David Goodhart, the journalist and head of Policy Exchange’s Demography, Immigration, and Integration Unit, is one of the sharpest interpreters of the West’s populist moment. In his latest book, Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, Goodhart offers a vision for reform that he believes would rebuild the bonds connecting Western elites – of both right and left – to their fellow citizens. Over the last 40 years, the winners of meritocracy have claimed more and more of the economic rewards and social prestige that our societies have to offer. Goodhart argues it is time we reverse this trend and recognize the many virtues besides cleverness and ambition that a well-functioning society requires.

Please join us on September 9 for a conversation between Manhattan Institute president, Reihan Salam, and writer and author, David Goodhart, for a discussion on the politics of meritocracy, the future of populism, and the prerequisites for social cohesion.

Event Transcript

Reihan Salam:

Good afternoon and welcome to our virtual event, Life After Meritocracy. I'm Reihan Salam, President of the Manhattan Institute and I'm very excited to talk today with David Goodheart, the Head of Demography, Immigration, and Integration for the UK Think Tank Policy Exchange, and the author of the forthcoming book, Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect.

Reihan Salam:

David possesses impeccable left-wing credentials. He founded Prospect magazine, is a former director of the think tank Demos, and I believe still identifies as a social democrat. But over the past few years he has become something of a heretic. David has argued that the cultural and social grievances which motivated Brexit and the Trump victory are fundamentally legitimate. Indeed, David has become one of the most insightful interpreters of populism, helping political elites on both sides of the Atlantic make sense of the changing landscape around them. In his latest book, David makes the case that an underappreciated strain in our politics is the unequal distribution of status in our society. In the 21st century, a college degree not only confers better job prospects on its holder but also higher status.

Reihan Salam:

As you'll hear today, David believes the traditional solution to this dilemma, expanding access to higher education, has run its course and that it is time for a more ambitious rethinking of our meritocratic system. Throughout the conversation, please feel free to submit your questions on whatever platform you're watching us on, and we will save some time at the end to get to as many of them as we can.

Reihan Salam:

David, thank you for joining me today.

David Goodhart:

Thank you for inviting me and thank you for that very flattering introduction.

Reihan Salam:

First a question. How meritocratic are our western market democracies? In the US, we're coming off a scandal where it was brought to light that many wealthy famous families were paying bribes to have their children admitted to elite colleges disguised as squash proteges. In the UK there was this year's controversy over A-level exams where in the algorithm that was being used in place of this year's exams downgraded students from state schools and upgraded those from selective private schools. In other words, why do you think we ought to scale meritocracy back rather than refine it to further even the playing field?

David Goodhart:

Yeah. I mean, our meritocracies are very flawed and very partial. I think, what is it, 1%, sorry, 50% of the students admitted to ivy league universities come from the top 1% of the income spectrum, and the same amount has come from the bottom 50%. I mean, there are, yeah, we have deeply flawed and partial meritocracies, and that is to some extent unavoidable. I mean, in a free society where people are allowed to pass on their privileges to their children and there are all sorts of ways you can do that, partly genetic, I mean, intelligence is ... The consensus amongst the experts is that intelligence is about 50% heritable, and then of course you also inherit your upbringing and certain upbringings are very oriented towards certain kinds of success and endeavor.

David Goodhart:

So meritocracy, I mean, it may be one of the reasons why meritocracy is wrong in principle because it is so hard to actually make it at all realistic in practice. We're actually in the middle of a there seems to be a whole space of books very skeptical about meritocracy. Daniel Markovits a few months ago, Michael Sandel has just written a book. We've had Thomas Frank one could mention in the same category. And indeed, my own book is also skeptical about meritocracy in some respects.

David Goodhart:

But I take a slightly different angle in that I stress it's the cognitive meritocracy, it's the focus on the cognitive particularly in the last 20, 30, 40 years that has sort of, has got out of kilter. And the very idea of what it is to live a successful life. I mean, cognitive ability and success in cognitive professions has become the kind of gold standard of human esteem and it's drawn away, it's diminished the prestige and status I think attached to aptitudes connected to hand, craft, manual, artisanal occupations, and caring occupations of various kinds and emotional intelligence. And we've narrowed our definition of what it is to lead a successful life too. The definition of a successful life is effectively doing well at school, going to more or less good university, and having more a successful professional career.

David Goodhart:

Moreover, I mean as Daniel Bell pointed out 50 years ago, he wrote an amazing book that predicted a lot of what has happened, the coming of post-industrial society. I mean, he predicted I think with some dismay the fact that there was going to develop essentially a kind of single ladder up into the kind of zone of safety and success of a cognitive professional occupation and that ladder up came through the modern university, modern higher education.

David Goodhart:

And my argument is essentially that this period has now come to an end. We've reached kind of peak head and we need to re-adjust both for economic reasons and for political social reasons, we need to adjust status more evenly across these clusters of human aptitudes relating to head cognitive analytical ability, manual technical ability, various kinds of caring ability. We need to readjust.

