Chapter 12 of 14

The Invisible Fence: Media, Education and the Story of Merit

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Three doors

On 12 March 2019, federal prosecutors in Boston announced charges against some fifty people in what the FBI had code-named Operation Varsity Blues. At the centre of the case was a college admissions consultant named William "Rick" Singer. Over several years, according to prosecutors, wealthy parents had paid Singer around twenty-five million dollars in total to get their children into elite American universities by fraud. Some paid to have a proctor correct their children's answers on college entrance exams. Others paid to have their children falsely presented as recruited athletes — in sports some of them did not play — with bribes passed to coaches who used their influence with admissions offices. Among the parents charged were two well-known actresses and a number of prominent business executives and lawyers. Several of them went to prison, though most for only a few weeks or months.

What made the case so revealing was not the fraud itself, but the way Singer explained it to one of his clients, in a phone call recorded by the FBI. There was, he said, a front door to elite colleges: getting in on your own. There was a back door: giving a very large donation to the university, which cost far more. And he had created a "side door", which was cheaper than the back door and more certain than the front.

The scandal was about the side door, which was illegal. But Singer's description raised awkward questions about the other two. The back door — admission eased by large donations — was entirely legal. And the front door, it turned out on closer inspection, was much easier to walk through for some applicants than for others.

The previous chapter ended with Michael Young's warning about meritocracy: that a society which sorted people by measured ability would produce an elite convinced that it deserved its position, and a lower class with no grounds for complaint. In Chapter 1, I promised to argue that meritocracy plays in our own age the role that divine right played in the age of kings. This chapter makes that argument. It is about the fence that people build in their own heads, and about the institutions — schools, universities, newspapers and broadcasters — that help to build it.

The cheapest fence

We have met the idea of this chapter many times already. In Chapter 1, David Hume observed that since force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. The pharaohs had their priests; Hammurabi his stele; the medieval Church its three orders; the Mughals their karma and caste; the Victorians their political economy and self-help. Every farm in this book has needed a story, and every story has needed tellers.

In the modern world, the tellers are organised on an industrial scale. Universal compulsory schooling, which most rich countries introduced in the late nineteenth century, means that nearly everyone spends a decade or more of their childhood inside an institution that, among many other things, teaches them how society works and where they fit in it. Mass media — newspapers, then radio and television, and now the internet — mean that nearly everyone receives, every day, a continuous account of the world selected and framed by a relatively small number of organisations. Neither of these institutions was created to serve the farm, and both have often been instruments of breakout. But both are also, inevitably, places where the farm's story is told.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in a fascist prison in the late 1920s and 1930s, gave this phenomenon a name that has been used ever since: hegemony. A ruling class, Gramsci argued, rules most securely not by force but by consent — by making its own view of the world appear to be simply "common sense", shared by everyone, including those it disadvantages. The most effective fence is the one people do not see as a fence at all.

The schoolroom and the state

Mass schooling was born with many purposes, and it is worth being fair to them. Reformers wanted children to be able to read the Bible, to become informed citizens, to escape the mills and the fields, to rise in the world. But states that built school systems also had purposes of their own, and they were often frank about them.

In 1763, Frederick the Great of Prussia issued a General School Regulation requiring the children of his rural subjects to attend school. Prussian schooling, much admired and imitated in the nineteenth century, aimed to produce literate, pious and loyal subjects and soldiers; the popular modern claim that it was designed specifically to produce obedient factory workers is an oversimplification, since Prussia had few factories in 1763, but obedience to authority was certainly part of the curriculum. In the United States, Horace Mann, the great champion of the "common school" in Massachusetts, argued in the 1840s that universal public education would be "the great equalizer of the conditions of men" — and also that it would teach the habits of order and self-restraint that a growing industrial society required.

In the empires, schooling was used to create shepherds. In 1835 the British historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote a memorandum on education in India, arguing that the colonial government should fund education in English rather than in Indian languages. Its purpose, he wrote, was to form "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect" — a class who could act as interpreters between the British and the millions they governed. It is as clear a statement as exists anywhere of the use of education to recruit the 1% of a farm. In the United States and Canada, boarding schools for Native American and Indigenous children, many run by churches with government funding, set out to strip children of their languages and cultures. Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879, summarised the philosophy in a speech in 1892: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." Thousands of children died in these schools in the United States and Canada, and investigations into their histories continue.

