THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARShortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times and McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year AwardThis unique and fascinating history explains why the blame now being piled upon meritocracy for many social ills is misplacedand that assigning responsibilities to the people best able to discharge them really is better than the timehonoured customs of corruption, patronage, nepotism and hereditary castes Steven PinkerMeritocracy the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their status at birth. For much of history this was a revolutionary thought, but by the end of the twentieth century it had become the worlds ruling ideology. How did this happen, and why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left?Adrian Wooldridge traces the history of meritocracy forged by the politicians and officials who introduced the revolutionary principle of open competition, the psychologists who devised methods for measuring natural mental abilities and the educationalists who built ladders of educational opportunity. He looks outside western cultures and shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocractic system.Wooldridge also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we...

Binding: Paperback;496 pages; Publisher: TBS-Penguin Random House Wholesale; Classification: HBTB; Weight: 478 g; Dimensions: 129 x 198 x 31

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