David Goodhart:

Now it's obviously easier said than done, and something like status is not really in the gift of politicians to readjust in the way that maybe taxes or income might be. So this is not a simple thing, but I think some of the rebalancing is kind of going to happen anyway because of the point we've got to, because the key thing that our politics I don't think is really yet taken on board either here in the UK or in the US, is that so much of our politics, both center right and perhaps even more center left, I mean, the kind of, promoting the meritocracy and complaining about the limited nature of the meritocracy that you were referring to at the beginning has actually been one of the kind of, the main stories of the left, of the center left in the last 20 or 30 years.

David Goodhart:

You might almost say, in fact, this is a point Michael, a good point I think that Michael Sandel makes in his book, The Tyranny of Merit, that as a sort of compensation for the left essentially adopting, going back to this new democrats and new labor in the kind of early 1990s, the kind of Robert Reich Work of Nations essentially accepting much of the new economic market openness, accepting globalization, but sort of saying, hey, in return, accept globalization but we'll retrain the steelmakers and turn them all into IT technicians, didn't happen. Didn't happen in the US, didn't happen in the UK. It may have happened a bit in Sweden and Germany.

David Goodhart:

But the other thing I was saying is, and will make our societies more meritocratic, something which obviously the center right also believes but perhaps has more vested interests in the existing distribution of privilege. So it was perhaps less wholehearted about it.

David Goodhart:

But anyway. Much of our politics is still based around this idea that our education policy, our social mobility policy, even our economic and productivity policy is based around what is now a fallacy, that we will have an ever expanding sort of cognitive professional class. And the cognitive professional class has reached about a third of the adult population in our societies, but it's been pretty static now. It's been growing very, very slowly for the last 10 or 15 years, and it is going to grow even more slowly and may even go into reverse because it turns out the knowledge economy doesn't need very many knowledge workers. This is an absolutely key point that hasn't really been taken on board.

David Goodhart:

We've lived with automation now for many decades. Automation eating into blue collar jobs. That's been sort of absorbed into our economies and societies. But we're now going for the kind of middle and lower levels of the cognitive jobs, the thinking machines, the algorithms and so on that can replace a lot of the labor done in accountancy offices, law offices, even in medicine. Lots of professional occupations are going to be thinned out. And we will still need lots of very clever professional people to design the algorithms apart from anything else, write the software for the robots to ... We still need high intelligence and perhaps more than ever before to work out how to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere or invent a vaccine for COVID. Teams of very clever people collaborating now internationally over the internet it's central to the future of humanity in many ways. But this kind of expanded, bureaucratic, cognitive class is now going to shrink, and that has huge social and political consequences I think.

Reihan Salam:

In your book you observe that Gordon Brown back in 2006 predicted that by 2020 there would only be 600,000 low-scale jobs remaining in the UK, and that the best guess is that there are around six million. So he was off by quite a bit. When he made that prediction, one assumes he was thinking about intensifying international competition, automation, two forces that you believe are now acting on the white collar labor market. So what makes you think your forecasts are going to be borne out 15 years hence while Gordon Brown's were not? I mean, could there be some development that leads to vastly increased demand for a kind of broadened educated professional class?

David Goodhart:

Yeah, you're right. One always has to be kind of humble before the future and something might turn up, but I mean, I guess I would respond to that by saying it's already here in some respects. Yeah, people are constantly, people like you and me constantly talking rather aerially about AI will do this or AI will do that. We don't really have a clue what it'll actually do. But we read people who seem to know.

David Goodhart:

I mean, clearly its impact is going to increase somewhat, but we already have evidence of this decline in the expansion at least to the cognitive class in things like the decline in the graduates' income premium certainly here. And I think from the figures I've seen in the US too, it's just common sense obviously. Go back 40 years when only, I don't know, 20%, 25% of the population went to three, four year university degrees. Then the premium was obviously much higher. Now around 35%, 40% of the population do so, both in the US and the UK. I mean, the US obviously pioneered mass higher education earlier than most European countries back in the '50s and '60s, but you then, it sort of tailed off in the last 15 years or so. We've caught up and even overtaken you.

David Goodhart:

But still, the point is, the graduate premium has declined dramatically. And not only that. You have very large proportions of graduates, people who've left university five or even 10 years ago who are still not in graduate employment. Now, that may be because they're not suited to it, which suggests perhaps they shouldn't have gone to university in the first place. But even if they are, even if they do have cognitive ability and ... We're also seeing something ... Well, I suppose this is a sort of subset of the AI argument, but it's something rather neat concept called Digital Taylorism.

David Goodhart:

I mean essentially, the idea that judgments, that sort of the intellectual judgment can be turned into an algorithm essentially or it can be routinized, it can be ... The classic example of this is the bank manager, the bank manager who used to know all of the ... The small town bank manager used to know all the local businesses and could come to a judgment about whether the bank's funds should be lent to the local car repair guy. The bank manager would know and would have judgment. He would know the history of this business and he would know the characters involved and would use his experience and his judgment to come to a decision.

