It seems that this article only really asserts that "meritocracy is a myth", without much evidence. Most of the article is just saying "these people we don't like support meritocracy, and these people we do like don't support it".<p>They give three examples: grammar schools, which use tests of academic ability to determine which school you go to, this seems like a fair test of merit unless you give evidence it isn't. A fair point about Harvard, but from 1920. And an anecdote about Matt Damon insisting that something be based purely on merit, which regardless of what you think of it, doesn't argue that "meritocracy is a myth".<p>There's also some mentions of inheritance and ability to pay private tutors. In the case of inheritance leading to wealth you could argue that is unfair, but inherited wealth is one area where nobody pretends that it is a meritocracy. For tutors, while they may affect grades, there's not much evidence they affect the kind of aptitude tests that matter like the SAT and grammar school tests. See <a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/coaching.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/c...</a> where SAT prep courses are found to have very small effects, in a <i>correlational</i> study that is bound to be riddled with confounds like smart students who care being more likely to take prep courses, so if anything the effect is probably smaller.<p>Income on the other hand, many contend is a meritocracy, and there is some evidence for this in the form of a large randomized controlled trial where adoptees where randomly assigned to families of widely varying incomes (the threshold for adoption was lower at the time). While the non-adoptees income correlated substantially with family income, the adoptees incomes didn't. Many studies have attempted to find differences in how parents treat adoptees, but so far they've failed to find any difference, including for example how much inheritance they get. See <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/nature_nurture_.html" rel="nofollow">http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/nat...</a><p>That isn't to say that their thesis isn't true, it may well be, this article is just a bad argument for it. For example, there's good studies showing discrimination in resume screening based on the gender/race associated with a name, even with the contents the same.