The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs

by James Bloodworth

It is fashionable to emit a liberal sneer at the flagrant racism of the American justice system, but according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, there is now greater disproportionality in the number of black people in prisons in the UK than in the US.

‘a society in which it was generally assumed that a high income was proof of merit and a low income of the lack of it … would probably be much more unbearable [to unsuccessful people] than the one in which it was frankly recognised that there was no necessary connection’.