Chapter 7 of 13

Cracks in the Story

About 22 minutes to read

The side door

On 12 March 2019 the United States Attorney in Boston, Andrew Lelling, stood before the press and announced charges against fifty people in what he called the largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Justice Department. Thirty-three of the accused were parents: business executives, investors, lawyers and two well-known actresses. Between 2011 and 2018, prosecutors alleged, they had paid a college admissions consultant named William "Rick" Singer more than $25 million in total. Singer had used the money to have other people sit or correct their children's entrance tests, and to bribe university athletics coaches to recruit the children as athletes in sports some of them had never played. Photographs of applicants' faces had been edited onto the bodies of real athletes. Singer called his method the "side door". The front door was getting in on merit. The back door, as he explained to clients, was giving a university so much money that it would admit your child anyway. The side door was cheaper and, he promised, guaranteed.

The case was a sensation, and it ended, eventually, with prison sentences for Singer and for many of the parents. But the most important thing about it was not what was illegal. It was what was not. Within a few years, the economists Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman had shown what the legal back door was worth. Studying applicants to the twelve most selective private universities in the United States — the eight Ivy League institutions plus Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago — they found that children from the richest one per cent of families were far more likely to be admitted than middle-class children with the same test scores. Nearly half of that advantage came from preferences for the children of alumni, and much of the rest from preferences for recruited athletes, in sports played mainly by the rich, and from the higher ratings that private-school applicants received for their extracurricular activities and character. None of it was a crime. It was simply how the front door worked.

The first book called meritocracy the theodicy of good fortune for an age that no longer believes in divine kings or noble blood: the story that tells the fortunate that they deserve their fortune and the unfortunate that they deserve theirs. It showed that the story was strongest where it was least true, and traced the damage it did: the arrogance of the winners, the humiliation of the losers, the "deaths of despair" among those the story had judged. This chapter, the first of Part III, asks what is happening to that story now that so many of its own beneficiaries can be seen leaving by the side door. Is meritocracy losing believers? What stories are being offered to replace it? And what would a story worth living by have to contain — including the story that this book's own design will need?

The word and its author

The word "meritocracy" was invented as a warning. Its author, the British sociologist Michael Young, published The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958. The book was a satire, written as if by a historian in the year 2033, who describes with approval how Britain had abolished inherited privilege and replaced it with a society in which position depended entirely on "merit", defined as intelligence plus effort, measured by tests from childhood. The result, in Young's telling, was a society more stratified and more cruel than the one it replaced. The people at the top believed that they deserved everything they had. The people at the bottom had lost even the consolation of knowing that the system was rigged against them: they had been tested and found wanting. The book ends with a revolt, and with a footnote reporting that the narrator has been killed in it.

Young lived long enough to see his satire taken as a manifesto. In June 2001, a few months before his death, he wrote an article in the Guardian with the title "Down with meritocracy". The word he had coined, he wrote, had gone into general circulation, "especially in the United States", and had recently found a prominent place in the speeches of the British prime minister, Tony Blair. "It is highly unlikely the prime minister has read the book," Young wrote, "but he has caught on to the word without realising the dangers of what he is advocating." The new meritocrats, he argued, could be "insufferably smug", and those judged to lack merit had lost every defence: "It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that."

The history of the word is a small example of something the first book found again and again. Stories that justify the farm are rarely imposed by force. They are adopted, often sincerely, by people who believe them, and they spread because they flatter those who tell them. The meritocratic story was attractive to the managing class of the late twentieth century — the 1% of the first book's title — because it explained their position as the result of their own efforts. It was also attractive to many of the 99, because it promised that their children could rise.

Losing believers

The story's hold depended on that promise being believable. In many rich countries, it has become harder to believe.

The first book cited the research of Chetty and his colleagues showing that the share of Americans who grew up to earn more than their parents had fallen from around nine in ten for those born in 1940 to around one in two for those born in the 1980s. People notice such things. In 2024 the Pew Research Center asked Americans about the "American dream" — the idea that anyone who works hard can get ahead. Just over half said it was still possible. Forty-one per cent said it had once been possible but was no longer. Among adults under fifty, only about four in ten said it was still within reach. Among lower-income Americans, fewer than four in ten did.

