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The Meritocracy Myth
The Meritocracy Myth challenges the widely held American belief in meritocracy—that people get out of the system what they put into it based on individual merit. The third edition has been revised and streamlined, with fresh examples and updated statistical information throughout. Chapters eight and nine have been combined into a comprehensive chapter about discrimination as a non-merit barrier to upward mobility. The book also features a new section on “The Great Recession.”
The Meritocracy Myth examines talent, attitude, work ethic, and character as elements of merit, and evaluates the effect of non-merit factors such as social status, race, heritage, and wealth on meritocracy. A compelling book on an often-overlooked topic, The Meritocracy Myth has become a classroom classic to introduce students to this provocative topic.
The Meritocracy Myth examines talent, attitude, work ethic, and character as elements of merit, and evaluates the effect of non-merit factors such as social status, race, heritage, and wealth on meritocracy. A compelling book on an often-overlooked topic, The Meritocracy Myth has become a classroom classic to introduce students to this provocative topic.
264 pages, Paperback
First published May 3, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 9, 2013
This is such a good book. Ok, admittedly, I’ve become obsessed with ‘merit’ lately. Years ago I watched Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety. I remember very little about it now, accept being a little annoyed with it. I think his thesis was that since we live in a meritocracy our status is a reflection of our real worth and so therefore that is why we can so easily be filled with self-loathing. De Botton would probably say that it doesn’t really matter if we live in a meritocracy or not – as long as we believe we do. Except, it does matter over and above what we believe.
This book does not say that merit is a myth – that is, that no one ever makes it (whatever ‘makes it’ might mean) because they merited it. Rather it is arguing against the other extreme (and one that is generally accepted as received wisdom) that we live in a society which only rewards merit and that no one gets anywhere in our society without merit. That is, that if you have ‘made it’ that fact on its own is proof that you deserved to make it. That this argument is seriously believed by so many in our society and is not just a straw man, on its own, ought to give us reason to pause.
The problem is that such an idea of a meritocracy could only be true if everyone gathered at the same starting line at birth and subsequently had the same advantages along the way – if that were the case, then you might be able to talk about meritocracies. But people clearly don’t start at the same starting point and they certainly don’t get the same assistance along the way. As a case in point, the richest woman in the world is an Australian – her daddy left her mines and money and contacts with other rich and powerful people, lots and lots of each. To pretend that she got to where she is today due to some sort of ‘merit’ would be to make a rather poor taste joke (just as it would be to say that Murdoch’s children somehow deserve the roles they have in his empire or Prince William deserves to become king – these roles have nothing to do with merit, per se). I’m not saying she doesn’t work hard or that she hasn’t ‘grown her business’ – but clearly she has had advantages over someone born on the same day she was but to Aboriginal parents in Australia. No, in fact, she had advantages over everyone else born in Australia, and not just on that one day, but on every day in every year since. She is proof of the existence, not of merit, but of a kind of caste system in Australia. That we pretend this caste system doesn’t exist, that we pretend hard work is all that is required for success shows the power of propaganda over what would otherwise be the blindingly obvious.
This book works through the main forces that distort people’s life paths from being determined on the basis of merit and how these present some people with distinct advantages, while presenting others with impossible to surmount obstacles. It does this with reference to the actual facts of our society, rather than its comforting stories of the hard working tailor who became a billionaire or the woman who owned the corner hairdressers who became the head of a leading international hair product empire. The point is that our myth of meritocracy means we remain wilfully blind to the benefits some of us receive while we also under-estimate the barriers imposed on others. These include the decided disadvantages of being born into a minority, being female, or being from the wrong social class and so on. The joke is that where our myths clash with reality, our myths generally win. So much of what we believe about our society is essentially delusional.
