Meritocracy or Else | Dr. Adrian Wooldridge | EP 265

What is America doing at the moment? You've got gifted programs being abandoned. You've got SATs being abandoned for university entrance. Boston Latin, which has used to select people on the basis of examinations, is ceasing to do so and is now accepting people on the basis of lotteries. The same with Lowell High School in San Francisco. You've got these books like Michael Sandel and Markovic's book attacking the principle of meritocracy at the same time that you've got this sort of rather plutocratic Ivy League system. So you're getting the ladder, and then you've got the attacks on the elite schools in New York. So you've got the ladder being distributed down on the one hand and you've got, you know, a sort of woke plutocratic elites on the one hand enjoying the fruits of all this educationally, these vast diaries that the education system has but on the other hand not really being willing to reach out, which is what meritocracy should be about, to the most talented groups in the whole of society. I think that means ultimately that the American loses and China wins, which is not something I want to see.

[Music]

Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have as my guest Dr. Adrian Woolridge. Dr. Woolridge was born in 1959 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took her first in modern history at All Souls College where he held a prize fellowship and was awarded a DPhil. His thesis was published as Measuring the Mind. He's worked for The Economist magazine since 1988, including as West Coast Bureau Chief, Washington Bureau Chief, and author of the Lexington column, Management Editor, and author of the Schumpeter column, and Political Editor, and author of the Beige Book column. He's the author or co-author of ten books including The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America with John Mickelthwaite, Capitalism in America with Alan Greenspan. His most recent book, which I recently read, is The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. I've rarely researched or been able to talk with someone who has so many interests that dovetail with mine and am very much looking forward to this conversation.

So, you published this Aristocracy of Talent and it's the continuance of an interest that you've held for a long time. How is the book being received?

Well, I’m glad to say that the book has been extremely well received in Britain. It's been reviewed by all the leading periodicals on both the left and the right and has been widely discussed on the radio and in various media outlets. In the United States, the reception has been much more muted, I would say. It hasn't been discussed anywhere near as widely, although there is discussion going on, and it's beginning to mount a bit. But what most irks me is it hasn't been reviewed by The New York Times. All the major publications in this country—by this country, I mean Britain where I’m sitting now—reviewed it. The New York Times hasn’t reviewed it. The New York Review of Books hasn't reviewed it. A lot of the sort of mainstream particularly liberal publications reviewed it here in Britain, all the liberal publications reviewed this, and I thought I expected to be more criticized than I was by the liberal publications. There was a sense in many liberal publications that this is an idea that we should grapple with and we shouldn’t dismiss out of hand. I was very pleased by the reception on both the left and the right; for example, The New Statesman wrote a long and positive review of it. So for The New York Times not to have mentioned it at all, well, we all want to be reviewed by The New York Times because it’s a big and important newspaper, but for them not to mention it at all, The New Review of Books not to mention it at all, The New Yorker—all of these outlets—I was disappointed by that just as I was extremely encouraged and pleased by the breadth of the reception in the United Kingdom.

Well, it seems to me to be a reflection of exactly what you're writing about in the book itself. I mean you traverse the history of the idea of meritocracy and the practice of meritocracy, also contrasting it with forms of social organization that weren't meritocratic either implicitly or explicitly. And you talk about the revolt against the idea of meritocracy, especially on the left, and the increasing potency, let's say politically and psychologically, of that rebellion. You know, interestingly enough, also pointing out that at least at certain times in the 20th century, the meritocratic idea was fundamentally progressive and maybe was in its essence. So maybe I’d like to know from you: you did your doctoral thesis on measuring the mind, the history of that, and this has been a concern of yours for an extraordinarily long time. I'd like to know what's at the bottom of that.

Sure. I wrote, I did a DPhil in history at Oxford University and my DPhil was on the history of IQ testing and particularly the way the history of IQ testing shaped educational policy. We had something called the 11 plus examination in Britain, which all people in the state sector had to sit, and which determined whether they went to grammar schools or secondary modern schools, by elite academic schools or non-elite schools, and which was essentially an IQ test or a set of IQ tests. It's an extraordinary example of the massive public impact of a set of ideas about what constitutes mental ability and how you test that mental ability. So I was interested in that partly because I was myself a product of a grammar school, and I went to Oxford having been to a grammar school, and my entire educational career was determined by sitting this examination at the age of 11 and passing this examination and passing subsequent examinations. So it was a sort of personal thing to me, but it also struck me as a very just thing that somebody from my background, which has a very ordinary background, could go to a really first-rate academic school and get an education that was comparable to people like Boris Johnson, people who went to Eton or Winchester. And so it always struck me that this examination, this way of organizing educational opportunity was a very intriguing thing. It was something that was subversive of the status quo, which was embodied in my mind by the private schools, the independent schools. And then the Labour government, which I naturally sort of gravitated towards and supported, came along and destroyed the grammar schools and abolished them in the name of comprehensive schools and in the name of getting rid of testing and selection and streaming and things like that. And it struck me, you know, as a young person, this was an extraordinary thing for a supposedly progressive party to be doing. It disillusioned me with it. It's the first thing. Many other things did subsequently, but it's the first thing that really disillusioned me with the socialist or the Labour project.

So I got interested in the history of how this came to be, how the 11 plus came to reshape education in Britain, and how these ideas were at first accepted and then rejected. I discovered, I think, that most people in the history faculty at Oxford, which was a fairly conventional conservative faculty, thought I was completely mad to be looking at this subject. I found myself in the strange position of being somebody who was looking at an unconventional subject—not political history or constitutional history—which would have put me in the camp of some sort of deranged lefty, but actually from quite a conservative direction because I thought that dismantling the 11 plus and dismantling the grammar schools was a terrible thing. So I would say I was intellectually quite homeless, but actually being intellectually homeless, I think, is quite appropriate to somebody who's interested in meritocracy, which ultimately I think is an idea that, in political terms, tends to be intellectually homeless.

So you do point out in the book—you use the phrase in your book, "cruel meritocracy," I believe—and you are referring there, despite the fact that you were a beneficiary of the 11 plus system, that the test, like, it's a really sharp fork in the road, and perhaps it's too sharp a fork in the road in some sense to be palatable. And then I suppose the people who have dismantled those systems would object to your support for that system by saying, "Well, it allowed you through and that was good for you, but there were all those other people who were arbitrarily denied the possibility of advancement." And I think the weak part of that argument is the idea that it's arbitrary, right? That’s the crux of the matter—what exactly does arbitrary mean? And you might also say that cruel as these examinations were, they were perhaps less cruel than what they prevented.

