CAT 2024 Slot 3 VARC: The Critique of Meritocracy

The word 'meritocracy' was coined in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, and it is one of the more instructive ironies of modern intellectual history that a term invented as a warning has been adopted almost universally as an aspiration. Young's book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, imagined a future Britain in which social position was determined entirely by a formula of IQ plus effort, and traced this system to its logical, dystopian conclusion: a rigid new class order in which the successful, having earned their position by demonstrable merit rather than inherited privilege, felt fully entitled to their advantages and the unsuccessful, denied even the excuse of an unfair system, were left with no consolation for their failure at all. Within a generation of the book's publication, however, 'meritocracy' had shed its satirical origin and become the sincere self-description of choice for elite universities, corporations and governments across the world.

The appeal of meritocratic ideals is not hard to understand, particularly by contrast with the systems they were meant to replace. A society that allocates opportunity by birth, caste or connection is, on almost any reckoning, less just than one that allocates it by demonstrated ability and effort, and the twentieth century's gradual dismantling of formal aristocratic and caste privilege in favour of examinations, credentials and competitive hiring represented genuine moral progress by most people's lights. The difficulty is not with the ideal of rewarding talent and effort but with the gap between that ideal and the mechanisms that claim to implement it.

Critics have identified at least two distinct problems here. The first concerns measurement: the instruments a meritocracy relies on to identify merit — standardised tests, university admissions criteria, performance reviews — are never the neutral rulers they present themselves as being. Because these instruments are typically designed, administered and interpreted by people already positioned to succeed by them, they tend to reward precisely the skills, dispositions and cultural fluencies that privileged upbringings cultivate, so that a system built to measure merit ends up measuring, in substantial part, prior advantage, and then relabels the result as merit after the fact. The second problem is more corrosive still and concerns what meritocracy does to the psychology of both winners and losers. Because a meritocracy insists that outcomes are earned rather than inherited, it grants the successful a moral license to view their success as fully deserved and — this is the crucial step — to view the unsuccessful as having earned their failure in equal measure. A hereditary elite could at least be embarrassed by its unearned luck; a meritocratic elite, Young argued, has no such humility available to it, because the entire premise of the system is that no luck was involved.

None of this amounts to an argument for abandoning the attempt to reward effort and ability, which remains, whatever its flaws, preferable to the alternatives history has tried. It is, rather, an argument for treating 'meritocracy' the way one treats any other seductive ideal — as a standard to be approached with permanent suspicion of one's own instruments, rather than a status, once achieved, that licenses complacency about how fairly the game was actually played, or humility about how much of one's own success was never really a matter of merit at all.