One interesting example is the UT system. Because affirmative action was banned in Hopwood v. Texas, the UT system resorted to a program where they accept the top 10% of each high school's class into all UT schools.
It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.
What I like about this system is that it helps a population that even the most altruistically inclined admissions office overlooks: the unprepared. I've met my fair share of students who are brilliant, hard workers but just do not play the game. Whether that's because of ignorance, fear of failure or some other factor, I do not know. They exist at every level; I've seen them for college, for tech jobs, probably for high school admissions. If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile.
> One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school.
Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools.
I would assume this is the case for 95% of Americans. You must have had a different experience?
My family was not wealthy so I did not get a choice whether to "play the game". Actually, I don't even know what game you are taking about.
Consider northern Tarrant county of Texas which is the highest density school district area I have heard of.
Houses in Southlake cost about 20% more per square foot and tend to be substantially larger than all neighboring areas except Colleyville. That creates exclusivity largely due to magnified wealth that has grown up around the school.
Now that the population in the area has substantially swollen competition among the school districts has increased irrespective of wealth, though wealth remains an influential factor. When a student can live mere miles from various schools in more than two school districts, in some rare cases 4 districts, there is incentive to consider among the choices even though it’s supposed to limited by geography.
To complicate that further there are state funded charter school systems that have competitive admission requirements and ignore geography.
Yes there are also private schools as well. In many places private schools exist to provide wealthy children a superior education. That does not apply in the north Tarrant area where there are so many excellent public schools to choose from and the wealthy ones are among the best in the nation. In this area private schools exist only to provide education public schools cannot, such as religious sponsored education.
>Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools.
You must never have bought a house. If you look on any real estate website, you'll find the ratings for local schools. Some towns grow or shrink on the quality of their schools. School districts are as important as cars in explaining the geometry of modern suburbia.
My city had a school choice program. Your local school was required to accept you, but out of dustrict schools were free to impose additional restrictions. Most used a lottery, but a few (at least 1 I waa considering) would look at at an applicants grade and test scores and make an admission decision based on that.
The game I'm referring to is whatever game you need to play to gain capital, social, economic or otherwise. Whether that's applying to colleges and all of the requisite application fluff; the technical interview game or the optimal high school game. And while these games are significantly easier to play if you come from means, I know plenty of low income students who play the game far better than your elite private school types.
"If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile."
I was surprised at the amount of people that had aced the military ASVAB test when I showed up at basic training. Not that acing that is similar to acing the SAT, but it's not easy either. Some of them were signed up for pretty menial jobs too.
Really? I took the ASVAB when I was looking for ways to fund my college education and considered doing Army Reserve. The only question I had to pause on was one about manual transmissions (I'd never driven stick before and couldn't remember how the gears were numbered on my Schwinn). The recruiter claimed to be blown away by the fact that I scored so high on the test. I was never actually given my score. I wonder if those people claiming to have aced the ASVAB were bragging with nothing to back it up. Or alternately, that some recruiters routinely tell their recruits they aced the test to help seal the deal.
Isn’t the United States still heavily segregated???
Take a look at the data on Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago for example.
As Clarence Thomas has mentioned often “affirmative action” just covers up larger injustices like underfunded public schools and housing discrimination.
In a lot of states, we have Democratic big cities and Republican towns with a Republican state legislature.
Guess which areas in the state get the most funding for their schools —- it’s NOT the cities with the most people per square mile.
> It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.
In practice in Texas when I saw this the effect was very limited, because the best classes were largely full of the would-normally-be-in-other-schools magnet students, and didn't have a ton of uptake from the students in that school's regular geographic region. And then they gave bonus GPA points for taking those classes, so cracking the top 10% as a non-magnet-program student was harder still.
Having the classes available was certainly helpful for a small number of students who took them who may not have had access to them otherwise, and concentrating the magnet programs let the district offer more a few more advanced classes than they might have otherwise, but it also somewhat negated any opportunity-spreading effects of the 10% rule.
Any "top nn%" rule asks for another form of toxic gaming of the system.
At least back around the turn of the century, in Arizona, the state universities gave a full tuition waiver for the top 25 or 33% of the graduating class. (Not sure if they still do) This seems at its face to be a very inclusive goal-- you'd make the program accessible to students regardless of finances.
But some schools were so aggressive on the AP and other 'weighted' programmes (A=5.0, B=4.0, etc.), that the valedictorian would have something like a 4.6 GPA, and even a standard 4.0 might not clear the top 25%. It would not be enough just to be an excellent student, you had to explicitly load up on weighted courses-- and of course, there were no weighted fine arts or vocational courses.
This leads to a bunch of toxic outcomes. A straight A student would rank below someone with an A/B record, because she chose the right courses to take. There was pressure to choose the courses which bumped the GPA as opposed to the ones which fit interests or potential commercial utility, which I suspect would lead to resource starvation and classes cancelled due to undersubscription.
That's not a problem with the admission system, that's a problem with the scholarship being underfunded. If 33% is missing people, go to 50%. This idea that college admissions should be competitive is absolutely toxic
> This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.
One of the common complaints higher performing students have is that they are dispersed in their classes and very bored as the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator. Now, that is classrooms, not schools, but you have schools that try to accommodate gifted students in their own tracks and...why are they even bothering putting them in the same schools?
This is playing out at a massive scale with virtual learning. Large amounts of kids in the gifted program and generally “smart” kids have been pulled a week in. there is little value in keeping them together with kids below their academic level in this environment since all the social aspects are gone.
UT Austin is allowed to accept only the top 6%. It also creates weird incentives for students. A friend of mine works in the front office of a local high school and she knows a lot of students who have dropped electives such as band because it lowers their grade point. In Austin area schools AP courses are weighted on a 6.0 scale which makes the problem worse if you want broaden your education and take non-weighted classes.
>getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools
I think there's also a lot of value in giving the local students some peers that are more serious about education too. Ideally every school should offer a non-distracting environment for motivated students
It used to be the case (when I was in High School) that 10% meant ticket to UT Austin, in fact a huge fraction of students at UT Austin were 10% students.
I found this policy excellent, it meant I had a bunch of colleagues from really small towns with no resources and this was clearly life changing for those attending college.
It felt like everything college is supposed to be (even if imperfect).
This is also how the UC system works: the top 9% (IIRC) students are eligible for guaranteed admission, but they are not necessarily admitted to the campus or program of their choice, so you might not get to go to eg Berkeley.
Also, the colleges within UT can have much more stringent requirements. You're not getting into the engineering or business colleges with a mediocre background.
I think an interesting result of this has increased the snobbishness/elitism of UT Grads. Older UT Alums (prior to the 10% rule) are pretty chill people, but the newer ones are universally entitled jerks.
A bunch of commenters here have gotten fixated on two questions: (a) "meritocracy" and what it means or should mean and (b) whether the value of top colleges derives mainly from being exclusive.
I think an interesting / illustrative case is the AMA as the credentialing authority for medical schools. An association of people in the profession, who have a clear interest in the supply of doctors being low, has a clear lever by which to restrain the future supply of doctors. Independent of which specific people get in and how, for the country overall, most of us would probably be better off if more people got into med school, if there were more med schools, and there were just more doctors working a decade from now. The important question isn't just who should get the seat, but which policy choice gives us a better health care system.
I'm guessing the same is true for other areas, but it's just less clear. Rather than asking "who gets to go to the best schools", more interesting is "what policies at the best schools give us a country we want to live in a generation from now?" or "what choice yields the greatest benefit, not just to the student, but to society?"
And if schools don't want to make choices from that perspective, if they want to operate like luxury brands whose goods are valued mostly because they're rare ... then maybe they shouldn't get tax exemptions around their endowments, or public funds, or the respect and esteem of a population that thinks they serve some higher, refined purpose.
The AMA doesn't restrict the number of people in medical school, you're thinking of residency slots, and they don't restrict that either. They're in favor of expanding the number of residencies available since everyone knows there is a shortage of doctors. The restriction comes from funding since it's all Federal dollars to pay for the training.
Congress, and more specifically right now, the Republican Senate is the only thing holding up funding tens of thousands of more slots (the bills are cosponsored by ~130 congresspeople, of which 100+ are Democrats and by 17 Senators, of which 15 are Democrats)
> The AMA doesn't restrict the number of people in medical school, you're thinking of residency slots, and they don't restrict that either.
There's a very simple solution to this problem that requires nothing other than the stroke of a pen: allow residents from OECD nations to practice medicine in the US.
There's nothing magical about an American residency. Countries like France, Britain, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Czechia, Costa Rica, Chile, and Portugal have better health outcomes than the US. Obviously there's nothing deficient about how doctors are being trained in Prague or Santiago or Seoul.
Yet American doctors have by far the highest compensation of any country in the world. Demand meet supply. Let's open up our borders and let doctors from qualified countries come here to practice. Many would flood our shores for significantly higher wages. We'd solve the doctor shortage over night.
Of course the AMA absolutely knows this. That's why they vehemently lobby against any change to the residency requirement. The AMA is a self-interest political lobby, just like any other interest group. They look out for the interest of doctors at the expense of patients. The issue about residency expansion being blocked is just a red herring. There's no reason the US can't outsource its residency training to other, much lower wage countries that are already producing superior physicians.
My mistake. After reading your response, I tried to go back and find where I had originally heard that the AMA contributed to a bottleneck at the med school level. While it is true that the AMA (one side of the LCME partnership) has a role direct role in accreditation of medical schools (which does restrict the number of medical students, albeit not at the level of stipulating a number of seats), it does seem like residencies are the more important bottleneck.
However, a meaningful fraction of those residencies are filled by people (including Americans) who did medical school overseas. I read this as suggesting that there are still not enough seats in American med schools, but that foreign institutions have stepped up to provide that training.
If the parent's comment is true, I wouldn't trust the AMA to market itself honestly.
Ditto for legislative solutions. There's too much conflict of interest, susceptibility to lobbying, non-representation of marginalized groups or those who would be doctors but are not because of troubling practices, etc.
From Mises.org[0]
To accomplish the twin goals of artificially elevated incomes and worship by patients, AMA formulated a two-pronged strategy for the labor market for physicians. First, use the coercive power of the state to limit the practices of physician competitors such as homeopaths, pharmacists, midwives, nurses, and later, chiropractors. Second, significantly restrict entrance to the profession by restricting the number of approved medical schools in operation and thus the number of students admitted to those approved schools yearly.
AMA created its Council on Medical Education in 1904 with the goal of shutting down more than half of all medical schools in existence. (This is the Council having its 100th anniversary celebrated in Chicago this weekend.) In six years the Council managed to close down 35 schools and its secretary N.P. Colwell engineered what came to be known as the Flexner Report of 1910. The Report was supposedly written by Abraham Flexner, the former owner of a bankrupt prep school who was neither a doctor nor a recognized authority on medical education. Years later Flexner admitted that he knew little about medicine or how to differentiate between different qualities of medical education. Regardless, state medical boards used the Report as a basis for closing 25 medical schools in three years and reducing the number of students by 50% at remaining schools.
The article is thoroughly footnoted. One might take exception with specifics, but it seems hard to argue that the above is not approximately correct.
Edit: I see the downvotes, but don't see the justification. I know Mises is an often-unpopular resources, but the above article is well-researched. If there are problems with the line of reasoning, I'd love to hear your perspective on it.
If a college accepts students taking government-subsidised loans, or otherwise receives any federal funding, it should not be permitted to consider legacy [1] or institutional advancement for admissions.
