Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The Merits of Merit - with Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

During the pandemic, standardized tests were suspended in an entire range of educational institutions. Will these changes be temporary or permanent? More than 600 of these institutions switched from a mandatory to optional test for the 2020-21 application season, and many just flat out refused to accept a test at all in their application process. According to the editor in chief of the Princeton Review, “That is a tectonic change for many schools.” According to Smithsonian Magazine, “The pandemic sped up changes that were already afoot; even before Covid, more than 1,000 colleges had made the tests optional. Many had been turned off by the way the tests perpetuated socioeconomic disparities, limiting their ability to recruit a diverse freshman class.” Concerns about disparities in outcomes, at the core of this massive shift, have been behind Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s agenda in New York City, including his past efforts to eliminate the entrance exam for the City’s seven specialized high schools. While that effort has experienced a setback in the State Legislature, the fight will likely carry on by other political leaders. And more recently, the Mayor announced a plan to make sweeping changes to the gifted program in the City’s elementary schools. There are similar efforts in other cities across the country. Joining today’s conversation is Adrian Wooldridge, a longtime journalist at The Economist, where he is political editor and writes a column on British life and politics, and before that he penned the Schumpeter column on business, finance and management. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for The Economist, where he also wrote the Lexington column. Prior to his role in Washington, he was The Economist‘s West Coast correspondent, management correspondent and Britain correspondent. Adrian has written a number of books. His most recent books include “Capitalism in America: A History”, which he co-authored with Alan Greenspan, “The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It”, which he co-wrote with John Micklethwait of Bloomberg News, and just out this year: “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World”. Adrian’s most recent book has been shortlisted for The Financial Times and McKinsey Book of the Year Award. Feel free to drop us a line with questions, feedback and ideas for the new podcast at [e-mail]

In order for the whole machine to keep going forward, we need to have a really, really good educational system. And in order to have a really good educational system that draws on the talents of the whole population, I think we need some sort of meritocratic spirit infusing it. And that's what really worries me about, apart from the injustice of it all, of getting rid of these elite schools in New York and San Francisco and Boston, because, you know, this immigrant talent that rose up from nothing, you know, was incredibly entrepreneurial. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. During the pandemic, standardized tests were suspended in an entire range of educational institutions for a number of reasons, not the least of which were concerns about congregating in person for long periods of time to take the tests.

But now that the pandemic is winding down, will this change be temporary or permanent? Liberal arts colleges, technical institutes, historically black colleges and universities, and Ivy League schools, more than 600 of these institutions switched from a mandatory to optional test for the 2020 and 2021 application season. And many just flat out refused to accept a test at all in their application process. According to the editor-in-chief of the Princeton Review, quote, that is a tectonic change for many schools. And according to Smithsonian Magazine, which has written extensively about this, open quote, the pandemic sped up changes that were already afoot. Even before COVID, more than 1,000 colleges had made the tests optional.

Many had been turned off by the way tests perpetuated socioeconomic disparities, limiting their ability to recruit a diverse freshman class. Close quote. Concerns about disparities in incomes. That's a key theme at the core of this massive shift, and it's been behind Mayor Bill de Blasio's agenda in New York City. If you live in the city, you may have been following Mayor de Blasio's past efforts to eliminate the entrance exam for the city's seven specialized high schools.

While that effort has experienced a setback in the state legislature, thankfully, the fight will carry on by other political leaders, so it's not over. And more recently, the mayor announced a plan to make sweeping changes, actually to take a wrecking ball, depending on how you look at it, to the gifted program in the city's elementary schools. The standardized test used to screen for the gifted program would be permanently ended under Mayor de Blasio's plan. There are similar efforts in other cities across the country, such as Boston and San Francisco, to weaken specialized public schools and gifted programs. Again, at the core of these education policy debates is a debate about merit.

There's a rethinking about the role that merit should play in education and a number of other areas of society. As this idea spreads, if the entire notion of meritocracy is under threat, we are in for profound changes. It's a subject that I've been interested in some time, and my friend Adrian Wooldridge has spent a lot of time thinking about. In fact, he wrote an entire book about it. We'll get to that in a moment. Adrian is a longtime journalist at The Economist, where he's a political editor and writes a column on British life and politics. And before that, he penned the Schumpeter column

on business, finance, and management. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for The Economist, where he also wrote the Lexington column. And prior to his role in Washington, he was The Economist's West Coast correspondent, their management correspondent, and their Britain correspondent. He's written a number of books, too many to list here. His most recent books include Capitalism in America, a history which he co-authored with Alan Greenspan. It's a terrific history of the American economy. I highly recommend it to people when they tell me they want good books on the history of the American economy. Then there was The Wake-Up Call,

Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West and How to Fix It, which he co-wrote with John Micklethwaite of Bloomberg, and just out this year, The Aristocracy of Talent, How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. It's this book, The Aristocracy of Talent, that will be our jumping off point for our discussion today, how the revolutionary idea of meritocracy helped make our world and whether it is now under siege, and what the implications are for our society. But before we start today, just one housekeeping note. As we mentioned in our last episode, the one with Jason Reilly from the Wall Street Journal, the pandemic is not the only issue consuming us. That's a good sign. We don't know if we're truly at post-corona yet. It's certainly

starting to feel that way, or at least that we're heading towards more of an ongoing endemic than pandemic. So we've been working on a new frame for the podcast that will broaden our conversations, a new topic, if you will, and even a new name. We've received a lot of feedback and some interesting ideas for the new podcast. What I want to focus on is this decade we're in, these revenant 2020s. It strikes me that we'll look back at the 2020s as one of the most consequential decades in modern history. From inflation and nearly unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies, to technological transformation driven by AI, blockchain, and life sciences, to the rise of China in Cold War II,

to declining American engagement in the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, all against the backdrop of culture wars, public safety breakdowns, and public health crackups. There's a lot that's been packed into this decade already, and so much of it feels like history from other seminal decades rearing their head again now. So feel free to drop me a line with ideas for the new podcast at dan at unlocked dot fm. That's dan at unlocked dot f as in Frank, m as in Mary. Also, some of you have already sent in, shall we say, some very strong feedback on some issues raised in previous episodes, and I'll start responding

to those comments as well in future episodes. By the way, you won't need to worry about finding and subscribing to the new podcast when it comes out in a few weeks. It will simply appear in your feed instead of this one. But now let's get to Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist. This is Post-Corona. And I'm pleased to welcome Adrian Wooldridge to the conversation. Hi, Adrian. Hi, how are you? I'm good. Where are you? You're in London, outside of London? Outside of London, I'm in Hampshire, Jane Austen country. Jane Austen country, good, very literary.

Yep. And your book, the aristocracy of talent as I mentioned in the intro has just been shortlisted for the Financial Times McKinsey business book of the year so congrats on that thank you very much so let's let's talk about the book because I think it's extremely timely not only does the FT and McKinsey think so but I but I think so too I think it's extremely timely. Not only does the FT and McKinsey think so, but I think so too. I think our listeners will too,

because I think it touches on, like many issues we deal with on this podcast, it touches on an issue that wasn't really on anyone's radar, I don't think. It must have been on yours, because you've been working on this book. But for most people, it hasn't been on people's radar. And then all of a sudden,

it hits us and kind of walks right into this book but for most people hasn't been on people's radar and then all of a sudden it hits us and kind of walks right into like the zeitgeist of this time where we're wrestling with some really big complicated issues that are upending the status quo as we've known it and i want to quote from your book where you write the surest sign that the country will be economically successful is not the health of its democracy as some liberals like to think or the leanness of its government as some free marketers imagine but its commitment to meritocracy so that's what you write that basically meritocracy is the ball game to borrow an american uh sports metaphor you'll you'll indulge me um. The whole notion of meritocracy as so central to our system is actually, I mean, I say it's been part of the status quo. It's a principle that it's sort of

all we've known. But you argue in the book, it's actually a pretty recent phenomenon or a recent innovation. I mean, you go only as far back as like the French Revolution, the American Revolution. This has not been around forever. Can you explain what existed before it and then what catalyzed meritocracy as an idea? Yeah, absolutely. In historical terms, meritocracy is a very new phenomenon. For most of human history, and indeed in many places now, society is not organized on the basis of merit, that is judging people on the basis of their individual abilities and promoting them on that basis. It was organized on the basis of inheritance, you inherited your position in

society. It was organized on the basis of family power, that ruling dynasties determined what was going on. And it was also organized on the basis of patronage, or indeed even buying or selling jobs. So most people were born into a position in society, not just kings who are obviously born into a position in society, but all the way down to the very bottom of society. And that was regarded as the natural way of the world, the way that things ought to be so if you read for example in Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida he says untune that string that the string of inheritance and lo what chaos follows everything falls apart if you start questioning the principle of inheritance also the ruling, the ruling bodies in society were really ruling families,

starting, of course, with monarchs, but including all sorts of aristocratic families. Those families owned the land, which was the means of production, and they distributed everything on the basis of patronage. They owned, essentially, jobs. They owned the state. They owned their feudal domains. And they gave away

patronage jobs to their retainers. And finally, a very peculiar thing here is jobs were essentially pieces of property. They could be given in patronage, but also they could be bought or sold. So there was quite a literal jobs market. Lots and lots of jobs were bought and sold. So there's no notion, really, that doing a job is connected with merit or efficiency or your capacity to do that job. They're like your furniture. You buy them or... So explain how that works. How do you trade a job? How would that work practically? Literally on the market. So many states, for example, France being the most preeminent here, but also England and indeed all the European states, had a flourishing

job market. So the state, the king, would sell a job to the highest bidder, for example, a job in the civil service or a job raising taxes and that provided immediate money for the state and for the buyer it provided long-term income or indeed the armies armies were consisted of a of an officer class of people who bought their their positions in the army and men who were press their rank and file who were press ganged into the army so you would buy a commission and you would pay yourself for that commission it was an investment by keeping the rewards of war the people that you know the treasures that you you conquered in war which could be of course you know extraordinary

