Sadly, merit is a terrible qualifier. Humans have proven time and again that they are appallingly bad judges of “merit”, and this holds whether they are doing s

Sadly, merit is a terrible qualifier. Humans have proven time and again that they are appallingly bad judges of “merit”, and this holds whether they are doing so on an ad-hoc/heuristic basis or by some systematic quantification: both approaches are wide open to intrinsic bias and systematic discrimination, and this routinely happens on scales from the job interview to national elections. As for democracy, however, what we don’t have (yet) is anything demonstrably better. A meritocracy will not be an improvement over a democracy. The critical function of a democracy is affording the governed a guaranteed means to evict bad adminstration.