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Once again, being a member of the iberal striver class is dysgenic
I think it's worse than that.....meritocracy might be dysgenic. Yes, you draw from a much larger population, take all the talent (on whatever metric you're measuring talent) and promote them into the middle-class rat race where one's career is the primary social status.
The problem with meritocracy is talented people who have attained wealth, power and privilege don't want their reversion-to-the-mean children to lose financial/social position. This makes the competition for those jobs greater, reduces the places for lower-class talented people to rise to, etc. The middle class fertility shredder is a natural consequence of social mobility. In the long run, this leads to genetic bifurcation of the population as the lower and working class lose everyone with this trait, and the middle class breeds with itself at far below replacement levels.
Yeah, it's going to create a small cohort of highly capable individuals and a much larger cohort of ne'er-do-wells. The number of diamonds in the rough will diminish over time. It will create the hyper unequal dystopia the left fears, but it will be even more intractable unless we figure out a technological solution to the genetic rot. The accumulating genetic load must also be addressed by similar means, or else natural selection will eventually do it for us and that is likely to be rather unpleasant.
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Not quite. It is, at least in your model, a consequence of downward social mobility. As far as I can tell, few systems have totally eliminated the threat of downward mobility (except perhaps for a very small slice of the population, like the Tsar's family), so it's not clear to me why meritocracy is uniquely bad in this respect.
Unlike economic pies, social status pies are zero sum by definition. Social status, and the economic and political benefits, tend to be "sticky". This isn't a problem with meritocracy, it's a problem with heirarchy, which meritocracy is supposed to streamline, but cannot entirely avoid.
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