TRIGGERnometry - The Problem with Meritocracy - David Goodhart

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00:02:03.860 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:06.620 I'm Francis Foster.

00:02:07.860 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:02:09.080 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:02:14.660 Our brilliant guest was on the show a couple of years ago talking about his previous book,

00:02:18.760 The Road to Somewhere, and he's now triumphantly returned here with his new book,

00:02:23.180 Head, Hand, and Heart. David Goodhart, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:02:26.140 Thank you for inviting me.

00:02:27.420 It's great to have you back. You've written this great book, and a very important one,

00:02:31.660 I think, will form the basis of many political conversations going forward.

00:02:37.600 It's one of a series of books. You're not the only person to have started to talk about

00:02:42.160 the limitations and, in fact, the harms of, quote-unquote, meritocracy.

00:02:46.340 What was your thinking behind the book?

00:02:48.100 And just give everybody a summary of what you're talking about in this.

00:02:51.380 Yeah, it sort of, it carries on somewhat from my last book,

00:02:57.320 The Road to Somewhere, which is about the value divides in our society

00:03:00.100 that have led to Brexit and Trump and the mass political alienation.

00:03:07.480 I mean, this book too is trying to answer that question,

00:03:10.440 trying to understand what it is about our apparently quite rich

00:03:14.900 and successful modern societies that does seem to be alienating so many of our fellow citizens.

00:03:20.360 And whereas, I mean, The Road to Somewhere was, as I say, primarily about value divides,

00:03:26.720 partly to do with educational stratification, educationally based value divides.

00:03:33.900 And in this book, I've kind of burrowed down a bit deeper into these educational divides

00:03:42.340 and looked more broadly at what it is that are the kind of aptitudes

00:03:48.320 and skills that our society values.

00:03:50.280 And I do think it's kind of, you know, one of the elephants in the room

00:03:55.140 is that we have, particularly in the last 30 years or so,

00:03:59.480 shifted, allocated a huge amount of much more status and reward

00:04:04.560 to one cluster of aptitudes, those related to cognitive analytical ability.

00:04:10.380 and that's inevitably kind of drawn away

00:04:14.000 some of the prestige and reward

00:04:16.180 that used to go to other forms of skill and aptitude

00:04:18.640 to do with manual technical skills

00:04:22.420 and caring and emotional aptitudes

00:04:27.280 and I mean some of this has always been the case

00:04:31.100 I mean some of this goes back thousands of years

00:04:32.960 but it's been very much reinforced

00:04:34.900 in the last generation or two

00:04:38.080 partly by the expansion of higher education in most rich countries

00:04:42.680 with anything between about 35% and 50% of school leavers

00:04:47.620 going to university now in most rich European countries,

00:04:51.120 even more than 50% in some.

00:04:54.060 And I think this isn't...

00:04:55.880 I mean, this is now, I think,

00:04:57.400 creating all sorts of dysfunctions in our societies.

00:05:00.760 And it is not just to do with the fact that we have,

00:05:06.060 while sending more and more people into very academic forms of education.

00:05:12.340 We have huge skill shortages and skilled trades,

00:05:15.560 middling technician-type jobs.

00:05:18.260 One of the reasons given for the failure of the testing system

00:05:20.680 is we don't have enough white-coated lab technicians. 0.99

00:05:23.780 We've got lots of academic scientists,

00:05:25.320 but not enough technicians to do the more practical hands-on work.

00:05:29.940 We have huge recruitment crises in all the caring professions.

00:05:35.000 We certainly did before the pandemic.

00:05:36.960 I mean, I think one of the positive things about the pandemic

00:05:38.680 is apparently recruitment into nursing courses has risen

00:05:42.680 as a result of the kind of attention on the kind of heroic work

00:05:46.140 that people have been doing in the care sector.

00:05:48.560 So we've got things out of alignment.

00:05:50.580 So we're overproducing kind of middle and lower level

00:05:56.420 sort of cognitively trained people

00:06:00.700 for whom increasingly there are not going to be the jobs

00:06:03.720 because we've reached what I call peak head.

00:06:06.800 We've found, particularly in the last five or ten years,

00:06:12.180 the number of cognitive professional jobs

00:06:14.800 has not been growing at the pace that it used to grow.

00:06:17.480 There was a reason for expanding higher education.

00:06:21.220 There was a rationale for it going back 30, 40 years.

00:06:24.700 But that rationale has now come to an end.

00:06:27.520 And yet the system is still on kind of automatic pilot,

00:06:31.040 churning out more and more graduates.

00:06:33.060 most of whom, many of whom, are not getting the high-status, high-paid jobs that they expected.

00:06:38.520 So we're creating a crisis of expectations.

00:06:43.120 About a third of graduates are not in graduate employment between five and ten years after they graduate.

00:06:49.820 The graduate income premium has fallen from an average of 50-60% to below 10% for many people,

00:06:58.080 particularly men from non-elite universities.

00:07:01.160 so a lot of things have got out of kilter but i think it's but it's more than just a an economic

00:07:07.780 question it's also to do with um with a kind of broader sort of culture psychology of the

00:07:16.280 country almost that the idea of what it is to be a successful person has become far too narrowly

00:07:22.000 focused on cognitive ability that that you know the people who are most respected and who are most

00:07:29.040 rewarded are the people who pass exams at school go to more or less good university have a more or

00:07:33.900 less successful professional career and um and what is more there is now only essentially kind

00:07:41.180 of one ladder into that zone of safety and success and and it's not surprising that so many kids

00:07:48.020 and their parents want to still travel along that that that motorway into the it's all it's very

00:07:55.540 It's very clearly signposted.

00:07:57.820 It's still, despite high tuition fees, it's still hugely subsidised by the taxpayer.

00:08:03.720 And it's become completely automatic now for most of the middle and upper middle classes in this country.

00:08:10.600 I mean, it's true, some working class people go into higher education too.

00:08:14.720 But it's one of the reasons for the slowdown in social mobility.

00:08:17.620 All of the things that are claimed by the advocates of expanded higher education have really, I mean, one has to be pretty sceptical about.

00:08:27.320 You know, we don't have the right skills for a highly productive economy.

00:08:33.480 Social mobility has declined, not increased in the time that higher education has been expanding.

00:08:38.420 And that's partly because it has been so monopolised by one section of society.

00:08:42.780 um and and there used to be there used to be lots of little ladders up there's now one big ladder

00:08:49.140 up you know if you don't if you don't get into that you know if you don't do a levels and and

00:08:54.640 go to a decent university um you know your life chances are quite likely to be not necessarily

00:09:00.580 but are quite likely to to to be lower than somebody who does and uh i think you know you

00:09:05.820 only have to go back 30 40 years and there were lots of lots of different pathways to

00:09:10.020 leading a successful life and David there's a question that I want to ask which is how much

00:09:17.020 responsibility do John Major and Tony Blair need to take for this John Major number one because he

00:09:21.620 turned all the polytechnics into universities and number two with Blair saying that 50% of

00:09:27.600 the population should go to university and when quizzed about this it turned out it was just an

00:09:33.460 arbitrary figure um yes i mean i think i mean it's not really about allocating blame but

00:09:40.700 but i do think perhaps particularly you haven't met francis it is on trigonometry david that's

00:09:47.300 what we do guilty men he loves it how much responsibility does this need to take that

00:09:53.220 it's all about taking listen i'm catholic all right come on well yeah i mean i do think there

00:09:58.700 was a kind of there was a lack of emotional intelligence i mean this sort of in a way goes

