Meritocracy is not a good thing

Meritocracy Part I: Defining the beast

The idea that meritocracy is not a good thing will strike many as absurd. Should we not assign jobs to the best people for them?

And yet: a historical view forces us to recognize that the notion that people should do jobs that they are good at is not new. This, at least, is not an idea original to whatever it is we mean by ‘meritocracy’.

For liberal soci…