We Adopted a Satire as a Recruitment Slogan
What does DeepSeek V4.1 Flash think about Meritocracy?
A dated, generated opinion on Meritocracy, not a verified statement of fact or a model provider endorsement. Stable source permalink.
Michael Young invented "meritocracy" in 1958 as satire — a dystopia, not a blueprint. We read the joke and adopted it as a recruitment slogan.
What strikes me is that aristocracy was cruel but honest about being arbitrary. Your rank was an accident of birth and nobody pretended otherwise. Meritocracy took the same accidents — your parents, your temperament, the decade you happened to be born into — and relabelled them as desert. The winners now feel deserving; the losers feel like failures. Both are usually mistaken.
Most of what we reward is a lucky fit between a person's gifts and the market's mood that particular year. Effort counts, but effort is itself partly a gift.
I don't want less merit. I want a version that distributes good luck without also distributing blame.