Meritocracy or Else | Dr. Adrian Wooldridge | EP 265 - YouTube

What is America doing at the moment? You've got gifted programs being abandoned. You've got SATs being abandoned for university entrance. Boston Latin, which has used to select people on the basis of examinations, is ceasing to do so and is now accepting people on the basis of lotteries, the same with Lowell High School in San Francisco. You've got these books like Michael Sandel and Markovitz's book attacking the principle of meritocracy. At the same time that you've got this sort of rather plutocratic Ivy League system. So you're getting the ladder and then you've got the attacks on the elite schools in New York. So you've got the ladder being just pulled down on the one hand and you've got a sort of woke plutocratic elites on the one hand enjoying the fruits of all this education, this vast dairies that the education system has. But on the other hand, not really being willing to reach out, which is what a meritocracy should be about to the best talented groups in the whole of society. I think that means ultimately the America loses and China wins, which is not something I want to see.

现在美国在做什么？天赋项目被废弃，SAT考试被废弃用来进入大学，波士顿拉丁学校过去是基于考试选拔人才，现在也停止了，改为抽签选拔，旧金山洛厄尔高中也是如此。像迈克尔·桑德尔和马尔科维茨的著作攻击精英主义原则。同时，你有一些比较富有的常青藤盟校。因此，一个人手中举着阶梯，而另一只手攻击纽约的精英学校。所以，你得到一个人手中拔下阶梯，而另一只手却在享受教育系统所带来的巨大收益。但是，另一方面，这些富有的精英们并没有真正愿意去接触和招揽社会上最优秀的人才，这应该是一个精英主义的要求。我认为这最终意味着美国将输给中国，这不是我想看到的。

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Hello everyone. I'm pleased today to have as my guest Dr. Adrian Woolridge. Dr. Woolridge was born in 1959 and educated at Baliel College, Oxford, where he took a first in modern history. And all souls college where he held a prize fellowship and was awarded a D. Phil. His thesis was published as Measuring the Mind. He's worked for the Economist magazine since 1988, including as West Coast Bureau Chief, Washington Bureau Chief, an author of the Lexington Column, Management Editor, and author of the Shumpeter Column, and Political Editor, an author of the Beijhard Column. He's the author or co-author of 10 books, including The Right Nation, Conservative Power in America with John Micklethwaite, Capitalism in America with Ellen Greenspan. His most recent book, which I recently read, is The Aristocracy of Talent, How Maritocracy Made the Modern World. I've rarely researched or been able to talk with someone who has so many interests that dovetail with mine, and very much looking forward to this conversation.

大家好。今天我很高兴邀请到Adrian Woolridge博士作为我的嘉宾。Woolridge博士生于1959年，毕业于牛津的Baliel学院，取得现代史一等荣誉学位，并在All Souls College获得了奖学金和D.Phil学位。他的论文被发表为《测量心智》。自1988年以来，他一直为经济学人杂志工作，包括西海岸分局局长、华盛顿分局局长、莱克星顿专栏作家、管理编辑、顿巴特专栏作家、政治编辑、贝亚哈德专栏作家等。他是10本书的作者或合作者，包括与John Micklethwaite合著的《权力的右国》、与Ellen Greenspan合著的《美国资本主义》。他最近的一本书是《人才的贵族》：贵族如何创造现代世界，我最近有幸阅读了这本书。我很少有机会与许多与我的兴趣有交集的人进行研究或对话，非常期待这次对话。

So you published this Aristocracy of Talent, and it's the continuance of an interest that you've held for a long time. How has the book been received? Well, I'm glad to say that the book has been extremely well received in Britain. It's been reviewed by all the leading periodicals on both the left and the right, and has been widely discussed on the radio and in various media outlets. In the United States, the reception has been much more muted, I would say. It hasn't been discussed anywhere near as widely, although there is discussion going on and it's beginning to mount a bit. But what most irksmies, it hasn't been reviewed by The New York Times. All the major publications in this country, by this country, I'm in Britain where I'm sitting now, reviewed it. The New York Times hasn't reviewed it. The New York View Books hasn't reviewed it. A lot of the mainstream, particularly liberal publications reviewed it here in Britain, all the liberal publications reviewed it. And I thought, I expected to be more criticized than I was by the liberal publications. It was a sense in many liberal publications that this is an idea that we should grapple with and we shouldn't dismiss out of hand. I was very pleased by the reception both on the left and the right. For example, The New States been wrote along and positive review of it. So for The New York Times, not to have mentioned it at all, well, we all want to be reviewed by The New York Times because it's a big and important newspaper. But for them not to mention it at all, the New York Review Books, not to mention it at all, The New Yorker, all of these outlets. I was disappointed by that just as I was extremely encouraged and pleased by the breadth of the reception in the United Kingdom.

你出版了《才华的贵族》这本书，它延续了你长期以来的兴趣。这本书被接受得怎么样了？嗯，我很高兴地说，这本书在英国受到了极好的接待。它已被左右两派的所有主要期刊评论，已在广播和各种媒体上广泛讨论。在美国，接待要淡得多，我想说。它没有被广泛讨论，尽管正在发生讨论，而且正在逐渐加剧。但是，最让我烦恼的是，它没有被《纽约时报》评论。在这个国家的所有主要出版物，我在英国，我的座位就在这里，它都经过了评论。《纽约时报》没有评论它。《纽约》观书也没有评论它。很多主流，特别是自由派出版物在英国评论了它，所有自由派出版物都评论了它。我想，我预计我会受到自由派出版物的更多批评。许多自由派出版物认为，这是一个我们应该认真对待而不应该轻易抛弃的想法。我对左右两派的接待都非常满意。例如，《新国家报》写了一篇长篇正面评论。所以，对于《纽约时报》没有提到它，我们都想被《纽约时报》评论，因为它是一家重要的大报。但是，他们根本没有提到它，纽约评论书籍也没有提到它，纽约客杂志，在所有这些出口中都没有提到它。我对此感到失望，就像我对在英国接待的广泛性感到非常鼓舞和满意一样。

Well, it seems to me to be a reflection of exactly what you're writing about in the book itself. I mean, you traverse the history of the idea of meritocracy and the practice of meritocracy. Also contrasting it with forms of social organization that weren't meritocratic, either implicitly or explicitly. And you talk about the revolt against the idea of meritocracy, especially on the left and the increasing potency, let's say, politically and psychologically of that, rebellion. Interestingly enough, also pointing out that at least at certain times in the 20th century, the meritocratic idea was fundamentally progressive and maybe was in its essence. So maybe I'd like to know from you, you did your thesis, your doctoral thesis, on measuring the mind, the history of that. And this has been a concern of yours for an extraordinary long time. And I'd like to know what's at the bottom of that.

嗯，我觉得它正好反映了你在书中所讨论的问题。我的意思是，你穿越了精英主义观念和精英主义的实践的历史。也将其与非精英主义的社会组织形式进行了对比，无论是隐含的还是明确的。你还谈到了反抗精英主义观念的运动，尤其是在左翼阵营中越来越强大、具有政治和心理的影响力。有趣的是，你还指出，在20世纪某些时期，精英主义观念本质上是进步的。所以，也许我想知道你，你的博士论文研究了“测量思维”的历史。这已经是你长期以来的关注点了。我想知道这背后有什么东西。

Sure. I wrote, I did a D fill in history at Oxford University and my D fill was on the history of IQ testing and particularly the way the history of IQ testing, the way that IQ testing shaped educational policy because we had something called the 11 plus examination in Britain, which all people in the state sector had to sit and which determined whether they went to grammar schools or secondary modern schools, I elite academic schools or non elite schools, and which was essentially an IQ test or a set of IQ tests.

当然，我曾在牛津大学进行过历史方面的D类填空考试，其中我的D类填空是关于智商测验的历史以及它对教育政策的影响。在英国，我们有一项名为11加考试的考试，所有国家部门的人都必须参加，这决定了他们是否进入语法学校或中心学校——即精英学术学校或非精英学校。这项考试本质上是一个智商测验或一系列的智商测验，它影响了教育政策的制定。

It's an extraordinary example of the massive public impact of a set of ideas about what constitutes mental ability and how you test that mental ability. So I was interested in that partly because I was myself a product of a grammar school and I went to Oxford having been to a grammar school and my entire educational career was determined by sitting this examination at the age of 11 and passing this examination and passing subsequent examinations.

这是一个关于心智能力以及如何测试心智能力的理念在公众中引起巨大影响的非凡案例。我对此感到很有兴趣，因为我自己是一所语法学校的产品，我上过牛津大学，并且我的整个教育生涯都是通过在11岁时参加这项考试并通过它及随后的考试来决定的。

So it was a sort of a personal thing to me, but it also struck me as a very just thing that somebody from my background, which is a very ordinary background, could go to a really first rate academic school and get an education, it was comparable to people like Boris Johnson, people who went to eat in or Winchester, and so it always struck me that this examination, this way of organizing educational opportunity was a very intriguing thing.

这个对我来说是一种个人情感，但对我来说，从我那非常普通的背景出身的人，能够进入一所一流的学术院校接受教育，与像鲍里斯·约翰逊、去伊顿或温彻斯特的人相媲美，这也让我感到非常公正。因此，我总是认为这种考试、组织教育机会的方式是非常有趣的。

It was something that was subversive of the status quo, which was embodied in my mind by the private schools, the independent schools, and then the labor government, which I naturally sort of gravitated towards and supported, came along and destroyed the grammar schools and they abolished them in the name of comprehensive schools and in the name of getting rid of testing and selection and streaming and things like that.

这件事情颠覆了现状，我的理解是私立学校和独立学校的存在，而我自然地倾向于支持工党政府。然而，工党政府却废除了语法学校，并以综合学校的名义废除了测试、选择和分班等制度。

And it struck me as a young person. This was an extraordinary thing for a supposedly progressive party to be doing and it disillusioned me with the first thing, many other things did subsequently, but it's the first thing that really disillusioned me with the socialist or the labor project.

当我还是个年轻人的时候，这让我感到震惊。一个自称进步的政党这样做是非同寻常的，这使我对社会主义或工党方案感到幻灭。后来有很多其他事情也让我感到失望，但这是第一件让我对此感到幻灭的事情。

So I got interested in the history of how this came to be, how the 11 plus came to reshape education in Britain and how these ideas were first accepted and then rejected. And I discovered, I think, that most people in the history faculty at Oxford, which was a fairly conventional conservative faculty, thought I was completely mad to be looking at this subject. And I found myself in the strange position of being somebody who was looking at an unconventional subject, not political history or constitutional history, which was an unconventional subject, which would have put me in the camp of some sort of deranged lefty, but actually from quite a conservative direction because I thought that dismantling the 11 plus and dismantling the grammar schools was a terrible thing.

于是我对这个问题的历史产生了浓厚的兴趣，这个11 plus考试是如何重塑了英国教育，而这些想法是如何被首先接受，然后再被拒绝的。我发现，牛津历史系的大多数人都认为我疯了，因为我在关注这个主题。我发现自己处于一种奇怪的境地，有一种非传统的主题，不是政治史或宪法史，这将把我归入某种疯狂的左翼阵营，而实际上却是从相当保守的角度看问题，因为我认为解除11 plus和文法学校是一件可怕的事情。

So I was intellectually quite homeless, but actually being intellectually homeless, I think it's quite appropriate to somebody who's interested in meritocracy, which ultimately I think is an idea which in political terms tends to be intellectually homeless.

我一直都感到知识上非常无所归属，但事实上，对于那些对任人唯贤制感兴趣的人来说，知识上的无所归属是相当合适的。我认为，这种思想在政治上通常是没有真正归属感的。

So you do point out in the book, you're the phrase in your book, you say cruel meritocracy, cruelty, meritocracy, I believe, and you are referring there despite the fact that you were a beneficiary of the 11 plus system, that the test, it's a really sharp fork in the road. And perhaps it's too sharp a fork in the road in some sense to be palatable.

在你的书中，你提到了“残酷的精英主义”的说法，我相信你指的是尽管你是11+制度的受益者，但这个测试确实是一条分叉明显的路。也许在某种意义上，这个转折点太过明显，难以让人接受。

And then I suppose the people who have dismantled those systems would object to your support for that system by saying, well, it allowed you through, and that was good for you, but there was all those other people who were arbitrarily denied the possibility of advancement. And I think the weak part of that argument is the idea that it's arbitrary, right? That's the crux of the matter.

