YouSaid · the spoken record

Adrian Wooldridge

lines on the record: 44
first: 2021-06-15
most recent: 2021-06-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Select any more people. That's only the ruling families would keep those jobs and they would be able to pass them on to their children and them to their children. La Sarieta, I think it was called, the severance. And it went downhill from then onwards. It just kept going downhill. So we have plenty of examples in history of times when open societies have become closed and the result has always been discontent, decline and irrelevance. And I'm very worried that we're doing that to the West at the moment. It's exactly the time that China is making more and more use of meritocratic mechanisms in order to produce its productivity.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and more and more use of holistic assessments, essays and teacher recommendations and things like that, which I think, again, privileges privileged people and makes it harder for people from the bottom of society to get the due recognition for their intellectual abilities. So I think you're both getting the destruction of selection mechanisms and the sort of softening of the selection mechanism. So I think a meritocracy can be destroyed. And I end my book with the example of Venice. Venice was the most thriving of city in Europe, in the Middle Ages, primarily because it was open to talent, far more open to talent than any other city. It had had a doge, it had a council that selected people from a broad range of society on a regular basis. And then, in the late Middle Ages, it suddenly decided that it wouldn't”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh the battle for meritocracy is never won, I think it can easily fade away. I think it has faded away because of its own corruption, as I say, because it's been captured by an elite which is self-perpetuating. I think the revolt against meritocracy is very, very serious at the moment, particularly again in the United States. For example, in San Francisco, they have a school called Lowell School, which is one of the most successful schools in the country, provided mainly immigrants generation upon generation with opportunities to go to Berkeley and Stanford and Ivy League schools. That school has just been prevented from selecting people on the basis of test scores and told that it has to select people on the basis of a lottery, which I think is a disaster. Once you destroy these elite institutions, it's very, very hard to rebuild them. Again, universities across the country are making less and less use of”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Becomes more sophisticated, we should be able to support more and more talents, but also we do need people with vocational skills, we need to put more emphasis on further education, vocational education. And it's interesting that the big backlash against meritocracy is coming in the United States and Britain, which have been over-obsessed by universities, haven't come so much in Germany, where I think this capacity to recognise vocational skills and feed people into these middle stand, mid-sized practical engineering companies and the rest of it has served that country extremely well, not just because it's productive, but it finds an outlet for all sorts of different sorts of skills.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a clich ⁇ pray Germany, but it's a justified clich ⁇. I think one of the problems that we have in this country is that we are obsessed with one dimension of talent, which is academic talents, university-educated talents. And we've had a vast expansion of universities, very expensive expansion of universities, with everybody being funneled into the same sort of academic institutions. I think educated academic intelligence matters enormously. I think it creates a lot of the biggest productivity gains at the moment are being made by people who do have academic intelligence in the IT industry. But there are also lots and lots of other sorts of talent. I think John Adams it was, who said that I studied war and politics so that my children can study philosophy and mathematics so that their children can study art and sculpture and porcelain and tapestry work and things like that. And I think it's a”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outcomes in London. So I think it's not impossible to do this, but we need to go in a different direction. We need to go back to 1945, back to that spirit of 1945, and say instead, imagine in 1945, if we'd not got rid of the grammar schools, I mean, in the 1960s, not gone on to get rid of the grammar schools, but instead incorporated the public schools into the state school system and forced them to take scholarship boys and girls in large numbers. We'd have a very, very different country. We wouldn't have prime ministers who came from Eton, followed by Eaton, because they could pay the fees. We'd have a new class of supergrammar schools and supergrammar school boys and girls who would really be driving productivity in this country.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's not quite there, I would say that's right, and I would say that we have a number of problems. One, as I say, human nature pushes against this. Secondly, that the left in this country is committed much more to equality of outcome than to equality of opportunity. It's very different from the left of the 1940s. And thirdly, that the Conservative Party is not going to really, I think, go to war with, let's say, the landed aristocracy, which owns about half the country or more than half the country, and big chunks of London, which I think is exceptionally unmeritocratic. But the Tory party is not going to go to war with those people. Nevertheless, there are some good signs. Look at the academy schools which were created under Tony Blair. They did a lot to improve social mobility and provide opportunities for less able children. Look at the London Challenge, again produced by Tony Blair, that had very, very positive results about educational...”