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Meritocracy and Its Discontents, Glenn Loury and Daniel Markovits in Conversation

March 6, 4:00 pm, Alumnae Hall Ballroom

A conversation between Glenn Loury and Daniel Markovits about meritocracy, its promises of fairness and equality, and its troubled past and present, moderated by Wellesley Sociologist Kelly Rutherford. Can the US be characterized as a meritocracy, given increasing levels of income inequality? Should it even aspire to be one? How did meritocracy emerge as an ideal for contemporary society, and are there alternatives that would serve our citizenry better? Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stolz Professor of Social Sciences and Economics at Brown University, writes widely on such topics as race, social mobility, and criminal justice. Professor Loury has been profiled in the New York Times and the New Yorker and, in addition to his vast scholarly record, is noted for providing fresh and honest perspectives in interviews, podcasts, and blogs. Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale University. The author of four books and dozens of articles, Professor Markovits specializes in legal ethics and the moral foundations of law. His most recent book, the much discussed The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, provides a new framework for our national conversation on the roots and problems of meritocracy. Kelly Rutherford of the Wellesley College Sociology Dept. studies the effects of neoliberal policies and rising social inequality on families and parenting. Her current project focuses on the anxieties youth and their parents experience about competitive high school environments and the bottleneck for elite college admissions.

Glenn Loury
Glenn Loury

Glenn C. Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University. He holds the B.A. in Mathematics (Northwestern) and the Ph.D. in Economics (M.I.T). As an economic theorist he has published widely and lectured throughout the world on his research. He is also among America’s leading critics writing on racial inequality. He has been elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association, as a Member of the American Philosophical Society and of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, and as a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Daniel Markovits
Daniel Markovits

Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law.  Markovits publishes widely and in a range of disciplines, including in Science, The American Economic Review, and The Yale Law Journal.  His current book, The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin Press, 2019), develops a sustained attack on American meritocracy. The meritocratic ideal—that people should get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than their parents’ social class—has become our age’s literal common sense. After earning a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded a M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.