fortunes and this system you know this world of patronage this world of inheritance you inherit your position and that is the way that things ought to be, or patronage, or family dynastic power, or the purchase of jobs is something that lasts for a very, very, very long time. So the buying and selling of commissions in the British army is only got rid of in the 1870s. Buying and selling civil service jobs only really got rid of it roughly the same time. And still, even in the 20th century, there's a sort of suspicion of people who rise up the social system, who owe their position to their abilities rather than to their birth. So how did this change? What sparked the upending of this system? Britain, which is really fought against this whole system of what they regard as patronage,

corruption, and cronyism, and is fought in the name of giving people of ability their proper due. And if you look at the great makers of the revolution, Madison and Jefferson and Adams, they're not really talking about equality. They're talking a bit about freedom, by which they mean freedom from colonial rule. But the most important thing that's driving them is the idea of giving power to the natural aristocracy, people who have natural and innate abilities, and taking it from what they call the tinsel aristocracy, or the artificial aristocracy, who are landowners and and particularly british landowners so it's it's an attempt to replace a society of patronage uh with a society of natural

abilities rising to the top that's really what they what they mean by by um you know they're unleashing the power of natural talents. And different founding fathers put their emphasis on different things. But this is basically natural talent, giving natural talent its due, is I think the central mission of the founding fathers. Now, the French Revolution also has very similar aims, but runs more out of control. It becomes more violent, certainly, and then has to be reined in by Napoleon. But again, Napoleon talks about every soldier having a general's baton in their

knapsack, the career open to talent. And he wants to create a natural aristocracy through education and selecting people on the battlefield through education. So those are the two great revolutions which create the modern meritocratic society. Then the third revolution is in Britain, which, as you'd expect from the nature of British society, is much slower, much gentler, much less violent, certainly much less violent than the French Revolution, but it's nevertheless a terribly radical revolution it essentially replaces a society run by a landed oligarchy it doesn't replace it but it supplements it with a society run by an intellectual elite

and it does this through open examinations and abolishing patronage, sinecures, the purchase of offices and things like that. So this starts off with the civil service reforms, the Northcote Trevelyan Act, the report of 1854, which then becomes later enacted in Parliament, which says that you must give civil service positions to people on the basis of open competition and their performance in examinations. And these examinations are designed to test general intellectual firepower. That's one thing. And also fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge, which could quite often be given to members of families. They're called founders kin, people who were related to the founders of colleges. Those are opened up to academic ability as measured by open competition,

often by examinations as well to get academic jobs. And this sort of system starts off really involving a relatively small male intellectual aristocracy, but then it grows, it's broadened to include women and then the ladder of opportunity is is is thrown down to to you know regular people through the extension of the um education system so um this is a fundamental break in the nature of the world and one of the things i i say in my book is that

it's it's extraordinary that we have general histories of democracy we have general histories of capitalism but we don't have i believe until my book was written any attempt to write a general history of meritocracy and i think the reason for that is that we just take it for granted it's such a fundamental break with the past it's so much woven into the way that we think about the world that we can't conceive of a world in which ambition isn't rewarded or a world in which you you buy your job in the bbc or or you buy your job at the new york times or whatever or that you have sinecures in which people aren't expected to to work for the living it's become It became very rapidly built into people's fundamental way of looking at the world.

And because we take it for granted, we don't defend it with enough vigor, I think. But we'll talk about that later. So let's submit that there's no perfect meritocracy. There are, it is inherently an imperfect system. But with that, those imperfections, you know, with those imperfections sort of laid out, which we'll get to, what do you think are the big benefits of a meritocracy? What has it done, at least for the West, over the last couple centuries? Well, the most obvious benefit of meritocracy, and the one that I think has the least possible

philosophical objections, or arouses the fewest objections, is that it creates a much more efficient world, that it creates an economically dynamic world um insofar as it's applied to economic productive areas of the economy and it creates a much more efficient bureaucracy insofar as it's applied to to bureaucracy so you appoint people on the basis of their ability to do jobs rather than who they know or what you base on base of what they know rather than who they know or how powerful their mental abilities are rather than just on the basis of their relationships with certain ruling families that creates much more efficient bureaucracies so to give the example of england the english civil service basically from the mid 19th century onwards becomes much

smaller, but it also becomes much more powerful. It becomes much more efficient. So we're spending less money on running the state. We're actually reducing the overall tax burden, but also the state is becoming much more efficient. It creating a essentially the the infrastructure of a modern uh in in modern uh society modern industrial society so and that's because you're not spending money on people to do nothing or to be parasites you're spending money on people to run things in fact we run a massive empire um with a very small civil service around the world, because these were very, very able people who very cunningly in various ways established imperial rule. When it comes to economic efficiency, I think if you look at all sorts of data,

if you look at the relative performance of public companies, publicly traded companies, as against family-owned companies. Public companies are more efficient, they're more productive. If you look at countries which have meritocratic systems, they're much richer, more dynamic and more prosperous than those that don't. So if you look at, say, Singapore versus Pakistan, for example, Singapore, which is a paragon of meritocracy is a much more dynamic and prosperous society or if you look at countries like sweden and compare them with

