Privileged people born into rich families, like Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, love to gush about meritocracy, ‘aspiration’ and hard work so as to distract attention from their privilege. Margaret Thatcher loved to play up her humble grocer’s daughter origins, while keeping silent on the benefits of marrying a millionaire ex-public school boy who funded her training as a barrister and bought two houses for them, one of them in Chelsea.

When people think about markets, they usually focus on individual transactions and contracts, ignoring the social context and the history of the situation, or who is doing the transactions; and they usually focus on markets for products, not job markets. There are just buyers and sellers of apples or oranges, who freely agree to contract with one another; if they can agree on a price, the buyer hands over the money for the goods. They’re free adults freely exchanging, and so it looks like a level playing field. Even if the seller is richer than the buyer, that hardly seems relevant to understanding how markets work. And what’s true of the market for apples and oranges must be true of all markets, mustn’t it? Economics textbooks invariably start with such stories.

But if it’s a job market, this picture is likely to be seriously misleading. As we’ve already seen, young jobseekers enter the labour market already unequal, as an indirect result of the effects of the unequal division of labour on their parents. The two most important facts in sociology are, first, that we are all profoundly shaped by our social environments, and second, that we don’t get to choose our parents or the environment in which our early, most formative years are spent.

To be sure, some children will do better or worse than their parents, perhaps because they are more or less able or motivated than them. Some will be luckier in relation to the local educational system and labour market they encounter: some will grow up in major cities with diverse job opportunities, some in small towns with a limited and declining range of jobs.