Meritocracy means those who have lucky breaks early in life (schooling, opportunities, etc) earn compound interest on those choices. If you could give everyone

Meritocracy means those who have lucky breaks early in life (schooling, opportunities, etc) earn compound interest on those choices. If you could give everyone a "merit metric", and you had two options, one scoring 45 and one scoring 50, you'd chose the one scoring 50, without realising the the adversity the one scoring 45 has endured to get that far means they'll be operating at 55 or 60 in a year with the right environment, but the one that coasted at 50 for the last 10 years will continue to coast at 50. Someone whose parents coached them in IT skilled for 14 hours a week for 10 years could have a higher "merit" score than someone that picked up 90% of the skills working on their own in 2 weeks, but would likely not be as good a hire