lifetime, is hard work. For most people, what happened is a kind of layer cake of reductive stories, and further complicating understanding, is that those reductive stories have effects - so they themselves are a part of what happened, and that needs unpacking.

For example, in the 90s, Australia, Boomers were hit with this story of 'self-funded retirement' its a heroic myth and a new-era story. Boomers were a large cohort, that had been followed by smaller cohorts, (each with their own reductive stories, like Gen-X as a product of 'no fault divorces' creating latchkey kids etc.) they anticipated this existential threat to the economy - if they fulfilled the social contract of paying off their home and retiring onto the age pension, they would become a tremendous burden to the cohort behind them.

Instead they were to 'self-fund' their retirement, via superannuation. Not only was this the responsible thing to do, but it was also better - your reward for a working life of toil was no longer merely to not have to go to work anymore, and like stay local and play golf at the Echuca Golf and Bowls Club, but retirement self-funded through investment would consist of a Cosmopolitan lifestyle, cycling tours of Spain, River tours of Germany and Scandanavia, intercontinental first class train rides, birthdays in Hawaii with the kids and grandchildren, spending a few months of a year at home shuffling between the country house and the beach house in your BMW convertibles - his and hers.

That story was only really available to 20% of boomers, and it was facilitated by a bunch of tax concessions for 'retirement planning' - salary sacrificing, super co-contribution scheme (where the government matches your own voluntary super contributions effectively giving you a 100% ROI before interest even starts compounding on the investment) but to salary sacrifice, you have to have the disposable income to begin with. Furthermore, Australian tax policy suicidally (from an economic development POV) basically begs people to 'invest' in the unproductive existing stock of housing sooner than in the productive private sector of stocks and bonds. Once "super-choices" came in, wealthy Boomers were able to set up a trust and speculate on property.

As such, while the tax burden of financing the age pension may be somewhat reduced by maybe the 20-10% wealthiest boomers who would outlive their retirement savings and draw a part-pension or full-pension after a few years of retirement, the economic burden of boomer's lavish retirements are colossal.

Right, like that reductive story "self-funded" retirement was sold and bought, there are boomers whose chest swells with pride at how much tax the successfully avoided paying, and the wealth they have extracted through their property portfolio, thinking themselves noble heroes of their generation, while at the same time distressed by the arrested development of every generation that succeeds them.

And it was just part of the overarching 'what happened' that is Neoliberalism. The opinions that formed policy that reversed the post-war trend of shrinking inequality, a growing middle class, consumption increases driven by income increases etc. etc. and began our journey, ironically back down the 'Road to Serfdom' where the future looks like a removal of the fragile new technologies of democracy and capitalism and a regression to feudalism.

Enter Meritocracy

Meritocracy in brief, is a concept appropriated from a satirical dystopian work "The Rise of Meritocracy" by Michael Dunlop Young and in that fine tradition of dystopian fiction, some morons thought it a good idea.

From there it has become a kind of formally defined system where resources and responsibilities are allocated based on merit where merit =

talent + effort + investment???

In the original satire it was "IQ + effort" and much of Marovitz' book "The Meritocracy Trap" is dedicated to that component as what makes meritocracy a trap.

Think of it this way, and let's decenter Europe for a moment:

Imperial China, specifically the Sui dynasty introduced the kējǔ "imperial examination" in like the 6th Century. (To contextualise this for Europeans the University di Bologna, the oldest University in continuous operation, opened its doors in the 11th century) 

The idea was that administrative positions within the empire would be appointed on merit, based on performance in the kējǔ. Get top marks, and you might be the imperial treasurer, get a B+ you are governor of a province etc. etc.

The idea being that it didn't matter who your father was, or what your birth order was, the exam weighed you on your merit.

That's the romance of meritocracy, the same as American Idol or the NBA draft. That the child of someone who mucks out the stables might ascend to the throne.

Investment however, is where Meritocracy loses all its romance. Matilda's parents are sleazy con-artists, but her natural brilliance might shine under meritocracy, or Billy's parents are coal miners on strike, but Billy with dedication and determination might make the national ballet company.

Yes, but more importantly no because of investment. An aristocrat can maintain their claim on resources by making incredible investments in the education of their mediocre offspring to brute force them into the elite range.

Abe Lincoln can learn to write growing up in a dugout by practicing with ash from the fireplace and writing with his finger on a shovel head, but Alexander of Macedon's dad can afford to hire Aristotle as his tutor. Nero's parents hire Seneca.