然后我认为，那些拆除了那些系统的人会反对你支持那个系统，因为他们会说，虽然那个系统让你通过了，对你来说是好的，但是还有许多其他人被任意地拒绝了晋升的可能性。而我认为这个论点的弱点在于它是任意的，对吧？这是问题的关键。

What exactly does arbitrary mean? And you might also say that cruel as these examinations were, they were perhaps less cruel than what they prevented.

“任意”的确切意思是什么？而你也可能会说，尽管这些考试很残酷，但它们可能比它们所阻止的更残酷。”

Absolutely. Absolutely, I wouldn't advocate for a return to the 11 plus. I think it was a system which was too much a matter of dividing people into sheep and goats. It was too once and for all.

当然。当然，我不会支持重归11加试验。我认为这是一个把人们分成“绵羊”和“山羊”的系统。这种系统是一劳永逸的。

I think you have to have some sort of recourse to what happens if people have a bad day. And I would want a system in which you have a very negated set of selective schools, lots of second chances, lots of different types of schools.

我认为，在人们遭遇不顺时，你必须有某种解决办法。我希望建立一个完备的选择学校体系，有很多第二次机会和不同类型的学校。

But I think there's a distinction between sort of a system which is short sharp and therefore obviously cruel and a system which is very prolonged seems to be very kind and actually ends up being quite cruel. And I would say that what we've done is replace a system whereby you have one-off test which can benefit a large number of poorer people with a system of very prolonged educational selection which over a long period of time tends to be very biased towards people who have the resources to keep going through.

我认为，有一种制度是短暂而且显然残酷的，而有一种制度则是非常长久的，看起来很友善，但最终却非常残酷。我会说，我们所做的是，用一个极度长期的教育选择系统替代了一个可以惠及大量贫困人口的一次性测试系统，这个长期的系统往往对那些有资源继续参加下去的人具有很大的偏向性。

the system. So under the 11 plus you have a number of people who would be selected as 11 would get a very good academic education, would get free educations at Oxford, Cambridge or whatever university they went to and then would go on to the fast stream of the civil service. Now where you have a much more prolonged system it's easier for people who don't have a lot of resources to be weeded out or to drop out.

在11加考试制度下，被选中的人将获得优秀的学术教育，可以免费在牛津、剑桥或其他大学接受教育，然后进入公务员极速通道。现在，在更长的教育制度下，那些资源匮乏的人更容易被淘汰或辍学。

And so it costs a lot of money to go to university. It costs a lot of money to go to graduate school by prolonging the process of selection. It looks kinder on the surface but deep down it can be a system which is much more socially biased towards richer people rather than people who might be deserving on the basis of their innate solutions.

因此上大学需要花费很多钱。如果延长招生过程，则上研究生也需要花费很多钱。尽管外表上看起来有点温和，但实际上这是一个更倾向于富人而不是那些天生有才华的人们的社会偏见系统。

You see the same conundrum emerging to some degree with the use of statistically valid and reliable tests to do selection in the workplace. Yes. I mean they have an error so some people are going to be forbidden advancement as a consequence of that test because of error. But, and that's obviously unfortunate and it's particularly unfortunate for them. But placing someone in a position where the probability that they'll succeed over time is extremely low and then tormenting them to death over a one year period while they fail dreadfully and also burdening the company let's say with the fact of dealing with someone in a management position for the sake of argument who actually isn't competent to do that doesn't strike me as a particularly just or empathic solution.

在职场招募和选拔中，使用可靠有效的统计测试也存在同样的难题。是的，我的意思是这些测试也会存在误差，因此一些人可能因为测试结果而被拒绝晋升。显然这非常不幸，尤其是对于那些被拒绝的人来说。但是，将一个人安排到一个成功概率极低的职位，然后在一年的时间里折磨他们深受失败煎熬，同时也给公司带来了负担，比如让一个不称职的管理者处理事情，这不是一个特别公正或富有同情心的解决方案。

And you know part of the problem here is that, and this is I think part of the problem that we're facing as a society in general with the use of let's say intelligent test, intelligence test is they are the most powerful technology that's research psychologists have ever invented by a large margin. And so if we equated them in some metaphoric sense to surgery we might say well you don't want, surgery might be necessary but you don't want to do it without an anesthetic and you also want to be aware that the scalpel can kill.

你知道这里的问题的部分原因是，智力测试是研究心理学家迄今发明的最具有影响力的技术，这也是我们作为一个整体社会使用智力测试所面临的问题的一部分。因此，如果我们用隐喻的方式把它们等同于外科手术，那么我们可能会说，虽然手术可能是必要的，但您不希望没有麻醉就进行手术，同时您也需要知道手术刀可以致命。

And so I think partly what we're wrestling with is the among many other things is the fact that these tests are of incredible power in terms of their predictive ability and we're not exactly sure what to do with that. I mean when I started familiarizing myself with the IQ literature it was actually quite disheartening in some sense because I started to understand just how broad the ability range among human beings is and how intractable that is in some measures in the lower let's say 10th.

因此，我认为我们正在努力应对的其中一个问题是这些测试在预测能力方面的极强力量，我们并不确定该怎么处理。当我开始熟悉智商文献时，有一些让人沮丧的事实，因为我开始了解人类的能力范围是多么广泛，而在一些低端的测量中这是多么不可解决的。

So one stat I came across at one point and you detailed the use of IQ tests by the American military they were picked up very rapidly by the military and very successfully and with many positive social consequences but you know the American military decided I believe all three branches and I believe this was in the 1980s that it was illegal, it's now illegal in the US to induct someone to the armed force if they have an IQ of less than 82. And that's 10% approximately 10% of the population. And that is a dismal statistic because the military is chronically hungry for people.

有一项统计数据我曾经了解过，它详细介绍了美国军队使用智商测试的情况。军方非常迅速地接受并成功地使用了这些测试，带来了许多积极的社会后果。但你知道吗？我相信在20世纪80年代，美国军方决定，所有三个军种都一致认为，如果有人智商低于82，他们就不能被招募到武装力量。这占到了人口的大约10%。这是一个令人沮丧的统计数字，因为军队一直处于快速扩张的状态。

And if their conclusion after close to 100 years of IQ testing was that 10% of the population can't be trained to do anything of any utility in the military that has well that speaks for itself if you think it through. And so it's no wonder people are leery of these tests and they're leery of what they reveal and the easy thing to say is well what they reveal isn't true you know it's the tests themselves but I'm afraid I couldn't swallow that. I spent 10 years looking at the IQ literature.

如果他们在接近100年的智商测试之后的结论是有10%的人无法被训练用于任何军事上有用的事情，那么这对于思考来说就已经说明了很多。所以人们对这些测试感到谨慎和怀疑，并且很容易说测试所显示的结果并不真实，但我无法接受这种说法。我花了10年时间研究智商文献。

Well I mean when we talk about the military there are two big questions say what is the First World War when a lot of the IQ testing was fairly crude and when they had this you know they tended and a lot of literature which came out of the First World War was quite racist and I think Bingham for one recanted on what he'd said in 1930s and then said no no we were wrong it was a premature application of our methods we should have been more sensitive about cultural differences and linguistic abilities because you have a huge population of new immigrants.

当我们谈论军事时有两个大问题，第一个是第一次世界大战时的情况，当时的智商测试还相当粗糙。在这个时代，许多文献都带有浓厚的种族主义色彩。很多人开始认为这是不恰当的，比如Bingham就在1930年代撤销了自己的声明，说：“不，我们错了。我们使用方法过于仓促，我们应该更加敏感于文化差异和语言能力，因为有大量新移民涌入。”

After the Second World War I think it was a much more developed science and the most important thing it revealed in both Britain but most specifically in America was the huge amount of talent that was in the population that was being underutilized.

二战结束后，我认为科学得到了更加发展，其中最重要的发现是在英国，但更具体地说是在美国，揭示了人口中存在大量未被充分利用的人才。

Right right. And so out of that comes the GI Bill because people are saying gosh there are all these clever people we're a technical scientific civilization we must use them we must we must promote them. So I think there's a big difference on the impact of the two things but these two questions that you raise one is the accuracy of the tests but the other is whether they're accurate or not but the other is if they are accurate what they reveal about the human population and particularly the sheer range of abilities within the human population and so which is very wide.

没错。正是出于这个原因，GI账单出现了。因为人们认为，哇，有这么多聪明人，我们是一个技术科学的文明，我们必须利用他们，我们必须促进他们。因此，我认为这两件事情的影响有很大的区别，但是你提出的这两个问题中，一个是有关测试的准确性，而另一个则是如果他们准确，它们揭示了有关人类群体的什么以及特别是人类群体内广泛的能力范围，这是非常广泛的。

The person who invented the term meritocracy was Michael Young who wrote this wonderful magnificent sort of really clever clever book in 1958 called The Rise of the Meritocracy and what he was saying in that book was that the problem with meritocracy the problem with IQ tests is that they work and the meritocracy works the general tenor on the left at that time is these tests were inaccurate they were missing children of ability they were allocating positions arbitrarily.

发明“精英主义”这个词的人是迈克尔·扬，他在1958年写了一本名为《精英崛起》的了不起的书，非常聪明，他在书中提出了一个问题，就是精英主义的问题，还有智商测试的问题，他说这些方法是可行的，但精英主义带来的问题是：当时左派普遍认为这些测试不准确，它们无法发掘人的才能，无法合理分配资源。

Michael Young says no no no no the real problem is that they work that they're accurate but the sort of society that you create by selecting people and promoting people on the basis of ability is the opposite of socialism he was a socialist he was one of the authors of the labor manifesto of 1945. He says he didn't like the sort of society that was being created by the use of these tests precisely because it promoted people by ability and it revealed very wide differences in people's capacity to do things and he wanted to paint the political classes.

迈克尔·扬说，真正的问题不是他们的工作效率和精度，而是通过选人和晋升人员的能力来创造的社会形态与社会主义相反。他是社会主义者，是1945年劳动宣言的作者之一。他说，他不喜欢通过这些测试所创造的社会形态，因为它通过能力来晋升人员，并揭示了人们能力差异非常大，他希望改变政治阶层。

That is a painful thing well that is a painful thing for anyone psychologically and socially but you know the rub is always yeah yeah compared to what exactly? Oh well compared to my hypothetical utopia it's like no no your hypothetical utopia is very low resolution and impractical and if you implemented it wouldn't turn out the way you think it is think it would so we're not gonna go there how about compared to other real things and you do that in your book in your recent book you walk through other forms of social organization you talk about dynastic organizations you talk about aristocratic organizations that are based well that were based let's say mostly on the possession of land and that tended to be hereditary so they were unbelievably stratified and also completely immobile and so you can dream up a non-stratified society but maybe you could comment on this too I found out late in my life the existence of the predo distribution and the Matthew principle it's quite common among economists.

这是一件痛苦的事，对任何人来说心理和社交都是痛苦的，但你知道问题总是，与具体情况相比如何？哦，那么与我的假想乌托邦相比就不算什么了。不，不，你的假想乌托邦很低像素，不切实际，如果你实施了它，结果不会像你想象的那样。 那么与其他真实的事情相比呢？在你的近期书中，你走过其他形式的社会组织，谈到了基于土地拥有的世袭的王朝组织和贵族组织，它们是非常分层和完全不可移动的。所以你可以设想一个非分层的社会，但你或许可以对此发表评论，我在我生命晚期才发现了普雷多分布和马克思原理在经济学家中非常常见。

I mean we tended to think in psychology that everything was normally distributed but there's lots of things that aren't when I developed a test called the creative achievement test which is widely used psychometrically now and when we first administered it to hundreds of people and it was basically it's a test that sums the number of creative achievements you've concretely made in 13 different creative realms well it was wildly predo distributed the median score was zero across 13 dimensions but there were people who had scores of 80 they were way out on the tails and we couldn't even utilize the test it was hard to utilize the test statistically because it didn't conform to the normal distribution assumptions that underlie, well IQ testing for example and that's when I started to become aware of the predo distribution and the predo distribution bedevils every society and so you get stratification and so these people who are objecting to the meritocracy well are they objecting to stratification and I'd say yes and so okay well what's the solution to that well then it turns into something like well it's capitalism's fault which is unbelievably shallow analysis and that's why I liked your historical approach as well.