I mean, the basic idea behind an elite school is you have:
* A community of rich folks who get to look smart-by-association
* A community of smart folks who get networked into the power networks
All the decision-makers would lose out on this. Why would this even fly? George Bush Jr went to Yale and Harvard. He looked smart. And, a bunch of people were friends with the President. Folks like him make the laws.
Yeah this is really funny to me. Articles like this fantasize about being able to apply some engineering solution to a problem as if just having any good idea is sufficient to force some third party to implement it. They complete ignore the incentive system the thing lives in so as to make their analysis a total waste of time.
The fact that GWB went to Yale made it possible for him to become President.
Elite schools make it easier for people who have money (but aren’t too academically inclined) to get into positions of political power by building credentials and connecting with a community of smart people.
Why? I think legacy helps with the culture of a school. Legacy shouldn't get you in, but it should be part of the overall intention of class composition. If some 20% of people are good enough and have a family connection, I think it makes the institution stronger.
Picking the top applicants backfires because people game it.
For example, consider Students A and B who're mostly identical except Student A likes to binge on Wikipedia while Student B spends every night doing SAT practice problems. Colleges that select only the top applicants get the B's of the world, who optimize their observables, while the A's seem somewhat less competitive on paper.
If you change the rules -- like you start focusing on clubs, volunteering, or even just skipping the Top-1% -- the gamers'll adjust their strategies, out-performing the non-gamers who develop actual talents. The top colleges end up getting flooded by gamers who're focused on looking good.
The pragmatic solution proposed in this article is to randomly select "good enough" applicants. This allows colleges to take in the top-performing non-gamers who have a wealth of actual skills (rather than gaming hacks) while also reducing the incentive for gamers to waste their time gaming the system.
right but if you’re looking for people who will succeed in college (or the corporate world)
wouldn’t you be looking for people who can achieve based on specified rules and fun to within a system, instead of undisciplined people who can’t do that but may naturally be intellectually curious?
the first makes a terrific employee, the second might not put in hard work for stuffthey don’t find interesting or may leave altogether
If you've got a simple, mechanical job that a trained monkey could do if monkeys were more intelligent, then, definitely, you'd want folks who'll slavishly adhere to whatever task is assigned -- the folks who'll spend all night doing SAT prep problems would be perfect hires.
But if you want to train innovators who'll actually advance their fields -- whether we're talking mathematicians, scientists, engineers, doctors, or business leaders -- then you'll want the folks who'll pursue such things on their own initiative along with the talents they've developed due to that intrinsic motivation.
Elite non-innovators can have their place. In science/engineering/math, they won't be leaders, but they can still be effective researchers with strong publication records, reliably churning out decent-quality papers. In medicine, they can be great practicing doctors. In business, they'd be reliable middle-management types.
Still, it'd be weird for a top institution to only have middle-management types.
Pretty much every admission system I have seen can be gamed in some way.
Standardized testing is probably the worst offender here, since while the absolute equalizer on paper (everyone gets the same test!) it really rewards over-fitting and learning how to perform well on one type of exam.
It's probably closer to that today than most would care to publicly admit. Oh, they don't roll a dice but they mostly have some sort of academic cutoff and then decide on admissions from the remaining pool by lots of factors aiming for a diverse student body across many somewhat arbitrary dimensions. A handful may be slam-dunks above a certain floor (star athlete, parents donated a building, did some amazing humanitarian project in high school). But for the most part, there is a lot of randomness among the admissions of solidly good-enough students.
Top colleges should stop treating admissions like a limited release beer - driving up prices with intentional shortages - and build some damn classrooms.
Getting enough teaching staff and laboratory space is expensive and exponentially harder to manage. Plus you will need support such as cheap mass housing. Then on top of that, big mass transport.
It's not insurmountable, and quite a lot a chicken and egg problem.
The most important part is, what do you do with drop outs? Or with people who try and cannot find fit?
How do you handle people who have to quit for personal or family reasons, who suddenly now are concentrated on one place near the university?
Absolutely. Because we want our doctors and engineers to be just "good enough", none of this elitism for us!
I'm sure they'll still cure cancer and get us to Mars, right?
And the truly elite who miss out by random chance ... that doesn't matter because justice doesn't require us to recognise and appropriately reward genius.
In fact, screw those priviliged geniuses, they're only first in line because they won a genetic lottery right?
i think the point the article was trying to make is that good enough is a much more quantifiable metric and randomization after that is better at minimizing bias from those who select who is "special." I think of it more like, everyone with a 1500 sat go into a hat, and we pick 20 randomly, rather than lets put everyone with a sat score of 1000 in a hat because that is "good enough."
It's not obvious that the current process does better than chance at detecting genius, though - at the margin, the formal and informal tests used for admissions are far better predictors of your parents' tax bracket than of your own inherent ability.
I upvoted you, but it is true that for most graduates, a degree is just a ticket to the upper middle class where they will mostly do meetings, email, and office documents.
Sadly, this is true for a lot of engineering jobs too.
That's true. But, bluntly, and speaking as a member, we don't matter anywhere near as much as the absolute best.
The members of the "upper middle class ticket" group might as well be selected by ballot from the intellectually qualified.
But I'd never suggest that if it in any way imperiled the idenfitifcation and support of the very best and brightest. Which, AFAICT, is exactly what this proposal would do.
Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline.
"Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
Social justice and "fairness" is rarely one of the main goals of a meritocracy. The main goal of a meritocracy is peak performance. NFL teams select the "best" quarter-backs not because it's most fair, but because it will produce the most wins. Universities grant tenure to the most productive professors, because that will enhance the University's reputation. Hospitals hire the best doctors, because they can save the most lives. A society should delegate its most important responsibilities to its smartest/most-knowledgable members, because they can best lead society through worldly challenges.
Which is not to say that Social Justice isn't important. It is vital. But you don't get to it by hiring the wrong people in the wrong roles. A meritocracy excels at producing wealth - Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Unemployment Insurance, better Public Schooling... these are the kind of Social Justice programs that best distribute the wealth back to society.