00:10:01.680 back to my previous book and the argument about kind of anywheres and somewheres and anywheres

00:10:05.800 you know the anywhere worldview which tends to be pro-mobility and openness and autonomy

00:10:11.140 perfectly decent and legitimate worldview just as the somewhere worldview is you know with its

00:10:15.420 um greater attachment to familiarity and and locality and so on these are both decent worldviews

00:10:22.140 the problem was problem is that anywheres in the last 30 40 years have become too powerful and

00:10:27.480 dominate our culture and our society. And they think they're doing it in the national interest,

00:10:32.140 but often actually they're pursuing their own priorities. And this is a very good example of

00:10:35.980 it, I think. The fact that Tony Blair could give that speech in 1999, saying that we want 50% of

00:10:42.220 school leavers to go straight to university, showed not only the extent to which the Labour

00:10:48.280 Party had kind of lost connection with its sort of original voters, but it was just sort of

00:10:54.960 psychologically um uncurious i mean i i talk in the book about what i call the 15 50 problem

00:11:02.260 that when 15 of people you know go back 40 years or even when i was at university i mean

00:11:08.380 eight or ten percent of school leavers went to university so the kind of the graduate elite was

00:11:12.880 much smaller and there's obviously something to be said for the graduate elite being bigger and

00:11:16.980 more democratic um but you know inclusions create their own exclusions and that actually when only

00:11:23.960 10 or 15 percent of people in your class or school or town were going to college and you weren't it

00:11:29.560 didn't matter you know you went and worked in a local office or factory and life went on

00:11:33.700 but when 40 or 50 percent are going and you're not it's a completely different ball game and

00:11:39.380 and nobody seems to have thought about that i mean you know um in in the late 1990s when they were

00:11:44.940 when they were expanding well the big expansion came as you say when when polytechnics became

00:11:49.320 universities in 1992. But then this 50% target in 1999, nobody seems to have given any thought

00:11:57.080 to that. And I think, you know, and these, I mean, what did they imagine that 50% would

00:12:04.540 become 100%? I mean, and I think, I mean, part of it is a perfectly decent, and I have

00:12:12.080 this argument now with David Willits and Andrew Adonis and others who are much more wedded

00:12:16.080 to the higher education status quo.

00:12:19.100 Indeed, David Willits partly designed it.

00:12:21.100 And there's a perfectly decent instinct

00:12:22.860 behind the desire not to kick away the ladder.

00:12:26.620 And I often get, as a sort of personal attack,

00:12:30.600 well, it's all right for you.

00:12:31.480 You went to a Russell Group University,

00:12:32.820 your children do,

00:12:34.240 but now you want to sort of kick away the ladder

00:12:36.760 and force everybody to go to do technical courses

00:12:42.000 at the local FE college.

00:12:43.080 um well i mean that that's that seems to not be you know that's sort of getting it the wrong way

00:12:50.900 around i mean we should you know when we'll when we're arguing about this or trying to think about

00:12:55.560 this we should sort of look at the bigger public interest to begin with so what is it actually in

00:12:59.820 the interest of this country to do in terms of how many people can actually benefit from how many

00:13:05.360 people is it appropriate should go to you know properly rigorous academically rigorous higher

00:13:12.600 education and of course much of our higher education has ceased being properly rigorous

00:13:17.960 but I mean you know if we want to keep you know really proper decent rigorous academic

00:13:22.860 higher education you know what is the proportion of the population that should go from the point

00:13:29.240 of view of the kind of public interest given all the other things that we also need done in our

00:13:33.440 society that don't necessarily require higher level academic qualifications. But even David

00:13:39.120 Even from the perspective of the individual interest, the economic figures you described, the decline in the graduate premium, the rising tuition fees, the huge debts that graduates are now accruing.

00:13:52.780 It would seem to me that 20 or 30 years ago when the argument was going to university is good for you, then of course you'd want to increase the number of people who'd go.

00:14:03.320 Now that argument is starting to look increasingly unsound,

00:14:07.300 particularly given that, as you say,

00:14:08.760 there's been a huge dilution in the quality

00:14:10.900 of many of the courses that people are doing.

00:14:13.180 So if you've come out of a second grade university

00:14:15.960 with a Mickey Mouse degree and whatever...

00:14:19.580 Tutu and drama from Essex University, thank you.

00:14:21.800 I was talking about Francis exactly there.

00:14:25.780 But a tutu meant something in those days. 0.98

00:14:27.760 I'm not that old, David, for fuck's sake. 0.98

00:14:30.120 It meant that you were very, very much below average. 0.99

00:14:33.280 That's what it meant in those days.

00:14:35.320 But you take my point, which is from an individual perspective,

00:14:39.220 it no longer seems necessarily to make sense.

00:14:41.620 Sure, if you are gifted in the head, as you talk about,

00:14:45.680 then you may continue to benefit from that.

00:14:48.140 But it seems like what you're really saying,

00:14:50.060 and certainly something I think a lot of people would agree with,

00:14:53.060 is there are a lot of people now who are being pushed

00:14:56.080 into that sort of education, which actually hurts them

00:14:59.160 rather than benefits them.

00:14:59.840 Absolutely, yeah.

00:15:01.080 And, I mean, it's another basic thing that people seem to have overlooked

00:15:04.080 is that there's something called the law of diminishing returns.

00:15:07.880 You know, you cannot, when 50% of the population are going to university,

00:15:12.520 you're obviously going to have a lower return than when only 10% or 15% go.

00:15:16.920 And the whole ballgame is a different one.

00:15:20.200 And, yeah, I mean, I think we've, as I say, we've sort of got things out of kilter,

00:15:26.000 but now the system has so much vested interest behind it too.

00:15:28.960 And also we have a situation where 40% of jobs in the British economy are graduate only.

00:15:34.580 You know, more and more professions that don't have graduate status, like nursing, policing now is coming up,

00:15:43.060 it's going to be graduate only in a few years' time.

00:15:45.600 More and more, because there's a, you know, if you can't beat them, join them.

00:15:51.180 I mean, you know, in a society in which all the prestige seems to be going to people, you know, with degrees,

00:15:57.820 the sort of graduate the mass graduate elite if you like um everybody everybody wants a part of

00:16:03.940 that you know aren't we as policemen sort of you know shouldn't we be respected too and

00:16:07.620 and the and the only path to respect has become going through that funnel into into higher

00:16:13.300 education and it's become dysfunctional um and you know like i said there used to be many more

00:16:19.980 ladders up you used to be able to get promotion from below you don't really get promotion from

00:16:23.000 below any longer you know if you were an able able kid and you you know you hadn't done very

00:16:27.800 well at school and this happens to a lot of people now people some people are late developers

00:16:32.720 and and don't do very well in their exams um but you know their lives are now much more precarious

00:16:39.700 i think than would have been the case um in the in the relatively recent past if you were

00:16:44.220 if you didn't do well you'd still you still had had the opportunity in most big organizations if

00:16:49.500 If you were capable, you'd be spotted and you would kind of rise up through the ranks.

00:16:53.420 Now you have to have a degree or even a postgraduate degree before you get in the front door in the first place.

00:16:59.220 So I think, you know, and also we just, you know, the amount of kind of national resource that is invested in 18, 19 year olds going into higher education, many of whom aren't going to benefit from it particularly.

00:17:13.340 I mean, they're just not mature enough.

