Editing Meritocracy (section)

====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.