Jamie Dimon is named in The Bob Zadek Show as a figure at the top of American finance — the chairman of JPMorgan and, in the host’s usage, the endpoint of an elite life trajectory. The excerpts do not supply biographical facts about Dimon: no birth date or place, no education, no career history, no title beyond the one Bob Zadek states, and no statement from Dimon himself. He functions in the source material as an emblem rather than a subject.
The chairman as the end of an elite trajectory
In the 2019-11-23 episode with Daniel Markovits, Bob Zadek described an assumption he saw implicit in Markovits’s account of the elite: that everyone would aspire, from early childhood, to a life groomed from kindergarten onward to replace Jamie Dimon as chairman of JPMorgan. Zadek characterized that trajectory as one in which a person works hard, studies hard, and focuses on a single goal — becoming chairman of JPMorgan or holding similar jobs — and eventually arrives there after a lifetime of privileged education and long hours. Zadek said he called that elite, and that he was being a little bit harsh for the purpose of radio in calling it kind of pathetic, asking who in the world would want it. He added that the children of the elite may not want it, but their parents do not give them a choice, and that the rest of the country regards such children as poor kids forced into a life others would never want. By calling the life elite, Zadek argued, one gives it a universal desirability he doubted it had Daniel Markovits on the (De)Merits of Meritocracy (2019).
Markovits agreed completely. He said the part of his book’s subtitle about devouring the elite is exactly the idea that a life of being groomed — but also twisted, pressured and demanded from — in pursuit of something that may not be that great to have is not a way to live well. He then turned the discussion from the elite’s own welfare to the middle class.
Finance and the disappearing loan officer
Markovits took home mortgage finance as his example. He said the central figure in that field fifty or sixty years ago was the loan officer, a middle-class person with some college education who worked for a local bank and whose job was to evaluate individual borrowers, homeowners and houses to ensure loans were prudently made and borrowers could repay. Banks issued the loans, held them, and serviced them for the life of the loan, so the loan officer was a respected person who exercised judgment and earned a wage on which he could raise a family. Today, Markovits said, that loan officer pretty much does not exist in that form; loan officers in banks are form-fillers who help borrowers fill in computer forms. The reason, he said, is that banks no longer service the loans they originate: the loans are chopped into securities, traded on Wall Street, and traded perhaps not by Jamie Dimon but by Jamie Dimon types — super-educated traders making huge sums. As they make that money, Markovits argued, they have changed mortgage finance so as to make the middle-class loan officer no longer relevant or possible. He framed the point as broader than the elite’s own well-being: running finance by putting such people at the center means nobody else has a good middle-class job anymore, and finance becomes a field that does not support middle-class workers Daniel Markovits on the (De)Merits of Meritocracy (2019).
Bob Zadek pushed back by asking whether Markovits was not really describing a change in the nature of the middle-class workforce. Zadek said he had interacted with the loan officer occupation because he had been doing finance his whole life, and that the loan officer looked a little like Jimmy Stewart in his mind. He granted that the mythical loan officer no longer exists, but noted that coders do exist, that coding did not exist a long time ago, that it is very much in demand, that it is a middle-class job, and that it is kind of interesting work. He asked whether Markovits was not really talking about something that has happened throughout civilization, with jobs coming and going — elevator operators among them — and being replaced by other jobs. When jobs become no longer useful, Zadek said, it is the job of an individual to figure out how to make an hour of his or her time valuable, a task everyone has, just as a seller must sell something somebody else wants to buy.
Markovits called that fair enough: jobs come and go, and at some point it is the individual’s responsibility to do something useful for society. But he said it is also important to ask which jobs are going and which are replacing them. Over the past thirty years, he said, there has been a massive increase in pay for the most educated and for jobs requiring the most skill at the very top, and a decent but not great and non-trivial increase in wages at the bottom of the skill distribution, while middle-class jobs are disappearing — not replaced by other middle-class jobs. Loan officers are going and coders are coming, he conceded, but there are not as many coders as there used to be loan officers, or at least not in those categories. The middle of the labor distribution, he said, is being destroyed by the technologies now being embraced, which means a worker cannot retrain because there are not as many jobs in the new category as there used to be in the — and the excerpt breaks off there Daniel Markovits on the (De)Merits of Meritocracy (2019).
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts names Jamie Dimon — the 2019-11-23 conversation with Daniel Markovits — so the excerpts show no development in his treatment across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no biographical information about Dimon: no birth date or place, no education, no career history, no compensation, and no statement or action by him. They do not describe JPMorgan as an institution, its size, its businesses, or its regulatory history. They do not say whether Dimon was ever invited onto the program or ever appeared on it. Everything the excerpts offer is Bob Zadek’s and Daniel Markovits’s use of his name to stand for the top of elite finance.