Making the historical case for talent

MERITOCRACY has been having a tough time lately, exemplified in Harvard professor Michael J Sandel's indictment of it for having eroded the common good. His recent bestseller, The Tyranny Of Merit, attracted sympathetic attention in Singapore, which is trying to contain the inequality and elitism that some see as having been generated by the pursuit of meritocracy.

Adrian Wooldridge's admiring citation of Singapore as the "global capital of meritocracy" in The Aristocracy Of Talent: How Meritocracy Made The Modern World sets the tone for a combative rebuttal of critics of meritocracy.

Wooldridge defines meritocracy as the idea that "an individual's position in society should depend on his or her combination of ability and effort". The idea has faults, but they are fewer than those of alternative systems in "reconciling various goods that are inevitably in tension with each other - for example, social justice and economic efficiency and individual aspiration and limited opportunities".