TRIGGERnometry - The Problem with Meritocracy - David Goodhart

Episode Date: November 15, 2020

David Goodhart is a journalist, commentator and author of Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. Support TRIGGERnometry: Locals: https://triggernometry.locals.com/ Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod If you want to advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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top dogs do, then you get a one-on-one call or meeting with us whenever this lockdown is lifted in 2028. So see you then when we will all be greyhead. slightly fatter, but still as problematic. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest was on the show a couple of years ago talking about his previous book,

The Road to Somewhere, and he's now triumphantly returned here with his new book, Head, Hand and Heart. David Goodhart, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thank you for inviting me. It's great to have you back. You've written this great book. and a very important one, I think, will form the basis of many political conversations going forward. It's one of a series of books. You're not the only person to have started to talk about the limitations and, in fact, the harms of, quote, unquote, meritocracy. What was your thinking

behind the book and just give everybody a summary of what you're talking about in this? Yeah. It carries on somewhat from my last book, The Road to Somewhere, which is about the value divides in our society that have led to Brexit and Trump and all, and the mass political alienation. I mean, this book, too, is trying to answer that question, trying to understand what it is about our apparently quite rich and successful modern societies that does seem to be alienating so many of our fellow citizens. And whereas, I mean, in the road to somewhere was, as I say, primarily about value divides, partly to do with educational stratification, educationally based value divides.

And in this book, I've kind of borrowed down a bit deeper into these educational divides and looked more broadly at what it is that are the kind of aptitudes and skills of society values. And I do think it's kind of, you know, one of the, you know, one of the, you know, one of the the elephants in the room is that we have, particularly in the last 30 years or so, shifted, allocated a huge amount of much more status and reward to one cluster of aptitudes, those related to cognitive analytical ability. And that's inevitably kind of drawn away some of the prestige and reward that used to go to other forms of skill and aptitude

that to do with manual, technical skills and care. and emotional aptitudes. And some of this has always been the case. I mean, some of this goes back thousands of years, but it's been very much reinforced in the last generational two, partly by the expansion of higher education in most rich countries, with, what, anything between about sort of 35 and 50% of school leavers going to university now in most rich European countries,

even more than 50% in some. And I think this is now, I think, creating all sorts of dysfunctions in our societies. And it is not just to do with the fact that we have, you know, while sending more and more people into very academic forms of education, we have huge skill shortages and skilled trades, you know, middling technician type jobs. One of the reasons given for the failure of the testing system is we don't have enough white-coated lab technicians. We've got lots of academic scientists, but not enough technicians to do the more practical hands-on work. We have huge recruitment crises in all the caring professions. We certainly did before the pandemic. I mean, I think one of the positive things about the pandemic is apparently recruitment into nursing courses has risen

as a result of the kind of attention on the kind of heroic work that people have been doing in the care sector. So we've got things out of alignment. So we're overproducing. kind of middle and lower level sort of cognitive, cognitively trained people for whom, increasingly there are not going to be the jobs, because we've reached what I call peak head. We've found, particularly, you know, in the last five or ten years, the number of sort of cognitive professional jobs has not been growing at the pace that it used to grow. There was a reason for expanding higher education. There was a rationale for it going back

30, 40 years. But that rationale has now come to an end. And yet, and yet the system is still on kind of automatic pilot churning out more and more graduates, most of whom, many of whom, are not getting the high-status, high-paid jobs that they expected. So we're creating a crisis of expectations. About a third of graduates are not in graduate employment between five and ten years after they graduate. The graduate income premium has fallen from an average of 50, 60% to below 10% for many people, particularly men from non-elite universities. So a lot of things have got out of kilter. But I think it's more than just an economic question. It's also to do with a kind of broader sort of culture, psychology of the country almost, that the idea of what it is

to be a successful person has become far too narrowly focused on cognitive ability. That the people who are most respected and who are most rewarded are people who pass exams at school, go to a more or less good university, have a more or less successful professional career. And what is more, there is now only essentially kind of one ladder into that zone of safety and success. And it's not surprising that so many kids and the kids and the their parents want to still travel along that motorway into the, it's very clearly signposted. It's still, despite high tuition fees, it's still hugely subsidised by the taxpayer. And it is, you know, it's become completely automatic now for most of the middle and upper

middle classes in this country. I mean, it's true. Some working class people go into higher education too. But it's, but one of the reasons for the slowdown in social mobility. And all of the things that are claimed by the advocates of expanded higher education have really, I mean, one has to be pretty skeptical about. You know, we don't have the right skills for a highly productive economy. Social mobility has declined, not increased in the time that higher education has been expanding. And that's partly because it has been so monopolized by one section of society.

And there used to be lots of little ladders. up. There's now one big ladder up. You know, if you don't get into that, you know, if you don't do A levels and go to a decent university, you know, your life chances are quite likely to be, not necessarily, but are quite likely to be lower than somebody who does. And I think, you know, you only have to go about 30, 40 years and there were lots of different pathways to leading a successful life. And... David, there's a question that I want to ask, which is, how much responsibility? do John Major and Tony Blair need to take for this.

John Major, number one, because he turned all the polytechnics into universities. And number two, with Blair saying that 50% of the population should go to university. And when quizzed about this, it turned out it was just an arbitrary figure. Yes, I mean, I think, I mean, it's not really about allocating blame, but I do think perhaps particularly... You haven't met Francis. It is on trigonometry, David. That's what we do.

