Meritocracy: the word that was meant as a warning
An accessible guide to meritocracy: the three claims the word carries, why Michael Young coined it as a warning, how Rawls cut fair selection away from desert, and what the mobility data say about the promise.
In 1958 the British sociologist Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy, a satire about a country that had reorganised itself around measured ability. 1 The book covers Britain from 1958 to an imagined revolt against the meritocracy in 2033, narrated by a fictional historian who approves of the system he describes. 2
The word he invented for that society is now used as praise. It reached Tony Blair's speeches, and it appears wherever an institution wants to say that it ignores birth and background. 2
In June 2001 Young answered his own word in The Guardian. "I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book," he wrote. "The book was a satire meant to be a warning." 2
Two sentences in that essay hold the whole argument. "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit," Young wrote. "It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." 2
Three claims wearing one word
Young endorsed one thing and attacked another in the same breath, and most arguments about meritocracy repeat that split without noticing it. Set out separately, the word carries three claims.
| The claim | What it says | What has to be true for it to hold |
|---|---|---|
| Selection | Positions should go to whoever can do the work best. | Ability can be measured, and the test measures the ability the position needs. |
| Reward | Pay and standing should track what a person contributes. | Contribution can be measured, and contribution is the right reason to pay someone. |
| Desert | Those who end up on top deserve it, and those below deserve their place. | Selection and reward are fair, and fairness transfers moral credit to the person. |
Wikipedia's working definition covers the first two: goods and power vested in individuals "based on ability and talent, rather than wealth or social class". 1 The same article notes that meritocracy is now "frequently seen as equality of opportunity". 1 That is a separate idea: opportunity governs entry to the competition, and desert governs the verdict afterwards.
The third claim is the one that does the moral work, and it is the one the critics attack. Defenders of meritocracy usually defend the first, and as an objection it is close to unanswerable. That mismatch explains why the argument runs for decades without resolving.
Where the word came from
Young built his satire on a formula: merit equals intelligence plus effort, identified early and selected for across a lifetime of schooling. 1 His narrator states the arithmetic of selection plainly: "Every selection of one is a rejection of many." 1
Young's claim to the word is mostly right. Wikipedia records an earlier use by the sociologist Alan Fox in Socialist Commentary in 1956; the novel made it stick. 1
What the book predicted was a class, formed by education. Ability of a conventional kind, once "distributed between the classes more or less at random", had been concentrated by the engine of education, Young wrote. 2
Education, in his account, put "its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many". The result was a new kind of loser, judged by a standard that claimed to be objective. 2
It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that. 2
He illustrated the point with two cabinets. Ernest Bevin left school at eleven and Herbert Morrison began as an errand boy; both sat in Attlee's 1945 cabinet. Blair's was "largely filled" with members of the meritocracy. 2
The case for it
Before examinations, offices were property. 3 Commissions, clerkships and professorships went to the sons of people who already held them, and competence was whatever the man in the post could be assumed to have.
The examination state was Chinese before it was European. The Han dynasty replaced nobility of blood with a bureaucracy chosen for virtue and ability, and the imperial examinations kept selecting officials for centuries after. 1 Britain's East India Company used competitive examinations in India to prevent corruption and favouritism. 1
Thomas Taylor Meadows was Britain's consul in Guangzhou. In 1847 he argued that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only". 1 Competitive entry to the British civil service followed, and Young dated the shift in status from birth to achievement to the 1870s. 2
Adrian Wooldridge's The Aristocracy of Talent (2021) states the defence at book length. Meritocracy, in his history, is what broke the hereditary grip on offices and professions and supplied the competence that modern states and economies ran on. 3
Wooldridge also concedes the machinery has been captured, and asks how to recover "its original progressive spirit". 3 That concession matters, because Young's prediction was that capture is the machine's ordinary output.
Rawls and the hole in the middle
John Rawls accepted the selection claim and cut it away from the desert claim in a single argument. A Theory of Justice (1971) asks what principles people would choose without knowing where they would land. 4
Rawls's answer contains a step that does most of the work. "No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society," Rawls writes. 5
Talents, on this account, are as arbitrary as inheritance. "The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position," Rawls writes. "These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts." 5
He kept the selection rule. The second principle requires offices and positions open to all "under conditions of fair equality of opportunity". It also requires inequalities to work to the benefit of the least advantaged. 4
What Rawls changes is the justification of the outcome. Higher expectations for those better situated are just "if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society". 5
His difference principle treats "the distribution of natural talents as in some respects a common asset". 5 A fair competition then identifies a winner. Making the winner worth more is a further step, and the one Rawls refuses.
Effort is the harder half of the desert claim. Talent arrives by lottery, while effort at least looks like a choice, and Rawls's argument does most of its work on the first.
What the ranking does to the ranked
Michael Sandel pushes the argument into the moral economy that survives a fair distribution. His 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit describes success in a meritocracy as a verdict the successful give themselves. 6
The meritocratic hubris of elites is the conviction by those who land on top that their success is their own doing, that they have risen through a fair competition, that they therefore deserve the material benefits that the market showers upon their talents. 6
The same belief produces its mirror image below. "Meritocracy is an attractive, even inspiring ideal, but it has a dark side: It generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among the losers." 6
Sandel's case turns on a credential. Society has made a four-year degree "a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life", and nearly two-thirds of Americans lack one. 6 His remedy is a lottery among qualified applicants, to make the luck visible to everyone who enters.
