You can argue that a true meritocracy still wouldn't be ideal (as Young did), but that argument seems irrelevant -- the problem in the real world is that we pretend that we have a meritocracy, but often the person who gets the promotion or whatever isn't actually the best at their job, but is a cousin or fraternity brother of the person in charge -- the old "it isn't what you know, but who you know".

  > often the person who gets the promotion or whatever isn't actually the best at their job

it would be interesting to experiment with how people get promoted in orgs... maybe vote by co-workers? or by team members?