They will both function substantially as a heritable institution

The Rise of Meritocracy by Toby Young.

An excellent investigation of the link between meritocracy and genetics and the consequent implications.

Both the backstory and the discussion are interesting.

Toby Young is a conservative author and journalist in the UK. His father, Michael Young, was a Labour Party leader, and also an author of a satire in 1958, The Rise of The Meritocracy. Indeed, Michael Young coined the word meritocracy. Wikipedia's description of the book.

It describes a dystopian society in a future United Kingdom in which intelligence and merit have become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited.

While the British Labour Party was in general very enthusiastic about establishing a meritocratic system as a means of displacing the then existing class system, Michael Young was far more skeptical.

His view was that in the long run, meritocracy might simply be the replacement of a heritable class system based on past birth with a heritable class system based on merit. Specifically, he was concerned that merit (ability to produce) was materially determined by genetics and cultural behaviors.

And indeed, in subsequent years, the emerging scientific general consensus (with dissenters) is that life outcomes are about half determined by heritable IQ and half determined by behaviors. And we are now discovering that behaviors are far more heritable than we had thought in the past.

The upshot is that meritocracy has a certain appeal when everyone has a random chance based on a genetic lottery where all outcomes are randomly distributed. The implication under these conditions is that in each generation, no matter where they are born in the class hierarchy, those who are gifted with high IQs and productive behaviors will rise to the top and be rewarded for their productivity. Everyone has a chance.

However, in an environment where genetic outcomes are not randomly distributed, and particularly where there are institutional pressures for assortative mating, then the risk is that people's station in life is determined by their genetic heritage. Under this scenario, everyone still has the chance of rising to the top based on their IQ and productive behavior but it is simply a function of mating strategies and genes that the most productive are also likely to have been born to those in the top tier.

Aristocracy will have been replaced by meritocracy but they will both function substantially as a heritable institution.

That is what Michael Young feared. In treating the subject, his son, Toby Young explores the various fields and comes to the conclusion that it is quite possible that Michael Young was correct to be concerned.

It is not mentioned in this report, but there is converging evidence to the same effect from other fields. The Economic historian Gregory Clark has produced a lot of evidence which suggests that we may have all along been living in a meritocratic system and have failed to spot the forest for the trees owing to the unique global circumstances of the past fifty years.

Clark has found much lower long term social mobility across multiple countries and across multiple centuries under multiple forms of culture/government institution than we had thought there was. This has the indirect implication that past elites were more meritocratic than we thought and that the range of social mobility is already much lower than that which the past fifty years had led us to believe. Basically, in all countries across long centuries, the accomplished rise to the stop and tend to stay at the top, not through social protections but because assortative mating concentrates the most talented in the top tier.

Towards the end of the broadcast Toby Young takes a brief diversion into the question whether CRISPR and gene editing might open a new era of eugenics with parents able to create designer babies with all the attributes that they desire them to have to be successful. Science fiction for now but not an inconceivable condition in the future.

For now, Young finishes with a quiet allusion to the classical liberal value which I think is the actual solution. It is a belief that we parrot without thinking but rarely practice. All people have inherent value and rights. If you are Christian, more explicitly, all people are God's children and worthy of equal respect.

After World War II with our technology horizons exploding, prosperity booming, everyone's boat rising, it was easy to ignore some of these issues. By ignoring them, we let positional status supersede inherent worth as the measure of a man. Certainly the postmodernist ideology of group identities has also reinforced that view.

Perhaps, as we reengage with a recognition of genetic probabilities and possibly much lower social mobility than we want, we might regain an understanding of that older wisdom.