More contemporarily, what this means is that yes, ostensibly your local elite University's entrance requirements may be open to all and in many ways objective.

Markovitz uses two disparities to pretty succinctly make his case for the Meritocracy Trap.

40% of students at elite Universities went to a private secondary school, when only 14% of highschool students go to a private school. That's statistical disparity one.

In the US $70,000 per year is spent on each private school student, and $12,000 per year is spent on each public school student. That's statistical disparity two.

Combining to make the case that education and training works.

Glossy and Gloomy Jobs

Forgive me for coming across as reductive with Markovitz' work, it is going to take a while to digest Meritocracy, which curiosly does not map onto neoliberalism - the grab bag of economic policies that constitute the 21st centuries ironic "road back to serfdom" we are now living through.

I'm skipping over a bunch to talk about Markovitz' construction of glossy and gloomy jobs, with the aim of trying to reconcile this with Graeber's 'Bullshit jobs'

Glossy jobs are superordinate jobs, with 'superordinate' being the opposite of 'subordinate' think of the Wall street workaholic, cash rich and time poor, doing 100 hour weeks routinely and receiving not only the highest wages available in the job market, but cash bonuses that may be multiples of the base annual salary paid out in a lump sum.

On the flipside, gloomy jobs are pretty much everything else, and here in particular Markovitz points to the underemployed, who are poorly compensated for too few hours and given no responsiblity and as such effectively have leisure forced upon them.

This is important if you think it a simple matter to map Bullshit jobs, directly onto gloomy jobs, and an important statistic is recognised by Markovitz, though it takes until (or near) the conclusion of his case -

The richest countries on Earth, where the Meritocratic elites live, have not produced impressive economic growth for decades.

Which is to say in the 1960s your granpappy could quit school at 15 and get a job at General Motors on the production line, and be an executive by 1975 with the majority of his training and education being an investment in him by his employer, furthermore being a crucial part of an economy where GDP grew as well as a middle class whose increased consumption was afforded by real increases in wages.

Your eldest sister, dad & dad's favorite now may secure her place at Ormond College to study Law at Melbourne University on the strength of her representing the state in field hockey during highschool and being in the schools first rowing crew as well as being first chair in the school band and third chair in the municipal symphony orchestra. 

She completed an honours year, before being offered a Rhodes scholarship to go study at Oxford where she became a specialist in Biotech-law and now works as head of a research lab in Singapore for Monsanto. She is paid an incredible wage relative to your granpappy, however she is presiding over a pretty stagnant era of economic development, with most of the growth in jobs and productivity coming via a transfer of wealth from the middle class of rich nations to the impoverished of poor nations.

Your granpappy sat in board rooms and said things like "measure twice cut once." whereas your sister sits in board rooms and says "the Bioethics of CRISPR and de-extinction are a frontier where we are obliged to consider first, second and third order unintended consequences that will echo through the centuries."

Your granpappy put teenagers in cars so they could attend colleges across the country, your sister has helped make growing potatoes more expensive for farmers.

As such, an elite, superordinate 'glossy' job in for example the financial, legal, or STEM sectors where you are compensated 4 times the median income and some productivity equation says they are enormously productive can also be a bullshit job. So let's set that up in contraposition:

Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber wrote an article that went viral titled "On Bullshit Jobs" that then became the book "Bullshit Jobs" and a bullshit job, at its barest, is a job you suspect doesn't need to exist.

Graeber was an anthropologist, which means he likely begins without the priors of an Economist that might be overly swayed by 'productivity' where Graeber was well positioned to stand back and say 'okay but what do we produce and why?'

Anyway, Graeber breaks the larger set of bullshit jobs down into 5 subtypes:

1. Flunkies - who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters.
2. Goons - who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
3. Duct tapers - who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage
4. Box tickers - who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration
5. Task masters - who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals

Now I must disclose I have not read Graeber's book, just the original article which I would describe as a resonant autoethnography. As such, I took the above definitions and examples straight off wikipedia, and as I'm scanning them my own mind starts picking holes in the definitions and examples, so I should say that I still think Graeber's sub-types are defensible and/or that Graeber's initial definition might be too strong.