David Goodhart:

Now it's done by an algorithm. The bank manager might still have some, the algorithm's decision is challenged. The bank manager might still have some role in it. But that is the kind of the Digital Taylorism that people like Phil Brown and Hugh Lauder talk about. I think is, this is already here, the routinization. A lot of people, and this has huge political consequences too I think. It's one of the kind of unanalyzed aspects of some of the radicalism of recent years, I mean, the kind of Bernie Sanders movement in the US.

Reihan Salam:

The experience of downward mobility for those who expected to be part of a stable established professional class is radicalizing.

David Goodhart:

Exactly, yeah. And we kind of know this from history. Revolutions are often made by the disappointed amongst the educated and affluent classes. And the Bernie Sanders movement in the US, the Jeremy Corbyn momentum movement and the lurch to the left in the Labour Party here in the UK, possibly even Black Lives Matter to some extent, Black Lives Matter movement I think is partly driven by a generation of graduates who were led to expect high status and relatively high paid jobs, and then they're working, they're doing kind of back office clerical work for $30,000 a year or whatever, and feeling very pissed off about it. They're doing a job similar in status and pay to their non-graduate parents in the US and the UK. And they've got all this bloody student debt as well.

Reihan Salam:

One curious aspect of this phenomenon and of course there are many different radicalisms, many different varieties one can point to, but one pattern is young people who have had this experience of higher education that is not an entirely happy one. They've accumulated debt. They now find themselves in occupations that are not especially remunerative. And yet the reaction is not an objection to higher education. Rather, it's an objection to the notion that they ought to be obliged to pay for their higher education.

Reihan Salam:

So one can imagine another reaction which is that I was misled, I was led into higher education to essentially benefit a higher education establishment that benefits from the selling of false hopes that exist to perpetuate itself, that exist to demand that these credentials be requirements for entering any number of professions where higher education isn't strictly necessary. But you don't see that revolt against higher education. Rather, you see a call for increased subsidies for higher education.

Reihan Salam:

So clearly people working in higher education are doing something right if they've managed to avoid a program, if they've managed to avoid becoming targets of this rage. Rather, the solution is always let's simply give more money to the higher education establishment. It's not let's narrow it, let's make it more inclusive still whether or not it leads to emotive employment. I wonder what you think about that? It seems somewhat surprising to me.

David Goodhart:

All I think it is, is evidence of the domination of higher education and to some extent by quite a large slice of our public culture, by the Brahmin Left, what Thomas Piketty calls the Brahmin Left. It's the left who in a sense have the greatest vested interest in the knowledge economy. And the left tends to dominate higher education both in the US and the UK. So they can't see themselves as the kind of bad guys in this story. And their activists, their voters are overwhelmingly now graduates. I mean, part of your left have essentially become liberal graduate parties.

David Goodhart:

So the idea that we might kind of reinvent other kinds of occupations and aptitudes and reward and upwardly value their statuses, whether it's nursing or the skilled trades, skilled craft jobs for which there is huge demand still in the US and the UK. Employers are crying out for there's this kind of missing middle problem that I think both of our economies have. It's the technician type jobs that may not require a huge amount of analytical, exam passing knowledge, but require a certain kind of applied intelligence that is in very high demand.

David Goodhart:

And I think the more interesting question in a sense is why isn't the market itself re-jigging the relationship? Why hasn't the market as it were flushed out the unnecessary and indeed counterproductive expansion of the cognitive bureaucracy and rewarded more what one would regard in a sort of cognitive sense as more basic jobs better? And I think we are beginning to see that. I think we're beginning to see that in the UK. And of course, the COVID crisis has certainly helped with the kind of distribution of status question when it might not mean that people who stack shelves in supermarkets may not be very much better paid now than they were six months ago. But we have more respect for them. We recognize their essential role in the kind of hidden wiring of our lives.

Reihan Salam:

There's another way in which this could move in a different direction. It seems that when labor markets are tight, employers become less concerned with credentials. So in a slack labor market you might demand that your employees have a college education simply because that's an indicator of some other quality. It's a signal of some diligence ambition as one of our commenters observes. But when you have a tight labor market, you simply can't be quite that selective and yet there are people who might be very capable who don't have those credentials who can then come to the fore. So it's possible that if you have some sustained economic downturn, we could actually go back to that kind of credentialism that you worry about. So do you believe that there's an appropriate role for public policy to insist that we don't require these credentials for jobs like the job of a police officer or beautician or what have you where in some cases they're now required?

David Goodhart:

I mean I think, yeah, I mean we are seeing that these things have a life of their own. The vested interest in turning as many jobs as possible into graduate only jobs. I mean, nursing is now a graduate only job in the UK. I don't think it is in the US. I mean, there are many different kinds of nursing. But what used to be the kind of standard registered nurse in the UK now requires a degree. Police officers are going to have a degree in the UK. I don't know. I mean, I suspect that's quite a long way off in the US. Actually it might not be such a terrible thing in the US given recent events. I mean, assuming we think that police officers who are graduates will tend to be less chauvinistic. But yeah, I mean, I think ... It's a tricky one. I think there probably is a role for government in slowing down unnecessary credentialism.