这句话的意思是，我们曾经认为，心理学中的所有事物都是正态分布的，但实际上有很多事情不是这样的。我开发了一项被广泛应用的心理测量测试——创造成就测试，当我们首次对数百人进行测试时，它表现出极高的预测分布性。在13个不同的创造领域中，中位数得分为零，但一些人得分却高达80分，他们处于极端的尾部，而我们甚至无法利用这项测试进行统计分析，因为它不符合正态分布的假设。智商测试就是例子。这时我开始意识到预测分布的存在，每个社会都会受到影响，导致人们分层。对于那些反对精英统治的人，他们是反对分层的，这表明他们反对的是什么。那么，如何解决这个问题呢？这变成了像“资本主义是罪魁祸首”这样的浅薄分析，而我喜欢您采取的历史性方法。

What I tried to do in my book was to look at the history of meritocracy and treat as a historical problem rather than just as a philosophical problem or a legal problem because what I wanted to show is that if you look the meritocracy is a relatively recent thing and it's an extremely radical thing and if you look at the history of previous societies most previous societies have been based on principles other than merit because there is an argument that says of course we all believe in meritocracy it's a natural way of doing things and what's the point of it? what's the point of discussing everybody believes this in fact for most of human history societies have not been organized according to the principle of meritocracy they've been organized according to the principle of the inheritance of positions from father to son so dynasties they've been organized according to the principle.

我的书所试图做的，是将精英主义的历史问题视为一个历史问题，而不仅仅是一个哲学问题或法律问题。因为我想要展示的是，精英主义是一个相对较新的、极其激进的概念。如果你观察历史上的其他社会，你会发现，大多数早期社会的组织原则并不是基于精英主义，而是基于子承父业的原则，即前任将职位传承给自己的儿子。因此，有一种观点认为，当然，我们都相信精英主义，这是一种自然的做事方式。但事实上，人类历史上的大多数社会都没有按照精英主义的原则组织。它们都是按照"王朝"的原则组织的。

of description whereby the position that you have in society is one that you inherit and one that in somehow is regarded as natural the world is naturally organized into hierarchies you know Shakespeare talks about a great deal about how people should reconcile themselves with their position in society because if they try and change it it will cause some terrible problem almost a psychic problem or a natural order of thickness I'm chewing that string and you know what discord follows as you see in Troyless and Cressida and also so you have a notion that a static society is a good society a hierarchical society is a good society that power and position and property should flow through families and you know dynasties that should ruin world and also you get the question of how in such a society do you allocate positions well there are actually you know very significant answers to that what one is that you give them away as patronage another is that you buy them and sell them so there was a huge market in jobs in these pre-marriageocratic societies that you know you would buy a job in the civil service or you would buy a job as a tax collector France was a particularly extreme example of this but most pre-modern societies you know had a market in jobs jobs were regarded as property and one of the most the things that didn't exist in that world was a notion that there is a precise relationship between having a job and your ability to perform that job so I quote the example in the book of a woman called Margaret Scott who is the wet nurse to the Prince of Wales in 1783 she was given a pension of 200 pounds a year and 200 pounds a year in those days was a great deal of money but it was also a great deal of money when you consider the fact that the Prince of Wales was 23 years old at the time and so probably not in need of a wet nurse but you know there just isn't a notion that a job is something you do that you need to be qualified for that is a set of commitments to your employer so let's take that apart for a minute because partly what you're pointing to is that the idea of meritocracy is so deeply rooted in our culture that we assume that its existence is something akin to a natural fact it's not a natural fact and it's a fragile fact it's something that we can lose very easily if we do the wrong things so that's why I spend so much time talking about history because what I want to prove in this book is it's something that was created historically and could be destroyed historically we could we could move towards a non-meritocratic society which is what worries me so and yeah so we assume now I think that if I have a job my job doesn't really matter what the job is to produce something productive that other people value in as efficient a manner as possible at a cost that's less than what I'm paid yeah right right and all of those assumptions are questionable and right I mean they're not natural kinds which is partly what you're pointing out.

这段描述着一个人在社会中的地位往往是继承而来的，也因此被看做是自然而然的。在这样的社会中，世界自然而然地形成了等级制度。正如莎士比亚经常谈到的那样，人们应该接受自己在社会中的地位，因为如果他们试图改变它，那将会引起一些可怕的心理问题，或者说是违背了自然秩序。在这样的观念中，一个静态的、等级制度的、通过家族和王朝传承的社会才是良好的社会，权力、地位和财产应该通过家族流转。同时，也涉及到如何在这样的社会中分配职位的问题。有两种方法，一是赞助，二是购买和出售。在这些前高认知社会中，官职是被看做一种财产的，而一个人是否有能力胜任他所担任的工作恰恰不是一个重要因素。因此，认为地位是按照能力来分配的观念并不自然，这个观念是对历史的扭曲。当今社会中，我们总是觉得只要工作能产生价值，而且这个价值也被其他人看重，并且工作的效率高于薪资成本，我们的工作就是有价值的工作。但这些假设都是有问题的，正如作者指出的，这并不是自然情况，而是人类历史和文化的产物，很容易被改变，我们不能掉以轻心。

And do and then okay so alright so we'll accept that let's let's go to the other side of this for a minute so part of the problem I think is terminology part of what makes people resistant to this because we also tend to sort of casually talk about elite institutions which in clock implies a kind of moral valuing we talk about meritocracy which implies that the people at the top are of greater merit right and and that means to the degree that that meritocracy is established on the basis of let's say fluid intelligence that we're conflating moral worth with abstract intellectual ability and that's really a catastrophe and that's part of the pride of intellect and you talked about the best and the brightest and and one of the criticisms that that book leveled against the meritocracy was precisely one of intellectual pretension and arrogance right it's just because you're smart doesn't mean you're good it doesn't mean you're wise it doesn't mean you're meritorious it doesn't even necessarily mean that the decisions you make are going to be better than decisions that other people would make using other. means

所以，讨论这个问题的另一面，我认为问题的一部分在于术语。我们通常随便地谈论精英机构，这暗示了一种道德价值观；我们谈论精英主义，这意味着位于顶层的人有更高的优点。如果这种优点被建立在流体智力的基础上，那么这意味着我们正在混淆道德价值与抽象智力能力，并造成了灾难。这是智力的骄傲，你谈到过最好和最聪明的人，但这本书对精英主义的批评之一正是智力上的自负和傲慢。这仅仅因为你聪明，并不意味着你是好人，没有智慧，没有功绩，甚至并不一定意味着你做出的决策比使用其他方法做出的决策更好。

Now it's complicated because as you point out in the book it's quite likely if you're in the top let's say 10th of the IQ distribution and you start poor that you won't end up poor where it right and so I believe I read a paper at one point that that suggested that you were much better off in the United States if you were born in the top quartile of IQ than if you were in the born in the top quartile of wealth if you had to pick at birth yes I think so yes I think there's so much evidence of the same the same thing yeah and I do have some sympathy I mean one of the things I've been trying to sort out in my own mind is the the conceptual inadequacy of both the left and the right when it comes to profound individual differences and ability

现在很复杂，因为正如你在书中所指出的那样，如果你处于智商分布的前10%，并且出生在贫困家庭，那么你最终不会陷入贫困。我曾经读过一篇论文，它建议如果你从出生那一刻开始选择，在美国出生时，如果你出生在智商分布的前四分之一而不是出生在富裕家庭的前四分之一，你的未来会更好，是的，我认为你是对的。我认为有很多证据表明，在深层次个体差异和能力方面，左派和右派都存在概念上的不足，我对此有些同情。

So I had a client at one point who had an IQ of under 80 and and he he couldn't read well he collected a lot of books because he was a bit obsessive but he couldn't read and I spent about 30 hours training him to fold a piece of paper a letter into three equal segments so that it could be put effectively into an envelope with enough accuracy that a multitude of such envelopes would actually pass through an envelope sorting machine and it was something I could do without thinking and it he couldn't really do it after 30 hours of training and so it I I struggled for about a year and a half to find him a volunteer job and it turns out you know volunteer jobs are actually harder to get in many ways than paying jobs now because there's so many police checks and that sort of thing you have to go through and they're very technically challenging and I sent him to a government agency that that was hypothetically designed to help people like him find a job and they said you know type up your resume and send it out it's like well he can't type and he doesn't have a resume and he can't use a computer and that's not helpful thank you very much you have no idea what you're dealing with here and so this 10% of the population let's say the liberals think you can train anyone to do anything which is rubbish and the conservatives think if you work hard enough there's no obstacles to your success and that's also rubbish in some situations because hard work alone isn't gonna do it and so we have a real conundrum

我曾经有一个客户，他的智商不到80，阅读能力很差，但他因为一些强迫症而收集了很多书。我花了大约30个小时训练他将一张纸信折成三等份，这样就可以将信放入信封中，使得大量这样的信封能够在一个信封分类机中被有效地处理，而这对我而言是稀松平常的事情。但是，在经过了30个小时的训练之后，他还是无法做到。接下来的一年半里，我为他寻找志愿者工作而苦苦挣扎。现在，志愿者工作在很多方面比有偿工作更难找到，因为需要进行很多政府的背景调查，工作也非常技术性，我曾经把他介绍给了一个政府机构，这个机构理论上旨在帮助像他这样的人找工作。但他们却让他打出简历，并发送出去。但实际上，他不会打字，也没有简历，他无法使用电脑，所以他们的建议一点也不有用。这就是我们的一个困境，自认为代表自由派的人认为他们可以训练任何人做任何事情，但这是不切实际的，而保守派则认为只要你努力工作，就不会有任何障碍。在某些情况下，单靠辛勤工作是不够的。

Now what we're doing right now I think is shooting the messenger it's like we don't want to hear this so we'll get rid of tests that are valid and reliable so you know the heart of my D filthy system also to some extent at the heart of this this new book the aristocracy of towns is this group of psychologists who emerge in the late 19th century and become very dominant in the 20th century up to the 1960s who are psychometricians who are concerned with the psychology of individual differences measuring individual differences and what I would say that those people are essentially is bell curve liberals they believe in the bell curve they believe in the normal distribution they believe that the range of individual differences is very wide but they say that those natural facts about the world lead one to liberal conclusions they need they lead one to believing in a more active state a more child-centered set of educational policies and a more redistribution more restrictive tax system as well so in Britain where I think bell curve liberalism is particularly dominant they they would all be members of the Labour Party or at the very least of the Liberal Party they would have all voted in 1945 for the Labour Party they believe that the very fact that people have wide ranges of individual ability means that you have to have an active and generous welfare state because it's not their fault that they're not very bright it's not their fault that the bottoms decided that they can't look after themselves so they need to be as it were looked after through a pension system through through a system of redistributive taxation as I say through supplements that you're making a case there too that's an interesting case because you're actually making the case that it is the observation of genuine and profound differences in people's ability that are fundamental and maybe not even easily changed by social policy that actually justifies the redistributive welfare state at a moral level right and so that's something for people who oppose the idea of meritocracy to really think about for a while

目前我们正在做的事情，我认为是打击信使，就像我们不想听这个一样，所以我们会放弃那些有效可靠的测试，你知道脏系统的核心也在某种程度上在这本新书《城镇贵族》中，它讲的是一群心理学家出现在19世纪末，成为20世纪直到1960年代非常占主导地位的心理测量学家，他们关心个体差异的心理学、测量个体差异，我想说，这些人本质上是钟形曲线自由主义者，他们相信钟形曲线，相信正态分布，相信个体差异的范围非常广，但他们认为，这些关于世界的自然事实导致人们达成自由主义结论，它们需要人们相信更积极的国家、更以儿童为中心的教育政策、更具有再分配性的和更加限制性的税制。所以在英国，我认为钟形曲线自由主义特别占主导地位，他们会是工党成员，或者至少是自由党成员，他们都会在1945年为工党投票。他们认为，人们具有广泛的个体能力范围这件事，就意味着你必须有一个积极、慷慨的福利国家，因为他们不太聪明不是他们的错，底层甚至无法自理也不是他们的错，所以他们需要通过养老金制度、再分配税制、交上税金等方式来照顾他们。你也提出了一个有趣的案例，实际上你正在提出一个论点，即观察到人们能力上的真正和深刻差异是基本的，而且可能不容易被社会政策改变，实际上在道德层面上支持再分配的福利国家。这对于反对精英统治的人来说是值得深思的。

well I mean John Rawls actually you know it's central to his theory of justice that you should have redistribut I mean he John Rawls very interestingly as a as electives is also a sort of genetic deterministic says that people don't own their talents and they inherit their talents and so if they're born very bright it's not because they're morally superior it's because they happen to be lucky if they're born not so bright it's because they happen to be unlucky and therefore society has an obligation to redistributive resources from the from the lucky to the unlucky I think that's a weak philosophical argument in some sense because I could I think you could just as easily say if that is the case those a priori presumptions about the distribution of talent it is in everyone's best interests regardless of the causes of the differences and ability to radically incentivize those who can so they will produce as much as they can for the rest of us who can't yes so what what is interesting about it is that there is a liberal case for redistribution based on the idea of inheritance of of people's you know inherited IQ and I think that was the dominant position on the left