I'll just pick one example, from the Flunky category of door attendants - whom Rory Sutherland centers in his 'doorman fallacy' which is where a prestigious hotel has a bunch of doormen on the payroll and a management consultant comes in (task master) and they are like 'this costs you $120,000 in payroll a year, we get a little motion sensor robot for $1,000, a really good one and bosch! we've just justified our consulting fees.'

Sutherland would point out the fallacy is in thinking that all a doorman does is watch doors, whereas they are also security, branding etc. 

More to the point, people do notice when a doorman job disappears from the Plaza hotel.

Bullshit jobs need to be reconciled with, not only the glossy and gloomy job dichotomy of Markovitz, but likely Chesterton's fence.

Graeber did this somewhat by proposing a UBI, and I've seen him in interviews suggest that a UBI only needs to produce one Mozart or one Einstein and it will more than have paid for itself.

I am somewhat sympathetic to this proposal but it might be worth a subsection.

Welfare and Sensibility

In my vicinity, Covid lead to a then conservative government saying the quiet part out loud. As lockdowns came into place in early 2020 and travel agencies began laying off their workforce, then PM Scomo announced sweeping changes to our social safety net.

Rather than get into details, what was revealed was that all the pain of our unemployment welfare could just be switched off. Red tape and complicated processess, harassing phonecalls and onerous gameification all just disappeared, in an instant. 

Revealing that all the pain was actually built in.

Why build a pain machine? Well, near as I can speculate, it is to appease the preferences of a different group of voters. There's a bunch of people, typically wealthy and conservative, who have a sensibility that just abhores giving someone an income who is not gainfully employed.

So like many a nation, we wind up with an awful system that tries to make the process of being unemployed less pleasant than having the worst job - which is an impossible task, because the worst jobs are not just gloomy, but dangerous, dangerous and poorly compensated for that danger.

Right, like so we have a bunch of voters whose sensibilities (not knowledge) is being appeased in such a way as to say 'force that young woman who got pregnant by that young guy to drive trucks for that employer who operates illegally as cost cutting measure.'

Similar to how many, with the same sensibilities lust for an immigration policy that says 'try and make claiming asylum so unpleasant, that people in war torn, or totalitarian countries won't want to come here.'

Okay, so I hope I don't have to overdetermine the case, that social safety nets are often compromised in democracies by voter sensibilities - that are irrational, impractical and immoral.

Now earlier in the year, I'm at a party watching some Millenials turn into boomers - they have kids who have reached the beginning of the next 20 years of adolescence. So this one guy, who frankly has aged well into the conservative opinions of his youth, the kind of guy who was already a boomer at 20, was promoting the practice of charging your kids rent to live with you once they hit University age.

His rationale was intelligible: you do this because the kids don't save, they blow through all their money, so you charge them rent, stick it in a savings account and then give that money back to them in three years time.

Sounds pretty reasonable at first blush, but it is sensibility based. Consider your child's alternative - they move out and pay market rates to a landlord. In that case, they have matured, and learned something about financial responsibility but they don't get a bunch of money handed back to them once they've learned this lesson. 

Landlording, btw, is not a productive economic activity, it is in fact, a bullshit job.

A parent could also just make room & board contingent on their child hitting savings targets. In fact, a parent can just inculcate a habit of saving pocket money toward goals prior to their kid hitting the workforce.

Why the subterfuge? the faux rent? It's a sensibility, and a conservative one, because what we are really pretending is that the economy works great. Instead, as Count Binface's campaign promises highlight - our governments can't even deliver on a promise to build 'at least one affordable house' 

Now, let's consider a wealthy parent of an unemployed 21 year old child. That child could go and sign up for welfare, receiving some income fortnightly in exchange for 'mutual obligations' generally requiring them to apply for and take any fucking job they can get. The longer they are on welfare the more they will get basically pressured and harassed into getting off it, that is what our sensibility based system is.

Alternately, the wealthy parent can just make up a job for their child and employ them. Some administrative position where they where a button down shirt, kakis and loafers to go to an office 9-5 three days a week and have approximately 20 minutes of duties to complete in an 8 hour day, walking around and checking all the photo-copy printers are loaded with paper.

That child is effectively on welfare, but they have all these advantages - they aren't stigmatised, they aren't forced to participate in the job-market, they have an employer to put on their CV, they are getting soft launched into corporate culture, they are being handed daily access to people to network with, they are paid above the 'living wage' of unemployment insurance etc. etc.

Bullshit jobs, as a concept fundamentally suggests that our societies and economies are filled with 'hidden unemployment' and I will define hidden unemployment as employment - work, where work is productive activity.