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. The same Eton, particularly the King Scholars, was supposed to be Paul. St. Paul's, all of these schools, Marlborough and the rest of them, now they've been taken over by financiers and their children, by the global mega-rich, I think a third of students at these schools are foreign born. And yet they have charitable status. We're using charitable status to subsidize a very privileged global oligarchy. And I think in order to preserve their financial status, they should give at least half of their places a way to what they were originally designed to do, which is able poor children. I would say selected by pretty rigorous objective tests. But I think that meritocracy is something that you have to fight for and you have to keep fighting for. And what we've seen now is a sort of silting up of the process.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or academically focused schools that you'll give them the same advantages that very rich people naturally have. So I say select early, use IQ tests. I'm not advocating a return to the 11 plus, but I'm advocating a return to a much more differentiated system with lots and lots of different academic schools or different schools of various kinds, but certainly with an academic stream. And I would say absolutely that we have these so-called public schools in Britain, which are private, you know, private schools, which cost an enormous amount of money. Even speech now of $48,000 a year. These schools were founded in order to educate poor children for the benefit of the state and the church. Winchester.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make big financial commitments to that and the fact that they marry each other and produce children who are privileged from birth in terms of the number of words they hear and the rest of it, that we need to try very, very hard to break the connection between your birth and where you end up in society. So it's not enough just to do a few small things. You have to do You have to push hard. And I think to push hard, you need to do several things. One is to use objective tests, SATs, tests that measure as much as we possibly can brain power rather than acquired skills. And you have to use them early and you have to use them frequently in order to find the best talent. And secondly, you have to have selection quite early on because it's only if you take the very best people and put them in the very best.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. What I would say is that meritocracy, the force is pushing against meritocracy a very, very powerful force. One of them is human nature itself, that we tend to want the best for our children and we want to fix the system for our children so they will do as well as they possibly can and better than other people's children in many ways. part of our nature and it's something that we may say that we support meritocracy in theory but it's other denying ordinance that will stop others from looking after their children but we'll try and fix this as Marcel. You can't get away from that. So I think there's a powerful force against meritocracy there and there's also now because we have this process whereby the rich are so obsessed by getting their children into the best schools and universities and so willing”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of cognitive educated elite obsessed with universities, which in some ways is a new thing to have it on the scale that you've got it at the moment, plus this long-term Jacksonian resentment of these snobs. So America is in many ways the sort of nexus of this great conflict between the cognitive elite and the populists. And I must say that neither side is...”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, it's very much a sort of Jacksonian tradition going back to saying that these people like the Adamses were intellectuals, they were eggheads, and it's the true people are the sort of people who rely on business acumen and common sense. And there's also an attitude, an objection to elitism in America. So I remember reading Max Weber talking about America, and he said Americans would rather have a collection of bureaucrats who are useless at their job and sort of physically stunted so they could despise and spit on them rather than having bureaucrats who would look down and spit on them. They'd rather be able to look down. They'd rather incompetence that they could despise than competence that would make them feel small. So that is a very, it is a very long-term and powerful tradition in the United States, but it's really, what we've had in the United States is the rise of this sort of...”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're also useless at what they're doing, and yet they manage to protect themselves from the consequences of these bad decisions. And I would point to Brexit as one movement that was very much driven by a populist right-wing backlash against these cognitive elites. And Trump even said, you know, in his very Trumpian way to a grad, I love the poorly educated. He was a sort of hillbilly billionaire. He didn't read books or anything like that. He prided himself on his sort of intellectual sophistication, although strangely enough, he insisted that he was incredibly smart, but not smart in the way that those sort of eggheads were smart. He didn't need to read books to know that it's come to the right decisions.