"Should be", "best society", "meritocracy" etc - I used all of these in the sense of my ideal world, not the actual one. Feel free to critique either the concept of meritocracy (in an ideally meritocratic world), or the current society, but please don't combine the two, saying "meritocracy is bad because markets don't reward the best academics" or something similar, that simply a logical fallacy.

This is a frequent criticism that is IMO completely off base. Nobody is saying that this world is particularly meritocratic (although I think Western-style democracy+capitalism+markets is experimentally the most meritocratic system ever realised).