The Aristocracy of Talent with Adrian Wooldridge

In this episode we talk about meritocracy and whether it is still a viable system for social organisation.

We begin by dissecting the concept of merit by analysing the role that talent or IQ play in assessing whether someone deserves something or not. We discuss the historical relationship between the fight for equality and the growth of the meritocratic ideal. We talk about the importance of education in the construction of a meritocracy; we wonder whether tests are sufficiently fine-grained to tell us whether somebody is deserving of something or not, and we think about the applicability of exam results to job roles that involve value-judgments. Finally, we interrogate the relationship between meritocracy and capitalism and wonder whether meritocracy is made worse by capitalism, or whether capitalism is made worse by meritocracy.