The meritocratic thesis states that a strong association between individual “merit” and social rewards is inherent in highly industrialized society. A simple model of meritocratic allocation is proposed and applied to provide empirical assessment of “how far to meritocracy?” from empirical reality. The model conceptualized as an ideal type of meritocracy, incorporates the principle according to which more educated persons do not have lower status than less educated ones. Assuming that a meritocratic society should resemble its ideal type, we have formulated three testable hypotheses involving status mobility within educational groups, status determination by education, and status inequality among educational groups. The tests consist of evaluating the discrepancies between the data on the U.S. total labor force and the model. All three hypotheses implying that American society is close to meritocracy are rejected.
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Krauze et al. (1985) studied this question.