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are two populist backlashes. There's the populist backlash that comes from the left, which claims that meritocracy is just an excuse for class privilege and that the roots of that class privilege lie in different levels of economic opportunity, and marriage is just a way of sort of reifying that. And then there is a growing and more recent backlash from the right, which we'd associate with Trump and also I think with Brexit, which says that what you've got is this terribly self-satisfied cognitive elite, people who went to universities, people who do professional jobs, who look down on the rest of society. If you listen to the populists, they're full of this idea that they're looked down on by these elites, but also who haven't made a very good job of running the world. We've had a massive financial crisis, we had a disastrous Iraq war, all of these things were brought to us by various intellectual elites. So the populists say they're not very nice. There are a bunch of snobs.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“extraordinary number of dynasties. I think that again, I keep coming back to this point, but I think it is true that the United States is a great offender here. You have obviously the Clinton dynasty, you have the Cuomos, and you have the bushes. The bushes managed to be an old-fashioned dynasty that's now turned itself into a sort of new fashioned dynasty that it's moved south, but it hasn't lost its capacity to get its children into the right universities and into the right seize the right opportunities to have political careers. And I think Jeb Bush's son is particularly likely to go quite a long way in politics. I think he's now already in the Texan administration in some significant way.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's happened is that two things, really. One is that the elite, particularly the money elite, puts much more value on universities. So it devotes a lot more of its resources to getting their children into universes. And the second is that particularly in the United States, universities are massive money machines. They're incredibly expensive. They're obsessed by having the best facilities, the best gyms, the best new science buildings. And because of that, I wouldn't say I wouldn't go so far as to say they sell places to particular students, but they go the next, they do the next best thing. And people who give a lot of Malita to universities build a science block, all the rest of it have a very significantly greater chance of getting their children into those universities than other parents. So money is pervading the whole process of meritocratic selection and distorting.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And absolutely, and that just shows you how deeply rooted a lot of these inequalities are because we like to think, you know, that we want to provide equality of opportunity and we like to think that we can do that by spending more money, providing nursery education and the rest of it. But actually, if you know that one of the most basic things that determines your long-term cognitive ability is how many words you hear from your parents. And parents who are educated and married will speak a lot more words to their children than people who are at the bottom of society. So that just shows you how deep, deeply rooted this self-replication of meritocratic or quasi-meritocratic hierarchies are.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The more functional day-to-day inequality will increase. So we like to think this society is being distorted by the arrival of this new class of billionaires, which indeed it is, but just even more important from a day-to-day point of view, is this process of educating people, marrying educated people. And that creates everyday inequality, which we see all around us. And that is a consequence of a very good thing. It's a consequence of women flooding into the universities and into the labor market. But it's having consequence for the whole of society, which is massively to increase inequality.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, assortative mating is a sort of technical and rather impolite way of saying like people tend to marry like people, people like themselves. It used to be the case that you probably wouldn't meet somebody exactly like yourself if you Director, you might”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah. And so a lot of people at the bottom of society, I think, because they no longer see an opportunity to get ahead attorney against the whole of society. This is particularly serious in the United States because the United States was built on the American, as you know perfectly well, it was built on the American dream, the idea that your children would do better than you did. And that is no longer a widely shared belief. More and more people are thinking, no, my children are going to do worse than I do.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best education available. Now that process has slowed, particularly in the United States, but also in Great Britain. And more and more you're seeing society calcified rather than mobile.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many of the most powerful people in the world work for global companies, global organizations, the World Bank, the IMF, and the rest of it, and they meet each other in Davos and Bildeburg in such organizations. So the global elite is more divorced from the rest of society, and the ladder has got more and more and more rungs missing because public education is not as good as it should be and in some ways not as good as it used to be. So in all sorts of ways, we've seen the corruption of meritocracy by money, family connections, global networks, and as a result of that, a slowing down of social mobility. So just as in the years in the late 40s, 50s and 60s, you had this flourishing of social mobility, large, large numbers of people coming from uneducated backgrounds to get into the...”