Ah, yes, Packard. The Wilson Brian Key of the 1950s. 1960-ish pop sociology at its pappiest.
For the record, nearly everything he wrote about in Hidden Persuaders and its sequels was old hat (by decades) when he wrote about it and Shocked America. Like the current flap over googly eyes on cereal boxes, the marketing industry has known and used the technique for decades. The pointy heads outside the industry just noticed and gosh, Shocked America again.
Irrelevant babble. Sorry.
Ditto. Got something other than dorm-room radicalism to bring to this discussion? At least something longer than bumper stickers?
It beats a yellow submarine.
Besides the Mars siblings and the Walton siblings, who do you think would not be on the list if they had not inherited wealth? Coming from a well off family is not the same as inheriting wealth. The Koch brothers are the only ones who built on an inheritance and there were thousands of companies of comparable size in 1967 and they are the only ones who built it into a fortune in the tens of billions.
So now the problem is not inheritances right now, but inheritances 30 years ago? That is not what was argued and does not fit the data.
If you spend half your life building investment capital, you are going to be far behind the curve of those who start adult life with capital, even if it is modest. The gap between those who start their career with little or no accumulated wealth and those who have that first pile of chips - say, about $1M right now, proportional over time - is much wider than between that paltry million and those who have piles of millions to start.
An idiot could squander $100M and have little to show for it at 40. A more skilled person with $1M could be a billionaire at 40. But a person with $10-50k in net worth is going to need extra decades just to get to that first million.
Harrison Bergeron is a nutcase story that more or less extrapolates an extreme idea of civil rights being regulated based on formal ability assessments with an eye to eliminating all forms of meritocracy. In other words, the smarter and more abled you are, the more restrictions should be placed on you.
In real life, I can understand where the idea of our society being a meritocracy is coming from, but it’s a far cry from a formalized version of it.
As is obvious, education and skills are important in life, but social connections are arguably as important. It’s not like one can go to the library, read a bit, gain a KSA (knowledge, skill, or ability), go to the local Merit Evaluation Center to get the new ability vetted, and walk out with a rank up pip that grants X collection of additional rights.
“I just my card indicating that my knowledge of French Renaissance painters has increased from Level 2 (intermediate beginner) to Level 3 (intermediate). My votes are now worth 10% more than they were before, and I am now am allowed to carry a 38 caliber handgun rather than only a 22. Next month, I’m going to see if I can increase my sewing skills enough to increase my de jure minimum wage from $10.50 an hour to $11.50 an hour. A Level 4 Sewing certificate should do it. Maybe I’ll also try for a Level 10 Jumping-Jacks rank ribbon”
It’s remarkable how Packard evaluates his subjects by the companies they belong to. It was either in this book or in The Pyramid Climbers where, in making a point, he mentioned the work of a Dr. Somebody Cuff, “a psychologist with Reed, Cuff.” Apparently your education and research meant nothing if you weren’t “with” an important firm of some kind.
I’ve never been able to find out exactly what Reed, Cuff was; presumably it was some kind of executive search firm.
Apparently the OP is using the term “meritocracy” to describe our current social structure based on level of advancement within the various education and professional institutional hierarchies we are a part of.