5/8: The Meritocratic Sunak Government in turmoil: The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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5/8: The Meritocratic Sunak Government in turmoil: The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge
https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern-World/dp/B0B4PWWDJ9/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1655594403&sr=1-1
In The Aristocracy of Talent, esteemed journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge traces the history of meritocracy forged by the politicians and officials who introduced the revolutionary principle of open competition, the psychologists who devised methods for measuring natural mental abilities, and the educationalists who built ladders of educational opportunity. He looks outside western cultures and shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocratic system.
Wooldridge also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we should call for its renewal.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:08.4 | Here's John Bachelorette. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm John Bachelorette speaking with Adrian Woldridge, who is |
| 0:14.4 | a badger for the economist magazine, but as author, the new book, |
| 0:18.5 | The Aristocracy of Talent, how meritocracy made the modern world. |
| 0:23.2 | Adrian's book presents the case for who is best, who to |
| 0:28.6 | who is wisest, who is most prosperous, who is a leader for |
| 0:33.4 | 2500 years from Plato all the way to the 20th century, the 21st century. |
| 0:39.8 | And yet in the 21st century, starting in the 20th, in the middle of the 20th, |
| 0:45.3 | there are doubts about meritocracy, about how it's rendered. |
| 0:49.7 | And that comes to the invention of the word meritocrat or meritocracy, |
| 0:55.2 | a man by the name of young, writes a book in the middle of the 19th century |
| 1:00.1 | that raises these questions, these doubts. |
| 1:03.0 | And we need to begin there because as Adrian |
| 1:05.5 | explocates, this is a criticism that enjoys an America |
| 1:10.2 | way would say bipartisanship. |
| 1:12.8 | They write at the left, the center, everybody has doubts. |
| 1:16.8 | And so we go to Michael Young, 1958, meritocracy. |
| 1:21.9 | Adrian, what are Michael Young's doubts in the middle of the 20th century, |
| 1:26.3 | and then we'll examine the rest of the 20th century? |
| 1:29.7 | Yeah, in 1958, Michael Young, who is a Labour Party peer, eventually, |
| 1:35.9 | a Labour Party activist, and who is one of the authors of the extraordinary |
... |
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