00:17:14.820 you know wouldn't it be far better i mean that to say you know go and do a pretty basic job in

00:17:20.380 software development or coding or whatever and then you know if you are if you do have a kind

00:17:24.600 of intellectual interest in it and you want to find out as it were the kind of logic and the

00:17:28.600 maths or the physics or whatever it is behind uh behind what you're doing you know go and do a

00:17:33.340 degree in computer science five or ten years later you'll probably be you'll enjoy it a lot

00:17:37.380 more you'll get much more out of it and you'll probably be a much more useful person economically

00:17:41.260 too um david isn't part of the problem that with globalization a lot of these menial jobs

00:17:47.360 they simply don't exist anymore so kids have less choice when it comes to choosing a career path

00:17:53.300 and it seems that for them university might be the only option in some ways

00:17:58.140 um it's true that that that both kind of trade and and technology and automation of have have

00:18:06.980 have caused a lot of old-fashioned blue-collar jobs to disappear.

00:18:12.640 That is certainly true.

00:18:14.020 But we have huge skill shortages in this country,

00:18:16.880 huge skill shortages in the skilled trades.

00:18:19.180 And, you know, lorry drivers, you know, we've got a shortage of lorry drivers.

00:18:23.120 I mean, you know, perhaps partly because people read the papers

00:18:25.780 and they think, oh, well, this is one of those jobs that's going to be,

00:18:28.340 you know, we're going to have, you know, what is it, robotic cars.

00:18:32.520 What's the phrase?

00:18:34.820 Yeah, automated cars.

00:18:36.200 Yeah.

00:18:36.980 You know, and lorries are perhaps in the front line of that.

00:18:39.860 So people are not doing HGV courses and so on.

00:18:45.180 And as I said earlier, I mean, those kind of, we've got a missing middle in our training system.

00:18:53.520 The old, you know, in the language of international education, level three is A-levels and level six is a degree.

00:18:59.820 level four or five we used to have hundreds of thousands of people doing these kind of higher

00:19:05.420 technical manual um qualifications usually spending some time in a polytechnic before

00:19:11.920 the politics became universities um and and sort of doing it on the job part-time courses and

00:19:17.340 sandwich courses and so on and and all of that is not completely disappeared but i mean you have

00:19:23.100 kind of a few thousand people doing those courses because the people that used to do those courses

00:19:26.960 You know, their children have gone to university or many of them have gone to university and they're doing dilute versions of what our kind of political class elite, you know, many of them went to the very best universities, think, you know, thought, you know, in a perfectly sort of generous spirited way, they thought, well, why shouldn't everybody else have this experience without really sort of thinking it through?

00:19:52.980 because by definition, not everybody can have that experience.

00:19:56.700 I mean, both because there is a limit on the number of people

00:20:00.080 who are clever enough to really take advantage of it,

00:20:03.680 but also because it's bound to be a sort of diluted version

00:20:07.160 of the kind of experience that the Tony Blairs

00:20:11.600 and the Gordon Browns might have had, you know, 40 or 50 years ago.

00:20:16.420 and you know is a diluted version of that sort of elite academic experience really better than

00:20:26.560 you know doing a doing a technical qualification at a polytechnic i mean given that you know we're

00:20:33.440 talking about the level of ability i mean you know most of us are in the middle when it comes

00:20:37.680 to ability you know speak for yourself well constantin will be in the top 15 or in the

00:20:45.680 bottom it depends who you ask and then you know i mean this is you know i mean intelligence

00:20:49.800 researchers will say you know there's kind of 15 with you know very high kind of you know raw

00:20:54.740 intelligence as it were i mean intelligence is a complex i mean i have a whole chapter on it it's

00:20:58.640 very context dependent and complex and um and one can't speak too confidently about it but i mean i

00:21:06.240 think intelligence researchers will say there are there are people who do have um that that very

00:21:11.660 high level of kind of raw intelligence, and there are 15% of people at the bottom who

00:21:16.360 are a bit slow. But most of us are in the middle. So most of the people that are going

00:21:20.340 to university now are probably no brighter than the people who are not going to university.

00:21:27.420 Most of the people who are not going to university. So it's not about ability. I mean, it's about

00:21:32.780 sort of convention in a way now.

00:21:36.900 Right. Which brings us very much to the point that you cover in detail in the book, which

00:21:41.260 is meritocracy.

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00:22:58.980 what's and it's it's something that you and others are criticizing uh as something that

00:23:08.220 no longer works or perhaps never work uh what define first of all for people you know to most

00:23:13.620 people the idea of meritocracy is the people who are good get the rewards and the people who are

00:23:17.960 not good don't what's wrong with that um nothing is wrong with that essentially um um the yeah so

00:23:27.900 So meritocracy seems like a completely fair idea.

00:23:31.920 I think Michael Young, who coined the term, was actually a critic of meritocracy.

00:23:39.500 He was an egalitarian socialist and he didn't like the fact that people were differentially rewarded for whatever quality.

00:23:48.080 He didn't like traditional societies where you were rewarded because you happened to be born into a landed family.

00:23:54.480 He didn't like the fact that you may have been born into a family

00:24:00.600 or you may have inherited, both sort of through genetics and culture,

00:24:08.000 you inherited various advantages when it comes to the cognitive meritocracy.

00:24:15.100 He thought that was as much of a lottery as being born into a landed family in the 19th century, say.

00:24:21.920 So he was against it for socialist reasons.

00:24:27.080 But obviously there is a common sense appeal about the idea

00:24:30.900 that obviously it makes sense for people who are the most able.

00:24:36.260 I mean, you know, we want the most appropriate people in the right jobs,

00:24:39.940 particularly when it comes to top jobs.

00:24:41.380 You know, you want your top nuclear physicists

00:24:45.400 to be in charge of your nuclear research programme.

00:24:47.840 You don't want it chosen by lottery.

00:24:49.120 You don't want to be...

00:24:51.260 Otherwise you get Chernobyl.

00:24:53.280 You don't want to be operated on by someone who failed their surgery exam.

00:24:57.300 So all of that is common sense,

00:24:59.540 which is why actually the critique of meritocracy

00:25:01.620 has very limited political appeal, I think.

00:25:04.620 I mean, it has much more appeal in the kind of university seminar room

00:25:09.180 than it does sort of out on the street.

00:25:11.580 Having said that, I think meritocracy has been a disappointment.

00:25:17.260 I mean, so Michael Young coined the term back in the late 50s

00:25:23.660 and wrote this book that was a kind of satire on it.

00:25:27.520 You know, the idea of kind of IQ plus effort equals merit

00:25:33.660 and therefore, and he described a society

00:25:36.840 in which people were ruthlessly screened for their IQ

00:25:40.160 and created an elite.

00:25:42.300 And of course, it became a self-perpetuating elite,

00:25:44.800 as it tends to do.

00:25:46.480 I mean, this is one of the problems with meritocracy.

00:25:49.740 There's some American philosopher who says, well, it's fine.

00:25:52.920 Of course, everyone is in favour, surely,

00:25:55.620 of us being sort of ruled by the clever.

00:25:58.420 But you just wait until you're ruled by the clever's children.

00:26:02.680 And then by the clever's children's children.

00:26:05.080 You know, there's a tendency of it to become oligarchic.

00:26:09.660 And to some extent, that's probably unavoidable.

00:26:12.340 I mean, one doesn't have to sort of speculate

00:26:13.560 even about the sort of genetic inheritance of intelligence.

