The ideal that positions and rewards should go to the most talented and hard-working, regardless of birth. The word was coined in its modern political sense in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young as a warning — a satire of a society where a new elite, selected by exam and credential, had come to believe it deserved its advantages. That origin is now largely forgotten. Critics argue that meritocracy does not replace hierarchy; it makes the winners feel they earned it and the losers feel they deserve their fate.
In 1958, a British sociologist invented a word to describe a nightmare. Michael Young imagined a future society sorted entirely by intelligence and effort. The result, he warned, would not be liberation — it would be a crueler aristocracy than the one it replaced, because the new elite would have no doubt that it had earned its place. Young coined the term meritocracy as a warning, not a blueprint. Within a generation, politicians across the political spectrum were using it as a compliment.