"Private School Mindset"

Something I reflected upon often while reading Markovitz book, is that while I am not the meritocrat he describes, I am likely a provincial meritocrat. Meritocracy can be described as a 'race to the bottom' phenomena, like in my local system lets just posit for arguments sake that if you are capable of getting an ATAR score of 80, then you are cognitively capable of completing a law degree and being a competent lawyer - there will be a bunch of people who do just this all the time, they just can't get straight into a law degree out of high-school.

The race to the bottom is a supply-demand thing where there are less law degree places than their are high school graduates who want to do law, and the 'surge pricing' solution the tertiary institutions have taken is to allocate the scarce places based on who has the highest ATARs, so effectively to do law at Melbourne University requires an ATAR of 98+.

The 'private school mindset' is where you get into a mindset of 'I need an ATAR of > x or my life is over.' from an individual perspective, from an institutional perspective it looks like 'Any ATAR < x is a failure.'

People who fall below some threshold, are basically forgotten about. Casualties. They kind of cease to exist in the private school mindset. When my old principal did presentations to gullible rich parents considering enrolling their children in private primary school, he presented the stats on year 12 graduates (most, including the best performing, not having gone to the associated primary school) and while I wasn't there, I am going to hazard a guess that he spent no time selling those parents on the good times enjoyed by the students who achieved an ATAR below 20.

The private school mindset is an out-of-touch mindset that can only picture the future of elites - white collar superordinate workers with post graduate qualifications.

In contrast, the government mindset is like 'how do we find jobs for n - 4%' in stark contrast, they know that to stabilise society, they need to find jobs not only for the top 20% of high school graduates, but for most of the bottom 20% of high school graduates.

They know if unemployment (and perhaps even underemployment), and more consequentially poverty gets too out of hand ever they don't only lose power, they might lose the nation.

So it is actually a luxury among the meritocrats, to have the public sector worrying about catching those who do not merit, in a social safety net that finds long term solutions to their ability to find work, afford their lives and live sufficient quality of life to not become a cohort of discontents. 

Markovitz I think in dissecting meritocracy as a trap, is looking at the fruits of this private school mindset - the gloomy/glossy job dichotomy comes from the implicit agreement in training and education - that one can pay to win, not without effort, but in ensuring that there's a return on investment - a limited liability, such that elites can secure their status in society by ensuring the opportunity to do productive work is reserved from them.

The public sector then deals with the byproduct, which is everybody meritocracy sheds, gloomy jobs are really just the flipside of the guarunteed ROI, gloomy jobs function where any failed-meritocrat is forbidden from doing actual valuable work, because that work is reserved for the meritocrats. 

My friend who worked as a waiter in a fancy french restaurant once told me of a colleague he knew that had waited on Russian oligarchs, divulging a cultural quirk where in Russia a customer has the right to watch a staff member pour any leftover wine into a sink to ensure that a lowly waiter cannot enjoy an expensive wine paid for by a wealthy customer.

I think gloomy jobs are like that. Not being a waiter, working as a dishwasher was one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had, and in that job I had the autonomy to set up my own system to be as productive as possible. Gloomy jobs are like the poured out wine - this is where you are deprived of any autonomy to improve your job or performance yourself, the exclusive right to succeed or fail at that is reserved for a superordinate worker.

This gives us a waiter, who does valuable work, and therefore does not have a bullshit job, but they have a gloomy job, because they are not allowed to innovate in any way. The super-ordinate, or glossy job of say a head waiter, maître-de or owner, may in fact overlap with the bullshit job category of Task Master - in their failure to innovate from a top-down approach, they are by default creating unnecessary work for their subordinates. 

In turn, this may then force the waiter to become in part a "duct taper" being that they always have to fix problems temporarily rather than permanently.

I actually have a perfect example of this in one of my current roles - there is a process I have to follow, which is just broken. I was neither the first, nor the last to notice it. A request to fix it was made and denied. As such, I have to repair it, routinely for each new customer. Not only I but everyone else, but that is only as and when a customer notices it is broken. The rest of the time, we just let it be broken, because this is more efficient than fixing it. As such, that process is pure waste, and we are stuck with it.

The good news is, we are paid for it. Paid to do this broken process, which becomes welfare via duct taping. 