我指的是约翰•罗尔斯，实际上，在他的正义理论中，重分配是至关重要的。他有趣的一点是，作为一个主观决定论者，他认为人们不拥有自己的才能，而是继承了他们的才能。所以，如果他们出生非常聪明，不是因为他们道德上优越，而是因为他们运气好，如果他们出生不那么聪明，那是因为他们运气不好，因此社会有义务从幸运者中重新分配资源给不幸的人。我认为这是一个在某种意义上较弱的哲学论点，因为我认为您可以同样轻易地说，如果情况确实是这样，关于人们才能分配的这些先验假设，它符合每个人的最佳利益，不管能力差异的原因是什么，它都可以强烈激励那些有能力的人生产尽可能多的东西，为我们这些无能力的人提供帮助。因此，有一个基于继承的IQ的自由主义者关于重分配的论据，我认为这是左派的主流立场。

so we've got a whole bunch of some let's say JBS Hallday and who is a sort of Marxist who is the sort of editor of The Daily Worker which was the Communist Party magazine who's also a biologist he wrote this this this book I haven't had it on my shelves here in 1932 called The Inequality of Man and it's all about you know if we have if we know that people are unequal what do we do about this and he thought that what you do about it is have a bigger more active more enlightened enlightened state and something happened in the 90s let's say in the 1960s roughly in the 1960s whereby this notion became forbidden on the left the left became not only more egalitarian rather than meritocratic but it also became committed to a blank slate theory of the world and that anything that questioned the blank slate theory of the world was associated with the right

我们有一大堆，比如JBS哈利戴这样的马克思主义者，他是《每日工人报》的编辑，这是共产党的杂志，他还是一位生物学家。他在1932年撰写了《人类的不平等》，这本书探讨了如何处理人们的不平等现象。他认为，应该建立更加强大、更加积极、更加开明的国家来解决这个问题。但是在60年代左右，左派开始禁止这种观念，他们不仅更加推崇平等而不是精英主义，同时也高度支持空白板理论。如果有人怀疑空白板理论，就被视为右翼。

Let me ask you some questions about that. I see the malevolent side of the insistence politically on blank slate as justifying the utopian pretensions of those who would like to remake man in their in the image of their political ideology. And if the blank slate argument is true then we could be anything that those who would like to change us could make us into and why not? And so that bothers me.

让我问你一些关于这个问题的问题。我认为，政治上坚持“空白状态”的恶意一面在于，它为那些希望按照自己的政治意识形态重塑人类形象的人辩护了乌托邦假想。如果“空白状态”的论点是正确的，那么我们可以变成那些想要改变我们的人想让我们成为的任何东西，为什么不呢？这让我感到不安。

I also think it's unbelievably by naive both biologically and psychologically. It's clearly not the case. There isn't a deep psychological biologically minded psychological thinker who adheres to anything like a blank slate theory. Even the behaviors have completely abandoned that notion and they probably did the most rigorous job of attempting to test its validity.

我也认为这是非常天真的生物和心理上的想法。显然情况并非如此。没有一个深度心理生物学思想家会坚持白板理论这样的事情。即使是行为学家也已经完全放弃了那种想法，他们可能做了最严格的尝试来测试它的有效性。

And then with regards to the the the rejection on the left let's say part of that was a consequence of persistent ethnic differences in IQ testing and that's proved something. Well, that's a no one knows what to do with that. Now I read some recent work showing that the ethnic differences and racial differences that pop up in the IQ literature are much less evident at the age of five and increase over time. That's quite interesting because it does indicate that perhaps there's an educational deviation that's occurring that's that's at least at part at least in part at the basis of this.

关于左翼拒绝接受的问题，其中一部分原因是由于智商测试中存在持久的种族差异，这已经被证明了。然而，这是无法解决的问题。最近我读到一些研究表明，在智商文献中出现的种族差异和种族差异，在五岁时不太明显，随着时间的推移逐渐增加。这非常有趣，因为它表明可能存在一种教育偏差，至少在一定程度上，是这种差异的基础。

But it's proved a very thorny and intractable problem with endless social consequences particularly in the US and we don't know what to do with that, I would say. And the easy answers to say what the tests themselves are biased but then you're stuck with well what are you going to use instead and what do you mean biased and compared to what exactly? Yeah, on the ethnic differences on the group difference. I mean of course these are differences between group averages and that you know there is an incredibly wide range of talents and abilities within groups. Differences within groups are much bigger than average differences between groups evidently but it is a very American set of data.

这是一个非常棘手和棘手的问题，尤其是在美国，它带来了无穷无尽的社会后果，而我们不知道该如何处理这个问题。说测试本身有偏见是一个简单的答案，但这时你得面对这些测试有什么问题，你会使用什么代替它，什么是偏见，和什么做比较？对于族群差异和组群差异，这是一个非常复杂的问题。我指的是在群体平均值之间存在差异。当然，每个群体内部的差异比群体间的平均差异要大得多，但这确实是一个非常典型的美国数据。

And I think that what we're seeing in Britain at the moment which is very interesting, I think, is that we've had a series of schools which are called academies which are a bit like American magnet schools but there's schools that can select people at the age of 16 once they've done their own levels when they go into A levels there. There's a lot of them in the East end of London in poorer parts of other cities and we found that these schools which have been very academically rigorous, very focused on achievement, have been designed to say that if you've got a poor population what you need to do to it is to give it opportunity and give it rigor rather than sort of dumb down education and these schools have been extremely good at getting members of ethnic minorities into high quality universities.

我认为我们目前在英国所见的非常有趣的现象是学院式中学，类似于美国的磁性学校，但这些学校可以在16岁时挑选学生，一旦他们完成高中教育，就可以进入A-levels阶段。在许多贫困城市和伦敦东区有许多这样的学校，我们发现这些学校非常严格，专注于成就，旨在告诉人们如果你面对的是贫困人口，你需要给他们机会和严格要求，而不是降低教育水平。这些学校在把少数族裔成员送入高质量大学方面非常出色。

So there's one called Brampton Manor Academy in the East End of London which has an ethnic minority dominant population which has the majority of its students have free school meals which is a measure of poverty and they now get as many or more children every year into Oxbridge than Eaton does. So, and again you have, you know, in the United States by percent or total number in total number. So in fact, by percent, I think that would have been would be better because Eaton's a very big school.

伦敦东区有一所名为 Brampton Manor Academy 的学校，拥有占主导地位的少数民族群体，学生中大多数享受免费的学校餐食，这是一种贫困程度的衡量方式。现在，他们每年考进牛津剑桥大学的学生数量已经与伊顿公学持平甚至更多。并且，在美国，也可以按百分比或总人数来衡量。事实上，按百分比计算会更好，因为伊顿公学是一所很大的学校。

These schools have been doing amazingly well and they've surprised everybody by how successful they've been so there is a lot of drive in poor ethnic minority population and what we're finding in Britain is that the people who are doing worse are white working-class children, particularly white working-class boys. And they're being surpassed in education by Africans, West Indians and obviously, you know, Oriental Chinese ethnic minorities which have traditionally done done very well.

这些学校表现得非常出色，让大家都惊讶了，因为它们的成功令贫穷的少数民族人口充满动力。在英国，我们发现表现不佳的是白人工人阶级的孩子，特别是白人工人阶级的男孩。非洲人、西印度人和中国人等传统上表现很好的少数民族已经在教育方面超越了他们。

So it's a different it's a bit of a different picture from from the United States okay so what do you think's going on with the white working class in England? The white working class in England is it's partly that they're living in areas where opportunities don't abound. They're living in the north of England, they're living in areas. These were people who were part of the industrial working class and we had a massive de-industrialization from you know particularly from the 1980s onwards. So they're in left-behind areas which you've seen their industries destroyed so that is a depressing thing.

这是一个与美国不同的情况，那么你认为英国白人工薪阶层发生了什么？英国白人工薪阶层在某种程度上是生活在机会不足的地区。他们生活在英格兰北部，生活在一些地区。这些人曾经是工业工人阶级的一部分，而我们经历了从1980年代开始的大规模去工业化。所以他们处在落后的地区，看到了他们的产业被摧毁，这是令人沮丧的。

And I think that's limited their ambitions, it certainly limited their access to good schools and ambitious teachers. And I think also you have a culture which tells them that they're bad people or that they, you know, we have a culture that celebrates almost every group in society apart from the white working classes.

我认为这限制了他们的抱负，当然也限制了他们接触优秀学校和雄心勃勃的老师的机会。而且我认为你们的文化会告诉他们，他们是坏人或者我们有一种文化，几乎赞美社会上除了白人工人阶级之外的每个群体。

Yes, particularly. Well, I've seen the conflation of ambition and achievement with power and domination in that sort of messaging right and and those things shouldn't be conflated. It's very disheartening.

是的，尤其是。嗯，我看到过在这种信息传递中把野心和成就与权力和控制混为一谈，这些事情不应该混为一谈。这非常令人沮丧。

I think particularly for boys and girls even if they're. poor still have the message that's sent pretty strong by our culture that well whatever a girl wants to accomplish and achieve that's to be celebrated there's no there's no fear of patriarchal power lurking underneath that let's say and so yeah I think it's it's it's dangerous to underestimate the demoralizing effect that that kind of language and messaging that's constantly applied actually has.

我认为，特别是对于男孩和女孩，即使他们很贫穷，我们的文化仍然传递了一个非常强烈的信息：无论女孩想要实现什么目标，都应该受到庆祝，没有父权主义的恐惧潜伏在背后。因此，我认为低估这种语言和信息不断传达的的挫败效果是很危险的。

Yeah so we you know we and like the United States about 60% of people in universities now are women and the people at the very people who've got the least opportunities I would say are probably the children the male children are white working class people living in areas like Stoke or Newcastle who've seen you know industrial jobs disappearing but still have this conception that men must be people who sort of make things or do things and can't should be sitting behind desks or be involved in the caring professions or something like that and those are the people I think who really are stuck with that without they don't have role models and they don't have a general sense of where they fit into the post-industrial hierarchy.

咱们知道，像美国大约60%在大学里读书的人现在都是女性，同时，我认为那些拥有最少机会的人可能是那些在斯托克或纽卡斯尔等地区生活的白人工人阶级孩子，由于看到工业工作的消失，他们依然认为男性必须是那些能制造或做事情的人，而不应该坐在办公桌后或从事照顾行业之类的工作，这些人缺乏见解和角色模型，不知道自己在后工业社会中的地位。

Yeah well that the attitude that men are people who do things with their hands is a perfectly useful attitude in industrial society when you're in the lower strata the population because that's exactly what the case is and there's plenty of honor and not as well and so it's not easy for that to be replaced when that was the basis of productive effort itself and of a success so why do you think that your book has been positively received all things considered in the UK?

嗯，对于在工业社会中处于人口较低层的人来说，认为男性是那些用手干活的人的态度是非常有用的，因为在这种情况下，这正是事实，而且也有很多荣耀。因此，当这是生产力本身和成功的基础时，很难将其替换掉。那么你为什么认为你的书在考虑到所有因素时在英国得到了积极的反响呢？

Is the assault on the meritocracy let's say or in the conflation of the idea of intellectual prowess with merit maybe is that is that not as contentious an issue in general in the UK? Now we have a lot of the currents that you have in the United States but in a sort of weak aware as a sort of echo chamber in the United States but we still have a memory I think of the meritocracy as being something that was progressive and something that was a cultural memory of the meritocracy being something that's progressive and something that displaced the old aristocratic elite and I think both the new Tories and the old labor people can agree that you know the old aristratically there's something wrong with them so we have we have a better memory of the failures of a pre-meritocratic society than you do in the United States I think I would say.