When the benefits of a society that's lead well bubble up to a small elite, why should anyone else give a shit about how well-optimized the operations of society are?
To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.
Most signifiers of merit, outside of academics (I'd argue even including academics), require a certain amount of privilege. You can't volunteer or take piano lessons or play sports seriously if you have to help out around the house because you're living in a single parent household where the parent has to hold two jobs to make ends meet.
The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back at Fred's talk history in detail we learn that one of the conferences has a slight bias towards white men they don't even know about, and another is a committee of mostly men who agree that male speakers are just better.
By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and / or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.
> A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
This is a good point but your argumentation isn't really convincing. Here's a simple fix for your scenario: only use talks in your circuit as tie breaker. The other concern("possibly even the less qualified person") is an impossibility given your assumptions("all else being equal between speakers"). If you have a perfect meritocracy, and only use your own tests to measure merit, then you would maintain it.
Of course, as you said, achieving perfect meritocracy is impossible, which means we should always consider how to work around the flaws in our existing approach. I like the idea of randomization, but you have to consider that it has its own flaws - drawing from a small pool wouldnot have the desired diversifying effect, but drawing from a too large pool might introduce too many students that are not at the same academic level, with all the problems that brings. In a sense, random choice has similar problems of not being able to achieve "perfection" as meritocracy, and they would need to be balanced together.
To me, all of this concern over the admissions process of the top tier schools tells me that there's a growing need for an even more elite tier of schools. Those schools will undoubtedly have a diversity problem, but it does not sit right with me to limit the ceiling for the most academically gifted students just because most of them come from a privileged background. What this tends to do is exacerbate the problem, as the more wealthy can afford more expensive, privately tailored programs to their kids - the brilliant underprivileged kids will not have this opportunity. Just like we'll never achieve perfect meritocracy, we'll never eliminate privilege - our pursuit of equality should be tempered by the same concerns of unintended, negative consequences due to our imperfect approach.
We live in a society where tech conference organisers, far from being biased in favor of white men, are actually desperate to shield themselves from accusations of anti-female/poc bias. Derive from that what you will.
Correct. Meritocracy, when iterated over time with the effects of previous iterations brought forward, can have unintended and counter-intuitive consequences.
You're conflating the principle and the implementation. Meritocracy is good in principle, but your specific metric is bogus. Feel free to criticize the implementation/metric, but that's not a valid criticism of the underlying principle.
As an analogy, safe driving is a good principle. Assessing the safety of a driver by past behaviour ("this person hasn't crashed in a while") is decent but biased metric. E.g. "drunkenness" might be a better metric. But the choice of metric doesn't (in)validate the underlying principle.
We really need to interrogate the concept of meritocracy a lot more:
"Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?"
Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game."
-- Freddie de Boer (from The Cult of Smart, an incredible book btw)
“ A well-written, highly intelligent book, inveighing against various aspects of the current meritocracy, and how they contribute to what the author calls “social injustice.” People who do educational policy, or who think about inequality should read this book. But ultimately what is his remedy? I would sooner attack homework, credentialism, and bureaucratization than testing. And yes, IQ is overrated, but the correct alternative view emphasizes stamina and relentlessness in a manner that I don’t think will make deBoer any happier. To lower the status of smarts, in the meantime, I fear is not going to do us any good.”
This is obviously true. Nobody deserves to take pride in anything, whatever you consider "merit"; Mark Twain wrote an essay called "What is Man" arguing this. Everybody is a product of their environment.
On the other hand, remember what Roman Hruska said about needing some representation of mediocre people on the Supreme Court?
"We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos."
I think wealth is essentially a means of distributing, directing and exchanging social power. So wealth and scarcity are not necessarily cruel, unless you feel like cruel deprivation is necessary to maintain social power. Then the question is not how do you distribute cruelty and wealth, but rather, how do you direct society in order to minimize cruelty?
I think meritocracy would be a really bad way to go about this, because rooting power in 'merit' would very quickly lead to merit being defined as whatever maintains incumbent power. So you'd end up with not only something that isn't meritocratic in any reasonable sense, but also corrupts the idea of merit. And since that's often knowledge-based merit, you'd end up with a situation where whatever 'knowledge' incumbents had proved proficiency in would become something they would protect against all challengers. Intellectual stagnation and extreme discouragment of creativity would be the norm.
> once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away
Not from a society-level utilitarian perspective.
Meritocracy aims to elevate the most competent people to the elite ranks while working to remove incompetent elites from power. (Given power is a zero-sum game, we have no short-term solution to the existence of elites.)
A properly-tuned meritocratic measure thus looks for what a society needs in its elites to survive and thrive. (We don’t have such a function.) It may not be fair, individually. But it will he efficient, socially.
Paradoxically, those elites must then recognise that their position is largely a result of luck, and thus not an opportunity to become extractive towards the rest of the populace. That latter component means not every selection mechanism should to be meritocratic. This is one philosophical basis for balancing a meritocratic private sector and public service with elected elites, whose selection is decidedly not meritocratic.
Right - but are we talking the 'merit' of billionaires or the 'merit' of being an engineer who can pass difficult math exams? Totally different things, and conflating them is not helpful.
Take two individuals with the aptitude and the willingness to learn engineering and pass said exam. Give one person enough money to pursue an engineering degree. Burden the other one with an ailing parent. There is no conflation here.
But what is merit? Take the "aptitude and the willingness" in the other reply: we cannot decide to be naturally driven or passionate about something, or being quick learners and so on.
We can only decide to put efforts into something. Unless our energy is depleted by issues that we cannot control, ranging from being concerned about financial difficulties, family issues, to physical and mental health, and so on.
We can't lower global warming by 3 degrees, so it's useless to lower it by 2
Mostly fair is worse than completely fair, but way better than unfair or random.
If 80% is getting a fair deal, but you wanting to solve the issue for the remaining 20% results in making things worse for the 50%, you're not solving the issue.
