Dr. Adrian Woolridge is the author or co-author of ten books, including The Right Nation, Conservative Power in America, and Capitalism in America with Ellen Greenspan. His most recent book, which I recently read, is The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, a book that challenges the idea of meritocracy, especially on the left and psychologically of the 20th century, and argues that at least in certain times, the meritocratic idea was fundamentally and in essence, a progressive idea. Dr. Woolridge was born in 1959 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in modern history, and All Souls College where he held a prize fellowship and was awarded a D. Phil. He s worked for The Economist magazine since 1988, including as West Coast Bureau Chief, Washington bureau chief, an author of the Lexington column, a management editor, the Schumpeter column, and political editor of the Beigehot column. In this episode, we discuss his thesis on measuring the mind, and how the history of IQ testing shaped his thesis, and why he thinks the IQ test should be re-examined as a measure of the mind. He also discusses his new book, The Aristocrat of Talent, which has been well received in the UK, but not widely discussed in the U.S., and much less so in the United States. Let s take a step towards the brighter future you deserve. - let s all agree to fill in the IQ testing machine by filling in the bottom of your IQ test and fill in your brain with a D-Phil. . Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Daily Wire Plus Subscribe to Daily Wire plus to get immediate access to all the latest news and updates from the world s most influential podcasting platform, including blogs, podcasts, social media and social media platforms, and more. Subscribe and subscribe to stay up to date with the latest posts on the most influential blogs and social meditations on the happenings in the world wherever you get your favourite podcast , wherever you re listening to the most important podcast on the internet including your most authentic source of information about what s going on the biggest things going on today s or your day-to-day news and trends in the most authentic version of the world, wherever you are listening to it! Thank you so much for listening to this podcast?
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00:00:57.000Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have as my guest Dr. Adrian Woolridge.
00:01:17.000Dr. Woolridge was born in 1959 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in modern history,
00:01:25.000and All Souls College, where he held a prize fellowship and was awarded a D. Phil.
00:01:30.000His thesis was published as Measuring the Mind.
00:01:34.000He's worked for The Economist magazine since 1988, including as West Coast Bureau Chief, Washington Bureau Chief,
00:01:41.000an author of the Lexington column, management editor, an author of the Schumpeter column,
00:01:47.000and political editor, an author of the Beigehot column.
00:01:50.000He's the author or co-author of ten books, including The Right Nation, Conservative Power in America with John Micklethwaite,
00:01:59.000Capitalism in America with Ellen Greenspan.
00:02:02.000His most recent book, which I recently read, is The Aristocracy of Talent, How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.
00:02:10.000I've rarely researched or been able to talk with someone who has so many interests that dovetail with mine,
00:02:15.000and very much looking forward to this conversation.
00:02:18.000So you've published this aristocracy of talent, and it's the continuance of an interest that you've held for a long time.
00:02:27.000Well, I'm glad to say that the book has been extremely well received in Britain.
00:02:32.000It's been reviewed by all the leading periodicals on both the left and the right,
00:02:38.000and has been widely discussed on the radio and in various media outlets.
00:02:45.000In the United States, the reception has been much more muted, I would say.
00:02:50.000It hasn't been discussed anywhere near as widely, although there is discussion going on and it's beginning to mount a bit.
00:02:59.000But what most irks me is it hasn't been reviewed by the New York Times.
00:03:04.000All the major publications in this country, by this country I mean Britain where I'm sitting now, reviewed it.
00:03:12.000The New York Times hasn't reviewed it.
00:03:14.000The New York View Books hasn't reviewed it.
00:03:17.000A lot of the sort of mainstream, particularly liberal publications, reviewed it.
00:03:22.000Here in Britain, all the liberal publications reviewed it, and I thought I expected to be more criticised than I was by the liberal publications.
00:03:31.000There was a sense in many liberal publications that this is an idea that we should grapple with and we shouldn't dismiss out of hand.
00:03:38.000I was very pleased by, you know, the reception both on the left and the right.
00:03:42.000For example, the New Statesman wrote a long and positive review of it.
00:03:47.000So for the New York Times not to have mentioned it at all.
00:03:52.000Well, we all want to be reviewed by the New York Times because it's a big and important newspaper.
00:03:58.000But for them not to mention it at all, the New York Review of Books not to mention it at all.
00:04:03.000The New Yorker, all of these these outlets.
00:04:06.000I was disappointed by that, just as I was extremely encouraged and pleased by the breadth of the reception in the United Kingdom.
