If you lool at it from a perspective of winning/loosing/fair/unfair you are probably right. If you look on the total effect of society then probably not. I mean to have competetive companies you need people who have worked(or played) their ass off and achieved skills and knowledge which only the mixture of privilege, work and skills can achieve. You actually want to give the smart kids extra tuition, because mostly these people will innovate later.
(I dont mean to speak in absolutes here, but on average)
Society is not only about distribution but to distribute something you have to create it first.
So I would say, yes it is a flaw of meritocracy, but meritocracy is not flawed.
In a meritocracy, a person should become powerful/rich according to their merit—education, skill, diligence, etc. However, what then happens is elites start religiously investing all they can (and they can invest a lot) into ensuring their own offspring has even more of that merit than others.
As an exaggerated example, you can’t buy your kid a Pfeiffer turbopump to experiment with if you are choosing between bread and soap when you’re going to the store.
What we get as a result is the same ever-growing gap between the already-rich and the rest. Meritocracy turns into plutocracy as merit becomes more or less a proxy for wealth.
Breaking that trend would involve actions that go beyond meritocracy, and arguably are un-meritocratic: instead of just rewarding by merit, it’s about helping more people have that merit regardless of their or their parents’ wealth.
That’s not a confusion of merit and wealth. If I use wealth to teach you how to drive a truck or learn to program, that’s growing value inside a person. That person became stronger, and in the eyes of society, more meritorious for some tasks.
Merit is due to many things, and mentorship, experimentation, and preparation are all parts of it. Medical training is also very expensive and part of medical merit, but also clearly entangled in discussions of money, opportunity, and growing inequity.
If you have hidden biological talent but never trained as a doctor due to wealth, should we trust you now to perform medicine? Not before that expensive prep; it’s part of merit.
> Merit is due to many things, and mentorship, experimentation, and preparation are all parts of it. Medical training is also very expensive and part of medical merit, but also clearly entangled in discussions of money and opportunity.
Exactly, and if one has a lot of hard-earned wealth thanks to their own smarts and merit and drive to work hard they’ll of course happily spend it on all the right things to make sure their kids have even more of that than their parents. With private education and all that blocks opportunities for kids in lower income families and increase inequality; merit becomes a proxy for wealth and as meritocracy matures it becomes more and more a rule of the rich. (Being “a proxy for” is not the same as “being confused with”, it’s just that one would more or less follow the other.)
Yes. And I believe this is sort of the best of all worlds. I find it better that like high paying jobs like a surgeon are given on merit (beeing a proxy for parents beeing rich, but still on merit) instead of given on e.g. power, like oh he is the son of ... he doesnt need to study to become a surgeon. Or whatever example you like.
The question is, how possible is it to level up. At least in Europe not so difficult, and in the US the Asian immigrants also show it is possible (if you think in terms of 2 generations).
Money helps. It would be hard for me to become competent in something I wanted to educate my hypothetical kids about if I were struggling to make ends meet. On the other hand, if I were among the really rich, I would furnish my kids a well-equipped lab and ensure they get a chance to hang out around top experts in the field.
So I would say, yes it is a flaw of meritocracy, but meritocracy is not flawed.