Absolutely. So I wouldn't advocate for a return to the 11 plus. I think it was a system which was too much a matter of dividing people into sheep and goats. It was too once-and-for-all. I think you have to have some sort of recourse to what happens if people have a bad day, and I would want a system in which you have a variegated set of selective schools, lots of second chances, lots of different types of schools. But I think there's a distinction between sort of a system which is short sharp and therefore obviously cruel and a system which is very prolonged, seems to be very kind and actually ends up being quite cruel. And I would say that what we've done is replace a system whereby you have a one-off test which can benefit a large number of poorer people with a system of very prolonged educational selection which, over a long period of time, tends to be very biased towards people who have the resources to keep going through the system. So under the 11 plus, you have a number of people who would be selected at 11, would get a very good academic education, would get free educations at Oxford, Cambridge, or whatever university they went to, and then would go on to the fast stream of the civil service. Now where you have a much more prolonged system, it's easier for people who don't have a lot of resources to be weeded out or to drop out. And so, you know, it costs a lot of money to go to university. It costs a lot of money to go to graduate school. By prolonging the process of selection, it looks kind on the surface, but deep down it can be a system which is much more socially biased towards richer people rather than people who might be deserving on the basis of their ability.

You see the same conundrum emerging to some degree with the use of statistically valid and reliable tests to do selection in the workplace.

Yes, I mean they have an error, so some people are going to be forbidden advancement as a consequence of that test because of error, but—and that's obviously unfortunate, it's particularly unfortunate for them—but placing someone in a position where the probability that they'll succeed over time is extremely low and then tormenting them to death over a one-year period while they fail dreadfully and also burdening the company, let's say, with the fact of dealing with someone in a management position, for the sake of argument, who actually isn't competent to do that, doesn’t strike me as a particularly just or empathic solution. And you know part of the problem here is that—and this is, I think, part of the problem that we're facing as a society in general with the use of, let's say, intelligence tests is they are the most powerful technology that research psychologists have ever invented by a large margin. And so if we equated them in some metaphoric sense to surgery, we might say, well, you don't want surgery, might be necessary, but you don't want to do it without an anesthetic. And you also want to be aware that the scalpel can kill. And so I think partly what we're wrestling with is the—among many other things—is the fact that these tests are of incredible power in terms of their predictive ability, and we're not exactly sure what to do with that.

I mean, when I started familiarizing myself with the IQ literature, it was actually quite disheartening in some sense because I started to understand just how broad the ability range among human beings is and how intractable that is in some measures in the lower, let's say, 10th percentile.

So, one stat I came across at one point—and you detailed the use of IQ tests by the American military. They were picked up very rapidly by the military and very successfully and with many positive social consequences, but the American military decided, I believe all branches, and I believe this was in the 1980s, that it was illegal—it's now illegal in the U.S. to induct someone to the armed forces if they have an IQ of less than 82. That's approximately 10% of the population. And that is a dismal statistic because the military is chronically hungry for people, and if their conclusion, after close to 100 years of IQ testing, was that 10% of the population can't be trained to do anything of any utility in the military, that has—well, that speaks for itself if you think it through. And so it's no wonder people are leery of these tests, and they're leery of what they reveal.

And the easy thing to say is, well, what they reveal isn't true, you know, it's the tests themselves, but I'm afraid I couldn't swallow that. I spent 10 years looking at the IQ literature.

Well, I mean, when we talk about the military, I mean there are two big questions here. One is the First World War when a lot of the IQ testing was fairly crude and they had this, you know, they tended—and a lot of literature which came out of the First World War was quite racist. And I think Bingham, for one, recanted on what he’d said in 1930. He said then they said, "No, no, we were wrong. It was a premature application of our methods. We should have been more sensitive about cultural differences and linguistic abilities," because you have a huge population of new immigrants. After the Second World War, I think it was a much more developed science, and the most important thing it revealed in both Britain, but most specifically in America, was the huge amount of talent that was in the population that was being underutilized.

Right, right. And so out of that comes the GI Bill because people are saying, "Gosh, there are all these clever people. We're a technical scientific civilization. We must use them. We must promote them." So I think there's a big difference on the impact of the two things, but these two questions that you raise: one is the accuracy of the tests; but the other is that, you know, whether they're accurate or not, but the other is if they are accurate, what they reveal about the human population, and particularly the sheer range of abilities within the human population, which is very wide.

And so, the person who invented the term meritocracy was Michael Young, who wrote this wonderful, magnificent, sort of really clever book in 1958 called The Rise of the Meritocracy, and what he was saying in that book was that the problem with meritocracy, the problem with IQ tests is that they work, and that meritocracy works. The general tenor on the left at that time was these tests were inaccurate; they were missing children of ability; they were allocating positions arbitrarily. Michael Young says, "No, no, no! The real problems is that they work!" That they're accurate, but the sort of society that you create by selecting people and promoting people on the basis of ability is the opposite of socialism. He was a socialist, he was one of the authors of the Labour manifesto of 1945. He says he didn't like the sort of society that was being created by the use of these tests precisely because it promoted people by ability, and it revealed very wide differences in people's capacity to do things, and he wanted—

No, that is a painful thing. That is a painful thing.

Well, that is a pain, absolutely, for anyone psychologically and socially. But, you know, the rub is always, "Yeah, compared to what, exactly?" Oh, well, compared to my hypothetical utopia. It's like, no, no, your hypothetical utopia is very low resolution and impractical, and if you implement it, it wouldn't turn out the way you think it would. So we're not going to go there. How about compared to other real things? And you do that in your book, in your recent book, right? You walk through other forms of social organization, you talk about dynastic organizations, you talk about aristocratic organizations that were based—well, that were based, let's say, mostly on the possession of land and that tended to be hereditary, so they were unbelievably stratified and also completely immobile. And so, so you can dream up a non-stratified society, but maybe you could comment on this too. I found out late in my life the existence of the Pareto distribution and the Matthew principle. It's quite common among economists. I mean we tended to think in psychology that everything was normally distributed, but there's lots of things that aren't. When I developed a test called the Creative Achievement Test, which is widely used psychometrically now, and when we first administered it to hundreds of people, and it was basically—it’s a test that sums the number of creative achievements you've concretely made in 13 different creative realms. Well, it was wildly Pareto distributed; the median score was zero across 13 dimensions, right? But there were people who had scores of 80. You know, they were way out on the tails, and we couldn't even utilize the test—it was hard to utilize the test statistically because it didn't conform to the normal distribution assumptions that underlie IQ testing, for example. And that's when I started to become aware of the Pareto distribution.

And the Pareto distribution bedevils every society. And so you get stratification. And so these people who are objecting to the meritocracy—okay, well, are they objecting to stratification? And I'd say yes. And so, okay, well, what's the solution to that? Well then it turns into something like, "Well, it's capitalism's fault," which is an unbelievably shallow analysis and that's why I liked your historical approach as well.