David Goodhart:

Credentialism is not all bad. We need some sort of way of judging and selecting people. This brings us back to the meritocracy argument in a way. What are the grounds on which society selects people? And I think critics of meritocracy, I mean including me sort of don't really have an answer to the ... Pretty well everybody. Even Michael Young, the British socialist who invented the concept in his famous book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, back in the late '50s. I mean, even he accepted that clearly when it comes to selection for jobs, you should select ... We need to employ meritocratic criterion for selection for jobs, particularly top jobs. You want your best nuclear physicists running the nuclear energy program. You don't want to choose it by lottery. But if you have meritocratic selection for jobs, top jobs, how can that not lead to a meritocratic society or to a society where the principle of meritocracy and indeed cognitive meritocracy is very dominant, possibly too dominant?

David Goodhart:

I mean, at the same time I have sympathy with the kind of Michael Young or the kind of Christopher Lash type argument. If you turn society into a competition that the most able win and everybody else feels like failures or a lot of the others feel like failures, that is not a good society. So one can acknowledge the continuing central importance of meritocratic collection for jobs while having some ambivalence about and indeed even wanting to question.

David Goodhart:

Certainly meritocracy as an ideal, the idea that meritocracy is something to sort of celebrate as an ideal of society seems to me wrong-headed. It's not an ideal, I mean, for all the reasons that Michael Young gave and Michael Sandel has repeated, and the hubristic ... The winners are no longer as in aristocratic societies that where the winners knew that their winning was arbitrary, it was based on birth, based on an accidents of birth. In a meritocracy the winners are ... Although actually I think to be fair to the winners, I mean many of the winners in our society are often very liberal and not particularly hubristic and kind of worry about how to spread their advantages to other people.

David Goodhart:

But nonetheless, that's the sort of dilemma. And I think this is why my answer is in some ways I think more useful than Michael Sandel. Michael Sandel's answer is essentially let's just spread status more evenly. I mean, a) this is not in the gift of politics really to do, and you then end up with a kind of sort of status communism. I mean, you end up with sort of status egalitarianism. You then raise egalitarianism to just the highest principle. I mean, you've got to have a balance between these different ... Any good society obviously needs ... You don't want to kind of base a society around just a single principle whether it's liberty, equality, or merit. All of these things are-

Reihan Salam:

We want some kind of pluralism in terms of what societies value.

David Goodhart:

Yeah. But that's why I think in a way my proposal is sort of somewhat more practical because it's saying, and it also goes with the grain of what is happening. I mean, if I'm right about the knowledge economy not needing more knowledge workers, then this is kind of going to happen anyway. I don't want to sound too Marxist determinist about it, but these trends are going to come and people who would have gone into cognitive jobs or are currently still going into cognitive jobs are going to have to find some other form of employment, more likely to be in a hand or a heart related area.

David Goodhart:

And one of the really interesting things I think is the gender aspect of this. Whether men will start doing, because many of the jobs that are actually best protected from either international competition or from robots are jobs that have historically been done by women. All of those sort of public care economy jobs that 100 years ago were done by our great grandmothers in the private realm, whether we're talking about caring for old people, indeed, many of the functions of modern hospitals, even education, primary education overwhelmingly female, nursing overwhelmingly female, people working in elderly care homes overwhelmingly female, 80% plus in all of those areas in the UK. And I suspect it's the same in the US. And men have shown a reluctance to move into these areas historically, and it'll be interesting to see whether that changes.

Reihan Salam:

One potential challenge is that these caring professions you've identified, the heart professions, these are functions that used to take place within families, and only recently in historical terms have we outsourced these functions to public institutions, to the state, to funders, to cares who are funded by the state. So one anxiety is that we'll see a world in which a much larger share of those who are employed are in these subsidized care roles as families become smaller and less capable of actually providing that kind of care. And that the portion of the economy that is productive, that is able to generate the revenue that is necessary to kind of subsidize this universe of care work will therefore be squeezed. Is that something that concerns you at all, the idea that this domain, this economic domain that's highly competitive that depends on cognitive ability, that is more export oriented let's say than care oriented, that ultimately the tax revenue is going to have to come from somewhere and it's going to come from that sector that is shrinking over time?

David Goodhart:

Yeah, although, I mean a lot of the care economy in the US is in the private sector. I mean ...

Reihan Salam:

In the private sector but certainly subsidized. I think we can agree that when you're looking at medical care, long-term care insurance, a very contentious issue on both sides of the Atlantic, these are functions where the state has played a much larger role. One argument could be that perhaps the state ought to play a smaller role there. But I'm curious as to how you think about that potential difficulty, if those kind of competitive sectors of the economy shrink in size while the caring sector grows, does that create some kind of imbalance?