00:04:15.000Well, it seems to me to be a reflection of exactly what you're writing about in the book itself.
00:04:20.000I mean, you traverse the history of the idea of meritocracy and the practice of meritocracy,
00:04:27.000also contrasting it with forms of social organisation that weren't meritocratic, either implicitly or explicitly.
00:04:36.000And you talk about the revolt against the idea of meritocracy, especially on the left and the increasing potency, let's say, politically and psychologically of that rebellion.
00:04:48.000You know, interestingly enough, also pointing out that at least at certain times in the 20th century, the meritocratic idea was fundamentally progressive and maybe was in its essence.
00:04:59.000So maybe I'd like to know from you, you did your your your your thesis, your your doctoral thesis on measuring the mind, the history of that.
00:05:08.000And this has been a concern of yours for an extraordinary long time.
00:05:11.000And I'd like to know what's at the bottom of that.
00:05:13.000Sure. I wrote I did a D fill in history at Oxford University, and my D fill was on the history of IQ testing and particularly the way the history of IQ testing,
00:05:26.000the way that IQ testing shaped educational policy, because we had something called the 11 plus examination in Britain, which all people in the state sector had to sit and which determined whether they went to grammar schools or secondary modern schools.
00:05:40.000I elite academic schools or non elite schools and which was essentially an IQ test or a set of IQ test.
00:05:49.000It's an extraordinary example of the massive public impact of a set of ideas about about what constitutes mental ability and how you test that mental ability.
00:05:59.000So I was interested in that partly because I was myself a product of a grammar school and I went to Oxford having been to been to a grammar school.
00:06:08.000And my entire educational career was determined by sitting this examination at the age of 11 and passing this examination and passing subsequent examinations.
00:06:19.000So it was a sort of a personal thing to me. But it also struck me as a very just thing that somebody from my background, which is a very ordinary background,
00:06:28.000could could go to a really first rate academic school and get an education that was comparable to people like Boris Johnson, people who went to Eton or Winchester.
00:06:37.000And so it always struck me that this examination, this way of organising educational opportunity was a very intriguing thing.
00:06:48.000It was something that was subversive of the status quo, which was embodied in my mind by the private schools, the independent schools.
00:06:56.000And then the Labour government, which I naturally sort of gravitated towards and supported, came, came along and destroyed the grammar schools,
00:07:03.000abolished them in the name of comprehensive schools and in the name of getting rid of testing and selection and and streaming and things like that.
00:07:12.000And it struck me, you know, as a young person, this was an extraordinary thing for a supposedly progressive party to be doing.
00:07:19.000And it disillusioned me with the first thing many other things did subsequently, but it's the first thing that really disillusioned me with the socialist or the or the Labour project.
00:07:30.000So I got interested in the history of how this came to be, how the 11 plus came to reshape education in Britain and how and how these ideas were first accepted and then rejected.
00:07:42.000And I discovered, I think, that most people in the history faculty at Oxford, which was a fairly conventional conservative faculty, thought I was completely mad to be looking at this subject.
00:07:53.000And I found myself in the strange position of being somebody who was, you know, looking at an unconventional subject, not political history or constitutional history, which was an unconventional subject,
00:08:06.000which would have put me in the camp of some, you know, sort of deranged lefty, but actually from quite a conservative direction,
00:08:13.000because I thought that dismantling the 11 plus and dismantling the grammar schools was a terrible thing.
00:08:19.000So I would say I was intellectually quite, quite homeless, but actually being intellectually homeless, I think it's quite appropriate to somebody who's interested in meritocracy,
00:08:29.000which ultimately I think is an idea which which in political terms tends to be intellectually homeless.
00:08:34.000So you do point out in the book, you use a phrase in your book, you say cruel meritocracy, cruelty meritocracy, I believe,
00:08:44.000and you are referring there, despite the fact that you were a beneficiary of the 11 plus system, that the test, like it's a really sharp fork in the road,
00:08:56.000and perhaps it's too sharp a fork in the road in some sense to be palatable.
00:09:01.000And then I suppose the people who have dismantled those systems would object to your support for that system by saying,
00:09:09.000well, it allowed you through, and that was good for you, but there was all those other people who were arbitrarily denied the possibility of advancement.
00:09:18.000And I think the weak part of that argument is the idea that it's arbitrary, right? That's the crux of the matter.
