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Debate

Do We Deserve Our Success? Meritocracy

That success still depends heavily on family background is well documented: meritocracies fall short of their own promise. The harder question is whether the ideal itself is just – can anyone deserve rewards for talents they did not choose, and what does the belief in merit do to winners and losers?

The word “meritocracy” was coined as a warning: in Michael Young’s satire The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), a society that selects its elite by “IQ plus effort” ends in arrogance at the top, resignation below and finally revolt. Yet the ideal that positions should go to the most capable rather than the best connected became a shared creed of modern democracies, with education as its main route. That it is unfulfilled is well documented. Educational success still depends heavily on family background – in the United States, children from the richest one per cent of families were more than twice as likely to attend an elite private college as middle-class children with the same test scores (Chetty, Deming and Friedman, 2023) – and the divide between graduates and non-graduates has become one of the strongest predictors of how people vote. Disputed is whether the ideal is also unfair in itself, or harmful even where it works.

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Positions

Merit against privilege

Defenders recall that the meritocratic idea was revolutionary: competitive examinations and careers open to talent broke the hold of aristocracy, patronage and nepotism, and opened positions to women, minorities and the children of workers. Adrian Wooldridge (The Aristocracy of Talent, 2021) argues that the alternatives – selection by birth, connections or group quotas – are worse, and that the remedy for today’s failures is more meritocracy, not less: better schools, early support for talent wherever it is found, and an end to the privileges that let the wealthy bypass competition. Selecting the most capable surgeons, engineers and judges also benefits everyone who depends on them.

No one deserves their talents

Rawls argues that the distribution of natural talents is as “arbitrary from a moral point of view” as the social class one is born into: no one deserves a better starting place – nor even, he adds, the character that makes effort possible, since that too depends on fortunate circumstances. A just society may reward talent to create incentives, but people are entitled to their earnings only as legitimate expectations within fair institutions, not as a prize for moral worth. Kathryn Paige Harden (The Genetic Lottery, 2021) applies this to behavioural genetics: if genetic differences between individuals partly predict educational success – she explicitly rejects any inference from them to differences between racial or ethnic groups –, that is no reason to accept inequality, but one more reason to see success as luck rather than desert.

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The tyranny of merit

Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit, 2020) argues that the trouble is not only that meritocracy falls short of its promise, but that its ideal itself is corrosive. Those who rise come to believe that they have earned their success and deserve their rewards, while those left behind are told that their fate is their own fault – a mix of hubris and humiliation that, in his view, fed the populist backlash of 2016. He proposes admitting students to selective universities by lottery among qualified applicants, and a renewed respect for the dignity of work regardless of credentials. Daniel Markovits (The Meritocracy Trap, 2019) adds that meritocracy harms even its winners, who must spend their lives in exhausting competition to keep their place and pass it on to their children.

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Merit as disguised inheritance

Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (Les Héritiers, 1964; La Reproduction, 1970) argue that schools reward a familiarity with legitimate culture – ways of speaking, tastes, self-assurance – that children of educated families acquire at home, and then present the result as natural gift and individual achievement. Merit thus legitimates the transmission of privilege by making inherited “cultural capital” look earned. Young (Justice and the Politics of Difference, 1990) adds that merit criteria are rarely neutral measures of performance: they build in the norms and experiences of dominant groups, which is why she called the idea of a value-free assessment of merit a myth.

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Equality among citizens

Anderson (2007) argues that the point of fair opportunity in education is not a fair race for scarce prizes but a democratic elite: leaders drawn from all parts of society, who know the lives of the people they serve and can be held to account by them. Segregation by class and race in schools and neighbourhoods therefore damages democracy itself, not only individual chances. On this relational view, a just society narrows the distance between top and bottom and honours the contributions of all, so that losing a competition does not mean losing one’s standing as an equal citizen.

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As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made

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