After the 1970s, meritocracy began to look more and more like Michael Young’s dark satire. A system intended to give each new generation an equal chance to rise created a new hereditary class structure. Educated professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further beh

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The reason these errors were not known was because economists who work with inequality were not familiar with…inequality. Inequality is the disproportion of the role of the tail—rich people were in the tails of the distribution.*8 The more inequality in the system, the more the winner-take-all effect, the more we depart from the methods of thin-tai

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