00:09:25.000What exactly does arbitrary mean? And you might also say that cruel as these examinations were,
00:09:33.000they were perhaps less cruel than what they prevented.
00:09:37.000Absolutely. Absolutely. I wouldn't advocate for a return to the 11 plus.
00:09:41.000I think it was a system which was too much a matter of dividing people into sheep and goats.
00:09:50.000It was too once and for all. I think you have to have some sort of recourse to what happens if people have a bad day.
00:09:58.000And I would want a system in which you have a variegated set of selective schools, lots of second chances, lots of different types of schools.
00:10:09.000But I think there's a distinction between sort of a system which is short, sharp and therefore obviously cruel and a system which is very prolonged,
00:10:19.000seems to be very kind and actually ends up being quite cruel.
00:10:23.000And I would say that what we've done is replace a system whereby you have, you know, a one off test,
00:10:29.000which can benefit a large number of poorer people with a system of very prolonged educational selection,
00:10:37.000which over a long period of time tends to tends to be very biased towards people who have the resources to keep going through the system.
00:10:46.000So under the 11 plus, you have a number of people who would be selected at 11, would get a very good academic education,
00:10:53.000would get free educations at Oxford, Cambridge or whatever university they went to, and then would go on to the fast stream of the civil service.
00:11:00.000Now, where you have a much more prolonged system, it's easier for people who don't have a lot of resources to be weeded out or to drop out.
00:11:09.000And so, you know, it costs a lot of money to go to university, it costs a lot of money to go to graduate school.
00:11:15.000By prolonging the process of selection, it looks kinder on the surface, but deep down it can be a system which is much more socially biased towards richer people,
00:11:28.000rather than people who might be deserving on the basis of their innate abilities.
00:11:32.000You see the same conundrum emerging to some degree with the use of statistically valid and reliable tests to do selection in the workplace.
00:19:24.000And so, okay, well, what's the solution to that?
00:19:27.000Well, then it turns into something like, well, it's capitalism's fault, which is unbelievably shallow analysis.
00:19:33.000And that's why I liked your historical approach as well.
00:19:35.000What I tried to do in my book was to look at the history of meritocracy and treat it as a historical problem rather than just as a philosophical problem or a legal problem.
00:19:47.000Because what I wanted to show is that if you look, that meritocracy is a relatively recent thing, and it's an extremely radical thing.
00:19:56.000And if you look at the history of previous societies, most previous societies have been based on principles other than merit.
00:20:04.000Because there is an argument that says, of course, we all believe in meritocracy.
00:20:13.000In fact, for most of human history, societies have not been organized according to the principle of meritocracy.
00:20:19.000They've been organized according to the principle of the inheritance of positions from father to son, so dynasties.
00:20:27.000They've been organized according to the principle of ascription, whereby the position that you have in society is one that you inherit and one that in somehow is regarded as natural.
00:20:37.000The world is naturally organized into hierarchies.
00:20:41.000You know, Shakespeare talks about a great deal about how people should reconcile themselves to their position in society, because if they try and change it, it will cause some terrible problem, almost a psychic problem or a problem in the natural order of things.
00:20:56.000Untune that string and, you know, what discord follows, as you see in Troilus and Cressida.
00:21:03.000And also, so you have a notion that a static society is a good society, a hierarchical society is a good society, that power and position and property should flow through families, you know, and dynasties that should rule the world.
00:21:19.000And also, you get the question of how in such a society do you allocate positions?
00:21:24.000Well, there are actually, you know, very significant answers to that.
00:21:28.000One is that you give them away as patronage.
00:21:31.000Another is that you buy them and sell them.
00:21:36.000So there was a huge market in jobs in these pre-meritocratic societies that, you know, you would buy a job in the civil service or you would buy a job as a tax collector.
00:21:47.000And France was a particularly extreme example of this, but most pre-modern societies, you know, had a market in jobs.
00:21:56.000And one of the things that didn't exist in that world was a notion that there is a precise relationship between having a job and your ability to perform that job.
00:22:06.000So I quote the example in the book of a woman called Margaret Scott, who is the wet nurse to the Prince of Wales in 1783.
00:22:19.000She was given a pension of 200 pounds a year and 200 pounds a year in those days was a great deal of money.
00:22:25.000But it was also a great deal of money when you consider the fact that the Prince of Wales was 23 years old at the time.
00:22:31.000And so probably not in need of a wet nurse.
