Very true. And thanks for flagging up the new Markovitz and Sandel books on meritocracy. In a free society, it's impossible to prevent parents passing on advantage -- even if inheritance or worldly goods is prohibited. The only way is what happened in the Soviet Union. So maybe Lenin was right after all and the pendulum is swinging back,,,

These thoughts were initiated by reading that University of London's SOAS failed to admit a single white working class student in 2017. In the USSR there was positive discrimination for many decades -- which of course caused much bitterness and hamstrung progress. In the end some kind of modus operandi has been worked out -- too bad the whole thing then collapsed.