ALARM IN THE IVIES: 5/8: 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
⏱️ 12 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.
1918 Harvard graduation
Transcript
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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 speaking with Adrian Woolridge, who is Badgett for The Economist magazine, |
| 0:50.0 | but as author, the new book, The Aerosocracy of Talent, how meritocracy made the modern world. |
| 0:56.3 | Adrian's book presents the case for who is best, who is wisest, who is to why is wisest who is most prosperous who is the leader for 2,500 years |
| 1:07.6 | from Plato all the way to the 20th century to 21st century and yet in the 21st century. And yet in the 21st century, starting in the 20th, the middle of the 20th, |
| 1:18.4 | there are doubts about meritocracy, about how it's rendered, and that comes to the invention of the word meritocrat or |
| 1:26.7 | meritocracy. A man by the name of Young writes a book in the middle of the 19th |
| 1:32.4 | century that raises these questions, these doubts. |
| 1:36.0 | And we need to begin there because as Adrian explicates, this is a criticism that enjoys in America we would say bipartisanship. They right at the left |
| 1:47.1 | the center everybody has doubts and so we go to Michael Young, 1958 meritocracy. |
| 1:54.6 | Adrian, what are Michael Young's doubts |
| 1:57.4 | in the middle of the 20th century |
| 1:59.0 | and then we'll examine the rest of the 20th century? |
| 2:02.4 | Yeah, in 1958, Michael Young, who is a Labour Party peer, eventually, a Labour Party activist, |
| 2:10.0 | and who is one of the authors of the extraordinary 1945 Labour manifesto which helps them to win the landslide victory in 1945. |
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