> It absolutely is a real thing

Unfortunately due to outside forces, it isn't.

Two people build something.

One knows a guy who runs local meet up, and offers them a spot to talk about it. Present at the meet up is a tech funder who catches them afterwards, and wants to meet for lunch to talk about this cool idea...

The other doesn't. They live in a small rural town. They may have even have come up with the idea first. Without a local meet up they don't get the chance to present. So they post to HN, but Apple announced a new AI tool and their stuff quickly gets bumped by links to Apple, Ars Technica, and a few Apple blogs.

Same idea, different outcomes due to outside forces. Sorry to break it to you but your environment has far more influence to your success than your personal merits.

You may have heard the joke that polyamory is wrong, because it should be multiamory or polyphilia. Meritocracy is a similar case. Because the word mixes Latin and Greek roots, it's unlikely to be old.

The first recorded uses of "meritocracy" are apparently by Marxist sociologists in the 1950s. They used it to describe a dystopian society, where merit serves as a moral justification for social classes, and social class determines the opportunities available to gain and demonstrate merit.

Of course the idea that career success and influence should be based on demonstrated ability and effort is ancient. But once you start building a society based on that idea, you run into Goodhart's law.

> Of course the idea that career success and influence should be based on demonstrated ability and effort is ancient. But once you start building a society based on that idea, you run into Goodhart's law.

Do you have any evidence for that? Aside from the thought-terminating cliché "it was used by Marxists once" ?

(Upper) middle class culture, where parents try to give their children a favorable start in life, which often involves a lot of effort. Such as buying a home in a good school district or helping them gain admission to a good university.

What's this supposed to be evidence of? Failure of meritocracy?

The moral justification for meritocracy is that the society benefits when the most capable people are in charge. Which means the society should find the children with the most potential and give them the best education and other opportunities available. But parents subvert this by trying to improve the relative standing of their children. Which means the people who had the best education and other opportunities will be less capable on the average, and the society benefits less.

You need to read less, since apparently you couldn't even get past the dictionary definition of meritocracy.

If you have some kind of point to make about the term, please list your qualifications on what makes you an arbiter of meaning.