He loves the... He loves it. How much the responsibility does this need to take? It's all about taking... Listen, I'm Catholic, all right? Come on. Well, yeah, I mean, I do think there was a kind of... There was a lack of emotional intelligence.

I mean, this sort of, in a way, goes back to my previous book in the argument about kind of Anywheres and Somewheres and Anywheres, you know, the Anywhere worldview, which tends to be pro-mobility and openness and autonomy, perfectly decent and legitimate worldview, just as the Somewhere worldview is, you know, with its greater attachment to familiar... familiarity and locality and so on. These are both decent worldviews. The problem was, problem is, that anyways in the last 30 or 40 years have become too powerful and dominate our culture and our society. And they think they're doing it in the national interest,

but often actually they're pursuing their own priorities. And this is a very good example of it, I think. The fact that Tony Blair could give that speech in 1999 saying that we want 50% of school leaves to go straight to university showed not only how the extent of the extent, to which the Labour Party had kind of lost connection with its sort of original voters. But it was just sort of psychologically uncurious. I mean, I talk in the book about what I call the 1550 problem, that when 15% of people go about 40 years, or even when I was at university, I mean, 8 or 10% of school leaders went to university.

So the kind of the graduate elite was much smaller. And there's obviously something to be said for the graduate elite being bigger and more democratic. But, you know, inclusions create their own exclusions. And that actually, when only 10 or 15% of people in your class or school or town were going to college and you weren't, it didn't matter. You know, you went and worked in a local office or factory and life went on. But when 40 or 50% are going in you or not, it's a completely different ballgame. And nobody seems to have thought about that. I mean, you know, in the late 1990s, when they were expanding, well, that the big expansion came, as you say, when

Politechics became universities in 1992, but then this 50% target in 1999, nobody seems to have given any thought to that, and I think you know, and these, I mean, what do they imagine that 50%

will become 100%? I mean, and I think, I mean, part of it is a perfectly decent, and I have this argument now with David Willits and Andrew Adonis and others who are much more wedded to the higher education status quo, indeed David Willits partly designed it.

And there's a perfectly decent instinct behind the design not to kick away the ladder. And I often get, you know, as a sort of, you know, as a sort of personal attack, well, it's all right for you. You know, you went to a Rosselgut University, your children do, you know,

but now you want to sort of kick away the ladder and force everybody to go to, to do, you know, technical courses at the local FE college. Well, I mean, that's, seems to not be, you know, that sort of getting it the wrong way around. I mean, we should, you know, when we're arguing about this or trying to think about this, we should sort of look at the bigger public interest to begin with. So what is it actually in the interest of this

country to do in terms of how many people can actually benefit from? How many people, is it appropriate, should go to, you know, properly rigorous, academically rigorous, higher education. and of course much of our higher education has ceased being properly rigorous. But, I mean, if we want to keep really proper, decent, rigorous academic higher education, you know, what is the proportion of the population that should go from the point of view of the kind of public interest, given all the other things that we also need done in our society that don't necessarily require higher level academic qualifications? But even, David, even from the perspective of the individual interest, The economic figures you described, the decline in the gradual premium, the rising tuition fees, the huge debts, the graduates are now accruing.

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 a number of people who'd go. Now that argument is starting to look increasingly unsound, particularly given there, as you say, there's been a huge dilution in the quality of many of the course. that people are doing. So if you've come out of a second grade university with a Mickey Mouse degree and whatever, you're... Tutu and drama from Essex University, thank you. I was talking about Francis.

Exactly there. But a Tutu meant something in those days? I'm not that old, David. You're fuck say. It meant that you were very, very much below average. That's what I meant in those days. But you take my point, which is from an individual perspective,

it no longer seems necessarily to make sense. Sure, if you are... are gifted in the head, as you talk about, then you may continue to benefit from that. But it seems like what you're really saying, and certainly something I think a lot of people would agree with, is there are a lot of people now who are being pushed into that sort of education, which actually hurts them rather than benefiting them. Absolutely, yeah. And I mean, it's another basic thing that people seem to have overlooked is that there's something called the law of diminishing returns. You know, that you cannot,

When 50% of the population are going to university, you're obviously going to have a lower return than when only 10 or 15% go. And the whole ballgame is a different one. And, yeah, I mean, I think we've, as I say, we've sort of got things out of kilter. But now the system has so much vested interest behind it, too. And also we have a situation where 40% of jobs in the British economy are graduate only. You know, more and more professions that don't have. graduate status, like nursing, policing now is coming up, it's going to be graduate only in a few years' time.

More and more, because there's a, you know, if you can't beat him, join them. I mean, you know, in a society in which all the prestige seems to be going to people, you know, with degrees, the sort of graduate, the mass graduate elite, if you like, everybody wants a part of that, you know, aren't we as policemen sort of, you know, shouldn't we be respected too?

and the only path to respect has become going through that funnel into higher education. And it's become dysfunctional. And, you know, like I said, there used to be many more ladders up. You used to be able to get promotion from below. You don't really get promotion from below any longer. You know, if you were an able kid and you, you hadn't done very well at school, and this happens to a lot of people now. Some people are late developers and don't do very well in their exams.

but their lives are now much more precarious, I think, than would have been the case in the relatively recent past. If you didn't do well, you still had the opportunity in most big organisations, if you were capable, you'd be spotted, and you would kind of rise up through the ranks. Now you have to have a degree or even a postgraduate degree before you get in the front door in the first place. 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. I mean, they're just not mature enough. You know, wouldn't it be far better? I mean, to say, you know, go and do a pretty basic job in software development or coding or whatever. And then, you know, if you do have a kind of intellectual interest in it, and you want to find out, as it were, the kind of logic and the maths or the physics or whatever it is behind what you're doing.

