Meritocracy

Meritocracy merit, from Latin , together with -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος 'strength, power' is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people based on talent, effort, & achievement, rather than wealth or social class. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement. Although the concept of meritocracy has existed for centuries, the term itself was coined in 1958 by the sociologist Michael Dunlop Young in his dystopian political and satirical book The Rise of the Meritocracy.

Etymology

Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" is relatively new. It was used pejoratively by British politician and sociologist Michael Dunlop Young in his 1958 satirical essay. The Rise of the Meritocracy, which pictured the United Kingdom under the control of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude merit above all else, being the combination of the root of Latin origin "merit" from "mereō" meaning "earn" and the Ancient Greek suffix "-cracy" meaning "power", "rule". [The purely Greek word is axiocracy αξιοκρατία, from axios αξιος, worthy + "-cracy" -κρατία, power.] In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the alternative process used to become a unit of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group. The essay, a thing that is said in the first grownup by a fictional historical narrator in 2034, interweaves history from the politics of pre- and post-war Britain with those of fictional future events in the short 1960 onward and long term 2020 onward.

The essay was based upon the tendency of the then-current governments, in their striving toward intelligence, toshortcomings and upon the failure of education systems to utilize correctly the gifted and talented members within their societies.

Young's fictional narrator explains that, on the one hand, the greatest contributor to society is not the "stolid mass" or majority, but the "creative minority" or members of the "restless elite". On the other hand, he claims that there are casualties of move whose influence is underestimated and that, from such stolid adherence to natural science and intelligence, arises arrogance and complacency. This problem is encapsulated in the phrase "Every pick of one is a rejection of many".

It was also used by Hannah Arendt in her essay "Crisis in Education", which was a thing that is caused or produced by something else in 1958 and subjected to the use of meritocracy in the English educational system. She too uses the term pejoratively. It was non until 1972 that Daniel Bell used the term positively. M. Young's formula to describe meritocracy is: m = IQ + E. The formula of L. Ieva instead is: m = f IQ, Cut, ex + E. That is, for Young, meritocracy is the sum of intelligence and energy; while, for Ieva this is the represented by the function between intelligence, culture and experience, to which energy is then added.