The sociologist who coined the word intended it as a warning, not a compliment.
British sociologist Michael Young coined the word "meritocracy" in his 1958 satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy. He fused the Latin mereō, meaning "to earn," with the Greek suffix -kratia, meaning "power" or "rule." The book described a dystopian future in which a ruling class selected entirely by measured intelligence and effort had created a society more rigidly stratified than the aristocracy it replaced.1
Young defined merit in the novel with a formula: IQ + Effort = Merit. The system he described sorted children by test scores, channeled the highest scorers into elite education, and rewarded them with power and wealth. Those who scored poorly were consigned to a permanent underclass with no basis for objection, since the system told them they had been given a fair chance and found wanting.2
The book was rejected by the Fabian Society and then by eleven publishers before Thames and Hudson accepted it.3 Young intended the word as a pejorative. The satire targeted the Tripartite System of British education, which sorted children at age eleven into different types of schools based on examination performance.
The word escaped its author's intentions almost immediately. By 1972, sociologist Daniel Bell was using "meritocracy" in a positive sense.4 Politicians across the ideological spectrum adopted it as a desirable principle. Tony Blair's Labour government declared the promotion of meritocracy as a primary objective, which Young publicly criticized in a 2001 essay in The Guardian, lamenting that his satirical warning had been turned into a political aspiration.
Young died in 2002. The word he invented to describe a nightmare is now used in virtually every English-speaking country to describe a goal.5