You know, go and do a degree in computer science five or ten years. later. You'll enjoy it a lot more. You'll get much more out of it and you'll probably be a much more useful person economically too. David, isn't part of the problem that with globalization, a lot of these menial jobs simply don't exist anymore. So kids have less choice when it comes to choosing a career path. And it seems that for them, university might be the only option in some ways? It's true that both trade and technology and automation have caused a lot of old-fashioned blue-collar jobs to disappear. That is certainly true. But we have huge skill shortages in this country, huge skill shortages in skilled trades. And, you know, lorry drivers. You know,

we've got a shortage of lorry drivers. I mean, you know, perhaps partly because people people read the papers and they think, oh, this is one of those jobs that's going to be, you know, we're going to have, you know, what is it, robotic cars, what's the phrase? Yeah, automated cars. Yeah. You know, and lorries are perhaps in the front line of that. So people are not doing HGV courses and so on. But we have, and as I said earlier, I mean, those kind of, we've got a missing middle in our training system.

The old, you know, in the language of international education, level three is A-levels and level six is a degree. Level four, five, we used to have hundreds of thousands of people doing these kind of higher technical manual qualifications, usually spending some time in a polytechnic before the polytechnic became universities, and sort of doing it on the job, part-time courses and sandwich courses and so on. And all of that is not completely disappeared, but I mean, you have kind of a few thousand people doing those courses, because the people that used to do those courses, you know,

their children have gone to university, or many of them have gone to university. And they're doing dilute versions of what, what are kind of political class elite, you know, many of whom 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 because by definition, not everybody can have that experience. I mean, both because there is a limit on the number of people who are clever enough to really take advantage of it, but also because it's bound to be a sort of diluted version of the kind of experience that the Tony Blairs and the Gordon Browns might have had, you know, 40 or 50 years ago.

and is a diluted version of that sort of elite academic experience really better than, you know, doing a technical qualification at a polytechnic? I mean, given that, you know, we're talking about the level of ability. I mean, you know, most of us are in the middle when it comes to ability. No, I'll speak for yourself today. Well, Constantine will be in the top 15. Or in the bottom. I mean, that depends who you ask.

And then, you know, I mean, intelligence researchers will say, you know, there's kind of 15% with, you know, very high kind of, you know, raw intelligence, as it were. I mean, intelligence is a complex. I mean, I have a whole chapter on it. It's very context dependent and complex. And one can't speak too confidently about it. But, I mean, I think intelligence researchers will say there are people who do have that very high level of kind of raw intelligence. And there are 15% of people.

at the bottom who are a bit slow. But most of us are in the middle. So most of the people that are going to university now are probably no brighter than the people who are not going to university. Most of the people who are not going to university. So it's not about ability. I mean, it's about oh, it's about sort of convention in a way now. It's become... Which brings it very much as to the point that you cover in detail in the book, which is meritocracy. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality,

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amidst all the nonsense that is happening, drop us a line at Marketing at Triggerpod.com.uk. That's Marketing at Triggerpod.com.com. dot UK, and we will do our very best to help your product stand out. And when we say stand out, what we really mean is get cancelled. And it's something that you and others are criticizing as something that no longer works, or perhaps never work. Define, first of all, for people, you know, to most people, the idea of meritocracy

is the people who are good get the rewards and the people who are not good don't. What's wrong with that? Nothing is wrong with that, essentially. The, yeah, so meritocracy seems like a completely fair idea that, you know, the people, I think Michael Young, who coined the term, was actually a critic of meritocracy. He was a, he was an egalitarian socialist, and he didn't like the fact that people were differentially rewarded for whatever quality. You know, he didn't like traditional societies where, you know, you were rewarded because you have to be born into a landed family.

He didn't like the fact that you may have been born into a family or you may have inherited, both sort of through genetics and culture, you inherited various advantages when it comes to the cognitive meritocracy. He thought that that was as much of a lottery as being born into a landed family in the 19th century, say. So he was against it for socialist reasons. But obviously there is a common sense appeal about the idea that obviously it makes sense for people who are the most able. I mean, you know, we want the most appropriate people in the right jobs, particularly when it comes to top jobs.

You know, you want your top nuclear physicists to be in charge of your nuclear research program. You don't want to chosen by lottery. You don't want to be... You don't want to be... Otherwise you get Chernobyl. You don't want to be operated on by someone who failed their surgery exam. So all of that is common sense, which is why actually the critique of meritocracy has very limited political appeal, I think. I mean, it has much more appeal in the kind of university seminar room than it does sort of out on the street.