Daniel Markovits, writing two years earlier, argues the competition has stopped delivering on its own terms. "Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win." 7
The enrolment figures he cites are blunt. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale together enrol more students from the top 1 per cent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 per cent. 7
Work intensified as the sorting tightened. The American Bar Association could describe 1,300 fee-earning hours a year as normal in 1962; by 2000 a major firm called a quota of 2,400 billable hours "not unreasonable". 7
The losers then get a moral bill. "Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury." 7 Markovits's counter-intuitive point is that the winners are caught too: meritocracy "ensnares the rich just as surely as it excludes the rest". 7
Young, Sandel and Markovits describe one operation from three sides. A ranking of performances becomes a ranking of persons, and then a claim about worth. The person at the bottom is asked to read a score as a judgment on themselves. The person at the top is invited to read one as a judgment in their favour.
The desert story does political work, which is part of why it survives the evidence. Thomas Piketty notes that "our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview", and the idea has been called "a key means of cultural legitimation for contemporary capitalist culture". 1 One comparative finding sharpens the point: the more unequal a society, the more readily its members attribute success to merit rather than to inherited wealth. 1
What the numbers say
The reward claim carries a promise: that ability and effort move people between ranks across generations. The OECD tested how fast that movement happens. 8
In an "average OECD country" it would take "around four to five generations for children from the bottom earnings decile to attain the level of mean earnings". 8
The spread between countries is wide. Children from the bottom earnings decile reach mean earnings in about two generations in the Nordic countries, between four and six in continental Europe, and in "many more" in emerging economies. 8
Education shows the same stickiness. Four in ten people with low-educated parents have only lower secondary education themselves, and one in ten reaches tertiary study; two-thirds of children with highly educated parents do. 8
Movement does happen, in small steps. Two-thirds of people with low-earning parents rise to a higher status, and for almost half of them the rise stops at the neighbouring earnings group. 8
Earnings mobility is weaker where income inequality is high. The OECD itself draws a narrower conclusion, reporting "no evidence that greater inequality would bring higher income mobility", and noting that Austria, France, Germany and Hungary combine low inequality with low mobility. 8
A separate finding bears on the tests themselves. Satoshi Araki's study of the United States found the economic return to educational qualifications significantly larger than the return to cognitive skills, with intergenerational inequality forming through credentials rather than abilities; he calls the result an "imagined meritocracy". 1
These figures measure how fast families change rank, which tests the promise attached to merit. They leave open a separate question: whether the examinations that rank people measure the ability the position needs. 8
Merit as a way of choosing rulers
In one tradition the object of merit is authority rather than income, which moves the argument onto different ground. Confucian political meritocracy defends rule by the capable and the virtuous as an alternative to election. 1
Daniel Bell's The China Model describes the system he defends: hyper-selective examinations, then proven performance in local government, then promotion upward, rung by rung. 1 Tongdong Bai proposes an elected lower house beside a meritocratic upper chamber; Jiang Qing imagines three chambers, one of them filled by examination and gradual promotion. 1
Their shared case against election is that voters act in "irrational, tribal, short-termist ways", and that democracy needs meritocratic checks. 1 They disagree among themselves about institutional design, about how meritocrats should be promoted, and about how far the model can live with liberalism. 1
Moving merit from jobs to rulers changes what a defender has to show. An examination can demonstrate competence. Authority over people who failed it also needs an answer that exam results cannot supply, and that answer is about consent.
The disagreement on one page
| Position | Its claim | What would count against it |
|---|---|---|
| Michael Young (1958, 2001) | Selecting by ability is sensible; the class that forms around the selected is the danger. 2 | Evidence that merit selection disperses advantage across classes rather than concentrating it. |
| Adrian Wooldridge (2021) | Meritocracy broke hereditary rule and built competent institutions; the task is to repair it. 3 | A case that the openness came from something other than merit selection, or that capture is structural. |
| John Rawls (1971) | Fair selection and fair reward can be justified; the winners' desert cannot. 5 | An argument that natural talent is something a person can deserve. |
| Michael Sandel (2020) | Even a perfect meritocracy corrodes the common good by moralising success. 6 | A meritocracy that produced humility in winners and dignity outside the credential. |
| Daniel Markovits (2019) | The competition excludes the many and consumes the few; the promise has failed. 7 | Rising mobility and falling elite working hours within a meritocratic system. |
| Daniel Bell | Examinations and promotion select better rulers than elections do. 1 | Evidence that examined rulers serve the governed no better, or that selection cannot be legitimate without consent. |
| Measurement critics | Standardised tests measure isolated skills, facts and function, and miss judgment, curiosity and commitment. 1 | A test that predicts the competence a position requires better than its alternatives. |
A reading frame
Five questions take apart the next merit claim you meet.
- Which claim is being made? Decide whether the sentence is about who gets the position, what the position pays, or what the outcome says about the person.
- What is being measured, and does it track the work? Bill Ayers's objection to standardised tests is that they count "isolated skills, specific facts and function", leaving out judgment, curiosity and commitment. 1
- Who carries the cost of the ranking? A ranking that sorts people also tells them something about themselves, and that message is part of the policy. 6
- Does the reward need to track merit at all? Rawls justifies unequal rewards by what they do for the worst off, which is a different test from what the earners deserve. 5
- What would show the claim false? For the promise of movement, the test is generational: four to five generations on average, two in the Nordic countries. 8
Young's worry was that a society which measures everyone will end up grading everyone's worth. The measurement can survive that worry. The grade is the part that has to go.
References
- 1Wikipedia, "Meritocracy"
en.wikipedia.org
- 2
- 3Khan, "The Aristocracy of Talent — A Review"
quillette.com
- 4Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Original Position"
plato.stanford.edu
- 5John Rawls, *A Theory of Justice* (1971), §17
home.csulb.edu
- 6
- 7
- 8
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