Is meritocracy more than being a member of the lucky sperm club?

One of the many things I’m grateful to my father for is inventing the word ‘meritocracy’. He coined it in 1958 to describe a society in which social status is determined by ‘merit’, which he defined as a combination of intelligence and effort. As a member of the Labour party, he thought that such a society was thoroughly undesirable because it was every bit as hierarchical as a feudal society, but in some ways even worse, because its pyramid-like structure was thought to be fair. In other words, it legitimised inequality and, for that reason, all good socialists had a duty to oppose it. He did his bit by writing a dystopian satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which he described just what the meritocratic society of the future would look like. It wasn’t pretty.

The reason I’m grateful is because whenever a public figure brings up the subject of meritocracy — which is quite often — I get asked to comment and am usually paid to do so. You could say my father’s invention of the word ‘meritocracy’ has helped to support his useless layabout of a son — which is what some people would describe as ‘ironic’, except it isn’t really because my father disapproved of meritocracy, which is what I have to spend the first five minutes of every interview on the subject explaining.

Anyway, this week I got a call from the Today programme because Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, gave a graduation speech at Princeton over the weekend in which he questioned whether a meritocratic society is fair. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career -opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards.’