Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied in countries like the US and UK social mobility has greatly declined . If neoliberalism was anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and thinktanks were financed from the beginning by some of the worlds richest people (the US multimillionaires Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent. deti