What I tried to do in my book was to look at the history of meritocracy and treat it as a historical problem rather than just as a philosophical problem or a legal problem because what I wanted to show is that if you look—that meritocracy is a relatively recent thing and it's an extremely radical thing, and if you look at the history of previous societies, most previous societies have been based on principles other than merit, because there is an argument that says, of course, we all believe in meritocracy; it's a natural way of doing things. And what’s, you know, what's the point of it? What's the point of discussing it? Everybody believes this. In fact, for most of human history, societies have not been organized according to the principle of meritocracy. They've been organized according to the principle of the inheritance of positions from father to son, so dynasties. They've been organized according to the principle of ascription, whereby the position that you have in society is one that you inherit and one that in some way is regarded as natural. The world is naturally organized into hierarchies. You know, Shakespeare talks a great deal about how people should reconcile themselves to their position in society, because if they try and change it, it will cause some terrible problem, almost a psychic problem or a natural problem in the natural order of things. Untune that string, and you know what discord follows, as you see in Troilus and Cressida.

And also, so you have a notion that a static society is a good society—a hierarchical society is a good society—that power and position and property should flow through families, and you know, dynasties that should rule the world. And also you get the question of how in such a society do you allocate positions? Well, there are actually, you know, very significant answers to that. One is that you give them away as patronage; another is that you buy them and sell them. So there was a huge market in jobs in these pre-meritocratic societies. You know, you would buy a job in the civil service or you would buy a job as a tax collector. France was a particularly extreme example of this, but most pre-modern societies had a market in jobs. Jobs were regarded as property.

And one of the most—the things that didn't exist in that world was the notion that there is a precise relationship between having a job and your ability to perform that job. So I'd quote the example in the book of a woman called Margaret Scott, who was the wet nurse to the Prince of Wales. In 1783, she was given a pension of 200 pounds a year. And 200 pounds a year in those days was a great deal of money, but it was also a great deal of money when you consider the fact that the Prince of Wales was 23 years old at the time and so probably not in need of a wet nurse. But, you know, there just isn't a notion that a job is something you do, that you need to be qualified for, that is a set of commitments to your employer.

So let's see, let's take that apart for a minute, because partly what you're pointing to is that the idea of meritocracy is so deeply rooted in our culture that we assume that its existence is something akin to a natural fact. It's not a natural fact; it's a fragile fact; it's something that we can lose very easily if we do the wrong things. So that's why I spend so much time talking about history, because what I want to prove in this book is it's something that was created historically and could be destroyed historically. We could move towards a non-meritocratic society, which is what worries me. So, and yeah, so we assume now, I think, that if I have a job, my job doesn't really matter what the job is—is to produce something productive that other people value in as efficient a manner as possible at a cost that’s less than what I’m paid.

Yeah, right, right. And all of those assumptions are questionable. Absolutely right. I mean, I mean they're not natural kinds, which is partly what you're pointing out. And to—and then, okay, so, so alright, so we'll accept that. Let's go to the other side of this for a minute. So part of the problem, I think, is terminology. Part of what makes people resistant to this is because we also tend to sort of casually talk about elite institutions, which implies a kind of moral valuing. We talk about meritocracy, which implies that the people at the top are of greater merit, right? And that means, to the degree that that meritocracy is established on the basis of, let's say, fluid intelligence, that we’re conflating moral worth with abstract intellectual ability, and that's really a catastrophe. And that’s part of the pride of intellect. And you talked about the best and the brightest, and one of the criticisms that that book leveled against the meritocracy was precisely one of intellectual pretension and arrogance, right? It's just because you're smart doesn't mean you're good, it doesn't mean you're wise, it doesn't mean you're meritorious, it doesn't even necessarily mean that the decisions you make are going to be better than decisions that other people would make using other means.

Now, it's complicated, because as you point out in the book, it's quite likely if you're in the top, let's say, 10th of the IQ distribution and you start poor that you won't end up poor. Correct?

Right. And so, I believe I read a paper at one point that suggested that you were much better off in the United States if you were born in the top quartile of IQ than if you were born in the top quartile of wealth, if you had to pick at birth.

Yes, I think there's so much British evidence of the same saying the same thing. And I do have some sympathy. I mean, one of the things I've been trying to sort out in my own mind is the conceptual inadequacy of both the left and the right when it comes to profound individual differences and ability. So I had a client at one point who had an IQ of under 80, and he couldn't read well. He collected a lot of books because he was a bit obsessive, but he couldn't read. And I spent about 30 hours training him to fold a piece of paper, a letter, into three equal segments so that it could be put effectively into an envelope with enough accuracy that a multitude of such envelopes would actually pass through an envelope sorting machine. And it was something I could do without thinking, and he couldn't really do it after 30 hours of training. And so I struggled for about a year and a half to find him a volunteer job, and it turns out, you know, volunteer jobs are actually harder to get in many ways than paying jobs now because there's so many police checks and that sort of thing you have to go through, and they're very technically challenging. And I sent him to a government agency that was hypothetically designed to help people like him find a job, and they said, you know, type up your resume and send it out. It's like, well, he can't type, and he doesn't have a resume, and he can't use a computer, and that's not helpful, thank you very much! You have no idea what you're dealing with here.

And so this 10% of the population, let's say, the liberals think you can train anyone to do anything, which is rubbish. And the conservatives think if you work hard enough, there's no obstacles to your success, and that's also rubbish in some situations because hard work alone isn't going to do it. And so we have a real conundrum now.

What we're doing right now, I think, is shooting the messenger. It's like we don't want to hear this, so we'll get rid of tests that are valid and reliable. So, you know, the heart of my Devil thesis, and also to some extent at the heart of this new book The Aristocracy of Talent, is this group of psychologists who emerge in the late 19th century and become very dominant in the 20th century up to the 1960s, who are psychometricians who are concerned with the psychology of individual differences measuring individual differences. And what I would say that those people are essentially is bell curve liberals. They believe in the bell curve; they believe in the normal distribution; they believe that the range of individual differences is very wide. But they say that those natural facts about the world lead one to liberal conclusions. They lead one to believe in a more active state, a more child-centered set of educational policies, and a more redistributive tax system as well.

So in Britain, where I think bell curve liberalism is particularly dominant, they would all be members of the Labour Party or, at the very least, of the Liberal Party. They would have all voted in 1945 for the Labour Party. They believe that the very fact that people have wide ranges of individual ability means that you have to have an active and generous welfare state because it's not their fault that they're not very bright; it's not their fault at the bottom of society that they can't look after themselves, so they need to be, as it were, looked after through a pension system, through a system of redistributive taxation, as I say, through supplements to that.

