The Rise of the Meritocracy

"This book is quite old now, although recently and quite rightly republished. It is an amazing insight into how society works, how families work, and how good intentions go astray. It is also really important that people realise that the term meritocracy, which we now wave around as if it was the one thing we could all agree on as a good thing, was actually coined for this satirical novel. The rise of the meritocracy is not seen as the arrival of nirvana: it’s seen as something which has a large number of downsides, both socially and particularly in the way individuals feel about themselves. We don’t all believe in the NHS any more, we don’t all believe in God any more – if we ever did – but somehow we are all meant to believe in meritocracy. And I think reading Michael Young’s satire is a salutary antidote. What he describes probably couldn’t quite happen because he implies that we could have this talent to see absolutely clearly what people’s innate abilities were. The idea is that you would educate the people who are really able for elite positions, and end up with a society that is, first, just as ruthless as anything that was based on the family crest on your shield; second, destructive of individual self-respect, and third, intolerable to large numbers of parents. Yes, but also intolerable because it’s all your fault, there is nothing you can do about it. Status is just about whether you are any good, which is just as horrendous as if it’s all to do with whether you’ve got the right colour skin or the right family tree. The idea that you are either born as one of the chosen or not is actually inherent in this notion of meritocracy. Michael Young was interested in the motives that all human beings have and the way that societies change. I don’t think you ever could end up with a society in which people were all labelled precisely at birth and I don’t suppose for a moment Michael Young thought you could either. But he was writing a Gulliver’s Travels-type satire. And as a satire I think it’s brilliant. As a social scientist I think he captures superbly this interaction between how individuals feel and behave and larger social development, and that’s my own abiding interest. People make choices, they try to do the best thing for themselves, they try to do the best thing for their families. This is often not what bureaucrats in Whitehall expect and want them to do, but that’s how things get determined. It is true that we have got more worried about this recently, and it has been a big political issue – although not only here. The degree to which individuals all have opportunities is something that concerns most societies. I’m not sure why we are worried about our own record on this more than other countries. We have all this stuff about how the UK has uniquely bad social mobility but this is actually over the top: it depends which data you use, and we don’t have very good measures or information for most of the world, including much of Europe. I suppose the reason is, first, that we have a government in power which set itself a goal of greater equality and greater opportunity and is staring disappointment in the face. And the second thing is we have changed our education system more than most other countries have. Most other nations don’t have this situation where you have a large part of the current middle class and elite having come up through one system now facing a system that is very different. Even though we know that most of the people that went to grammar schools were middle class anyway, those don’t make the good stories. The mythology and the feeling that you can go from the bottom to the top seems to be very important to how countries see themselves."