Why meritocracy is a myth

But he makes a few useful suggestions on how to rebalance the system. British public schools, he argues, should massively hike up the number of scholarships they offer. Half of their places should instead go to bright students who cannot afford the fees, argues the author. The country asks bright students to repay state scholarships for overseas study by serving in public office before going off to become millionaires.

It also selects teachers from the top third of each class, to ensure high standards. To maintain its ubiquity, governments will either have to tax inheritances, or find some way to make education less of an elite club. Follow LJucca on Twitter. Breakingviews Reuters Breakingviews is the world's leading source of agenda-setting financial insight. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Is meritocracy a myth? Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Next Up In Video. Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Suddenly he was a member of the transnational elite: dining with President Roosevelt, listening in on a conversation between Leonard and Henry Ford.

Young, who has been called the greatest practical sociologist of the past century, pioneered the modern scientific exploration of the social lives of the English working class. He did not just aim to study class, though; he aimed to ameliorate the damage he believed it could do. The Dartington ideal was about the cultivation of personality and aptitudes whatever form they took, and the British class structure plainly impeded this ideal.

What would supplant the old, caste-like system of social hierarchy? Meritocracy represents a vision in which power and privilege would be allocated by individual merit, not by social origins. Inspired by the meritocratic ideal, many people these days are committed to a view of how the hierarchies of money and status in our world should be organised.

We think that jobs should go not to people who have connections or pedigree, but to those best qualified for them, regardless of their background.

Occasionally, we will allow for exceptions — for positive discrimination, say, to help undo the effects of previous discrimination. But such exceptions are provisional: when the bigotries of sex, race, class and caste are gone, the exceptions will cease to be warranted.

We have rejected the old class society. In moving toward the meritocratic ideal, we have imagined that we have retired the old encrustations of inherited hierarchies. As Young knew, that is not the real story. Soon the party, as it promised, raised the school-leaving age to 15, increased adult education, improved public housing, made public secondary school education free, created a national health service and provided social security for all.

As a result, the lives of the English working class were beginning to change radically for the better. Unions and labour laws reduced the hours worked by manual labourers, increasing their possibilities of leisure.

Rising incomes made it possible for them to buy televisions and refrigerators. And changes, partly driven by new estate taxes, were going on at the top of the income hierarchy, too. For a couple of generations afterward, these efforts at social reform both protected members of the working classes and allowed more of their children to make the move up the hierarchy of occupations and of income, and so, to some degree, of status. Young was acutely conscious of these accomplishments; he was acutely conscious, too, of their limitations.

J ust as happened in the US, college attendance shot up in Britain after the second world war, and one of the main indicators of class was increasingly whether you had been to university. The middle-class status of meagerly compensated librarians reflected a vocational requirement for an education beyond secondary school; that the better-paid assembly-line workers were working-class reflected the absence of such a requirement.

Working-class consciousness — legible in the very name of the Labour party, founded in — spoke of class mobilisation, of workers securing their interests. The emerging era of education, by contrast, spoke of class mobility — blue collars giving way to white. Would mobility undermine class consciousness? These questions preyed on Young. Operating out of a community studies institute he set up in Bethnal Green, he helped create and nurture dozens and dozens of programmes and organisations, all attending to social needs he had identified.

So was the Open University , which has taught more than 2 million students since Young founded it in , making it the largest academic institution in the UK by enrolment. Yet education mattered to him not just as a means of mobility, but as a way to make people more forceful as citizens, whatever their station — less easily bulldozed by commercial developers or the government planners of Whitehall.

Late in life, he even set up the School for Social Entrepreneurs. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe. Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.

This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people.

However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed.

What separates the two is luck.