The American dream is dead. Once a nation where ‘universal rights’ were promised, the USA has become a self-validating hierarchy, incentivising social inequality and limiting Gen-Z’s possibility of emancipation. Meritocracy, and the collapse of its tenets and what has brought about this death. Michael Young’s The Rise of Meritocracy notably satires a world governed by the relation IQ + Effort = Merit. Despite its undeniable elegance, the reality is that such a formula typically pays off best for those who started competing several metres ahead. Were such an equation to be correct, Gen-Z would be running the economy rather than swallowed whole by its whims. While this relation has come to be the genuine central tenet for some, the evident problem is that success is often determined by non-meritocratic factors.
Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve influentially posited that IQ is genetically inheritable and completely unaffected by policies and environmental factors. Factors from lobbying, to eugenics, and legacy admissions all challenge neoliberal narratives that market reward merit rather than reproduce advantage. Gen-Z seems to be the most impacted by these false premises, given they are the most educated generation of all time; yet, they suffer the lot of unfair opportunity allocations, inequality, increasing student debt, and lower social mobility.
Is the system implying eugenics?
Shock and scandal came with The Bell Curve’s publication. Critics argued its claims echoed eugenicist ideals, potentially risking reinforcing inequalities. Murray and Herrnstein argues inherited intelligence plays a tremendous role in explaining socioeconomic disparities. The key issue is that this focus on inherited intelligence can be argued to downplay the significance of structural focus in shaping life outcomes, such as the education system, discrimination, and unequal access to opportunity. The New York Times’ Bob Herbert launched a damning critique of the book as “racial pornography masquerading itself as serious scholarship.”
Intelligence, Environment, and the Limits of IQ
In reality, Nicholas Rescher argues that socioeconomic status reflects environmental conditions far more than genetic IQ. His position is straightforward – biological differences between individuals do not automatically translate into social inequality. They should not dictate public policy. Analyses reported by Bonity argue that research promoting strict genetic determinism relies on selective data interpretation and heavily depends on modelling choices. Here, prior assumptions can be masked as ‘respected empirical findings.’ When broader socioeconomic variables are included, IQ’s predictive power over income significantly weakens, as demonstrated for instance within the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Put bluntly, claims that income disparities primarily reflect intelligence and effort can function as a rhetorical defence for existing class advantages! When institutions prioritise IQ as a gatekeeping metric, accumulated social advantage begins to obtain a picture as a form of natural superiority. This system performs a trick – rewarding privilege while insisting it rewards talent.
Starting the Race a Few Paces Behind
For the current generation, the promise of meritocracy is simple – give your best in school, attend a prestigious institution, and be rewarded with a high-paying job. Reality, however, mixes in a few extra variables, a sprinkle of legacy admissions or Varsity Blues, and delights in the unequal game it cooks up.
Researchers note how inequality begins before university applications are even submitted. The Stanford Graduate School of Education has claimed that distributing opportunities solely on supposed ‘merit’ risks ignoring structural factors shaping performance in the first place, such as private education. The result is a system where opportunities may formally be open to all, while the opportunity to develop merit is far from equally distributed.
Standardised testing and numbers illustrate this gap. Deming showcases how, among students from the bottom fifth of the income distribution, only a quarter take the SAT and roughly 2.5% score above 1300. Contrarily, the typical SAT-taker comes from the top fifth of the income distribution, where about 17% exceed such a score. These results provide that while the SAT is not directly a wealth test, it is a reflection of unequal opportunity distribution and its implications. Students from wealthier families are more likely to access costly summer programmes, or international volunteering trips to East Africa or Southeast Asia: experiences that, while impressive, leave a substantial blemish on the family’s credit card statements. Research published in Science Advances even saw a difference in equality in terms of content and style in university applications, with distinctive differences in application style across income brackets from across 238,000 application essays to the University of California. It is a lottery of birth, thus left to deeply influence life outcomes.
Inequality and Long-Run Macroeconomic Effects
The economic consequences of meritocratic systems become clearer over the long run. A growing corpus of research links increasing wealth inequality with declining social mobility, further limiting socioeconomic diversity and constraining the effective use of human capital. The result can be slower innovation and enterprise. This outcome echoes a broader concern: markets, much like ecosystems, often perform better with a slight increase in diversity.
The Galor-Zaira Model explains how initial inequality shapes long-term growth. When capital markets are imperfect, poorer families cannot easily borrow to invest in education. As a result, inequality reduces human capital formation and decreases long-run per capita income in middle and high-income economies: a conclusion that follows the model’s logic with the kind of consistency economists usually associate with well-behaved equations. Empirical testing in disproportionately unequal countries often shows similar outcomes, with economies settling into low-education, low-income steady states.
Recent research complicates the familiar narrative that meritocracy automatically promotes fairness and opportunity. Economists Comerford, Mora and Watts argue that stronger meritocratic wage settings, where earnings directly reflect measured ability, can paradoxically increase divergence within the income hierarchy while simultaneously reducing social mobility. When firms reward human capital more precisely, returns to education rise and wage dispersion widens. Higher-income parents, already well-positioned to invest in education, continue to expand those advantages.
The effect is measurable through intergenerational income elasticity. As educational investment correlates with parental income, the elasticity coefficient rises, indicating lower mobility. Put briefly, even systems that efficiently reward talent can amplify inequality when starting conditions are equal.
Cumulative Advantage and Repercussions
Merton showcases this dynamic through the Matthew Effect: early advantages compound over time, much like interest. Families with higher incomes convert early privilege into better school placements, tutoring, and extracurricular opportunities, reinforcing intergenerational advantages even in formally meritocratic systems.
The pattern also appears in the Great Gatsby Curve, which shows that countries with greater income inequality exhibit lower social mobility. This divide is stark: in the US a Gini coefficient of 0.41 corresponds to intergenerational income elasticity of about 0.45-0.50, indicating relatively low social mobility. Contrarily, in Sweden, a country that has long made human capital investment its priority, a Gini coefficient of near 0.28 brings an elasticity of around 0.20, with far greater opportunities for social mobility.
Taken together, the evidence points to a consistent conclusion: when the opportunities to develop merit are unevenly distributed, meritocratic systems end up reinforcing the very inequalities they claim to overcome.
Can Gen-Z Overcome the System
Gen-Z may be history’s most educated generation, yet it enters a society that insists success is the sole product of hard work and talent, while structural barriers enact significant real barriers. An illusionary meritocracy is taken as genuine, undermining outcomes for all.
The fault line lies within the education system and how public education often limits opportunities relative to the private system. This is showcased by the divide between Northern and Southern Europe. The institutions within the education system in the South are quite backwards due to a lack of funding. This can be showcased by English language levels. In the North, most children speak English as they learnt it properly in school. Knowing this language constitutes a vital source of human capital. When access to strong public schools, incentive programmes, tutoring, and extracurricular activities rely on household income, merit begins to reflect privilege. Progressive taxation in contexts of high-income inequality would allow governments to invest heavily in public education and widen access to higher learning. Financial support mechanisms are crucial. Scandinavian countries offer tuition-free education and students ‘salaries’ while Scotland’s Education Maintenance Allowance provides weekly financial assistance to eligible students. Affirmative action and more holistic admissions processes can further help address embedded disadvantages by evaluating students in context, valuing motivation, resilience, and intellectual curiosity adjacent to standardised testing.
If society truly wants greater equality and opportunity to reflect merit, the opportunity to develop such merit must be equally distributed. Equal access to education should not be a luxury only a few can afford, but the foundation of a dynamic economic system and social justice.