Without doubt, attaining financial success in an economic meritocracy, without the benefit of inheritance or advantages of birth, provided a measure of personal validation that the nobleman of old, who had been given his money and his castle by his father, had never experienced. But at the same time, financial failure became associated with a sense of shame that the peasant of old, denied all chances in life, had also, and more happily, been spared. The question of why, if one was in any way good, clever or able, one was still poor became more acute and painful for the unsuccessful to have to
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