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The John Batchelor Show

7/8: 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

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2023

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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@Batchelorshow



7/8: 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

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0:06.0

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0:23.0

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0:26.0

Search TikTok Guardians Guide to learn more.

0:56.0

And where did it come from? And is it to be trusted?

1:00.0

We've talked about the left starting with doubts in the 1930s, but the right represented by two events in these last years.

1:09.0

One is the Brexit vote in 2015, and the second is the election of a non-politician, Donald Trump of New York in 2016.

1:19.0

This is the populist school, and the populist school has doubts about meritocracy.

1:26.0

So, Adrian, let's generalize first, populism doubts meritocracy because it's made up of experts, because it does not represent common sense.

1:38.0

Is that the same in the United Kingdom with the levers as it is with the Trump voters we're told in the United States?

1:46.0

Are these the same people?

1:49.0

Absolutely. Absolutely the same people. So, experts, so in Britain, one of the leaders of the lead campaign, Michael Gove said,

1:57.0

we've had enough of experts, and the experts got very upset.

2:01.0

The notion that they don't have common sense, very much the argument here, and also, both in Britain and the United States,

2:07.0

another argument was these people are snobbs, they look down on us, they're self-satisfied, they're arrogance, and they look down on us.

2:16.0

And I think another important part of the argument was the argument that these people think they're clever, and they're actually not that clever, they're not very good at running the country.

2:24.0

So, you have a series of catastrophes that have taken place under the eagus of these so-called meritocrats, the most important of which being the financial crisis, which almost brought the world to the world.

2:36.0

And so, what you see, you see endless similarities between what happened with Brexit and what happened with Trump.

2:45.0

But some of the most important are that less educated voters on the whole voted for Brexit as they did for Trump.

2:54.0

The people who came from outside the sort of golden triangle, the best connected parts of the country voted for Brexit and voted for Trump.

...

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