On Meritocracy

Will future generations look back and wonder: “What were they thinking?”

TALENT + EFFORT = REWARD

Meritocracy is the sacrosanct ideology of our lives and times.

A socio-economic system which rewards people — financially and through social plaudits and other recognitions — not only for their talent but also for their hard work.

What constitutes merit has shifted about a bit over the years, but in any of its formulations, meritocracy fosters work ethic and encourages personal responsibility, and the inequality of outcome it produces is an intentional byproduct of its commitment to individual excellence and achievement.

I’ve never known anything but a society founded on meritocratic principles. And it seems a whole lot healthier as a framework than what came before it (including, for example, the hereditary aristocracy of the agricultural age or the plutocratic elite of the industrial).

So I was shocked to discover that the person who coined the term meritocracy meant it pejoratively.

THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY

In 1958, the sociologist Michael Young published a satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy in which he described a dystopian society where intelligence and merit had become the central tenet of…