This book is at its best when it displays some of the myths that we generally take for granted, but that are clearly not true. For example, that getting an education is the surest path to economic security – whereas the fact that many more women than men are ‘getting an education’ and there has been no change in women’s economic standing ought to tell us something very different about the economic benefits of education. The facts simply don’t quite stack up – and yet we are constantly being told that a degree is virtually all it takes to get on. The problem is that the number of jobs that actually require a university degree, the types of jobs most people who get a degree are actually after, haven’t increased over the years – but many, many more people now have degrees, degrees they have paid dearly for – in both time and money. So, all we have achieved is credential inflation. The jobs that only required a high school certificate, now require an under graduate degree. The work hasn’t become any more demanding, but you can’t get it now with the qualifications that are ‘all that’s required’ to do the job. As the authors point out, we don’t have a skills shortage, we have far too many highly qualified people for the scarcity of jobs requiring those qualifications.
And work itself has become a problem too. A few years ago I made the mistake of deciding I should read and review some introductory books on economics written by rabid free market types. Now and again I still get posts on the threads following the reviews of these books from crazy guys (they are never female, a fact I’ve only just realised) basically telling me that hate me. They never actually present a case, they basically spout a couple of what they imagine are win points and then spit venom. But a major part of their belief system is that we live in a kind of free market economy that allows competition and that ‘works’ because it is unplanned and therefore receptive to the needs and wants of a vast array of consumers. Clearly, these people have been too busy reading Hayek to ever actually look about themselves. We live increasingly in a world dominated by huge corporations – they plan everything they do to within an inch of its life. They dominate our lives and effectively employ the majority of us. Rather than us having near endless choice, our choices are incredibly constrained. In fact, these companies pride themselves on the fact of their providing near identical services anywhere in the world. Capitalism likes to think of itself as providing a kind of anarchy of production directed by the blind hand towards satisfying diverse wants – whereas, it does nearly the exact opposite, it is an authoritarian mode of production that needs to constantly create the desire for the wants it seeks to satisfy.
The point is that small businesses, as a means of their owners being able to move up in the world, are often presented as the proving ground of entrepreneurs. However, the facts prove the opposite. The numbers of small businesses have dramatically shrunk over the years. And the level and kind of competition between large and small businesses is such that it is nearly impossible for a small business to grow into a large business. There is no level playing field, there is no proving ground where merit clashes with merit in a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ form of competition. Instead, there is a gamed system sustained by a myth that blames ‘those who didn’t make it’ for their own failures. It is Orwellian in its extent, but what is surprising is how nearly completely we accept these myths.
I think an illustrative story, only partly told in this book, is that of President George W Bush. He went to Yale, but he got in, not on something as silly as exam results, but as a legacy student – that is, he got in because his father had been to Yale. That is, he got in due to a non-merit, affirmative action policy designed to benefit already privileged. Would GWB believe he didn’t deserve to go to Yale? Probably not. Somehow or other he would be able to espouse ‘merit’ in his achievements, even his modest educational ones. But you need to remember that one of his first acts as president was to remove affirmative action policies from universities that were used to assist poor black students from getting in. Why? Because he pointed out that these were ‘reverse discrimination’ that assisted the ‘undeserving’ while ‘stopping the best people from accessing the best education’. It is easy to read this as being a case of little more than hypocrisy, but I think that white privilege is so ingrained in our society that it is just possible GWB had no idea this was hypocrisy.
We also like to believe that even if the system is twisted out of shape a little, that with the simplest of adjustments a true meritocracy would spill out anyway. In fact, some people believe that no matter what advantages you give one group and what disadvantages you present another, true talent always shines through anyway. Another of our society’s comforting myths is the idea that those who inherit lots of wealth end up losing it – the stats, of course, don’t support this, but our myths require it. It is, of course, is utter nonsense. This is shown by the fact that movement between classes (yes, there are classes in our society, who’d have thought?) is virtually unheard of and getting increasingly harder. In fact, it is much harder to move up in society in the US today than it is in Europe. Rather than hard work being the thing that assures success, it is but one factor in a complex of factors that contribute to social success and it isn’t even the most important one. Much more important is being smart enough to have been born to rich parents.
