Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect - Softcover

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David Goodhart is one of the most distinctive and influential contemporary political analysts. He worked for the Financial Times for twelve years before founding Prospect magazine in 1995. He now leads the demography unit for the Policy Exchange think tank. His book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration was runner up for the Orwell book prize. In bestselling book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, Goodhart identified the value divisions in western societies that help explain Brexit, Trump, and the global rise of populism.

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Chapter One: Peak Head

Chapter One Peak Head

We… need to apply ourselves to something we do not yet quite know how to do: to eradicate contempt for those who are disfavoured by the ethic of effortful competition.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

What has gone wrong in rich, Western democracies? Political polarization. Economic stagnation. A weaker sense of common interest. Disappointed expectations among the university-educated mass elite. A rising tide of depression and loneliness. A crisis of meaning.

Even before the Covid-19 crisis struck there was a mood of despondency in our politics—a sense that losers were outnumbering winners in nations buffeted by anonymous global forces, that the public realm was being slowly poisoned by social media, and that mainstream politics was failing to recognize the widespread yearning for stability and belonging.

But there’s an overarching explanation for some of these discontents that was, and still is, hiding in plain sight. In recent decades, in the interests of efficiency, fairness, and progress, Western democracies have established systems of competition in which the most able succeed and too many of the rest feel like failures.

Who are the most able? People with higher levels of cognitive ability, or at least those certified as such by the education system. One form of human aptitude—cognitive-analytical ability, or the talent that helps people to pass exams and then handle information efficiently in their professional lives—has become the gold standard of human esteem. Those with a generous helping of this aptitude have formed a new kind of expanded cognitive class—a mass elite—who now shape society, and do so broadly in their own interests.

To put it more bluntly: smart people have become too powerful. How is this different from the past? Seventy years ago, just after the Second World War, when we lived in less complex societies, the people who ran government and business were generally brighter and more ambitious than the average—as they still are today.

What’s different is that, back then, skills and qualities other than cognitive-analytical intelligence were held in higher regard. Education had not yet emerged as the primary marker of social stratification. In the 1970s most people in rich societies left school with no qualifications at all, and as recently as the 1990s many professionals lacked university degrees.

In the language of political cliché, the “best and brightest” today trump the “decent and hardworking.” Qualities like character, integrity, experience, common sense, courage, and willingness to toil are by no means irrelevant, but they command relatively less respect.

When such virtues are undervalued, it can contribute to what socially conservative critics call a “moral deregulation” in which simply being a good person is valued less and it becomes harder to feel satisfaction and self-respect living an ordinary, decent life, especially in the bottom part of the income spectrum.

Without us noticing it, something fundamental has got out of kilter. It is too early to tell whether the Covid-19 crisis will contribute to a better balance between aptitudes based on “Head,” “Hand,” and “Heart.” But we need one. The three aptitudes overlap to a degree, but the modern knowledge economy has produced ever rising returns for Head workers—who are highly qualified academically—and reduced the relative pay and status of much manual (Hand) work.

At the same time, many aspects of caring (Heart) work, traditionally done by women in the gift economy of the family, continues to be undervalued even as care work has become an increasingly critical part of the public economy and was so widely applauded (literally) at the height of the crisis.

An economic and social system in rich countries that once had a place for a range of aptitudes and abilities—in the skilled and semiskilled jobs of the industrial era, on the land, in the military, in the church, in the private realm of the family—now favors the cognitive classes and the educationally successful.

The diminishing sway of those older structures and ways of life are a necessary condition of freer, more open societies, especially for women. But what many of those institutions also provided were forms of unconditional recognition based simply on being you, and a role and a purpose for the people, both men and women, whose strengths lie elsewhere than in the cognitive-analytical. Just doing your duty and making a contribution brought a degree of respect.

Moreover, whereas until recently different social classes and groups and regions had their own separate leaders and hierarchies and measures of prestige, today in most developed countries there is something more like a single, common elite that has passed through the same funnel of higher education and then into the top quartile of professional and managerial occupations. At the very top, these national elites merge into a semi-global one that studies at the same universities, works at the same corporations and institutions, and consumes the same media.

For most of human history, cognitive-analytical ability was scattered more or less randomly through society, with only a tiny minority attending university, religious seminaries, or similarly elite academies. But in recent decades in rich countries, a huge sorting process has taken place in which most of the young exam passers are swept up and sent into higher education. This has triggered a significant decline in the status of much nongraduate employment and also made promotion from below much harder for those without the passport of a university degree.

This does not mean that we now live in a true meritocracy. Family income and the educational background of your parents still correlates strongly with educational and career success, and indeed with performance in IQ-type tests.

The children of two-parent professional families are far more likely to be brought up by parents who are well-connected, understand what is required for children of even middling academic ability to enter good universities and obtain high-status professional jobs, and have the means to invest heavily in them.

The evidence also suggests that most rich societies are at least somewhat open and that many of the cognitively able from lower social classes can and do rise via higher education (thereby helping to legitimize the status quo).

The end result may be the emergence of a partially hereditary meritocracy, especially in the United States, although a few seem to get there by egregiously playing the system.I Many people, particularly members of the cognitive class themselves, may protest that progress has always been driven forward by the cognitively blessed and that modern, technologically advanced societies simply need more clever people—especially in software and computer science—than ever before.

Moreover, they may add, the so-called Flynn effect (named after the New Zealand academic James Flynn) shows that everyone is getting brighter—that average IQ levels have been rising throughout the twentieth century as a result of improved living conditions and human minds adapting to a more demanding cognitive environment.1

They argue that as long as the social biases mentioned above are ironed out, through...