I have begun the reconciliation process already, but the greater point is that I as a parochial meritocrat, have deep residue of the private school mindset, as such, anytime I sit and actually think about how unemployment is 'bad' at 6% I am like 'wow, 94% employment is already beyond what I can imagine' when I think of the distribution of people I've met versus the jobs I can come up for everyone.

The private school mindset I believe to be related to some kind of fallacy of composition. Down at ground level, I come across people frequently that given a domain - a popular one right now being clinical psychology, most people I meet I would rather not even volunteer to be a psychotherapist than be employed in that capacity. (Most people I meet, for example, and being white, seem to think the first question to ask is "Are you AuADHD?" if you can't see what is immediately wrong with that approach, please stay out of the clinical psychology space.)

Right, there are contexts and categories of people for which I see more value in paying them not to do a job, than in employing them, and contexts can vary from psychotherapy to business idiot to e-bike food delivery gig worker.

Thinning out the Ladder Rungs

Again, something that inspired me to go read Markovitz book, was his rare defence of middle managers.

Joshua Fluke describes middle-managers as "you are too valuable to fire, but not good enough to be given any real responsibility.' Fluke's definition maps neatly onto Graeber's 'Taskmaster' category of bullshit job, and also the Peter Principle - in terms of rising to your level of incompetence - particularly the studies that have evidenced the Peter Principle - where top performing sales reps are promoted to a managerial position where the employer loses a valuable sales agent and gains a useless manager - so it is not even Fluke's definition of a middle manager.

Fluke also turned me on to Simon Sinek just being a mouther of platitudes, though I do think I had the opportunity to ask a US servicemen whether the leaders do indeed 'eat last' and he said 'no, they don't.' Sinek made some truly cringeworthy argument as to why being a middle manager is 'the hardest job' and I disagree with him in the 'managers and not leaders' argument, also the part where he says there's self taught managers watching TED talks, which I would argue is the opposite of teaching yourself something.

Markovitz in his defence of middle-management is referring to an era of corporate ladders - Markovitz calls this 'mid-century' referring of course, to the middle of last century or 75 years ago. I personally prefer 'Post war period' which is where you had a growing middle class, up until the OPEC oil crisis of the 70s and the beginning of the present period which is the Neo-liberal period.

Neoliberalism is generally described (but I will caution you that this is reductive) as being a set of policies to empower property rights, and disempower labour - Privatisation reduces competition from the public sector, Globalization uses offshoring production to undermine local labour power, Deregulation pushes costs away from capital...

That last one, is a variety of 'externality' which is basically where your production cost is pushed onto someone else to pick up the bill. For example, due to a shortage of energy infrastructure, US datacenters can obtain power from setting up natural gas turbines - an absolute environmental disaster.

The environmental bill will be picked up not by the private sector as these datacenters are pretty much doomed to go broke, there will be no profits to tax. The bill will be picked up by the public sector some time in the future. That's an externality.

More pertinent though, is that companies used to pay taxes, and those taxes were in part used to finance education. My parents generation were beneficiaries of free University education, my parents graduated from their respective tertiary institutions debt free with in-demand qualifications. 

Furthermore, my father was PhD averse, he didn't see them as fit for the private sector employment, overqualified and on the wrong side of the theory-practice gap. Though he would obtain his own MBA eventually, he lived in a world where employers invested in training their employees as par for course.

Increasingly though, employers want to invest nothing, they have no training programs and Markovitz cites specifically the departure from a McDonald's fry-cook founding 'Hamburger University' and winding up CEO vs. the present day CEO who followed a meritocrat-career path hoping from elite institution to elite institution.  

You need a different metaphor now, because the "career ladder" now more reflects "stepping stones" that are externalised. Being a fry-cook at McDonald's is now likely, a dead-end job, or gloomy job. 

One of the many flaws of Economics, in my experience is that it can often treat substitutes as perfect. Under this simplifying assumption, we can produce a scenario where email renders the mail room redundant, so now a firm can't hire young people into an entry level job because an email server and ISP is just miles cheaper and faster, as a substitute to hiring a bunch of mail clerks and observing over 6 months to a year, who turns up reliably, who is a quick learner, who has social skills and builds good rapport, who has a good work ethic - and positively reinforcing these traits with training and opportunity to advance a step up a ladder, education is assumed to be a "perfect" substitute, where a student takes on debt to subject themselves to something "perfectly" equivalent to the old career ladder, where grades convey all the information about organisational and role fit, that observing someone in an entry level job used to do.

