This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Batcher, and Adrian Wuldrich is new book is the

Aerosocracy of talent, how meritocracy made the modern world, and having described the

genius of brain power, finding governance for democracies, for prosperity for the modern

world. We now come up about what is to be done because the meritocrats have in some

fashion that's very romantic, created a condition that is not unlike royalty or dynasties or

hereditary power. So the first thing to do is to describe what we're looking at here

is it's a meritocracy, but it's not based on land. Adrian, you report that it's based

on information gathering. How so? The meritocrats are people who can collect and process and

command information better than everybody else. And of course in a society that is in an

economy that's based above all on information, these people have enormous amounts of power,

they can get this information quickly and they can process it and manipulate it on a

global scale. So their power as knowledge workers is like the power of old aristocrats,

you know, only more so because they operate on a global scale rather than just on the scale

of the local land. It is a state. One response to this, one response is moral,

to make a moral argument about what is wrong. At first I came up against this and I thought,

how can you make a moral argument against people who are so well to do? What would it

look like Adrian, to to remoralize the meritocrat? Well, what if you think of the origins

of meritocracy in the middle of the 19th century in Britain? What you had at that time was

not just a technical solution to a problem of how you recruit and elite. You had that,

you had the idea that you have open competition and you have examinations, that's a technical

solution. But at the same time you had a moral solution and the great reformers were

saying at that time, the old world is a corrupt world and we need to replace corruption

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