THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR*Shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times and McKinsey & Company
Business Book of the Year Award* 'This unique and fascinating history explains why the blame
now being piled upon meritocracy for many social ills is misplaced-and that assigning
responsibilities to the people best able to discharge them really is better than the
time-honoured customs of corruption patronage nepotism and hereditary castes' Steven Pinker
Meritocracy: 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 world's 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 should call for its renewal.