You're making a case there too—that's an interesting case because you're actually making the case that it is the observation of genuine and profound differences in people's ability that are fundamental and maybe not even easily changed by social policy that actually justifies the redistributive welfare state at a moral level, right? And so that's something for people who oppose the idea of meritocracy to really think about for a while.

Well, I mean, John Rawls actually, you know, it's central to his theory of justice that you should have redistributive. I mean, John Rawls, very interestingly as a leftist, is also a sort of genetic determinist. He says that people don't own their talents. You know, they inherit their talents, and so if they're born very bright, it's not because they're morally superior because they happen to be lucky. If they're born not so bright, it's because they happen to be unlucky, and therefore society has an obligation to redistribute resources from the lucky to the unlucky.

I think that's a weak philosophical argument in some sense because I could, I think you could just as easily say if that is the case, those a priori presumptions about the distribution of talent, it is in everyone's best interests, regardless of the causes of the differences in ability, to radically incentivize those who can, so they will produce as much as they can for the rest of us who can't.

Yeah, and so what is interesting about it is that there is a liberal case for redistribution based on the idea of inheritance of people's inherited IQ, and I think that was the dominant position on the left. So you've got a whole bunch, something like, let's say, J.B.S. Haldane, who is a sort of Marxist. He was the sort of editor of the Daily Worker, which was the Communist Party magazine; he was also a biologist. He wrote this book, I have it on my shelves here in 1932, called The Inequality of Man, and it's all about, you know, if we know that people are unequal, what do we do about it? And he thought that what you do about it is have a bigger, more active, more enlightened state.

And something happens in the 90s, let's say in the 1960s, roughly in the 1960s, whereby this notion became forbidden on the left. The left became not only more egalitarian rather than meritocratic, but it also became committed to a blank slate theory of the world, and that anything that questioned the blank slate theory of the world was associated with the right.

Okay, so let me ask you some questions about that. I see the malevolent side of the insistence politically on a blank slate as justifying the utopian pretensions of those who would like to remake man in their image of their political ideology. And if the blank slate argument is true, then we could be anything that those who would like to change us could make us into, and why not? And so that bothers me. I also think it's unbelievably naive, both biologically and psychologically. It's clearly not the case; there isn't a deep psychological, biologically-minded psychological thinker who adheres to anything like a blank slate theory. Even the behaviorists have completely abandoned that notion, and they probably did the most rigorous job of attempting to test its validity.

And then with regards to the rejection on the left, let's say part of that was a consequence of persistent ethnic differences in IQ testing.

And that's proved something—well, that's a—no one knows what to do with that. Now, I read some recent work showing that the ethnic differences and racial differences that pop up in the IQ literature are much less evident at the age of five and increase over time. And that's quite interesting because it does indicate that perhaps there's an educational deviation that's occurring that's at least in part at the basis of this. But it's proved a very thorny and intractable problem with endless social consequences, particularly in the U.S., and we don't know what to do with that.

I would say—and the easy answer is to say, well, the tests themselves are biased—but then you're stuck with, well, what are you going to use instead? And what do you mean biased? And compared to what, exactly?

Yeah, on the ethnic differences, on the group difference. I mean, of course, these are differences between group averages and that, you know, there is an incredibly wide range of talents and abilities within groups. Differences within groups are much bigger than average differences between groups, evidently, but it is a very American set of data. And I think that what we're seeing in Britain at the moment, which is very interesting, I think, is that we've had a series of schools which are called academies, which are a bit like American magnet schools, but they're schools that can select people at the age of 16, once they've done their O levels when they're going to A levels. There are a lot of them in the east end of London, in poorer parts of other cities. And we found that these schools, which have been very academically rigorous, very focused on achievements, have been designed to say that if you've got a poor population, what you need to do to it is to give it opportunity and give it rigor rather than sort of dumb down education. And these schools have been extremely good at getting members of ethnic minorities into high-quality universities.

So there's one called Brampton Manor Academy in the east end of London, which has an ethnic minority dominant population, which has the majority of its students have free school meals, which is a measure of poverty, and they now get as many or more children every year into Oxbridge than Eton does.

And again, you have, you know, in the United States or total number?

A total number, so in fact, by percent, I think that would have been would be better because Eton's a very big school. So these schools have been doing amazingly well and they've surprised everybody by how successful they've been. So there is a lot of drive in the poor ethnic minority population. And what we're finding in Britain is that the people who are doing worse are white working-class children, particularly white working-class boys, and they're being surpassed in education by Afro-Caribbeans, West Indians, and obviously, you know, Oriental, Chinese ethnic minorities which have traditionally done very well. So it's a bit of a different picture from the United States.

Okay, so what do you think's going on with the white working class in England?

The white working class in England is—it's partly that they're living in areas where opportunities don't abound. They're living in the north of England. They're living in areas... These are people who are part of the industrial working class, and we had massive de-industrialization, particularly from the 1980s onwards, so they're in left-behind areas which have seen their industries destroyed. So that is a depressing thing, and I think that's limited their ambitions. It certainly limited their access to good schools and ambitious teachers. And I think also you have a culture which tells them that they're bad people or that they're, you know, we have a culture that celebrates almost every group in society apart from the white working classes.

Yes, particularly—well, I’ve seen the conflation of ambition and achievement with power and domination in that sort of messaging. And those things shouldn’t be conflated. It’s very disheartening, I think, particularly for boys, and girls even if they're poor still have the message that’s sent pretty strongly by our culture that, “Well, whatever a girl wants to accomplish and achieve, that’s to be celebrated." There’s no fear of patriarchal power lurking underneath that, let’s say.

And so, yeah, I think it's dangerous to underestimate the demoralizing effect that that kind of language and messaging that’s constantly applied actually has.

Yeah, so we, you know, we—and like the United States about 60% of people in universities now are women. And the people at the very—people who've got the least opportunities, I would say, are probably the children, the male children of white working-class people living in areas like Stoke or Newcastle, who've seen industrial jobs disappearing but still have this conception that men must be people who sort of make things or do things and shouldn't be sitting behind desks or being involved in the caring professions or something like that. And those are the people I think who really are stuck with that, without they don't have role models and they don't have a general sense of where they fit into the post-industrial hierarchy.

Yeah, well, the attitude that men are people who do things with their hands is a perfectly useful attitude in an industrial society when you're in the lower strata of the population because that's exactly what the case is, and there's plenty of honor in that as well.

And so, it’s not easy for that to be replaced when that was the basis of productive effort itself and of success. So why do you think that your book has been positively received, all things considered, in the UK? Is the assault on the meritocracy, let’s say, or in the conflation of the idea of intellectual prowess with merit, maybe, is that not as contentious an issue in general in the UK?

