You still benefit from your parent's network, you learn a lot more at a young age at home, you profit from their money while being raised. That's a huge difference between people from poor areas and those from even middle-class families.

And that's something advantaged people don't like to think about when they use the meritocratic word: most of them benefited from huge advantages by being born in the right family. Or even just by being born in the right country.

Nowadays you benefit from your inheritance when you are established and don't really need it anymore. What really helped you was the 100k-1 million 0% interest loan with no problem if you don't pay it back you got during your 20s from your parents. Or just knowing you could be attending a good college and knowing the most important you have to get out of there is the right network of people.

https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/september/toddler-langua... for an example of what having the right parents can help a long time before inheriting their property.

Why shouldn't we concentrate most of our effort on those whos' parents succeeded? If the parents had the right mindset and the right genes to succeed, they would in all likelihood pass those onto their children. This mirrors the natural world to a great degree, and to me would seem to allow for a lot more beneficial outcomes then some arbitrary guideline of fairness.

What is better, to give $100K in wealth to everyone, from idiots to geniuses, or concentrate our efforts on those that have more chance to succeed?

The problem with this is that as long as there are so many confounding factors, there is no reason to assume that the success of someones parents was "their own" as opposed to a result of one or more of the confounding factors such as a better network, and access to better education.

If you are going to go that route a better measure would be how much upwards mobility someones parents have demonstrated proportional to their starting point.

Of course that still suffers from a number of confounding factors (e.g. we don't know how much is down to luck)

That would be true if we were trying to find the exact reasons for success.

If you are just trying to promote success, then it stands to reason to reward success of the parents, incase some of those confounding factors are hiding actual fitness. After all, if the null hypothesis is true, you aren't losing anything by promoting some people over others, if they are all equality capable, anyway.

Does it? We don't know that without actually testing. It's very much possible that providing less assistance but to more people will have a much wider impact. If the parents truly are responsible for their own success, there is for example good reason to hypothesize that they may be able to compensate for reduced support with their abilities.

The problem is that measurable success is going to change the experiment.

If you consider that there is no constant landscape, it's always changing and always an unknown, the best option is to try a plethora of different ideas, hoping some will succeed.

It's more like fighting a war in an unknown battlefield. If you play it just one way, you are more likely to lose than if you try many different strategies at once.

The ones that succeed will be self-sustaining, for as long as they are successful, anyway, and gain you enough ground to compensate for the strategies that didn't work.

If this wasn't true, nature would only have produced one single organism rather than a billion or more.

If you're letting 1% of the population hoard 99% of the opportunity, you're losing metric tons of potential.

It isn't. It's much more graduated than that.

If we don't vary the amount of support people get, then we won't be able to take advantage of situations where more support (or less) would result in greater success.

And given that everything is constantly changing, there is no way to find a perfect level of opportunity to give to people.

So, a system that provides a varying level of support spread out against the population will do better nearly all of the time than one that provides an equal amount to everyone.

I wasn't advocating for perfect exactly measured equality, I was arguing for a distribution that wasn't over the top insanely unfair to 99+% of everyone.

Social Darwinism was bullshit 100 years ago and it’s bullshit today.

I looked up this term in wikipedia, and I don't know what you are trying to label me as. It seems to be just a buzz word.

As quoted from "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics":

Part of the difficulty in establishing sensible and consistent usage is that commitment to the biology of natural selection and to 'survival of the fittest' entailed nothing uniform either for sociological method or for political doctrine. A 'social Darwinist' could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist.

Can you explain further?