The Academia is a Meritocracy

From Mankiw’s blog today:

A student emails me from Greece to ask:

I wish to follow an academic career and I would like to teach at famous universities (like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and so forth). Do you think that this is possible?

Yes, absolutely. Academia is very much a meritocracy. Success at getting goods academic jobs is determined by research productivity, measured by such things as publications in top academic journals (such as the AER, JPE, and QJE) and citations by others in academic journals (recorded in the Social Science Citation Index and Google Scholar).

Local universities do not apply?