Having said that, I think meritocracy has been a disappointment. I mean, Merotoch, I mean, so Michael Young coined the term back in the late 50s and wrote this book that was a kind of satire on it. You know, the idea of kind of IQ plus effort equals merit and therefore, and he described a society in which people

were ruthlessly screened for their IQ and created an elite. Of course it became a self-perpetuating elite, as it tends to do, I mean, this is one of the problems with meritocracy. There's some American philosopher who says, well, it's fine. Of course, everyone is in favour, surely, of us being sort of ruled by the clever. But you just wait until you're ruled by the clever's children.

And then by the clever's children's children's children, you know, the sort of tendency of it to become oligarchic. And to some extent, that's probably unavoidable. I mean, one doesn't have to sort of speculate even about the sort of genetic inheritance of intelligence. I mean, it's sort of inevitable in free societies where parents are able to hand on their advantages to their children, they will do so. It's the strongest human instinct, really. It's a very strong human instinct. And you don't even need, you know, lots of countries, even if we abolish private schools tomorrow, all of this

would happen. Private schools is obviously one way that it happens in this country. And that has proved a much more powerful factor, I think, than most people. expected. I mean, indeed, you might even say mass education has been a bit of a disappointment to egalitarians going about 150 years. And in more recent times, meritocracy, although originally, as I say, term was coined as a critique, but it became something the left, but originally I think the centre left took up as a kind of banner in the kind of 80s, 90s. After it, I mean, it was kind of new Democrats, new Labor time. They were looking for a new story because they'd effectively accepted much of the political economy of the centre-right.

You know, the sort of Thatcher-Ragan reforms, they reformed them a little bit at the margin, but they broadly accepted that. They needed new stories. I think one of them was probably culture, you know, support for minorities, you're being pro-immigration and so on. But I think the other story was meritocracy. It was kind of easier for the central left, perhaps because the centre-right was it sort of more of a defender of privilege and therefore or less inclined to meritocracy, although in fact, of course, where Margaret Thatcher may not have talked very much about meritocracy, but under her, the Tory party definitely changed its sort of style and image.

It was, what was the joke, how it used to be the party of, you know, it used to be the party of, you know, run by people who owned a state, and now it was taken over by estate agents. And so actually the centre-right went along with the idea of merit- and it became a complete political census. It has been a political consensus now for 30 or 40 years. Of course, everybody is obviously in favour of meritocracy. I mean, but it has been a great disappointment,

which is where you now have this spate of books. You've got Michael Sandel, Tyranny of Merit, you've got Daniel Markovits' book, The Meritocracy Trap. You've got Quarmae Antony Appiah, who's written a book on it. 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,

has been a time of grotesque increases in inequality and only rather limited increases in social mobility. So it just, it's proved much harder to have anything much more than a partial meritocracy. Now, a partial meritocracy is probably better than not having one at all, you know, going back to, we don't want to go back to nepotism, but it's proved much harder, I think, than people expected. So people have been questioning both, it's kind of meritocracy gets two barrels in a way.

First of all, it's not meritocratic enough. You know, it's not working according to how it should be. But the second point is that it's, we don't really like it in principle anyway. Now, the reason we don't like it in principle is that what's so clever about turning society into a competition that the most able win and most of the rest feel like failures. That doesn't sound like an ideal society, does it?

So, I mean, my answer to this is that, yes, of course, we, you know, meritocracy is unavoidable at the level of the labour market, at the level of job allocations, and to some extent, the allocation of merit too. But it is not, and should never be seen as an ideal. It's a kind of pragmatic labour market principle, like I said, about the kind of nuclear physicists. You know, you want the right people in the right jobs. And, you know, how they are awarded is a sort of broader economic and social question. But you want the right people in the right jobs. But you do not necessarily, but it's not an ideal to have society turned into a

competition in which the most able win and the others feel like failures. So there is a sort of, there is a distinction between meritocratic selection for jobs, which even Michael Young would accept. I mean, you know, and all of the, all of the recent meritocracy critics, you know, because it's just common sense. No one is in favour of, you know, lotteries for surgeons. So everyone agrees with that, and yet we also don't like the idea of meritocratic society. You can see how that's quite a hard thing to sell on the doorstep. On the other hand, there is a distinction, I think. It's slightly comparable to the, you remember the French socialist Lionel Jospin talked about being in favour of a market economy but not a market society. I think it's sort of analogous to that.

So, I mean, I think where I think I differ slightly from the Sandals and the Markovitses is saying, let's not, we can't abolish meritocracy. You know, it's the worst system apart from all the others. But what we can do is shift the focus of what we are. are valuing. So my focus is more on the prefix to meritocracy, which is cognitive. So, I mean, I want to shift some of the reward and esteem that is going to the winners of the cognitive meritocracy, as it were, to the other aptitudes, to the manual technical and craft and the, and the emotional and caring jobs. And actually, and I think we've got a lot of room to do that. I mean, I think we can, we can sort of spread the idea of merit rather than abolish it.

And let me just give you an example from, particularly from the care economy. So if you ask an economist, you know, why is it the people in care homes are so poorly paid, they will say because anybody can do it. And what they mean by that, I mean, this is an example, I think, of what I call cognitive creep. What they're sort of judging those jobs by sort of cognitive

exam standards. I mean, pretty well anyone can get a job in a care home. You barely need GCSEs, I think. But at the same time, they're completely wrong about the fact that anybody can do it. You only have to spend 10 minutes in a hospital or a care home. You know, like any walk of life, there are good carers, there are OK carers,

and there are crap carers. But we don't sort of have the means of sort of differentiating or not so easily in the kind of care sector as we do for cognitive jobs. Right. It's a bit like saying anyone can do surgery if you don't think about the consequences. Yeah. It's a bit like that. In a way, yeah.

