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 “polished” or “rough around the edges” in ways that correlated with class background rather than competence. The stated meritocratic criteria were real, but they operated within a prior filter that most candidates never saw.

Audit studies make the gap between stated and actual criteria measurable. Researchers send identical resumes to employers, varying only the name at the top, and record callback rates. The results are consistent across countries and decades: resumes with names read as white receive significantly more callbacks than identical resumes with names read as Black or Latino. The same pattern appears when resumes signal class background or gender or when disability is disclosed.

Believing in meritocracy does not make people fairer. Research by Emilio Castilla and Stephen Benard found that organizations that explicitly adopt merit-based pay principles show larger gender pay gaps than those that do not. The mechanism appears to be moral licensing: people who believe the system is already fair feel less need to monitor their own judgments for bias. The belief in meritocracy also predicts harsher moral judgments of people who fail. After all, if outcomes are deserved, then failure is evidence of some personal deficiency. This framing conveniently shifts responsibility from structures to individuals and makes collective responses to poverty or unemployment harder to sustain politically.

The meritocratic ideology takes specific forms in the tech industry. The puzzle interview, popularized by Microsoft in the 1990s and still widespread, selects for people who have prepared for puzzle interviews, which correlates with having time, networks, and educational backgrounds that make such preparation possible. “Culture fit” as a hiring criterion is even less bounded: it is assessed subjectively and consistently reproduces the demographic composition of existing teams. Neither criterion is without any signal about likely job performance, but neither is calibrated against actual job performance data, because most organizations never close that loop.

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Cottom2017

Tressie McMillan Cottom: Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. The New Press, 2017, 978-1620970607.

Karabel2006

Jerome Karabel: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Mariner Books, 2006, 978-0618773558.

Rivera2015

Lauren A. Rivera: Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton University Press, 2015, 978-0691155623.

Sandel2020

Michael J. Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, 978-0374289980.

Wilkinson2011

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury Press, 2011, 978-1608193417.

Young1958

Michael Young: The Rise of the Meritocracy. Thames and Hudson, 1958.