Hello and welcome to a teaser of a patron only episode of the Katie helper show.

One of the things that's really interesting is the word meritocracy, which I didn't know until I read this,

is actually started out as a critical term.

Yeah. Can you talk about the history of that?

Yeah, so it was coined as kind of as a satire of the idea that in England in the 60s,

in England was one of its clients, that the old aristocracy

of inherited titles given at birth

was being replaced by a new hierarchy of people who

deserve their high rank because they were educated and because they succeeded in school. And so his point was that you're simply replacing one unjust hierarchy with

another because the reason why people earn their way into the sort the so-called meritocracy is by being well-born enough to afford an education

and to be able to be a graduate.

So he would the joke of the word merit concurs is that it was a combination of aristocracy

and merit. But the way people use it now, the satirical punch of the word

aristocracy gets lost. And so people now use it in earnest to describe

the thing that Michael Young as I write right there. To hear the full episode go to

Patreon.com slash the Katie helper show. Again that's

Patreon.com slash the Katie helper show.