Not to mention, what even is merit? Is it present skill? Potential for future skill? I know plenty of people who are advanced not because they're brilliant, but because they got started earlier, because they had parents who enrolled them into math camp, because they went to schools that taught a more in depth curriculum.
Sure; but we don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of the good. “Fair capitalism” also doesn’t exist in society. But in both cases it’s worth asking - do we want more capitalism / meritocracy or do we want less? Is the problem that our assessment tools are too easy for rich people to game, or is the problem meritocracy itself?
Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’ve yet to hear anyone who complains about the inherent biases in meritocracy propose any system which isn’t just as pathological. Like, what does “fair” actually mean here? Should we select based on IQ tests? That’s illegal. Select based on conscientious? That biases for people who have free time - and hence it biases for wealth. Select randomly? Actually it turns out society benefits more from educating our best and brightest.
“Meritocracy“ is never perfect. But it’s better than any other system I can think of. Complaining is easy. If you were in charge, how would you make it better?
Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with.
For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good.
Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better selection" of students, was able to point out that this bias was limited by the fact that admission was based on a lottery.
Whenever people talk about meritocracies as being real things or potentially real things that merely require everyone to be on board to implement, I always wonder how old they are and whether or not they think they would benefit from being in a meritocracy, and to what degree they think they’ve been screwed over in the past by not being in a meritocracy. IME, they’re almost always little kids up through people working their first job and frustrated that everyone hasn’t perceived their brilliance yet. Or insecure adults frustrated at their lack of success compared to what they think they deserve.
I’m not saying meritocracies are bad- they’re the ideal, they’re generally what everyone wants. Of course you want the best people for a given job or educational opportunity. But when people start talking about meritocracies as if the only thing preventing us from having better ones are people making conscious decisions to have them, I seriously wonder about their life experiences, worldliness, and personal/professional maturity.
For example, it’s common for people to attack things like pushes for diversity as being antithetical to meritocracies, but the intention of things like encouraging diversity is to build the foundation for better meritocracies in the future by helping weed out the things that stand in the way of better meritocracies now. And it’s also very common for those same people to be convinced that if only the world was more meritocratic, they would personally be more successful and everyone would respect them more, because they see themselves as not getting what they think they deserve. Funny how that works, kinda like how libertarians generally think that if only everything was more libertarian, they personally would be more successful, because other people would no longer hold them back. They think some other people would be more successful too, and some less deserving people would be less successful, but their emotional pull for the whole belief system comes from thinking they deserve more than they’ve got and that it must be someone else’s fault. And IME, in practice they’re super wrong about that, but it must be a wonderful sort of fantasy to go through life believing. “I’m better than everyone seems think I am, and it’s other people’s fault that everyone doesn’t see me that way. If only all those other people would see the light and stop holding me back and allow the truly meritorious like myself to flourish!”
> When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline.
> "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
These two sentences contradict each other. Also, if making money was as easy as you say once you have a pile of money the Forbes Rich List would be much more stable than it is. In reality most of the extremely wealthy fail to beat an index fund over the generations because of hubris. The Rockefellers are still rich but their combined wealth as a portion of the US economy is less than the founder of their fortune’s was when he made it.
None of this matters to the organizations offering patents of nobility of course. Ideally they’d be abolished, all real property expropriated and the IP released to the public domain. Anything that reduces their prestige is to the good though. Reducing the fellow feeling of the ruling class by giving them a less concentrated base of experience is to the good.
> Liberal technocrats give us literally no reason at all to think their interests are aligned with the great majority of people, yet when they are attacked as a governing class they stress their credentials and competency. But it'd be worse if they're doing bad stuff efficiently!
...
> The American system of government was built on the assumption that the most salient political divides would reflect geography, not ideology or class. The senator from Massachusetts would share bonds in common with the lay citizenry of Boston that he did not share with a senator from South Carolina. On the national sphere this would allow him to represent the interests of his constituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in American history than others; yet because of the way American politicians are elected, this sense of representing the interests of a geographically bounded group of people is more true in the political arena than in most others.
> Things have not always been this way.
> Though commentators sometimes speak of the old WASP gentry as an earlier era's national elite, they were not really so: they were the business, cultural, and political elites of one region of America. They ruled the roost in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. During the WASP heyday these states had greater economic and demographic heft than other regions in the nation, and so families with names like Roosevelt, Adams, and Lodge had an outsized influence on national politics and culture. But those families were not competing against the best and brightest of the entire nation: they were competing with each other. Texas' best and brightest did not strive to get into Harvard—they strove to get into Baylor. They were generally satisfied to be Texas elites, and if they operated on the national stage they tended to think of themselves as such.
Beating an index fund while also spending some of the money is vastly more difficult than just beating the index. The real question is do they beat inflation. And in that context you see:
Churn on that list is largely an illusion.
The wealth required to maintain a spot on Forbes list is growing significantly faster than inflation. Wealth that would have put you in first place in 1992 ($6.3 Billion) or 12.49 Billion in 2020 money, is less than 1/2 what it takes make the top 20 today. Don’t worry Bill Gated may have lost the #1 spot, but hey he’s got 7x as much money despite giving away billions.
Readit News
It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.
What I like about this system is that it helps a population that even the most altruistically inclined admissions office overlooks: the unprepared. I've met my fair share of students who are brilliant, hard workers but just do not play the game. Whether that's because of ignorance, fear of failure or some other factor, I do not know. They exist at every level; I've seen them for college, for tech jobs, probably for high school admissions. If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile.
Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools.
I would assume this is the case for 95% of Americans. You must have had a different experience?
My family was not wealthy so I did not get a choice whether to "play the game". Actually, I don't even know what game you are taking about.
Parents are often willing to move to areas where there are good schools.
Houses in Southlake cost about 20% more per square foot and tend to be substantially larger than all neighboring areas except Colleyville. That creates exclusivity largely due to magnified wealth that has grown up around the school.