Confidence in the institutions that run the meritocratic sorting has fallen in step. When Gallup first asked Americans in 2015 how much confidence they had in higher education, 57 per cent expressed a great deal or quite a lot. By 2023 the figure was 36 per cent. It recovered a little in 2025 and fell again in 2026. The decline was sharpest among those who had not been to university, and it divided Americans politically more than almost any other attitude: in many countries, whether a person has a university degree has become one of the strongest predictors of how they vote. The meritocratic story had promised that education was the open road to the top. To many of those who did not take it, the road began to look like the farm's main gate, guarded by the people who had already passed through.

The beneficiaries of the story have also begun to doubt it. In The Meritocracy Trap (2019), the Yale law professor Daniel Markovits argued that meritocracy harmed even its winners, who were trapped in an exhausting competition that began with pressured childhoods and continued through punishing hours in elite professions — what he called a "rat race" that left little room for anything else. In Success and Luck (2016), the economist Robert Frank argued that luck plays a much larger part in success than successful people believe, and that the belief in pure desert makes them less willing to pay for the public goods that made their success possible. Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit (2020), which the first book quoted, was written by a Harvard professor and was read most widely, perhaps, by the very people it criticised.

None of this means that meritocracy has lost its grip. Most people in most rich countries still believe that effort should be rewarded and that positions should go to those best able to fill them, and they are right to believe it: no one wants a surgeon chosen by birth or by lot. What has cracked is not the principle that ability and effort should count, but the story that the present distribution of rewards is the result of ability and effort — that the people at the top are there because they deserve to be. And when a farm's story cracks, the first book found, something always rushes in to fill the gap.

The examination states

The cracks are not only American. Some of the most intense meritocracies in the world are in East Asia, and they show the story at full strength.

Every June, around thirteen million young people in China sit the gaokao, the national university entrance examination; in 2025 the figure was 13.35 million. Their scores largely decide which university they can attend, and with it much of their future. The first book traced the examination back to the imperial civil service tests of Chapter 6, with their locked cells and anonymised essays: open in principle, dominated in practice by families who could afford years of preparation. In South Korea, on the day of the national college entrance examination, offices open late so that traffic will not delay candidates, and for the thirty-five minutes of the English listening test the country halts take-offs and landings so that the noise of aircraft will not disturb them.

These are societies that have taken the meritocratic story more seriously than any other, and they have paid a price for it. Families spend heavily on private tutoring; children spend their evenings in cram schools. In 2021 China's government banned for-profit tutoring in core school subjects, in part on the grounds that the competition had become unbearable for families. South Korea, as Chapter 3 noted, has the lowest fertility rate in the world, and surveys of young Koreans regularly cite the cost and pressure of education as reasons not to have children. The story that positions should go to the most able, pursued to its limit, has produced a competition so exhausting that some of its participants have stopped wanting to take part — the root of the refusal described below.

What rushes in

Several stories are now competing to replace the meritocratic one. Each has followers. Each contains something true. And each, judged by the first book's evidence, carries a danger.

The story of the people against the elite. The most powerful political story of the past decade, in many countries, has been the claim that the ordinary people have been betrayed by a self-serving elite. The political scientist Cas Mudde defined populism as a "thin" ideology that divides society into two groups, "the pure people" and "the corrupt elite", and holds that politics should express the will of the people. The story contains an obvious truth, which the first book spent fourteen chapters documenting: there is an elite, and it has done very well at the expense of everyone else. But in practice the story has often been used to redirect anger away from the owners and towards other targets — immigrants, minorities, universities, "globalists" — and to elevate leaders who are themselves among the richest people in their countries. The first book called this the oldest move of all: the farm's story of the outsider who is to blame, told so that the herd will not look at the farmer.

The conspiracy story. A darker version of the same story holds that the farm is run by a secret cabal. The first book refused every such theory, including the antisemitic ones that have attached themselves to banking for centuries, because the evidence does not support them and because they always end by blaming a people rather than a system. The farm, as the first book described it, does not need a conspiracy; it runs on incentives, institutions and stories that most of its beneficiaries sincerely believe. Conspiracy theories are dangerous not only because they are false but because they make the real farm invisible. There is, however, a hopeful finding here. In a study published in Science in 2024, the psychologists Thomas Costello, Gordon Pennycook and David Rand had more than two thousand Americans who believed in a conspiracy theory discuss it with an AI system instructed to respond with evidence. Belief in the chosen theory fell by about a fifth on average, and the effect was still present two months later. People are not beyond the reach of evidence, even when they have found a story that explains their anger.

