Meritocracy: A Dysfunctional Ideal?

Meritocracy is one of the most widely celebrated ideals in modern societies. It promises a fair deal: that your intelligence, effort, and ability – not the family you were born into – will determine how far you go. It sounds just. It sounds rational. But what if the very system designed to eliminate privilege ends up creating a new, more entrenched form of it? That is precisely the warning buried inside British sociologist Michael Young’s 1958 satirical novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Young didn’t celebrate meritocracy – he invented the word as a warning label.

Where the word “meritocracy” actually comes from
The promise vs. the projection
The unintended consequences Young foresaw
Contempt from the top down
Shame and alienation from the bottom up
The re-entrenchment of privilege
Meritocracy and social conflict
The Chelsea Manifesto: an alternative vision
Why Young’s warning still matters

Where the word “meritocracy” actually comes from

Most people use the word “meritocracy” as a compliment. Ironically, its creator intended it as the opposite. Young’s book describes a dystopian future United Kingdom in which merit – defined strictly as IQ plus effort – replaces social class as the basis for how society is organized. The formula at the heart of this fictional world is simple: IQ + Effort = Merit, and it becomes the guiding principle for who holds power, who gets educated, and who is left behind.

Young wrote the novel as a satirical essay narrated by a fictional sociologist writing in 2034, on the eve of a popular revolt against the meritocratic elite. The irony is that the book was roundly misread. The word “meritocracy” was absorbed into public life without the negative connotations Young intended it to carry, and politicians across the spectrum began using it as shorthand for fairness and opportunity. Young spent the rest of his life trying to correct this misreading. In a 2001 piece in The Guardian, just a year before his death, he wrote that it makes good sense to appoint individuals to jobs on merit, but that the danger arises when those selected for merit harden into a new social class with no room for others.

The promise vs. the projection

The appeal of meritocracy is easy to understand. In hereditary aristocracies and caste societies, people’s fates are fixed by birth. In a meritocracy, by contrast, people can rise – competing for desirable positions based on their own abilities. Compared to nepotism, bribery, or inherited title, a system that rewards talent seems obviously superior.

But Young’s projection was more unsettling. He imagined a society that had fully committed to this ideal – and watched it curdle. In Young’s fictional world, the successful meritocrats hoard ever-greater rewards for themselves, crystallizing into a rigid and repressive elite who rule over an increasingly powerless and depressed underclass. The aristocracy of birth had simply been replaced by an aristocracy of talent – equally closed, equally self-serving, but now with a moral justification attached to it: they deserved it.

That moral justification is the sharpest part of Young’s critique. In an old class-based society, even the poor could tell themselves the rich were simply lucky – born into the right family. But in a meritocracy, the logic shifts. If your position is the result of your own merit, then failure is also your own fault.

The unintended consequences Young foresaw

Contempt from the top down

One of Young’s most pointed warnings was about what success does to people psychologically. In his fictional society, the eminent “know that success is a just reward for their own capacity and their own efforts,” while the poor are repeatedly tested and labelled, demoralised into accepting their place. The elite don’t just have more – they feel entitled to have more, because the system has told them they earned it.

Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel sharpened this point in his book The Tyranny of Merit. The closer a society comes to achieving true equality of opportunity, the more plausible it becomes – to both winners and losers – that those who succeed have genuinely earned their rewards. This creates a troubling moral psychology: the winners feel no obligation to the losers, because the losers had their chance.

Meritocratic attitudes and economic inequalities are mutually reinforcing – in a market-driven society, material inequalities become bound up with status inequalities, and challenging one requires challenging the other. The result is a culture in which those at the top genuinely struggle to empathize with those below them, because the entire system has validated their sense of superiority.

Shame and alienation from the bottom up

If the elite develop contempt downward, those at the bottom of a meritocratic system experience something equally corrosive: internalized failure. Young’s novel argues that if people believe they deserve less on merit – that their position reflects their inadequacy – they can be damaged in their own self-esteem and generally demoralised. Failure in a meritocracy is not just bad luck; it becomes a verdict on your worth as a person.

By placing the responsibility for success solely on the individual, meritocracy creates a system where those who fail are led to blame themselves regardless of the structural barriers they face – resulting in feelings of inadequacy, shame, and hopelessness. This psychological burden falls hardest on those who are already disadvantaged, compounding material inequality with emotional harm.