00:22:34.000But, you know, there just isn't a notion that a job is something you do, that you need to be qualified for, that is a set of commitments to your employer.
00:22:44.000So let's take that apart for a minute, because partly what you're pointing to is that the idea of meritocracy is so deeply rooted in our culture that we assume that its existence is something akin to a natural fact.
00:23:01.000It's not a natural fact and it's a fragile fact.
00:23:04.000It's something that we can lose very easily if we do the wrong things.
00:23:08.000So that's why I spend so much time talking about history, because what I want to prove in this book is it's something that was created historically and could be destroyed historically.
00:23:18.000We could we could move towards a non meritocratic society, which is what worries me.
00:23:22.000So we assume now I think that if I have a job, my job, it doesn't really matter what the job is, is to produce something productive that other people value in as efficient a manner as possible at a cost that's less than what I'm paid.
00:23:58.000Let's let's go to the other side of this for a minute.
00:23:59.000So part of the problem, I think, is terminology, the part of what makes people resistant to this, because we also tend to sort of casually talk about elite institutions, which implies a kind of moral valuing.
00:24:11.000We talk about meritocracy, which implies that the people at the top are of greater merit.
00:24:18.000And that means to the degree that that meritocracy is established on the basis of, let's say, fluid intelligence, that we're conflating moral worth with abstract intellectual ability.
00:24:52.000It doesn't even necessarily mean that the decisions you make are going to be better than decisions that other people would make using other means.
00:24:59.000Now, it's complicated because, as you point out in the book, it's quite likely if you're in the top, let's say, tenth of the IQ distribution and you start poor, that you won't end up poor.
00:25:16.000And so I believe I read a paper at one point that that suggested that you were much better off in the United States if you were born in the top quartile of IQ than if you were born in the top quartile of wealth.
00:25:54.000Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know how to intercept it.
00:26:03.000And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:26:06.000With some off the shelf hardware, even a tech savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins and credit card details.
00:26:14.000Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:28:25.000I mean, one of the things I've been trying to sort out in my own mind is the conceptual inadequacy of both the left and the right
00:28:34.000when it comes to profound individual differences in ability.
00:28:37.000So I had a client at one point who had an IQ of under 80 and he couldn't read well.
00:28:46.000He collected a lot of books because he was a bit obsessive, but he couldn't read.
00:28:50.000And I spent about 30 hours training him to fold a piece of paper, a letter, into three equal segments
00:28:58.000so that it could be put effectively into an envelope with enough accuracy that a multitude of such envelopes would actually pass through an envelope sorting machine.
00:29:07.000And it was something I could do without thinking.
00:29:10.000And he couldn't really do it after 30 hours of training.
00:29:14.000And so I struggled for about a year and a half to find him a volunteer job.
00:29:20.000And it turns out, you know, volunteer jobs are actually harder to get in many ways than paying jobs now because there's so many police checks and that sort of thing you have to go through.
00:29:30.000And they're very technically challenging.
00:29:32.000And I sent him to a government agency that that was hypothetically designed to help people like him find a job.
00:29:38.000And they said, you know, type up your resume and send it out.
00:29:41.000It's like, well, he can't type and he doesn't have a resume and he can't use a computer.
00:29:45.000And that's not helpful. Thank you very much. You have no idea what you're dealing with here.
00:29:49.000And so this 10 percent of the population, let's say the liberals think you can train anyone to do anything, which is rubbish.
00:29:57.000And the conservatives think if you work hard enough, there's no obstacles to your success.
00:30:02.000And that's also rubbish in some situations because hard work alone isn't going to do it.
00:30:08.000And so we have a real conundrum. Now, what we're doing right now, I think, is shooting the messenger.
00:30:13.000It's like, we don't want to hear this. So we'll get rid of tests that are valid and reliable.
00:30:18.000So, you know, the heart of my D Phil thesis and also to some extent at the heart of this, this new book, The Aristocracy of Talents,
00:30:26.000is this group of psychologists who emerged in the late 19th century and become very dominant in the 20th century up to the 1960s,
00:30:35.000who are psychometricians who are concerned with the psychology of individual differences, measuring individual differences.
00:30:42.000And what I would say that those people are essentially is bell curve liberals.
00:30:47.000They believe in the bell curve. They believe in the normal distribution.
00:30:52.000They believe that the range of individual differences is very wide.
00:30:56.000But they say that those natural facts about the world lead one to liberal conclusions.
