Meritocracy was never meant as a compliment.
Michael Young invented the word in 1958 for The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033. The book was a satire: an imaginary history written by a complacent member of Britain’s future meritocratic elite. The narrator believes he is describing the triumph of fairness and intelligence. The reader is supposed to understand that he is describing a dystopia.
Many people did not.
Young wrote a satire. Tony Blair took it seriously. In fairness, so did almost everyone else.
We forgot Young’s joke, retained his word and spent the next seventy years constructing the society he had warned us against. Shortly before his death, Young publicly rebuked New Labour for adopting meritocracy as a political ideal while overlooking what he had meant by it.
Young’s imaginary Britain has swept away the accumulated incompetence of hereditary privilege. Important positions are no longer occupied by people whose only qualification is having selected their parents wisely. Intelligence is identified, effort is rewarded, and everyone is allocated a place according to an admirably simple formula:
Merit = Intelligence + Effort
It sounds perfectly reasonable.
That is the joke.
Young’s narrator believes he is documenting the replacement of class with opportunity. What he is actually documenting is the construction of a much more confident aristocracy.
The old ruling class inherited its position and knew it. Its members might regard themselves as naturally superior, but even the most self-satisfied duke could not claim to have earned his grandfather. Their privilege was obvious, faintly ridiculous and increasingly difficult to defend.
Young’s meritocrats have no such embarrassment. They have been examined, measured and selected. Their intelligence has been certified, their effort acknowledged and their position awarded through what appears to be an open competition. They do not merely possess power. They possess an explanation for why they deserve it.
This makes them much harder to dislodge—and much less inclined to doubt themselves.
The cruelty falls most heavily upon those who do not succeed. An aristocracy tells people that they were born into the wrong family. A meritocracy tells them that they were given their chance and proved they belonged at the bottom.
The old social order denied opportunity. The new one offers opportunity, measures the result and converts it into a moral verdict.
The winners receive wealth, status and the comforting knowledge that both are deserved. The losers are left, in Young’s phrase, “morally naked.” If the competition was fair, what possible explanation remains for failure except the person who failed?
This is why the familiar criticism that meritocracy is rigged does not go nearly far enough.
It is certainly rigged. Wealthier children receive better education, safer homes, stronger connections, greater confidence and more opportunities to recover from mistakes. Some begin the race fifty yards ahead and spend the rest of their lives congratulating themselves upon their superior speed.
But Young’s argument is more disturbing. Even a perfectly functioning meritocracy would be intolerable if it used measured ability to determine not merely who should perform a particular job, but how much dignity, security and social value each person deserves.
Of course competence matters. Nobody wants open-heart surgery performed by someone selected at random in the hospital car park. Intelligence matters. Effort matters. Judgment, discipline and persistence matter. Some people really do build companies, discover medicines, write books and solve problems that others cannot.
Meritocracy became such a persuasive story precisely because it contained so much truth.
I am not observing this class from the outside. I built a successful company, accumulated capital and helped create precisely the advantages for my own family that this essay describes. Ability and effort mattered enormously. So did timing, circumstance, partnership and luck.
Meritocracy takes the part attributable to the individual and presents it as the whole. It converts circumstance into achievement, luck into virtue and wealth into evidence.
The successful are encouraged to believe they deserve everything that happened to them. The unsuccessful are encouraged to believe the same.
This is not merely a way of distributing money. It is a moral operating system.
Every social order requires some explanation for its inequalities. Kings ruled by divine authority. Aristocrats possessed blood and breeding. Industrial capitalists claimed ownership and risk. The modern professional class offered intelligence, education and productive achievement.
Every aristocracy eventually invents a reason why its advantages are deserved.
Meritocracy was ours.
Young understood that the new elite would not remain new for long. Its members would marry one another, accumulate wealth and invest heavily in their children. The first generation might rise through genuine ability and effort. The second would inherit security, education, confidence and connections while still appearing to compete. Eventually, the meritocratic class would reproduce itself as reliably as the aristocracy it had replaced.
What Young imagined as satire, Branko Milanović later described as economics.
Milanović calls the process homoploutia: the convergence of high labour income and high capital income in the same people. The modern elite is no longer neatly divided between workers who earn wages and capitalists who own assets. The highly paid professional, executive or entrepreneur is both.
A large income buys investments. Investments produce additional income. Two successful people form a household, combining salaries, property, pensions and capital. They deploy those resources on behalf of their children—not as part of some sinister conspiracy, but because that is what loving parents do.
The children receive every opportunity to develop genuine merit.
That is what makes the arrangement so difficult to see. Privilege does not necessarily replace merit. It cultivates it.
The child becomes intelligent, disciplined, credentialled and successful. The advantages were inherited; the accomplishments are real. By the time the family’s position has become effectively hereditary, everyone involved can still tell an honest story about hard work.
No individual needs to be especially wicked. Parents help their children. Successful people meet and marry other successful people at universities and workplaces. Families preserve what they have built. Each choice is understandable and individually defensible.
The architecture reproduces inequality through millions of reasonable private decisions.
