Meritocracy is the idea that you achieve success because of effort and ability. As long as you work really hard, you'll become successful. It's basically a belief in karma. Successful people deserve to be successful, and unsuccessful people deserve to be unsuccessful. In this video I make the argument that 1) we do not live in a meritocracy, 2) meritocracies actually aren't fair, and 3) the idea of a meritocracy doesn't even make any sense and therefore can't exist.

I originally intended this video to be 3 minutes long, but I wanted to make it thorough, thus the section about hockey, and the section about rearranging society to eliminate arbitrary advantages, and the section about free will and not truly earning anything yourself.

0:00 meritocracy
1:12 competing bakers
1:45 the snowball effect of success
3:07 education
4:01 meritocracy doesn't create fairness
4:25 circumstantial luck
5:25 generative luck
6:05 outliers and youth hockey
7:40 what if we got rid of circumstantial factors?
9:51 what if we got rid of talent differences?
10:35 meritocracies can't exist
11:26 unless you only care about skill
12:31 genetics and environment
14:01 the illusion of free will
16:20 everything comes down to luck
16:52 conclusion

Links:
Hockey video 1:    • 9-Year-Old UNREAL Hockey Skills | Nex...  
Hockey video 2:    • Great Goals of the Decade | 2010-2019...  
NBA 7 foot tall: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamo...
Common birthdays: https://thedailyviz.com/2016/09/17/ho...
Control over your height: https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
Wealth Inequality in America:    • Wealth Inequality in America