This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Batsch, speaking with Adrian Wuldrich, the author

of the new book The Aristocracy of Talent. We're going through the several thousand years

of the search for talent and the combination of honesty and philosophical thoroughness

with the same time of prejudice in everybody who is looking for talent to maintain governance

and to achieve prosperity. The blindness of everyone until the 20th century is the mother

they've had, the sister they have, and the children they want to have. That's the blindness.

And I don't know other than the fact that I'm sure we're blind to something here in the

21st century and in the 24th century they will laugh and say something like, can you imagine

they thought so well given that they were meaty-dears or something equally unexpected to

condemn us. So I'm not seeking to condemn, but Adrian, it is amazing to me now to consider

that women did not come to a man called Clevverton McColley. Given his genius for reforming

the Indian civil service, he did not see his own mother as someone to participate in decision-making.

It is absolutely extraordinary. You have these great, great reformers in the middle of the

19th century who develop extremely sophisticated theories of why we should have open competition

and why talent is, you know, if not quite democratic, is why you distributed the population

certainly doesn't just reside with the aristocracy and it doesn't occur to them to say, well,

what about them? And it doesn't occur to them to think, well, wait a minute, my wife

is quite intelligent or my daughter is quite intelligent, she should be allowed to join

in this competition. But here we have one of the paradoxes of meritocracy. There are a

lot of people who say, well, the point of meritocracy is that it's just designed by the powerful

to preserve their positions. But in fact, what meritocracy does is to open the way for

other people to use meritocratic arguments to say, what about me? So women come along

...