southern european countries such as greece and italy they are more prosperous and more dynamic and they're growing growing at a at a faster rate and i think that difference in terms of rate of growth is actually getting bigger uh than it used to be so merit the the economic benefits of meritocracy are growing now as we move towards a knowledge an it dominated society so directionally i think you're right in outside of the west there's there's a, which we'll talk about certainly in China and elsewhere, to move towards a merit-based society. But in the West, and specifically in the U.S., we're suddenly having a debate about meritocracy

on the left and the right. On the left, it's all wrapped up in these debates around social justice and racial equity. And I'd like you to just spend a moment unpacking that. Because what you're saying is that the the the movement towards meritocracy the innovation the invention of it you know during over the last several centuries was a bottom-up movement and here we are now with the progressive movement that seems to be challenging the centrality the importance of having merit as central to our system.

Okay, no, that's absolutely right. That meritocracy was essentially a radical movement, and it was essentially a bottom-up movement. It was driven by people who wanted to change the status quo, and it was driven by people who were essentially excluded from power. I talked about the intellectual aristocracy in the middle of the 19th century, people like Trevelyan and Macaulay, who were basically very critical of the landed elite. They wanted a transfer of power from the landed elite,

who were fairly narrow, to people of intellectual ability. Then the idea is taken up by women, who say, why should men be judged by merit, but not women judged by merit? It's taken up by women who say, why should men be judged by merit but not women judged by merit? It's taken up by working class people who said, we want to be judged by the same standards, but give us the chance to go to school and things like that. And taken up by ethnic minorities as well.

So somebody like W.E.B. Dubois, this great intellectual, the first, I think, black, first African-American to get a permanent job at Harvard. um you know this great intellectual the first i think uh black uh first african-american to to get a permanent job at harvard um he talks about the talented 10th he talks about this this intellectual elite within the black population who demand to university places and and and and that sort of thing so it's it's a-up movement, it's a radical movement, and it's a progressive movement. So if you look at progressive thinking in the late 19th and the 20th century,

right the way up to the 1960s, it's something which is absolutely meritocratic. Merit is their key phrase, really. Judge us on our merits, create equality of opportunity, and you will then create a just society. Now, something very strange happens, or something very new happens, in the 1960s, which is you get a revolt of the left against meritocracy on the basis of two sets of reasons.

One is equality. They say that what meritocracy does is to create a different sort of inequality inequality of opportunity creates different results and what we want is equality of results that's what true leftism progressivism socialism means so that current comes in and also the notion of community there's a very strong communitarian element in the left, which really becomes very powerful in the 1960s. And people are saying what meritocracy is, is individualistic. It judges people as individuals.

But we should be judging people as collectivities, as members of ethnic groups, as members of preference groups, as the working class movement would be, would be an old-fashioned example of that. So it's pitting individuals against each other. So this happens in the 60s. And it's reappeared now, or it never really disappeared, but it's reappeared in a very powerful form at the moment. The 1960s critique with an even greater emphasis

on racial injustice and what people are saying is that meritocracy is basically propaganda for plutocrats it's the propaganda for the winners of society they're using it to justify their position at the top of society and they're using all sorts of artificial constructs to define merit and therefore they are probably intentionally but certainly in effect doing down minorities in particular but also the the poor and the working class by saying that somehow the rich deserve their positions and the the poor deserve, by logical extension, their lack of positions. Ibrahim Kendi has referred to, written that standardized testing, which you write about, which is one of the keys to implementing a real merit-based system, are inherently racist.

What does he mean by that, and how do you respond to it? Well, he means that the sort of measures that we use are systematically biased in favor of certain ways of thinking. You might call them Western ways of thinking or white ways of thinking, which means that people who belong to different minority groups are prejudiced against. Their way of thinking, their way of reasoning is discounted. Now, I think this is a very profoundly worrying thing

and misguided thing, partly because I think that ethnic groups don't have different ways of thinking, different ways of solving problems. But also because I think that the ability to game standardized tests, IQ tests or SAT tests, is limited to some extent. It's certainly true that by practicing, you can improve your performance on a lot of standardized tests. And it's certainly true that richer people will make sure that their children

have those advantages. They'll send them to tutors or give them courses or that sort of thing or practice themselves. And so there's a degree of bias there. But I think there's an upper limit on the degree to which you can improve

your children's performance. And I think that standardized tests, A, there's an upper limit, but B, that they're much less biased than other forms of testing. Like what? What are other forms of testing? Well, you know, one would be essays, just your ability to write an essay,

which has a lot of cultural capital embedded in it. Another would be the sort of thing that universities have introduced so universities have introduced things called you know holistic assessment you try and judge the person as a whole person rather than just on the basis of their performance so based on interviews essays all of those things from absolutely secondary school absolutely or whether you can play the cello or your personal statements or what you know personal statements stories about what you did on your holidays and that sort of thing middle class people love that sort of thing you know and upper middle class people love that