I think we like to believe that if there is a fundamental disjunction between reality and our belief system, that eventually reality will win out. You know, that some people believe crazy shit, but eventually they will bump their head against reality often enough to finally see their beliefs are off beam. But I don’t believe this is the case at all. Our social system is premised on large numbers of people going on believing that the system is fundamentally fair – when, as books like this one point out, it is anything but fair. But so many people have so much at stake in believing this myth (and not just those who benefit from it) that that fact alone gives the myth inertia. We like to believe that we are the makers of our own destinies – when, in fact, there is a remarkably complex interplay between the social position we find ourselves in and what being in that position will encourage us to want and need. We need to believe that the rich and powerful are rich and powerful as a reward for remarkable talent – that they deserve the benefits that they have heaped upon them.
The solution to all this isn’t to sit back and accept that caste systems are the only effective systems of organising societies, but to finally see the myth. We really do need to make our societies much, much more merit based. This book gives hints about how we should go about achieving that – basically, lots of progressive taxation and a redistribution of wealth so that more people in society have access to pathways that lead to them to being able to display their merit. That is, the exact opposite of what we can expect to happen.
I don't expect to see a society that is based on merit any time soon – but it is very instructive to think about why our society is so obsessed with presenting itself as a meritocracy when even a brief glance, as provided by this book, shows we have so much more in common with caste societies.
Like I said, this is a good read and one that is well referenced, well supported by facts and figures, and even a bit urgent for people to at least know about. You should read this one, I think.
This book does not say that merit is a myth – that is, that no one ever makes it (whatever ‘makes it’ might mean) because they merited it. Rather it is arguing against the other extreme (and one that is generally accepted as received wisdom) that we live in a society which only rewards merit and that no one gets anywhere in our society without merit. That is, that if you have ‘made it’ that fact on its own is proof that you deserved to make it. That this argument is seriously believed by so many in our society and is not just a straw man, on its own, ought to give us reason to pause.
The problem is that such an idea of a meritocracy could only be true if everyone gathered at the same starting line at birth and subsequently had the same advantages along the way – if that were the case, then you might be able to talk about meritocracies. But people clearly don’t start at the same starting point and they certainly don’t get the same assistance along the way. As a case in point, the richest woman in the world is an Australian – her daddy left her mines and money and contacts with other rich and powerful people, lots and lots of each. To pretend that she got to where she is today due to some sort of ‘merit’ would be to make a rather poor taste joke (just as it would be to say that Murdoch’s children somehow deserve the roles they have in his empire or Prince William deserves to become king – these roles have nothing to do with merit, per se). I’m not saying she doesn’t work hard or that she hasn’t ‘grown her business’ – but clearly she has had advantages over someone born on the same day she was but to Aboriginal parents in Australia. No, in fact, she had advantages over everyone else born in Australia, and not just on that one day, but on every day in every year since. She is proof of the existence, not of merit, but of a kind of caste system in Australia. That we pretend this caste system doesn’t exist, that we pretend hard work is all that is required for success shows the power of propaganda over what would otherwise be the blindingly obvious.
This book works through the main forces that distort people’s life paths from being determined on the basis of merit and how these present some people with distinct advantages, while presenting others with impossible to surmount obstacles. It does this with reference to the actual facts of our society, rather than its comforting stories of the hard working tailor who became a billionaire or the woman who owned the corner hairdressers who became the head of a leading international hair product empire. The point is that our myth of meritocracy means we remain wilfully blind to the benefits some of us receive while we also under-estimate the barriers imposed on others. These include the decided disadvantages of being born into a minority, being female, or being from the wrong social class and so on. The joke is that where our myths clash with reality, our myths generally win. So much of what we believe about our society is essentially delusional.
