"The Aristocracy of Talent" Review

The Aristocracy of Talent by Adrian Wooldridge review — why meritocracy is a sham

Today’s self-congratulatory elites think they competed their way to the top — but the system is rigged in their favour, says James Marriott

By James Marriott

In 1837 the future 10th Earl of Wemyss attended an interview for a place at Christ Church College, Oxford, and faced only one question: a polite inquiry about his father’s health. Needless to say, he aced it. This system of advancement according to birth and social connection — which rewards familial proximity to eg the 9th Earl of Wemyss above intellect or talent — has structured almost all human societies throughout history.

It’s remarkable, then, that our present system, meritocracy, which aims to reward citizens according to their abilities, has come to seem so much like common sense. More than common sense. Meritocracy structures our lives, tells us who we are. The struggle for exam results, university places, prestigious jobs and promotions defines us in a way that would have been incomprehensible a hundred years ago. Meritocracy even penetrates our subconscious lives through that nearly universal modern experience: the examination anxiety dream.

This all-pervading quality of meritocracy is why it’s so disturbing to learn in Adrian Wooldridge’s superb new history of the subject, The Aristocracy of Talent, that we don’t really live in one at all. Or if we do, it is one that has been corrupted: Wooldridge prefers the term pluto-meritocracy.

Once, however, the idea of even a perfect meritocracy was eccentric. Dr Johnson thought mankind “happier in a state of inequality and subordination”. The diarist Samuel Pepys, who owed his career to the patronage of his cousin Sir Edward Montagu, believed the system of family connections was motivational. Because, as he happily admitted, he got his job “without merit” (he knew nothing about the navy or administration when he began work as a naval administrator) he was aware that he had to exercise extraordinary “diligence” to keep it.

A scepticism of mere talent long survived the meritocratic revolution of the 19th century — the period when there was the introduction of competitive examinations for the civil service, an expansion of scholarships for poor students and the abolition of the sale of army commissions. In the 1920s magazines carried articles with headlines like “Why I never hire brilliant men” and as late as the mid-1950s the president of Yale expressed the gentlemanly hope that no man at his university would ever embarrass himself by becoming a “beetle-browed intellectual”.

China was many centuries ahead of the West. Wooldridge calls early modern China the world’s first “examination state”. In the 17th century, 2.5 million Chinese citizens, fully ten per cent of the population, took the first level of civil service exams in 1,350 test centres around the country. These centres each contained 4,000 cells, where candidates slept, ate, defecated and worked in total isolation for the three-day assessment period. Invigilators stood guard in watchtowers.

The most successful examinees were transferred to the capital to run the imperial bureaucracy and became the Islington elite of their day: their names were inscribed on stone slabs, they were carried through the streets in litters and they were worshipped by the common people, who fell on their knees before them.

The weaknesses of the Chinese system are familiar to members of our present meritocracy. Successful families used their financial resources and connections to secure unfair advantage. The frustration of the system’s losers caused social unrest (the Taiping rebellion of 1850 was driven in part by disappointed examinees). The passionless rote learning demanded by all those exams created an uncreative, undynamic elite — the reason, Wooldridge says, that China fell behind the West so dramatically in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Wooldridge’s principal criticism of the modern West’s “uneasy marriage between plutocracy and meritocracy” is that it enables the rich to use their wealth to buy educational privileges for their children, virtually guaranteeing them a place at the top of society and thereby perpetuating an “intellectual aristocracy” that risks becoming every bit as entrenched as the one the 10th Earl of Wemyss belonged to.

If our society was ever truly meritocratic it was during the postwar years, when grammar schools and university scholarships efficiently hauled working-class kids out of their poor backgrounds and deposited them on the doorsteps of the professions. Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn and John Carey were beneficiaries of that system.

Today, state comprehensives are hopelessly out-competed by a ruthless and hyper-professionalised private school system which was modernised in the 1980s and now works its pupils furiously hard and provides them with the most brilliant teachers and the most extraordinary amenities. At Eton there is one teacher for every eight pupils as well as 24 laboratories, three theatres and a study centre in Florence.

