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Notes -
I feel like this accounting of winners vs losers in meritocracy is obscuring the fact that there is no 'natural' distributional outcome of meritocracy.
Meritocracy 'naturally' produces an ordinal relationship between people on whatever axis it measures, which does naturally create 'winners' and 'losers' (and those in between).
But one meritocratic system might end with the winners have 10% more resources than the losers, and another meritocratic system might end with the winners having 1,000,000X more resources than the losers. This having nothing to do with how much better the winners are than the losers, just with contingent factors about how the system itself functions.
The meritocratic ordering itself says nothing about which of those two distributional outcomes is 'correct' or 'natural' or 'right,' meritocracy measures something different from that and has nothing to say on the matter.
Which of those systems we should choose to live in, and which distributional outcomes we should want our meritocracy produces, is purely an arbitrary and political question.
If the losers demand that they get more than the winners, then that is trying to overturn meritocracy and take what is not theirs.
If the losers think that winners should get 10x as much as losers, and the winners think that winners should get 1000x as much as losers, then that's just a standard conflict of material interests between two different groups of citizens.
That's just politics.
(also, insert the standard affirmative action rant about 'recruit the kid who runs fast but has terrible form')
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