The builders' story. A third story comes from the owners of the new technologies themselves. In October 2023 the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto", a series of declarations beginning "We believe", which argued that technology and free markets were the engine of all human progress, that growth could solve every material problem, and that those who sought to slow technology down were, in effect, the enemy. Versions of this story are widespread in the technology industry: the builders make the future; everyone else should get out of their way and share in the abundance they produce. The story contains a truth — material progress has transformed human life, and the first book found that many breakouts depended on the surplus it generated. But it assigns the credit for that progress to a small class of founders and investors, and it is, in the first book's terms, a theodicy of good fortune for the owners of the machines.

The story of abundance. A fourth story, offered mainly from the political centre-left, argues that the problem of the rich countries is not too much growth but too little building: that housing, energy, transport and science have been strangled by rules that protect those who already have what they need. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance (2025) gave the story its name. It, too, contains a truth: in many rich cities the scarcity of housing has become one of the main ways in which the owners of existing assets capture the gains of everyone else. But a story of abundance says nothing, by itself, about who will own what is built.

The story of refusal. A fifth story is not a story of how society should work, but of opting out of it. In China in 2021, the phrase tang ping — "lying flat" — spread on social media, describing young people who rejected the endless competition for exams, jobs, homes and status and chose to do the minimum. The government's censors quickly moved against it. In the West, the "Great Resignation" and "quiet quitting" of 2021 and 2022 expressed something similar. The first book recorded older forms of refusal: the peasants who fled, the enslaved who worked slowly, the Luddites who broke the machines. Refusal is a real form of power; it is the exit of this book's fourth test. But a story of refusal does not, by itself, describe anything to build.

How stories change

Stories do not replace one another by accident. The last great change of story in the rich countries shows how it was done.

In 1947 a group of economists, historians and philosophers met at the Swiss resort of Mont Pèlerin, convened by Friedrich Hayek. The welfare state and the managed economy were at the height of their prestige, and the group's members, who believed both were a road to tyranny, were a small and unfashionable minority. They did not try to win the next election. They set out to change what educated people believed, over decades, through books, university departments, think tanks and journalism. One of them, Milton Friedman, later explained the strategy in the preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom: "Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

When the crisis came, in the inflation and stagnation of the 1970s, their ideas were lying around. In 1981 Ronald Reagan told Americans in his inaugural address that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem". In 1987 Margaret Thatcher told an interviewer that there was "no such thing as society", only individual men and women and families. The story of the post-war settlement — that a society owed its members a floor and that the state could provide it — gave way to a story in which markets rewarded merit and the state got in the way.

The lesson matters for this book, because Chapter 2 found that the coming decades will very likely bring crises, and that crises have recently entrenched the farm rather than levelling it. A story is not written in the crisis. It is written before, by people who keep it alive while it seems impossible, so that it is lying around when the moment comes. The first book found the same pattern in the long campaigns of the abolitionists and the Chartists. The 99's story, if there is to be one, must be prepared in the same way.

The story the design needs

The Federation hypothesis needs a story too, and it is time to examine it with the same suspicion.

The fifth element of the design is reward weighted by contribution. Every person contributes, and every person is rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, above a floor that no one falls below. At first sight this looks like the opposite of the meritocratic story, because it rewards contribution rather than credentials. Looked at more closely, it looks dangerously like the same story in a new costume.

Consider how Michael Young's satire would read if it were rewritten for the Federation. In the year 2075, a historian explains with approval how the old farm was abolished and replaced by a society in which every person's share depended on their contribution, measured fairly and openly by public systems. Those who contributed most received most. Those who contributed least — the unlucky, the unhealthy, the uncreative, the people whose care for others had never been counted — received least, above the floor. And because the system was fair, everyone knew that they deserved what they had. The people at the top believed that they had earned it. The people at the bottom had lost even the consolation of knowing that the system was against them.

