meritocracy
/ˌmɛrɪˈtɒkrəsi
/noun (plural meritocracies) [mass noun]
1Government or the holding of power by people selected according to merit: progress towards meritocracy was slow...
- For the first time in the 20th century, Britain's agonisingly slow progress towards meritocracy went into reverse.
- What is happening to the campaigning steamroller that was going to propel the new prophets of technocratic and meritocracy craving Labor into power?
- Many liberal democracies, Britain included, justify wide disparities in the income levels of the rich and poor in terms of a doctrine of meritocracy.
1.1 [count noun] A society governed by people selected according to merit: Britain is a meritocracy, and everyone with skill and imagination may aspire to reach the highest level...
- In the earlier article, Herrnstein argued that our society is a meritocracy where not only does the cream rise to the top, but it starts near the top from day one.
- Social mobility will therefore be high during the transition period to a meritocracy and as society becomes more equal.
- If no one accuses me of saying that we're living in a caste system or rigid class society I promise not to ask anyone to defend our society as a pure meritocracy.
1.2 [count noun] A ruling or influential class of educated or able people: the relentless advance of the meritocracy...
- However, they embrace the meritocracies of education and athletics, two pursuits that have come to be associated especially, though not exclusively, with American middle-class culture.
- Sure, the ideal of a meritocracy - Jefferson's aristocracy of talent and all that - is very old, but America fell short of it for a long time.
- De Bottan's comparison between Aristocracies and meritocracies does indeed seem facile if you look at it as the be-all and end-all of happiness - but its not if you remember its context.
Derivatives
meritocrat
- The immigrant families who squatted in Dickensian poverty in the Georgian terraces clustered around Christchurch have been replaced by a new class of period-feature-hugging meritocrats.
- When meritocrats talk about rewards flowing from merit, the rewarding mechanism is typically assumed to be the market, especially the market for labour.
- The same old story of the Irish diaspora - immigrant meritocrats fighting their way to power - runs through the stories.
meritocratic
/ adjective ...- But the meritocratic system that produced Laura and me not only produced outsized expectations; it inculcated a belief that we deserved wonderful jobs and a comfortable lifestyle.
- The intelligence needed to get a place in the cognitive elite may become more concentrated in a fair meritocratic society.
- At the very least this implies the claim that markets are more meritocratic than the public sector.