One might define a meritocracy as one in which the coolness signalling aspect of money is no different from the resource gathering aspect. You also raise the interesting point about the granularity of money: if IBM makes more money than the Lisper for her Lisp, does that make IBM cooler? It could.
I think you can see this in real world. Look at Linus or David of 37 Signals. They have created at least millions if not billions of dollars worth of value (uncollected).
As a quick experiment with my girlfriend:
Do you know who Linus is? => Uh, No.
Do you know what Linux is? => Yeah, it's your system.
Do you know what IBM is? => Yes, it's a computer company.
It's pretty clear to me that outside of our nerd/geek bubble at the society level those that make more money are cooler.
Talking about 'How much someone is rich' without talking about 'How someone became rich' is so plainly wrong.
You have to work in order to make money. And to make a lot of money you need to work a lot, or at least harder. To do that you need to know how to use your time well.
Understanding some meta aspects of work is very important. And sometimes studying nerd lives can give you how they manage those meta aspects which affect the actual aspects which make them money.
Everything you've said is true, except for your first sentence. What we're talking about here is money as a proxy for an actual score board. At this resolution the score board is all that matters because we can't see the game being played.