None of this means that mass education was simply a tool of control. Literacy, as we will see, was also one of the most powerful weapons the 99% ever acquired. But schools have always taught more than reading and arithmetic. They have taught children who they are, what they may hope for, and to whom they owe obedience.

The front door

Start with education, and with the front door.

In 2017, the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues published a study based on the anonymised tax records of millions of American students and their parents. They found that at thirty-eight of the most selective colleges in the United States, including five of the eight Ivy League universities, more students came from families in the top one per cent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom sixty per cent. In 2023, Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman looked more closely at the twelve "Ivy-Plus" colleges — the Ivy League plus Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago. They found that, among applicants with the same test scores, children from the richest one per cent of families were, on their estimates, more than twice as likely to be admitted as children from middle-class families. Nearly half of that advantage came from preferences for the children of alumni — "legacy" admissions; around a quarter came from the recruitment of athletes, often in sports such as rowing, fencing and squash that are played mostly at wealthy schools; and much of the rest from higher ratings for "non-academic" qualities such as extracurricular activities and personal recommendations, which also favour the children of the rich.

Evidence from the lawsuit brought against Harvard by Students for Fair Admissions, which went to trial in 2018, pointed in the same direction. An analysis by the economists Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ransom found that over forty per cent of the white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of faculty or staff, or on a "dean's interest list" of applicants connected to donors — and that most of them would probably have been rejected without that status.

Britain's version of the front door runs through private schools and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 2019, a report by the Sutton Trust and the government's Social Mobility Commission, Elitist Britain, found that while only seven per cent of the British population had attended private schools, 65 per cent of senior judges, 59 per cent of the permanent secretaries who head government departments, 57 per cent of the members of the House of Lords and 44 per cent of newspaper columnists had done so. Seventy-one per cent of senior judges had graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. Eton College alone, founded by Henry VI in 1440 to educate poor scholars, has produced twenty British prime ministers.

None of this means that the people who pass through these institutions are not talented or hard-working. Most of them are both. The point is that talent and hard work are distributed across the whole population, while the opportunities to develop them, display them and have them recognised are not.

Reproduction

Why does education, which is supposed to open opportunity to all, so often reproduce the existing hierarchy? Sociologists have offered several answers.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1970), written with Jean-Claude Passeron, argued that schools reward a particular kind of "cultural capital": familiarity with high culture, a certain way of speaking and writing, ease in the company of teachers and examiners, a sense that the world of learning belongs to you. Children from educated, prosperous families acquire this capital at home, without trying. Children from working-class families must acquire it at school, against the grain of their upbringing — and many do not. The school then rewards the children who already have it, and certifies their success as individual merit. In this way, Bourdieu argued, education converts social inheritance into apparent personal achievement, and makes the result seem fair.

The American economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), proposed what they called the "correspondence principle". The social relations of the school, they argued, mirror those of the workplace. Schools for children destined for routine jobs emphasise punctuality, obedience and following rules; schools for children destined for management emphasise initiative, self-direction and leadership. Children learn not only what is in the curriculum but what kind of worker they are expected to become. Their argument has been criticised as too mechanical, and there are many exceptions. But anyone who has compared the ethos of an elite private school with that of an overstretched state school in a poor district will recognise something in it.

The legal scholar Daniel Markovits, in The Meritocracy Trap (2019), added a twist. The modern elite, he argued, is not idle; it works extremely hard, and it invests enormous sums — in tutoring, enrichment, test preparation and private schools — in the education of its children. The children who emerge are genuinely, measurably more skilled. That is precisely what makes meritocracy such an effective mechanism for passing advantage from one generation to the next: the inheritance is no longer an estate but a set of qualifications, and qualifications look earned.

How the shepherds are chosen

The universities do not only select the elite. They feed it into the institutions that run the modern farm.

The sociologist Lauren Rivera spent years studying how the most prestigious American investment banks, management consultancies and law firms recruit new staff, and published her findings in Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (2015). She found that these firms concentrated their recruitment on a short list of "core" universities, largely ignoring applicants from elsewhere, however able. In interviews, evaluators placed great weight on "cultural fit" — which in practice often meant shared experiences and leisure pursuits, such as particular sports, travel and hobbies, that were far more common among the children of the wealthy. The firms were not, for the most part, consciously seeking to exclude anyone. They were looking for people like themselves.

