Adrian Wooldridge

Singapore pays top civil servants more than $1 million a year in salary and performance bonuses

six of the seven biggest Russian oligarchs of the 1990s earned degrees in maths, physics or finance before becoming natural-resource tycoons.

In Singapore, the global capital of meritocracy, students erect shrines to the ‘bell curve God’, referring to the normal distribution curve, the ‘omnipotent, inscrutable force that rules over their lives’.

The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid – I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is. 21

Members of the elite spend millions of dollars purchasing educational advantage for their children, sometimes by moving to the right school districts, sometimes by sending their children to the right private schools, but always by providing them with a rich diet of extracurricular activities. At the same time, poorer children are trapped at the bottom of the ladder, weighed down from the get-go by poor infant care, poor schools and general lack of opportunity. This palace of illusions is also a factory of misery. The successes of the system are crushed by overwork: documents to read late into the night; emails to answer at all hours; an ever-buzzing smartphone.

The aim of this book is to fill this void: to explain where the meritocratic idea came from, how it replaced feudal ideas about ‘priority, degree and place’, how it evolved over the centuries and why it eventually became the world’s leading ideology. In the process I also hope to offer some perspective on roiling debates about whether it is a mistake that needs to be rejected or a still-progressive idea that can be a force for good in the world.