“Everyone knows how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as a meritocratic system is. The first criterion of loyalty to any organization is therefore complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power. … As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true.”

Source: Joyland

Glimpses of World History (1949)

The Monthly Magazine

Introduction (p. xii)
Broca's Brain (1979)

Reaction to Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase's address to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in Nadi, 31 August 2005

Source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), p. 1.

The New York Times (18 September 1966)

Vulture interview (2014)

"Transcript: Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Qin Gang on Face the Nation" in CBS https://www.cbsnews.com/news/qin-gang-chinese-ambassador-face-the-nation-03-20-2022/ (20 March 2022)