Those firms, in turn, supply the managers, advisers and financiers who run the institutions described in the last two chapters: the banks, the corporations, the central banks, the regulators, the think tanks and, increasingly, the governments. Here are the modern shepherds — the 1% of this book's title — and here is how they are recruited: through a pipeline that begins with expensive schooling, passes through a handful of elite universities, and ends in a small number of firms whose employees move easily between the private sector and the state.

What makes this pipeline different from those of earlier farms is that it is presented, and largely experienced by those inside it, as a fair competition. The Egyptian scribe of Chapter 2 learned from his schoolbooks that he was superior to the farmer. The modern graduate learns something subtler: that his position is the result of his own effort and ability, and that others could have achieved the same if they had tried as hard. The Chinese examination system of Chapter 6, with its locked cells and anonymised essays, was a remarkably similar machine: open in principle, dominated in practice by those who could afford the years of preparation, and justified by the belief that office went to the worthy.

The theodicy of good fortune

Why does the belief in merit matter so much?

Max Weber, whose types of legitimate authority we met in Chapter 3, made an observation in 1915 that goes to the heart of this book. "The fortunate is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate," he wrote. "Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he 'deserves' it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others." Weber called the religious versions of this need a "theodicy of good fortune": a doctrine that explains why the lucky are lucky and the unlucky are not.

Every farm in this book has had its theodicy. The divine king deserved his throne because the gods had chosen him. The noble deserved his estate because God had ordered society in three ranks. The Brahmin deserved his status because of his deeds in previous lives. The plantation owner deserved his slaves because of the supposed inferiority of their race. The industrialist deserved his fortune because he was the fittest.

Meritocracy is the theodicy of good fortune for an age that no longer believes in divine kings or noble blood. It shares one crucial feature with the doctrine of karma that we examined in Chapter 6: it locates the cause of a person's position in that person's own past actions. If you are at the top, you earned it. If you are at the bottom, you did not. The philosopher Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit (2020), argued that this belief has corrosive effects in both directions. It makes the successful arrogant, convinced that they owe nothing to luck or to others. And it makes the unsuccessful feel humiliated, because in a meritocracy failure is not misfortune but a verdict on one's worth.

The evidence suggests that the belief is strongest precisely where it is least justified. Economists have documented what Alan Krueger, chairing the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2012, named the "Great Gatsby curve": across rich countries, those with greater income inequality tend to have lower intergenerational mobility — that is, children's incomes are more closely tied to their parents'. The United States and the United Kingdom are among the most unequal rich countries and among the least mobile; the Nordic countries are among the most equal and the most mobile. Yet the sociologist Jonathan Mijs, analysing surveys across dozens of countries, found that belief in meritocracy tends to be stronger, not weaker, in more unequal societies. The higher the fence, it seems, the more people believe that those on the other side climbed over it by their own efforts.

In the United States, the chance that a child would grow up to earn more than his or her parents fell, according to Chetty and his colleagues, from around ninety per cent for children born in 1940 to around fifty per cent for children born in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented a rise in what they called "deaths of despair" — deaths from suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol-related disease — among middle-aged Americans without a university degree, which helped to drive a fall in American life expectancy even before the Covid-19 pandemic. The people at the bottom of the meritocracy were not merely poorer. They were dying.

The invisible government

Alongside the school stands the second great institution of the invisible fence: the media.

In 1922, the American journalist Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion, a study of how people form their picture of a world they cannot see directly. The "pictures in our heads", he argued, are formed largely by what newspapers choose to report and how they report it, and the shaping of public opinion had become a deliberate art. He used a phrase for it that would become famous: the "manufacture of consent".

Six years later, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud who had worked on the American government's propaganda effort during the First World War and went on to become one of the founders of the public relations industry, published a book called simply Propaganda. Its opening lines are among the most candid ever written about the subject. "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society," Bernays wrote. "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." Bernays meant it as a description of his profession and, largely, as a defence of it. In 1929, working for the American Tobacco Company, he arranged for young women to march in New York's Easter Parade smoking cigarettes, which he publicised as "torches of freedom", to break the taboo against women smoking in public.

Nearly sixty years later, the economist Edward Herman and the linguist Noam Chomsky borrowed Lippmann's phrase for the title of Manufacturing Consent (1988), a study of the American news media. They proposed a "propaganda model" consisting of five "filters" through which news passes before it reaches the public: the ownership of the media by large, profit-seeking corporations and wealthy individuals; the dependence of the media on advertising revenue; the reliance of journalists on official and corporate sources; the "flak" — organised criticism, lawsuits and pressure — directed at media that step out of line; and, at the time, anti-communism as a national ideology. Their crucial point, often misunderstood, was that this system required no conspiracy. Editors and journalists did not need to be told what to write. The filters operated through ordinary market forces and professional norms, selecting for people and stories that fitted, and against those that did not.