That is the danger, and it is a serious one. A society that rewards contribution can still produce the arrogance of the winners and the humiliation of the losers that the first book traced to meritocracy. Under this book's fourth assumption — that creativity is the scarcest and most valuable contribution of all — it could produce something worse: an aristocracy of the creative, convinced that their gifts entitle them to more, as Chapter 3 warned. The measurers of contribution would become a new priesthood, deciding whose work counts, as Chapter 11 will have to confront.

Philosophers have argued about this problem for a long time. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), argued that the distribution of natural talents is "arbitrary from a moral point of view": no one deserves to be born clever, healthy, creative or into a family that encouraged them. On Rawls's view, inequalities in reward can be justified, but only if they work to the benefit of the least advantaged — as incentives, not as moral prizes. Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit, proposed a different emphasis, which he called "contributive justice": the idea that what people most need is not only a fair share of income but recognition — the dignity of being needed, of contributing something valued to the common good, and of being honoured for it. On Sandel's view, the meritocratic story failed not because it rewarded contribution but because it recognised only one kind: the kind that markets pay for and universities certify.

These two arguments point to how the design's story must be told if it is not to become a new theodicy. Reward for contribution must be justified as reciprocity — a fair return for what people give to a common enterprise, and an encouragement to give — not as a verdict on anyone's worth. It must recognise the contributions that markets have never priced: the care of children and the old, the maintenance of communities, the volunteer, the learner. It must acknowledge luck openly, so that those who contribute most understand how much of what they could give was given to them. And it must make the floor a right of membership, not a reward: something everyone receives because they belong, not because they have earned it.

What a story worth living by contains

What would such a story need to contain? The first book's history of breakouts offers some evidence, because every successful breakout carried a story with it, and the stories have features in common.

They named the farm honestly. "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" asked the priest John Ball in the English rising of 1381, as the first book recorded. The question did not blame a scapegoat. It asked how the division between lords and labourers had come about, and implied that it need not last.

They included everyone. The medallion that Josiah Wedgwood produced for the British campaign against the slave trade in 1787 showed a kneeling, chained African man, with the words "Am I not a man and a brother?" The power of the image lay in its claim that the person the farm treated as property belonged to the same family as the person looking at it. The stories that have lasted — liberty, equality and fraternity; the dignity of every person — have been universal.

They described a better life, not only a grievance. In January 1941, as war spread across the world, Franklin Roosevelt described four freedoms that he hoped would follow it: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. In 1942 William Beveridge's report proposed to slay what he called the five giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Both described a society people could imagine living in, and both became the stories that the post-war institutions of Chapter 6 were built to tell.

They gave dignity to work that the farm despised. The labour movement's story of the dignity of labour, of the worker as the maker of all wealth, turned the farm's account of its herd upside down.

And they were told by the people whose lives they described. The most powerful stories of breakouts were not written for the 99 by sympathetic members of the 1%; they were sung at meetings, preached in chapels, printed in workers' newspapers, chanted on marches.

The thought experiment at the centre of this book borrowed one such story. In the film Star Trek: First Contact (1996), a woman from the twenty-first century asks Captain Picard how much his starship cost. He tells her that money no longer exists in his time. "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives," he says. "We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." It is fiction, and it describes a society that its writers never explained in detail. But it has held the imagination of millions — including some of the richest owners of the new technology; Jeff Bezos, a lifelong admirer, appeared in a small role in one of the later films. Its power lies in exactly the features above: it names a world without the farm, it includes everyone, it describes a life worth living, and it gives work a meaning beyond wages.

The story the machine cannot write

The plan of this book holds that, under its assumptions, the next story cannot be written by a machine. If the wall is creativity, and AI cannot originate the genuinely new, then the story that replaces meritocracy — like every story that has broken a farm — will have to come from people. It is the one job that stays wholly human, which makes it the 99's to write.

That claim needs two qualifications, both of which the evidence supports.