This book is at its best when it displays some of the myths that we generally take for granted, but that are clearly not true. For example, that getting an education is the surest path to economic security – whereas the fact that many more women than men are ‘getting an education’ and there has been no change in women’s economic standing ought to tell us something very different about the economic benefits of education. The facts simply don’t quite stack up – and yet we are constantly being told that a degree is virtually all it takes to get on. The problem is that the number of jobs that actually require a university degree, the types of jobs most people who get a degree are actually after, haven’t increased over the years – but many, many more people now have degrees, degrees they have paid dearly for – in both time and money. So, all we have achieved is credential inflation. The jobs that only required a high school certificate, now require an under graduate degree. The work hasn’t become any more demanding, but you can’t get it now with the qualifications that are ‘all that’s required’ to do the job. As the authors point out, we don’t have a skills shortage, we have far too many highly qualified people for the scarcity of jobs requiring those qualifications.
And work itself has become a problem too. A few years ago I made the mistake of deciding I should read and review some introductory books on economics written by rabid free market types. Now and again I still get posts on the threads following the reviews of these books from crazy guys (they are never female, a fact I’ve only just realised) basically telling me that hate me. They never actually present a case, they basically spout a couple of what they imagine are win points and then spit venom. But a major part of their belief system is that we live in a kind of free market economy that allows competition and that ‘works’ because it is unplanned and therefore receptive to the needs and wants of a vast array of consumers. Clearly, these people have been too busy reading Hayek to ever actually look about themselves. We live increasingly in a world dominated by huge corporations – they plan everything they do to within an inch of its life. They dominate our lives and effectively employ the majority of us. Rather than us having near endless choice, our choices are incredibly constrained. In fact, these companies pride themselves on the fact of their providing near identical services anywhere in the world. Capitalism likes to think of itself as providing a kind of anarchy of production directed by the blind hand towards satisfying diverse wants – whereas, it does nearly the exact opposite, it is an authoritarian mode of production that needs to constantly create the desire for the wants it seeks to satisfy.
The point is that small businesses, as a means of their owners being able to move up in the world, are often presented as the proving ground of entrepreneurs. However, the facts prove the opposite. The numbers of small businesses have dramatically shrunk over the years. And the level and kind of competition between large and small businesses is such that it is nearly impossible for a small business to grow into a large business. There is no level playing field, there is no proving ground where merit clashes with merit in a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ form of competition. Instead, there is a gamed system sustained by a myth that blames ‘those who didn’t make it’ for their own failures. It is Orwellian in its extent, but what is surprising is how nearly completely we accept these myths.
I think an illustrative story, only partly told in this book, is that of President George W Bush. He went to Yale, but he got in, not on something as silly as exam results, but as a legacy student – that is, he got in because his father had been to Yale. That is, he got in due to a non-merit, affirmative action policy designed to benefit already privileged. Would GWB believe he didn’t deserve to go to Yale? Probably not. Somehow or other he would be able to espouse ‘merit’ in his achievements, even his modest educational ones. But you need to remember that one of his first acts as president was to remove affirmative action policies from universities that were used to assist poor black students from getting in. Why? Because he pointed out that these were ‘reverse discrimination’ that assisted the ‘undeserving’ while ‘stopping the best people from accessing the best education’. It is easy to read this as being a case of little more than hypocrisy, but I think that white privilege is so ingrained in our society that it is just possible GWB had no idea this was hypocrisy.
We also like to believe that even if the system is twisted out of shape a little, that with the simplest of adjustments a true meritocracy would spill out anyway. In fact, some people believe that no matter what advantages you give one group and what disadvantages you present another, true talent always shines through anyway. Another of our society’s comforting myths is the idea that those who inherit lots of wealth end up losing it – the stats, of course, don’t support this, but our myths require it. It is, of course, is utter nonsense. This is shown by the fact that movement between classes (yes, there are classes in our society, who’d have thought?) is virtually unheard of and getting increasingly harder. In fact, it is much harder to move up in society in the US today than it is in Europe. Rather than hard work being the thing that assures success, it is but one factor in a complex of factors that contribute to social success and it isn’t even the most important one. Much more important is being smart enough to have been born to rich parents.