sort of thing because they can game that system to an extraordinary degree you know it's basically and you know we've seen all sorts of um data which indicates that the sort of people who make decisions to allow you into university can be they're less imperfect than all the other forms of measurement. And they're less culturally biased. And I think what's very interesting here is if you look at the sort of schools that have used standardized tests to admit people, the various elite high schools in New York, Lowell High School in San Francisco, Boston Latin and things like that, they have tended to... The people who've done best on these sort of admissions have not been necessarily rich or well-connected people,

but they've very often been the very able children of immigrant groups. So these schools have traditionally been avenues of upward mobility of people who come from poor backgrounds and from culturally excluded backgrounds. So I think that the notion that SAT tests or IQ tests are in their nature biased in favor of Western whites is exceptionally questionable. So let's talk about these specialized schools. You mentioned the law school in San Francisco, the Boston Latin. You're outside of London. I'm in New York City right now. And the debate about

these specialized high schools has really come into sharp relief over the last couple years. There's seven of these specialized high schools in New York spread across five boroughs. There's three in Manhattan. There's two in the Bronx. There's two in each of the Bronx in Brooklyn and one in each of Queens and Staten Island. And with the exception of one of them, LaGuardia High School, which considers auditions and artistic portfolios, backgrounds, all these schools require applicants to take the specialized high school admissions test, and some 30,000 middle school students take the exam every year, but only a fraction of them actually succeed in making it to one of these elite schools.

Fast forward to Mayor de Blasio, and this system has been in place for something like 50 years, I think. The system was put in place in the early 70s. Fast forward to Mayor de Blasio, who basically wanted to quote Boaz Weinstein, who wrote about this in the New York Times. He's a very successful investment manager in New York City, but he's a member of the board of the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association, which is one of these seven schools. And he's also a founder personally of two success academy charter schools, which are also very successful in New York. So he wrote this piece for the New York Times, and he says de Blasio's plan would, quote, destroy the best high schools in New York City. And the point he makes is that what de Blasio was advocating for is to eliminate the test, the admissions test,

completely. And he writes, instead, de Blasio would guarantee automatic admission to Stuyvesant and the other specialized high schools in the city for the top students at every middle school regardless of their abilities and then Weinstein goes on to write Mr. de Blasio would send the top seven percent of students at every middle school to the specialized high schools but at 80 middle schools or one out of every six not even seven% of seventh graders pass the state math exam. So he's basically saying, de Blasio wants to do away with this universal test, and then just basically take the top performers at 80 different schools, and give them all a pathway

to these elite specialized schools. The problem is, the abilities and the performance of students at these 80 different schools is very uneven. And the idea that you can take a top performer from one school and compare them to a top performer at another school gives you no consistency. And so you're effectively breaking a system that had created, as I said, a pathway for a whole bunch of groups particularly underprivileged minority groups immigrant families who had excellently performing students to get access to these schools absolutely the um it's and and de blasio's scheme is not as bad as some other schemes in the country lowell high school um i think is from now on going to admit people on the basis of a lottery

um so not on the way to get get rid of examination tests and do people on the basis of a lottery. So not on the basis... Get rid of examination tests and do it on the basis of a lottery, which is the least intelligent of all possible ways of selecting people for education. But why it's so dangerous to do the lottery system or to do the top 7% of very, very differently performing schools is that what the reason why these schools are so successful is they take people of very similar intellectual abilities

and educate them together and it's by educating people of similar intellectual abilities particularly in very demanding subjects like maths that you can really move through the curriculum very very quickly and if you have people of very different levels of intellectual ability trying to work together in the same classroom, that's difficult for the teacher. It's also difficult for the students who fall behind. You know, it's actually unjust to the students who fall behind because they're competing with people who are much better than them or much better taught than they are. So what you need to do, you know, in education as much as possible is to match people to classes to set them in classes on the basis of how much how clever they are ultimately but also how much they know that's the way that education will go very quickly but I think one of the things that most concerns me

about the American revolt at the moment against elite schools is that it's very very hard on the people it's trying to help which are ethnic minority children particularly African-American children and one of the things we're doing in this country and I don't want to say that Britain is wonderful and America is terrible and anything like that there's nothing worse worse than the Anglo-Saxons blowing their trumpets about things but we have gone in the opposite direction. We've created academy schools, which are academically specialized schools in Britain, and we've put them in poor catchment areas

with very high ethnic minority populations and very poor populations. So is this like Brampton Academy in East London? Brampton Academy is the one exactly that I'm thinking of although there are several that do the same thing. The Brampton Academy is in the east end of London so a very poor part of London ethnically very dominated by minorities with a lot of Afro-Caribbean minorities and this school is very selective at the sixth form very academically rigorous incredibly high standards are set and not compromised at all and this school now gets

more people into Oxford and Cambridge every year than Eton which is costs 48,000 pounds a year and selects people from the whole world so you, you know, you can, the best way to help minority children is to give them access to high quality education, not done by, you know, random lotteries and not even done by just taking the top people from a very diverse range of schools, but done without compromising standards. You know, George Bush had this phrase about the soft bigotry of low expectations, and it's exactly right. You know, you have to have high expectations

in order to combat bigotry. What would you argue? I mean, you can see there are imperfections, as you've alluded to before, with a full merit-based system. Now, I agree with you. The difference is not—or the problems with a merit-based system are not as stark as Ibrahim Kendi and others on the progressive left would argue. But there are imperfections. So can you just spend a moment describing those just so we know?

