Rory Sutherland, "Don't look for any merit in meritocracy", The Spectator, June 2017:
"...The property fetish is essential to maintaining this bourgeois delusion
of ‘earned good fortune’. I might go further and suggest that the
middle-class preoccupation with university education also serves the
same meritocratic myth, allowing people to present genetic or social
advantages as earned accomplishment. The problem with this is that a
huge amount of effort and expense is expended in creating the
self-serving delusion that inherited genetic or social capital is really
earned educational capital. Perfectly bright people who lack the
temperament or means to go through this costly signalling process are
frozen out of the job market...."
