The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World

"Adrian Wooldridge is an Economist journalist who has been on the shortlist before, with a book that he co-authored with Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America . He writes the “Bagehot” column in the Economist. If you follow that, you will recognize his very keenly argued, Economist style. His concern in this book is about what he sees as a backlash against meritocracy. It’s his pushback against those who blame meritocracy for a lack of social mobility, for highly educated, highly paid people monopolizing top positions and being the dominant class across a range of areas, from journalism to economics to politics. He’s putting forward a view that­—perhaps surprisingly—is a controversial one now: that meritocracy is the way forward. It’s going to stir the waters for those who think that meritocracy has become a way of promoting the elite and keeping them there. As Wooldridge points out in the book, until relatively recently, meritocracy was considered the principal way to overcome elitism. He paints a beautifully written picture of the history of merit and meritocracy, the ways in which it has succeeded in bringing a wider range of people to the top and encouraged prosperity by ensuring that the best people are doing the most important jobs. The whole book is really a plea to restore meritocracy and to use that as the main tool of encouraging social mobility rather than an anti-elitist approach. The book covers a lot of ground. You might argue that this is not as much of a business book as some of the others, but he’s so well-read, it’s such a well-written book, and it’s such a compelling argument, that it’s a worthy part of the shortlist. Also, it does shade over into discussion of how the people who run and influence the world’s economies make it to the top which is bound to be of interest to anyone in business. In addition to the Business Book of the Year award, the FT and McKinsey also organize the Bracken Bower Prize , which encourages writers aged 35 and under to research ideas that could make the best business book of future years."