Michael Young coined the word meritocracy in 1958 and objected for decades to the way politicians used it. Why did he regard a fully meritocratic society as a dystopia rather than an ideal?

A. Allocating rank by measured ability leaves the successful entitled and the rest with no defence

Young’s target was the legitimation, not the selection. An aristocracy knows its position is arbitrary and can be argued with; a meritocratic elite believes its position is earned, which removes the grounds for objection and strips the unsuccessful of any account of themselves except failure. That is the dystopia the book describes and the reading almost every political use of the word discards.