David Goodhart:

Yeah, I mean, it's a good point, although I think the more competitive sort of private value generating sectors are not going to necessarily shrink in value or in the value of their exports. They're going to shrink as employers. They're going to shrink mainly in employment terms. And I think, I mean, that's already happened in the last 20, 30, 40 years, hasn't it, and we have far fewer people employed in the most productive parts of the economy. I think that trend will probably continue. But much of the caring sector is a sort of hybrid of public and private too, and obviously all the drugs they use are produced by private pharmaceutical companies, and even in Europe there's a big private sector that sort of flanks and supports the public care economy. But actually, but one of the things I wanted to ... just relating to what we were saying earlier about the economy. Who is it? It's Robert Gordon who's written interestingly about productivity declines. I mean, his big thing is productivity decline.

David Goodhart:

One of the very good points he makes is that productivity has been declining precisely at the time when more and more resources have gone into the sort of cognitive sector. Never have we been investing more money in our elite research universities at a time when productivity has been stagnating. I mean, I think, it's not ...

Reihan Salam:

It hasn't been a reliable path to increase productivity and public wealth creation.

David Goodhart:

Yeah, yeah. But the other point, I'm just going back to the care issue. I mean, one of the perhaps slightly more controversial points I make in the book, I think this book is possibly less controversial than my previous one, and perhaps a little bit more left-wing, but one of the things I do say that is perhaps controversial in the context of at least some modern feminism is that if we are going to raise the status of heart jobs in the public care economy, we sort of have to raise the status of domesticity, we have to raise the status of private realm in the family too.

David Goodhart:

I think the two things are sort of inextricably linked in a way. And that's often, that's not a popular thing to say, given that much of modern feminism has been dominated by the interests of upper professional women who themselves are part of the sort of head cognitive analytical elite and whose main and completely legitimate concern is equal competition with men in the higher professions. And they haven't taken such an interest in or they should've share in some ways the lack of interest in some ways in domesticity of all professional men. I mean, not complete lack of interest, but I mean, they're very public-realm focused people as are the men.

David Goodhart:

This is one of the explanations. In a period when the political power of women you might say has been obviously increasing, something like the Me Too movement is evidence of that. It didn't happen 30 years ago because there weren't so many women in positions of power in the media and politics to draw attention to the bad behavior of men. Now there are. And yet, this power has not been used, so far anyway, it could be used perhaps in the future, it hasn't been used to raise the status of the care economy.

David Goodhart:

One has to be a bit careful generalizing too much about the care economy. Most doctors and nurses working in NHS hospitals in the UK do have a fair amount of respect and are pretty well paid, certainly the doctors and even the nurses. It's the Cinderella sectors like particularly elderly care where people do essentially minimum wage jobs.

David Goodhart:

But the interesting thing from the point of view of my thesis here is that I mean this is why I kind of depart from some of the other meritocracy critics who are writing at the moment. I mean in a sense what I'm saying is not so much ... I share the ambivalence about meritocracy as an ideal. It's not an ideal. You might even say it's a necessary evil. But I do think that, I mean maybe that in some ways we need more meritocracy in these other sectors that-

Reihan Salam:

But going beyond a narrowly cognitive meritocracy, having a broader conception of what merit means and what it looks like.

David Goodhart:

Exactly, a broader conception of merit and skill even. I mean, for example, if you ask an economist why are people in care homes so poorly paid, they will say because anybody can do it. What they mean by that, I mean this is an example of what I would call cognitive creep. What they mean by that is you don't need any academic qualifications to do it. In many care homes you can walk in and get a job tomorrow. You might be changing someone's catheter a week later. I mean even though these are potentially highly skilled in a different way to how we normally think of it, the skill to change someone's catheter without hurting them and do it in a dignified way, that requires emotional intelligence, it requires some-

Reihan Salam:

Discipline certainly.

David Goodhart:

Yeah. And it's simply not true. All of us have had parents in old people's homes or in hospitals. You only have to spend 10 minutes in a hospital to know that the economist is in a sense wrong. Not anybody can do it or not anybody can do it well. We know there are good carers, there are middling carers, and there are poor carers like in any walk of life. And yet, we don't apply meritocractic principles to that set of aptitudes, perhaps partly because of historic prejudices about, well, these are mainly female jobs and women just have a natural aptitude for caring, which we also know is not true.

Reihan Salam:

So your argument is not an egalitarian argument in some simple sense. Rather, you're suggesting that there's a place for hierarchy, there's a place for the celebration of talent for making distinctions, but that we need to do them more broadly, with greater subtlety and thoughtfulness in domains beyond the narrowly cognitive. In a way, that would lend itself to greater status for people in the domains of heart and hand.

David Goodhart:

Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.

Reihan Salam:

Now, what does that look like in practice because you've said you're not a step ... You're not embracing status communism, reflexive status egalitarianism. You believe that there's a place for recognizing excellence. But you also don't believe that this can be centralized. There's not going to be any government authority that will dictate to us that we ought to celebrate and respect work that is done outside of these cognitive domains.

