Michael Young

Now, there is a very good post-liberal critique of meritocracy, which says that meritocracy reproduces the ills of aristocratic society by basically creating a new aristocracy, an aristocracy of exam winners who then-

I think Michael Young, when he wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy, actually used the word satirically-

Totally

... to forecast precisely that, that a new...

... based on IQ and effort was gonna take over.

And, you know, maybe [laughs] that has happened.

Well, the extraordinary thing about Michael Young's book, um, which was published I think in 1957-

'58, actually.

Today, you find us in the Barn Cinema at Dartington Hall Estate in Devon.

Dartington Hall is the place, as some of you might know, where the Labour Party manifesto was written by Michael Young in 1945.

And we're here today to talk about the novel-

novel-A Passage to India by E.M. Forster.

He decided to come up with a term that sounded extremely intellectual, and he thought, let me just combine something that sounds Greek with something ancient Greek, with something that sounds also Latin, right? Merit and krasi, right? Krasi means power, power of merit, strength in merit.

This was a completely made-up, coined by the sociologist Michael Young in actually 1958, to be precise, as a cautionary tale.

And he was very concerned that societies at the time, the UK, could become overly convinced that success and failure were entirely dependent on merit.

Today, nevertheless, meritocracy is typically viewed as an aspiration, as a positive idea of I think that there's been a lot of people really misusing it, as I was saying at the very, very beginning.

So first, let's discuss the warning that nobody kept.

In 1958, a British sociologist named Michael Young wrote a book called The Rise of Meritocracy.

He invented the word, and before Young, it did not really exist, and he did not invent it as a compliment.

The book is a satire written as a history from the year 2034, looking back at a Britain that had recognized itself or reorganized itself entirely around intelligence and effort.

So let's look at identity clarity.

Who does the word meritocracy actually serve? It doesn't serve the people who are working hardest since the data I just also discussed showed that effort and output have been decoupled from each other and they have been decoupled from reward at literally every level.

meritocracy serves the people actually already holding positions because the word gives them a story in which their position required no explanation beyond their own virtue or their own sense of having worked hard michael young the person who coined the term meritocracy named exactly this group in 1958 before it fully existed and before it exists as it currently does now.

So let's look at context clarity.

But Rawls is more of a kind of look it in the eyes kind of guy.

When we think of meritocracy, we basically think, I mean, to sort of take from Michael Young, who satirically actually sort of popularized it it's intelligence plus effort right that's what merit is the way that rules puts it is a world in which we get what we deserve right that's what people believe in the classic thing and pretty much everyone would say that they agree with that the trouble is for rules and for others is that we don't really deserve our talents like take messy right We're just coming out of the World Cup, so I still have some remnant bits of football understanding.

This is like the last bow for Football Ian.

He'll be back in two years.