Meritocracy promised to replace inherited privilege with earned success. Homoploutia describes the moment earned success becomes inherited privilege again.
And then we invented artificial intelligence.
The meritocratic order justified its inequalities through the economic scarcity of particular human capabilities: intelligence, expertise, memory, analysis, creativity, judgment and the ability to manipulate symbols. People who possessed these capabilities could perform work that most others could not, and the market rewarded them accordingly.
Greater income became evidence of greater productivity. Greater productivity became evidence of greater merit. Greater merit made the resulting inequality appear not merely economically useful but morally deserved.
Artificial intelligence begins to break that chain.
It makes increasingly sophisticated cognition abundant, inexpensive and available to almost anyone. Abilities that once required unusual intelligence, years of education and an expensive professional can now be summoned through a screen.
The machine does not need to perform every intellectual task better than every human being. It merely needs to make enough previously scarce capability sufficiently common that its market value begins to fall.
We spent generations constructing elaborate systems to identify the cleverest people. We educated them, examined them, certified them and placed them in positions of authority.
Then we invented something cleverer than all of them.
Naturally, the meritocratic class has not greeted this development with uncomplicated enthusiasm.
Professors, columnists, consultants and authorised interpreters are remarkably alert to every group whose position artificial intelligence may threaten—except their own. They worry about workers losing their jobs, citizens being deceived, artists being imitated and democracies being manipulated. These are real concerns.
But interpretation itself is also becoming abundant.
The professional commentariat occupies an interesting position. Its members are often critics of wealth and power, yet their authority rests upon another kind of scarcity: the ability to understand the world and explain it to everyone else.
They condemn Silicon Valley for believing that technology can solve everything. But they maintain an equally self-serving conviction: that nothing can be understood without the old meritocratic elite.
Their imagined future therefore preserves a familiar division of labour. Machines may assist ordinary people, replace ordinary workers or endanger ordinary citizens, but the professor, expert and commentator will still be required to explain what it all means.
Every ruling class mistakes the continued need for its own services for the continued needs of humanity.
Humanity will continue to need knowledge, judgment, criticism and interpretation. It does not follow that the same people, institutions and credentials will retain an exclusive franchise on supplying them.
Artificial intelligence still makes mistakes. It fabricates facts, reflects the limitations of its training and can produce confident nonsense. Human judgment remains essential.
But “essential” is a dangerous word. It can describe something we genuinely need, or merely something whose disappearance we find difficult to imagine.
The meritocratic elite is not the first ruling class to confuse those two meanings.
There is an understandable temptation to enjoy its discomfort. The people who spent decades explaining why markets properly rewarded intelligence and skill have discovered a market mechanism capable of reducing the value of both. The same creative destruction once prescribed for factory workers has arrived at the faculty lounge.
But this is not necessarily a victory for equality.
Artificial intelligence may devalue the labour of the meritocratic class without redistributing the capital it accumulated while that labour was valuable. The professional who once earned a large salary and invested part of it may see the salary decline while retaining the investments. The next generation may inherit the property, shares and funds without needing to reproduce the professional achievements through which they were acquired.
Homoploutia begins to lose its labour-income side.
What remains is ownership.
The people who prospered during the meritocratic period may become the ancestors of a new class whose position no longer requires much merit at all. Their descendants will own the capital, including perhaps the machines that perform the work once used to justify the family’s wealth.
The circle is complete.
Aristocracy was replaced by meritocracy. Meritocracy generated homoploutia. Homoploutia converted earned income into inheritable capital. Artificial intelligence then removed the scarcity of the human abilities that had earned the income in the first place.
Meritocracy does not collapse into equality. It hardens into inheritance.
This is the part of the AI argument that neither its evangelists nor its critics find especially comfortable.
The evangelists promise abundance while remaining curiously vague about who will own it. The critics warn of mass unemployment while continuing to treat employment as the only respectable mechanism through which people may claim a share of society’s resources.
Both remain trapped inside the old moral operating system.
If employment establishes deservingness, then people whom the economy no longer requires become more than unemployed. They become morally surplus.
They may still be parents, friends, neighbours, carers, citizens and human beings with desires, loyalties and obligations. But a society organised around employment may have no language through which to recognise their claim upon its abundance.
That is the genuine crisis: not merely unemployment, but the collapse of the moral story that connected economic usefulness with human deservingness.
The property accumulated under that story, meanwhile, remains exactly where it is.
We may discover that meritocracy was not merely unfair. It was temporary.
It offered a transitional explanation for inequality during a period in which scarce human intelligence could be converted into both high income and capital. It allowed a new elite to believe that its position was earned, then allowed that elite to transmit the resulting advantages to its children.
Michael Young saw the first part. Branko Milanović explained the mechanism. Artificial intelligence delivers the punchline.
Young imagined a society that sorted people perfectly according to intelligence and effort. Milanović showed how its winners converted earned success into inheritable capital. AI now removes the scarcity of the intelligence that originally justified the hierarchy.
Artificial intelligence may not abolish meritocracy. It may complete its transformation into aristocracy—removing the merit and leaving the inheritance.