Reihan Salam:

So what exactly does it look like to hold these other roles, these non-professional roles in higher esteem? Is that something that needs to be taken on by the culture industries? Is that a product of introspection on the part of individuals? Is there some role for societies collectively in order to kind of help facilitate kind of sharing that esteem more broadly?

David Goodhart:

I think it's, as I said earlier, I mean obviously this is not in the gift of politics or politicians, but politics can help and it can nudge. And as you said, I think it may be sort of a broader thing in the culture, and it may also as it were follow the people. If lots of people who would have gone into cognitive jobs 10 years ago, in 10 years' time are going into non ... or not jobs whose primary base is another kind of human aptitude, then I think it'll sort of happen in some ways automatically. I mean, that's perhaps a bit complacent. Just think about how other things have changed in the last 20 or 30 years. I mean, certainly-

Reihan Salam:

If you expected throughout your life you were going to become a solicitor, you were going to become an academic, you were going to go into one classic meritocratic professional track and you're not, you shouldn't experience that as an injury to your status, you shouldn't experience that as demeaning. You should in fact celebrate it and embrace it. Not understand it as a kind of defeat or downward mobility. Is that part of what you probably meant?

David Goodhart:

Exactly yeah. Exactly. And a really interesting thing that we tend to forget, people like you and me who do really, we have lovely interesting jobs and we get an element of our sense of ourselves, a very important part of the sense of ourselves, a kind of self-actualization from work. A very large proportion of our fellow citizens don't get that, and possibly don't even want that. I mean, about 50% of people in the UK and the US say that they go to work to earn a living. And it's often a little bit ambiguous whether that is just a description and they'd like something more self-actualizing or whether they're happy with that. But I mean that is the reality.

David Goodhart:

Now, these people are not nobodies. These people are often leading meaningful lives in lots of other ways. And I think actually we perhaps need to wean ... I mean that the people who dominate our society and our culture tend to be people who do see work as a form of self-expression. But a large minority and possibly even a majority don't. And it may be that they're kind of in a way on the right side of the argument because the rest of us are going to be more moving in their direction I think.

Reihan Salam:

So the cognitive meritocracy sensibility essentially devalues those for whom their professional identity is not at the heart of their identity, it's not what they value most about themselves and their communities.

David Goodhart:

Yeah. But actually, being a good amateur sportsman, having hobbies that absorb you, being a good husband and father and all of those things that ... I don't know. We associate with kind of the average Joe. Well, it may be that we need to kind of ... I mean, and this is a point actually that Thomas Frank makes rather well, the kind of bring back averageness. Let's have greater respect for the average life and not be striving for why should everyone become some sort of high-powered solicitor. We'll still need a kind of thin level of brilliant people in all the professions, in medicine, in law, in finance, in the media. I mean, we know. Like I said earlier, we still need high intelligence more than ever before.

Reihan Salam:

One complicated element of the politics of meritocracy and the backlash to meritocracy is the advent of a new mode of anti-racist ideology which maintains that disparities in any domain are presumptively unjust, presumptively racist. So if you look at professional occupations when you look at the academic elite for example, if that is not perfectly representative of the ethnoracial demographic composition of society at large, kind of this ideology tells us that something is badly wrong.

Reihan Salam:

Now, what you seem to be suggesting is that that's not quite the right way to think about it, that when you're looking at the hand and heart occupations, certainly in the UK and the US, these might have a different composition in terms of ethnicity and race than the professional class. But that's not to say that we should transform the composition of any of these groups. Rather, let's have a more balanced respect for these different domains rather than expect them all to have perfect proportional representation.

Reihan Salam:

Tell me what you think about that intersection of meritocracy and the recent upheavals over race and ethnicity.

David Goodhart:

Wow. I hadn't really thought about that. But yes, I mean, that is ... Yeah, I mean, I suppose you do get different groups who tend to thrive in certain occupations to do with the culture of different groups over time, attitudes to education and so on. I mean certain groups have thrived in a world that allocates a high degree of prestige and reward to cognitive functions. I mean Jews, Asians, people who on average done very much better than some other groups in academic pursuits and ... So I suppose one of the consequences of what I'm saying is that ... I mean, I suppose, there's a question, does it have to be a zero sum game? Are we going to take away status from some of these groups who've been very successful in the knowledge economy and give it to other groups who tend to be more represented in hand and heart occupations? I mean I suppose I kind of am saying that, but I suppose well-

Reihan Salam:

This also relates to your thesis in somewheres and any ... Just kind of somewhere to be anywhere. It's just the idea that kind of the somewheres, their status has to some degree been diminished in recent years and that that is something that partly explains some of our larger political upheavals, even if we leave aside some of the conversation around race and that there are reasons of political comedy and stability that would lead us to want some kind of rebalancing.

David Goodhart:

Yeah. It's an easy thing to say, but I mean intelligence is to some extent its own reward. If you're quicker on the uptake of things, it's easier to learn foreign languages. I don't know. You can name any number of things that intelligent people. Do we also then need to kind of give them all these extra rewards of paying them so much better than everybody else?

