My own modest proposal: designer babies for the poor

I’ve just written an essay for Quadrant, an Australian periodical, in which I propose a controversial solution to the problem of entrenched inequality: free designer babies for the poor. Yes, yes, I know. It sounds like a 21st-century version of Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ and, at first, I rejected it as being too far-fetched. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make.

So how did I get there? The essay starts by discussing one of the long-term problems with meritocracy, which is that it ends up replacing one hereditary elite with another. This shortcoming was first pointed out by my father, who invented the word ‘meritocracy’ in the 1950s to describe the sort of society he thought Britain was becoming. He intended it to be a term of opprobrium rather than approval and it was a source of great irritation to him that it was taken up by politicians like Tony Blair to denote something desirable.