KEY POINTS:
Meritocracy. Merit-o-cracy. Cool word. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary says it is a system in which the talented are moved ahead on the basis of their achievement.
Meritocracy sounds like something Plato might have yarned about, but the word was only thunked up in 1958 by Michael Young, the egalitarian chap who brought tertiary education to the masses by founding the Open University. Later - reluctantly, one supposes - he got a peerage. It is probably him we have to thank for the growth of PhDs in hairdressing.
Anyway, 50 years ago Young wrote a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. Now here's the wacky thing: he was dead against it. "How could anyone be against meritocracy? It seems incomprehensible today," writes Toby Young, Lord Young's son, in Prospect magazine.
His father disapproved of meritocracy because he saw it as a way of legitimising inequality. If you don't become a success, it's because you didn't work hard enough to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Michael Young thought that in a meritocracy the elite would not inherit their privileges but the pyramid-like shape of society would be preserved. And he was right. The idea of equality of opportunity has become entrenched in Britain and the US, and probably even more so here.
But has that led to a corresponding change in the composition of the "ruling class"? Not really.
You are still unlikely to end up a judge in Britain unless you have been privately educated. And good luck finding someone in Barack Obama's inner circle who isn't a Yale, Harvard or Princeton alumn.
In New Zealand the social fabric is stretchier - John Key was a state house kid. But as the preachy devotees of the cult of diversity, like journalism lecturer Jim Tucker, will attest, the chattering classes still tend to hire people who remind them of themselves: white bread, middle class, easy-peasy. And not every blue-collar kid has an inspirational mother like Key's amazing role model.
Isn't this all just so darn depressing? I am not partisan, but my entire ideological framework depends on the idea of self-determination and aspiration - that we are free to make what we want of our lot.
I know life isn't fair, but I believe passionately that anyone can make it if they work hard enough. I have to carry on believing that because the alternative is just too grim.
Still, there is a glimmer of hope. Following in his father's footsteps, Toby Young has made up his own new word: the "celebritariat". Toby's position is that while professional elites remain closed shops, popular culture offers the new celebritariat class, which is open to anyone who is happy to eat a mouthful of worms or date a footie star.
It is hysterical that Toby Young posits this theory since he has made his name out of trying to be a celebrity.
His memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People chronicled his social-climbing sojourn at Vanity Fair magazine and has been made into a film.
A modern Nancy Mitford, Toby Young has the most exquisitely calibrated social radar and can tell the U (upper class) from the non-U at 20 paces.
On Toby Young's website there is a cartoon of him meeting an attractive woman at a party. "So YOU'RE the Toby Young you write so much about," she says. Toby Young is a living indictment of his father's theory - anyone can make it. It's just that if you're no good at anything, you just have to find what you are bad at.
deborah@coneandco.com
