The Dystopian Meritocracy

Michael Young, the sociologist who helped British Labour draft its 1945 manifesto, also coined the term meritocracy in his 1958 book The Rise of Meritocracy. In 2001 he wrote that it is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that. So there are huge spatial differences in Britain worse than any other high-income country which would say that opportunities are skewed both by education and by where you live.