> Canonically in the western world it's usually "gumption" or "intelligence".
Emphasis on natural inherence. Meritocracies work if everyone is statistically identical. They even work when everyone is perfectly identical. They don't if every action is independent and identically distributed, but it's not; being lucky in the past can make one more capable in the present even in an unbiased system.
We should keep that randomness in mind to avoid being cruel. But systems that ignore this path dependence, or worse, try to stamp it out, underperform those that acknowledge it.
You don't have to believe the "luck begets luck", and there is certainly injustice in the way wealth lands around society, but not allowing people to become rich by taking socially-positive risks removes the marginal incentive to do so. That is, I believe, GP means by "the whole doesn't progress".