Hello, I'm Katie Stallard, senior editor for China Inglable Affairs at the New

Statesman. In your listening to the New Statesman podcast, today I'm joined by

Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College, and the author of

Crack Up Capitalism, market radicals, and the dream of a world without

democracy. When you've written a fascinating and have to say frankly

disturbing piece for the New Statesman magazine on the rise of the new tech

right, and how the cult of IQ became a toxic ideology in Silicon Valley and

beyond, all very optimistic stuff. Thanks for that. You begin this piece by

exploring the concept of meritocracy and its evolution since the 1950s, and I

think we should start there by just kind of defining these terms and

introducing this subject. Could you give us a sense of what we're talking about,

when we talk about this idea of meritocracy, and how have the implications of

that concept changed since the 1950s where you start this piece? Sure, well the

term actually was coined by a labor politician and sociologist Michael Young in a

kind of speculative science fiction novel, interestingly enough that he wrote

that was published in 1958, and in the novel the premise is that the way that

the elite would be selected in the future would not be through their

connections or their kind of class status, but through their ability and their

intelligence above all would be the kind of criteria that people were selected

by to become basically the governing class. So the book sets up this

fascinating situation where you get a kind of assorting out of the

population according to their intelligence and a seeming kind of perfection of

...