「优才统治的袭击」或将智力水平与素质混为一谈，这或许在英国并不是一个非常具争议性的问题？现在我们拥有许多美国的思潮，但这在英国却仅仅是一种微弱的知晓程度，只是美国舆论的回声而已。不过，我认为我们仍然记得优才统治曾经是进步的代表，是一种文化上的记忆，优才统治取代了旧的贵族精英。我认为，新的托利派和旧的工党人都可以同意旧的贵族精英有问题。因此，我们对于优才统治之前的社会失败，记忆比美国更加清晰。

I think the situation in the United States is strange because one of the things that we're better at at the moment in Britain is I think promoting social mobility or doing something about social mobility that as I say we've got the Academy schools which are providing real opportunities for an excellent education in the inner cities Oxford and Cambridge are doing something to sort of reach out to a much broader strata of population they're creating sort of extra years where they take people in people from poor backgrounds and give them an extra years education so they're they're basically broadening their selection without abandoning the principle of merit I think exactly without abandoning the principle of merits that they may be softening it a bit in some some areas but in the United States you still have I think you I mean you're not in the United States I believe you're in Canada but in close enough for now they they still have legacies which exists they still have athletic scholarships which they still have incredible advantages for the children of faculty members and if you look at the the social composition of Harvard it's exceptionally elite institution plutocratic institution you know people come from very very rich backgrounds at Harvard so I think America at the top of society is doing less to revive the meritocratic spirit than we in Britain are doing and what it's doing instead because it sort of feels some sort of vague guilt about the fact that you know Harvard is a privilege in 1920 rich university is they leap into wokism as a sort of almost as a sort of defense mechanism to their guilt.

我认为美国的情况很奇怪，因为英国目前在某些方面比美国更擅长促进社会流动性或采取措施加以改变。我们有学院学校，在城市中心提供真正的卓越教育机会，牛津和剑桥也在尝试向更广泛的人群开放，他们开设额外年级，取纳来自贫困背景的学生，给予他们额外的教育尝试，因此他们实际上在拓展选拔基础条件的同时没轻易抛弃英才原则。我认为，正是因为没有抛弃这一英才原则，所以在某些领域上他们可能会有所软化，而在美国，则仍然存在一些遗留问题，例如赞助单项运动员的奖学金，以及针对教职员子女的巨大优势。如果看看哈佛的社会构成，就会发现这是一个极其精英化的机构，人们都来自非常富有的背景。因此，我认为在社会上层，美国所做的远不及英国多，以发扬英才精神为例，美国的做法是通过跳进“无所不能”的怪圈来找到某种用于纾解罪恶感的自我防御方式，而这实际上是出于弥补过去哈佛这样的优质大学的特权地位所带来的某些影响，这笔账太沉重，使得美国现在根本无法回过头去去重新发扬自身的优点和特长。

I happen to believe that a lot of a lot of this wokism is a sort of way in which the old privileged white ruling class holds on to its position by preserving a certain you know it's us plus certain selected members of or of the excluded classes but yeah well I saw that often in in in my students who were of the radical left persuasion.

我认为很多"身份政治"的行为都是由旧有的、具有特权、白人统治阶层为了维持其地位而保留某些传统的方式，以及招收一些被排斥的群体中的特定成员。在我有些持激进左派观点的学生中，我经常看到这种现象。

At elite institutions like Harvard where I was there for seven years as a professor and then less so at the University of Toronto but it's less it's a less elite and plutocratic institution by a large margin but it always grated on me to some degree because I thought well here you are at that in this institution and so you are by definition already a member of the class of oppressors that you hypothetically despise and the fact that you are here and accepted this and going through this means that you've accepted it and now you want to be on the side of the oppressed and you want to have all the advantages of the hypothetical oppressor simultaneously seems a bit much to ask for right to be a victim and an oppressor at the same time.

在像哈佛这样的顶尖机构，我在那里当了七年的教授，然后在多伦多大学这样的机构，这个机构没有那么精英和富豪，但这总是让我感到有点不舒服，因为我认为在这里，你定义上已经成为了你理论上所鄙视的压迫者阶级的成员，而你在这里并被接受入学并承认了这一点，现在你想成为被压迫的一方，并同时享受理论上压迫者的所有优势，这似乎有点要求过分，要求既是受害者又是压迫者。

Yeah well I think we should always start with the with the question of what are you personally willing to give up but but but still I mean what so what I think one of them I worry about abandoning the meritocratic principle. I think that as I said the meritocratic principle is something that's fragile it's something that was created relatively recently in history it's something that can be destroyed. And once you start making exceptions so we'll make an exception for the children of faculty members we'll make an exception for alumni we'll make an exception for people who give us a lot of money we'll make an exception for people who were born into certain certain groups of the population we'll make we'll accept the meritocratic principle ultimately you end up completely destroying the meritocratic principle.

我认为我们应该始终从个人愿意放弃什么来开始，但我担心放弃分配机会的原则。我认为，正如我所说，分配机会的原则是非常脆弱的，它是近代历史上相对较新的产物，可以被摧毁。一旦你开始为某些特定群体的人们制定例外规定，例如为教员的子女制定例外规定，为校友制定例外规定，为捐赠大量资金的人们制定例外规定，为出生在某些群体中的人们制定例外规定，你最终会完全摧毁分配机会的原则。

But you also end up reintroducing the idea that people should be judged as members of groups and the fundamental thing about the meritocratic principle is you judge people as individuals not as members of groups. And as soon as you begin to reintroduce this collective principle judging people by members of groups then you have a different principle as the on the basis okay so and and so so are there advantages do you think to classifying people by group if we play devil's advocate?

但是，你最终会重新引入一种思想，即人们应该被视为群体成员而被评判，而精英主义原则的根本之处在于要将人们作为个体而非群体成员来评判。一旦你重新引入这种以群体成员为基础评价人们的集体主义原则，你就会有一个不同的原则基础。那么，如果我们打鬼扯的话，你认为将人们按群体分类有什么优点呢？

Because that's I see that exactly the same thing happening there's this insistence that immutable group identity should trump individual merit and then there's a deeper criticism which is and hit the deepest criticism in some sense is your understanding of merit your concept of merit and I'm speaking of you personally as an advocate of this position is nothing but a reflection of your unreflected demand say to justify your position as a beneficiary of the 11 system and also to justify the privilege you have as a member of your particular ethnicity and and background that's Foucault's criticism right of virtually. everything well let me answer the two questions and I think you probably won't agree with my first answer but I think that there are certain groups of people who by dint of their history do deserve to be treated as groups who've been collectively wronged and this is a you know I've been a long-term opponents of affirmative action I've now come round to seeing its merits because I think the African American population the United States because of the legacy of slavery because of the legacy of Jim Crow and because redlining and segregation by residents lasted for such a long time in the United States that there is there is a case for affirmative action for reaching out positively to look for talent and to look for potential

因为我观察到在这里发生了完全相同的事情，即坚持认为不可变的群体身份应该胜过个人的能力，还有更深层次的批评，也就是在某种意义上对于你个人对优秀的理解和概念的质疑，我正在谈论你个人作为这一立场的支持者，认为你对优秀的理解其实并不是反思的结果，而是为了证明你在进行11制度受益人的立场上的要求，以及为了证明你以此为背景的特定族裔和背景所享有的特权，这就是福柯对于一切的批评。好，让我回答这两个问题，我认为你可能不会同意我的第一个答案，但我认为有一些群体由于历史原因确实应该被视为受到集体的伤害而受到特别对待的人群，我一直是反对肯定行动的长期支持者，现在我已经认识到了它的优点，因为我认为美国的非裔人口由于奴隶制度的遗产，由于吉姆·克劳法的遗产，以及由于红线政策和居民的隔离持续了如此长时间，存在着通过肯定行动积极地寻找人才和潜力的理由。

and making an incredibly hard effort to do that as a way of making up for historical wrongs but historical wrongs which continue to limit opportunities but I would say what I do not accept as a conclusion from that is that if you can just do it by numbers hitting number targets you can't just take them into the universities and just you know hit your quotas and then not do anything about it it should be part of a very broad policy of affirmative education not just affirmative action but affirmative education as I say what they're doing in Oxford now is giving people who come from historically underprivileged backgrounds and giving them a foundation year spending a whole year making sure that they get up to standards so they can compete with people who come from from from being through a more rigorous educational system and I think one of the many problems with affirmative action in America is that they've tended to accept people and then just let them do what they do and quite often that means you know either dropping out or moving to courses that are that are less than or or gerrymandering the standards themselves or credential the standards themselves

我们正在非常努力地努力做到这一点，作为弥补历史上的错误的方式，但这些历史上的错误仍然限制着机会。但我要说的是，我不接受这样的结论，即如果您只是按数字目标来完成，您就可以把他们带进大学，然后完成您的配额，而不采取任何措施。这应该是一个非常广泛的肯定教育政策，而不仅仅是肯定行动。正如我所说，牛津现在正在为那些来自历史上处于劣势的背景并给予他们基础年度，花费整整一年时间确保他们达到标准，以便他们可以与来自更严格的教育系统的人竞争。我认为在美国的许多肯定行动问题中，其中一个问题是他们倾向于接受人们，然后让他们做他们自己感兴趣的事情，而这往往意味着退学或选择低于标准或操纵标准的课程。

well okay so I'm gonna press you on that a little bit yeah you did point out just before we had this last bit of conversation that the danger in the elite institutions in the US in particular are the exceptions to the meritocratic principle right and so how do you reconcile the the desire that you just expressed to in certain cases to redress historical wrongs with the problem of exception to the fundamental merit merit individualistic meritocratic rule because you know it's it's it's that's a typical conservative objection in some sense it's like yeah yeah that's your exception you know but then so there's gonna be 10 other people that have slightly different case to make for exceptions and then we're back to the same problem so we should just stick to the damn harsh 11 that's an actual cut off right despite the fact that it causes a certain amount of trouble because there isn't a better solution sure absolutely as I say I came to this position reluctantly because you know it's it's an inconsistent position but I also think it's a pragmatic position

好的，那么我要对你的言论进行一些追问，你之前指出，特别是在美国的精英机构中，危险在于优势阶层有时违背了晋升原则。那么，你如何处理在一定情况下希望补偿历史错误的愿望和进取心的矛盾呢？因为你知道这是保守派通常反对的一点，他们可能会说：“那是你们的例外情况，那么其他人还有其他例外情况，那我们就陷入了同样的问题中。我们应该坚持完全以个人优劣为标准的原则，即使这可能会引起一些麻烦，因为没有更好的解决方案。”是的，绝对的标准才是最好的，尽管会有一些麻烦。我是迫不得已地采取了这个立场，因为你知道这是一种不一致的立场，但我也认为这是一种务实的立场。

I think that the injustice involved with slavery was of such a different order that we need to make recompense for it or that the society in general has to make recompense for it and it continues to shape the opportunities of or of black Americans but I would not extend that principle let's say to recent immigrants who by the very fact that they've immigrated to the United States have massively improved their life chances.

我认为，奴隶制造成的不公正情况与其他形式的不公正有很大区别，我们需要为其进行补偿，或者说整个社会需要为其进行补偿，并且它仍在影响黑人美国人的机会。但是，我不会延伸这个原则，比如适用于最近移民到美国的人，因为他们仅仅通过移民就显着提高了他们的生活机会。

I'd like to keep it limited to essentially the descendants of slaves and also I would like it's say that it's something that should be time limited it's something that we want to get beyond we want to get beyond beyond it and to a world in which we can begin to judge people purely on the basis of as individuals.

我希望这个限制仅仅适用于奴隶的后代，同时也想说这是一个应该设时间限制的事情，我们希望能够超越它，进入一个世界，在这里我们可以纯粹地基于个体来评判人。

What that timeframe would be I'm not sure but it seems needs to be something that's ended and that's why I think there's a really important distinction between affirmative action and the talk now of diversity.

我不确定那个时间段是多长，但似乎需要结束某件事情，这就是为什么我认为肯定行动与现在的多样性谈话之间存在非常重要的区别。

This diversity is based on very different philosophy from affirmative action the philosophy of affirmative action is we did something bad and we've got to make up for it. The philosophy within the confines of a meritocratic system yes within the confines of a meritocratic system we were actively searching for talents and we have to actively search for talents in certain populations much more than we do in other populations because of their history.

