ALARM IN THE IVIES: 1/8: The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern-World/dp/1510768610/ref=sr_1_2?qid=1658009977&refinements=p_27%3AAdrian+Wooldridge&s=books&sr=1-2
The Times (UK) book of the year! Meritocracy: the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their birth. While this initially seemed like a novel concept, by the end of the twentieth century it had become the world's ruling ideology. How did this happen, and why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left?
In The Aristocracy of Talent, the 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.
1910
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| 0:40.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:42.0 | This is CBS I in the World. |
| 0:44.0 | I'm John Bachelor and I welcome Adrian Woolridge of The Economist magazine. |
| 0:49.0 | He is Badgett. |
| 0:51.0 | At the same time he is Adrian Waldridge author of a new book, The Aristocracy |
| 0:56.2 | of Talent, How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. Good heavens, this sweeps over enormous |
| 1:02.4 | a period of history. |
| 1:04.0 | From kingships reaching back all the way to Plato and then right up till now, |
| 1:10.0 | Maritocrats is the word, it was invented in the 20th century but we begin with what |
| 1:16.1 | Adrian introduces as a ditty from the 19th century to describe the the contest for finding why people are elevated and why people are not elevated in |
| 1:28.4 | human history. It goes like this, God bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper |
| 1:36.4 | stations. Adrian, good evening and thank you and congratulations. That didy for me is your book because the contest against that |
| 1:47.4 | presumption that there is such a thing as proper stations has informed arguments for well at least 2,500 years. Let's begin with where |
| 1:56.9 | you identify the hierarchical presumption of mankind. How did it work and what was its genesis? What drove it |
| 2:05.3 | Adrian? Good evening to you. |
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