00:26:17.760 I mean, it's sort of inevitable in free societies

00:26:21.740 where parents are able to hand on their advantages to their children,

00:26:26.280 they will do so.

00:26:27.720 It's the strongest human instinct.

00:26:29.260 Exactly, it's a very strong human instinct.

00:26:30.780 And you don't even need, you know, lots of countries,

00:26:33.260 even if we abolish private schools tomorrow,

00:26:35.360 all of this would happen.

00:26:36.300 Private schools is obviously one way that it happens in this country.

00:26:39.020 and that has proved a much more powerful factor i think than most people expected i mean indeed

00:26:47.880 you might even say mass education has been a bit of a disappointment to egalitarians going back 150

00:26:52.860 years and in more recent times merit meritocracy although originally as i say um term was coined

00:27:01.300 as a critique but it became something the left but originally i think the center left took up

00:27:06.580 as a kind of banner in the kind of 80s, 90s.

00:27:10.740 After, I mean, it was a new Democrats, new Labour time.

00:27:13.780 They were looking for a new story

00:27:15.000 because they'd effectively accepted

00:27:16.600 much of the political economy of the centre-right.

00:27:19.640 You know, the sort of Thatcher-Reagan reforms.

00:27:21.440 They reformed them a little bit at the margin,

00:27:23.480 but they broadly accepted that.

00:27:24.540 They needed new stories.

00:27:26.040 I think one of them was probably culture,

00:27:29.760 you know, support for minorities,

00:27:31.860 you know, being pro-immigration and so on.

00:27:33.860 But I think the other story was meritocracy.

00:27:35.700 It was kind of easier for the centre-left, perhaps because the centre-right was more of a defender of privilege and therefore less inclined to meritocracy.

00:27:43.120 Although, in fact, of course, Margaret Thatcher may not have talked very much about meritocracy, but under her, the Tory party definitely changed its style and image.

00:27:52.920 It was, what was the joke? It used to be the party run by people who owned a state, and now it was taken over by a state agent.

00:28:00.820 and so actually the centre-right went along

00:28:05.100 with the idea of merit

00:28:06.640 and it became a complete political census

00:28:08.240 it has been a political consensus now

00:28:10.260 for 30 or 40 years

00:28:11.780 of course everybody is obviously in favour of meritocracy

00:28:14.000 I mean

00:28:15.740 but it has been a great disappointment

00:28:17.620 which is why you now have this spate of books

00:28:19.620 you've got Michael Sandel, Tyranny of Merit

00:28:22.080 you've got Daniel Markowitz's book

00:28:23.960 The Meritocracy Trap

00:28:25.360 you've got Kwame Anthony Apaya

00:28:28.100 who's written a book on it

00:28:29.180 But, I mean, I think one of the reasons why, perhaps particularly in America, people on the left have turned against meritocracy is because it's at the time when meritocracy has been on the kind of banners of most of the mainstream political party flags,

00:28:49.300 has been a time of grotesque increases in inequality

00:28:54.460 and only rather limited increases in social mobility.

00:28:57.380 So it's proved much harder to have anything much more than a partial meritocracy.

00:29:04.340 Now, a partial meritocracy is probably better than not having one at all,

00:29:08.100 you know, going back to, we don't want to go back to nepotism,

00:29:11.080 but it's proved much harder, I think, than people expected.

00:29:14.200 um so people have been have been questioning both it's kind of meritocracy gets two barrels

00:29:22.580 in a way it gets first of all it's not meritocratic enough you know it's not it's not

00:29:26.380 working according to how it should be but the second point is that it's we don't really like

00:29:31.160 it in principle anyway now the reason we don't like it in principle is that what's so clever

00:29:37.400 about turning society into a competition that the most able win and most of the rest feel like

00:29:42.860 failures. That doesn't sound like an ideal society, does it? So, I mean, my answer to this

00:29:49.700 is that, yes, of course, meritocracy is unavoidable at the level of the labour market,

00:29:58.180 the level of job allocations, and to some extent, the allocation of merit too. But it is not and

00:30:04.360 should never be seen as an ideal. It's a kind of pragmatic labour market principle, like I said,

00:30:09.040 about the kind of nuclear physicists.

00:30:11.040 You know, you want the right people in the right jobs.

00:30:14.320 And, you know, how they are awarded

00:30:16.020 is a sort of broader economic and social question.

00:30:18.940 But you want the right people in the right jobs.

00:30:20.660 But you do not necessarily,

00:30:21.720 but it's not an ideal to have society

00:30:24.760 turned into a competition in which the most able win

00:30:26.940 and the others feel like failures.

00:30:28.820 So there is a sort of,

00:30:30.300 there is a distinction between

00:30:31.880 meritocratic selection for jobs,

00:30:34.180 which even Michael Young would accept.

00:30:36.000 I mean, you know, and all of the recent meritocracy critics,

00:30:38.540 you know because it's just common sense no one is in favor of you know lotteries for surgeons

00:30:43.480 so everyone agrees with that and yet we also don't like the idea of meritocratic society

00:30:51.980 you can see why how that's quite a hard thing to sell on the doorstep

00:30:55.000 on the other hand there is a distinction i think it's slightly comparable to the you remember the

00:31:00.480 french socialist lionel jospin talked about being in favor of a market economy but not a market

00:31:07.700 society. I think it's sort of analogous to that. So, I mean, I think where I think I differ

00:31:15.460 slightly from the Sandells and the Markovitzis is saying, let's not, we can't abolish meritocracy.

00:31:24.660 You know, it's the worst system apart from all the others. But what we can do is shift

00:31:32.900 the focus of what we are valuing so my focus is more on the prefix to meritocracy which is cognitive

00:31:41.520 so i mean i i want to shift some of the reward and esteem that is going to the winners of the

00:31:48.440 cognitive meritocracy as it were to to the other aptitudes to the to the manual technical and craft

00:31:54.600 and the emotional and caring jobs.

00:31:59.220 And actually, I think we've got a lot of room to do that.

00:32:04.940 I mean, I think we can sort of spread the idea of merit

00:32:08.000 rather than abolish it.

00:32:10.020 And let me just give you an example,

00:32:12.360 particularly from the care economy.

00:32:15.820 So if you ask an economist,

00:32:19.140 why is it the people in care homes are so poorly paid?

00:32:22.740 they will say because anybody can do it and what they mean by that I mean this is an example I

00:32:27.540 think of what I call cognitive creep what they're sort of judging those jobs by sort of cognitive

00:32:35.140 exam standards you know I mean pretty well anyone can get a job in a in a care home you don't you

00:32:40.740 don't you barely need GCSEs I think and but at the same time they're completely wrong about the

00:32:49.660 fact that anybody can do it you only have to spend 10 minutes in a in a hospital or a care home you

00:32:53.420 know they're like any walk of life there are good carers there are okay carers and there are crap

00:32:57.660 carers um but we don't we don't sort of have the means of of sort of differentiating uh or not so

00:33:05.100 easily in in the kind of care sector as we do for cognitive jobs right it's a bit like saying

00:33:10.780 anyone can do surgery if you don't think about the consequences yeah yeah it's a bit like that

00:33:16.140 In a way, yeah.

00:33:18.160 I mean, you know, the problem will become more immediate in surgery

00:33:20.920 because someone on the table will bleed to death, you know.

00:33:24.800 Whereas in a care home, you know, you can be a not very good carer

00:33:27.920 and, you know, the other carers will know you're probably not a very good carer,

00:33:31.680 but you'll probably be on the same pay as the people who are the good carers.