Now that the population in the area has substantially swollen competition among the school districts has increased irrespective of wealth, though wealth remains an influential factor. When a student can live mere miles from various schools in more than two school districts, in some rare cases 4 districts, there is incentive to consider among the choices even though it’s supposed to limited by geography.
To complicate that further there are state funded charter school systems that have competitive admission requirements and ignore geography.
Yes there are also private schools as well. In many places private schools exist to provide wealthy children a superior education. That does not apply in the north Tarrant area where there are so many excellent public schools to choose from and the wealthy ones are among the best in the nation. In this area private schools exist only to provide education public schools cannot, such as religious sponsored education.
You must never have bought a house. If you look on any real estate website, you'll find the ratings for local schools. Some towns grow or shrink on the quality of their schools. School districts are as important as cars in explaining the geometry of modern suburbia.
People choose schools by moving house.
The game I'm referring to is whatever game you need to play to gain capital, social, economic or otherwise. Whether that's applying to colleges and all of the requisite application fluff; the technical interview game or the optimal high school game. And while these games are significantly easier to play if you come from means, I know plenty of low income students who play the game far better than your elite private school types.
I was surprised at the amount of people that had aced the military ASVAB test when I showed up at basic training. Not that acing that is similar to acing the SAT, but it's not easy either. Some of them were signed up for pretty menial jobs too.
Take a look at the data on Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago for example.
As Clarence Thomas has mentioned often “affirmative action” just covers up larger injustices like underfunded public schools and housing discrimination.
In a lot of states, we have Democratic big cities and Republican towns with a Republican state legislature.
Guess which areas in the state get the most funding for their schools —- it’s NOT the cities with the most people per square mile.
READ:
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/20/detroit-chic...
- https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/...
- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/clarence-thomass-rad...
In practice in Texas when I saw this the effect was very limited, because the best classes were largely full of the would-normally-be-in-other-schools magnet students, and didn't have a ton of uptake from the students in that school's regular geographic region. And then they gave bonus GPA points for taking those classes, so cracking the top 10% as a non-magnet-program student was harder still.
Having the classes available was certainly helpful for a small number of students who took them who may not have had access to them otherwise, and concentrating the magnet programs let the district offer more a few more advanced classes than they might have otherwise, but it also somewhat negated any opportunity-spreading effects of the 10% rule.
At least back around the turn of the century, in Arizona, the state universities gave a full tuition waiver for the top 25 or 33% of the graduating class. (Not sure if they still do) This seems at its face to be a very inclusive goal-- you'd make the program accessible to students regardless of finances.
But some schools were so aggressive on the AP and other 'weighted' programmes (A=5.0, B=4.0, etc.), that the valedictorian would have something like a 4.6 GPA, and even a standard 4.0 might not clear the top 25%. It would not be enough just to be an excellent student, you had to explicitly load up on weighted courses-- and of course, there were no weighted fine arts or vocational courses.
This leads to a bunch of toxic outcomes. A straight A student would rank below someone with an A/B record, because she chose the right courses to take. There was pressure to choose the courses which bumped the GPA as opposed to the ones which fit interests or potential commercial utility, which I suspect would lead to resource starvation and classes cancelled due to undersubscription.
One of the common complaints higher performing students have is that they are dispersed in their classes and very bored as the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator. Now, that is classrooms, not schools, but you have schools that try to accommodate gifted students in their own tracks and...why are they even bothering putting them in the same schools?
I think there's also a lot of value in giving the local students some peers that are more serious about education too. Ideally every school should offer a non-distracting environment for motivated students
Sort of. Most of them that want to go to UT want UT Austin. There's not enough room there for all of them.
I found this policy excellent, it meant I had a bunch of colleagues from really small towns with no resources and this was clearly life changing for those attending college.
It felt like everything college is supposed to be (even if imperfect).
And you think randomly selecting students instead of selecting them on the basis of merit is a way to find gems?
This is all such wishful thinking without any evidence or even, I have to say, common sense.
You'd say that, but it would be wrong.
>And you think randomly selecting students instead of selecting them on the basis of merit is a way to find gems
Totally. Especially since there's little about "merit" in the current system.
Have you never been to school?
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I think an interesting / illustrative case is the AMA as the credentialing authority for medical schools. An association of people in the profession, who have a clear interest in the supply of doctors being low, has a clear lever by which to restrain the future supply of doctors. Independent of which specific people get in and how, for the country overall, most of us would probably be better off if more people got into med school, if there were more med schools, and there were just more doctors working a decade from now. The important question isn't just who should get the seat, but which policy choice gives us a better health care system.
I'm guessing the same is true for other areas, but it's just less clear. Rather than asking "who gets to go to the best schools", more interesting is "what policies at the best schools give us a country we want to live in a generation from now?" or "what choice yields the greatest benefit, not just to the student, but to society?"
And if schools don't want to make choices from that perspective, if they want to operate like luxury brands whose goods are valued mostly because they're rare ... then maybe they shouldn't get tax exemptions around their endowments, or public funds, or the respect and esteem of a population that thinks they serve some higher, refined purpose.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-bui...
Congress, and more specifically right now, the Republican Senate is the only thing holding up funding tens of thousands of more slots (the bills are cosponsored by ~130 congresspeople, of which 100+ are Democrats and by 17 Senators, of which 15 are Democrats)
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2267...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/130...
There's a very simple solution to this problem that requires nothing other than the stroke of a pen: allow residents from OECD nations to practice medicine in the US.
There's nothing magical about an American residency. Countries like France, Britain, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Czechia, Costa Rica, Chile, and Portugal have better health outcomes than the US. Obviously there's nothing deficient about how doctors are being trained in Prague or Santiago or Seoul.
Yet American doctors have by far the highest compensation of any country in the world. Demand meet supply. Let's open up our borders and let doctors from qualified countries come here to practice. Many would flood our shores for significantly higher wages. We'd solve the doctor shortage over night.
