DM

To succeed, such a movement must develop a politics and policies that reinforce each other — so that they jointly drive home the mutual benefit that unwinding meritocratic inequality would bring. The trick is for every particular intervention to reprise, in microcosm, the model of mutual benefit from escaping the logics of human capitalism that stands behind the movement as a whole.

One example is using the tax system to encourage elite private schools and universities to diversify the economic backgrounds of their student bodies, by doubling enrollments and taking virtually all of the additional students from outside of the economic elite. This would obviously benefit middle-class Americans, by reopening pathways of social and economic mobility that meritocratic inequality has closed off. But it would also (equally surely, if less obviously) benefit the elite, as expanded enrollments will inevitably also allow more rich children to be admitted. Even a modest increase in slots for the rich will provide relief from the severity of the academic competition that now dominates elite childhood.

A second example, also addressed in the book, involves labor market policies that promote mid-skilled jobs and reduce the economy’s reliance on super-skilled labor. Once again, this obviously benefits the middle-class workers who would do the new jobs. And once again (although again less obviously) it also benefits elites.

To be sure, superordinate workers will earn a little less. But they will also work less hard and — more importantly — gain release from the tyrannical wage hierarchy that now dominates their working lives. Today only a few jobs, in a narrow range of fields (finance, management, law, and medicine) pay the wages needed to buy houses in elite neighborhoods and pay tuition at elite schools. A more democratic labor market would free elites to pursue their interests, and treat work as a vocation, without sacrificing their — and their children’s — caste. It would provide relief from the alienated labor that now dominates elite adulthood.

In each case, a practicable policy gives concrete expression to ideals that can inspire a broad political coalition to seek economic democracy. The middle class gains income and status from more open and inclusive social and economic arrangements (rather than, as populists now propose, by excluding others who are presently worse off still). And elites trade modest diminutions to income and status that they can easily afford for a precious return of their authentic freedom — set against the backdrop of the fact that it is simply impossible for a person to dominate others on account of his human capital without also damaging himself.