Merito, meritocrazia e disuguaglianza

Those who advocate meritocracy justify income and wealth inequality on the basis of different degrees of merit. It is not easy even just defining what individual merit is. Merit does not coincide with personal talent or even with skills acquired through effort and requires that everyone have an equal opportunity to acquire them. Meritocracy as an individual race to climb the social ladder, where applied in the absence of substantial equal opportunities, has ended up reaffirming the inequalities decreed by the market while encouraging the winners’ feeling of moral superiority and the losers’ feeling of inferiority.