Herman and Chomsky's model has been criticised for underestimating the diversity and independence of the press, and for ignoring the many occasions on which mainstream media have exposed the powerful — from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate to the investigations into the 2008 financial crisis cited in Chapter 10. Those occasions are real, and they matter. But some of the model's elements are hard to dispute. Ownership of the media in many countries is highly concentrated. In 2018, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owned or operated around two hundred local television stations in the United States, required its local news anchors to read an identical script warning viewers about "fake stories" in other media; a video montage of dozens of anchors reciting the same words in unison was watched by millions. It was not a secret. It was simply a vivid demonstration of who decides what local news says.

Whose opinions count?

The invisible fence matters because, in a democracy, opinion is supposed to rule. But does it?

In 2014, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page published a study that compared nearly eighteen hundred policy questions in the United States, between 1981 and 2002, with surveys of what different groups of Americans wanted. They found that the preferences of economic elites and of organised interest groups, especially business groups, had a substantial independent influence on whether a policy was adopted, while the preferences of average citizens, once those of elites were taken into account, appeared to have little or none. Their conclusion was stark: the United States, they suggested, looked less like a majoritarian democracy than a system of "economic elite domination". The study has been criticised on methodological grounds; other researchers have argued that the preferences of the rich and the middle class coincide so often that their influence is hard to separate. But it put numbers on a suspicion that many people already had.

If Gilens and Page are even partly right, the invisible fence works in two directions. It shapes what the 99% believe. And when what they believe differs from what those at the top want, it often does not matter very much.

Doubt is our product

The invisible fence is not only built by schools and newspapers. It is also built by experts — and expertise can be bought.

In 1969, an executive at the tobacco company Brown & Williamson wrote an internal memo, later made public in litigation, about how the industry should respond to the growing scientific evidence that smoking caused cancer. "Doubt is our product," he wrote, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public." For decades, the tobacco industry funded research, scientists and public-relations campaigns whose purpose was not to prove that smoking was safe but to persuade the public and policymakers that the question was still open. The historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in Merchants of Doubt (2010), showed how some of the same scientists and the same techniques were later deployed to cast doubt on the science of acid rain, the ozone layer and climate change. In 2023, a study published in Science by Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf and Oreskes found that scientists working for the oil company Exxon had, from the late 1970s onwards, produced projections of global warming that were remarkably accurate — while the company publicly emphasised the uncertainty of climate science for decades.

The think tanks founded in the wake of the Powell memo, described in Chapter 11, played a similar role across economic and social policy. Many of them do serious research. But they are funded, overwhelmingly, by wealthy individuals, foundations and corporations, and their output tends to reflect the interests of their funders. A policy debate in which one side can pay for a permanent army of researchers, media spokespeople and lobbyists, and the other cannot, is not a fair contest of ideas — even when nobody on either side is lying.

This, too, is an old pattern in new form. The temple scribes of Uruk, the Brahmin authors of the law codes, the Confucian commentators and the medieval theologians were the experts of their day, and their expertise was supported by the institutions whose authority they upheld. The modern expert is far more independent than any of them, and the scientific method has a power to correct error that no earlier body of knowledge possessed. But the question that matters for the farm is the one it has always been: who pays for the knowledge, and whose questions does it answer?

The story at work

The story of merit is told in many places, but nowhere more consistently than in the language of everyday economic life. A worker is "unskilled"; a chief executive is a "wealth creator". A person who receives a public benefit is "dependent"; a company that receives a public subsidy is "investing". The poor make "bad choices"; the rich make "bold bets". A cut in taxes on the rich is "relief"; a rise in the minimum wage is a "burden on business".

None of this vocabulary is false in every case, and much of it is used without any intention to mislead. That is exactly how hegemony, in Gramsci's sense, works. The words carry the story for us. And the story, as always, makes the farm look like the natural order of things: the reward of the deserving, the price of the undeserving, the way the world simply is.