I assert this is bogus, they are very very different things. The kid starting in the mail room was likely somehow grounded in the local community, connected, ammenable to living there, whereas the Accounting Graduate that comes to H&R block may have grown up in a different city, and was aiming to work for Deloitte, KPMG, PWC etc. and regards the job opportunity a failure, under the auspices of meritocracy, it kind of is. 

Some Examples

These are speculative on my part, because I cannot rightly recall organisations that had the mail-room to board-room ladder. I graduated into a corporate world that gave out awards to employees who had been with the company for 3 years, Miki, my Japanese girlfriend at the time (I was young and white) found the very concept puzzling. 

But anyway:

In banking you might have janitor and doorman as no qualification entry level position, and they would have been on the same payroll as all other employees (whereas these days cleaning is often an employee of a contracted cleaning service), then security guard, tellers/clerks, loan officer, deputy managers, branch manager, regional/territory manager, national manager, board members, chairman.

In a large restaurant you might have janitor, dishwasher, busboys, waiters, kitchen hand, fry cook, line cook, pastry chef, sous chef, head chef, ownership.

In an ad agency you may have mail clerks, secretaries, copywriters, draftsmen, creative directors, account executives, partners, director.

Neologism coined: Rolerization

Being a portmantua of "role" and "polarization" this is what happens when you remove the middle rungs from the ladder.

To take the hypothetical examples above, a progression from door man to national manager of a banking company might represent a 30 year career in one organisation. Starting at 16 you don a uniform and are paid (holding inflation steady) a starting wage of $16,000 per year, opening and closing doors making a good impression on customers and colleagues before you are given a shot at being a teller. They bump you up to $20,000 a year a significant wage increase and as you keep good accounts and maintain good customer relations, you are mentored and coached into the role of loan officer now earning $35,000 per year, and so on until you are the branch manager earning a whopping 4x what the doorman earns at $64,000 per year.

Removing this internal progression structure - the corporate ladder - you wind up with polarized roles, loan officers go from professionals that had to get to know clients, hear their proposals and exercise discretion in judging who would be approved for a loan, to sales agents handed down algorithmically generated approval criteria and then given targets or quotas to fill. 

The national managers become superordinate workers devising financial products to push out at target markets, and developing massive statistical models in the pursuit of maximising returns for risks. 

Moving away from the limited scope of the bank example, Ricardo Semler made the point in his book "Maverick" a memoir of his change management at Semco to build the world's first democratic company (highly recommend) that most organisational charts - being pyramids, (compare that shape to a ladder) if you were to apply that design principle to a highway you would be designing a system for traffic jams.

That's bad enough, but the move has been to polarize the pyramid into two parking lots, far removed from eachother - one a proper garage with a valet to store European sportscars, the other a gig-workers temporary pick-up zone - the casualised workforce of gloomy jobs.

Rolerization is what gives you glossy and gloomy jobs.

Graebers Missing Category

Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers and Task Masters (I will revisit the modern middle-manager shortly) they do not really cover Markovitz elite superordinate "glossy" job worker.

Yet these jobs must be somewhat 'bullshit' because while they play a crucial role in exacerbating the wealth inequality, they have played no role in delivering economic growth.

A student of mine perfectly defined micromanagement as: delegation minus trust. You are given responsibilities but not trusted to do them.

Often micromanagement I believe is a symptom of the Peter principle where the manager having no real aptitude for management, applies what they know, which is the role at their last level of competence.

The superordinate elite however, doesn't delegate, they abrogate responsibility, as in, they render their subordinates maximally redundant.

I like to understand this through analogy to a particular kind of sports star, and no this isn't tohmwin's Law as yet, however I assert there are almost always in professional sports a player who will be controversial - undoubtedly talented, but debate will arise as to whether they are or are not overrated.

Often, this can be settled by advanced statistics - things like in basketball the box +/-, VORP, Winshare and Defensive winshare. This means in basketball terms which has a nice fat stat line known as a triple-double, you can have 2 players that both put up 25 points per game, 10 assists and 10 rebounds.

One player however has a +/- of 14, which means while he was on the court, their teams score improved by 14 points. The other player has a +/- of -1 which means while they were on the court the other team actually outscored them by 1. The other advanced statistics I actually don't understand well enough to flesh out this example, but how this can be possible is by having one star player whose statistics represent a positive contribution to the teams performance, they are scoring points, grabbing rebounds and dishing out assists that otherwise would not have happened. 

