I am rating this book primarily on how I think I would feel about it, had I read the description properly and not read so many other books with the same sort of information. It's a good book - well written, logical, straight to the point, pragmatic, short and to the point. The author's main messages are clear, simple, and easy to implement.

All that said, within this genre, it's not particularly original, and it's really only tangentially related to the notion of meritocracy. It really is a book much like all the others written by economists and behavioural economists, that points out how we overestimate our own abilities and underplay the role of luck, how heuristics work most of the time but sometimes fail us, how our biases affect the narratives we tell ourselves about our own lives, others, and society, etc. I pre-ordered this book when I first saw it was going to be published because I haven't read a book specifically dedicated to the ludicrous notion of meritocracy, and I was interested in learning more about why people hold on to this idea despite it being such an obvious myth. This book is not about that, really; or rather perhaps it is more accurate to say that it focuses on mainly one aspect of the possible "why", relating mainly to some of the aforementioned cognitive errors that humans tend to make. I would still like to read a book that discusses meritocracy from a more macro-scale perspective, however, as the book doesn't really explain why the notion of meritocracy is so much more pervasive in societies like the United States but not so in countries that aren't really all that culturally different. What might the X factor be? That would be an interesting book for sure.

That said, if you haven't read books such as Invisible Gorilla, The Drunkards Walk, Predictably Irrational, Thinking, Fast and Slow or other pop psychology and behavioural economics books, you will get a lot out of this book, I think, and it's a quick and entertaining read. It would be thought provoking if you haven't been exposed to some of these concepts before, and it is more economically-oriented than the others I mentioned. It also has a very simple policy proposal that makes quite a lot of sense to restructure society in a way that might make it more equal, but I will leave that to readers to discover themselves.