You're just moving the privilege from born rich to born talented. It's still going to exclude all the people without that, so it's still going to be unfair.
It's not necessarily better either. Kids of wealthy parents have a lot of work put into developing their capabilities. A lot of their success comes from that investment in their development. You would need to somehow do the same with these poor talented people too. How? Their parents aren't capable. Maybe forced adoption like Australia's "stolen generation"?
I think that from an efficiency point of view, the way it is is best. It takes advantage of the natural desire people have to give their own children an advantage over others. That's a strong incentive. We'll miss some poor talented kids but I don't see any practical way to actually get such a pure meritocracy beyond human rights violations like some kind of Communist Olympic swimmers.
I agree with you about carrots though. They seem to be getting further out of reach.
For a long time, people also had a "natural desire" to eat their enemies.
We stopped doing that because it was harmful. In fact now we think it's just gross.
At some point some of these practices stop being "natural" and start to seem barbarous.
In the case of inherited wealth, it's usually around the point where it becomes obvious that extreme inherited wealth/privilege + narcissism and/or sociopathy are incredibly toxic and damaging to democracy, economic stability, general well-being, and potentially even species survivability.
Of course you can still get bad actors in a meritocracy. But you don't get highly privileged and powerful bad actors born into situations where they can avoid accountability.
As for poor parents being "incapable" - that's a wholly circular argument. Who knows how capable they would be with more resources?
I'm talking about more common levels of income, not just the odd Bill Gates or King of Bazerbaijar.
Advantaging your own reproductive success is a stronger feeling than eating enemies. You could even say it's the ultimate purpose of life for an organism or genome. It would be hard to suppress it, and destructive if people suppress it too much.
Maybe culture could change so that it becomes normal but obviously we can't have everyone doing that or we'd be in a race to the bottom. I don't see how a culture that supports the biologically superior people at the expense of the inferior would be stable. Even if you have popular support for eugenics, surely people who realize they're at the bottom of the heap and being pushed further down will rebel against it.
> As for poor parents being "incapable" - that's a wholly circular argument. Who knows how capable they would be with more resources?
It's you being circular. Obviously, any incapable person would be capable if they had capability, by definition. I'm talking about people who are incapable with what they've got.
It's not necessarily better either. Kids of wealthy parents have a lot of work put into developing their capabilities. A lot of their success comes from that investment in their development. You would need to somehow do the same with these poor talented people too. How? Their parents aren't capable. Maybe forced adoption like Australia's "stolen generation"?
I think that from an efficiency point of view, the way it is is best. It takes advantage of the natural desire people have to give their own children an advantage over others. That's a strong incentive. We'll miss some poor talented kids but I don't see any practical way to actually get such a pure meritocracy beyond human rights violations like some kind of Communist Olympic swimmers.
I agree with you about carrots though. They seem to be getting further out of reach.