The re-entrenchment of privilege

Perhaps the most damaging irony of meritocracy is that it tends to reproduce the very hierarchies it claims to dismantle. Although meritocracy was embraced as the partner of equality, it now more nearly stifles rather than fosters social mobility, argues Yale Law School’s Daniel Markovits. A ratchet is created in which inequality in education feeds into inequality in the workforce, which produces incomes that allow the elite to buy even more unequal education for their children – and so the cycle deepens.

By 1985, fewer than half of students at selective US colleges came from the top income quartile. By 2010, that figure had risen to 67 percent – a striking sign that meritocracy had begun generating its own hereditary elite, selected by credentials rather than bloodlines, but no less exclusive. In societies with significant socioeconomic inequalities, worse-off families simply have fewer resources to help their children develop the skills required to pass meritocratic selection, meaning that what gets rewarded as “merit” is often a proxy for pre-existing advantage.

Young’s novel ends not with a stable, efficient society but with revolution. The fictional narrator – a defender of meritocracy – is killed in the social unrest he failed to predict. This ending was deliberate. Young wanted readers to understand that a society stratified by merit, rather than being more stable than one stratified by birth, might actually generate deeper resentment – because it offers no excuse for those at the bottom and no humility from those at the top.

In his 2012 book Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes argues that the move toward meritocracy has produced widespread inequality and corruption, contributing to a sharp decline in public trust in institutions. Sandel similarly attributes the increasing gap between economic winners and losers, the decline of civic engagement, and the rise of populism to the meritocratic ideal – arguing that it creates an elite disconnected from society and lacking empathy for those left behind.

This is a pattern Young anticipated in 1958. In an age characterized by the rise of populist leaders and movements and a backlash against educated “liberal elites,” revisiting Young’s influential satire has never been more urgent. The populist revolts of 2016 – from Brexit to Trump – look, to many sociologists, like the early stages of exactly the conflict Young projected.

The Chelsea Manifesto: an alternative vision

Young did not leave readers without hope. Inside his novel, a dissident movement publishes what he called the Chelsea Manifesto – a counter-vision to meritocratic hierarchy. It argued for a classless society that would evaluate people not only by intelligence and education, but by kindness, courage, imagination, sensitivity, sympathy, and generosity – qualities that cannot be measured by any test. In this vision, no single metric of human worth dominates. The lorry driver skilled at growing roses is not ranked below the civil servant skilled at winning prizes.

This is not a utopian fantasy on Young’s part – it is a sociological argument. If merit is narrowly defined (by IQ, credentials, or economic output), the “meritocracy” that results will always reflect and entrench the values of those who get to define merit. Research across more than 40 countries shows that belief in school meritocracy reduces support for policies aimed at reducing income inequality – meaning that the meritocratic ideology doesn’t just describe inequality, it actively makes people more comfortable with it.

Why Young’s warning still matters

Young coined “meritocracy” as a critique, but the word escaped its author and became a political aspiration. Young later confessed he was deeply disappointed that the notion was favorably spoken of in the United States and appeared in the speeches of Tony Blair at home – the very leaders he had hoped to caution. Today, meritocracy represents a positive ideal against which institutions measure their own justice, even as the evidence of its dysfunctions continues to accumulate.

The core problem Young identified remains unsolved: a society that rewards merit without addressing unequal starting points does not produce fairness – it produces a hierarchy that feels more legitimate because it looks fair. And a hierarchy that feels legitimate is, in some ways, harder to challenge than one that is openly unjust. Social meritocracy risks justifying the perpetuation of old, discredited hierarchies and social inequalities, simply by dressing them in the language of individual achievement.

Young’s novel ends in a riot. The real question his work poses is not whether meritocracy produces inequality – the evidence suggests it does – but whether societies are willing to look honestly at what they mean when they call something “fair.”

What do you think? If societies began measuring human worth by qualities like empathy, creativity, or community contribution alongside formal credentials, how might that reshape who holds power – and who is left out? And if a meritocracy systematically advantages those who already begin with more, is it still reasonable to call the outcomes “deserved”?

References

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Table of Contents

Where the word “meritocracy” actually comes from 🔗

The promise vs. the projection 🔗

The unintended consequences Young foresaw 🔗

Contempt from the top down 🔗

Shame and alienation from the bottom up 🔗

The re-entrenchment of privilege 🔗

Meritocracy and social conflict 🔗

The Chelsea Manifesto: an alternative vision 🔗

Why Young’s warning still matters 🔗

References

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