I mean, you know, the problem will become more immediate in surgery because, you know, someone on the table will bleed to death, you know. Whereas in a care home, you know, you can be a not very good carer. And, you know, the other carers will know you're probably not a very good carer. but you'll probably be on the same pay as the people who are the good carers. And I suppose the logic what I'm saying is, you know, we should have more differential pay in some of these fields. But doesn't that attitude betray a certain type of arrogance,

which is bred by our school system, that, you know, the surgeons of this world would have been getting great grades all the way through. They've been set one of every class. And then the ones who have got other skills, other abilities, maybe caring, maybe more, technical, maybe more hands-on, they would be in the lower sets. So right the way through from your school education, you were told that you were worthless than the people in the top sets. And perhaps to some extent that's unavoidable. I mean, I think the problem is not so much,

you know, the very highest level of kind of, you know, of raw intelligence or stroke academic ability is always going to be very highly valued. And I mean, I don't want to give the impression that I'm hostile to intelligence. I mean, you know, as a human species, we need our really, really intelligent people probably more than ever. I mean, you know, we need them to invent a bloody vaccine for COVID-19. You know, we need people to work out how to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. I mean, there are all sorts of problems that we have posed ourselves as a species in recent decades, because what we've been up to as human beings. We now need the clever people to come to our aid

and find technical fixes to a lot of these problems. And I think, you know, and we should value high intelligence, you know, and people who do those jobs more than someone who cleans your office here in terms of, not as human beings, but in terms of the wards. I love the way David thinks we actually can afford to pay a cleaner. We do it ourselves. Those people are very low IQ, David.

I promise you. Oh, it's looking very clean. Good job, lad. Well, if there's one thing we can do, it's do the hoovering. But, David, I mean, the idea that these other forms of work should be value, and forms of intelligence, which is what you're really talking about, emotional intelligence and being able, you know, like, I think I'm probably intellectually quite intelligent,

but when it comes to putting a shelf together or whatever, I'm a credit, right? And there are, thank you, mate. You are even worse, though, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't. But there are people who are insanely gifted when it comes to things like that. To me, what they do is magic. But, you know, I was thinking about this. Like, my plumber, I speak to him when he comes to service the boiler,

he makes way more money than me. Yeah. But if you were to ask somebody, you know, who's cooler or more high status. So, say the plumber. No, they really wouldn't, right? which is, I think, the point that you're making. Yeah, I mean, status normally, status and money are usually quite closely linked, but they do diverge sometimes.

You know, there are, you know, I mean, perhaps somebody like you who doesn't earn a huge mantle, or something, you know, an artist in a garret, you know, who produces some decent art, but not not well-known enough, celebrated enough to earn a decent living from it. You know, people like, you know, Giles Fraser, you know, clergymen, you know, who have high status, but, but there are. poor as church mice. But most of the time, you know, and plumbers do get very well paid,

and the market signals, I think, are going to contribute to the shift. Because, I mean, just to finish my thought on, I mean, obviously we all agree how intelligence is valued. I mean, this is not an argument against intelligence. I suppose my argument is that we've created below the kind of level of the genuine,

the real knowledge creators, there's a sort of enormous great blow, cognitive bureaucracy of people who are no more able, as I said earlier, than the people who were not going to university. And we've created this sort of dilute version of the elite experience, which I think is, if you want to blame people, it was, you know, the anywhere political class of the kind of 1980s and the 1990s who was saying rather narcissistically, you know, you can all be like me, you can all be like us. And actually, you know, for various kind of logical and other reasons, it's not possible for that to be the case. You know, we do need a spread.

of aptitudes and abilities to make the system work. And we have aging societies. We need tens of thousands of specialist dimension nurses. Now, you know, that is a head and a heart job. Most of these, I mean, head, hand and heart, you know, as one or two reviewers are pointed out. I mean, perhaps I do make it clear in the book that obviously the three are incredibly intertwined.

Everything you do, you know, what we're doing now is a mixture of cognitive, emotional, embodied. but nonetheless there are certain roles that require more of one than the other. And I think it's going to happen anyway. I mean, this is my kind of peak head point is that while I was writing the book, when I started writing the book at the beginning of 2019, I sort of thought this is, I thought it was rather kind of idealistic notion anyway, almost a bit new agey.

I also discovered that head-hand art is the motto of Beedale's school, the progressive English private school. But the more I read about what's happening with AI and what's already happening, 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

and we're in the foothills of AI. It hasn't even really moved in on the large scale. But work of people like Phil Brown and Hugh Lauder on digital tailorism. So many jobs did involve the degree of professional judgment and analytical ability are now being replaced by

sort of thinking machines. You know, what's happened to blue collar work is now happening to kind of the middle and lower levels of the cognitive. So it's that, yeah, we've created this sort of bloated sort of cognitive graduate class

that is not doing, as it were, the really, you know, the really useful knowledge work. But they're simply not going to, many of these people are not going to have jobs in 15 years' time. So there's going to have to be a redistribution. And where the redistribution will go, it will go into care. And to some extent manual technical functions that we have a shortage of at the moment. And some of those manual technical jobs will get taken over by technology too.

but, you know, education, you know, the care economy. And one of the interesting stories there, I think, is the whole gender imbalance and whether we will start to see as part, you know, as we have to, as we have to value those jobs more. And obviously, look, not all jobs in the public care economy are undervalued. I mean, doctors and nurses actually have quite high status. And nurses are not poorly paid in this country. It's a bit of a myth.