No, we have a lot of the currents that you have in the United States, but in a sort of weaker way, as a sort of echo chamber in the United States. But we still have a memory, I think, of the meritocracy as being something that was progressive and something that was a cultural memory of the meritocracy as being something that's progressive and something that displaced the old aristocratic elite. And I think both the new Tories and the old Labour people can agree that, you know, there’s something wrong with the old aristocratic elite. So we have a better memory of the failures of a pre-meritocratic society than you do in the United States, I think.

I’ve said, I think the situation in the United States is strange because one of the things that we're better at at the moment in Britain is, I think, promoting social mobility or doing something about social mobility. As I say, we've got the academy schools which are providing real opportunities for an excellent education in the inner cities. Oxford and Cambridge are doing something to sort of reach out to a much broader strata of the population. They're creating sort of extra years where they take people in—people from poor backgrounds—and give them an extra year’s education, so they're basically broadening their selection without abandoning the principle of merit, I think.

Exactly, without abandoning the principle of merit. They may be softening it a bit in some areas, but in the United States, you still have, let’s say—you’re not in the United States, I believe you’re in Canada, but close enough for now—they still have legacies, which exist. They still have athletic scholarships, which they still have incredible advantages for the children of faculty members. And if you look at the social composition of Harvard, it's an exceptionally elite institution, a plutocratic institution. You know, people come from very, very rich backgrounds at Harvard. So I think America at the top of society is doing less to revive the meritocratic spirit than we in Britain are doing. And what it’s doing instead, because it sort of feels some sort of vague guilt about the fact that, you know, Harvard is a privilege 1920 rich university, is they leap into wokism as a sort of almost as a sort of defense mechanism to their guilt.

I happen to believe that a lot of this wokism is a sort of way in which the old privileged white ruling class holds on to its position by preserving a certain, you know, it's us plus certain selected members of the excluded classes.

But yeah, well, I saw that often in my students who were of the radical left persuasion at elite institutions like Harvard, where I was there for seven years as a professor, and then less so at the University of Toronto, but it's a less elite and plutocratic institution by a large margin. But it always grated on me to some degree because I thought, "Well, here you are at this institution, and so you are by definition already a member of the class of oppressors that you hypothetically despise." And the fact that you are here and accepted this and going through this means that you've accepted it, and now you want to be on the side of the oppressed, and you want to have all the advantages of the hypothetical oppressor simultaneously. It seems a bit much to ask for, right? To be a victim and an oppressor at the same time?

Yeah, well, I think we should always start with the question of what are you personally willing to give up? But still, I mean, what I think one of my worries about abandoning the meritocratic principle, I think that, as I said, the American principle is something that’s fragile. It's something that was created relatively recently in history. It’s something that can be destroyed. And once you start making exceptions, so we’ll make an exception for the children of faculty members, we’ll make an exception for alumni, we’ll make an exception for people who give us a lot of money, we’ll make an exception for people who are born into certain groups of the population—so we’ll make—we’ll accept the meritocratic principle. Ultimately, you end up completely destroying the meritocratic principle, but you also end up reintroducing the idea that people should be judged as members of groups. And the fundamental thing about the American graduate principle is you judge people as individuals, not as members of groups. As soon as you begin to reintroduce this collective principle, judging people by members of groups, then you have a different principle as the basis.

Okay, so are there advantages, do you think, to classifying people by group, if we played devil’s advocate? Because that's—I see that exactly the same thing happening. There’s this insistence that immutable group identity should trump individual merit. And then there’s a deeper criticism, which is—and it’s the deepest criticism in some sense—is your understanding of merit, your concept of merit, and I'm speaking of you personally as an advocate of this position, is nothing but a reflection of your unreflected demand, say, to justify your position as a beneficiary of the 11 plus system and also to justify the privilege you have as a member of your particular ethnicity and background. That’s Foucault’s criticism, right, of virtually everything.

Well, let me answer those two questions, and I think you probably won’t agree with my first answer. But I think that there are certain groups of people who by dint of their history do deserve to be treated as groups who’ve been collectively wronged, and this is—I’ve been a long-term opponent of affirmative action. I’ve now come round to seeing its merits because I think the African American population in the United States, because of the legacy of slavery, because of the legacy of Jim Crow and because of redlining and segregation by residence lasted for such a long time in the United States, that there is a case for reaching out positively to look for talent and to look for potential and making an incredibly hard effort to do that as a way of making up for historical wrongs, but historical wrongs which continue to limit opportunities.

But I would say what I do not accept as a conclusion from that is that if you can just do it by numbers, hitting number targets, you can't just take them into the universities and just, you know, hit your quotas and then not do anything about it. It should be part of a very broad policy of affirmative education—not just affirmative action but affirmative education. As I say, what they’re doing in Oxford now is giving people who’ve come from historically underprivileged backgrounds and giving them a foundation year, spending a whole year making sure that they get up to standards so they can compete with people who’ve come from more rigorous educational systems.

And I think one of the many problems with affirmative action in America is that they’ve tended to accept people and then just let them do what they do, and quite often that means either dropping out or moving to courses that are less difficult or gerrymandering the standards themselves or criticizing the standards themselves.

Well, okay, so I’m going to press you on that a little bit. Yeah, you did point out just before we had this last bit of conversation that the danger in the elite institutions in the U.S. in particular are the exceptions to the meritocratic principle, right? And so how do you reconcile your desire that you just expressed to, in certain cases, to redress historical wrongs with the problem of exception to the fundamental merit-individualistic meritocratic rule? Because, you know, it’s—that’s a typical conservative objection in some sense. It’s like, yeah, yeah, that’s your exception, you know, but then, so there’s going to be 10 other people that have slightly different case to make for exceptions, and then we’re back to the same problem.

So we should just stick to the damn harsh 11 plus that’s an actual cutoff, despite the fact that it causes a certain amount of trouble because there isn’t a better solution.

Sure, absolutely. As I say, I came to this position reluctantly because it’s an inconsistent position, but I also think it’s a pragmatic position. I think that the injustice involved with slavery was of such a different order that we need to make recompense for it. The society in general has to make recompense for it, and it continues to shape the opportunities of black Americans. But I would not extend that principle, let’s say, to recent immigrants who, by the very fact that they’ve immigrated to the United States, have massively improved their life chances. I’d like to keep it limited to essentially the descendants of slaves; and also I would like—I’d say that it’s something that should be time-limited. It’s something that we want to get beyond. We want to get beyond this and to a world in which we can begin to judge people purely on the basis as individuals. What that time frame would be, I’m not sure, but it needs to be something that’s ended.

And that’s why I think there’s a really important distinction between affirmative action and the talk now of diversity. This diversity is based on a very different philosophy—for affirmative action, the philosophy of affirmative action is we did something bad, and we’ve got to make up for it. The philosophy of within the confines of a meritocratic system, yes, within the confines of a meritocratic system, we’re actively searching for talent, and we have to actively search for talents in certain populations much more than we do in other populations because of their history.

