Inkspire

What is Meritocracy?

Most people are told from a young age that studying and working hard will guarantee a stable career and therefore success. So we pour our efforts into improving our talents and skills with the hopes that we too shall eventually reach that point of success where we can look back and say it was all worth it. The problem is that we no longer know when to stop. How can we tell if we’ve reached success? This entire process of using your education and talents to improve your social standing is a part of Meritocracy. Whenever you have to list your qualifications and experiences on a job application, you can thank Meritocracy for that. Michael Young, the author who coined the term in his satirical novel, defined merit as IQ combined with effort. Now our entire society runs on this idea that anyone can climb to the top with the right knowledge and abilities. Is Meritocracy the best way to run a society though?

History

First, take a look at how we got here in the first place. Most countries had some form of feudalism. The ruling family and their friends (nobles) ruled over everyone else. Feudalism provided no way to improve your social standing over life and created a deep divide between the rich and the poor. Centuries ago, people decided that it’s not enough to just be someone’s nephew or son to get a job. They wanted qualified workers and began administering tests and interviews to choose candidates. Meritocracy was born. In fact, it became a founding ideal of the United States of America. Men believed in making themselves rich; especially due to the Great Awakening–a religious movement that emphasized individual achievement. It was commonly believed that working to get rich was equivalent to preaching the gospel. In other parts of the world, the Industrial Revolution created the need for skilled engineers and factory workers, which also resulted in the switch to a merit based society. In America, meritocracy created a whole new generation of self-made men who believed that anyone could improve their socioeconomic status through hard work (except enslaved people and native Americans, of course). Even early on, a new divide between the rich and the poor was created, and the poor were blamed for not working hard enough. A founding father of America, Benjamin Franklin, also came from humble beginnings. However, his rise to power made him unsympathetic towards the poor that could not improve their position. He even argued against government support for the poor, writing that “the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer”. Meanwhile, only one in three businesses were able to survive after three years, and escaping poverty was a much more difficult task than assumed. Michael Young who wrote the Rise of Meritocracy–where this idea was first explored–warned of this new form of hierarchy. In America, it managed to create a world where lower classes are frowned upon for “not working hard enough” while the rich have more access to education and tools to ensure that their children continue profiting from meritocracy.

Present

Today, meritocracy is still the main social and political system. Sociologists and political scientists have always criticized meritocracy because of unequal starting points and the new hierarchy. The system operates under the impression that everyone has equal opportunities to get educated and gain experience; however, the rise of privatized education, expensive tutoring programs, and the general cost of living crisis has made it so that the children of the rich have the resources to learn while other children are forced to work part-time or care for their family instead of focusing on their education. And in a world that relies on education as a deciding factor for careers and income, the gap between the rich and poor widens. Michael Young explains how this can get particularly dangerous because the people on the bottom of the pyramid might not even have the resources or power to revolt against the system that is forcing them down. Exacerbating the issue, meritocracy is manifesting itself in a completely new way with the rise of social media. It has become ridiculously easy to find other people’s achievements and to compare them to your own. Consequently, almost everyone feels “behind” in some way because there’s always someone doing it better. Perhaps you saw someone get accepted to your dream university while you got rejected. Maybe all of your peers have gotten the promotion that you’ve been working for for years. Meritocracy promises growth if you put in the work, but it fails to tell you when you can stop. And people continue running the race because it’s safer than stopping and getting trampled by everyone else. While meritocracy is a massive improvement from feudalism, we’re still far from the perfect social system.

So what can we do?

Luckily, Michael Young proposed several solutions as well. First, he says to support other traits equally. Instead of merit being the main focus, he encourages us to value characteristics like compassion and creativity just as much. Next, he argues that purely merit does not give anyone the right to look down upon anyone else, and he requests mutual respect between everyone. Lastly, he describes the need for “equality of opportunity” where no one is left behind. In the last paragraph of his book, he states that if the “brilliant children” who escaped poverty would go back to mentor and share their knowledge, meritocracy might end up differently.

No system is entirely perfect. We can only hope that the people who profit from the system will work with the people left behind to improve life overall. Just as there is no one right answer to how the world should work, there is no one right answer to what success is. Everyone has an equally significant story to tell.