I mean, I interviewed somebody for the book who's only three years out of doing a nursing degree, and they were on 36 grand. Admittedly, they actually work at a hospital just around the corner from here. That includes London allowance and some anti-social hours working. But nursing suffers perhaps from a sort of compressed pay band. So a lot of – there's something like nearly 700,000 registered nurses in Britain. and only half of whom are actually working as nurses. And that, I think, is because a lot of nurses,

mainly women, go off and have families, and then the idea of coming back into a really high stress, huge responsibility job for perhaps not that much more than 36 grand, doesn't seem that appealing. So anyway, so a lot of care jobs are reasonably well-paid, but a lot are not, and we're going to have to do something about those. I mean, I'm sure we will, you know, social care was high. high on the government's list just before the pandemic struck.

It's now even higher on their list of things to do things about because they got, they had such a disastrous crisis. So I think that that will happen. And people sort of say, oh, you know, people, hard-headed people sort of say, oh, well, but, you know, the market economy chooses, doesn't it? I mean, you know, the market allocates reward and therefore, to some extent, prestige. Well, it does, but behind the markets stands human beings and human priorities. And, you know, you think of, look at the business plans of big corporations and how they've been

radically changed, well, some more than others, in the last 20 years, by things like the concern for gender equality or anxieties about the environment. And, you know, and so the, the the signals shift. The signals do shift. And I think the signals will shift in this respect, but indeed they already are. And I think you will see, and that may be accelerated by more men going into caring jobs. Because at the moment, you know, what, 88% of NHS nurses are women, 85% of primary school teachers are women, 82% of people who work in social care are women. I mean, you know, the removal of the glass ceiling and the much greater opportunity that women have in Britain and countries like Britain in the last 30 or 40 years has sort of de-gender segregated a lot of the sort of upper, a lot of the kind of cognitive meritocracy jobs, a lot of the professional jobs where are at least 50% women now. And women, more than 50% of universities, are more than 50% of universities are more than 50% of universities.

female at the undergraduate level. But in other areas of life, life continues to have this very, very big gender division of labour. And I think that is one of the things that will shift. Why? Well, because it'll have to. Well, I mean, one of the reasons why we have recruitment crises in caring jobs is for the benign reason that women have many more options now. Go back, you know, in our mothers, certainly in our grandmother's time, I mean, the opportunities for women, you know, you could only, you know, if you were a capable woman, the opportunities didn't extend much beyond being a teacher or a nurse. So the public service has got a huge free lunch. I mean, you know, right up until the 70s and 80s in this country, you don't have incredibly capable women

whose daughters or, you know, who, you know, whose daughters would be, you know, partners in city law firms, they were headmistresses of primary schools or, you know, ward matrons in hospitals. So, and that, you know, and that has changed and quite rightly, and women have much greater opportunities. And but men haven't stepped into the breach so far. And I think, I mean, will they, I mean, I think they'll have to because, I mean, partly it'll start to become more attractive because because pay will have to go up. because we simply need people to do these jobs. I think we will start to value it more. I mean, we've always valued it to some extent.

I don't want to exaggerate. But this is one of the effects of the pandemic, I think, is that a lot of the not just caring jobs, but a lot of the sort of basic, basic sort of non-college educated functions that keep the show on the road, you know, van drivers and lorry drivers and people who work in supermarkets

and people who stack shells in supermarkets, markets. I mean, you know, they are never going to be paid a king's ransom, but, you know, if people recognize the kind of our interdependence, our dependence on people doing basic jobs like that. But don't you think the pandemic has helped for that when all of a sudden people were stuck at home and then they just went, hang on, you know, all the, you know, I may be, you know, a social media manager at Facebook and whatever else. Yeah. But actually, I'm not that important compared to the bloke or the lady who works at Tescoes. No, absolutely.

And we used to, I think I actually did possibly frighten my children with the idea that if they didn't do their homework, they would end up stacking shells in Tescoes. And it turns out. I like that. Your middle class, not Little, Tesco. And it turns out... Little would be way too scary for them that they couldn't handle that. Daddy, what's a little?

Don't worry. And, you know, and of course, I mean, I'd still, rather my children didn't stack shells in Liddles or Tesco's. 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. And, you know, there are lots of basic jobs that will always need to be done. and it's one of the kind of mistakes that economists always make. I remember when I was Labor editor of the FT in the early 90s, all these people predicting complete disappearance of kind of low-skill employment. Actually, Gordon Brown, in his famously, I think he was his penultimate speech as Chancellor in 2006, was it,

predicted there would be 600,000 low-skill jobs in Britain by, I think maybe in about now, of 2020 or maybe in 2025. Depending on how you define low-skill, there's something like 10 million. I mean, you know, they just got it so wrong. Lots of technical change generates actually quite, you know, like kind of Amazon warehouses. Of course, they replace some jobs in retail,

but they create a lot more jobs. And one of the sort of biases of the sort of anywhere world, I think, has been this idea that a job has to be a form of self-expressure. And if you look at the surveys, about half of people in Britain and America say that work is just a means of earning a living. I mean, whether they would like it to be a form of self-expression is another question. Perhaps some of them would. But I think many people actually do just want to go to work and earn a living. They get their sense of purpose and meaning from things outside work.