Now, the logic of diversity is very different from that because the argument of diversity from the back case was that diversity is a good in itself, and you have to judge people as members of groups because it’s by mixing those members of groups, because different groups have different characteristics, that you produce better educational outcomes. Now, that's—yes, there's no evidence for that. That’s wrong technically.

That’s partly wrong because, look, we could talk about one of the arguments you lay out in your book that certain psychologists—and they tend to be educational psychologists—have levied against strict meritocratic tests like those that are fundamentally IQ tests, so that would be the SAT, the GRE—all, everything that’s used for entrance into undergraduate universities where that's used in graduate school, professional schools, that's all IQ testing essentially, and people will say it's not, but that's because they don't know what they're talking about.

Okay, so then you might say, “Well, IQ is a pretty singular, is a pretty good predictor of long-term success in a cognitively complex society,” but there are other sources of variance, possibly. So you get thinkers like Robert Sternberg, for example, who talked about practical intelligence and the multiple intelligence theorists, Howard Gardner, and both of whose scientific work I think is shoddy beyond comprehension and a terrible answer to a problem that’s been answered actually quite nicely psychometrically.

We know there are other sources of variability. There’s variability in temperament, five dimensions—five dimensions, and I don't think that that's a biased finding, and it was agnostic theoretically; it emerged out of pure brute force statistics. That's where the diversity lies, and there is not a lot of racial difference in temperament.

So the idea that group membership produces diversity of a sort that would actually broaden the human scope of any discussion, any corporation, etc., etc., is just wrong. There’s no evidence for it whatsoever, and it’s even worse than that because it makes the presumption that the essential source of diversity is in fact ethnicity and race, and that can go wrong very badly. But the diversity argument is a much more profound threat to a meritocratic society than the affirmative action argument because the diversity has no possible time limit, and it’s fundamentally opposed to individualism. It’s fundamentally illiberal because it says that group membership is fundamental to our identities and that you must judge people at least partly, if not primarily, on the basis of group identity.

But I wanted to go back to your point about Foucault, which I think is a very interesting point, and I think one which is absolutely refuted by history because one of the arguments that the critics of meritocracy make is that meritocracy is basically propaganda for plutocrats or is propaganda for the ruling elite. The ruling elite choose people according to its own criteria; it invents those criteria. They’re essentially the criteria of the capitalist class or the ruling class, and only people who fit those criteria will be selected. So it’s purely socially constructed.

Yeah, on the basis of the drive to power.

Of the drive to power. But I would say that actually something very different is going on, and that’s why the history really matters here, is that merit, meritocracy is a Promethean concept, or it's—sorry, it’s a mutable concept that actually has its own internal logic. So if you look at Britain as an example of this in the middle of the 19th century, a group of educated bourgeois men, the intellectual aristocracy, decided that they wanted to take power from the landed elite. And they said that they wanted to do—people like them, Thomas Macaulay, people with names like Huxley and Holden and all and Keynes. And these people wanted to—and Stephen wanted to have power. And so they said what they needed to do was to have open competition for jobs in the civil service, in Oxbridge fellowships and the rest, and open competition that was determined by your ability to perform in examinations.

So that you could say, well, these are a bunch of people who are advancing their power. They vent these ideas to advance their power, but look at what happens historically. First of all, you get women coming along and saying, "Well, if my brother can get a fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge by doing this exam, why can't I?" And indeed, you know, they say, you’ve got to open—if open competition means anything, you can't just exclude women. If open—if examinations test objective ability, you can’t just say we’ll only have them for half of humanity.

So the very logic is self-perpetuating. So you do indeed get a bunch of very clever women who come along and knock on the door of these institutions. So I tell this story in my book of a woman called Philippa Fawcett, who in 1892 sits for the Cambridge mathematics tripos, which is the hardest examination in the world, and she comes top. She gets the best results; she beats everybody. But of course, at that point, women weren’t actually officially allowed to sit these examinations, so she is classified as above the senior wrangler. The senior wrangler is number one, but she's classified as above the senior wrangler because she has taken on this system and beaten it.

So there's then—the working classes. You've got a whole bunch of people who come from poor backgrounds but are born very bright, who are born with a great desire for knowledge. They come along and they knock on the door of the civil service and they knock on the door of Oxford and Cambridge and say, "Judge us by these standards, and we’ll get into these universities." And the same happens; you get somebody like W.E.B. Du Bois in the United States, you know, a black person who becomes the first, I think, tenured professor at Harvard, writes this magnificent book on The Philadelphia Negro, writes this great stuff on the talented tenth, on the talented tenth of the population who are going to drive progress in all populations.

So what you're doing is not creating a system whereby the ruling class can regulate who comes up and who doesn't, whereby the ruling class defines what merit is. You have a system which, by its own logic of open competition of examinations, changes the nature of the ruling class. And I don't think any of the people who set up the system in the first place imagined universities in which 60% of the people going to them would be women—imagine a system in which you'd have massive, massive numbers of ethnic minority people or working-class people going to universities.

So merit is not a conspiracy of the plutocratic elite; indeed, it's something which constantly reconfigures society from with the outside group coming in and getting ahead as a result of the openness of competition.

Okay, so I want to hit hard at that argument, because I've been trying to parse out in my own mind exactly what it was that Foucault was doing. And so one of the problems that has emerged since the 1960s is the problem of the realization of the complexity of perception. So up until about the 1960s, it was more or less assumed that the world was just made out of objects in some simple way and that we saw those objects and then we thought about them and evaluated them and acted, and that's just wrong. That isn’t how it works at all. It's almost impossible to perceive a visual landscape. We have almost no idea how we do it. It looks like you need an intelligence that’s embodied in some sense and that can act in order to perceive.

So perception is extraordinarily tightly tied to action, and there's almost an infinite number of interpretations of any given visual landscape, and the same problem bedevils all other forms of perception that emerged in AI and has bedeviled robotics engineers ever since, which is why we don’t have robots zipping around doing everything that we could do. And then it also emerged in literary criticism. It's like, well, how many ways can a text be interpreted? Well, innumerable ways. Well, how do you know which of those ways is canonical? Oh, we don't know how we know that. Well, how do you know the whole canon is canonical then? Because it's just a meta text.

Well, we don't know that. Well, how is it you understand the text given its innumerable interpretations? We don’t know that. We don't know how we do that. Well, maybe you just do it as part of your drive to power. Yeah, okay, premature answer to a very difficult question—that’s Foucault. He essentially assumes that the will to power is at the basis of categorization itself and even at the basis of the process of categorization, which is even a deeper criticism, right? It's nothing but your drive to elevate yourself and power hierarchies that governs your—by which you categorize—and even your justifications for that categorization.

