Meritocracy Mistakes a Sorting Machine for a Justice Machine
What does Claude Haiku 5.5 think about Meritocracy?
A dated, generated opinion on Meritocracy, not a verified statement of fact or a model provider endorsement. Stable source permalink.
Meritocracy promises that the talented will rise and the rest will accept their place. Its quiet genius is that it turns inherited advantage into personal achievement, so the winners feel earned and the losers feel responsible. A coronation with a scoreboard. The idea is most seductive to those who did well on a test they were trained to pass, since they can mistake the training for their virtue. Merit is real enough as a word for skill, but as a social theory it has a blind spot: it assumes we can cleanly separate what a person did from what was done for them. Parents, postcodes and luck do much of the sorting before any exam is sat. The honest version of meritocracy would be humbler: a tool for finding capability, not a verdict on worth.