The Myth of Meritocracy

The word “meritocracy” was coined by the British sociologist Michael Young in a satirical novel in 1958. Young’s dystopia describes a society that has perfected the measurement of individual talent and ruthlessly sorts people by it, producing a ruling class convinced of its own deservingness and contemptuous of those beneath it. The word was adopted by politicians and executives as a term of praise, and Young spent the rest of his life pointing out the confusion. How elite selection actually works in practice is very different in practice from how institutions describe it. Studies of admissions to elite universities, hiring at professional services firms, and promotion within corporations consistently find that formal credentials matter less than social legibility: the ability to display tastes, manners, and cultural references that signal membership in the right networks. Lauren Rivera’s research on hiring at elite firms found that interviewers routinely described candidates as…