Racial, gender, religious, and sexual orientation inequality were all enormously worse 50 years ago than today, representing genuinely egalitarian and emancipatory movements that have succeeded impressively and consequentially, though not completely.

The old aristocratic system assigned advantages based on biologically inherited identity categories (class, race, gender) that were socially constructed but mechanically passed at birth, which is clearly a terrible system.

Advantage under meritocracy is distributed based on accomplishment, which depends on three inputs: natural ability, effort, and training. While natural ability and effort are more randomly distributed across the population, training is where the wealthy secure unjust advantage—the elite that reached its position through meritocratic means has unmatched willingness and resources to invest in training its children.

At Yale Law School, in typical recent years there are more children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution than in the entire bottom half of the population, demonstrating that meritocracy and equality of opportunity are not the same thing.

The fact that meritocratic inequality doesn't require cheating makes it worse, not better, because if the real problem is structural, focusing on corruption in the system (alumni preference, donor preferences, fraud) is a way the system avoids being challenged, as fixing corruption leaves the underlying structure 80-90% as unequal.

Fifty years ago, there was less economic inequality despite a less meritocratic system because the old aristocratic elite was structurally unsuited to succeed in a meritocratic system; they weren't very smart or hardworking, so when elite institutions began demanding intelligence and effort, the old families couldn't and wouldn't keep up.

John Rawls himself was more clear-eyed and skeptical about inequality than some characterizations of his work acknowledge; at a conference marking the 25th anniversary of A Theory of Justice, he came very close to saying that economic inequality had made the government of the United States illegitimate.

Desert can mean two different things: first, that those who win are virtuous/responsible for success and those who lose are vicious/responsible for failure (which meritocracy undermines by showing outcome dependence on non-responsible factors); and second, how much you are worth in market terms, which in meritocracy becomes your wage and thus your social esteem.

The solution is not to change ideology about who deserves what but to stop making market valuation so important: just as the solution to beauty-based social hierarchy is not to tell people they don't deserve their beauty but to make beauty less central to social value, we need to make market wages less central to social esteem.

Growth is one of humanity's greatest moral accomplishments because 250 years ago almost everyone was poor (80% of the world in 1800 lived on less than $2 a day in current dollars), and today only 10% do, entirely due to growth not redistribution.

Growth cannot continue because if the population grew by a factor of 10 and average incomes by a factor of 30 over 250 years, continuation of that growth rate would result in 100 billion people 30 times richer than today's average by 2500, which is physically impossible.

If growth is a moral ideal and growth will end, then a post-growth world will have an enormous imaginative hole in civilization, requiring that we build new civilization around new ideals suited for a world with past growth but no future growth.

To reject one extreme position is not to endorse its opposite; the old aristocratic system was terrible and should not be returned to, but accepting meritocracy as the best option does not follow from rejecting aristocracy.

The privilege of being inside an elite system creates structural incentives and possibilities to act in ways that promote the system's continuation, even for those who see through its structures and wish to critique it.

The English phrase 'made redundant' (when someone loses their job) literally means being declared surplus to requirements or worthless, reflecting how market inequality creates psychological injury by declaring unequal social worth, not merely unequal consumption ability.

Rich people use their money to determine what everything else happens in society and this is bad for everyone else even if everyone else has enough to eat and adequate shelter because they don't have equal power.

Elite institutions at present are sufficiently stable and self-confident that they are happy to have people inside them criticizing them aggressively, partly because they believe the criticisms will not be effective.

On the SAT college admissions test, the gap between typical test scores of children in the top 5% of income and middle-class children is approximately 250 points, while the gap between middle-class and below-poverty-line children is approximately 125 points, meaning the rich-middle-class gap is twice as large as the middle-class-poor gap.

A just social order requires that political arrangements produce sympathies and bonds among citizens intergenerationally such that all citizens can see the collective arrangement as a shared project in the common interest, and inequality begins to undermine this even if the worst off are not materially destitute.

Meritocracy emphasizes superiority (a positional value where being better than others is the point, a winner-takes-all system) rather than excellence (a threshold concept where you only need to be good enough at something to make it worth doing).