Meritocracy Week

It’s Meritocracy Week on Engelsberg Ideas. Leading writers explore the global history of merit in culture and politics. Do meritocracies deliver on their promise? Is meritocracy working? Can the concept be fixed?

Podcast episodes

A helicopter is pushed off the overcrowded deck of the aircarft carrier USS Hancock (CV-19) off the coast of South Vietnam during the fall of Saigon.
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta.
A double portrait of Mozaffar al-Din Shah, the fifth Qajar shah of Iran.
Walter Sickert's Easter Monday.
During the Soviet-Finnish war (1939-1940) skiers of the Finnish army in white camouflage made lightning and effective attacks on units of the Red Army.
Leonidas at Thermopylae, by Jacques-Louis David, 1814.