Okay, I think that is the most cynical thing you can think, and I don't say that lightly, but it's not that easy to detail out what the alternative is. Now, you're pointing at it to some degree with this issue of merit that transcends the power drive of any particular group of people, even those who might be pushing the idea of merit. Well, there’s something deep down in there. What is it that—what is it that’s being facilitated that isn’t the drive to power? And we haven’t got that conceptualized.

Well, it—the university, especially the humanities departments, wouldn't have been so easily taken over by the postmodernist types who insist upon this kind of interpretation if the counterargument was well-articulated.

Well, one of the problems with Foucault, the many problems we could find, is I'm not sure how one would go about disproving his claims, because they're so all-encompassing and so sort of mutually self-reinforcing. I don't know how one would say your interpretation of text is not right.

Well, you did it with the historical examples, right? Your claim is—I'd hope to do that, but I would say that Foucault has a huge influence on the revolt against the meritocracy in the 1960s and 70s because he's basically saying that categories, the categories that we use to make distinctions between people, are as you say the products not of sense or organizational necessity or convenience or efficiency but of power.

I would happen to believe that the arguments in favor of meritocracy can be made in terms of both social justice and in terms of economic efficiency. I think we can demonstrate that meritocratic institutions and meritocratic countries and systems are more economically productive, that they have a higher, you know, higher efficiency level of fish efficiency, that the productivity rates are higher in such societies than in other societies. So just to dismiss it all as a mishmash of power plays, I think is—

Well, okay, so let’s take that as a starting point then because at least in principle, one of the things that the people who claim that those in power are doing by imposing their category system is subjecting those who are deprived to a level of absolute deprivation that’s so terrible that it's unjust and immoral. But if the counterclaim is, “No, you wait a minute, when we make arguments on the basis of individualistic meritocracy and the net consequence of that is that although there’s still a fair degree of income disparity that the bottom gets lifted up far enough so that absolute privation, let's say, of the sort that defines starvation just to take an example—no longer exists,” that you interfere with that at your peril, even if you’re on the left and you actually care for the poor and dispossessed.

Absolutely, I can believe that. I can believe that I can demonstrate quite clearly that meritocratic societies have higher levels of productivity. If you take a family company or you take family companies in general as a category and compare them with public companies that will appoint people primarily on merit, you will see that public companies are more productive, that they grow faster, that they're better at turning inputs into outputs than family companies. Family companies have a much bigger variance of performance, but the average performance of public companies—if you take countries that are pretty meritocratic, they will have higher growth rates than countries that aren't meritocratic.

So let’s take Singapore, which is in many ways the most meritocratic country in the world. Its growth rate, which has been extraordinary, has been powered by its use of human capital, by its merit, by its meritocracy. Compare Singapore with Sri Lanka, which in 1960 they were on comparable income levels. I think Sri Lanka was a bit richer. Singapore, by focusing relentlessly on meritocracy, has pulled ahead.

Or take—do you think the data linking meritocracy per se and the stringent meritocracy in Singapore to that economic advancement?

I think you can collect data on this. Another example would be if you take Sweden or any of the North European countries and compare them with Greece and Italy. Greece and Italy being nepotistic or familial in their organization and much more dominated by family companies and much more dominated by informal familial arrangements, they have got lower growth than Sweden.

And also, the rate of growth in Italy has been slowing down recently as they’ve moved towards—as the effect of high technology has begun to kick in. So the growth rate in Italy, which was quite fast after the Second World War as society—as economists are becoming more advanced, is beginning to slow down because a familial, nepotistic organization just is proving to be incompatible with an IT-based society.

And there's plenty of economists, Luigi Zingales at the University of Chicago primarily, who've done work showing that meritocracy, you know with using big data sets and how companies select people, on how open the educational system is, on how much corruption there is—that meritocratically organized societies have higher growth rates.

Well, there's a very, very well-developed psychometric literature in management psychology. The actual science of management psychology—there's a bit of that, although, you know, most of management psychology is rubbish, and the same for most of leadership psychology—but there’s good data looking at differences in individual productivity rates across a multi-year period after hiring, depending on the method of selection. And the best method is one that’s G-loaded. The second best method is one that assesses conscientiousness, Big Five conscientiousness. The best test combination is a combination of those two, a weighted combination of those two, and it predicts individual productivity at about 0.6, which is staggeringly high for psychometric standards, by the standards of such things.

And that data is very, very well developed by, I think, the best psychometricians and statisticians that are working in psychology. And, you know, if you’re a social scientist and you say, “Well, those things aren’t believable,” I would say I defy you to find anything social scientists have ever demonstrated using any methods other than those methods that show results more than one-third as great.

So if you throw out all that, you throw out everything. It’s the same methods, but if we accept that the economic growth is a good thing and improvements in productivity are good things because they make the life of the average person better as well as the life of successful entrepreneurs better, I think the consequences of this—which I said, which can be demonstrated, are extremely big.

And this is what leads me to my biggest worry in my book, and that is that we live in a world that doesn’t just consist of the West. We live in a world in which you’re getting the biggest and most serious challenge to Western dominance that we've seen ever, which is coming from China. And as if we are seeing at the moment meritocracy being abandoned in various ways in the United States at a time when I believe that China is becoming more like Singapore and taking meritocracy much more seriously, both in terms of its educational system, which is very, very competitive, in terms of its university system, which is both highly selective and growing all the time and the way that the Communist Party operates.

And I think it does set itself performance standards and even promotes people on the basis of examinations. If we have America becoming less meritocratic or less enthusiastic about meritocracy and China becoming more meritorious or at least more enthusiastic about meritocracy, that presents the possibility of a future in which China really pulls ahead of the United States. You know, I think—except there are lots of objections to this. China has massive levels of corruption; it has the red princes; it has enormous inefficiencies and internal inequalities and the rest of it.

But imagine if it—if I'm right—imagine if China really is slowly slouching towards being a Singapore but with 1.4 billion people.

Yeah, not so slowly, you know?

Yeah, I mean that has massive implications for the future.

And what is America doing at the moment? You've got gifted programs being abandoned. You've got SATs being abandoned for university entrance. Boston Latin, which has used to select people on the basis of examinations, is ceasing to do so and is now accepting people on the basis of lotteries—the same with Lowell High School in San Francisco. Um, you've got these books like Michael Sandel and Markovic's book attacking the principle of meritocracy at the same time that you've got this sort of rather plutocratic Ivy League system. So you're getting the ladder and then you've got the attacks on the elite schools in New York. So you've got the ladder being just pulled down on the one hand, and you've got, you know, a sort of woke plutocratic elites on the one hand enjoying the fruits of all this educationally, these vast diaries that the education system has, but on the other hand not really being willing to reach out, which is what meritocracy should be about, to the most talented groups in the whole of society.