New rungs have been added to the meritocratic ladder. The postgraduate qualifications and internships demanded by the most prestigious employers are almost impossible to get without family wealth to cover extra years in education or the cost of living in one of the expensive cities, where the world’s most powerful companies are invariably located.

Having purchased their positions at the top of society, today’s elite take their prestigious educations and careers as proof of moral and intellectual superiority. Once our upper class at least felt a sense of noblesse oblige towards their social inferiors. Today’s elites imagine themselves to have competed their way to the top and disdain the stupidity and backwardness of the racist morons at the bottom.

The preening of the institutions where they study and work doesn’t help. Goldman Sachs describes itself as “probably the most elite work-society ever to be assembled on the globe”; Harvard calls itself “a haven for the world’s most ambitious scholars”.

This self congratulation is not only emetic but dangerous. Some at the top of society have begun to wonder whether the uneducated are worthy of democratic rights at all. Democracy, a system founded on the idea that all people are equal, doesn’t make much intuitive sense to meritocrats accustomed to valuing people according to their academic and professional achievements. Richard Dawkins was not untypical of his class when he suggested that it was “unfair” to entrust a decision of as “great complexity” as the Brexit vote to “unqualified simpletons”.

They needn’t worry. Various informal pressures are already infringing on the democratic representation of the less educated. Today 85 per cent of MPs have a degree, compared with 30 per cent of the population. As Wooldridge points out, those without degrees are likely to have different political priorities to the highly educated. Less than 100 years ago, most Labour MPs were manual workers. Today only 3 per cent are. It seems we no longer consider such people competent to legislate.

Those without degrees are increasingly excluded from the top ranks of big corporations, which prefer to recruit members of the pluto-meritocratic elite straight out of expensive business schools rather than nurturing talent from the bottom. As local papers die off, journalists are hired directly from university.

Wooldridge, the political editor of The Economist, quite brilliantly evokes the values and manners of the pluto-meritocrats at the top of society. Although they flaunt their liberalism, their family lives are much more traditional than those at the bottom. Our elites are “planners”, treating marriage and childbearing as “part of a carefully crafted life-plan involving having a career and accumulating wealth”. They marry later, and divorce less (among the highly educated, divorce rates have been falling since the 1970s while remaining high for everyone else).

Meanwhile, the “drifters” at the bottom of society “don’t bother to get married and drift from partner to partner in much the same way as they drift from job to job”. On top of their wealth, the children of the rich get all the psychological and educational benefits of a stable home.

And for all the elite talk of equality, they far prefer to marry within the elite — a phenomenon known as “assortative mating”. Between 1960 and 2005 the number of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 per cent to 48 per cent. This trend concentrates wealth and cultural capital at the top of society, acting as a “mighty multiplier of inequality”. As Wooldridge points out: “two married lawyers are substantially richer than two married shelf-stackers”.

Where the landed aristocrats of the past show off their wealth through grand houses or collections of porcelain, today’s intelligence-worshipping pluto-meritocrats display their love of ideas, marking “the passing of the seasons with conferences in the way that the old rich used to mark them out with horse races and regattas.” They host “idea camps”, write books or make a big deal about reading them (Mark Zuckerberg runs a book club, Bill Gates and Barack Obama publish their reading lists every year).

They would do well to read Wooldridge’s erudite, thoughtful and magnificently entertaining book. They will find many uncomfortable truths in it. Most alarming of which may be that for all their intellectual peacocking our elites cannot seriously claim any longer to represent the most brilliant members of society. “The engines of upward mobility have been silting up for decades,” Wooldridge writes. Merit risks once again becoming divorced from success.

Wooldridge calls for private schools to offer half their places to poorer students and advocates the creation of a “highly variegated” school system consisting of technical and art schools as well as academically selective ones. He also says we need a “moral revival” in our values to counteract our society’s obsessive celebration of intelligence. He points out that many members of the cognitive elite (such as bankers and journalists) are generally despised by the ordinary public, who revere the caring professions instead.

I’m on his side. It’s all too clear that whoever is today’s equivalent of the future 10th Earl of Wemyss (the son of a chief executive?) will get his place at Oxford. Not thanks to an obsequious tutor, but because the system has been rigged behind the scenes.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge, Allen Lane, 496pp; £25