Once-closed professions, especially finance, law, politics, and national journalism, followed suit. Every society has an elite. Both its size and its attitude upset egalitarian social critics. It's another to have that same distribution of income rigorously based on schooling and skills. In the latter situation, those with more money will be able to claim not just that they have more money, but that they have something else, knowledge, that makes them more valuable.
Market processes simply express the intersection of diverse tastes and scarce talents.
Perhaps it' s simply too open. That stifling the talents of people born poor or female might be wrong, as well as economically foolish, was no concern of Lasch's. But the anti-meritocracy crusade isn't mostly about keeping poor girls down. In Kaus and Lind and Lasch's ideal world, Bill Gates simply would not have happened. Three years after that fateful decision, Gates dropped out of Harvard to work full time for Microsoft.