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posted by n1 on Saturday June 18 2016, @06:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the in-my-day-we-called-it-social-darwinism dept.

When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched.

Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.


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  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday June 18 2016, @02:49PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Saturday June 18 2016, @02:49PM (#362098)

    A Meritocracy is based around making the best at science scientists, and the best at politics politicians. It is not about what sort of incentives the system used to reward the people who go into those positions.

    You gotta do what you gotta do!

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