I think we like to believe that if there is a fundamental disjunction between reality and our belief system, that eventually reality will win out. You know, that some people believe crazy shit, but eventually they will bump their head against reality often enough to finally see their beliefs are off beam. But I don’t believe this is the case at all. Our social system is premised on large numbers of people going on believing that the system is fundamentally fair – when, as books like this one point out, it is anything but fair. But so many people have so much at stake in believing this myth (and not just those who benefit from it) that that fact alone gives the myth inertia. We like to believe that we are the makers of our own destinies – when, in fact, there is a remarkably complex interplay between the social position we find ourselves in and what being in that position will encourage us to want and need. We need to believe that the rich and powerful are rich and powerful as a reward for remarkable talent – that they deserve the benefits that they have heaped upon them.
The solution to all this isn’t to sit back and accept that caste systems are the only effective systems of organising societies, but to finally see the myth. We really do need to make our societies much, much more merit based. This book gives hints about how we should go about achieving that – basically, lots of progressive taxation and a redistribution of wealth so that more people in society have access to pathways that lead to them to being able to display their merit. That is, the exact opposite of what we can expect to happen.
I don't expect to see a society that is based on merit any time soon – but it is very instructive to think about why our society is so obsessed with presenting itself as a meritocracy when even a brief glance, as provided by this book, shows we have so much more in common with caste societies.
Like I said, this is a good read and one that is well referenced, well supported by facts and figures, and even a bit urgent for people to at least know about. You should read this one, I think.
Read
March 13, 2025Read this for class!
December 13, 2013
Excellent book. Very clear arguments, great referencing.
May I refer you to Trevor's excellent review?
There's nothing I could add to that.
May I refer you to Trevor's excellent review?
There's nothing I could add to that.
February 6, 2020
Couldn’t get into it. I guess I don’t need convincing. Felt boring to me.
September 1, 2022
Everyone should read!
November 18, 2020
A great shattering of the idea of a self-made man with solid argumentation.
August 14, 2015
though it is organized as a counter argument to something almost no one believes, that society is perfectly fair, it presents the counter argument in a very informative and well sited way. I think the most valuable understanding this book gives is a sense of how the workplace has changed in the US over time. It addresses concepts of fairness in our social structure from the time of agrarianism, through industrialism and to the corporate/service economy. I think a good question to ask yourself before sitting down with it is, "what sorts of capital do I have and how can I best take advantage of them."
May 3, 2020
The meritocracy myth is a "myth" not because people of merit don't exist; but because what passes as "merit" in our days is a slap in the face for people of true caliber. Our democratic set up rewards mediocrity, compliance, impostorship and ambition for personal advancement. Not excellence in and of itself. For that, explore the aristocratic option which frees everyone to focus on making life better instead of ego glorification.
July 6, 2012
The only thing that makes this book difficult is that people will find it linguistically challenging, even though the concepts are relatively simple. It's well written, but could use some smaller words, although technically it is an academic book.
September 4, 2014
Very interesting. Reaffirmed some beliefs I've had and enlightened me in some ways. Great read for anyone interested in sociology or anyone who wants to read about where the "American Dream" really can get us.
April 8, 2021
I wish everyone was forced to read this book. I read it in a sociology class and it was amazing. It opened my eyes to so many things & I really consider everything so differently now. I swear the world would be a COMPLETELY different place if everyone was forced to read this.
January 26, 2010
Straight-forward, detailed, cited. Perfect reminder of the various influences in American society that are so often invisible.
February 10, 2017
Key to understanding US dynamics (inequality) - a myth purveyed to obscure real causes.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews