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That it tends to become a caste system with extra steps (which steps provide a defense of the system as “fair”) is one of the chief criticisms of meritocracy (and criticism of the idea is where we got the term itself)

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So as a society do we want to have people performing tasks based on demonstrated aptitude to perform those tasks, or to have people performing tasks based on achieving certain social and political outcomes?

The entire point of any such system is the latter thing anyway, regardless of how you go about it. I mean the higher-level point, like “why do we have any system at all?”

> regardless of how you go about it

i very much beg to differ. A poor but high aptitude student today is able to escape the "caste" they're born into. Under a true nepotistic system, this cannot happen no matter how much aptitude he/she possesses.

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