What drove him was his sense that class hierarchies would resist the reforms he helped implement. He explained how it would happen in a 1958 satire, his second best seller, entitled The Rise of the Meritocracy. Like so many phenomena, meritocracy was named by an enemy. Young’s book was ostensibly an analysis written in 2033 by a historian looking back at the development over the decades of a new British society. In that distant future, riches and rule were earned, not inherited. The new ruling class was determined, the author wrote, by the formula “I.Q. + effort = merit.” Democracy would give way to rule by the cleverest—“not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent.” This is the first published appearance of the word “meritocracy,” and the book aimed to show what a society governed on this principle would look like. [...]
Americans, unlike the British, don’t talk much about working-class consciousness; it’s sometimes said that all Americans are, by self-conception, middle class. But this, it turns out, is not currently what Americans themselves think. In a 2014 National Opinion Research Center survey, more Americans identified as working-class than as middle-class. One (but only one) strand of the populism that tipped Donald Trump into power expressed resentment toward a class defined by its education and its values: the cosmopolitan, degree-laden people who dominate the media, the public culture, and the professions in the US. Clinton swept the fifty most educated counties, as Nate Silver noted shortly after the 2016 election; Trump swept the fifty least. Populists think that liberal elites look down on ordinary Americans, ignore their concerns, and use their power to their own advantage. They may not call them an upper class, but the indices that populists use to define them—money, education, connections, power—would have picked out the old upper and upper-middle classes of the last century. [...]
Because, Young believed, the problem wasn’t just with how the prizes of social life were distributed; it was with the prizes themselves. A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations. This is why the authors of his fictional Chelsea Manifesto—which, in The Rise of the Meritocracy, is supposed to serve as the last sign of resistance to the new order—ask for a society that “both possessed and acted upon plural values,” including kindliness, courage, and sensitivity, so all had a chance to “develop his own special capacities for leading a rich life.” Even if you were somehow upholding “I.Q. + effort = merit,” then your equation was sponsoring a larger inequality.[...]
The ideal of meritocracy, Young understood, confuses two different concerns. One is a matter of efficiency; the other is a question of human worth. If we want people to do difficult jobs that require talent, education, effort, training, and practice, we need to be able to identify candidates with the right combination of aptitude and willingness, and provide them incentives to train and practice.
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