Of course the AMA absolutely knows this. That's why they vehemently lobby against any change to the residency requirement. The AMA is a self-interest political lobby, just like any other interest group. They look out for the interest of doctors at the expense of patients. The issue about residency expansion being blocked is just a red herring. There's no reason the US can't outsource its residency training to other, much lower wage countries that are already producing superior physicians.
They were in favor of restricting slots some 25-40 years ago. The facts have changed, but the memeplex hasn’t.
Ditto for legislative solutions. There's too much conflict of interest, susceptibility to lobbying, non-representation of marginalized groups or those who would be doctors but are not because of troubling practices, etc.
From Mises.org[0]
The article is thoroughly footnoted. One might take exception with specifics, but it seems hard to argue that the above is not approximately correct.[0]: https://mises.org/library/100-years-medical-robbery
Edit: I see the downvotes, but don't see the justification. I know Mises is an often-unpopular resources, but the above article is well-researched. If there are problems with the line of reasoning, I'd love to hear your perspective on it.
If a college accepts students taking government-subsidised loans, or otherwise receives any federal funding, it should not be permitted to consider legacy [1] or institutional advancement for admissions.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences
* A community of rich folks who get to look smart-by-association
* A community of smart folks who get networked into the power networks
All the decision-makers would lose out on this. Why would this even fly? George Bush Jr went to Yale and Harvard. He looked smart. And, a bunch of people were friends with the President. Folks like him make the laws.
Elite schools make it easier for people who have money (but aren’t too academically inclined) to get into positions of political power by building credentials and connecting with a community of smart people.
Ultimately it reinforces a culture where influence can be passed to children.
Picking the top applicants backfires because people game it.
For example, consider Students A and B who're mostly identical except Student A likes to binge on Wikipedia while Student B spends every night doing SAT practice problems. Colleges that select only the top applicants get the B's of the world, who optimize their observables, while the A's seem somewhat less competitive on paper.
If you change the rules -- like you start focusing on clubs, volunteering, or even just skipping the Top-1% -- the gamers'll adjust their strategies, out-performing the non-gamers who develop actual talents. The top colleges end up getting flooded by gamers who're focused on looking good.
The pragmatic solution proposed in this article is to randomly select "good enough" applicants. This allows colleges to take in the top-performing non-gamers who have a wealth of actual skills (rather than gaming hacks) while also reducing the incentive for gamers to waste their time gaming the system.
wouldn’t you be looking for people who can achieve based on specified rules and fun to within a system, instead of undisciplined people who can’t do that but may naturally be intellectually curious?
the first makes a terrific employee, the second might not put in hard work for stuffthey don’t find interesting or may leave altogether
If you've got a simple, mechanical job that a trained monkey could do if monkeys were more intelligent, then, definitely, you'd want folks who'll slavishly adhere to whatever task is assigned -- the folks who'll spend all night doing SAT prep problems would be perfect hires.
But if you want to train innovators who'll actually advance their fields -- whether we're talking mathematicians, scientists, engineers, doctors, or business leaders -- then you'll want the folks who'll pursue such things on their own initiative along with the talents they've developed due to that intrinsic motivation.
Elite non-innovators can have their place. In science/engineering/math, they won't be leaders, but they can still be effective researchers with strong publication records, reliably churning out decent-quality papers. In medicine, they can be great practicing doctors. In business, they'd be reliable middle-management types.
Still, it'd be weird for a top institution to only have middle-management types.
Standardized testing is probably the worst offender here, since while the absolute equalizer on paper (everyone gets the same test!) it really rewards over-fitting and learning how to perform well on one type of exam.
It's probably closer to that today than most would care to publicly admit. Oh, they don't roll a dice but they mostly have some sort of academic cutoff and then decide on admissions from the remaining pool by lots of factors aiming for a diverse student body across many somewhat arbitrary dimensions. A handful may be slam-dunks above a certain floor (star athlete, parents donated a building, did some amazing humanitarian project in high school). But for the most part, there is a lot of randomness among the admissions of solidly good-enough students.
It's not insurmountable, and quite a lot a chicken and egg problem.
The most important part is, what do you do with drop outs? Or with people who try and cannot find fit? How do you handle people who have to quit for personal or family reasons, who suddenly now are concentrated on one place near the university?
Businesses that aren't based on restricted supply are often expanding. That's how you make more money!
It's not Harvard's job to run college for the whole country.
I'm sure they'll still cure cancer and get us to Mars, right?
And the truly elite who miss out by random chance ... that doesn't matter because justice doesn't require us to recognise and appropriately reward genius.
In fact, screw those priviliged geniuses, they're only first in line because they won a genetic lottery right?
/s
Sadly, this is true for a lot of engineering jobs too.
Whether they learn anything is irrelevant.
The members of the "upper middle class ticket" group might as well be selected by ballot from the intellectually qualified.
But I'd never suggest that if it in any way imperiled the idenfitifcation and support of the very best and brightest. Which, AFAICT, is exactly what this proposal would do.
"Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
Which is not to say that Social Justice isn't important. It is vital. But you don't get to it by hiring the wrong people in the wrong roles. A meritocracy excels at producing wealth - Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Unemployment Insurance, better Public Schooling... these are the kind of Social Justice programs that best distribute the wealth back to society.
To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.
By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and / or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.
This is a good point but your argumentation isn't really convincing. Here's a simple fix for your scenario: only use talks in your circuit as tie breaker. The other concern("possibly even the less qualified person") is an impossibility given your assumptions("all else being equal between speakers"). If you have a perfect meritocracy, and only use your own tests to measure merit, then you would maintain it.
Of course, as you said, achieving perfect meritocracy is impossible, which means we should always consider how to work around the flaws in our existing approach. I like the idea of randomization, but you have to consider that it has its own flaws - drawing from a small pool wouldnot have the desired diversifying effect, but drawing from a too large pool might introduce too many students that are not at the same academic level, with all the problems that brings. In a sense, random choice has similar problems of not being able to achieve "perfection" as meritocracy, and they would need to be balanced together.
