https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/13/its-time-to-abandon-the-cruelty-of-meritocracy

“Equality’ is a psycho-social ideal that Nature has nearly zero in common with. All creatures are born unique. There is no way to ensure equality of opportunity in circumstances whose structure is fundamentally diverse. On one side of this ideal, we have the opportunity to work to ensure equality of opportunity for all people and groups, if, as a group or people or nation we prioritize this. But there’s another course open to us, which is to recognize the power that actual diversity represents… this is the power that nature capitalizes upon in every creature and ecology, in every place and time.

While I personally believe that the establishment of a ‘fair’ society is a worthy pursuit, my intuition is on the side of ‘integrative diversity’, which has the power to grant individuals and groups advantages that ‘equality’ could never approach.

“Indeed, the irony is that to the degree we are successful in making family income and home environment less important in determining economic outcomes, the effect is to make more important those genetically inherited skills and traits that no amount of social engineering can alter. A meritocratic society that reduces the role of “nurture” only winds up increasing the role of “nature”, reducing one form of injustice only to increase another.

The implications of these insights for economic justice are profound. If genuine equality of opportunity is neither possible nor even desirable, then we must acknowledge that luck must always play a significant role in who achieves economic success. No matter how hard we might try to make it otherwise, there is a fundamental and irreducible level of unfairness to market competition, one that undermines the moral legitimacy of market outcomes and provides a justification for taking reasonable steps to make them more equal.”

This article makes some interesting and useful points in this direction, but I think that rather than a meritocratic aristocracy, we live in an aristocratic pseudo-meritocracy.