Editing Meritocracy (section)

===Practicality===
{{See also|Myth of meritocracy|Just-world hypothesis}}
The term "meritocracy" was originally intended as a negative concept.{{refn|name=Fox}} One of the primary concerns with meritocracy is the unclear definition of "merit".<ref>Arrow, Bowles and Durlauf. ''Meritocracy and Economic Inequality''. Princeton, 1999.</ref> What is considered as meritorious can differ with opinions as on which qualities are considered the most worthy, raising the question of which "merit" is the highest—or, in other words, which standard is the "best" standard. As the supposed effectiveness of a meritocracy is based on the supposed competence of its officials, this standard of merit cannot be arbitrary and has to also reflect the competencies required for their roles.

The reliability of the authority and system that assesses each individual's merit is another point of concern. As a meritocratic system relies on a standard of merit to measure and compare people against, the system by which this is done has to be reliable to ensure that their assessed merit accurately reflects their potential capabilities. [[Standardized testing]], which reflects the meritocratic sorting process, has come under criticism for being rigid and unable to accurately assess many valuable qualities and potentials of students. Education theorist [[Bill Ayers]], commenting on the limitations of standardized testing, writes that "standardized tests can't measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes. What they can measure and count are isolated skills, specific facts and function, content knowledge, the least interesting and least significant aspects of learning".<ref>To teach: the journey of a teacher, by William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1993, {{ISBN|0-8077-3985-5}}, {{ISBN|978-0-8077-3985-3}}, pg. 116</ref> Merit determined through the opinionated evaluations of teachers, while being able to assess the valuable qualities that cannot be assessed by standardized testing, are unreliable as the opinions, insights, biases, and standards of the teachers vary greatly. If the system of evaluation is corrupt, non-transparent, opinionated or misguided, decisions regarding who has the highest merit can be highly fallible.

The level of education required in order to become competitive in a meritocracy may also be costly, effectively limiting candidacy for a position of power to those with the means necessary to become educated. Eight of the nine [[Supreme Court of the United States]] Justices, for example, attended  only [[Harvard]] or [[Yale]] and generally only consider clerkship candidates who attended a [[Ivy League|top-five university]], while in the 1950s the two universities only accounted for around one fifth of the justices.<ref>{{cite web|title=Death by Degrees|url=https://nplusonemag.com/issue-14/the-intellectual-situation/death-by-degrees/|website=[[n+1]]|date=25 June 2012|publisher=n+1 Foundation, Inc.|access-date=20 January 2015|archive-date=30 October 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191030163515/https://nplusonemag.com/issue-14/the-intellectual-situation/death-by-degrees/|url-status=live}}</ref> 

An example of this was Chinese student self-declared messiah, [[Hong Xiuquan]], who despite ranking first in a preliminary, nationwide [[imperial examination]], was unable to afford further education. As such, although he did try to study in private, Hong was ultimately noncompetitive in later examinations and unable to become a bureaucrat. This economic aspect of meritocracies has been said to continue nowadays in countries without free educations. Even if free education were provided, the resources that the parents of a student are able to provide outside of the curriculum, such as tutoring, exam preparation, and financial support for living costs during higher education will influence the education the student attains and the student's social position in a meritocratic society. This limits the fairness and justness of any meritocratic system. 

Similarly, feminist critics have noted that many hierarchical organisations actually favour individuals who have received disproportionate support of an informal kind (e.g. mentorship, word-of-mouth opportunities, and so on), such that only those who benefit from such supports are likely to understand these organisations as meritocratic.<ref>{{Citation | title= Critical Approaches to Continental Philosophy: Intellectual Community, Disciplinary Identity, and the Politics of Inclusion | first1= Timothy | last1= Laurie | first2= Hannah | last2= Stark | first3= Briohny | last3= Walker | journal= Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy | volume= 30 | pages= 4 | year= 2019 | url= https://www.academia.edu/38122177 | access-date= 17 February 2019 | archive-date= 11 December 2019 | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20191211120909/https://www.academia.edu/38122177 | url-status= live }}</ref>

[[Cornell University]] economist [[Robert H. Frank]] rejects meritocracy in his book ''Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy''.<ref>Princeton University Press, 2016</ref> He describes how chance plays a significant role in deciding who gets what that is not objectively based on merit. He does not discount the importance of talent and hard work, but, using psychological studies, mathematical formulae, and examples, demonstrates that among groups of people performing at a high level, chance (luck) plays an enormous role in an individual's success.

====Undesirable outcomes====
Another concern regards the principle of incompetence, or the "[[Peter principle]]". As people rise in a meritocratic society through the social hierarchy through their demonstrated merit, they eventually reach, and become stuck, at a level too difficult for them to perform effectively; they are promoted to incompetence. This reduces the effectiveness of a meritocratic system, the supposed main practical benefit of which is the competence of those who run the society.

In his book ''Meritocratic Education and Social Worthlessness'' (Palgrave, 2012), the philosopher [[Khen Lampert]] argued that educational meritocracy is nothing but a [[post-modern]] version of [[Social Darwinism]]. Its proponents argue that the theory justifies social inequality as being meritocratic. This [[social theory]] holds that Darwin's theory of evolution by [[natural selection]] is a model, not only for the development of biological traits in a population, but also as an application for human [[social institution]]s—the existing social institutions being implicitly declared as [[normative]]. Social Darwinism shares its roots with early [[progressivism]], and was most popular from the late nineteenth century to the end of [[World War II]]. Darwin only ventured to propound his theories in a biological sense, and it is other thinkers and theorists who have applied Darwin's model normatively to unequal endowments of human ambitions.