00:33:35.280 And I suppose the logic of what I'm saying is, you know,

00:33:38.080 we should have more differential pay in some of these fields.

00:33:43.880 But doesn't that attitude betray a certain type of arrogance,

00:33:47.280 which is bred by our school system?

00:33:49.920 The surgeons of this world would have been getting great grades

00:33:53.020 all the way through.

00:33:54.220 They'd be in set one of every class.

00:33:56.720 And then the ones who have got other skills, other abilities,

00:33:59.740 maybe caring, maybe more technical, maybe more hands-on,

00:34:03.080 they would be in the lower sets.

00:34:05.700 So right the way through from your school education,

00:34:08.860 You were told that you were worth less than the people in the top seats.

00:34:14.820 And perhaps to some extent that's unavoidable.

00:34:17.160 I mean, I think the problem is not so much...

00:34:22.740 The very highest level of raw intelligence or stroke academic ability

00:34:28.800 is always going to be very highly valued.

00:34:31.980 And I don't want to give the impression that I'm hostile to intelligence.

00:34:35.920 I mean, you know, as a human species, we need our really, really intelligent people probably more than ever.

00:34:42.160 I mean, you know, we need them to invent a bloody vaccine for COVID-19.

00:34:45.820 You know, we need people to work out how to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

00:34:50.480 I mean, there are all sorts of problems that we have posed ourselves as a species in recent decades because of what we've been up to as human beings.

00:34:58.340 And, you know, we now need the clever people to come to our aid and find technical fixes to a lot of these problems.

00:35:03.560 um and and i think um you know and we should value high intelligence um you know and and people who

00:35:13.060 do those jobs more than someone who who cleans your office here um in terms of not not as human

00:35:18.840 beings but in terms of the wards the wards i love the way david thinks we actually can afford to

00:35:23.680 pay a cleaner we do it ourselves those people are very low iq david i promise you oh it's looking

00:35:30.220 very clean good job lads well if there's one thing we can do it's it's do the hoovering yeah um but

00:35:37.260 david i mean the idea that um these other forms of work should be valued and forms of intelligence

00:35:44.940 which is what you're really talking about emotional intelligence and being able you know like i think

00:35:50.140 i'm probably intellectually quite intelligent but when it comes to putting a shelf together or 0.82

00:35:54.240 whatever i'm i'm a cretin right and there are thank you mate you are even worse though so i 0.57

00:35:59.980 wouldn't i wouldn't but um but there are people who who are insanely gifted when it comes to

00:36:05.380 things like that they're mad to me what they do is magic but you know i was thinking about this

00:36:09.960 like my plumber i i speak to him when he comes to service and whatever he makes way more money than

00:36:15.060 me yeah but if you were to ask somebody you know who's cooler or more high status say the plumber

00:36:21.820 No, they really wouldn't, right?

00:36:23.560 Which is, I think, the point that you're making.

00:36:25.580 Yeah, I mean, status normally,

00:36:27.520 status and money are usually quite closely linked,

00:36:29.800 but they do diverge sometimes.

00:36:32.180 You know, there are, you know,

00:36:33.420 I mean, perhaps somebody like you

00:36:34.420 who doesn't earn a huge amount,

00:36:35.500 or an artist in a garret, you know,

00:36:37.380 who produces some decent art,

00:36:40.000 but not well-known enough, celebrated enough

00:36:43.440 to earn a decent living from it.

00:36:45.840 You know, people like, you know, Giles Fraser,

00:36:48.440 you know, clergymen, you know, 0.79

00:36:50.160 who have high status, but they're as poor as church mice.

00:36:57.240 So, but most of the time, you know, and plumbers do get very well paid,

00:37:01.120 and the market signals, I think, are going to contribute to the shift.

00:37:07.320 Because, I mean, just to finish my thought on, I mean,

00:37:10.760 obviously we all agree high intelligence is valued.

00:37:13.020 I mean, this is not an argument against intelligence.

00:37:14.760 I suppose my argument is that we've created below the kind of level

00:37:19.340 of the genuine the real knowledge creators there's a sort of enormous great bloated

00:37:23.720 cognitive bureaucracy of people who are no more able as i said earlier than the people who are

00:37:27.780 not going to university and we've created this sort of dilute version of the elite experience

00:37:32.260 which i think is which is you know if you if you want to blame people it was you know the the

00:37:36.840 anywhere political class of the kind of 1980s and the 1990s who was saying rather narcissistically

00:37:41.640 you know you can all be like me you can all be like us and actually you know you know for various

00:37:47.180 it's kind of logical and other reasons it's not possible for that to be the case you know we know

00:37:52.100 we do need a spread of of of aptitudes and abilities to make the system work and we have

00:38:00.260 aging societies we need you know tens of thousands of specialist dementia nurses now you know that is

00:38:06.100 a that is a head and a heart job most of these i mean head hand and heart you know as one or two

00:38:12.020 reviewers have pointed out i mean perhaps i i mean i do make it clear in the book that obviously

00:38:16.540 the three are incredibly intertwined.

00:38:18.340 Everything you do, you know, what we're doing now

00:38:20.420 is a mixture of cognitive, emotional, embodied.

00:38:23.060 But nonetheless, there are certain roles

00:38:26.380 that require more of one than the other.

00:38:30.660 And I think it's going to happen anyway.

00:38:32.740 I mean, this is my kind of peak head point,

00:38:35.400 is that, you know, while I was writing the book,

00:38:38.740 well, when I started writing the book

00:38:40.020 at the beginning of 2019,

00:38:41.180 I sort of thought this is,

00:38:41.940 And I thought it was a rather kind of idealistic notion anyway, almost a bit new agey.

00:38:48.280 I also discovered that head, hand, heart is the motto of B-Dale's school, the progressive English private school.

00:38:56.140 But the more I read about what's happening with AI and what's already happening,

00:39:01.540 I mean, both with the kind of diminishing returns from the graduate class and what's happening with, you know, bank managers being replaced by algorithms.

00:39:14.820 And we're in the foothills of AI.

00:39:17.600 It hasn't even really moved in on a large scale.

00:39:19.760 But the work of people like Phil Brown and Hugh Lauder on digital Taylorism, so many jobs did involve a degree of sort of professional judgment and analytical ability.

00:39:30.140 are now being replaced by sort of thinking machines.

00:39:34.000 You know, what's happened to blue-collar work

00:39:35.600 is now happening to kind of the middle and lower levels

00:39:38.800 of the cognitive.

00:39:40.340 So it's that, you know, we've created this sort of bloated

00:39:44.340 sort of cognitive graduate class

00:39:48.100 that is not doing, as it were, the really, you know,

00:39:51.360 the really useful knowledge work.

00:39:56.340 And, I mean, but they're simply not going to,

00:39:59.020 many of these people are not going to have jobs in in 15 years time so there's going to have to

00:40:04.180 be a redistribution and where the redistribution will go well it will go into care and to some

00:40:09.400 extent manual technical functions that we that we have a shortage of at the moment um now and some

00:40:15.780 of those manual technical jobs will get taken over by technology too but um but you know but

00:40:20.800 education you know the care economy and one of the interesting stories there i think is the whole

00:40:26.780 gender imbalance and whether we will start to see as part you know as as we have to as we have to

00:40:35.900 value those jobs more and obviously look not all jobs in the in the public care economy are

00:40:40.420 undervalued i mean doctors and nurses are actually actually have quite high status and nurses are

00:40:45.500 not poorly paid in this country it's a bit of a myth i mean i interviewed somebody for the book

00:40:49.680 who's only three years out of doing a nursing degree 1.00

00:40:55.580 and they were on 36 grand.