00:31:03.000They need they lead one to believing in a more active state, a more child centered set of educational policies and a more redistribution,
00:31:18.000more distributive tax system as well. So in Britain, where I think bell curve liberalism is particularly dominant,
00:31:24.000they they they would all be members of the Labour Party or the very least of the Liberal Party.
00:31:29.000They would have all voted in 1945 for the Labour Party.
00:31:34.000They believe that the very fact that people have wide ranges of individual ability means that you have to have an active and generous welfare state
00:31:43.000because it's not their fault that they're not very bright.
00:31:47.000It's not their fault at the bottom of society that they can't look after themselves.
00:31:50.000So they need to be, as it were, looked after through a pension system, through through a system of redistributive taxation, as I say, through supplements.
00:32:03.000Well, you're you're making a case there too. That's an interesting case because you're actually making the case that it is the observation of genuine and profound differences in people's ability that are fundamental and maybe not even easily changed by social policy that actually justifies the redistributive welfare state at a moral level.
00:32:25.000Right. And so that's something for people who oppose the idea of meritocracy to really think about for a while.
00:32:30.000Well, I mean, John Rawls, actually, you know, it's central to his theory of justice that you should have redistribute.
00:32:36.000I mean, John Rawls, very interestingly, as a leftist, is also a sort of genetic determinist.
00:32:40.000He says that people don't own their talents, you know, they inherit their talents.
00:32:45.000And so if they're born very bright, it's not because they're morally superior, it's because they happen to be lucky.
00:32:49.000If they're born not so bright, it's because they happen to be unlucky.
00:32:52.000And therefore, society has an obligation to redistribute resources from the from the lucky to the unlucky.
00:32:58.000I think that's a weak philosophical argument in some sense, because I could I think you could just as easily say if that is the case, those a priori presumptions about the distribution of talent, it is in everyone's best interests, regardless of the causes of the differences in ability to radically incentivize those who can.
00:33:19.000So they will produce as much as they can for the rest of us who can't.
00:33:23.000Yes. And so what is interesting about it is that there is a liberal case for redistribution based on the idea of inheritance of people's, you know, inherited IQ.
00:33:38.000And I think that was the dominant position on the left.
00:33:42.000So you've got a whole bunch of something like, let's say, JBS Haldane, who is a sort of Marxist, who is the sort of editor of the Daily Worker, which was the Communist Party magazine, who is also a biologist.
00:33:55.000He wrote this this this this this book I have on my shelves here in 1932 called The Inequality of Man.
00:34:01.000And it's all about, you know, if we have if we know that people are unequal, what do we do about it?
00:34:07.960And he thought that what you do about it is have a bigger, more active, more enlightened, enlightened state.
00:34:13.300And something happened in the 90s, let's say, in the 1960s, roughly in the 1960s, whereby this notion became forbidden on the left.
00:34:20.860The left became not only more egalitarian rather than meritocratic, but it also became committed to a blank slate theory of the world and that anything that questioned the blank slate theory of the world was associated with the right.
00:34:37.120So let me ask you some questions about that.
00:34:39.660I see the malevolent side of the insistence politically on blank slate as justifying the utopian pretensions of those who would like to remake man in their in the image of their political ideology.
00:34:53.740And if the blank slate argument is true, then we could be anything that those who would like to change us could make us into.
00:35:11.380There isn't a deep, psychologically-minded, psychological thinker who adheres to anything like a blank slate theory.
00:35:20.380Even the behaviorists have completely abandoned that notion.
00:35:23.260And they probably did the most rigorous job of attempting to test its validity.
00:35:27.560And then with regards to the rejection on the left, let's say, part of that was a consequence of persistent ethnic differences in IQ testing.
00:35:48.240Now, I read some recent work showing that the ethnic differences and racial differences that pop up in the IQ literature are much less evident at the age of five and increase over time.
00:35:59.220And that's quite interesting because it does indicate that perhaps there's an educational deviation that's occurring that's at least in part at the basis of this.
00:36:10.100But it's proved a very thorny and intractable problem with endless social consequences, particularly in the U.S.
00:36:16.540And we don't know what to do with that, I would say.
00:36:19.840And the easy answer is to say, well, the tests themselves are biased.
00:36:22.960But then you're stuck with, well, what are you going to use instead?
00:36:31.760On the ethnic differences, on the group difference, I mean, of course, these are differences between group averages.
00:36:37.700And, you know, there is an incredibly wide range of talents and abilities within groups.