To your point, no system is perfect, but it beats, you know, to paraphrase Churchill, it's better than all the rest. Absolutely. There are lots of imperfections. One is that no system of testing is absolutely perfect, absolutely objective, because they will always test to some extent how well you're taught, what your cultural background is. Even very tests of abstract reasoning will do that to some extent. There are problems that people who are brought up in poorer families

have more stress, they might not have a quiet place to work, their parents might be rowing all the time. There might be any number of things which mean that they perform below their level of ability so you know you're not ever going to be able to test pure ability which I think is what you're basically trying to do in these things and even if if you can do that, even if you find somebody who's very bright, put them in one of these elite schools, their performance in that elite school may be adversely affected by endless things that go on in their family, endless things that go on in their background. The British used to have a system, a pass-fail system at 11+. If you failed the exam at 11 plus you were

funneled off into less prestigious schools and that couldn't be changed that was a terrible system so any system that's um you need both needs to have a certain sensitivity built into it but it also needs to be able to be corrected that if you make the wrong decision you have to you you ought to be constantly trying to correct that but you also that that decision ought to be appealable people should be able to move from one school to another one set uh one stream or another so one of the criticisms is that once you stereotype a child in one way they'll never get out of that stereotype so you need constantly to be uh checking checking that but i think yes absolutely the the the the there's no there's no perfect system

um and that's why some of the criticisms you know have such moral and um such power the problem is uh there are many problems but i think that quite often when you do things that seem like nice alternatives which is to measure the whole child rather than the child's examination performance, or which is to put off selection or differentiation as late as possible in people's lives. All of these things sound very welcoming and very wonderful, but I think that they actually open the door to new forms, more subtle forms of class prejudice or social prejudice Let's talk. Let's talk about China. So you write about how China is moving Aggressively in the direction of a merit-based system, which is surprising to hear

for those of us who You know know China is a as a as a communist state that has experimented with some modicum of a free market economy from time to time, although less so now than it has at any time since China entered the World Trade Organization. What's going on? How is China moving into a merit-based system and why? Well, let me start off by saying that I talked about the great breakthrough from a society based on status, ascription, and lineage to one based on merit in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But there's one big exception to this, and that is China. China created a merit-based system, an examination-based system, very, very early on in the early Middle

Ages and kept it going for a very long time. So China, from let's say the 8th century right the way up till the beginning of the 20th century, had a vast examination system which tested people on their knowledge of the Confucian classics, but was also designed essentially to find clever people to put them in the administration. And this was a huge system, which involved about 10% of the population in doing examinations, and which did promote people, did have a significant degree of social mobility

based upon people's ability to do these very, very demanding examinations. So China enacted a meritocracy much earlier than the West. Now, it was a meritocracy which had all sorts of limitations. Primarily, it was focused entirely on the Confucian classics, and it didn't change so when you got the development of science and technology and all of those good things china didn't incorporate those into its examination system so it was ossified it was fossilized so if you did an examination in if you went into an examination in 1900 and you'd only read a

textbook written in 1600 you'd do just as well you know nothing nothing changed that collapsed in the early 20th century completely and then was followed by a series of revolutions not least the Maoist revolution which wanted to get rid of distinctions of merit ability completely it wants you know get rid of the experts, get rid of selection, get rid of differentiation. It's the ultimate sort of egalitarian, communitarian sort of frenzy, the cultural revolution. What's happening now is very, very intriguing, because what China is essentially doing is recreating this old Mandarin examination system, reaching deep into its sort of collective unconsciousness and recreating this system. But this time, it's not a system designed to select Confucian scholars. It's a system designed to select people in mathematics, science,

technology, engineering in particular, in all the subjects that create the wealth of the modern world and this is something that is um getting faster and faster in pace you know they're building universities they're they're creating um higher quality uh high schools and they're basing selection to these universities in on examinations you know the incredible emphasis on performance in examinations just as it was um in the before the examination system collapsed um and also they are putting in place a system of meritocracy within the administrative system as well so you're promoting people on the basis of performance and on the basis of examinations um so you know mid-level civil servants will take take examinations to get to the next level now i want to qualify what i've just said in all sorts of

ways because i don't want to present an unrealistic position portrait of of modern china there's massive corruption in the system uh there's massive favoritism in the system um there's the soft corruption which comes from um parents being able to buy their children uh better educations by sending them to private schools and there is a sort of replication of the red princes of the people who dominate the Communist Party, also dominating this new Mandarin education system that they're creating. All of those things I would take into account. But nevertheless, I think we should address this possibility that China will become the new Singapore, that China is looking to Singapore as its model. And I think Singapore, for all sorts of reasons, is probably the most meritocratic society on earth. China is looking to Singapore as its model.

