MixedThe New York Times Book Review... ambitious and disturbing ... There is something salutary and urgently necessary in the way the professor pounds his message home, with his statistics and charts and sickening Ivy League anecdotes, informing his right-thinking readers that the status of which they love to boast was purchased at the expense of our egalitarian ideals ... In some ways, however, Markovits pushes his thesis too hard. Yes, smug professionals sit atop our class system, but they aren’t the only winners up there. There are also self-made oil billionaires, retail billionaires, real-estate billionaires and so on. Besides, to put the blame for inequality on the shoulders of the educated elite is to overlook the particular political deeds that decimated the middle class — among them, changes to the tax code that have had a marked plutocratic effect, the crushing of organized labor and the refusal of our nation’s leaders over the years to enforce antitrust laws ... But in other ways Markovits doesn’t go nearly far enough. When he squares off against the meritocratic elite, he keeps pulling his punches, assuring us that its members’ educational credentials really are excellent, that their skills are real and that they work extremely hard ... A fuller account of the last real-estate bubble and the global financial crisis would have been helpful here; or the story of the Wall Street bailouts ... The book’s most unfortunate blind spot is the past ... forcefully interrupts the comfortable bath of self-flattery in which our well-graduated professionals pass their hours. We are so enlightened, they tell one another; we care so very much; we wish we knew whom to blame for our toxic, embittered society — and Markovits drags them to the mirror and bids them open their eyes.
