In other realms, too, Young saw an emerging cohort of mercantile meritocrats who “can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side. So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves.”50 Inequality rose as salaries and fees soared and stock-option schemes proliferated; and the carapace of “merit,” Young argued, had only
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