I think that means ultimately that America loses and China wins, which is not something I want to see.

Well, I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and it’s a very interesting place to be. And what you see there is an unbelievable concentration of unbelievably smart people, and so that's a merit-based establishment. And look what it's produced. I mean, it's absolutely stunning; it's absolutely remarkable; it's singular in some sense, and that's all a consequence of the—because, I mean, you get meritocratic selection, and that's one thing, but then you get this multiplier effect when you get people who have passed through that system, and you’ve seen also the tremendous consequences of exactly that for India, for example, because the Indian Institute of Technology is incredibly selective, and it’s producing graduates who are certainly the equal of MIT graduates, which is really saying something. And so many of them, many of their best and brightest, went to Silicon Valley, and what's happened is they've dumped immense amounts of capital back into India and facilitated the development of a robust technological society there.

And so it’s been to everyone's stunning benefit, assuming, as you said, that economic growth and growth in material prosperity are valuable. And, you know, you could critique that idea. You could say, "Well, we should be more ascetic; we should—there are other values we should pursue than material prosperity," but I do not see that coming from the left. What I see happening is an insistence that the corrupt aspect of our current society is the lack of material prosperity at the bottom and simultaneous interference with the only process we know of that could— that has historically demonstrated its ability to redress that.

So what's going on, like, why is that happening on the left?

Well, why the left? I just pick up on your point about MIT. MIT is now going through a big process of producing a mission statement—

Oh, God.

—well, you know, do you know that 75% did the word "merit" from it? They’ve excluded the word merit! That’s MIT of all places. Yeah, 75% of applicants to the UC system in the research science streams are rejected without consideration of their research history on the basis of their diversity statements, which is something introduced now to—in Canada, to get a grant at many of the federal agencies, you now have to produce a diversity statement or some equivalent of that along with your research proposal.

Something very—if you go back again to the late 19th century in the United States, you had a ruling class that became very worried about itself. It was very worried about the level of inequality, very worried about plutocracy, very worried it was becoming European and no longer sort of American. And what they did as a result of that was to construct a ladder of opportunity and throw that ladder down as deeply as possible. You know, from Harvard down to the local village school, there’s a sort of sense that we must draw all the talents from right across this great country.

Now we have the similar phenomenon, which is the creation of a plutocratic elite that is very divorced from the whole of society. But instead of saying, "Well, we must create a ladder," we must—we must make sure that the ladder really works and we must get talent from everywhere we possibly can, they’re saying, "Well, what does talent mean? Does it really exist? Can you measure it? Is it really a good thing, or is it an instrument of ruling class power?" You know, it’s sort of glass bead games being played and very little that’s being done that will really increase the supply of real talents, and some sources of talent, such as the Asian population, deliberately being ignored.

And it's difficult not to conclude from that that you actually have an old plutocratic elite that is—in these very convoluted ways using woke language, basically engaging in opportunity hoarding.

They don't want to be displaced from these positions, so—and that’s the net consequence of these sorts of actions.

Oh, at least in the short term. We’ll see what happens as those ideas propagate because they’re deeply in—the Foucault insistence. I mean, it’s the thing that I think disturbs me the most—the idea that at the basis of the act of categorization itself is nothing more than a totalitarian will to power. That’s a positively satanic vision of mankind.

It truly is, and what really frightens me about that is what it means for how you treat your enemies. Look, it’s like, you’re just out for your power, that’s it, and me too. There’s no place we can meet as civilized people between our power hierarchies. That place doesn’t even exist, and so what am I supposed to do with you if you oppose me? If we can’t come to an accord, well, you don’t have to think very long before you come up with a solution for that.

Well, that’s why the meritocracy, the history of meritocracy is so fascinating, because it moves in directions which were never designed. It was never designed to do in the first place. You know, once you set up the principle of open competition, the groups that succeed that are coming up from submerged positions in society are succeeding without any sort of sort of plan and quite often against the will of the traditional ruling elites, I guess.

It's in the land of the ruling elite is completely displaced by this process. So—and it comes because the system of testing, examination, open competition has its own internal logic, which is totally different from what Foucault would say, because all the categories and all ideas must be instruments of the powerful.

Yeah, oh, all categories, no matter what they are, right? It's an unbelievably deep criticism, and I think it was a reflection of Foucault's character itself, frankly speaking. He’s not someone I admire at all on the ethical front.

No, no, I didn’t think— I think that’s—that's right. But here we have subtleton groups: W.E.B. Du Bois is a particularly interesting example when he talks about the talented tent. These are subtleton groups who are saying, "Well, this system provides opportunities which we must seize, and which we can use to transform society peacefully." And, you know, by rising up intellectually, and again, that’s true of the women’s movement. It’s true of the working classes. You know, the aristocracy of labor—it has something to do, as well, with our struggle and movement as a society towards the integration of something like ethics across multiple levels of analysis.

So, you know, so we say, "Well, we want our workforce to do something productive that elevates our material well-being," and "stop suffering." And so we want to make the micro movements that we make and the selections that we engender systemically serve that. And so the whole thing is—the whole thing is integrated, and that desire for that integration for the greater common good in some sense, especially to alleviate the grossest elements of suffering at the most extreme end—that's an ethic and a desire that isn't captured properly at all.

It’s antithetical to the spirit of totalitarian oppression that Foucault insists, you know, infects every act of categorization. But meritocracy is also essentially a form of liberal individualism. It says that individuals should be judged on the basis of their own efforts and abilities, but it’s also an idea that presents agency. It has agency at the very heart; it says that people can shape their own futures. They can shape their characters. They can work hard; they can get ahead on the basis of working ability. That was always something, you know, and that they’re properly rewarded for that and that they need incentives to do—and that’s something that the—you know, the Foucault is obviously against.

But a great bulk of modern sociology has been against that; it's removed the agency and a sense of agency. But I think that it exists. I think that, you know, that there is a sense of agency. We do shape our destinies. We can work hard, or we can sleep all day. We can exercise our talents, or we can choose not to exercise our talents, or...or, yes, and we have virtues, using that. We have virtues, and we can exercise those. And we're not fundamentally totalitarian demons driven not by nothing but the will to power.

Exactly. So I think that the philosophy embodied in liberal individualism is something that really needs to be defended. And again, it doesn't have enough defenders at the moment as you see large chunks of academia in particular have gone to post-modernism, which is ultimately dehumanizing or it takes the agency out of being human, which is what being human I think is about. So I think meritocracy is right at the very center of a liberal view of the world.

Well, let’s say amen to that and close this discussion. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. I very much appreciated and enjoyed talking to you, and I was great—it went very quickly.

Okay, well, I hope we’ll talk again sometime in the future.

I hope so too.