So long as work is decently enough paid, you know, that you're treated well, you have opportunities for advancement and so on. These are not necessarily terrible jobs. and also if you are recognized by society as doing something valuable, which someone stacking shells in a supermarket is. So, you know, we don't, you know, the idea of converting every single job into a kind of lower-level cognitive one is barmy. I mean, because a lot of those things need to be, need, a lot of those functions need to be filled. And they can be filled, you know, perfectly well.

David, as you described this, is 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. Now, you've described the situation where you have a large number of young people who gets increasingly poor education, which is simultaneously becoming more expensive as it becomes less useful. We've got a future where they are not likely to get much out of those degrees that they have. They've accumulated large debts.

Inequality is not being reduced and in fact rising. We keep hearing the talk of the 1% who are genuinely accumulating more and more of the gains that society makes. Social mobility is sort of sluggish in terms of how it's growing. Is that all the recipe for the sort of BLM stroke, whatever a culture war stroke, cultural revolution stuff. Absolutely.

I mean, I think it's a good observation, and I share that idea. I mean, I do think that underlying quite a lot of the kind of eruptions of political emotion, whether it's BLM or the kind of Sanders movement in America, Jeremy Corbyn here, Melanchine, France. You know, if you listen to the people, I would see them, they often tend to be sound anyway, sort of quite edgy. and middle class. I mean, I think we have created a crisis of expectations, as I was saying earlier.

We haven't taken account of the kind of inevitable diminishing returns. I mean, public policy has been based on an illusion. It's been based on the illusion that the professional cognitive class will just go on growing and growing and growing. I mean, it's kind of what lies behind so much of education policy. You know, obviously, social mobility policy, and even kind of economic productivity policy. But it is failing on all counts, but partly because we've kind of, as I say, as I keep saying, we've reached peak head. If you look at the social class schema, I think it's the ONS social class schema for the UK. It's seven or eight classes, I think seven. The top two classes are the professional and managerial

class, higher and lower, essentially, first two classes. If you go back to two, 2000, about 35% of the adult population were classified as either higher or lower manager or professional. You look at last year, or it may even been this year, I looked at the figures, it's 37%. Okay, it's gone up slightly, but it's, you know, this figure was growing very fast in the, in the 70s, 80s because we were creating many, much more room at the top, as the social mobility academics call it. And we're not any longer. So we, you know, we got to a, we got to a, we got to a, adjust how we play the game. I mean, it's no longer, you know, if anything, it's going to shrink,

that 37% is probably going to shrink. So we've got to think about doing things differently. And that does involve, you know, raising the status, both of basic jobs, but also of care jobs and technical manual jobs. One of the things that I found very interesting in your book was when you were talking about the impact this is having on the people who are doing degrees, particularly mental health. Could you go into that a little bit for us?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're an outlier in higher education in two respects. One is that we send everybody to a classical university. Most advanced countries have a sort of differentiated system of post-school education, which includes what used to be our polytechnics, or some variation on kind of higher technical colleges, vocational colleges. You know, you've got the community colleges in America, you've got the Fakhosh Shuler in Germany. I mean, they are actually both technically classified as universities, but they're very, very different to universities in many ways. So we created,

after, as you mentioned earlier, after 92, everybody goes to, it's a full, it's for almost universally, full-time, full of 18, 19-year-olds, full of young people, It's full-time, it's three or four years. The courses are very academicized. They're taught by academics, not by teachers, as it were. And if you're doing, you know, it's true that a lot of the courses, perhaps particularly in the new university, the universities that used to be polytechnics,

are vocational courses. You know, you're doing nursing or surveying or construction management. But look at what a construction management degree is teaching. It's got lots of general stuff about. about accountancy and business, you know, it's got a kind of half of it, it's got a business studies degree. You know, 30 or 40 years ago, you'd have become a construction manager because you'd been sort of spotted on the construction site as a capable, responsible person, and you'd have been promoted and you'd have gone off and you'd have done some block release

course or part-time sandwich courses or whatever. And now, you know, and the other point, the other way in which we are an complete outlier is not only in the kind of uniformity of the classical university structure. It's also in the disproportionate number of people who go as residential students. It's 70 to 80 percent. And I mean, this is something I talked about more in my last book, The Road to Somewhere, is one of the kind of causes of the cultural divide is to do with social networks. It's to do with who you know.

You know, in most countries, you go to university in your hometown. So which means that you, you know, okay, so you're a bit cleverer or a bit more academically able than some of the other people in your school, but you remain friends with the people who go off and become electricians and plumbers. They remain in your friendship group. That doesn't happen here, anything like so much. And this is one of the things that really irritates me

about the kind of 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 Rotherrooms, they lose 20 or 30% of their brightest kids every year

to residential universities, and they invariably never go back. So, you know... You can't blame them. Well, no. That would be the clip that goes viral out of this into it. You go, no, you go. Maybe you can't.