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1960s that a school like Eton didn't really focus that much except for a few exceptional students on high level education. Now it's a merit factor. It's concerned with everybody doing really well at school and getting into the best universities. Secondly, I think you have this process of what scientists call assortative mating, whereas educationally successful people marry other educationally successful people and then invest very heavily in their children. That reinforces this caste-like aspect of meritocracy. And thirdly, I think what we have now is the globalization of the elite with the rise of the sort of the Davos class. And a lot of what merits the original meritocracy was about was creating a ladder of opportunity from the local village school right the way to the Oxford and Whitehall in the top of society. Now you have to create a much longer ladder.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I mean, there are a bunch of medieval historians who talked about feudalism and then they say feudalism degenerated in certain ways. So they invented the term bastard feudalism to describe the 14th and 15th centuries. And I think we're beginning to see that now as a sort of bastard version of meritocracy. And that is essentially because the notion of merit has been corrupted by a number of other forces. The most important of them is money, that people who have a lot of money can buy privileges, a privileged education for their children. And one of the most extraordinary things that we've seen in recent years is not only that you have meritocrats themselves making sure that they perpetuate their position by buying good educations for their children, sending them to good comprehensives in leafy suburbs or to private schools, but also old money has started investing in education as well. It used to be the case back, I think, in the”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lucky enough to have. It's something that you must also cultivate talents of things that need to be cultivated and worked on. And there may be a few people like Mozart who have such extraordinary talents that they're almost superhuman to us. But even the young Mozart had to do a certain amount of practicing when he probably preferred to have been playing with his spinning top or whatever they had in those days.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a philosophically respectable and in some ways profound objection because we inherit, I certainly think we inherit many of our intellectual abilities and we don't in that sense deserve them if you're born bright, if you're born intellectually able, then that's good luck. But I think the problem with that argument is it presumes that effort is of no importance whatsoever. Michael Young said merits equals IQ plus effort and I think effort is an incredibly important part of what merit means and I think it's very hard to get people to put in the hours, to do the work to stay up studying rather than watching the television or lying around drinking beer or whatever we'd prefer to be doing. So you need some sort of sense of reward for effort. So I think that it's not just something that you're”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just because the aristocrats nabbed all the good jobs and I was ignored at the bottom. But if you have lots of opportunities, the only person you can blame is yourself. And so it means that the price of defeat is even more bitter. And thirdly, I think what it does is to take the brightest people from the working class and sort of hijack that hijack them, take them hostage. And one example would be Early Bevin. Early Bevin came from left school at 1314 and went on to become one of the giants of the labor movement because he was such a brilliant man, such a great organizer, such an extraordinary figure. spotted very young and co-opted by the upper classes and the labor movement would be left with nobody but a bunch of sort of after Scargold style you know Thick-headed rabble rousers.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely. I mean, the term, the book that gave meritocracy its name was a book by Michael Young called The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958. And Young used this term not as a term of praise, but as a term of criticism. And he said that the problem with meritocracy is, well, let me say there are many, many problems, but let's name three. One is that it creates a society that's all competition. Everybody's trying to elbow each other out of the way in order to get to the front. He says that's absolutely the opposite of what socialists should want. The second is that it creates a feeling of terrible despair in people who don't succeed in that society. Because if you don't succeed in an aristocratic society,”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And shooting grouse on the grouse more and things like that. So that was a society in which you had all of Jackets and A society in which you had all of the elements of merit, both in terms of social mobility and in terms of a commitment to a different sort of productive, economically efficient technocratic society”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it began to create a meritocratic society in the sense that not only was a very significant degree of social mobility, higher social mobility than we have now, which a whole generation of people had opportunities which their parents never even dreamed of, but it also created a different ruling class. And one of the things about meritocracy is not just that you should have a high degree of social mobility from the top to the bottom, but also that the ruling class should be different. It should be a ruling class defined not by gentlemanly amateurishness, but by professionalism and a commitment to science and technology and rational economic progress. So it created Wilson called it the white heat of technology and he contrasted himself as a grammar school boy who knew all about numbers and slide rules and the rest of it with Alec Douglas Hume who went, you know, knew about a tweed jacket.