Catherine is right. We don’t operate in a pure meritocracy; but neither is it a Darwinian cesspool. I don’t see that the article points to some kind of natural law of increasing decency as you move down the spectrum of office to cubicle to janitor’s closet.
Is life unfair? Sure. Every fertilized egg is a roll of loaded genetic and sociopolitical dice. It only gets trickier from there. But it doesn’t follow from that that virtue is the sole province of the unsuccessful.