00:36:44.040Differences within groups are much bigger than average differences between groups, evidently.
00:36:49.060But it is a very American set of data.
00:36:51.300And I think that what we're seeing in Britain at the moment, which is very interesting, I think, is that we've had a series of schools which are called academies, which are a bit like American magnet schools.
00:37:05.340But they're schools that can select people at the age of 16, once they've done their O levels, when they're going to A levels.
00:37:13.660There's a lot of them in the east end of London, in poorer parts of other cities.
00:37:17.120And we found that these schools, which have been very academically rigorous, very focused on achievement, have been designed to say that if you've got a poor population, what you need to do to it is to give it opportunity and give it rigor rather than sort of dumbed down education.
00:37:33.960And these schools have been extremely good at getting members of ethnic minorities into high quality universities.
00:37:42.700So there's one called Brampton Manor Academy in the east end of London, which has an ethnic minority dominant population, which has the majority of its students have free school meals, which is a measure of poverty.
00:37:57.460And they now get as many or more children every year into Oxbridge than Eaton does.
00:38:06.580So and again, you have, you know, in the United States.
00:38:14.760So, in fact, by percent, I think that would have been would be better because Eaton's a very big school.
00:38:19.260So these schools have been doing amazingly well and they've surprised everybody by how successful they've been.
00:38:24.900So there is a lot of drive in the poor ethnic minority population.
00:38:32.520And what we're finding in Britain is that the people who are doing worse are white working class children, particularly white working class boys.
00:38:40.460And they're being surpassed in education by Afro-Caribbeans, West Indians.
00:38:46.380And obviously, you know, Oriental Chinese ethnic minorities, which have traditionally done done very well.
00:38:54.400So it's a different it's a bit of a different picture from from the United States.
00:38:59.660So, OK, so what do you think is going on with the white working class in in England?
00:39:04.380The white working class in England is it's partly that they're living in areas where opportunities don't abound.
00:39:12.160They're living in the north of England. They're living in areas.
00:39:15.640These are people who are part of the industrial working class.
00:39:18.460And we had a massive deindustrialization, you know, particularly from the 1980s onwards.
00:39:25.160So they're in left behind areas which have seen their industries destroyed.
00:39:29.600So that is a depressing thing. And I think that's limited their ambitions.
00:39:34.020It's certainly limited their access to to to to good schools and ambitious teachers.
00:39:39.320And I think also you have a culture which tells them that they're bad people or that, you know,
00:39:47.100we have a culture that celebrates almost every group in society apart from the white working classes.
00:39:54.440Yes, particularly. Well, I've seen the conflation of ambition and achievement with power and domination in that sort of messaging.
00:40:02.020Right. And and those things shouldn't be conflated.
00:40:04.460It's very disheartening, I think, particularly for boys and girls, even if they're poor, still have the message that's sent pretty strong by our culture that,
00:40:14.240well, whatever a girl wants to accomplish and achieve, that's to be celebrated.
00:40:18.360There's no there's no fear of patriarchal power lurking underneath that, let's say.
00:40:23.760And so, yeah, I think it's it's it's dangerous to underestimate the demoralizing effect that that kind of language and messaging that's constantly applied actually has.
00:40:33.560Yeah. So we you know, we and like the United States, about 60 percent of people in universities now are women and the people at the very people who've got the least opportunities,
00:40:46.300I would say, are probably the children, the male children of white working class people living in areas like Stoke or Newcastle who've seen,
00:41:00.380you know, industrial jobs disappearing, but still have this conception that men must be people who sort of make things or do things
00:41:08.260and shouldn't be sitting behind desks or being involved in the caring professions or something like that.
00:41:14.400And those are the people, I think, who really are stuck with that.
00:41:17.340They don't have role models and they don't have a general sense of where they fit into the post-industrial hierarchy.
00:41:25.760Yeah, well, the attitude that men are people who do things with their hands is a perfectly useful attitude in industrial society
00:41:32.660when you're in the lower strata of the population, because that's exactly what the case is.
00:41:36.600And there's plenty of honour in that as well.
00:41:38.480And so it's not easy for that to be replaced when that was the basis of productive effort itself and of success.
00:41:44.680So why do you think that your book has been positively received, all things considered, in the UK?
00:41:53.840Is the assault on the meritocracy, let's say, or the conflation of the idea of intellectual prowess with merit, maybe,
00:42:00.580is that not as contentious an issue in general in the UK?
