I am in Oxford at the TED Global conference, a melange of all sorts of talented people people making short and provocative presentations over four days. The surprise attraction at the opening session this afternoon was Gordon Brown, the British prime minister.

Although I agreed with some of what he said, I thought Mr Brown suffered from making a politician’s speech to an event where you get points for being entertaining and off the wall (he was later followed by a man who makes micro-sculptures of houses on the heads of pins).

In my view, the most thought-provoking presentation was Alain de Botton’s, which was a critique of the drive towards meritocracy in modern society on the grounds that it is a) impossible to achieve and b) implies that many people deserve to be at the bottom of the pile.

As Mr de Botton pointed out, we have come to expect that any of us can succeed if we work hard and have talent, whereas there in fact is a lot of chance and arbitrariness involved.

He noted that the poor in medieval times were known as “unfortunates”, a recognition that they were simply stuck with their social status, whereas we now talk about “losers” as if they deserve it.

He drew a comparison with the moral framework of literature, in which a hero’s tragic fate does not require an audience to look down upon him: “It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. He is not a loser, although he has lost.”

It reminded me of some of the deconstruction of individual success in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, in which he points out the importance of collective influence and random factors such as birth date.

Photo: TED/Duncan Davidson

July 21, 2009 7:07pm in TED | Comment