Under the sway of the meritocratic ideal, many people, these days, are committed to a picture of how the hierarchies of money and status in our world should be organized. They are against (of course!) the old ways of allocating status through birth; and think that jobs should go not to people who have connections but to the best qualified, regardless of class . . . or, for that matter, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or a whole host of other irrelevant identities. Occasionally, they’ll allow for exceptions: for positive discrimination, say, to help undo the effects of previous
...more
