Having a degree really has absolutly nothing to do with general intelligence. Especially when it comes to running a country - the ability to do well on standardised tests does not give you the civic sensibility and moral fortitude to make good desicions. Diversity makes for a good government and thats precisely what you loose when everyone comes from oxbridge. The more different ideas the better.

The idea that someone without a degree is less intelligent that someone with one is utter bull. For one, they chose not to go to university. In the current climate they easily could have if they wanted to. Two, standardised tests test your ability to do well in standardised tests and not much more. Three most jobs benifit from doing not from sitting in a lecture hall, someone who didnt go to uni probably has 4 more years of education than someone who did.

What does it mean to get what you deserve in life? Meritocracy is based on the idea that we go as far as our talents take us. There is an implicit assumption that this is a good thing, and that this is a just society. People get what they deserve. But do we really deserve a reward for our talents. Our God given talents? Our winnings fron the genetic lottery? Its really luck that we’re good at the things we’re good at. Sure effort may be involved, but its mostly luck. Especially that socity values the particular thing. Being really good at basketball in medieval Italy probably wasnt the most useful thing, it didnt get rewarded, but today professional players are worth millions.

Meritocracy just redfines the hirarcy on a differernt axis, one that allows the winners to believe they deserve what they have. Even if the talents you are bourn with are just as random as the family you were born with back in aristocratic times.

Even the ability to put in effort and do hard work is a God given gift/talent. Why should people be rewarded for something they are naturally endowed with. Your character is determined by your social setting and your family, something you dont have control over

The rewards we get from the market are rewards for giving people what they want (in an ideal free market world anyway). The markets are driven by consumer pr preferece. The actual ethical value of doing this, the merit of giving someone what they want is not so stright forward. It might be drugs, it might be gambling. Its crazy because this is quite obviously what we see in reality but this partucualr arguement is never address by either side of the public debate. I guess thats the hollowing out of public discourse in action for you. Its crazy that the author had to go back to 1920 for thus argument. I guess you only see the mountain from the plain.

An ecanomic system should be judged less by its efficiency in satisfying consumer demand then by the wants which it generates and the type of the character which it forms in its people. Ethically, the cration of wants is more important that want satisfaction.

Welfare that is distributed only when the recipients circumstances are beyond their control stops us respecting them. Everyone reviving welfare needs to frame themselves as unable to control there circumstances, they are viewed by scoiety of incable of acting responisbly and controlluig there actions. Hardly equal citizens.

This kind of thinking offers no aid to people deemed irrisponisble and humiliating aid to those it labels infierior. It defines the deserving as the inferior.

The ‘upwards mobility’ in American education is like an elevator where most people enter on the top floor

The way to counter the tyrany of merit is to reintroduce chance into the system. Rather than colleges accepting ’the best’ students, they should randomly pick from all qualified. Honestly they might do this already but the issue is that the people who get in think they deserve it.

People also need to be treated as respected citizents. People who have power and agency and can take part in the Democratic process. This, in America anyway, is sometimes viewed as the domain of the institutions of higher education. This would go some way to restoring the repect the less fortunate people deserve. In America more money is spent on prisons than on vocational training. And 160 times as much us spent on universities.

The meritocracy allows us to break out of poor conditions, to rise up. But society cannot be built on the promise of escape.

We need to readdress the dignity of work. Tax is inherintly a value judgement. Right now we tax labour more than we tax finacial profit even though one is taking money for nothing from society and one is making physical wealth. The reason everyone is upset is because nobody speaks for them. We need a new party or leader who is prepared to talk about these things