Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is CBS I on the World with John Bachelor.

Here's John Bachelor.

This is CBS I in the World.

I'm John Bachelorcher speaking with Adrian Woolridge, who is

Badgett for The Economist magazine, but as author, the new book The Aristocracy of Talent,

how meritocracy made the Modern World.

Adrian's book presents the case for who is best, who to why, who is wisest, who is most prosperous, who is the leader for 2,500 years from Plato all the

way to the 20th century, the 21st century.

And yet in the 21st century, starting in the 20th, the middle of the 20th,

there are doubts about meritocracy, about how it's rendered, and that comes to the invention of the word meritocrat or meritocracy.

A man by the name of Young writes a book in the middle of the 19th century that raises these

questions, these doubts. 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 the center

everybody has doubts and so we go to Michael Young 1958 meritocracy.

Adrian, what are Michael Young's doubts

in the middle of the 20th century

and then we'll examine the rest of the 20th century?

In 1958, Michael Young, who is a Labour Party peer, eventually, a Labour Party activist,

and who is one of the authors of the extraordinary 1945 Labour Manifesto, which helps them to win the landslide victory in 1945.

Michael Young writes a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy.

And this book basically is a denunciation of the meritocracy.

...