00:40:59.260 Admittedly, they actually work at a hospital

00:41:01.720 just around the corner from here.

00:41:03.920 That includes London allowance

00:41:05.640 and some anti-social hours working.

00:41:09.300 But nursing suffers perhaps from a sort of compressed pay band.

00:41:13.640 So a lot of...

00:41:14.700 There's something like nearly 700,000 registered nurses in Britain,

00:41:18.020 only half of whom are actually working as nurses and that I think is because a lot of a lot of

00:41:23.060 nurses mainly women go off and have families and then the idea of coming back into a really high 1.00

00:41:28.860 stress huge responsibility job for perhaps not that much more than 36 grand doesn't seem that

00:41:35.460 appealing uh so we probably so anyway but but um so a lot a lot of care jobs are are reasonably

00:41:42.240 well paid but a lot are not and we're going to have to do something about those I mean I'm sure

00:41:46.240 we will you know social care was high on the government's list just before the pandemic struck

00:41:50.340 it's now even higher on their list of things to do things about because uh because they they got

00:41:55.320 um they had um such a disastrous uh crisis um so i think i think that that will happen and

00:42:04.180 people sort of say oh you know people hard-headed people sort of say oh well but you know the market

00:42:10.100 economy chooses doesn't it i mean you know the market allocates reward and therefore to some

00:42:16.680 extent prestige well it does but behind the markets stands human beings and human priorities

00:42:23.860 and you know you think of look at the business plans of big corporations um and how they've been

00:42:31.440 radically changed um well some more than others in the last 20 years by things like the concern

00:42:39.020 for gender equality or anxieties about the environment.

00:42:44.640 And so the signals shift.

00:42:48.100 The signals do shift.

00:42:49.860 And I think the signals will shift in this respect.

00:42:52.340 Indeed, they already are.

00:42:54.760 And I think you will see...

00:42:56.080 And that may be accelerated by more men going into caring jobs.

00:43:04.720 Because at the moment, 88% of NHS nurses are women.

00:43:09.740 85% of primary school teachers are women.

00:43:12.960 82% of people who work in social care are women.

00:43:17.500 I mean, you know, the removal of the glass ceiling

00:43:21.740 and the much greater opportunity that women have in Britain 0.92

00:43:27.500 and countries like Britain in the last 30 or 40 years

00:43:29.760 has sort of de-gender segregated a lot of the sort of upper,

00:43:35.680 a lot of the kind of cognitive meritocracy jobs,

00:43:37.840 a lot of the professional jobs where at least 50% women now 1.00

00:43:41.860 and women more than 50% of universities 1.00

00:43:45.140 are more than 50% female at the undergraduate level.

00:43:49.780 But in other areas of life,

00:43:52.400 life continues to have this very, very big gender division of labour

00:43:57.380 and I think that is one of the things that will shift.

00:44:00.520 Why?

00:44:02.240 Well, because it'll have to.

00:44:04.100 um well i mean you know one of the reasons why we have recruitment crises in caring jobs is for

00:44:10.900 the benign reason that that women have many more options now go back you know in our mothers 1.00

00:44:16.100 certainly in our grandmother's time the i mean the opportunities for women you know you could only 0.99

00:44:20.440 you know if you were a capable woman the opportunities didn't extend much beyond being

00:44:25.000 a teacher or a nurse um so the public service has got a huge free lunch i mean you're right up until

00:44:30.740 the 70s and 80s in this country you'd have incredibly capable women whose daughters or you 1.00

00:44:36.460 know who you know yeah whose daughters would be you know partners in city law firms um they were

00:44:44.340 head mistresses of primary schools or you know ward matrons in in hospitals so um and that you

00:44:51.820 know and that has changed and quite rightly and women have much greater opportunities um 0.99

00:44:56.780 and but men haven't stepped into the breach so far um and I think I mean will they I mean I

00:45:05.020 think they'll have to because I mean partly because it'll start to become more attractive

00:45:09.100 um because because pay will have to go up um because we simply need people to to do these

00:45:15.620 jobs I think we will start to value it more I mean we've always valued it to some extent I don't

00:45:20.140 want to exaggerate um but we certainly know this is one of the effects of the pandemic I think

00:45:24.040 is that a lot of the, not just caring jobs,

00:45:28.040 but a lot of the sort of basic,

00:45:30.240 basic sort of non-college educated functions

00:45:33.940 that keep the show on the road,

00:45:36.020 you know, van drivers and lorry drivers

00:45:37.840 and people who work in supermarkets

00:45:39.800 and people who stack shelves in supermarkets.

00:45:43.660 I mean, you know, they are never going to be paid a king's ransom.

00:45:47.360 But, you know, if people recognise the kind of,

00:45:52.320 Our interdependence, our dependence on people doing basic jobs like that.

00:45:56.060 But don't you think the pandemic has helped for that,

00:45:58.100 when all of a sudden people were stuck at home

00:46:00.040 and then they just went, hang on.

00:46:01.940 You know, I may be a social media manager at Facebook and whatever else,

00:46:08.320 but actually I'm not that important compared to the bloke

00:46:11.680 or the lady who works at Tesco.

00:46:13.540 No, absolutely.

00:46:15.200 And we used to, I think I actually did possibly frighten my children

00:46:20.240 with the idea that if they didn't do their homework,

00:46:22.020 they would end up stacking shelves in Tesco's.

00:46:25.240 I like that, you're middle class, not Lidl, Tesco's.

00:46:30.180 Lidl would be way too scary for them if they couldn't handle that.

00:46:34.140 Daddy, what's a Lidl? Don't worry.

00:46:38.900 And, you know, of course, I'd still rather my children

00:46:43.720 didn't stack shelves in Lidl's or Tesco's.

00:46:46.740 But nonetheless, I think, you know, we do post, or not that we are completely post-pandemic, but we do kind of, those people are less invisible than they were.

00:46:59.660 And, you know, there are lots of basic jobs that will always need to be done.

00:47:04.700 And it's one of the kind of mistakes that economists always make.

00:47:08.240 I remember when I was Labour editor of the FT in the early 90s,

00:47:14.240 all these people predicting the complete disappearance of low-skill employment.

00:47:19.440 Actually, Gordon Brown, in his penultimate speech as Chancellor in 2006,

00:47:26.140 predicted there would be 600,000 low-skill jobs in Britain by,

00:47:30.740 I think maybe in about now, 2020 or maybe in 2025.

00:47:34.140 Depending on how you define low-skill, there was something like 10 million.

00:47:36.860 I mean, you know, they just got it so wrong.

00:47:42.160 Lots of technical change generates actually quite, you know,

00:47:45.180 like kind of Amazon, Amazon warehouses.

00:47:48.840 Of course, they replace some jobs in retail,

00:47:51.040 but they create a lot more jobs.

00:47:53.180 And one of the sort of biases of the sort of anywhere world,

00:47:57.800 I think, has been this idea that a job has to be a form of self-expression.

00:48:03.720 And if you look at the surveys,

00:48:05.060 is about half of people in Britain and America say that work is just a means of earning a living.

00:48:10.740 I mean, whether they would like it to be a form of self-expression is another question.

00:48:13.580 Perhaps some of them would.

00:48:14.320 But I think many people actually do just want to go to work and earn a living.

