ALARM IN THE IVIES: 7/8: 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
⏱️ 8 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.
1916 Stanford departing for the French Ambulance Corps
Transcript
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| 0:35.0 | Adrian Waldridge, the author of The Aristocracy of Talent, |
| 0:39.0 | how meritocracy made the modern world. |
| 0:41.0 | We're talking about the governance that it right now has made the world |
| 0:45.6 | safe in a pandemic. We're talking about the governance that hopes to restore the |
| 0:50.3 | prosperity that existed before the pandemic. |
| 0:53.0 | And where did it come from? |
| 0:55.0 | And is it to be trusted? |
| 0:57.0 | We've talked about the left, starting with doubts in the 1930s. |
| 1:01.0 | But the right, represented by two events in these last years. |
| 1:06.5 | One is the Brexit vote in 2015, and the second is the election of a non-politician, Donald Trump of New York in 2016. |
| 1:16.4 | This is the populist school, and the populist school has doubts about meritocracy. |
| 1:22.8 | So Adrian, let's generalize first. |
| 1:25.9 | Populism doubts meritocracy because it's made up of experts, |
| 1:30.4 | because it does not represent common sense. |
| 1:35.0 | Is that the same in the United Kingdom with the levers as it is with the Trump voters |
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