The premise of the article is that good education is available to some and not others, and that their children are more likely to also get good education, thus perpetuating the gap.
This leaves plenty of intelligent and meritorious people with poor educations and thus poor prospects, which tends to carry over to their kids. The very opposite of "meritocracy".
The article more than once calls for improving the prospects of poor, clever children.† If you missed the emphasis on intelligence, I suggest you give the article another read.
† — In Britain, where the article was published, clever is very nearly synonymous with intelligent (and more often used), by the way. Americans tend to use clever to mean something more like witty, inteventive, or even cunning.
> The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared.
> The solution is not to discourage rich people from investing in their children, but to do a lot more to help clever kids who failed to pick posh parents.
> Improving early child care in the poorest American neighbourhoods yields returns of ten to one or more; few other government investments pay off so handsomely.
Privilege breeds privilege, not by genetics but by nepotism.
Some white kid called one of the few black kids at my middle-school a nigger and they got in a fight. Somehow, only the black kid got sent to the principal's office. So the white kid walks by and taunts the black kid AGAIN at which point the black kid makes a bad decision blinded by emotion and grabs some scissors and chases the white kid down the hall. Black kid expelled and white kid... well I don't think anything happened to that POS.
I've tutored them so I know, these rich kids with helicopter moms are hands down working harder than everybody else. They're taking AP courses they're not even interested in because that's their work ethic, they play sports and it's assumed they should get at least a partial scholarship. By senior year in high school they're ahead of their peers in life skills, emotional maturity, work ethic and academics.
The parents raising these kids to be "bred for success" aren't leaving it up to the chance that they can cash in on nepotism, they teach these kids to work hard.
I actually read the goddamn article so let me restate it for you here to make it clear for you: The new advantage in our economy is essentially education, although the article uses the 5 dollar word "intellectual capital". Because the amount of "intellectual capital" a person has is closely tied to the amount of actual capital their parents have, we are seeing increasing inequality on this front. Rich parents are able to provide stimulation and training for their child from birth by way of having more free time because they can afford it, or by having various tutors for their child. When their child reaches school, rich people get better schooling for their children due to America's insane school funding paradigm. Finally, when those children reach college, rich people are actually able to afford to send their children to good institutions, and receive preferential admission for their "legacy students".
None of the above points to society filtering itself on some sort of intrinsic "merit" that a person is born with, leading to some grand meritocracy. Rather it points to a new type of capital being important in our system, and wealthy people being able to cultivate it for their children. Improving prospects for disadvantaged kids might just make them "smart", not that they are born smart and just held back by poverty.
TL;DR: Two kids of equal potential will have their economic circumstances dictate just how "smart" they become, and in an economy predicated on being "smart" this will lead to inequality. America should work to allow both children to become as "smart" as they possibly can be.