p. 5 Today, asking how long people have studied and how hard they work reveals not how poor they are, but how rich.
p. 37 Indeed, the profits that a rentier extracts free him to devote his personal energies to his authentic interests and ambitions - in the arts, for example, or statesmanship, or even just high society - without worrying about his economic income or social status. Traditional wealth, held as physical and financial capital, does not just free its owner from the need to work; it also enables him to become more fully himself.
p. 60 Elite society forgives (and even ignores) selfishness, intemperance, cruelty, and other long-recognized vices, but bigotry and prejudice, if exposed, can end a career. Such moralism seems selective, out of sympathy with life's complexities and confusions, and sometimes out of proportion to the harms at stake.
p. 61 The elite's intense concern for diversity and inclusion also carries an odor of self-dealing. Unlike other vices, prejudice attacks meritocracy's moral foundations, raising the specter that advantage more broadly follows invidious privilege rather than merit. Meritocracy demands extreme vigilance against prejudice in order to shore up the inequalities it seeks to legitimate against their increasing size and instability. The elaborate and fragile identity politics that govern elite life follow inexorably from the elite's meritocratic foundations.
p. 62 Meritocratic exclusion now approaches, in its statistical effects, the racial exclusion that scars American life. Yet when meritocracy declares its inequalities just, it licenses elites simultaneously to worry endlessly about identity politics and to embrace attitudes that, in myriad ways, flatly insult the idled working and middle classes.
p. 85 Celebrities today must also work intense and long hours. Supermodels, as one recently observed, "all train like it's the... Olympics." Even pure celebrities - who are famous only for being famous - constantly and effortfully cultivate their fame.
p. 104 Whatever its vices, and even as it ushers in massive new economic inequality, the American economic and political system today provides for the basic material needs of a virtually unprecedented share of citizens. The pervasive, grinding, absolute deprivation that drove the quest for economic justice at midcentury no longer dominates the American scene. Legitimate outrage at the poverty that remains does not erase and should not obscure this progress.
p. 154 Not just languid play and decadent amusements, but also deep reflection and an intrinsic love of learning are becoming historical curiosities - memories of life outside the meritocracy trap. The young rich today diligently study and doggedly train, with a constant eye on tests and admissions competitions, intent on acquiring and then demonstrating the human capital needed to sustain them as superordinate workers in adulthood.
p. 259 Present-day ideals concerning justice, entitlement, and even merit are all meritocracy's offspring and carry its genes inside them. Meritocracy has built a world that makes itself - in all its facets, including meritocratic inequality - seem practically and even morally necessary. This is the tyranny of no alternatives that makes the meritocracy trap so difficult to escape.
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