ENGLAND EXPECTS. 7/8: 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
⏱️ 15 minutes
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ENGLAND EXPECTS. 7/8: 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 | Hey guys it's Mimi Webb, I'm the new brand ambassador for Maybelline. Make up |
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| 0:14.4 | This is CBS Eye in the World, I'm John Bachelor and Adrian Wildrich, his new book is |
| 0:24.2 | The Aristocracy of Talent, how meritocracy made the modern world and having |
| 0:29.1 | described the genius of brain power, finding governance for democracies, for |
| 0:36.6 | prosperity for the modern world. We now come up about what is to be done because |
| 0:41.5 | the meritocrats have in some fashion that's very romantic, created a condition |
| 0:48.2 | that is not unlike royalty or dynasties or hereditary power. So the first thing |
| 0:55.5 | to do is to describe what we're looking at here is it's a meritocracy but it's |
| 1:01.3 | not based on land. Adrian you report that it's based on information gathering. |
| 1:06.1 | How so? The meritocrats are people who can collect and process and command |
| 1:13.1 | information better than everybody else. And of course in a society that is in an |
| 1:18.6 | economy that's based above all on information, these people have a |
| 1:21.7 | enormous amount of power. They can get this information quickly and they can |
| 1:26.0 | process it and manipulate it on a global scale. So their power as knowledge |
| 1:30.8 | workers is like the power of old aristocrats, you know, only more so because |
| 1:35.0 | it operates on a global scale rather than just on the scale of the local |
| 1:38.9 | land status. One response to this, one response is moral, to make a moral argument |
| 1:48.8 | about what is wrong. At first I came up against this and I thought how can |
| 1:52.6 | you make a moral argument against people who are so well to do? What would it |
| 1:56.4 | look like Adrian to to remoralize the meritocrat? Well, what if you think of |
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