In 1958, sociologist Michael Young wrote a dark satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy. The term “meritocracy” was Young’s own coining, and he chose it to denote a new aristocracy based on expertise and test-taking instead of breeding and titles. In Young’s book, set in 2034, Britain is forced to evolve by international economic competition. The elevation of IQ over birth first serves as a democratizing force championed by socialists, but ultimately results in a rigid caste system. The state uses universal testing to identify and elevate meritocrats, leaving most of England’s citizens poor and demoralized, without even a legitimate grievance, since, after all, who could argue that the wise should not rule? Eventually, a populist movement emerges. The story ends in bloody revolt and the assassination of the fictional author before he can review his page proofs.

THE MERITOCRACY TRAP: HOW AMERICA’S FOUNDATIONAL MYTH FEEDS INEQUALITY, DISMANTLES THE MIDDLE CLASS, AND DEVOURS THE ELITE by Daniel Markovits Penguin Press, 448pp., $30.00

In 2001, Young would take to The Guardian to declare his disappointment that Tony Blair, alongside politicians in the United States, had adopted the term without irony. The New Labour government now talked of “breaking down the barriers to success” and declared that “the Britain of the elite is over. The new Britain is a meritocracy.” Blair’s Cabinet, like George W. Bush’s and then Obama’s, was packed with graduates of the most elite educational institutions in the world. Young’s vision of IQ testing may have been a little off, but elite education had become the prerequisite for power. “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit,” Young wrote. “It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.”

Sixty years on from Young’s book, a pure product of meritocratic training has emerged to write what he hopes will be the epitaph for his class. Daniel Markovits—a professor at Yale Law School, who has earned a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, a master’s in econometrics at the London School of Economics, and a B.A. at Yale—believes that today’s highly educated, hyper-industrious elites have taken too large a share of the pie for themselves, and left over too little for the majority of Americans, who increasingly struggle to make ends meet from precarious and uninteresting work. If things continue this way, he worries, voters may “repudiate meritocracy wholesale and erect something considerably darker in its stead.”

This focus on meritocratic elites is apt at a time when those in charge of finance, tech, and politics have been widely discredited and disavowed by the electorate. Markovits’s dissection of elite culture and behavior (obsession with Ivy League credentials, competitive workaholism, exceptional wealth) is precise and unsparing. But perhaps just as revealing are his book’s weaknesses, not least its innocence of the realities of class struggle in the United States today—and of which fights will make society fairer and more equal.

In Markovits’s telling, the rise of the meritocracy is a story of unintended consequences. In the 1960s, more people were attending college than ever before. At the same time, new leaders in higher education opened up their institutions’ aristocratic gates, shedding a portion of academically mediocre bluebloods in favor of scrappier kids with impressive test scores. Companies suddenly had a much more educated workforce to draw on. This new labor pool drove a “skills revolution,” a sort of arms race in which education became highly valued, and therefore highly competitive, which produced even more elite workers, capable of “tasks of unprecedented complexity.”