Editing Meritocracy (section)

====Imagined Meritocracy====
Most of the criticism against meritocracy, including Sandel's argument in "The Tyranny of Merit", treats "meritocracy" as a mechanism that allocates rewards in accordance with one's abilities, but violates [[substantive equality]]. Casting doubt on this fundamental assumption, the Japanese sociologist Satoshi Araki examined whether economic outcomes are linked to individuals' skills levels in the United States. He found that the economic return to educational qualifications per se was significantly larger than that to cognitive skills and that intergenerational inequality had been substantially formed via credentials rather than abilities - that is why the unfair situation like "side doors" may exist. Araki therefore argues that contemporary America is a typical credential society, where credentialism prevails over skills-based meritocracy, but people are navigated to misbelieve that their society is meritocratic. Calling this situation "imagined meritocracy", he underscores the importance of examining the credential/meritocratic nature of a society by distinguishing the function of educational credentials as such and that of actual abilities both conceptually and empirically lest we mislead scholarly/policy discussion and public debate based on the imagined discourse of meritocracy.<ref name="Araki">{{cite journal |last1=Araki |first1=S. |title=Beyond 'Imagined Meritocracy': Distinguishing the Relative Power of Education and Skills in Intergenerational Inequality
 |journal=Sociology |date=2023 |volume=57 |issue=4 |pages=975–992 |doi=10.1177/00380385231156093|s2cid=257382308 }}</ref>