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The notion of merit on the right is captured by the idea of the market. It's really the market that provides meritocratic outcomes. And if those meritocratic outcomes mean that some people get filthy, rich and pass those riches onto their children, then so much the better. So I really think the era after the Second World War was an era in which this idea that merit is a socially left-wing, leveling idea when it comes to people who don't deserve positions, but also something that raises up people from the bottom to the top, really has an extraordinary flowering. The history boy generation is exactly right.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was the great moment of, it was, I call it the meritocratic moment, because it combined a notion that we should be looking for merit wherever it occurs in society. So we should be making sure that obscure the Miltons, as it were, from obscure parts of the country are given opportunities with a notion that the old ruling class, that people who've been squatting at the top of society for many, many centuries should be removed from that. So it's a sort of socialist idea, but it's a socialism that believes in equality of opportunity rather than inequality of results. And two things happen after this sort of meritogratic moment in history. One is that the left begins to abandon equality of opportunity in favor of equality of results. It wants much, much less steep hierarchies, as it were. And the second is”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very strong and sophisticated intellectual pushback which has been elaborated in recent years, and that is that the people who rise from the bottom and get to the top tend to be not just pushy people, but people who put their own selves and their own interests above the rest of society. So they're sort of disruptive forces, but they're disruptive forces who tend to be egotists. So a lot of people, I think Burke would be, Edmund Burke would be one of those people who say, well, the old society was a society of chivalry, but was also a society of reciprocal obligations. And when you look at a society organized entirely around atomized egotists, such as a capitalist or a meritocratic society, you lose something in that process society becomes, as it were, all elbows. Everybody's trying to elbow each other out of the way. And that notion that community is being destroyed by an avaricious individualistic society is a very”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. One of the things that happens and one of the driving forces which leads to the rise of the meritocracy from the early Middle Ages onwards is that the state needs competent people, competent bureaucrats and competence. Soldiers and the bureaucracy becomes more complicated, the demands of warfare become more intellectually sophisticated. And so you have these people who are very, very frequently captured from the bottom of society and given very, very privileged or prominent roles. So in this country, we have Thomas Wolsey, who's then succeeded by his own protege, who is Thomas Cromwell, who's been written about brilliantly by Hilary Mantel, but who comes from a very modest position in society and rules the country until Henry decides that he doesn't want him to rule the country anymore and chops his head off.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, he said that he didn't know anything about it, so he sort of had a fresh view, but he didn't want to disappoint his patron. He didn't want to bring shame on his patron. So he worked extra hard to make sure that he was actually quite good and competent, although one of his complaints was the very, very frequently the people he had to go and see, the lords and ladies, well, the lords actually, who were making the great decisions, were never there because they were either lying in bed, sleeping off their hangovers, or they were out hunting. So it was a very inefficient society by our standards, but there were, of course, people who kept things going. And indeed, many kings, I mean, I talked about James VI, but let's say Philip II of Spain was a ferocious worker. He worked 12, 14, and 15 hours every single day. So there was also mixed in with this sort of aristocratic attitude of not working hard and not really caring about competence.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And who had judged on competence, and you get some very interesting examples of this. One is Samuel Peeps, who was given his job in the Admiralty really on the basis of family connections, and actually becomes one of the great sort of administrators of his time or indeed of any time, his incredibly good at his job. So there were competent people. The problem is that for every competent person, there were probably two or three incompetent people.