The M-Word

"What's wrong with meritocracy?", a comment on a previous thread asks.

The worst fate that can befall a satirist is to be taken entirely seriously. When Michael Young wrote The Rise of The Meritocracy, after having been warned that no good would come of a Latin-Greek hybrid word (television, homosexuality...?), his targets took him entirely seriously, and have been doing so ever since.

His dystopia was, and is, their utopia, in which those with material wealth and paper qualifications determine "merit" on the basis of material wealth and paper qualifications.