This article looks one one tiny aspect of society (ivy league school attendance) while ignoring society at large, and tries to draw conclusions about meritocrac

This article looks one one tiny aspect of society (ivy league school attendance) while ignoring society at large, and tries to draw conclusions about meritocracy from it. There is an ancient tale about a dozen blind met each touching parts of an elephant and describing it, some say elephants are long like a tube, others round like a ball, etc... If you don't have a big picture view, it is best to be aware of it :) Meritocracy is just a politicized term for 'competence'. We want competent people running things, that's obvious. What we also want is for people who were competent but no longer are, to be replaceable - that's the real issue. If idiots from ivy league schools who cheated their way through school or were only good at taking tests got found out afterwards, attendance wouldn't be so hotly contested. This works in sports - the minute LeBron can't play well, he will be replaced by somebody else who can and it doesn't matter that he was the best player of his generation. This doesn't work in politics and many other fields because the people evaluating their competence are largely selfish idiots. If it is in your selfish interest to promote less competent people some of the time and you value your selfish interest above most things - we have a problem. If it were a matter of intelligent people having trouble decoding what competence meant in various fields, it is something we could improve upon as time goes on as we get better at science. Our current problems, are problems of idiots being capable of attaining decision-making power (becoming wealthy, becoming high ranking officials in government, business, academia) and holding on to it, regardless of their competence over time. This is what people are usually mad about - they call it being a parasite, being the 1%, being a wasp, etc and they are right, while also being too dumb to know what to do about it :) People want to work hard to give their kids a better future, while not realizing that other people wanting their kids and their friends to have a better future, is the same mechanism that leads to their kids' future being shitty! People are so dumb - they think they're upset about corruption/inequality/whatever while the vast majority of them are simply wishing the power dynamics were in their favor :) If you want competence over time, you need to abandon the idea of anyone having power over others regardless of their competence level. Georgism [0] is an economic movement that was aware of this problem in regards to land ownership - I'd go on to say it has to cut across all spheres of life - anyone getting to hold on to power regardless of their competence, is something most should agree upon, is a mistake. In order for most to agree upon this - they'd need to not be idiots. It always boils down to too many idiots folks :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism