6/14/26
Laird Stewart
6/14/26
In The Meritocracy Trap, Markovitz describes how meritocracy makes today's elite more miserable than the old aristocracy. In particular, competition from primary school to late careers causes depression, anxiety and burnout. To motivate the intensity of the competition, he should have shown the following graph
of income against percentile. The second plot is log-scale, note the hyper exponential returns at the end. A marginal increase in IQ or effort pays off much more when you're at the top ...