David Goodhart:

Yeah, no, I mean there will always be hierarchies of ability and hierarchies of competence, and the people higher up those hierarchies. We should be paying research scientists who are working on the COVID vaccine more than somebody who cleans their offices. I mean, it's obvious. As you said, I don't go along with the extreme status egalitarianism. But I think there is certainly space to soften the kind of harsher edges of the cognitive meritocracy. The respect for the mind as it were goes back thousands ... This is not something that's just been invented by the modern higher education system after all. You might say it goes back to Plato and beyond. Maybe in kind of human nature in some ways to respect-

Reihan Salam:

If you're not objecting to the idea that cognitive meritocracy, this celebration of intellectual achievement has a place, you're suggesting that we've gone too far in that direction in a way that has created some pathologies.

David Goodhart:

[inaudible 00:46:39] and too many people, and it's ... Which way around is it? Round pegs and square holes or square pegs and round holes. Too many kids are being, particularly from more middle class homes are being dispatched to universities when they're actually, they're not bloody learning anything. We know that from all the literature on what goes on in universities. Most of them are not learning anything. They may be having quite a good time. They're racking up all this debt. They come out with ... They forget what they knew anyway. I suppose I'm talking more about humanities. I mean, obviously there's a lot of vocational stuff that goes on in higher education too. Some people are learning to be doctors or lawyers or whatever. We need doctors and lawyers. But there's ... It's just got out of kilter. We've over expanded it. I mean, yeah, we need elite research universities very badly, even if investing in them hasn't solved the productivity problem. But probably without them our productivity problem will be even worse. Yeah, it's just gone out of balance.

Reihan Salam:

David, we have a number of questions from our audience that I'd like to share with you. The first is a question from Amelia. Recently we've seen more people making the argument that we should create opportunity for minorities in Silicon Valley and other high-tech sectors by restricting high-skill immigration. Do you think this heralds a coming shift? Will white-collar professionals rethink their support for mass immigration as their own job prospects get dicier, as they diminish?

David Goodhart:

Well, that's an interesting point. I mean, I'm a mass immigration skeptic anyway, so I think we should be restricting high-skill immigration both in the UK and the US, I mean, not stopping it completely obviously. I mean, mainly it's just an advantage to employers. They can hire somebody with a high level of skills so they don't have to train somebody locally. I mean, I think this is one of the things that people have been understandably upset about and actually ... But it's an interesting point. I mean, hitherto most hostility to large-scale immigration in the US has come from the bottom 50% of the income spectrum I would say, but in the future, as Amelia points out, I mean I think as the knowledge economy employment, the decent employment in the knowledge sector shrinks, then those jobs are going to become more valuable. I mean, hitherto those people have not been bothered about a fair amount of high-skill immigration. But I think you're absolutely right. That's a really good point.

Reihan Salam:

Well, this question from Frank cuts in a different direction. David makes the point that we should start elevating the average person and downgrade strivers. That's not necessarily the most charitable interpretation but let's stick with it for the moment at least a bit. How does our geopolitical context impact that? As America comes to think of China as a peer and a rival, will that push us toward lionizing striving as a competitive necessity?

Reihan Salam:

And by the way, this could also apply to the question of high-skill immigration. One could say from the perspective of an individual professional, you have one conclusion. But if the question is whether or not one country is going to dominate in a geopolitical competition, perhaps you'd want to have a collection of talent from the wider world to give you a strategic advantage. So I'm curious what do you think of Frank's question? Does a context of geopolitical competition in which the US and the UK can't take for granted their dominant position potentially change the story of it?

David Goodhart:

That's interesting. I mean, yeah, obviously we need those drivers. We need our clever people. We need our elite universities. I mean, I'm not being completely Luddite about this. I just think things have got out of kilter. And then it's the kind of middling and lower ranks of the cognitive class that I'm slightly gunning for. I mean, it's not the brilliant people. We need them more than ever. But also, you might say there's a sort of competitive advantage in geopolitics and having a happy society. I mean America doesn't seem a very happy society at the moment, and nor does the UK, nor do many western societies actually. I mean, these things are very difficult to measure, and no doubt I could be challenged on that assertion.

David Goodhart:

But I do think that one source of unhappiness is as we've become ... There's been a loss of meaning in our societies. Who was it? The great Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari says that modern life, we've traded off power where we've acquired power at the cost of losing meaning. By power, I think he means wealth and control of the environment. And I think he's sort of right about that. The kind of secular cognitive class worldview is rather ... it's hostile to tradition, it's hostile to traditional religious belief that was very consoling for many people, and it had the effect-

Reihan Salam:

In order to create ascension within the society.

David Goodhart:

Well, yeah. The cognitive class in the language of my previous book, the kind of the anywheres who kind of overlap to some extent with the cognitive class of have ... They have a worldview and a certain set of interests which have been over dominant I think in our culture. They're cognitively blessed, tend to promote certain things like openness.