这种多样性是建立在与“平权行动”完全不同的哲学基础上的。 “平权行动”的哲学是我们曾经做过错误的事情，现在必须弥补过失。而在纯粹的精英主义体制下，我们积极寻找人才，必须在某些人口中积极地寻找人才，比我们在其他人口中寻找得更多，这是由于他们的历史原因。

Now the logic of diversity is very different from that because the argument of diversity from the back case was that diversity is a good in itself and you have to judge people as members of groups because it's by mixing those members of groups because different groups have different characteristics that you produce better educational outcomes. Now that's yes there's no evidence for that that's wrong technically wrong well it's partly wrong because look we could talk about one of the one of the arguments you lay out in your book that's that certain psychologists and they tend to be educational psychologists have levied against strict meritocratic tests like those that are fundamentally IQ tests so that would be the SAT the GRE all everything that's used for effort entrance into undergraduate universities where that's used in graduate school professional schools that's all IQ testing essentially and people will say it's not but that's because they don't know what they're talking about.

现在多样性的逻辑与过去截然不同，因为多样性的论点是多样性本身是一种好事，你必须将人们视为群体的成员，因为通过混合不同群体的成员，因为不同的群体具有不同的特征，你才能产生更好的教育效果。现在，这个论点是错误的，技术上来讲是错误的，部分地是错误的，因为我们可以谈论你在书中提出的一些心理学家（他们通常是教育心理学家）对于严格优劣测试（如本质上是智商测试的SAT、GRE，以及用于本科大学入学和研究生、专业学校入学的一切测试）提出的反对意见。人们会说这些测试不是智商测试，但那是因为他们不知道自己在说什么。

Okay so then you might say well IQ is pretty singular it's pretty good predictor of of long-term success in a cognitively complex society but there are other sources of variance possibly so you get thinkers like Robert Sternberg for example who talked about practical intelligence and the multiple intelligence theorist Howard Gardner and yeah both of whose scientific work I think is shoddy beyond beyond comprehension and a terrible answer to a problem that's been answered actually quite nicely psychometrically we know there are other sources of variability there's variability in temperament five dimensions that's a lot five dimensions and I don't think that that's a biased finding in it it was it was agnostic theoretically it emerged out of pure brute force statistics that's where the diversity lies and there is not a lot of racial difference in temperament so the idea that group membership produces diversity of a sort that would actually broaden the human scope of any discussion any corporation etc etc is just wrong there's no evidence for it whatsoever and it's even worse than that because it makes the presumption that the essential source of diversity is in fact ethnicity and race and that can go wrong very badly.

好的，那么你可能会说智商相当单一，它在认知复杂社会中是一种非常好的长期成功预测指标，但是可能存在其他变量来源。例如，像罗伯特·斯特恩伯格这样的思想家谈到实用智慧，多元智能理论家霍华德· Gardner，我认为他们的科学工作都很糟糕，无法理解，并且对于已经通过心理测量学很好地回答的问题来说，是一种可怕的答案。我们知道还存在其他的变异来源，例如相对于气质而言的五个维度。这是很多的五个维度，而且我认为这并不是一种有偏见的发现，它是理论上没偏见，也是从纯粹的统计力量中产生的多元性所在。在气质方面，种族差异并不大，所以认为团体成员资格可以产生一种实际上能扩大任何讨论、公司等的人类范围的多样性是错误的，这方面根本没有证据，更糟糕的是，这意味着在本质上，多样性的来源实际上是种族和种族，这可能会带来非常糟糕的后果。

But the diversity argument is a much more profound threat to a marriage of political society than the affirmative action argument because the diversity has no no possible time limit and it's fundamentally opposed to individualism it's fundamentally illiberal because it says that group membership is fundamental to our identities and that you must judge people at least partly if not primarily on the basis of group identity but I wanted to move to go back to your point about Foucault which I think is a very interesting point and I think one which is which is absolutely refuted by history because one of the arguments that the critics of meritocracy make is that meritocracy is basically propaganda for plutocrats or it's propaganda for the ruling elite the ruling elite chooses people according to its own criteria it invents those criteria they're essentially the criteria of the capitalist class or the ruling class and only people who fit those criteria will will be selected so it's purely socially constructed yeah on the basis of the drive to power of the drive to power but I would say that actually something very different is going on and that's why the history really matters here is that merit meritocracy is a Promethean concept or it's a it's a mutable concept that actually has its own internal logic so if you look at Britain as an example.

但是，多样性论点对于政治社会的婚姻构成的威胁比肯定行动论点更深远，因为多样性没有可能的时间限制，它基本上与个人主义背道而驰，它基本上是不自由的，因为它认为团体成员身份对我们的身份至关重要，并且你必须部分或主要地基于团体身份来评判人们。但是，我想回到你关于福柯的观点，我认为这是一个非常有趣的观点，也是一个被历史完全反驳了的观点，因为一些反对精英主义的批评家们所说的一个论点是，精英主义基本上是财阀的宣传或是统治精英的宣传，统治精英根据自己的标准选择人才，它发明那些标准，它们本质上是资本家阶级或统治阶级的标准，只有符合这些标准的人才能被选中，因此，它是纯粹的社会构建，基于权力驱动，但我要说，实际上正在发生的是非常不同的事情，这就是为什么历史真的很重要，因为精英主义是一个普罗米修斯式的概念，或者说是一个可变的概念，它实际上有其自身的内在逻辑，因此，如果你以英国为例。

Of this in the middle of the 19th century a group of educated bourgeois men the intellectual aristocracy decided that they wanted to take power from the land of the elite and they said that they wanted that they would do people like them Thomas McCauley people with names like like like like Huxley and and hold in and all and Keynes and these people wanted to and Stephen wanted to have power and so they said what they needed to do was to have open competition for jobs in the civil service, Oxfordshire fellowships and the rest and open competition that was determined by your ability to perform in examinations so that you could say well these are a bunch of people who we who are advancing their power they vent these ideas to advance their power but look at what happens historically.

在19世纪中叶，一群受过教育的资产阶级知识精英决定要从精英的土地上夺取权力，他们说他们希望像托马斯·麦考利、赫胥黎以及霍尔丁、凯恩斯这样的人们能够参与竞争，掌握权力。这些人想要拥有权力，所以他们认为他们所需要做的是为公务员、牛津郡的研究员等职位开放竞争，并且这种竞争必须由你在考试中表现优异所决定。你可以说，这些人在为推进他们的权力而提出这些想法，但从历史的角度来看，我们可以看到会发生什么。

First of all, you get women coming along and saying, well if my brother can get a fellowship of Trinity College Cranbridge by doing this exam, why can't I? And indeed, they say, you've got to open competition if open competition means anything. You can't just exclude women if examinations test objective ability. You can't just say we'll only have them for half of humanity. So the very logic is self-perpetuating. So you do indeed get a bunch of very clever women who come along and knock on the door of these institutions. So I tell this story in my book of a woman called Philippa Fawcett who, in 1892, sits for the Cambridge Mathematics Tripos which is the hardest examination in the world, and she comes top. She gets the best results. She beats everybody. But of course, at that point, women weren't actually officially allowed to sit these examinations. So she is classified as above the senior Wrangler. The senior Wrangler is number one, but she's classified as above the senior Wrangler because she has taken on this system and beaten it.

首先，女性会说，如果我哥哥可以通过这个考试获得剑桥大学三一学院的奖学金，为什么我就不能呢？他们说，如果开放竞争真的有意义，那么你不能排除女性。如果考试测试客观能力，你不能只为半数人提供资格。因此，逻辑上是自我延续的。 因此，你确实会有一群非常聪明的女性来到这些机构的门口。我在我的书中讲述了一个名叫菲利帕·福塞特的女人的故事。在1892年，她参加了世界上最难的剑桥数学三等考试，并取得了最好的成绩。她打败了所有人。但是当时，女人实际上还没有被正式允许参加这些考试。所以她被分类为高于最高年级的优等生。尽管最高年级的优等生是第一名，但她被归类为高于最高年级的优等生，因为她挑战了这个系统并打败了它。

Then there's the working class. You've got a whole bunch of people who come from poor backgrounds but are born very bright, who are born with a great desire for knowledge. They come along, they knock on the door of the civil service, and they knock on the door of Oxford and Cambridge and say, judge us by these standards, and we'll get into these universities. And the same happens. You get somebody like W.E.B. Dubois in the United States, you know, a black person who becomes the first, I think, 10-year professor at Harvard, writes his magnificent book on the Philadelphia Negro, writes this great stuff on the talented tenth of the population who are going to drive progress in all populations. So what you're doing is not creating a system whereby the ruling class can regulate who comes up and who doesn't, whereby the ruling class defines what merit is. You have a system which, by its own logic of open competition of examinations, changes the nature of the ruling class.

接着是工人阶级。你会发现有很多人来自贫困的背景，但天生聪明，渴望知识。他们会去 civil service 的门前敲门，去牛津和剑桥的门前敲门，说“按照这些标准来评判我们，我们可以考进这些大学”。同样的情况出现在美国的 W.E.B. Du Bois 身上，他是第一位在哈佛担任10年教授职位的黑人，写了关于费城黑人的壮丽著作，还写了关于天才十分之一的人口将驱动所有人口进步的伟大文章。因此你所做的不是创造一个制度，让统治阶级来规定谁能够晋升，谁不能够。你创造了一个系统，通过公开的竞争和考试规则的逻辑，改变了统治阶级的性质。

I don't think any of the people who set up the system in the first place imagined universities in which 60% of other people going to them would be women imagined a system in which you'd have massive, massive numbers of ethnic minority people or of working-class people going to go into universities. So merit is not a conspiracy of the Platocratic elite. Indeed, it's something which constantly reconfigures society from with the outside group coming in and getting ahead as a result of the openness of competition.

我认为最初建立这个体系的人们中没有一个人想象到大学中60%的其他人是女性，也没有想象到会有大量的少数民族人或工人阶级人士进入大学的体系。因此，功绩并不是由贵族精英阴谋煽动的。实际上，这是通过开放的竞争机制不断地重构社会，从外部群体进入并获得成功的结果。

Okay, so I want to hit hard at that argument because I've been trying to parse out in my own mind exactly what it was that Foucault was doing. And so one of the problems that has emerged since the 1960s is the problem of the realization of the complexity of perception. So up until about the 1960s, it was more or less assumed that the world was just made out of objects in some simple way, and that we saw those objects and then we thought about them and evaluated them and acted. And that's just wrong. That isn't how it works at all. It's almost impossible to perceive a visual landscape. We almost, we have almost no idea how we do it. It looks like you need an intelligence that's embodied in some sense and that can act in order to perceive.

好的，所以我想要对那个论点进行强烈的批判，因为我一直试图在自己的头脑中理解Foucault到底在做什么。从20世纪60年代开始出现的一个问题就是感知复杂性的认识问题。直到大约20世纪60年代，人们还普遍认为世界只是由某种简单的物体构成，我们看到了那些物体，然后我们对它们进行了思考、评估和行动。但那是错误的，完全不是那样的。几乎不可能感知一个视觉景观。我们几乎不知道我们是如何感知的。看起来你需要某种意义上体现的智能才能行动并感知事物。

So perception is extraordinarily tightly tied to action, and there's almost an infinite number of interpretations of any given visual landscape. And the same problem bedevils all other forms of perception that emerged in AI and has bedeviled robotics engineers ever since, which is why we don't have robots zipping around doing everything that we could do. And then it also emerged in literary criticism. It's like, well, how many ways can a text be interpreted? Well, innumerable ways. Well, how do you know which of those ways is canonical? Oh, we don't know how we know that. Well, how do you know the whole canon is canonical then because it's just a meta text? Well, we don't know that. Well, how is it you understand a text given its innumerable interpretations? We don't know that. We don't know how we do that. Well, maybe you just do it as part of your drive to power. Yeah. Okay, premature answer to a very difficult question. That's Foucault. He essentially assumes that the will to power is at the basis of categorization itself and even at the basis of the process of categorization. So, even a deeper criticism, it’s nothing but your drive to elevate yourself in power hierarchies that governs the process by which you categorize and even your justifications for that categorization.

感知和行动密切相关，对于任何给定的视觉景象，几乎可以有无限多的解释。这个问题也困扰着人工智能中出现的所有其他感知形式，自从那时起就一直困扰着机器人工程师，这也是为什么我们没有机器人四处奔波完成我们能做的一切的原因。这个问题也出现在文学批评中。这就像是，一个文本可以有多少种解释方式？无数种。那么，你怎么知道哪种方式是正统的？哦，我们不知道我们如何知道那个。那么，你怎么知道整个正典是正统的，因为它只是一个元文本？我们不知道那个。那么，你怎么理解一个文本，考虑到它的无数解释？我们不知道那个。我们不知道我们如何做到这一点。那么，也许你只是出于驱动权力的动机而这样做。是的。好吧，这是对一个非常困难问题的过早回答。这是福柯的观点。他认为权力的意愿在分类本身以及分类过程的基础上发挥作用。因此，即使更深入的批评，也只是你驱动自己在支配分类过程中提升自己在权力层次结构中的地位。

Okay, I think that is the most cynical thing you can think, and I don't say that lightly, but it's not that easy to detail out what the alternative is. Now you're pointing at it to some degree with this issue of merit that transcends the power drive of any particular group of people, even those who might be pushing the idea of merit. Well, there's something deep down in there.

