Our challenge is this: how do we marry merit with opportunity?
For middle-class and affluent whites, overachieving Asian-Americans pose thorny questions about privilege and power, merit and opportunity.
But we should not mock psychological concepts, nor the moral story of merit and opportunity they can tell.
"We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent," Mr. Marx says.
In the past twenty years, Italy's problems have remained depressingly familiar: a stagnating economy, an enormous national debt, high unemployment, a large, inefficient bureaucracy, and a political and educational system that discourages initiative, innovation, merit, and opportunity.
He says he wants to restore the country to the kind of capitalism that existed before Obama began destroying it – a society based on merit and opportunity, where one person's success (implicitly his own) is to the benefit of everybody else.
"We have to respect the players that are here because they all merit the opportunity to represent Nigeria.
A merit-based, opportunity society gathers and creates a citizenry that pioneers, that invents, that builds and creates.
"A merit-based opportunity society is one that gathers and creates a citizenry of pioneers — a people who invent, who build, who create," Mr. Romney said.
As reasonable as Romney's endorsement of a "merit-based opportunity society" may appear on the surface, what he is really calling for is a society that rewards hard-hearted, relentless competitors and disregards the losers.
Joe Cole has grown used to the unnerving feeling of looking over his shoulder whenever the substitutes' board goes up at Chelsea, but the midfielder believes he merits the opportunity to finish a frustrating season in style.