David Goodhart:

If you're a clever person, you're interested in the free flow of ideas. That very quickly becomes the free flow people. You thrive in openness and your sense of yourself comes when achieves identity because of the things you've achieved in your life. So you can kind of live anywhere. Your identity is not so tied to place and group as it is for the people like all the somewheres. And that you're in favor of autonomy, openness, social fluidity. You tend to be a public sphere, not a private sphere person.

David Goodhart:

But many of our fellow citizens and perhaps a majority even in our rich, successful countries are not like that. Those aren't the things that they prioritize. So a happy society needs, it needs those cognitive strivers and it needs a lot of those notions of openness. They're very attractive things in many ways. I'm not saying that somewheres are better in some ways than the anyways. I mean, both of these worldviews are perfectly decent and legitimate in their mainstream forms. It's just that one has been very, very dominant for 30 years, and populism and Trump and Brexit and things like that are part of an expression of trying to rebalance our societies often with kind of unintended and rather negative consequences. But it's kind of democracy working.

David Goodhart:

Lots of my liberal friends go around with their head in their hands saying, "Oh my god, it's the end of the world." No, it's not. This is democracy working and a readjustment has been taking place. And I think part of that readjustment should be this shift in status, which I think is going to come anyway, but I think politics can help it along, this shift in status from one aptitude that has sucked up too much of it to these other two.

Reihan Salam:

What implications do you think the shift in status should have for our economic geography? Boris Johnson's government has paid a great deal of attention to the idea of leveling up, to the idea that we don't simply want to emphasize the southeast and its economic growth. We want to spread some of those benefits to cities but also to towns across the north. Do you see your call for this rebalancing of status as having some effect on the division of labor between major metropolitan cities and towns?

David Goodhart:

Yeah, and I think in a way one of the good things about the pandemic, I think possibly some of the sort of social and political consequences of the pandemic could feed into my argument about rebalancing across the aptitudes. I mean, I mentioned earlier that kind of greater respect for people doing basic jobs that kept us all going in the lockdown and of course the great respect, the new respect, even greater respect we had for many the caring occupations.

David Goodhart:

But I think of course one of the other things that is going to happen is that the pandemic is going to prove the kind of not the death knell but I mean it's going to reduce the share price so to speak of the great metropolitan centers where that someone who commutes into the suburbs to work in a big office block is going to ... they're going to decline substantially in numbers surely as we've all discovered just how much easier it is. You can still work perfectly efficiently from home, or perhaps from a little office in the suburb, and you don't need, we don't need the agglomeration effect perhaps so much of those big metropolitan centers. So we may return to.

David Goodhart:

I mean, this is one of the features of post-industrial societies that has reinforced perhaps the kind of cognitive meritocracy, the cognitive meritocracy big metropolitan center. The two often sort of go together, or the metropolitan center and the kind of big university towns have thrived. Whereas in the earlier era wealth and different kinds of, different mini elites, I mean, going back to the point I made right at the beginning about that as Daniel Bell predicted in the coming of post-industrial society, we have a single funnel up. We used to have lots of little ladders up, and there used to be lots of little regional elites and there was a working class intelligentsia and there was ... And it was possible to get promotion from below in big organizations. All of that has sort of gone with the rise of the credentialized graduate in recent years. But-

Reihan Salam:

So in a sense, yours is less argument against meritocracy than against monistic meritocracy inform more pluralistic meritocracy [inaudible 00:57:21].

David Goodhart:

But to get back to the [inaudible 00:57:23] point. I mean, one of the reasons why these things were more spread out and there were more little ladders up is because in an industrial society, one that still also depends on raw materials in the ground, you have a natural spread of industry and sort of important functions. And as industry declines and as the coal industry declines and the big manufacturing, the steel industry declines and so on, these things, the kind of value-added parts of the economy and the prestigious parts of the economy start to concentrate themselves in big urban centers. I mean, this is common sense really, isn't it? And that has reinforced, I think, that sense of loss, that sense of loss of meaning, loss of purpose in the so-called left behind parts of our, both of our countries. And it may be that the kind of, the left behind parts are actually going to have a bit of a boost from the pandemic in the ... I believe, at least the metropolitan centers-

Reihan Salam:

David, I'm afraid we've come to the end of our time. I'm so grateful to you. You've given us a great deal to think about. Thank you so much. You've written an excellent and challenging book, and it will be a real resource for everyone trying to understand how to improve our society and hopefully our politics. To everyone in the audience, please consider purchasing Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect.

Reihan Salam:

Thank you to everyone in the audience for your time and for your many thoughtful questions. If you would like to hear about more conversations like today's or are interested in supporting our mission, I'd encourage you to subscribe to the Manhattan Institute's newsletters or consider making a donation. There are links for doing so in the Comments window on your screen. Thank you everyone. This was great.

Reihan Salam:

David, I apologize for ending so abruptly.

David Goodhart:

Yeah, not at all.

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