Those were also the days when people like Julian’s parents—an academic and a therapist—could afford a big apartment on the park, and send their kids to private schools, and expect to retire on a pension with comfort. It was a very brief moment, wedged into the middle of the last century, when it looked as if egalitarianism would become the natural state of human affairs. The rest of the history of human civilization presented incontrovertible evidence of the opposite.
