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Okay, I think I understand the point now, but what I find to be the real issue is that if we were completely honest there's no need for "seventeen fucking years" to determine stuff like who should go to what college and etc. We can determine who is suited for what job with much simpler metrics like IQ, OCEAN personality traits, etc. The whole problem of inefficiency in the current "meritocratic" rat-race is that we lie by saying that "everyone can potentially become anything if they work hard enough for it", therefore subsidizing for example teaching non-basic math to kids that have neither interest or talent for it, making them also suffer through the process. We currently think of "meritocracy" as "giving everyone equal opportunities to compete" rather than "giving those that stand a chance opportunities to compete", the latter being much more efficient and still a "meritocracy" to me.
There's much better aptitude tests we could create if we were willing to throw out of the window two very important principles in the western hemisphere, namely "Everyone is equal" and "Hard work is more important than natural talent". They're very bitter pills to swallow though so I guess we just don't. The current education system is a very long, inefficient and expensive (but "fair") aptitude test, I agree on that.
Competition for resources or general adversity are the main factors that drives improvement not only in economy but in natural evolution too as far as I understand it (improvement in evolution being something like maximizing reproduction/survival efficiency in a given enviroment), a hereditary system removes or undermines those two factors and seems prone to stagnation/atrophy in the long-term.
If you told me then that we would make this "aristocratic caste" a large enough part of the population that it would still allow plenty of competition within it for higher paying positions, I would agree with you that it would be a better system than we've today but it would still feel like "meritocracy" to me, as long as "new aristocratic families" could join the club if they were more fit to compete rather than an "old aristocratic family" that somehow had a downturn in the metrics for consecutive generations. You would also have to ban marriage outside of the "caste" I guess which again also means you need it to be large enough to have enough genetic diversity.
So, on my part I conclude that hereditarism is perhaps a short-term improvement in efficiency but long-term decline in efficiency if we want to maximize results/achievements. Would be interested to see what you think of my logic here.
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