Michael Young and the perils of meritocracy

While Kwame Anthony Appiah’s celebration of Michael Young’s life (The myth of meritocracy, The long read, 19 October) is long overdue, it fails to place the idea of meritocracy in the contexts either of neoliberalism or of recent British history. Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy was a warning against a system of political rule, not a plea for opportunities for all. Humans were reduced to units of merit. Neoliberalism has since appropriated merit to mean the ability to be a profit-generating worker, where human beings only have worth as units of labour. Anything that interferes, like the welfare state, is to be dismantled. Appiah also ignores the complexity of Young’s political and sociological interactions in the 1950s debates over Labour policies, not least over the evils of selective secondary education.
Professor Geoff Payne
Newcastle upon Tyne

• Kwame Anthony Appiah’s long read does not cover the impact, importance, and consequences of expensively ingrained self-confidence. Top public schools exist to develop self-confidence. Oxford’s Bullingdon club goes one step further. It proves that dad’s status (and wealth) protects when self-confidence gives way to recklessness.

Capitalism thrives on win-win gambles. Instead, the reckless “heads I win, tails you lose” mentality of our supposedly meritocratic elite led to the 2008 financial crisis. Brexit now illustrates how Boris Johnson has been trained to gamble; he is prepared to damage Britain’s society and economy as long as it offers him a chance to enter No 10. Separating merit and recklessness is a key challenge of our age.
John Young
Edinburgh

• Your excellent article on Michael Young could have concluded with a further irony: that Young’s son Toby (disdainer of “functionally illiterate troglodytes with a mental age of six”) got into Oxford only after a phone call from his father.
Bill Bradbury
Bolton, Greater Manchester

• Kwame Anthony Appiah writes: “If we want people to do difficult jobs that require talent, education, effort, training and practice, we need to be able to identify candidates with the right combination of aptitude and willingness and provide them incentives to train and practice.’

Later he adds: “The capacity for hard work is itself the result of natural endowments and upbringing. So neither talent nor effort, the two things that would determine rewards in the world of the meritocracy, is itself something earned.”

These two points create a sort of cognitive dissonance. If our capacity for hard work together with specific cognitive endowments is inherent, then why the rewards at all? A person with such endowments has been gifted something in a similar way that we, collectively, have been gifted land. Isn’t the free reward of these skills enough? It might be possible, following this idea through, to imagine an inverted meritocracy where the more cognitively endowed a person is the less they need other rewards – while those who possess less inherent enjoyment of capacities might need the rewards to compensate them. This is no less crazy than the madness we are dominated by now, when so many of our “bright” people end up in financial services that contribute almost nothing to social wellbeing.
Simon Cohen
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

• Michael Young popularised but did not coin the term “meritocracy”. That came in 1956, two years before his book, when in the magazine Socialist Commentary (to which Young contributed) the industrial sociologist Alan Fox put the word in quotation marks and defined it as “the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure”.
David Kynaston
New Malden, Surrey

• Michael Young rightly described how meritocracy would not in itself solve problems of inequality and social status, but the many advantages of the system can now be demonstrated in two countries of the world, Singapore and China.

Starting almost from ground zero in 1965, Singapore now has one of the highest living standards in the world with first-class education, health, and welfare systems, stable government and public approval. China, which has adopted meritocratic government in the last three decades, has seen the most rapid economic growth in human history, lifted 800 million people out of poverty and on the way to building “a moderately prosperous society” by 2020.

Meritocracy still has to show that it can greatly reduce the inequality that inevitably happens in high-growth mixed economies. Eradicating “the contempt for those who are disfavoured by the ethic of effortful competition” might take even longer. But it is clear that our democratic system is incapable of producing leaders of merit and a future where everyone can achieve the maximum of their potential.
Derek Heptinstall
Westgate-on-Sea, Kent

• Kwane Anthony Appiah’s article on Michael Young omits any reference to his part, with Peter Laslett and Eric Midwinter, in establishing the University of the Third Age in the UK. These remarkable and flourishing endeavours are, of course, completely free of any negative notions of “meritocracy” in providing creative educational opportunities for large numbers of people.
Keith Richards
London

• Kwame Anthony Appiah’s reminder that Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy is dystopian satire is timely. Tony Blair and Theresa May have been serial abusers of the term, promoting it, perhaps with unconscious irony, as a condition to be desired. One might add to Appiah’s rightful description of Young’s life-changing Dartington experience his other key influences, such as RH Tawney’s concept of decentralised public ownership, the principles of the cooperative movement and the communitarian ideals of 19th-century thinkers like Robert Owen and Peter Kropotkin.
Eric Midwinter
Co-founder with Michael Young and Peter Laslett of the University of the Third Age

• Contrary to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s piece, Michael Young did not found the Open University. Jennie Lee is commonly acknowledged as the OU’s midwife – and Harold Wilson proudly claimed paternity.

With Brian Jackson, Young did set up the National Extension College in 1963. It both acted as something of a pilot study for the OU and laid on preparatory courses for the first OU students. The relationship between the two institutions was always rather cool and the naming of the OU’s new business school building after Young in 2001 was probably something of an olive branch.

However, Young would definitely have smiled on hearing that the OU’s plan to get it out of its current difficulties is called the Critical Review Action Plan.
Alan Woodley
Northampton

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition