"Although Piketty favors much higher income tax rates ('virtually confiscatory tax rates have been an immense historical success'), policies that redistribute property rather than income are the heart of his program."

"These would include reparations for descendants of enslaved and colonized people, encouraging countries in the global south to tax the fortunes of nonresidents who do business there, cancellation of debts and a program he calls 'inheritance for all,' in which wealth taxes would reduce large fortunes and provide everyone with a financial cushion. He would also take a large measure of control over corporations away from their managers and shareholders and give it to employees, and create 'a system of egalitarian funding for political campaigns, the media and think tanks.'... He is well aware that changes on the scale he is proposing never happen incrementally.... Piketty doesn’t make predictions, but he treats the current system of 'hypercapitalism' as being obviously doomed. Other than socialism, the only real alternatives are authoritarianism, Chinese-style Communism or 'reactionary projects' like ISIS. ... Absent disaster, it seems possible, or even likely, that [incremental adjustments] will move economic policy in the direction Piketty would want... though to an extent that he would consider pathetically inadequate."

From Nicholas Lemann's NYT review of Thomas Piketty's new book "A Brief History of Equality."

"In 1958, Michael Young, a British sociologist, introduced the word 'meritocracy,' warning that the widespread use of I.Q. tests as a sorting device would result in..."

".... a new and deeply resented kind of hereditary class system. But that’s not how people came to understand the term. To many, it denoted an almost sacred principle: that tickets to success, formerly handed out by inheritance or luck, were now given to the deserving... In the summer of 1948, Henry Chauncey, an assistant dean [at Harvard] who became the first president of the Educational Testing Service, was stunned to read an article co-written by one of the most prominent Black academics in the country, the anthropologist Allison Davis, who argued that intelligence tests were a fraud—a way of wrapping the privileged children of the middle and upper classes in a mantle of scientifically demonstrated superiority. The tests, he and his co-author, Robert J. Havighurst, pointed out, measured only 'a very narrow range of mental activities,' and carried 'a strong cultural handicap for pupils of lower socioeconomic groups.' Chauncey, who was convinced that standardized tests represented a wondrous scientific advance, wrote in his diary about Davis and Havighurst, 'They take the extreme and, I believe, radical point of view that any test items showing different difficulties for different socioeconomic groups are inappropriate.' And: 'If ability has any relation to success in life parents in upper socioeconomic groups should have more ability than those in lower socioeconomic groups.'" 

From "Can Affirmative Action Survive?/The policy has made diversity possible. Now, after decades of debate, the Supreme Court is poised to decide its fate" by Nicholas Lemann (The New Yorker).

I put that last sentence in boldface because it's so provocative. Take a few seconds to understand exactly what he is saying. It's an idea you do not see expressed too often, because it's experienced as offensive and depressing. The words "any relation" and "more ability" make it a fairly modest assertion, but even in that weakened form, you don't hear it said these days.