The other player is effectively cannibalising statistics, they are demanding the ball from players that would have scored in their absence, grabbing rebounds that were uncontested and could have been grabbed by whichever team mate was nearest, the assists represent a player capable of creating their own shots but who has been relegated to posting up for a corner three.

This latter type of 'cannibal' superstar, is my analogy to the elite superordinate employee - the MBA who is brought in, commissions a $500,000 bespoke dashboard software build from an analytical company, runs the latest quantitative models to determine policy and procedure and demands subordinates simply follow the dictates of their complex models like worker drones.

That is why they are paid the big bucks, and what they do does require an elite education and decades of training, but it doesn't really outperform mid-century organisational structures, this bullshit job isn't strictly speaking a taskmaster, they have just captured all the wages of middle-management at no benefit to the firm. 

Several excellent employees whose salaries may have totalled $1.5 million, are now replaced with one superior employee who puts in a 100 hour week and is paid $1.2 million all to themselves.

This then I propose we call a 6th category of 'bullshit jobs' and perhaps the least likely to self-diagnose their job as creating little to no value, potentially even a cost to society. Let's call it the Busy-body. Somebody doing the work of 10 for 80% of the compensation.

As to why such a productive worker that saves the firm money might be considered a crypto-bullshit job, there's this rule of thumb in economics that rich people's marginal propensity to consume is generally less than a poor or even median income person's marginal propensity to consume.

What this means, is that if you give a pensioner $10,000 they will spend that $10,000 and stimulate the economy, but give it to a millionaire, and likely they will save it, or use it to buy assets, or not even notice it.

Gary Stevenson uses former UK PM Rishi Sunak as his go to example, with an estimated net worth (in 2024 or whenever) of UKPS750,000,000. Estimating conservatively that Rishi earns a modest 3% on his wealth, that gives him 23M pounds per year, just on interest. Gary will then invite whoever he is speaking to to try and imagine spending 23M pounds in a year. Generally most agree that living the most lavish lifestyle they will still have 20 or 19 million pounds left. Which is enough to just buy up houses with.

Gary Stevens has a bunch of videos explaining why wealth inequality is bad and why it needs to be fought with a wealth tax of some kind, but fundamentally it is this marginal propensity to consume, that as we get richer, we save more and spend less of each additional dollar.

This means for the economy overall, where every dollar spent is someone else's income, it's really bad to have one superordinate employee work the job of ten average employees.

Maybe this Could Have Worked

Just at the moment I'm thinking a bunch about the fallacy of division and the fallacy of composition. Just briefly composition - all men have mothers therefore mankind has a mother. This is a fallacious argument, the most famous example of which is the cosmological argument for God - everything has a cause, therefore causes have a cause.

I could have been briefer. So briefly division - society is patriarchal therefore our household is patriarchal.

Markovitz superordinate elite worker, the product of massive investment is monopolising labour. Specifically all the responsibilities that command compensation. The afore-postulated "Busybody" may not necessarily have had to be a bullshit job.

A big problem has been deregulation. This is what gives us the fallacy of divison and composition. The "Busybody" is a job-monopolist, society suffers because of their monopoly - they buy up unproductive investment properties instead of hundreds of thousands of rotisserie chickens.

Corporate mergers are also monopolist, the prominent one as at writing is the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. however, deregulation has been going on for decades in the 1960s there was a "Big 8" Accounting firms, now it is the "Big 4" - Price Waters merged with Coopers & Labrand to become PWC, Ernst & Whinney mergers with Arthur Young to become Ernst & Young, Delloitte merged with so many companies it wound up just being Delloitte.

Now I feel, eras overlap most of the time, and my go to example is that in 2026 there are still human hunter gatherer's on Earth. There are certainly employers where you can still progress internally, without necessarilly needing to pay for all your own skills and training via graduate school.

But without the neoliberal era of unlimited mergers, what we don't have enough of is non-monopolistic employers to provide a market where monopolistic-employees effects can be counterbalanced.

This is basically, and here I paraphrase Markovitz himself - a finance industry that once ostensibly was productive by financing capital investment, but is now pure arbitrage - Barron Trump allegedly just does insider trading on the prediction markets now. This is not productive, but finance is the industry that commands the highest wages by far, and that monopoly is composed of divisions of superordinate workers.

