“American meritocracy,” the Yale law professor Daniel Markovits, drawing on similar research, argues, “has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.” To the extent that you can predict that disproportionately many of the children of the elite will—and disproportionately many of the children of the precariat will not—achieve a position in the top tier of wealth, power, and privilege, you have something too much like the intergenerational transmission of status that marks systems of caste. In
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