It wants the state to become a sort of developmental state that's powerful and that drives economic progress. It wants to have a Mandarin elite of people who move between the public and the private sector and who measure themselves according to their performance and their talents. It wants to, you know, you can squeeze out the corruption and the dynastification of China and move towards the Lee Kuan Yew vision of a meritocracy, if that happens at the same time that America is moving away from meritocracy towards group rights, resentment based on, you know, historical experiences of injustice and all that sort of thing, China becomes a more dynamic society than the United States. resentment based on historical experiences of injustice and all that sort of thing. China becomes a more dynamic society than the United States.

So I want to come back to that. Before we do, you talked about the education prep industry in China, which is like a $100 billion business, $100 billion sector. And the Chinese Communist Party is clamping down on it now. And one of the reasons it's clamping down on it now. And one of the reasons it's clamping down on it, it appears to be, is to sort of tap into a burgeoning populist revolt against the reality that the only people who can afford to pay for that special education prep are those with means. And it really does create classes and a haves and have-nots dynamic in China. So is China then, in that sense, wrestling with its own reaction to what some would argue would be the harshness of a merit-based system? Absolutely. The Chinese have some of the same worries

that people in America do, that the system is just too selective and burdensome, but also that it's beginning to have a class characteristic that people who succeed in meritocracy produce children who also succeed in meritocracy. So that's clearly their worry. I'm not completely convinced by these worries for several reasons. One is that if you have a big private tutoring system,

the downside of that private tutoring system is, apart from all the strain of these poor children having to do all this sort of stuff, but the downside of it is that you get a tighter link between class and educational outcomes. But the positive side of this private tutoring system is, as a society, you're investing more money in education, and that you're using lots of different experimental methods to produce the best educational results. So if you look right across Asia, if you look at Japan, for example,

they've got the same sort of private system. And if you look at PISA test performance, these Asian societies tend to cluster at the very top of these systems. So having a private schooling system, education system, supplementing a state education system, doesn't worry me intolerably. And the other thing is, I think that if you look at the elite Chinese universities, it's definitely the case that certain families, educated families or powerful political families are getting their children into the top universities. That's definitely the case. But I think that those top universities are less exclusive in terms of class than America's top universities. I think I've seen figures suggesting that, you know,

there are more children from the top 1% of the population in terms of wealth than the bottom 90% of the population in terms of wealth at Harvard. I think at the elite American universities, I've seen figures something 18 to 20% of people coming from manual or rural backgrounds. Also, at the elite colleges in the US, if you are the child of an alumni of the school or the child of faculty, your chances of getting in are far higher than someone comparative to you, comparative with you in terms of grades and performance and all the rest, but doesn't have those connections.

So I would say the Chinese are worried about this, but I think they have less reason in some ways to be worried than the United States. But nevertheless, again, if you look back at their history, they had a history of popular revolts against the examination system, most dramatically with the Boxer Rebellion is the death of many, many millions of people. So they understand resentment to some extent. You're bullish on autocratic meritocracies. My question is how sustainable are they over time?

From generation to generation, while they may start out the way you're describing what Lee Kuan Yew pulled off in Singapore and what is more or less sustained in Singapore, or some of which what we're seeing in China, or what China is aspiring to, the reality is over time, the sort of autocratic part of that equation becomes more dominant than the meritocratic part of that equation. I'm not sure that I agree that I'm bullish on autocratic meritocracies. I would say that I'm worried about autocratic meritocracies. And I think that for Democrats... Worried about it meaning their ability to be competitive globally and project power against the West. Being competitive globally

economically and project power against us. Because I think the thing that most drives economic growth is not democracy but meritocracy um democracy has all sorts of great merits and but i think it's merit democracy needs to harness meritocracy in order to be at its most successful and i think once democracy rejects meritocracy, particularly if it rejects meritocracy at a time when autocracy is using meritocracy,

then that's worrying. Meritocracy is a very powerful tool for creating efficient outcomes and creating economic growth. I agree that autocratic systems are not as self-correcting as democracies. And that is a worry. But I also think that if you have a meritocracy

which systematically excludes meritocracy, which is gripped by populist revolt against meritocracy, that creates all sorts of problems. It creates economic problems um because i think you know as i say public companies better than private companies and the rest of them but i think it also creates political problems because if you look at at western democracy it tends to have various meritocratic elements to it um which constrain democracy and give democracy a sense of an incentive to look further into the future. And we're now moving towards purer forms of democracy, which, again, worries me a bit.

