Mod­ern, open and dem­o­crat­ic so­ci­eties are sup­posed to re­ward brains and hard work with suc­cess, at least some­what fair­ly.

But what if fail­ure degrades brain­pow­er, cre­at­ing a vi­cious loop in which suc­cess slips in­ex­orably fur­ther away for an un­lucky group that started out worse off?

A group of re­search­ers claims this may be ex­actly what hap­pens, so rosy views on the ben­e­fits of ad­vanced so­ci­eties must be re­ap­praised as sim­plis­tic.

“Pow­er­less peo­ple of­ten achieve less be­cause lack­ing pow­er it­self fun­da­men­tally al­ters cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing,” wrote the sci­en­tists in a pa­per de­scrib­ing their re­search find­ings.