There is a further, subtler effect. Because the meritocracy recruits its shepherds from the brightest children of every class, it removes from the 99% many of the people who might otherwise have become its leaders. The Chartists, the Ten Hours campaigners and the early trade unionists of Chapter 9 were led, very often, by self-educated working men and women of great ability who had no way out of their class. Today, a gifted child from a poor family is more likely to be recruited — through scholarships and selective schools — into the professional elite. That is a real gain for the individual, and a society that blocked such mobility would be worse. But it means that the meritocracy, like the Ottoman devşirme of Chapter 6, takes the most capable members of the herd and makes them into shepherds. Michael Young saw this clearly in 1958. A lower class stripped of its natural leaders, he warned, would be a class without a voice.

Breakouts

Education and the media have been instruments of the farm. They have also been among the most powerful instruments of breakout in history.

The struggle for universal literacy was a breakout. In the early nineteenth century, the British government taxed newspapers through stamp duties that kept them expensive and largely out of reach of working people — the "taxes on knowledge". Radical publishers produced cheap "unstamped" papers in defiance of the law, and hundreds of them were imprisoned for it. The Chartist Northern Star reached a circulation in the tens of thousands, and each copy was read aloud to many more. The stamp duty on newspapers was abolished in 1855, and the duty on paper in 1861. When working men won the vote in 1867, the Liberal politician Robert Lowe is remembered as concluding that "we must educate our masters" — and the Education Act of 1870 laid the foundations of universal elementary schooling in England. Workers built their own institutions of learning: mechanics' institutes, co-operative libraries, the Workers' Educational Association founded in 1903, Ruskin College in Oxford, founded in 1899 for working-class adults.

In Brazil in the early 1960s, the educator Paulo Freire developed a method of teaching adult literacy that began from the words and problems of the learners' own lives, and that treated learning to read as part of learning to understand, and change, one's situation. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), he contrasted this with what he called the "banking" model of education, in which knowledge is deposited by teachers into passive students. Freire was imprisoned and exiled after the military coup of 1964. His ideas have shaped radical education movements around the world.

The opening of higher education has been a breakout too. The great expansion of universities after the Second World War, free tuition in much of Europe, the founding of Britain's Open University in 1969 to teach adults at a distance — all of these widened the front door. In recent years, a number of American universities have abandoned legacy admissions, and some states, including Colorado in 2021 and California in 2024, have banned them at some or all of their colleges.

And the media have been broken open again and again: by the radical press of the nineteenth century, by the underground newspapers of the 1960s, by community radio and, most dramatically, by the internet, which for a while seemed to promise that anyone could speak to everyone without passing through the filters of ownership and advertising. As the next chapter will show, that promise has turned out to be far more complicated.

What the invisible fence teaches

The fence in this chapter is internal: the belief that the existing order is fair, that those at the top deserve their position and those at the bottom deserve theirs. It is built in schools, in universities and in the media, and it is the cheapest fence of all, because those inside it maintain it themselves.

The feed is less obvious here, but it is real: the advantages that wealthy families buy for their children through private schooling, tutoring, legacy preferences and connections, which convert today's income into tomorrow's positions — and the political influence that allows the preferences of the rich to shape policy far more than the preferences of everyone else.

The shepherds are recruited through the meritocratic pipeline — elite schools, elite universities, elite firms — and trained to believe that they have earned their place. The tellers of the story are the journalists, editors, academics and public-relations professionals of Lippmann's and Bernays's "invisible government".

The story is merit: the modern theodicy of good fortune, which performs for our age the work that divine right performed for the kings of Babylon and the doctrine of karma performed in the caste order. Like them, it is not simply false. Effort and ability matter. But like them, it makes an arrangement that is largely inherited appear to be deserved.

The breakouts are the struggles for literacy and free schooling, for a free and independent press, for open universities and the end of hereditary privilege in admissions, and for an education that, in Freire's sense, helps people to understand and change their world rather than to accept their place in it.

Bridge: a poverty of attention

In 1971, the economist and computer scientist Herbert Simon, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Economics, made an observation about the coming information age. In an information-rich world, he wrote, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Three decades later, a handful of companies discovered how to harvest that scarce resource on a scale that no newspaper baron or broadcaster had ever imagined. They built platforms that billions of people used every day, free of charge, and sold their users' attention — and the data generated by their every click — to advertisers. Their founders became some of the richest people in history. In the next chapter we enter the newest field of the farm: the data farm of the digital age, where attention is a crop, workers are managed by algorithms, and the 0.01% has grown richer and faster than ever before.