...Or perhaps not, Gary Stevens in his memoirs, recalls colleagues in finance whose job it was to basically take out clients and show them a good time. This might wreck ones health, but surely is closer to the job of an aristocrat of no particular qualification save birthright, than that of a highly skilled meritocrat. Gary observed that the finance bros paid a lot of money to hang out with girls that Gary just knew socially.

The guy at an investment bank whose job it is to take clients to nightclubs, buy them champaigne and cocaine probably doesn't get bonuses like the guys on the trading desks do, they are likely more "Flunkie" than "Busybody"

Still, let me say, in a world where there aren't a bunch of monopolistic firms with shitty goods and services, like managed funds that don't outperform index funds, Microsoft software, Google info panels, Meta AI etc. etc. 

Elite superordinate workers are just another way of competing, such that you could have a firm that employs ten people, and one elite superordinate worker who uses technology to compete with them. I'm okay with that.

It's when you take the McKinsey approach, which is the approach taken in the world we live in, of paying upper management more if they gut a company of middle management, that we wind up with this career traffic jam. It furthermore renders the Busybody worker pointless when they work for a monopoly who demonstrably don't have to produce quality goods and services.

Conclusion

It's not pretty, and in many ways it is not up to me, but I personally am satisfied with this reconciliation, of what Markovitz describes and what I experience. 

It should be noted that insofar as I am a meritocrat, I am a provincial meritocrat. I was in public education up until my second year of secondary school. Resulting in a likely disparity of $40,000-$50,000 in terms of what was invested in my education relative to the local public school students.

I would question whether I was the recipient of a genuinelly excellent education. I certainly had excellent teachers, but I also had excellent teachers in my one year of public secondary school.

It is possible that I entered my private school in a transition period. Certainly I began the same year as a new Principal, who was far more salesman than educator. By my second or third year a new model for my school was emerging, with senior teaching staff retiring and the principal hiring not the most excellent, but the most recently graduated teaching staff. 

Most of this young staff sucked. Like we had the comparison, and they sucked vs experienced teachers. My school was not running a strategy of poaching the proven talent from public schools on the promise of higher wages and nicer facilities, but rather poaching the most inexperienced teaching staff possible, sometimes with acne comparable to or worse than the students. 

I think the principal liked them because they were cheap, pliant and not having established families and relationships more willing to get up at 6am three days a week to coach a rowing crew.

Us, provincial, meritocrats weren't given a Paul Giammatti from "The Holdovers" professor in the classics, what we were given where old-school phonebook sized printouts of past exams, practice exams etc. My elite school gamed the local university entrance system (VCE and ATAR) and didn't so much spoonfeed as forcefeed exam practice.

I speculated then and now, that if public schools knew that the difference in results was a photocopying budget of hundreds of dollars per student rather than the tens of thousands of dollars in school fees, whether there might be a revolution on hand. My guess is that the kinds of parents dropping serious moolah on their childrens education might be more inclined to expect their children to complete two practice exams a day over the mid-semester break.

This is all to say, I'm not qualified really to reconcile the Markovitz side of the equation, his book humbles me in pointing out I haven't really even touched the world of meritocrats. The grown up children who had ten million dollars spent on their education. The kind of kids depicted in "Your Friends & Neighbours" on AppleTV.

I come from the town where the wealthy elite own that bar from "Roadhouse".

What I can more readily attest to, is the abundance of well paid unproductive workers. All the market failures in our labour market that mean somebody who works really hard like a grocery store cashier or shelf stacker, a delivery driver, a nurse, a paramedic etc. etc. are paid really poorly despite Covid quickly revealing that they are the essential workers. 

And then there's people who arguably create no value at all - webdesigners paid well to design websites that have 0 daily visitors, interior designers that just pick paints and furniture and carpets and drapes rather than someone picking for themselves things they like, before you get to the corporate environment, the major employer of the middle class where you find just an abundance of flunkies, goons, box-tickers, task masters and occassionally duct-tapers.

My reconciliation is speculative, because I don't touch Markovitz' world of meritocrats, it is far above me, out of my reach. But what I can touch is the output, the sticking your head out the window to see if its raining - consumer goods go obsolete and get replaced, but beyond that, I am not experiencing the tremendous productive output of the super elite workers.

I believe they may be paid well, and there may be rampant speculation that their work is valuable in terms of markets being capitalised, but the goods and services produced are underwhelming.