If instead "talent" is (primarily) about the quality and extent of your training/schooling (and there's a lot of research to suggest that in most domains, it is) than even a very effective meritocracy is going to (IMO) perpetuate wealth and class disparities (5-year-olds don't decide to go to a great preschool and pay for it themselves, their parents do).
If I were a wizard trying to make a society with lots of upwards mobility I'd make it a lot harder to transmit generational wealth/privilege and try a lot harder to make sure everyone has the same resources/opportunities. I'm sure that would come with a ton of its own problems (even outside of just pissing people off), but it does seem worth at least acknowledging that any kind of merit-based assessment of people is going to be super biased towards those with wealth and privilege.
It seems very unlikely to me that an apocalypse scenario would lead to a _more_ merit-based society - rather that it would wipe out a lot of social protections & aids that _do_ exist (both from the government and civil society at large) for those currently at the bottom of the economic ladder. Whether we'd go feudal or just kinda-worse-than-we-are-now I certainly have no idea.
Worse - merit/talent/reward is determined by what the monied classes find useful, not what is actually useful to society.
There is a reason we let people keep the wealth they build. It's not because it's "fair." It's because taking it away, and having the brutes or demagogues decide how to distribute it, makes the society a hellhole.
Fortunately corporate management and promotions are so different frin politics, no way would a demagogue or someine incompetent be in position of power and decide how to distribute wealth
They're so backward they don't even have hundreds of thousands of health insurance bankruptcies every year.
>You should try visiting the Scandinavian hellholes...
It is misleading to group all of the Scandinavian countries together in terms of wealth inequality.
Here are the latest available wealth inequality numbers for the Scandinavian countries:
Denmark 0.838
Finland 0.742
Iceland 0.694
Norway 0.798
Sweden 0.867
As a comparison the US is 0.852
The entire range for the world (where there are stats) is 0.498 - 0.902
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...
By the way, the US health system crisis is caused by regulatory capture. There is no way to regulate the regulators to prevent this. At least, not in a failed democracy such as the US.
Probably the only way to regulate the regulators in a society as complex as the US and most other countries (contra Scandinavia) is with strict constitutional principles. That's the only way I know. Once you put "people" in charge, corruption and other dysfunctions eventually reign.
One might look at Switzerland. A big difference between there and the U.S. seems to be that the people can petition for a vote on adding or removing any law or amendment they don't like, at any of their three levels of government. Contrast that to the U.S., where this ability doesn't exist in most places, including the federal government which was designed to be responsive to the states and not the people.
The Swiss also have a tradition of local power where possible, to the point that most of their social programs such as health care are handled by cantons (states) that average a third of a million people each. While in the U.S. we have literally a thousand times that many people arguing over health care at the federal level.
Here's a bunch of info on the Swiss political system: https://wolf-linder.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Swiss-poli...