Institutional desert, however, has nothing to do with the intrinsic worthiness of the people who get into college or who get the jobs, any more than lottery winners are people of special merit and losers are somehow less worthy. Even if we are going to reward hard work, the capacity for hard work is itself the result of natural endowments and upbringing. So neither talent nor effort, the two things that would determine rewards in the world of the meritocracy, is itself something earned. Someone who, as The Rise of the Meritocracy bluntly put it, has been repeatedly “labeled ‘dunce,’” still has
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