# Meritocracy **Meritocracy** is the political-philosophical claim that social and economic positions should be allocated by *individual merit* — talent plus effort — rather than by inheritance, lottery, custom, or political preference. The term was coined satirically by the British sociologist Michael Young in *The Rise of the Meritocracy* (1958), which depicted a future dystopia in which IQ-plus-effort ranking had become the new and pitiless basis of class hierarchy — the winners convinced of their own deservingness, the losers stripped of any structural excuse. The word was rapidly drained of its satirical edge and adopted as a positive value by postwar liberal centrism and, with different inflections, by both the modern American right and the technocratic left. Young himself protested the inversion in a 2001 *Guardian* essay, to no avail. ## RWKB relevance Meritocracy is the secular cousin of the [[Prosperity Gospel]] in right-wing political philosophy: a framework that legitimates economic inequality by claiming that the distribution of rewards tracks *deserved* outcomes. Where prosperity gospel locates the legitimation in divine favor, meritocracy locates it in individual choice and ability. Both rest heavily on free-will assumptions — the rich *earned* their position because they could have chosen otherwise and didn't, and the poor likewise. This is what makes meritocracy ideologically load-bearing for the right: it converts the raw fact of inequality into a moral verdict, so that redistribution becomes not compassion but theft from the deserving, and poverty becomes evidence of character rather than circumstance. The "American Dream" — anyone can make it with hard work — is the popular, optimistic face of the same claim. ## The lines of critique The contemporary critique of meritocracy comes from several directions, and notably the deepest version is not the familiar left-wing one: - **Michael Sandel**, *The Tyranny of Merit* (2020) — the meritocratic frame is corrosive to civic solidarity because it tells winners they deserve their winnings and losers they deserve their losses, breeding hubris at the top and humiliation at the bottom that fuels populist backlash. - **Daniel Markovits**, *The Meritocracy Trap* (2019) — empirically, meritocracy in practice is largely hereditary; high-merit positions go disproportionately to the children of high-merit parents through capital, elite schooling, networks, and developmental advantages, so "merit" launders inherited privilege. - **Chris Hayes**, *Twilight of the Elites* (2012) — the institutions that select for merit are themselves captured by prior advantage, so each generation's "meritocrats" entrench rather than refresh the elite. - **The hard-determinist critique** — articulated most accessibly by the neuroscientist [[Robert Sapolsky]] in *[[Determined]]*. If no one freely chose their genes, their childhood environment, their culture, their neurochemistry, or the historical timing of their opportunities, then no one *earned* their successes any more than they *earned* their failures. The Stanford-educated CEO did not author the capacities the position requires; nor did the incarcerated high-school dropout author the absence of them. On this view the moral weight of *desert* — the keystone of meritocratic ideology — collapses on both sides at once. Behavioral-genetics evidence that the very traits meritocracy claims to reward (IQ, conscientiousness) are themselves substantially heritable sharpens the point. ## Significance The stakes of the meritocracy debate are not academic. If meritocratic desert is sound, the right's resistance to redistribution rests on a defensible moral foundation. If it is an illusion — whether for Markovits's empirical reasons or Sapolsky's metaphysical ones — then the entire edifice that converts inequality into just deserts loses its moral license, and the distribution of wealth becomes a matter of luck and power to be addressed on those terms. This is why meritocracy functions in the KB as a hinge concept linking economic ideology, religious legitimation, and the free-will debate. ## See Also - [[Prosperity Gospel]] — the religious cousin - [[Determinism]] — the metaphysical case against meritocratic desert - [[Determined]] — the canonical book on that position - [[Robert Sapolsky]] — its most accessible articulator - [[Free Market Fundamentalism]] — the economic creed meritocracy morally underwrites