00:42:04.500No, we have a lot of the currents that you have in the United States,
00:42:08.560but in a sort of weaker way, as a sort of echo chamber in the United States.
00:42:13.860But we still have a memory, I think, of the meritocracy as being something that was progressive
00:42:21.300and something that was a cultural memory of the meritocracy as being something that's progressive
00:42:25.600and something that displaced the old aristocratic elite.
00:42:30.560And I think both the new Tories and the old Labour people can agree that, you know,
00:42:37.320the old aristocratic elite, there's something wrong with them.
00:42:39.520So we have a better memory of the failures of a pre-meritocratic society than you do in the United States, I think.
00:42:50.540I think the situation in the United States is strange because one of the things that we're better at at the moment in Britain
00:42:59.420is, I think, promoting social mobility or doing something about social mobility.
00:43:06.660That, as I say, we've got the academy schools, which are providing real opportunities for an excellent education in the inner cities.
00:43:13.940Oxford and Cambridge are doing something to sort of reach out to a much broader strata of the population.
00:43:20.540They're creating sort of extra years where they take people from poor backgrounds and give them an extra year's education.
00:43:27.920So they're basically broadening their selection.
00:43:35.200Without abandoning the principle of merit.
00:43:37.820I think exactly without abandoning the principle of merit.
00:43:41.320They may be softening it a bit in some areas.
00:43:43.400But in the United States, you still have, let's say you, I mean, you're not in the United States, I believe you're in Canada.
00:43:52.260They still have legacies, which exist.
00:43:57.000They still have athletic scholarships, which they still have incredible advantages for the children of faculty members.
00:44:05.340And if you look at the social composition of Harvard, it's an exceptionally elite institution, plutocratic institution.
00:44:15.720You know, people come from very, very rich backgrounds at Harvard.
00:44:19.780So I think America at the top of society is doing less to revive the meritocratic spirit than we in Britain are doing.
00:44:28.200And what it's doing instead, because it sort of feels some sort of vague guilt about the fact that, you know, Harvard is a 1920 rich university, is they leap into wokeism as a sort of almost as a sort of defense mechanism to their guilt.
00:44:47.000But I happen to believe that a lot of a lot of this wokeism is a sort of way in which the old privileged white ruling class holds on to its position by preserving a certain, you know, it's us plus certain selected members of the excluded classes.
00:45:05.960Yeah, well, I saw that often in my students who were of the radical left persuasion at elite institutions like Harvard, where I was there for seven years as a professor and then less so at the University of Toronto, but it's a less elite and plutocratic institution by a large margin.
00:45:28.660But it always grated on me to some degree because I thought, well, here you are at this institution.
00:45:35.140And so you are, by definition, already a member of the class of oppressors that you hypothetically despise.
00:45:40.400And the fact that you are here and accepted this and going through this means that you've accepted it.
00:45:45.380And now you want to be on the side of the oppressed and you want to have all the advantages of the hypothetical oppressor simultaneously.
00:45:52.700It seems a bit much to ask for, right, to be a victim and an oppressor at the same time.
00:45:57.880Yeah, well, I think we should always start with the question of what are you personally willing to give up?
00:46:04.760But still, I mean, so what I think one of my worries about abandoning the meritocratic principle, I think, as I said, the meritocratic principle is something that's fragile.
00:46:16.080It's something that was created relatively recently in history.
00:46:21.060And once you start making exceptions, so we'll make an exception for the children of faculty members, we'll make an exception for alumni, we'll make an exception for people who give us a lot of money, we'll make an exception for people who were born into certain groups of the population.
00:46:43.220We'll accept the meritocratic principle.
00:46:46.720Ultimately, you end up completely destroying the meritocratic principle.
00:46:50.180But you also end up reintroducing the idea that people should be judged as members of groups.
00:46:57.200And the fundamental thing about the meritocratic principle is you judge people as individuals, not as members of groups.
00:47:02.600And as soon as you begin to reintroduce this collective principle, judging people by members of groups, then you have a different principle on the basis of society.
00:47:12.720Okay, so are there advantages, do you think, to classifying people by group if we play devil's advocate?
00:47:23.860Because I see that exactly the same thing happening.
00:47:27.160There's this insistence that immutable group identity should trump individual merit.