Of course, you know, one of the really attractive things about our university system for kids is the three years away from mum and dad. I mean, you know, partly subsidised by us taxpayers. It does change the nature of education, though, in the sense that it ceases necessarily to be about getting the grades or getting a good degree, and it becomes a sort of edutainment thing as well, doesn't it?

Yeah. Where you're sort of away from adult supervision so you can have all the fun you want without necessarily learning very much. Yeah, and yeah, the university is the function then and sort of credentializes. I mean, they're not particularly adding any value. I mean, perhaps in a way, particularly Russell Group universities

that are stuff full of kids from private schools and grammar schools. And they're not necessarily learning a huge amount of you're doing a humanities course. What you learn, you probably forget. And a lot of people, including David Soskis, who is one of the architects of the Tony Blair 50% target, he says, actually, this is the most valuable thing about universities, the three years that you spend getting to know people from, very different backgrounds, social class, ethnicity these days too. And you learn kind of social

and even political skills, you know, how to set up a university society, how to organise a political meeting. And these are useful things. But the idea that this, you know, I mean, it's also extremely expensive for our society to send all those kids away. And it has these damaging value divide implications too. It makes us a more divided society. And most other countries don't send anything like the same proportion of kids to residential universities and they seem to do okay. I mean, it doesn't seem to be in a sense...

I mean, you could argue perhaps that it contributes to the sort of creative economy that we are increasingly going to depend on that that three years away from home and... But actually, sorry, you were asking about the... I mean, it's also a great strain on a lot of kids. I mean, I mean, I...

I come from an upper-middle-class background. I went to a boarding school before I went to university, so it was water off the ducks back for me. But most kids, actually, even privately educated kids these days, tend not to board. And I think for a lot of kids, you know, being away from home is very discombobulating. Well, they won't have that problem going forward, well, they, with the coronavirus.

So the idea of having fewer people go to university may happen naturally as it becomes less appealing. But unfortunately, David, we've run out of time. It's a great book. I thoroughly recommend everybody get it, and I hope some of the people who have the influence and ability to change some of these things who do watch and listen to our show

will take some of what you're saying in the book on board and destroy every university in the country. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you back, and as you know, the last question we always ask is what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? Oh, God, I'm so crossing myself. because I prepared a really brilliant answer

and then I wrote it down even and then I forgot what it was. As a teacher, I've heard this excuse many times, Davy, I've got to be honest with you. The dog ate my heart, right? But I want to, can I, can I, it's not so much on what we're not talking about, but what we're not doing.

Even better. And it's a kind of, it's not a particularly big picture thing. It's rather a kind of techy, nerdy thing. 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 you kind of just in time volunteering. 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 it or 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 that have very busy lines, but they still want to kind of... And we've seen this actually in the pandemic. You know, a huge amount of volunteering. Let's try and keep some of that going forward.

You should be able to type in your postcode and then find out, you know, it may be little stuff. There's some little old lady who lives up the street from you who just needs her drugs picked up from boots or needs to be taken out for a walk every... You know, for an hour every weekend or something. And little things that you could sort of fit in around. And, you know, even if you have a family and you're very busy.

And, of course, one of the issues, I guess, would be security. There's ways to do all of that. But it's certainly a good idea. It's interesting how the whole kind of child protection thing, you know, seems to be suspended for the COVID volunteering. But I think, you know, and that could be applied to other things too. I mean, another thing actually, sorry, related thing, and I've always had to be in my bonnet about is, and I'm not going to go into a whole Germanic spiel. I mean, I am an very nicely with the reputation of the show.

You just unfurl the banner behind. But I did spend three years in Germany. I know the German system well, and there are a lot of things about it to admire, and a lot of those things cannot very easily be translated into the British context. But one thing that could very easily be is there's something called the Beruf Actual that all. kids who leave school get, I think particularly the kids who are going on to an apprenticeship, is essentially tells them what all the kind of the options are for apprenticeships and what the jobs that you could then you could then apply for once you'd got this apprenticeship and what they pay and so on. And I don't see why don't we have something like that in the UK.

Just, you know, again, it's something the state would need to do. It would have to have the kind of imprimatur of a, and you know, you could update it every year, and it could have not only, here are all these different jobs, and this is what they pay, and this is what, this is the training you need in order to get it, you know. So, you know, a coding course is going to cost you five grand. What subsidy might you be able to get from the state to do it? You know, why isn't it all just written in one place? I mean, you can probably find out, it's probably, it's all out there somewhere, but it's kind of, it's in it's, it's all, it's scattered everywhere. We should just, you know, this is a perfect example of what,

the state ought to be able to do very simply. I mean, you could, you know, someone at the DWP ought to be able to do that in kind of two days. Just gather all this stuff together, put it in one place, produce a little booklet for it or have it online and update it every year. And I think it would make,

it would make the whole sort of feel particularly now with so much uncertainty. It would create so much more visibility and transparency for people in this very unsure situation. It's a really good point. and so on, like the Germans, to centralise everything.

Thank you so much for coming back, David. Make sure you get head, hand, and heart. And thank you very much for coming back, and we will see you in a week's time. With an episode or live stream, they go out Tuesday to Sunday, always at 7pm UK time. So it won't be in a week's time.

It'll be a couple of days from now. We'll see you soon. Take care, guys. Bye-bye.