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are ideas that tension with each other here in the Middle Ages. One is the idea that you should inherit your position and that your bloodline is all that really matters. So James VI of Scotland became King of Scotland at the age of, I think, 13 months when I think he was probably not really capable of making rational kingly decisions. There was also a sense that lots of jobs were given on the basis of royal patronage and royal whim or even bought and sold. So I came across an example in seventeen eighty three of a wet nurse who was being paid £200 a year at the time, which has a lot of money to be paid. It's particularly a lot of money if you consider the fact that the person who she was wet nursing, supposedly wet nursing the Prince of Wales, was 21 years old at the time. So there's a lot of, but on the other hand, of course, you do basically have to have a certain number of people who are doing the work of the world.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now, of course, pretty much universal, the interview is much, much less important than your performance on written papers.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. The examinations, to most of us, they seem like incredibly boring and tedious things and things that we had to live through at school and at university. But in fact, they're very radical and revolutionary mechanisms because they mean that in the way that they were used, certainly in China and later in the West, they meant that opportunities were conditional upon your performance in examination rather than physical tests or just rather than your father tipping the wink to somebody that you were a good person. And examinations have a very interesting history. They're used by the Chinese first of all. They used by the Jesuits. The Jesuits are great examiners. And through the Chinese use written examinations in the Middle Ages and early modern period in Europe, they tended to be Viva Voce examinations who tended to be interrogated by your examiner. Written examinations come in in the West really in the 90s.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And your position in that hierarchy is determined by your abilities. And society must constantly sift through the entire population in order to find these men of gold. Plato's book is, of course, a book, it's a blueprint, it's a vision, but it does have considerable impact during the Renaissance people read it, during the 19th century in England people read it, and it did sort of help to infuse the meritocratic spirit, but also on a much bigger and more practical level the Chinese state from the early Middle Ages onwards begins to select people on the basis of examinations, this sort of Confucian elites, this civil service that governed China for centuries and centuries from really the early Middle Ages to 1905 is selected on the basis of its performance in examinations. At the time when countries like Britain were ruled by people”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, the notion of merit, of meritocracy, is the idea that people should be judged on the basis of their individual abilities rather than their position in the social hierarchy or their family connections. And that's something which seems very obvious to us, but for most of history, it hasn't been at all obvious. For most of history, indeed, society has been organized on the basis of inheritance of positions, on the basis of family connections, on the basis of a strict and inherited hierarchy. But there are two areas where meritocracy really originates and begins to undermine inherited society. One is Plato, the Republic, an extraordinary and brilliant book. So Plato's Republic presents a brilliant and extremely radical view of society in which social positions are determined by people's intellectual ability. He says there are three classes, men of gold, men of silver and men of bronze.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would call it a history with attitude, really, or a history with benefits. I wrote the book because I came to two conclusions. One is that meritocracy is absolutely vital to the creation of the modern world. It's as fundamental as democracy or capitalism. And secondly, that it's under assault from all sorts of directions, partly from its own internal contradictions or failures to live up to its promise, and that that assault, if it leads to the unwinding or collapse of meritocracy in some form, will be a really fundamental problem for the health and productivity of our civilization.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello podcast listeners, I'm Connor and welcome to this week's episode of Intelligence Squared. Today we're joined by Adrian Waldridge, author of the new book The Aristocracy of Talent, and in conversation with Mark Mardell they discussed how the idea that people should be advanced in society based on their talents rather than their status or birth came to be one of the leading ideologies across the world. It's a really fascinating conversation which deals with questions about why meritocracy is under attack today. And if you do enjoy it and want to continue the conversation with fellow listeners after the episode, we'll be running a chat forum about meritocracy on the new app multitude. Just click the link in our podcast description. We'll be taking some of the best arguments and comments from our listeners on the issue of meritocracy and giving them two free tickets to one of our upcoming in-person debates in London or free access to the live stream if they're joining us from outside the UK. You can find a link for the chat forum and Adrian's book in the podcast.”
2021-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is Meritocracy a Myth? With Adrian Wooldridge and Mark Mardell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source