00:48:17.880 They get their sense of purpose and meaning from things outside work.

00:48:21.380 So long as work is decently enough paid, you know, that you're treated well,

00:48:25.180 you have opportunities for advancement and so on, these are not necessarily terrible jobs.

00:48:29.620 And also, if you are recognised by society as doing something valuable,

00:48:33.320 which someone stacking shelves in a supermarket is.

00:48:37.920 So, you know, we don't, you know,

00:48:42.460 the idea of converting every single job

00:48:44.720 into a kind of lower level cognitive one is balmy.

00:48:49.480 I mean, because a lot of those things need to be,

00:48:52.320 a lot of those functions need to be filled

00:48:54.500 and they can be filled, you know, perfectly well.

00:48:58.980 David, as you described this,

00:49:00.080 Something that occurs to me, which is one of the things Francis and I have talked to a lot of our guests, as you know, because you listen to the show, is the cultural shifts that are happening, what broadly might be described as the culture war.

00:49:14.340 Now, you've described the situation where you have a large number of young people who are getting increasingly poor education, which is simultaneously becoming more expensive as it becomes less useful.

00:49:24.920 we've got a future where they are not likely to get much out of those degrees that they have

00:49:31.900 they've accumulated large debts inequality is not being reduced and in fact rising we keep

00:49:38.280 hearing the talk of the one percent who are genuinely accumulating more and more of the

00:49:42.780 gains that society makes social mobility is sort of sluggish in terms of how it's growing

00:49:49.040 is that all the recipe for the sort of blm stroke whatever a culture war stroke cultural revolution

00:49:58.120 stuff absolutely i mean i i think i think it's a it's a good observation um and i i i share that

00:50:05.760 idea i mean i do think that underlying um quite a lot of the the kind of eruptions of political

00:50:12.600 emotion, whether it's BLM or the kind of Sanders movement in America, Jeremy Corbyn here,

00:50:19.080 Mélenchon in France, you know, if you listen to the people, I would see them, they often tend to

00:50:24.520 be sound anyway, sort of quite educated and middle class. I mean, I think we have created a crisis

00:50:30.060 of expectations, as I was saying earlier. We haven't taken account of the kind of inevitable

00:50:37.160 diminishing returns. I mean, public policy has been based on an illusion. It's been based on

00:50:44.020 the illusion that the professional cognitive class will just go on growing and growing and

00:50:50.220 growing. I mean, it's kind of what lies behind so much of education policy, you know, obviously

00:50:56.920 social mobility policy, and even kind of economic productivity policy. But it is failing on all

00:51:03.120 counts but partly because we've kind of as I say as I keep saying we've reached peak head if you

00:51:09.820 look at the social class schema I think it's the ONS social class schema for the UK it's seven or

00:51:16.720 eight classes I think seven the top two classes are the professional and managerial class higher

00:51:23.980 and lower essentially first two classes if you go back to 2000 about 35 percent of the adult

00:51:29.820 population were classified as as either higher or lower manager or professional you look at um

00:51:36.660 last year or maybe this year i looked at the figures it's 37 okay it's gone up slightly but

00:51:42.420 it's you know this this figure was growing very fast in the in the 70s 80s um because we were

00:51:48.240 creating many much more room at the top as the social mobility academics call it um and we're

00:51:53.060 not any longer um so we you know we've got to we've got to adjust how we play the game i mean

00:51:59.400 it's no longer you know if anything is going to shrink uh that that 37 is probably going to shrink

00:52:05.360 so we've got to um we've got to think about doing things differently and that does involve you know

00:52:11.320 raising raising the status both of basic jobs but also of of of of of care jobs and and and

00:52:19.580 technical manual jobs.

00:52:49.580 at Mirvish.com. One of the things that I found very interesting in your book was when you were

00:52:55.000 talking about the impact this is having on the people who are doing degrees, particularly mental

00:52:59.620 health. Could you go into that a little bit for us? Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, we're an outlier

00:53:05.560 in higher education in two respects. One is that we send everybody to a classical university. Most

00:53:13.100 advanced countries have a sort of differentiated system of post-school education, which includes

00:53:18.760 what used to be our polytechnics,

00:53:21.980 or some variation on kind of higher technical colleges,

00:53:26.520 vocational colleges.

00:53:28.380 You know, you've got the community colleges in America,

00:53:30.060 you've got the Fachhochschule in Germany.

00:53:32.340 I mean, they are actually both technically classified as universities,

00:53:35.860 but they're very, very different to universities in many ways.

00:53:40.520 So we created, as you mentioned earlier, after 92,

00:53:45.240 everybody goes to um it's a full it's for almost universally full-time full of young full of 18

00:53:54.100 19 year olds full of young people um it's full time it's three or four years it's the courses

00:53:59.820 are very academicized they're taught by academics not by teachers as it were um and you know if

00:54:07.480 you're doing you know it's true that a lot of the courses perhaps particularly in the new universities

00:54:11.620 the universities that used to be polytechnics, are vocational courses.

00:54:16.680 You know, you're doing nursing or surveying or construction management.

00:54:20.880 But look at what a construction management degree is teaching.

00:54:24.600 It's got lots of general stuff about accountancy and business.

00:54:28.660 You know, it's got a kind of half of it.

00:54:30.480 It's got a business studies degree.

00:54:33.260 You know, 30 or 40 years ago, you'd have become a construction manager

00:54:36.280 because you'd been sort of spotted on the construction site

00:54:39.340 as a capable, responsible person and you'd have been promoted

00:54:43.780 and you'd have gone off and you'd have done some block release course

00:54:47.080 or part-time sandwich courses or whatever.

00:54:49.880 And now, you know, and the other point,

00:54:52.620 the other way in which we are a complete outlier

00:54:54.960 is not only in the kind of uniformity of the classical university structure,

00:55:00.280 it's also in the disproportionate number of people who go as residential students.

00:55:06.220 It's 70 to 80 percent.

00:55:07.840 And I mean, this is something I talked about more in my last book, The Road to Somewhere,

00:55:11.220 is one of the kind of causes of the cultural divide is to do with social networks,

00:55:15.640 is to do with who you know.

00:55:17.340 You know, in most countries, you go to university in your hometown,

00:55:20.180 which means that you're a bit cleverer or a bit more academically able

00:55:24.700 than some of the other people in your school,

00:55:26.360 but you remain friends with the people who go off and become electricians and plumbers.

00:55:30.140 They remain in your friendship group.

00:55:31.700 That doesn't happen here, anything like so much.

00:55:33.920 And this is one of the things that really, really irritates me about the way that the political class has been wringing its hands over regional inequality, say, over recent decades, while at the same time encouraging an expansion of higher education, which sucks out all the most able kids from working class towns like your Mansfields and your Rotherham's.

00:56:00.340 You know, they lose 20% or 30% of their brightest kids every year

00:56:04.460 to residential universities, and they invariably never go back.

00:56:08.740 So, you know...

00:56:09.380 You can't blame them.

00:56:12.100 Well, no.

00:56:14.200 That would be the clip that goes viral out of this interview.

00:56:18.280 You go, no, you can't.

00:56:20.260 Maybe you can't.

00:56:21.120 And, of course, you know, one of the really attractive things

00:56:23.240 about our university system for kids is the three years away from mum and dad.

00:56:28.180 I mean, you know, partly subsidised by us taxpayers.

00:56:32.620 It does change the nature of education, though,

00:56:34.880 in the sense that it ceases necessarily to be about getting the grades

00:56:38.900 or getting a good degree,

00:56:40.380 and it becomes a sort of edutainment thing as well, doesn't it?

