This article tries to make a moral point by (ab)using intellectually dishonest arguments. It blatantly attempts to confuse meritocracy as a value / goal and as

This article tries to make a moral point by (ab)using intellectually dishonest arguments. It blatantly attempts to confuse meritocracy as a value / goal and as state / belief. Replace "meritocracy" by "freedom" or "equality" or "justice" or "safe driving" - it's a constant struggle, a distant goal that we're continuously falling short of, and obviously the belief that we've achieved that goal results in less effort expanded towards it and falling more behind. That's not a paradox, it's just logic. > the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. False dichotomy; why not both? > In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead Again, why not both? How many successful people are there that didn't work hard? But yeah, obviously you need to be lucky, you won't achieve much if you die at 5 from malaria. > They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations That's not a failure of meritocracy, it's a failure of a specific policy used to implement meritocracy. Managers / police / judges / assassins are not impartial? Implement policies that enforce more impartiality (in this study's case, if you have a statistical benchmark to compare "performance evaluations" of different employees and contrast them with managers' appraisals, why not use that statistics itself to dole out rewards?)