Let’s face it, meritocracy is a myth. The game is rigged.

We cram young people’s lives with education, based upon the premise that skills and talent will provide the foundation for a successful life and career. Then, when finally free of their formal education, we encourage, direct or even lure them into further or higher education, telling them that 12 years is not enough. Then we add a large debt just for them.

When young folks are finally free to commence their careers (but not free of that debt), they discover we have rigged the game all along.

They discover that despite all of that knowledge acquired and their abilities finely honed, that is far from enough. Even for those who have started at the back of the pack, due to no more fault of their own than their “poor” choice of parents, ethnicity, possibly even gender and certainly postcode, excelling at school or college may not be enough.

I am fed up with our society’s stubborn refusal to conduct itself with anything even remotely resembling the meritocracy to which so many claim they aspire. Such assumptions typically lurk beneath the views of those that proclaim that their success is built upon their own endeavours.

For evidence that position and power are divorced from talent, we need look no further than Paul Keating’s “unrepresentative swill” in the Senate, or the House of Lords in the UK full of hereditary peers and, if Boris Johnson had his way, a bunch of cronies and rent-seekers.

Nepotism, luck and other processes that have nothing to do with talent are at play in most areas of the workforce. Of course all kinds of “strides” are claimed to have been made, generally championed by the propagandists in human resources departments that things are getting better, and we are levelling up.

However, the strides are still most likely those worn by the males who continue to be over-promoted, over-represented and over-rated in most of the top jobs.

Our acceptance of the status quo, or perhaps more optimistically, our sloth-like momentum in addressing this issue, is corrosive and undermines our productivity and creativity.