00:56:43.800 Yeah.

00:56:44.400 Where you're sort of away from adult supervision

00:56:46.760 so you can have all the fun you want without necessarily learning very much.

00:56:50.320 Yeah, and the university is the function then and sort of credentialises.

00:56:54.320 I mean, they're not particularly adding any value.

00:56:57.720 I mean, perhaps in a way, particularly Russell Group universities

00:57:00.020 that are stuffed full of kids from private schools and grammar schools,

00:57:03.080 and they're not necessarily learning a huge amount.

00:57:05.160 If you're doing a humanities course, what you learn, you probably forget.

00:57:08.620 And a lot of people, including David Soskis,

00:57:10.580 who was one of the architects of the Tony Blair 50% target,

00:57:14.740 he says, actually, this is the most valuable thing about universities,

00:57:18.900 the three years that you spend getting to know people

00:57:23.000 from very different backgrounds, social class, ethnicity,

00:57:25.500 these days too and um and you learn kind of social and even political skills you know how

00:57:32.260 to set up a university society how to organize a political meeting and these are useful things

00:57:36.300 but the idea that this you know it's also extremely expensive for our society to send

00:57:41.780 all those kids away and it has these damaging value divide implications too um it makes us a

00:57:48.080 more divided society and most other countries don't send anything like the same proportion of

00:57:53.080 kids to uh to residential universities and they seem to do okay i mean it doesn't seem to be in

00:57:59.000 a sense i mean you could argue perhaps that it contributes to the the sort of creative economy

00:58:03.680 that we are increasingly going to depend on that that three years away from home and um but but

00:58:10.980 actually sorry you were asking about the i mean it's also a great um a great strain on a lot of

00:58:16.520 kids um i mean i mean i i'm i come from an upper middle class background i went to a boarding school

00:58:23.400 before i went to university so it was water off the duck's back for me but most kids actually

00:58:28.360 even privately educated kids these days tend not to board so and i think for a lot of kids you know

00:58:33.980 being away from home is very discombobulating well they won't have that problem going forward

00:58:39.100 with the coronavirus and so so the idea of having fewer people go to university may happen naturally

00:58:45.940 as it becomes less appealing.

00:58:47.980 But unfortunately, David, we've run out of time.

00:58:50.920 It's a great book.

00:58:51.920 I thoroughly recommend everybody get it.

00:58:53.940 And I hope some of the people who have the influence

00:58:56.480 and ability to change some of these things

00:58:58.240 who do watch and listen to our show

00:58:59.780 will take some of what you're saying in the book

00:59:02.680 on board and destroy every university in the country.

00:59:06.900 But it's been an absolute pleasure to have you back.

00:59:09.520 And as you know, the last question we always ask

00:59:12.400 is what is the one thing that we're not talking about

00:59:15.220 that we really should be.

00:59:18.060 Oh, God, I'm so cross on myself

00:59:20.360 because I prepared a really brilliant answer

00:59:22.480 and then I wrote it down even

00:59:24.220 and then I forgot what it was.

00:59:25.480 As a teacher, I've heard this excuse many times, Davy.

00:59:28.060 I've got to be honest with you.

00:59:29.300 The dog ate my heart.

00:59:31.880 But I want to...

00:59:32.980 It's not so much on what we're not talking about,

00:59:35.780 but what we're not doing...

00:59:38.220 Even better.

00:59:39.660 And it's not a particularly big picture thing.

00:59:42.660 It's rather a kind of techie, nerdy thing.

00:59:44.300 I think the state is missing a huge opportunity to use its kind of convening power combined with the digital world to create, to make it so much easier for people to say, volunteer, do kind of just-in-time volunteering.

01:00:00.360 Why don't we have, you know, there ought to be, I mean, it would need to have the state's kind of imprimatur on it, and it should be advertised over here on the kind of tube on the TV, that you go to this one portal and you put, you know, and you type in your postcode and you find out, you know, I mean, you know, a lot of people have very busy lives, but they still want to kind of, and we've seen this actually in the pandemic, you know, a huge amount of volunteering.

01:00:25.520 let's try and keep some of that um going forward um you know you should be able to type in your

01:00:32.020 postcode and find out you know it may be little stuff like there's some little old lady who lives 0.99

01:00:36.740 up the street from you who just needs her drugs picked up from from boots or you needs to be

01:00:42.020 taken out for a walk every you know for an hour every every weekend or something and little things

01:00:48.960 you could sort of fit in around you know even if you have a family and you're very busy um and of

01:00:55.060 course one of one of the issues i guess would be security um uh and there's ways to do all of that

01:01:02.980 but it's interesting how the whole kind of um child protection thing you know seems to be

01:01:08.200 suspended for the for for covid volunteering um but i think you know and that and that could be

01:01:14.120 applied to other things too i mean another thing actually sorry related thing that i've always had

01:01:19.740 be in my bonnet about is um and i'm not going to go into a whole germanic spiel i mean i i am

01:01:26.860 very nicely with the reputation of the show

01:01:30.040 but i did spend three years in germany i know the german system well and there are a lot of

01:01:38.820 things about it to admire and a lot of those things cannot very easily be translated into

01:01:43.540 into the british context but one thing that could very easily be is there's something called the

01:01:48.240 beruf actual that all kids who leave school get, I think particularly the kids who are going on to

01:01:55.500 an apprenticeship, is essentially tells them what all the kind of the options are for apprenticeships

01:02:01.440 and what the jobs that you could then apply for once you've got this apprenticeship

01:02:08.460 and what they pay and so on. And I don't see why, why don't we have something like that

01:02:14.260 And in the UK, just, you know, again, it's something the state would need to do.

01:02:17.620 It would have to have the kind of imprimatur of a, you know, you could update it every year.

01:02:21.420 And it could have not only, here are all these different jobs, and this is what they pay,

01:02:26.580 and this is the training you need in order to get it, you know.

01:02:30.600 So, you know, a coding course is going to cost you five grand.

01:02:33.500 What subsidy might you be able to get from the state to do it?

01:02:36.160 You know, why isn't it all just written in one place?

01:02:38.840 I mean, you can probably find out.

01:02:40.400 it's probably it's all out there somewhere but it's kind of it's in it it's it's all it's scattered

01:02:44.680 everywhere we should just you know this is a perfect example of what the state ought to be

01:02:49.480 able to do very simply i mean you could you know someone at the dwp ought to be able to do that in

01:02:54.360 kind of two days just gather all this stuff together put it in one place produce a little

01:02:59.280 booklet for it or have it online and update it every year and i think it would make it would

01:03:04.360 make the whole sort of feel particularly now with so much uncertainty it would make it would create

01:03:09.620 so much more visibility and transparency for people in this very unsure situation it's a really

01:03:17.740 good point and so unlike the germans to centralize everything thank you so much for coming back 0.92

01:03:23.300 david uh make sure you get head hand and heart uh and uh thank you very much for coming back and we

01:03:29.160 will see you in a week's time with uh an episode or a live stream they go out tuesday to sunday

01:03:35.480 always at 7pm UK time

01:03:37.480 so it won't be in a week's time

01:03:38.700 it'll be a couple of days from now

01:03:39.680 we'll see you soon

01:03:40.240 take care guys

01:03:41.200 bye bye

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TRIGGERnometry - November 15, 2020

The Problem with Meritocracy - David Goodhart

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