ENGLAND EXPECTS. 2/8 The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge Hardcover
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
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ENGLAND EXPECTS. 2/8 The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge Hardcover
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.
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Baths. You're visiting with the author, Adrian Woodridge, |
| 0:08.7 | who is also a budget at the Economist magazine, Adrian Woodridge. His new book is The Aristocracy |
| 0:13.5 | of Talent. How meritocracy made the modern world. It's incredibly, personally up to date, |
| 0:20.4 | but we are exploring how we got here. The word meritocracy isn't until the middle of the |
| 0:27.2 | 20th century. However, the search for who is capable of giving good governance. Who can we depend |
| 0:34.9 | upon? Who will live out his reign? Includes nepotism, patronage, and vanity. And I note, |
| 0:43.6 | rather than look at the negatives, I want to make clear that there were successes. I wrote down |
| 0:49.3 | three, Adrian, Thomas Cromwell, Adam Smith. Well, that's enough. Those two would be enough |
| 0:56.5 | for any country. So patronage, patronage, and nepotism had its advantages. Was it attractive to |
| 1:04.6 | the kings? Did it make them worry that they were having to choose people outside of their family |
| 1:10.4 | for leadership? Sure. It's very important to remember that in pre-modern society, jobs |
| 1:20.1 | were not things that individuals earned on merit necessarily. There were things that were given |
| 1:24.6 | away by the ruling classes through a system of patronage. But the ruling classes quite often |
| 1:32.3 | give jobs to people who are completely useless. But if they'd only given jobs to people who |
| 1:37.5 | completely useless, society would have collapsed. So they also give certain jobs to people who are far |
| 1:44.8 | from useless, who are extremely good. One classic example of that is Henry VIII, who chooses a |
| 1:50.4 | succession of lowly-born men of extraordinary administrative ability to run his country for him |
| 1:57.5 | while he's out hunting and womanizing and doing all the things that he likes to do. The first one |
| 2:02.9 | he chooses is Thomas Woolsey, who is the son of a butcher, who's made his way in the church, |
| 2:10.4 | and who does his job extremely well, although ultimately he fails to get a divorce from Rome. |
| 2:18.0 | And so he has to be punished by being executed. And then followed by Thomas Cromwell, |
| 2:23.6 | who as much as anybody is the architect of the modern British state in its nascent form. |
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