Meritocracy came in as a response to hereditary wealth. Hereditary entitlement. You had a position or role in your caste or class, and that came from your parents or the money you inherited. Meritocracy was the wild idea that you should hire the best person for the job. Which is the most skillful or the most knowledgeable. You should push resources to where they will have the biggest impact. That provides a path for social mobility, and it allows people to move “up”. If you use that directionality. The problem with meritocracy is that the idea is handicapped by the impact of privilege. Part of our incentives is money, but part of it is we naturally want to invest in the skills and knowledge of our children. We quite reasonably want to give them a competitive advantage. One of the barriers to entry is education. If you give someone education, you implicitly strengthen their barriers and that compounds. So there is a lot of thinking to do about conspicuous meritocracy and the barriers that people have to overcome. If we really want to get resources to where the true merit is.
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