But we're distinctly not in a society that leans more towards merit. From what I can see, the highest compensated jobs go to morally and ethically bankrupt rag

But we're distinctly not in a society that leans more towards merit. From what I can see, the highest compensated jobs go to morally and ethically bankrupt raging narcisists, successfully masking psychopaths, and spineless puppets for the previous two categories. There's a lot of it about. (And IQ is not a particularly useful metric of overally intelligence. It's a useful metric of measuring how people perform on a common set of problems).