A Very Fairly Unfair Story

 

A Very Fairly Unfair Story Development, we’re told, is about achievement. In reality, it’s often a story of inheritance—of who began life with a head start and who was asked to treat disadvantage as character-building. When a child’s future depends less on effort than on family, caste, gender, or postcode, inequality doesn’t emerge—it arrives fully unpacked, with a welcome mat, in early childhood. Some children begin life with good schools, healthcare, nutrition, stable homes, and the assurance that one setback will not become a life sentence. Others begin with patchy schooling, unfair incomes, and the kind of adversity that gets politely filed under ‘background conditions.’ That is where the deeper unfairness lies. Not simply in unequal incomes or unequal outcomes, but in inequality of opportunity itself: in the unequal distribution of the conditions that allow effort to count in the first place. By the time society begins measuring merit, it has already spent years measuring privilege. That early gap does not stay in childhood. It follows people into educational attainment, labour-market outcomes, social mobility, and even the freedom to take risks or recover from failure. Growth, in such a setting, tends to reward those already best placed to benefit from it, while everyone else is praised for resilience and left to bridge structural deficits with personal effort. Meritocracy survives, of course, but often in the same way family businesses do: inherited, protected, and presented as self-made. To think seriously about development, then, it is not enough to ask how much a society has grown. The more uncomfortable question is who was given a fair chance to grow at all. Societies like to celebrate outcomes at the finish line; their real moral test lies much earlier, in the starting line they prefer not to see.