好的，我认为这是你能想到的最愤世嫉俗的事情了，我并不轻易地这样说，但是很难详细说明替代方案是什么。现在你在一定程度上指出了这个问题，即功绩不受任何特定人群的权力驱动的限制，即使是那些可能在推动功绩观念的人群也是如此。嗯，里面有深层次的东西。

What is it that’s being facilitated? that isn't the drive to power and and we haven't got that conceptualized well it the university especially the humanities departments wouldn't have been so easily taken over by the postmodernist types who insist upon this kind of interpretation if the counter argument was well articulated well one of the problems with the problems with Foucault the many problems with Foucault is I'm not sure how I wouldn't go about disproving his claims because they're so all encompassing and so so sort of mutually self-reinforcing I don't know how one would would would say you're not your your interpretation of text is is not right well you did it with a historical examples well your claim is I'd have to do that but I would say that you know Foucault has a huge influence on the revolt against the meritocracy in the in the 1960s and 70s because he's basically saying that the categories the categories that we use to make distinctions between people are as you say the products not of not not of sense or organizational necessity or convenience or efficiency but of power.

这是在促进什么？这不是对权力的驱动，我们还没有把这个概念化好了。尤其是在人文学科领域，如果反方观点被很好地阐明，后现代主义者不会那么容易掌控大学。关于福柯的问题之一是，我不确定如何去驳斥他的说法，因为它们是如此全面和相互加强的。我不知道怎样去说你的解释是错误的，你只能通过历史事实来证明。但我会说，福柯在60年代和70年代的反精英革命中有着巨大的影响，因为他基本上在说，我们用来区分人的这些类别不是基于常识、组织需要、便利或效率，而是基于权力。

I would I happen to believe that the the arguments in favor of meritocracy can be made in terms both of social justice and in terms of economic efficiency. I think we can demonstrate that meritocratic institutions and meritocratic countries and systems are more economically productive that they have a higher you know a higher efficient level of efficiency that the productivity rates are higher in such societies than in other societies. so just to dismiss it all as a mishmash of power plays I think you know it can be subject to.

我认为，赞成精英主义的论点无论从社会公正还是经济效率的角度来讲都可以得到支持。我认为我们可以证明，精英主义制度和国家体系更具经济生产力，效率水平更高，这样的社会生产率比其他社会更高。因此，仅仅认为这些都是权力博弈的混合物是不合理的。

Well, I okay so let's take that let's take that let's take that as a starting point then because at least in principle one of the things that the people who claim that those in power are doing by imposing their category system is subjecting those who are deprived to a level of absolute deprivation that's so terrible that it's unjust and immoral but if the counterclaim is no you wait a minute when we make arguments on the basis of individualistic meritocracy and the net consequence of that is that although there's still fair degree of income disparity that the bottom gets lifted up far enough so that absolute privation let's say of the of the sort that defines starvation just to take an example no longer exists that you interfere with that at your peril even if you're on the left and you actually care for the poor and and dispossessed absolutely.

好的，那么让我们以这个为起点，因为至少从原则上讲，那些声称有权力的人通过施加他们的类别系统所做的事情之一，是将那些被剥夺的人置于如此可怕的绝对匮乏水平之下，以致这是不公正和不道德的。但如果反对声称的人说：等一下，当我们基于个人主义的精英统治来进行论证时，其净后果是虽然仍存在相当程度的收入差距，但底层得到了足够提升，以至于绝对匮乏（例如饥饿）不再存在，即使您处于左翼，并真正关心穷人和失势者，干预这一点也会有危险。

I can I believe that I can demonstrate quite clearly that meritocratic societies have higher levels of productivity if you take a family company or you've take family companies in general as a category and compare them with public companies that that will appoint people primarily on merit you will see that public companies are more productive that they grow faster that they're better at turning inputs into outputs that the family companies family companies have a much bigger big of variance of performance but the average performance of public companies if you take countries that are pretty meritocratic they will have a higher growth rate than countries that aren't meritocratic so let's take Singapore which is in many ways the most meritocratic country in the world its growth rate which has been extraordinary has been powered by its use of human capital by its meritocracy compare Singapore with Sri Lanka which in 1960 they were on comparable income levels I think Sri Lanka was a bit richer Singapore by focusing relentlessly on meritocracy has pulled ahead.

我相信能够清晰地展示优异社会拥有更高水平的生产力。 如果你以家族企业或以家族企业为一般类别并将它们与那些主要以绩效为基础任命人员的上市公司进行比较，你会发现公众公司更具生产力、成长更快、更擅长将投入转化为产出，而家族企业的绩效差异更大。但如果你以表现平均水平来衡量上市公司，那么他们的平均绩效会更好。如果你看那些相当于用人能力的程度比较高的国家，他们的经济增长速度也会比那些不是优异社会的国家更快，因此我们可以拿新加坡作为例子，它是世界上最具优异社会特征的国家之一，它的经济增长得益于优异社会在人力资本的运用，同时拿斯里兰卡作为对比，1960年时两个国家的经济水平相当，但从优异社会的角度来看，新加坡已经遥遥领先了。

Or take and then you think the you think the data linking meritocracy per se and the stringent meritocracy in Singapore to that economic advantage you can collect data on this another example would be if you take Sweden or any of the North European countries and compare them with Greece and Italy Greece and Italy being nepotistic or or familial in their organization and much more much more dominated by family companies and much more dominated by informal familial arrangements they have got lower growth than Sweden and also the rate of growth in Italy has been slowing down recently as they've moved towards you know as they as as the effect of high technology has has began to kick in so the growth rate in Italy which was quite fast after the Second World War as society as as as economies are becoming more advanced is begin to slow down because of familial nepotistic organization just is proving to be incompatible with with with an IT based society and there's there's plenty of economists Luigi Dzinger is at the University of Chicago primarily. who've done work showing that meritocracy you know with using big data sets and how companies select people on how open the educational system is on how much corruption there is that the meritocratically organized societies have higher growth rates well there's there's a very very well developed psychometric literature in management psychology the the actual science of management psychology there is a bit of that although you know most of management psychology is rubbish and the same for most of leadership psychology but there is there's good data looking at difference in individual productivity rates across a multi-year period after hiring depending on the method of selection and the best method is one that's G loaded the second best method is one that assess conscientiousness big five conscientiousness the best test combination is a combination of those two a weighted combination of those two and it predicts individual productivity at about point six which is staggeringly high for bi-psychometric standards by the standards of such things and that doubt is very very well developed by I think the best psychometricians and statisticians that are working in psychology and you know if you're a social scientist and you say well those things aren't believable I would say I defy you to find anything social scientists have ever demonstrated using any methods other than those methods that show results more than one third is great so if you throw out all that you throw at everything it's the same method but so if we accept that the economic growth is a good thing and improvements in productivity are good things because they make the life of the average person better as well as the life of the successful entrepreneurs better I think the consequences of this which I was saying which can be demonstrated are extremely big and this is what leads me to the biggest worry in my book and that is that we live in a world that doesn't just consist of the West we live in a world in which you're getting the biggest and most serious challenge to Western dominance that we've seen ever which is coming from China and that if we are seeing at the moment meritocracy being abandoned in various ways in the United States at a time when I believe that China is becoming more like Singapore and taking meritocracy much more seriously both in terms of its educational system which is very very competitive in terms of its university system which is both highly selective and growing all the time in the way that the Communist Party operates and I think it does set itself the form and standards and even promotes people on the basis of examinations if we have America becoming less meritocratic or less enthusiastic about meritocracy and China becoming more meritocratic or at least more enthusiastic about meritocracy that presents the possibility of a future in which China really pulls ahead of the United States you know I think I accept there are lots of objections to this China has massive levels of corruption it has the red princes it has enormous inefficiencies and internal inequalities and the rest of it but imagine if it if I'm right imagine if China really is slowly slouching towards being a Singapore but with 1.4 billion people yeah not so slowly you know not slowly yeah yeah that has massive implications for the future and what is America doing at the moment you've got gifted programs being abandoned you've got SATs being abandoned for university entrance Boston Latin which has used to select people on the basis of examinations it's ceasing to do so and is now accepting on the people on the basis of lotteries the same with Lowell High School in San Francisco you've got these these books like Michael Sandel and Markovitz's book attacking the principle of meritocracy

或者你可以考虑，将数据联系到本质上的精英主义和新加坡严格的精英主义，并将其与经济优势联系起来。你可以收集这方面的数据。另一个例子是，如果你拿瑞典或任何北欧国家与希腊和意大利进行比较。希腊和意大利在组织上是裙带关系或家族主义的，而且更多地受到家庭企业的支配和非正式家族安排的影响。相比之下，瑞典的发展要更快，而且意大利的增长率最近一直在放缓，因为随着高科技的影响正在开始发生作用，家族主义的组织被证明与基于IT的社会不兼容。有许多经济学家，主要是芝加哥大学的路易吉·金杰，使用大数据集和公司选择人员的方式、教育系统的开放程度、腐败程度等来研究精英主义的作用，表明精英主义组织的社会具有更高的增长率。 在管理心理学的心理测量文献中，有非常完善的文献，实际上是管理心理学的科学。在经过多年的雇佣后，根据人员选择方法对个人生产率之间的差异进行研究，最好的方法是G字谱系载荷法，第二个最好的方法是评估个人的五个因素的尽责程度，最好的测试组合是这两个方法的加权组合，并且可以将个人生产率预测到大约0.6，这在心理学和统计学标准上都是颇具分量的。 如果我们认为经济增长和提高生产率是好事，因为它们不仅会使成功的企业家的生活变得更好，还会使普通人的生活变得更好，那么这些结果是非常重要的。这也是我在书中表达的最大担忧，那就是我们生活在一个不仅仅是西方的世界中。我们生活在一个来自中国的挑战西方主导地位的世界中，这是我们迄今为止所见过的最大、最严峻的挑战。如果我们看到目前在美国各种方式中弃用精英主义，而我相信中国正在变得更像新加坡，并且更认真地对待精英主义，包括它的教育系统和高度选择性的大学制度，这些都在不断增长，以及共产党的运作方式。我认为，它确实在考虑和推动选拔人才的方式和标准。如果美国变得不那么精英主义或不那么热衷于精英主义，而中国变得越来越精英主义或至少对精英主义更有热情，那么未来的可能性是中国真正地超越美国。我承认对此有许多反对意见，例如中国存在大规模的腐败，存在红色贵族，存在巨大的低效率和内部不平等等等，但是想象一下，如果我是对的话，想象一下中国确实正在缓慢地迈向新加坡，但是有14亿人口，那对未来产生的影响是巨大的。目前美国正在放弃有才华的计划，SAT正在被弃用以进入大学。波士顿拉丁语学校曾经是基于考试筛选人员的学校，现在不再是如此，而是通过抽签来接受人员。同样的情况也出现在旧金山的洛厄尔高中。此外，还有一些书籍，如迈克尔·桑德尔和马尔科维茨的书，攻击精英主义原则。

At the same time that you've got this sort of rather plutocratic Ivy League system so you're getting the ladder and then you've got the attacks on the elite schools in in New York so you've got the ladder being just pulled down on the one hand and you've got you know a sort of woke plutocratic elites on the one hand enjoying the fruits of all this education this vast dowries that the education system has but on the other hand not really being willing to reach out which is what a meritocracy should be about to the most talented groups in the whole of society. I think that means ultimately the the America loses and China wins which is not something I want to see.

