The Case Against Meritocracy
The system we built to replace aristocracy has become a new aristocracy — one that is more entrenched, more self-righteous, and more damaging than the one it replaced.
The word "meritocracy" was invented as a warning. Michael Young, the British sociologist who coined it in his 1958 satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, meant it as a prediction of horror: a society in which an elite that had convinced itself it deserved its position would become more tyrannical, not less, than the aristocracy it replaced. The old aristocrats at least knew their privilege was arbitrary. The new meritocrats would believe their status was earned, and that belief would make them merciless.
Young lived long enough to watch his satire become a term of praise. By the time he wrote a 2001 Guardian essay titled "Down With Meritocracy," the word he had invented as a dystopian warning had been adopted wholesale as a description of what American elites considered their greatest achievement. He died in 2002, before the full flowering of the system he dreaded could be observed. But the data that has accumulated since then suggests he understood it better than almost anyone.
The philosophical case for meritocracy rests on two premises: that merit can be identified reliably, and that people who demonstrate it deserve the rewards that follow. Both premises are far more fragile than the system's defenders acknowledge.
Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit, identifies the second premise as the deeper problem. Even if we could perfectly measure merit — even if the SAT really did measure something important, and Harvard really did accept only those who demonstrated it — the conclusion that those people deserve the vast material rewards that elite credentials confer does not follow. Luck plays an enormous role in the formation of what we call merit: the accident of which parents you were born to, which neighborhood, which school, which cultural context taught you that striving was a virtue. The child who wins this lottery did not choose to be born intelligent and hardworking in a household that valued intelligence and hard work. The child who lost it did not choose otherwise.
Daniel Markovits makes the complementary economic argument in The Meritocracy Trap. His central finding, derived from decades of income and occupational data, is that the returns to elite credentials have increased so dramatically — and the barriers to obtaining those credentials are now so dependent on prior wealth — that meritocracy has become, in practice, a machine for elite reproduction. The wealthy invest extraordinary sums in their children's educational outcomes. Those outcomes determine admission to elite universities. Elite university attendance determines access to elite professions. Elite professions return ever-larger shares of national income to their practitioners. The cycle repeats.
Kalshi ran a prediction market in January 2026 asking whether elite college admission rates for applicants from households earning over $500,000 annually would exceed those from households earning between $50,000 and $100,000 by a factor of 5 or more through 2030, controlling for test scores. The contract was trading at 72 percent. This is not a measure of whether rich kids are smarter. It is a measure of how reliably the system converts parental resources into children's credentials, independent of the underlying talent the system claims to be measuring.
The first premise — that merit can be reliably identified — is challenged by decades of research on standardized testing, hiring practices, and performance evaluation.
The problem is not that tests and grades measure nothing. They measure something real: a capacity to perform well under the specific conditions that tests and grades measure. The question is what that capacity predicts, and how much of it is produced by the underlying trait being measured versus the preparation and resources invested in its cultivation.
Research by economists at Harvard and the University of Chicago, using data from the Opportunity Insights project, has tracked the outcomes of students who attended elite universities versus those who were admitted but chose to attend less selective institutions. For students from low-income backgrounds, attending an elite university produces large and lasting income effects — the network, the credential, and the signaling value of the degree all compound over decades. For students from high-income backgrounds, the effect is much smaller. This asymmetry reveals something important: much of what we attribute to the quality of the person is actually attributable to the quality of the institution, and the quality of the institution is itself largely a function of who attends and who funds it, not what happens pedagogically.
The signaling theory of education — associated with economists like Bryan Caplan, who argues in The Case Against Education that most of what college produces is credential, not skill — is controversial but not obviously wrong. If the primary function of an elite degree is to certify that the holder passed a competitive selection process, then meritocracy is, at its core, a tournament whose winners are rewarded for winning the tournament, not for demonstrating the underlying qualities the tournament was supposed to identify.
The psychological consequences of meritocracy are perhaps less discussed than its economic distortions, but they may be more important.
The meritocratic ideal requires its winners to believe that they have earned their position through their own efforts and abilities. This belief is partly true and partly false, and the interplay between those two components produces a distinctive psychological profile: high anxiety about maintaining status, contempt (usually implicit, sometimes explicit) for those who have not achieved it, and a tendency to pathologize failure as evidence of personal deficiency rather than structural disadvantage.
The anxiety is documented. Elite professionals — the doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and management consultants who populate the top of the meritocratic pyramid — report higher rates of burnout, anxiety, and work-family conflict than almost any other occupational group. The work demands that justify their status are real, and they extract a genuine toll. What is striking is that the rewards of the meritocracy — the financial security, the professional recognition, the cultural prestige — do not appear to compensate for this toll as thoroughly as the system's mythology suggests.
The contempt is also documented, though it is expressed in more socially acceptable forms. Sandel calls it "meritocratic hubris" — the tendency of the credentialed elite to attribute the struggles of those below them to personal failing rather than to the structural conditions that made those struggles far more likely. The research on this is uncomfortable: studies consistently show that higher-income Americans are more likely to attribute poverty to lack of effort than to systemic barriers, while lower-income Americans show the reverse pattern. Whether this difference in attribution is cause or effect of the income gap is less important than the fact of it.
The question of what to put in place of meritocracy is, in some ways, the hardest part of the critique.
The alternatives are not obvious. Hereditary aristocracy is clearly worse on both efficiency and fairness grounds. Pure egalitarianism — distributing positions and rewards without regard to demonstrated capacity — would reduce the efficiency of complex societies in ways that would harm the least well-off most acutely. Some differentiation based on something like merit seems unavoidable and even desirable.
But there is space between the current system, which compounds small initial advantages into vast lifetime inequalities, and any alternative that is obviously worse. That space includes things like: radically reducing the financial returns to elite credentials through more progressive taxation; expanding the pathways through which talent can be demonstrated and rewarded; reducing the degree to which parental wealth translates directly into children's academic outcomes; and — perhaps most importantly — changing the cultural story we tell about what success means and what it requires.
The last item on that list is the most resistant to policy intervention and the most important in the long run. As long as meritocracy is the story we tell about why some people deserve more than others, the critique of meritocracy will remain, as Young intended, a warning that goes largely unheeded.
The markets have a contract on this too, in a manner of speaking. Metaculus asks whether the Gini coefficient in the United States will be higher in 2030 than it is today. The median forecast is 68 percent. The meritocracy is working exactly as Michael Young predicted.
Leila Farahani is a contributing writer at The Auguro covering philosophy, education, and the politics of inequality. She is the author of The Credential Economy (2025).