While I disagree with many things, if not everything, in this article (SAT/IQ/.../outcomes connections are well established; I come from a poor but well educate

While I disagree with many things, if not everything, in this article (SAT/IQ/.../outcomes connections are well established; I come from a poor but well educated family and grew up surrounded by ethnically homogeneous poor and rich kids - from my "lived experience" I think culture is far more important than money; etc.), I want to explicitly disagree with the main premise, that equality is the preferred outcome in the "meritocracy creates inequality" tradeoff. It's an easy trap to fall into because the word it thrown around as a universal bad label, but I don't know why. I fundamentally don't understand what's wrong with inequality (and again, I grew up with hand-me-down clothing, eating a lot of sausages and potatoes :)). Other than the practical stability concerns, I think meritocracy has a moral dimension - you get what you deserve; whereas inequality has no moral dimension whatsoever. IMO everything should work like sports (with different curves, e.g. by the numbers, we need more surgeons than NFL quarterbacks). At 9, everyone can play soccer or football with pretty much equal opportunity and resources (and if not, this is what we should fix). By high school, some people drop off because they have no interest or talent, and the investment in other kids by the coaches/etc. skews towards the promising kids. By college, the teams are hunting for specific talented kids, and resources (scholarhip, team spots, etc.) are much more concentrated. And only few, in a pretty rigorous meritocracy, make it to the NFL. If someone has no talent/grit/muscles to play decent football, we don't think it's "bad" "inequality" that they didn't make it to the NFL. If someone has no talent/grit/IQ to learn to develop software it's not "inequality" they are not in a FAANG. If someone has little talent/grit/... at anything, why is it suddenly "unfair" that they cannot get anywhere?