Meritocratic systems are not inevitable to produce extreme inequality, but there are constant structural tendencies in this direction that require continuous struggle to resist.

Harvard and Yale are now more socioeconomically segregated than they were in 1970, whereas Oxford and Cambridge are not.

Excellence is substantive rather than formal: one can be excellent only at tasks that are valuable—one cannot be an excellent torturer.

Growth has become the common sense organizing principle for both societies and individuals, associated not just with one virtue but with ambition itself, and people have the feeling that giving up on growth means giving up.

The book Marowitz is writing, tentatively entitled 'The Good Life after the Age of Growth,' describes what new ideals might look like in a post-growth world.

Critics of growth often frustratingly romanticize the pre-growth world and treat growth as always having been a calamity.

Marowitz has a dog in the fight regarding meritocracy and should be discounted accordingly, though thinking about something a lot provides the advantage of having developed a considered view.

Economic privilege is directly associated with political power in capitalist systems because money is the power to command the state in the service of one's projects—those with money can use state enforcement (men with guns putting people in prison) to protect and expand their economic power.

In typical recent years at Yale Law School, there are more children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution than in the entire bottom half

Beyond economic-political power, Rawls recognized that political arrangements must produce sympathies and bonds among citizens such that all citizens can view the collective arrangement as a shared project in the common interest, and at some point inequality undermines this even if the materially worst-off are not destitute

Focusing on elite corruption and abuse (alumni preferences, donations, fraud) as the primary problem with inequality allows the system to remain unchanged by removing the 'rotten apples', when in fact removing all these abuses would leave the system 90-80% as unequal as it currently is because the real problem is structural

We don't have enough home health aides, teachers, and many other mid-skill tasks that would be middle-class jobs; people trained to be excellent at these tasks could do them without worrying about being superior to somebody else, which an excellence-based system would enable.

The market wage is not a particularly important or valuable thing and should not be in a just society, implying that the solution to meritocratic inequality involves radically reducing what market wages determine about a person's dignity, opportunity, and social worth

Donor preferences and alumni preferences at universities explain only a small portion of elite overrepresentation; the fact that Marowitz's own law school has no alumni preference yet still has a student body full of privileged children demonstrates that meritocratic advantage operates within the rules.

Fifty years ago, there was less economic inequality despite having less meritocracy because the old elite (aristocrats) were structurally unsuited to succeed at a meritocratic system—they were not very smart or hardworking—so new meritocratic elites displaced them without immediate privilege consolidation

The current economic and social order is structured such that those who see through its mechanisms have incentives and possibilities only to act in ways that promote its structures.

The English language term 'made redundant' (meaning fired) captures the exact problem with market-based systems: it literally means 'declared worthless' or 'surplus to requirements', and this is the implicit status message of market-based meritocracy even when no one consciously believes in moral desert

Aristocratic and meritocratic systems are not logical opposites; rejecting the extremes does not require endorsing the opposite. An aristocracy of class, race, or gender where a biologically-determined identity passed at birth determines your advantage is terrible, but this does not mean meritocracy (superiority-based allocation) is the only alternative

The gap between SAT scores of children whose parents are in the top 5% of income and middle-class children is approximately 250 points, while the gap between middle-class and below-poverty-line children is only 125 points, making the rich-middle class gap twice as large

In a recent year, approximately 15,000 high school seniors in the US had at least one parent who attended graduate or professional school and scored at the Ivy League median on the SAT verbal section, while fewer than 100 students had neither parent complete high school and achieved this same score