The first is that, even if the machine cannot write the story, it can tell stories at a scale and with a precision that no farm has ever had. In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2025, Francesco Salvi, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Riccardo Gallotti and Robert West had about nine hundred people debate social and political questions online with either another person or GPT-4. When the AI was given basic information about its opponent — age, gender, ethnicity, political affiliation — it was more persuasive than a human opponent in most of the debates where one side clearly won. The first book described how the data farm learned to harvest attention. A farm that can tailor its story to each person, in conversation, at almost no cost, is a new kind of farm. Whoever owns the machines that tell the stories will hold a power over belief that no priesthood ever had. The Costello study shows that the same power can be used to bring people back to the evidence. Which way it is used depends on who governs the machine — the question of Chapter 10.

The second qualification concerns this book. It is drafted, as Chapter 1 disclosed, by an artificial intelligence working as a writing partner for the person who conceived the project, set its questions and settled its assumptions. A reader is entitled to ask whether that is consistent with the claim that the next story must be human. The answer this book offers is the one implied by its own assumptions. The questions, the conviction that a society without the farm is possible, and the judgement about what to keep and what to change came from a person. The machine has gathered, arranged and drafted. Whether that arrangement is a small example of the division of labour the design proposes — the machine within the wall, the human creating — or evidence against the wall altogether, the reader is in a better position than the author to judge.

The tests

This chapter tests the fifth element of the design, reward weighted by contribution, as a story — the account a Federation would give of why some receive more than others — together with the sixth, the floor, and the claim, implicit in the whole design, that a society without the farm can be held together by a story people freely believe.

Precedent. Every farm in the first book had a theodicy of good fortune, and every successful breakout carried a counter-story that named the farm, included everyone and described a better life. Meritocracy, the latest theodicy, began as a satire and became a creed. The danger that a story of reward for contribution becomes the next theodicy is real: Young's satire describes exactly that.

Evidence. Belief in the meritocratic promise and confidence in the institutions that sort people have fallen sharply in the United States, especially among the young and those without degrees. Research on luck and on recognition suggests that rewards can be justified as reciprocity and incentive without being claimed as moral desert. Experiments show that AI can be highly persuasive in conversation, and also that it can reduce belief in false stories.

Capture. The story of reward for contribution can be captured in three ways: by the most rewarded, who come to believe they deserve their position; by those who measure contribution, who become a priesthood; and by the owners of the machines that tell stories, who can shape what people believe about all of it.

Exit. A society needs a shared story, but it must also allow people to reject it. The stories of refusal — lying flat, quiet quitting — are a form of exit, and a design that punished them would be a better-run farm. The floor, given as a right of membership, is what makes refusal possible without destitution.

The ledger

What survived. Reward weighted by contribution survives, as does the floor. The evidence does not show that people reject the principle that contribution should count; it shows that they reject the claim that the present distribution reflects it. A story of reciprocity, in which people are rewarded for what they give and honoured for kinds of contribution that markets ignore, remains available.

What had to change. The design must change how it justifies reward. Contribution must be rewarded as reciprocity and encouragement, not as proof of worth, and the story must say openly that talent, health and opportunity are largely matters of luck. The definition of contribution must be broad from the start — care, maintenance of the commons, learning and creation as well as paid production — or it will reproduce the narrowness of meritocracy. The floor must be told as a right of belonging, not a consolation for failure. The gap between the most and least rewarded must be limited, so that no reward can grow large enough to become a new aristocracy; Chapter 11 will have to say how far. And the machines that tell stories must be governed in public, by the rules Chapter 10 will build, because the power to persuade at scale is a power over belief.

What remains unknown. Whether any society can hold a shared story strongly enough to sustain its institutions while leaving its members free to disbelieve it. Whether the anger released by the cracking of the meritocratic story will turn towards the farm or towards scapegoats. And whether the wall holds for stories: whether, as this book assumes, the next story that moves people must come from a human being.

Bridge: the owners who stop persuading

A farm's story exists to persuade the herd that the farm is natural, or just, or inevitable. But persuasion is costly, and it works only as long as the owners need the herd to believe. The first book found that elites who no longer needed the cooperation of the many often stopped trying to persuade them — and withdrew behind walls instead. When the meritocratic story cracks, some of the owners will try to repair it, some will offer a new one, and some will conclude that they no longer need a story at all, because they no longer need the herd. The next chapter examines that last possibility: the bunkers, private cities, purchased citizenships and worker-less machines of the owners' exit, and what history says about elites that withdrew.