In the most recent installment of “Fireside Chats,” the Roosevelt Institute’s Bloggingheads series, Fellow Mike Konczal talks with MSNBC host Chris Hayes, discussing the distortion of meritocracy and the problems of self-perpetuating elitism. As Konczal explains, the culture of “anxiety about the person who’s one step up from you” creates an environment where everyone knows everyone else is cheating, but "the rewards are so high, and conversely, the penalty for being left behind... [is] so severe, then even the most unethical things become a no brainer that you’re just compelled to take part of.”

“There’s the depth of failure but also the breadth of failure,” Konczal says. In a myriad of areas, from Washington and Wall Street to the test prep industry and steroids in baseball, the system we have now is a “meritocratic competitive arms race.” This has lead to extraordinary corruption and crisis in every sphere of American life, and with it a collapse of trust in our institutions that are increasingly run by distant elites. 

To add insult to injury, this elitism is self-perpetuating. Any organization, even if it begins as completely egalitarian and democratic, will have to utilize the mechanisms of meritocracy to determine some sort of leadership. However, Hayes explains that those who end up with this power will “inevitably use that disproportionate power to subvert whatever mechanisms of accountability, turnover, mobility,” that were initially in place. Konczal laments that things have gotten so bad that failures such as WorldCom and Enron “just feel like historical footnotes now compared to Lehman Brothers." He concludes that “People need to understand that the game is rigged.”

Watch the full video below: