The Tortoise Weekly Newsletter

Good afternoon. Welcome back to the Tortoise weekly newsletter. 

The prevailing idea that people should be awarded on merit rather than background – both in work and life generally –  is something that I never questioned. Throughout my working life I was judged, and judged others, on their effort and ability rather than where they came from. That was the status quo. 

And I still believe in rewarding hard work. From next week, I’ll be taking a month off (newsletter included, I’m afraid ??) and it feels well deserved. That said, over the last few months I’ve had to question whether meritocracy, writ large, is all it’s cracked up to be. The fact is, for every winner, there’s also a loser. And losing during the pandemic has been twice as hard.

So for my final newsletter this summer we’re looking at the idea of winners and losers. I hope you’ve enjoyed my weekly notes, please do share them with anyone who might be interested. 

1. The Meritocracy Trap

Part of this rethink was spurred by a ThinkIn we held on Monday. We were joined in the digital newsroom by the genius John Markovits, to take us through ideas from his new book The Meritocracy Trap. 

Here’s Markovits explaining how meritocracy and patriarchy have created a vicious cycle that impacts women’s advancement to senior-level professional roles:

You can catch up on the full ThinkIn by taking a Tortoise free trial here.

2. The Long Drop

Who, really, is likely to win and lose economically during this pandemic? We’re already starting to see hints in the data. Chris Cook travelled down to Cornwall last week to see how people there were coping with the plunge into unemployment, and he’s also been crunching the numbers. Here’s what he found:

Certain sectors have seen more furloughed than others, and from this we can assume that sectors linked to tourism are going to be hit hard with job losses when furlough ends.

Likewise younger people are more at risk of unemployment.

Read the full piece here.

3. The hopeful Chancellor

By contrast, one of the winners of the last few months, at least in terms of public opinion ratings, is the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. As the country begins to reckon with an epidemic of unemployment, Mr Sunak has been bulking up his PR team and going on the social media charm-offensive.

But if a second wave of infection hits because the poorest in society can’t afford to self-isolate, who will be to blame? It’s likely the buck will stop with him. My Tortoise co-founder James Harding analyses what’s in store for the chancellor in this week’s podcast. Listen here.

4. A winning mix

“Dishi Rishi” is a good nickname but it’s not quite as impressive as the name of my No.1 winner this week:

DeWalt Mix is a paralympic javelin thrower and great nephew of the Western movie star Tom Mix. Last Sunday he was paddle-boarding off the coast of Long Beach California and lost his prosthetic leg in the water. After several days of sifting through the seabed, the search team had no luck and Mix thought he’d have to postpone his ambitions to compete next year. 

But, as luck would have it, Los Angeles Fire Department’s Marine Unit stepped in to successfully pinpoint the exact location of the limb. Mix hopes that he’ll follow this particular win with another – a gold medal at Tokyo in 2021.

That’s everything for this week’s newsletter, I’ll be back in September to share with you all the goings-on at Tortoise. In the meantime, make sure you check out our ongoing investigation into the infodemic, published next week. My colleague Basia sat down for a tricky interview with America’s brightest hope turned prominent anti-vaxxer, Robert Kennedy Jr - not to be missed.

We’ve also got a load of great ThinkIns still to come and our G7bn Summit on global leadership in the autumn. I hope you’ll join us for some of them by clicking here.

Have a great weekend and a relaxing August, my newsletter will return in September, with plenty of pictures of Diggle the Dog who joins the Vanneck-Smith clan early that month. 

Katie.