Something we often take for granted is that innovative, hard-working individuals will use their talents to get rich, while at the same time improve the lives of others. As Adrian Wooldridge, the political editor of The Economist, points out in his new book The Aristocracy of Talent, this is a pretty recent discovery. Going back just a few centuries, human societies were static, bound by tradition, inimical to progress. The ruling aristocracy liked things the way they were and the people below them were expected to fulfill the roles that their forebears held. Social mobility was regarded as dangerous; the stratification of classes made it almost impossible.

How humanity escaped from those stultifying conditions and replaced them with meritocracy is Wooldridge’s subject. He celebrates the ways in which meritocracy has enabled talented people to use their minds to produce what University of Illinois, Chicago economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey (who has explored this subject extensively but is not cited by Wooldridge) calls “the Great Enrichment.” Wooldridge is worried, however, about two things: the attacks on meritocracy that are coming from the political left and right, and the possibility that today’s “meritocrats” are taking us back to the old days when wealth and privilege were inherited and those who were born poor would stay poor.

Meritocratic revolution / The idea that people ought to be free to use their talents to better themselves was, Wooldridge notes, revolutionary. For most of history, humans did as they were told. Education was only for an elite few; if the poor were to become educated, they could become discontented with their circumstances. The English jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) expressed the prevailing view when he warned, “Hold all new ways and innovations suspicious.” So how did the meritocratic revolution get going?

Fortunately, there were a few places in northwestern Europe where the aristocracy was less dominant and new thinking was tolerated. That was especially the case in Holland, where Jews were allowed to live without harassment and apply their painfully acquired knowledge of business and finance. The Dutch realized that commerce and profit-making were not bad and lowly, but beneficial and praiseworthy. That attitudinal change made its way to England, where the spirit of liberalism took hold. At the same time, the Protestant Reformation encouraged education so people could read the Bible and taught that hard work and success were good. The genie of merit was out of the bottle. Liberal philosophy began to corrode the feudal order.

In England, humble men with little or no formal education used their ingenuity to transform the country. Wooldridge writes:

James Brindley was the son of a Midland yeoman farmer who was barely able to read or write. He built many of the canals which allowed Manchester and Liverpool to flourish. Richard Arkwright was the son of a tailor. He built the spinning jenny, which helped to power the cotton industry.

The same was true in America, where self-made men led the booming economy. After quoting the historian Louis Hartz to the effect that America was “born liberal,” Wooldridge answers, “It would be truer to say that it was ‘born meritocratic.’ ” This might seem a minor quibble, but I think Hartz had it right. The liberal spirit of America allowed for the success of individuals on their merits, but it also produced other key aspects of the upstart nation: minimal government, the rule of law, personal responsibility, religious tolerance. Meritocracy flourishes only under the protection of liberal philosophy and governance.

Leading the country / Sadly, there have always been intellectuals who think that government must improve on the results of liberalism. Before long, they begin arguing that it should actively seek out the best and brightest young people and provide them with education so they can better contribute to the country’s well-being. In England, the otherwise staunchly laissez-faire Richard Cobden wanted government intervention in education to maximize the nation’s strength, while the fervent socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb wanted the same thing in order to lead the country into their egalitarian utopia. They disagreed with Cobden on economic central planning, but all three favored educational central planning to enhance meritocracy.

In the United States, Thomas Jefferson thought that government needed to find and educate the “natural aristocracy,” and he founded the University of Virginia as a result. (John Adams disagreed, arguing that the wisest and most talented would rise without any assistance; with it, they’d become a force against liberty.) Later, many political leaders, from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson and up to the present, would press for widespread “investment” in higher education and for policies that would entrust an educated meritocracy with power to figure out the solutions to national problems. (See “A College Education: Who Pays and How?” p. 54.) As the Webbs said, “Society must be nurtured by the state, ruled by educated bureaucrats guided by science.”

Wooldridge has sympathy for the idea that government should find and train the smartest people. He writes, for example, that John Maynard Keynes “invented a way of saving the economy from depression.” In truth, Keynes did nothing of the sort, but Britain, America, and other nations have repeatedly made the mistake of allowing statist intellectuals a free hand in directing public policy. Highly intelligent people often have blind spots, especially for their own limitations.

Academic leaders long ago decided that they should be the ones to discover the most capable young people, then educate them to be of the greatest service to the nation. They embraced standardized testing and sought to become, as Harvard president James Conant put it, the “training ground for the new elite.” America had done very well in the time when the Ivy League was mostly a playground for the sons of wealthy families, with little academic rigor, but that changed — somewhat — from the 1950s on. I say “somewhat” because, as Wooldridge notes, the Ivies still admit a great many students because they have family and money connections.

That disturbs him. He thinks we are losing out on potential meritocratic brainpower by holding elite university places for “legacies” and athletes rather than finding smart kids from poorer families and giving them a chance. In this, he falls for the notion, carefully cultivated by those universities, that they provide a far superior education. Actually, the kinds of students he favors would often get a better education at a small college or mid-level state university where the faculty is more committed to working with them than at a purportedly elite university where the undergrads are largely ignored by the “superstar” professors. Wooldridge claims that “selective schools are more successful than non-selective schools because they are in the business of educational transformation,” but that is just marketing hype. Graduating from an elite school is neither necessary nor sufficient for success in life.

Under siege / Despite its tremendous advances for humanity, meritocracy is under attack today. Wooldridge sees dangers both from the left and right. The populist right, led by Donald Trump or at least Trumpists, is a threat because of its supposed rejection of expertise, although Wooldridge admits that those people are mainly opposed to being under the thumb of snobbish, authoritarian intellectuals on the other side. The egalitarian left is more worrisome (I think to the author and certainly to me) because it rejects the liberal order in favor of government-engineered “equity.” Philosophers like John Rawls and Michael Sandel argue that meritocracy is unfair and their case against it finds support these days in the Democratic Party. The leftist attack is having quite an effect, for instance, in university hiring decisions, where barely qualified candidates join the faculty because they add to “diversity.”

Wooldridge also frets that today’s meritocracy is trying to make itself permanent and hereditary, as in centuries past. How? By getting its children into the top schools. He makes much of the recent “Varsity Blues” scandal where wealthy parents resorted to deception and bribery to get their kids into prestigious universities, as well as the continuing tendency among the elite schools to favor the sons and daughters of the wealthy and politically connected, rather than better-qualified applicants (particularly Asians).

In my view, that concern is overblown. Merely having a degree from a prestigious university doesn’t ensure success. Just as the Jewish students that Harvard used to reject often beat Harvard grads in courts and for Nobel Prizes, so today do students with degrees from less prestigious schools (or none at all) frequently enjoy better careers than do Ivy Leaguers. The elite schools don’t provide a better education and, after graduation, people succeed or fail on their own merits, not on the basis of their educational pedigrees. To avoid the possibility of the meritocrats “pulling up the drawbridge,” all we need do is retain liberalism, thus protecting the freedom of all people to advance.

At the end of the book, Wooldridge suggests that we should make a national policy out of identifying the most promising young people and educating them in top universities for free, in return for a period of service in the public sector. That idea has its roots in Plato’s Republic, but it strikes me as appallingly bad. We already suffer from too much intellectual influence over government. As Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell observes about intellectuals:

There always has to be some crisis — some reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses…. They go from one [crisis] to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

Instead of siphoning the smartest young people into elite universities (where they’re apt to fall under the spell of “progressives”) and then into government (where they will probably push more authoritarian policies), we should downsize the state and revive true liberalism.