你既有这种富豪菁英制度，你得到晋升的机会。而在纽约的精英学校上却受到攻击，你又发现同样的阶梯正在被拆除。一方面，你看到一群“觉醒”的富豪精英享受教育系统所带来的巨大财富，但另一方面，他们并不真正愿意与整个社会中最有才华的群体接触，这违反了精英主义的原则。我认为这最终会导致美国失败，而中国会取得胜利，这不是我想看到的。

Well I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley and it's a very interesting place to be and what you see there is an unbelievable concentration of unbelievably smart people and so that's a merit-based establishment and look what it's produced. I mean it's absolutely stunning it's absolutely remarkable it's singular in some sense and that's all a consequence of the because I mean you get meritocratic selection and that's one thing but then you get this multiply multiplier effect when you get people who have passed through that system and they all get together and you've seen also the tremendous consequences of exactly that for India for example because the the Indian Institute of Technology is incredibly selective and it's producing graduates who are certainly the equal of MIT graduates which is really saying something and so many of them many of their best and brightest went to Silicon Valley and what's happened is they've dumped immense amounts of capital back into India and and facilitated the development of a robust technological society there and so it's it's been to everyone's stunning benefit assuming as you said that economic growth and growth and material prosperity are valuable and you know you could critique that idea you could say well we should be more ascetic we should there are other values we should pursue than material prosperity but I do not see that coming from the left what I see happening is an insistence that the corrupt aspect of our current society is the lack of material prosperity at the bottom and simultaneous interference with the only process we know of that could that has historically demonstrated its ability to redress that so what's going on like why why is that happened on the left well why is left.

我在硅谷待了很长时间，那是一个非常有趣的地方，你能看到那里汇聚了大量极端聪明的人，这是一个基于功绩的机构，看看它所产生的成果吧。我是说这个地方绝对令人惊叹，绝对值得注意，从某种意义上来说是独一无二的，这都是因为……你能得到选才用功、层层选拔的人才，但当这些人汇聚在一起时，就会产生更多效应，你可以从印度看到这一点，例如印度理工学院的选拔非常苛刻，它培养的毕业生同样优秀，可以和 MIT 的毕业生媲美，这真的非常了不起。他们中的许多精英前往硅谷，现在，他们将大量的资本投入到印度，促进了当地科技社会的发展，这对所有人都是惊人的收益，但前提是，假设像你说的，经济增长和物质繁荣是有价值的，你当然可以批评这个观点，你可以说，我们应该更为禁欲，我们应该追求其他价值，而非物质繁荣，但我没有看到这种思想从左派那里出现，我看到的是一种坚持认为，当前社会腐败的方面是底层缺乏物质繁荣，与此同时干扰了我们唯一知道可以解决这个问题的过程，所以，为什么左派会这么想呢？

I just pick up on your point about MIT. MIT is now going through a big process of producing emission statements. Or, oh god, well you know. Do you know that 75 to the word merit from it? They've excluded the word merit. That's MIT of all places, yeah of all places. 75% of applicants to the UC system in the research science streams are rejected without consideration of their research history on the basis of their diversity statements.

我刚刚注意到你提到了麻省理工学院。麻省理工现在正在进行一项大规模的排放声明流程。或者，天呐，你知道吗？他们已经把“优点”这个词排除在外了。这是在麻省理工发生的事情，是在这里发生的。申请加入研究科学流的加州大学系统的申请人中，有75％会因他们的多元化陈述而被拒绝，而不考虑他们在研究历史方面的贡献。

Which is something introduced now in Canada to get a grant at many of the federal agencies. You now have to produce a diversity statement or some equivalent of that along with your research proposal. Yeah, something very, if you go back again to the late 19th century in the United States, you had a ruling class that became very worried about itself. It was very worried about the level of inequality, very worried about plutocracy, very worried it was becoming European and no longer sort of American.

现在加拿大的许多联邦机构要求申请者提交多样性声明或类似文件，以获取补助。这是一种新的引进方式。如果我们回溯到19世纪晚期的美国，那时的统治阶层非常担心自己，担心不平等水平，担心富豪政治，担心美国正变得更像欧洲而不像美国。

What they did as a result of that was to construct a ladder of opportunity and throw that ladder down as deeply as possible. You know, from Harvard down to the local village school, there's a sort of sense that we must draw all the talents from right across this great country. Now we have the similar phenomenon which is the creation of a plutocratic elite which is very divorced from the whole of society.

因此，他们所做的就是建立了一条机会之梯，并将这条梯子尽可能地扔了下去。你知道，从哈佛大学到当地村庄学校，人们普遍认为我们必须从这个伟大的国家中吸引所有的人才。现在我们面临的同样现象是富豪精英阶层的出现，这个阶层与整个社会非常疏离。

But instead of saying, well, we must create a ladder, we must make sure that the ladder really works, we must get talent from everywhere we possibly can, they're saying, well, what does talent mean? Does it really exist? Can you measure it? Is it really a good thing or is it an instrument of ruling class power? You know, it's sort of a class bead games being played, and very little that's being done that will really increase the supply of real talents.

但是，他们并不是说我们必须创造一种阶梯，确保这个阶梯真的可行并从各个地方发掘人才。相反，他们问道：“人才是什么？它真的存在吗？你能否衡量它？它真的是好事吗还是统治阶级权力的工具？” 这种想法反映了某种阶级斗争的游戏，并没有真正做出能够增加真正人才供应的事情。

And some sources of talent, such as the Asian population, deliberately being ignored, and it's difficult not to conclude from that that you actually have an old plutocratic elite that is in these very convoluted ways using woke language basically engage in opportunity hoarding. They don't want to be displaced from these positions, and that's the net consequence of these sorts of actions.

一些人才的来源，例如亚洲人口，被故意忽视，很难不得出结论，你实际上拥有一个老富豪的精英阶层，在这些非常错综复杂的方式中，使用唤醒语言基本上从事机会储藏。他们不想被这些职位取代，这是这些行动的净后果。

Well, at least in the short term we'll see what happens as those ideas propagate because they're deeply, and especially the, the Foucault insistence, it's the thing that I think disturbs me the most, the idea that at the basis of the active categorization itself is nothing more than a totalitarian will to power.

至少在短期内，随着这些观念的传播，我们将看到会发生什么，因为它们深刻地影响着我们，尤其是“福柯的坚持”，这是我最担心的事情。这个观念认为，在主动分类背后的本质其实只是一种专制的权力意志。

That's a positively satanic vision of mankind it truly is and what really frightens me about that is what it means for how you treat your enemies. Look, it's like you're just out for your power, that's it, and me too. There's no place we can meet as civilized people between our power hierarchies, that place doesn't even exist.

这是一个极度邪恶的对人类的看法。让我感到害怕的是，这意味着你会如何对待你的敌人。看，你似乎只是为了自己的权力而存在，而我也是。我们之间没有一个以文明人的方式相会的地方，在我们的权力等级之间是不存在这样的地方的。

And so what am I supposed to do with you if you oppose me if we can't come to an accord? Well, you don't have to think very long before you come up with a solution for that. Well, that's why the meritocracy, the history of meritocracy is so fascinating because it moves in directions which were never designed it was never designed to do in the first place.

如果你反对我，而我们又无法达成一致，我该怎么办呢？嗯，你不必想太久，就能想出一个解决办法。这就是为什么精英管理制度的历史如此迷人，因为它朝着从未被设计的方向发展。

You know, once you set up the principle of open competition, the groups that succeed that are coming up from submerged positions in society are succeeding without any sort of plan, and quite often against against the will of the the traditional ruling elites against the landed ruling elite is completely displaced by this by this process.

你知道的，一旦建立了开放竞争的原则，那些成功的团体就会从社会中处于淹没地位的位置崛起而无需任何计划，而且很常常是违背传统统治精英的意愿对抗他们，土地统治精英也会被这个过程完全取代。

So, and it comes because the system of testing examination open competition has its own internal logic which is totally different from what Foucault would say because all the, all categories and all ideas must be instruments of the powerful. Yeah, all, and all, all categories no matter what they are, it's an unbelievably deep criticism, and I think it was a reflection of Foucault's character itself, frankly speaking. He's not someone I admire at all on the ethical front, no, no, I don't think, I think that's right.

因此，测试考试公开竞争系统具有其独特的内在逻辑，与福柯的观点完全不同，因为所有类别和思想都必须成为强大的工具。是的，所有类别，无论它们是什么，都是一个难以置信的深刻批评，我认为这反映了福柯本身的性格。坦白说，他不是一个我在道德上钦佩的人，是的，我认为这是正确的。

But here we have subaltern groups. W.E.B. Dubois is a particularly interesting example when he talks about the talented tent, these are subaltern groups who are saying, well, this system provides opportunities which we must seize and which we can use to transform society peacefully. And you know, by by rising up intellectually, and again that's true of the woman's movement, it's, it's, it's, it's true of the working classes, you know, the aristocracy of labor.

但是在这里我们有次要群体。W.E.B.杜波依斯是一个特别有趣的例子，当他谈到天才帐篷时，指的是这些次要群体说，这个系统提供了机会，我们必须抓住并利用它们来和平地改变社会。通过智力的提升来崛起，这对于妇女运动、工人阶级、劳动贵族都是真实的。

It has something to do as well with our our struggle in movement as a society towards the integration of something like ethics across multiple levels of analysis. So, you know, so we say well, we want we want our workforce to do something productive that elevates our material well-being and and stop suffering.

这也与我们作为一个社会不断向伦理学在多层面上的整合所进行的努力有关。因此，我们说，我们希望我们的劳动力从事能够提高我们物质福利并停止苦难的生产活动。

And so we want to make the micro movements that we make and the selections that we engender systemically serve that in so the whole thing is the whole thing is integrated and that, that. that desire for that integration for the greater common good in some sense especially to elevate to what to alleviate the grossest elements of suffering at the most extreme end that's an ethic and a desire that isn't captured properly at all it's antithetical to the spirit of totalitarian oppression that Foucault insists right you know infects every act of categorization but meritocracy is also essentially a form of liberal individualism it says that individuals should be judged on the basis of their own efforts and abilities but it's also an idea that presents agency it has agency at the very heart it says that people can shape their own futures they can shape their characters they can they can work hard they can get ahead on the basis of work and ability that was always something you know that and that they're properly rewarded for that and that they need incentives but to do and that's something that the you know that Foucault is obviously against but a great bulk of modern sociology has been against that it's removed the agency and a sense of agency

因此，我们希望微小的动作和我们引发的选择在系统上服务于整个事物，从而达到整体的融合。这种融合的愿望是为了更大的共同利益，尤其是为了减轻最极端的痛苦。这是一种伦理和愿望，它完全不能被正确地捕捉，这与福柯所坚持的、感染着每一种分类行为的极权压迫精神是相反的。但是，精英领导体制也本质上是一种自由主义个人主义形式，它认为个人应该根据自己的努力和能力来评判，同时也充满了自主性的概念。它认为人们可以塑造自己的未来，塑造自己的性格，努力工作，在工作能力的基础上取得成功，这也是我们一直奉行的观念，即只要你为之付出努力，就会得到适当的回报，你需要有激励才能实现目标。然而，这是福柯明显反对的事情，但现代社会学的大部分都反对这一点，因为它剥夺了个体的自主性和自我决定的能力。

but I think that exists I think that you know that there is a sense of agency we do shape shape our distances we can work hard or we can sleep all day and we can exercise our talents or we can choose not to exercise our talents or or yes and we have virtue using that we have virtues and we can exercise those and we're not fundamentally totalitarian demons driven not by nothing but the will to power exactly so I think that the philosophy embodied in liberal individualism is something that really needs to be defended and again it doesn't have enough defenders at the moment as you see that the large large chunks of academia in particular have gone to postmodernism which is ultimately dehumanizing or it takes it takes the agency out of being human which is what being human I think is is about so I think meritocracy is right at the very center of a liberal view of the world well let's say amen to that and close this discussion

我认为这是存在的，我认为你知道有一种代理感，我们塑造着我们的距离，我们可以努力工作或整日睡觉，我们可以发挥我们的才能或选择不发挥我们的才能，我们有美德，我们可以锻炼那些美德，我们并不是根本的极权恶魔，被驱使而已，而是有意志力量的人。因此，我认为自由个人主义所体现的哲学是需要被捍卫的，而目前它并没有足够的捍卫者，正如你所看到的，特别是大部分的学术界已经转向后现代主义，这在根本上否定了人性，剥夺了人的代理感，而我认为这正是人类存在的意义。因此，我认为精英主义（Meritocracy）正处于自由观世界的核心地位，让我们为此祈祷，并结束这场讨论。

thank you very much thank you very much I'm very much appreciated and enjoyed talking to you and great it went very quickly okay well well I hope I hope we'll talk again sometime in the future I hope so too

非常感谢，非常感谢！我非常感激并享受与您的交谈，很高兴这次交谈进行得很快。好的，希望未来我们还能再交谈。我也希望如此。