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 societies to uniquely pride themselves on their embrace of meritocracy, it must mean something specific, new, and revolutionary.

And, indeed, a study of the origins of the term bears this out. The word ‘meritocracy’ was coined comparatively recently, in 1956, by sociologist Alan Fox (writing for the journal Socialist Commentary).

Another interesting discovery is that for the first few decades of its use it was a pejorative, popularized by Michael Young’s 1958 satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy. And yet, since then, the term has not only been rehabilitated; it has been embraced as a self-evident virtue.

So what does it actually mean?

Jose David Morales

Meritocracy is the notion that our entire political and economic system should be arranged according to a measurable quality known as ‘merit’.

Within this system, merit is typically defined by formal examinations and evaluations of performance. Meritocracy is therefore characterized by tests, reviews, qualifications, competitions, structured interviews, and the quantification of performance and ability.

The term ‘meritocracy’ is the combination of the Latin-origin "merit" (from mereō meaning earn) and the Greek suffix "-cracy" (power, rule). In other words, it is rule by those who are understood to have earned it, as opposed to rule by those who derive their legitimacy from traditional sources.

It is often celebrated as the replacement of a class-based (aristocratic) system. This claim has emerged as not entirely true: meritocracies evidently retain class structures, but these class structures are now advertised and justified as the expression of ‘merit’, rather than deriving from hereditary institutions.

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Advocates for meritocracy typically imply that a ‘merit’-based system increases social mobility (although the notion that one can move up or down the social hierarchy is itself a tacit admission that class structures survive). This claim of increased mobility is also questionable, as we shall see.

Meritocracy necessitates and idealizes the destruction of traditional boundaries. This began with the attack on class structures, but after the moral primacy of ‘merit’ is accepted, it must also be conceded that other structures which impede the centering of ‘merit’ should be questioned: national borders, gender divides, insular communities, and prejudices of all kinds.

The seeds of meritocratic thought arose in the West with the broader Enlightenment, which held that the scientific process - with its advocacy of quantification and objectivity - could be turned upon politics and human affairs more generally, in order to progress society towards utopia.

A provable meritocracy thus demands that all achievement must be explicit, documented, legible, and acceptable. Meritocracy can only be conducted on the basis of what we can measure; this thing we call 'merit’.

Of course, distilling the ineffable qualities of human existence into quanta has always proved challenging for the social sciences, which is why they have strayed while the hard sciences have progressed.

The central question at hand is: “What is the definition of this thing we recognize as ‘merit’ within a meritocracy?” How is it measured, by whom, and when? Is the ‘good’ we are attempting to capture an intrinsic quality of the human subject or an objective outcome we are trying to engineer? What scale and timescale do we care about?