Prospect Podcast: Meritocracy and the social mobility trap, with Daniel Markovits

Is it a rewards-based social system that works, or a sinister trap?

Sure it’s a good idea in theory, but does meritocracy really work in practice? Yale law school professor Daniel Markovits joins the Prospect podcast and tells us why he’s sceptical. Far from seeing a world where people can get ahead regardless of one’s social background, Markovits instead argues that meritocracy has also emerged alongside a greater concentration of wealth and privilege, more so than ever.

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UnHerd: How Boris can cement his new coalition

Brexit, rather like immigration in the past couple of decades, has become an “emblem” policy. Support for Brexit is not so much about the details of EU regulation, rather it has become part of a wider, defensive reaction to the radicalism of the post-Cold War “double liberalism” of free market and cultural opening, represented in the EU by the two central post-national policies of the Euro and free movement. [...]

There will also be genuine conflicts of interest between different parts of the new Tory coalition. The small-state, low-tax Toryism of the affluent suburbs has hardly been in the ascendancy in recent years. But it will have to concede further ground to the new Tory voters who want quite high public spending and good public infrastructure. How much ground it will have to concede will be the stuff of battles to come. [...]

This election result is a big blow to the confidence and cultural power of educated, left-liberal Britain. A new coalition of people from many different backgrounds, by no means all Tories, now has an opportunity to push back against the extremes and pathologies of that cultural hegemony.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Overpopulation & Africa

For most of our history, the human population grew slowly. Until new discoveries brought us more food and made us live longer. In just a hundred years the human population quadrupled. This led to apocalyptic visions of an overcrowded earth. But the population growth rate actually peaked in the 1960s. Since then, fertility rates have crashed as countries industrialize and develop. World population is now expected to balance out at around 11 billion by the end of the century. But the big picture conceals the details.

Let us look at one region in particular: Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019 it was home to a billion people living in 46 countries. Although its growth rate has slowed down in the last few decades, it is still much higher than in the rest of the world. While some projections expect around 2.6 billion people others reckon with up to 5 billion by 2100. Such growth would be a huge challenge for any society. But Sub-Saharan Africa is also the poorest region on earth. So is Sub-Saharan Africa doomed? And why do the projections vary by 2.4 billion people?

PolyMatter: Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets

The Daily Beast: Fish and Fascism: How Italy Is Turning the Tide Against the Far Right

The movement started in Bologna just one month ago when Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini held a rally promising to draw 6,000 people to spread his anti-immigrant message and capture the city ahead of regional elections in January. A group of four friends started sending messages on social media to stage a counter protest and “pack the piazza like sardines” to stand up to Salvini. Nearly 15,000 people showed up, and the movement was born. [...]

One of the group’s founders Andrea Garreffa, a 34-year-old tour guide, said Saturday that the group is more of a phenomenon than a real political movement. They just want to start a conversation. “We are trying to get people to start talking about the direction of this country, to get them involved in politics and not give up,” he said. [...]

Whether the sardines can really turn the tide is yet to be seen. The Five Star Movement, which is currently in power and was previously aligned with Salvini, started in the country’s piazzas just like this and grew against all odds to a mainstream political party that has fallen as quickly as it rose.

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The Guardian: Tactical voting was set to be Remainers’ saviour, so what went wrong?

Why so few successes? It was not the fault of Deltapoll’s data. Almost everywhere, they identified the correct challenger. Most dramatically, they showed rightly that the Liberal Democrats were snapping at Dominic Raab’s heels, despite the foreign secretary’s apparently impregnable 23,000 majority. [...]

Deltapoll’s data showed what tactical voting was up against. Lib Dem supporters were reluctant to help Corbyn become prime minister. Likewise, Tory Remainers feared voting for a badly led Lib Dem party that might support Corbyn. These Tories preferred a Brexit Britain governed by Johnson to a stop-Brexit government led by Corbyn.

The big lesson is that tactical voting needs not just a common enemy, but a broadly common vision, shared by the Labour and Lib Dem leaders. This was the case with Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown in 1997; it was not with Corbyn and Swinson last week.

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Politico: The Labour civil war has already started

The Labour left was not scrabbling to save the blushes of Corbyn. Rather, it was seeking to frame the inevitable battle for the soul of the party in its own terms. For decades, the left longed to hold the levers of power in Labour, and it will not release its grip without a fight.

Blaming the historic drubbing on anything other than the left-wing leader and his policy platform was a no-brainer. The Labour left needed a scapegoat, and Brexit, an obvious factor in the defeat but far from the whole story, was it.

After the 2017 election, in which Corbyn deprived Theresa May of a majority, many critics of the leader in the centre and centre-right of the party sucked up their differences and put on a united front. Despite splits over Brexit deepening the rifts in the shadows, Corbynism became a vast umbrella under which various factions could sit, claiming to be represented by the squirming, triangulating positions the Labour leader settled on over different issues. [...]

The difficulty for the contestants is that Labour is an unpredictable beast. The 500,000-strong membership, many of whom joined the party in 2015 specifically to elect Corbyn into the top job, is pro-EU, pro-left and pro-Corbyn.

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statista: An election battle drawn on Brexit lines

As this infographic shows though, parties whose stance was either anti-Brexit or pro-second referendum actually won a majority of the votes - 51.2 percent. The parties looking to 'get Brexit done' - based either on conviction or the desire to honour the referendum - garnered just 46.8 percent. That though is of course irrelevant in practical terms and something which will be made very clear in the coming weeks as Boris Johnson and the Conservatives press on with their now large parliamentary majority.

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