I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs from Israel, startups from Israel. I've written about them. When I traveled to Singapore two summers ago, it was actually summer before the pandemic, when I met with government leaders there, they are all marveling at Israel's startup ecosystem. And they say, yes, we have tremendous economic success. We have all the results that you've articulated here and you speak to in your book, but we don't have young Singaporeans wanting to take risk to be entrepreneurs and to start startups. At the end of the day, real jaw-dropping innovation,

real exponential improvements in productivity come from big innovations, tech-based innovations, which require entrepreneurs to take real risk. And Singaporeans are not trained to think that way, maybe because there's so much this intense merit-based system that the fear of failure is so real that the safest thing to do is just to work hard and do your best to get into the system, whatever the system may be, the government bureaucracy, the big corporation, but it's not rolling the dice and living with the reputational risk of failure, the stigma of failure. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's right. I think if I was to say why in the end I think

the West will win, so long as it doesn't completely get rid of meritocracy. I would say this adventurousness, this appetite for creative destruction, which involves, of course, destruction as well as creation, is its great benefit. But also I think it's worth remembering that in order to reach the frontiers of knowledge these days, the areas where real step changes in, where new ideas can really flourish, you need to have a, you know, you need to learn more. You know, you need to, so most of the great productivity improvements in the modern world are done by people

who have been very successful educationally, so successful educationally that they can drop out of Harvard before they finish their degree. So the Zuckerbergs and the Gateses of this world are not like the Carnegies and the Rockefellers. They're people who have actually done extremely well within the educational system. And in order for the whole machine to keep going forward, we need to have a really, really good educational system. And in order to have a really good educational

system that draws on the talents of the whole population i think we need some sort of meritocratic um spirit infusing it and that's what really worries me about uh apart from the injustice of it all of getting rid of these elite schools in in new york and and san francisco and boston because you know that these this immigrant talent that rose up from nothing, you know, was incredibly entrepreneurial in terms of its output. So yes, absolutely, we have to mix with meritocracy the entrepreneurial spirit, you know, the startup culture that you've spent

so much of your life writing about. But it does have to go along with really disciplined learning. You know, just staying on Israel as a model, the system that sets up Israelis, young Israelis best for performance in the high-tech economy is whether or not they emerge out of one of these elite military units, like 8200 or 81 or Tal Piot. It's basically like the equivalent of getting a military degree, a leadership degree, sorry, military training, a leadership degree, and like a PhD from MIT, all in one formative experience. And the system by which the Israeli education system and the IDF, the Israeli military,

work to identify talent in the high school system, they seek it out. It doesn't matter who your parents are. It doesn't matter what kind of prep you've had or no prep. They have a very aggressive and comprehensive system for identifying who would be the best fit for which unit. And you have some people who get approached in high school who never in a million years thought that they were a good fit for such a unit, but because the IDF and the education system has picked up on certain aptitudes, they say, no, no, no, no, you're being recruited for

unit X or you're being recruited for unit Y. And you talk about this, we need a system for finding hidden Einsteins, right? So it seems, by the way, in this regard, Israel does actually have this system. And it's not at odds with a communal mindset. The country has very much a communal feel. But on this track, when they're recruiting for the military, merit is not compromised, and it enables them to find these hidden Einstein's. Absolutely. I think it's extraordinarily interesting that,

and I think it's a model for the rest of the world. It's very odd in the United States or in Britain that it's regarded as perfectly normal for talent scouts to look for great football players or great soccer players or great badminton players or tennis players as we we've seen into and and to seek them out and to and to train them from a very early age and you know we we we just saw you know a woman from you know mixed race backgrounds you know at a woman from, you know, mixed race backgrounds, you know, at 18 years old winning the American Open, who'd been identified very early on. We regard that as a wonderful thing

and as a tool of justice and the promotion of opportunity. We don't do that with intellectual talents. In fact, people would, I think many people would feel a bit nervous about that. But actually, I think being very proactive in looking for hidden einsteins going everywhere you can to find these the these people and and to give them the best possible opportunities would be an extraordinary progressive measure and i quote in my book the example of churchill who said that after the second world war the empires of the future would be empires of the mind, and said that he thought that the English public schools,

i.e. private schools such as Eton or Harrow, which is where he was educated, would have to give at least 50% of their places to these hidden Einsteins, to people who were brought from the working classes, spotted by talent scouts and given this education, because the world would depend upon, you know, brain power. The West would depend on brain power in order to survive. And I think, you know, we need to be much more innovative

in the way that... We need to be much more proactive in our willingness to look for these people, but also innovative in the way that we look for people. We've talked a lot about SAT tests, but there must be other ways of scouting through the population to find people who are extremely talented, who are brilliant at video games,

or have other forms of extreme ability that could be spotted and nurtured. Adrian, we are very grateful for your time. I know it's late in England uh England right now so we want to uh we want to let you go the book is the aristocracy of talent how meritocracy made the modern world we will provide links in the show notes and in the closing so our listeners know how to find this very important book it's an important contribution so important that you've like triggered 10 other questions

I want to ask you on a whole range of topics, which means I'm probably gonna have to rope you in to coming back to have another conversation. But until then, thanks, Adrian, and have a great weekend. Thank you very much. That's our show for today. If you want to follow the work of Adrian Wooldridge, you can find him on Twitter,

at A.D. Wooldridge. Of course, you can find him at The Economist, either the print copy or The Economist's website. And you can find any of his books, including The Aristocracy of Talent, at barnesandnoble.com or your favorite independent bookstore or that other e-commerce

site that I think they're calling Amazon. Post Corona is produced by Elan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.