00:47:33.380And then there's a deeper criticism, which is, and the deepest criticism in some sense is, your understanding of merit, your concept of merit, and I'm speaking of you personally as an advocate of this position,
00:47:46.480is nothing but a reflection of your unreflected demand, say, to justify your position as a beneficiary of the 11 system, and also to justify the privilege you have as a member of your particular ethnicity and background.
00:48:02.340That's Foucault's criticism, right, of virtually everything.
00:48:06.400Well, let me answer those two questions, and I think you probably won't agree with my first answer.
00:48:11.700But I think that there are certain groups of people who, by dint of their history, do deserve to be treated as groups who've been collectively wronged.
00:48:25.380And this is a, you know, I've been a long-term opponent of affirmative action.
00:48:29.400I've now come around to seeing its merits, because I think the African-American population in the United States, because of the legacy of slavery,
00:48:37.380because of the legacy of Jim Crow, and because redlining and segregation by residents lasted for such a long time in the United States,
00:48:49.960that there is a case for affirmative action, for reaching out positively to look for talent,
00:49:01.120and to look for potential, and making an incredibly hard effort to do that as a way of making up for historical wrongs,
00:49:10.560but historical wrongs which continue to limit opportunities.
00:49:14.960But I would say what I do not accept as a conclusion from that is that you can just do it by numbers,
00:51:11.920As I say, I came to this position reluctantly, because, you know, it's an inconsistent position.
00:51:16.380But I also think it's a pragmatic position.
00:51:18.080I think that the injustice involved with slavery was of such a different order that we need to make recompense for it.
00:51:29.800The society in general has to make recompense for it.
00:51:32.920And it continues to shape the opportunities of black Americans.
00:51:37.320But I would not extend that principle, let's say, to recent immigrants who, by the very fact that they've immigrated to the United States, have massively improved their life chances.
00:51:48.120I'd like to keep it limited to essentially the descendants of slaves.
00:51:54.000And also, I would say that it's something that should be time limited.
00:51:58.680It's something that we want to get beyond.
00:52:01.340We want to get beyond it and to a world in which we can begin to judge people purely on the basis as individuals.
00:52:10.560What that time frame would be, I'm not sure.
00:52:14.780But, you know, it needs to be something that's ended.
00:52:16.980And that's why I think there's a really important distinction between affirmative action and the talk now of diversity, because diversity is based on a very different philosophy from affirmative action.
00:52:29.600The philosophy of affirmative action is we did something bad and we've got to make up for it.
00:52:38.760Within the confines of a meritocratic system, we are actively searching for talent.
00:52:42.840And we have to actively search for talent in certain populations much more than we do in other populations because of their history.
00:52:49.860Now, the logic of diversity is very different from that, because the argument of diversity from the back case was that diversity is a good in itself.
00:52:58.940And you have to judge people as members of groups, because it's by mixing those members of groups, because different groups have different characteristics, that you produce better educational outcomes.
00:53:10.480Now, that's there's no evidence for that.
00:53:15.340Well, it's partly wrong because, look, we could talk about one of the arguments you lay out in your book that certain psychologists, and they tend to be educational psychologists, have levied against strict meritocratic tests like those that are fundamentally IQ tests.
00:53:32.680So that would be the SAT, the GRE, everything that's used for entrance into undergraduate universities, where that's used in graduate school, professional schools.
00:53:43.160And people will say it's not, but that's because they don't know what they're talking about.
00:53:46.500Okay, so then you might say, well, IQ is pretty singular, and it's a pretty good predictor of long-term success in a cognitively complex society, but there are other sources of variance, possibly.
00:53:58.720So you get thinkers like Robert Sternberg, for example, who talked about practical intelligence, and the multiple intelligence theorist Howard Gardner, and both of whose scientific work, I think, is shoddy beyond comprehension.
00:54:14.160And a terrible answer to a problem that's been answered actually quite nicely, psychometrically.
00:54:19.720I mean, we know there are other sources of variability.
00:54:21.820There's variability in temperament, five dimensions.
00:54:26.300And I don't think that that's a biased finding, and it was agnostic, theoretically.
00:54:32.480It emerged out of pure brute force statistics.
00:54:36.720That's where the diversity lies, and there is not a lot of racial difference in temperament.
00:54:42.000So the idea that group membership produces diversity of a sort that would actually broaden the human scope of any discussion, any corporation, etc., etc., is just wrong.
00:54:54.660There's no evidence for it whatsoever, and it's even worse than that, because it makes the presumption that the essential source of diversity is, in fact, ethnicity and race, and that can go wrong very badly.
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