Sunday the 18th of September was the last day of the 2022 Segovia Hay Festival, a world-leading art and literature festival organised along the IE Foundation. I was able to attend a fascinating panel about meritocracy and elitism, with a focus on politics and education.
In this article, I will summarise some of the main points, ideas, and opinions put forward by the panellists, as well as provide some of my own reflections and questions I have asked myself. It is possible that this article may pose more questions than it answers, but it will serve to reflect on how our world works and how it should work.
Before we get into it, though, let me introduce the panellists:
– Santiago Íñiguez, President of IE University, and was the moderator of the conversation.
– Simon Kuper: a journalist and columnist, anthropologist, and renowned author. He is the author of “Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK”, a great book which I happened to read in summer (and I highly recommend). After the panel I briefly discussed his book with him and the deteriorated state of politics in the UK currently, but that is something for another article.
– Adrian Wooldridge: columnist and author of the Times (UK) book of the year: “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World”.
– Celia Villalobos: Spanish People’s Party (PP) politician, former Minister of Health, Social Policy and Equality.
– Hana Jalloul: member of the Assembly of Madrid in the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) group and former Secretary of State for Migration.
The conversation started with defining meritocracy, elitism, and with the question of whether or not the world should be run by the most capable, the most intelligent.
Adrian Wooldridge was the first speaker to address that question. He supports a meritocratic system with checks and balances. He argues that it would be beneficial for IQ tests to be used to assess politicians’ adequacy for a governing role, as he describes them as one of the most objective ways to measure potential.
Celia Villalobos joked that if politicians should be IQ tested, so should journalists and all those working in the media, and that this could equally be applied to all roles in society, which would simply be ridiculous. She considered it a disgrace that some people get great educational opportunities that others do not get just because of the families they are born into, but pointed out that public universities enable people from all backgrounds to access higher education. She believes that opportunities should be redistributed to achieve equality.
Hana Jalloul started her intervention by speaking about her experience in government, especially within her role as Secretary of State for Migration. She explained meritocracy as a system in which everyone is allowed and capable of achieving great things based on effort. She argues that for that to be possible, everybody must have equal opportunities. Her example, relating to migration, was that the major inclusion factor for immigrants in a society is the work opportunities that they have. The inclusion and integration of immigrants in a society is a priority because it is both in the society’s interest and the interest of the immigrants themselves. Since they want to work (and need to) to support themselves and their families, the more work opportunities that they are provided with, the better they will integrate and the more overall benefit for society. This principle can be extrapolated to those who are not immigrants, but are from less privileged backgrounds.
Society would also benefit from them having equal opportunities (education, work, social) to their more privileged fellow citizens. Ms Jalloul said that IQ tests are perhaps an interesting tool to discover talent and high potential, but we cannot rely on them as a decisive tool, as people with high IQs could sometimes lack empathy and/or emotional intelligence (EQ). Mr Wooldridge took us back to when meritocracy as a set of ideas started becoming more popular, precisely because it was a “radical” movement that went against the aristocracy and all the nepotism in the elites, awarding success and power based on merit, not background. And merit, he suggested, comes from both natural talent and effort (bringing back the debate between nature and nurture).
Simon Kuper also defended that people should not be entitled to anything just because of their privileged background. He expressed how impressed he was by how Oxford and Cambridge create the British Establishment, the social, political (especially Oxford), and financial elite. His criticism of the British system is mostly based on the United Kingdom liking to pretend to be a meritocracy, when it actually is not, and he said that Oxford in the late 1980s (when the current British political elite were studying there) was more a plutocracy or a kind of aristocracy. He did point out, though, that since then, these elite British universities have been under pressure to reform, and are now admitting more students from poorer backgrounds than ever before, outnumbering those from elite schools like Eton. American institutions, on the other hand, have not been under such pressure to change, according to him.
Meritocracy is fair and possible, according to Mr Wooldridge, and to achieve it we should aim for a universal system of education, of all levels and for everybody. An important risk in this system which he addressed is that the educationally privileged would tend to hoard opportunities for themselves. To prevent this, he put forward two potential measures: getting rid of the Harvard system of legacies (being admitted because of a family history at Harvard) and buying your way into universities with donations, and having elite, highly academic schools for poorer people.
Mr Kuper supports meritocracy as a system that goes against aristocracy, elitism, and nepotism; but he warns that people from less privileged backgrounds who then reach the top thanks to their talent and effort (merit) could end up forming their own caste, and that therefore a perfect meritocracy is also highly risky, as it can lead straight back to elitism.
Mr Kuper supports meritocracy as a system that goes against aristocracy, elitism, and nepotism; but he warns that people from less privileged backgrounds who then reach the top thanks to their talent and effort (merit) could end up forming their own caste, and that therefore a perfect meritocracy is also highly risky, as it can lead straight back to elitism.