To me, all of this concern over the admissions process of the top tier schools tells me that there's a growing need for an even more elite tier of schools. Those schools will undoubtedly have a diversity problem, but it does not sit right with me to limit the ceiling for the most academically gifted students just because most of them come from a privileged background. What this tends to do is exacerbate the problem, as the more wealthy can afford more expensive, privately tailored programs to their kids - the brilliant underprivileged kids will not have this opportunity. Just like we'll never achieve perfect meritocracy, we'll never eliminate privilege - our pursuit of equality should be tempered by the same concerns of unintended, negative consequences due to our imperfect approach.
What if Sarah spoke at a women's only conference. At this conference, it's not just a "bias" towards women speakers, it's a downright rule.
How do we regard Sarah's experience here?
As an analogy, safe driving is a good principle. Assessing the safety of a driver by past behaviour ("this person hasn't crashed in a while") is decent but biased metric. E.g. "drunkenness" might be a better metric. But the choice of metric doesn't (in)validate the underlying principle.
>> a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done
Why? That’s not a meritocracy, it is tenure based. Tenure does not always correlate with merit, so the basis of your example is moot.
"Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?"
Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game."
-- Freddie de Boer (from The Cult of Smart, an incredible book btw)
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/08/wh...
On the other hand, remember what Roman Hruska said about needing some representation of mediocre people on the Supreme Court?
"We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos."
...and people still make fun of it.
I think meritocracy would be a really bad way to go about this, because rooting power in 'merit' would very quickly lead to merit being defined as whatever maintains incumbent power. So you'd end up with not only something that isn't meritocratic in any reasonable sense, but also corrupts the idea of merit. And since that's often knowledge-based merit, you'd end up with a situation where whatever 'knowledge' incumbents had proved proficiency in would become something they would protect against all challengers. Intellectual stagnation and extreme discouragment of creativity would be the norm.
Not from a society-level utilitarian perspective.
Meritocracy aims to elevate the most competent people to the elite ranks while working to remove incompetent elites from power. (Given power is a zero-sum game, we have no short-term solution to the existence of elites.)
A properly-tuned meritocratic measure thus looks for what a society needs in its elites to survive and thrive. (We don’t have such a function.) It may not be fair, individually. But it will he efficient, socially.
Paradoxically, those elites must then recognise that their position is largely a result of luck, and thus not an opportunity to become extractive towards the rest of the populace. That latter component means not every selection mechanism should to be meritocratic. This is one philosophical basis for balancing a meritocratic private sector and public service with elected elites, whose selection is decidedly not meritocratic.
But what is merit? Take the "aptitude and the willingness" in the other reply: we cannot decide to be naturally driven or passionate about something, or being quick learners and so on.
We can only decide to put efforts into something. Unless our energy is depleted by issues that we cannot control, ranging from being concerned about financial difficulties, family issues, to physical and mental health, and so on.
Mostly fair is worse than completely fair, but way better than unfair or random.
If 80% is getting a fair deal, but you wanting to solve the issue for the remaining 20% results in making things worse for the 50%, you're not solving the issue.
Deleted Comment
Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’ve yet to hear anyone who complains about the inherent biases in meritocracy propose any system which isn’t just as pathological. Like, what does “fair” actually mean here? Should we select based on IQ tests? That’s illegal. Select based on conscientious? That biases for people who have free time - and hence it biases for wealth. Select randomly? Actually it turns out society benefits more from educating our best and brightest.
“Meritocracy“ is never perfect. But it’s better than any other system I can think of. Complaining is easy. If you were in charge, how would you make it better?
For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good.
Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better selection" of students, was able to point out that this bias was limited by the fact that admission was based on a lottery.
I’m not saying meritocracies are bad- they’re the ideal, they’re generally what everyone wants. Of course you want the best people for a given job or educational opportunity. But when people start talking about meritocracies as if the only thing preventing us from having better ones are people making conscious decisions to have them, I seriously wonder about their life experiences, worldliness, and personal/professional maturity.
For example, it’s common for people to attack things like pushes for diversity as being antithetical to meritocracies, but the intention of things like encouraging diversity is to build the foundation for better meritocracies in the future by helping weed out the things that stand in the way of better meritocracies now. And it’s also very common for those same people to be convinced that if only the world was more meritocratic, they would personally be more successful and everyone would respect them more, because they see themselves as not getting what they think they deserve. Funny how that works, kinda like how libertarians generally think that if only everything was more libertarian, they personally would be more successful, because other people would no longer hold them back. They think some other people would be more successful too, and some less deserving people would be less successful, but their emotional pull for the whole belief system comes from thinking they deserve more than they’ve got and that it must be someone else’s fault. And IME, in practice they’re super wrong about that, but it must be a wonderful sort of fantasy to go through life believing. “I’m better than everyone seems think I am, and it’s other people’s fault that everyone doesn’t see me that way. If only all those other people would see the light and stop holding me back and allow the truly meritorious like myself to flourish!”
> "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
These two sentences contradict each other. Also, if making money was as easy as you say once you have a pile of money the Forbes Rich List would be much more stable than it is. In reality most of the extremely wealthy fail to beat an index fund over the generations because of hubris. The Rockefellers are still rich but their combined wealth as a portion of the US economy is less than the founder of their fortune’s was when he made it.
None of this matters to the organizations offering patents of nobility of course. Ideally they’d be abolished, all real property expropriated and the IP released to the public domain. Anything that reduces their prestige is to the good though. Reducing the fellow feeling of the ruling class by giving them a less concentrated base of experience is to the good.
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-problem-isnt...
> Liberal technocrats give us literally no reason at all to think their interests are aligned with the great majority of people, yet when they are attacked as a governing class they stress their credentials and competency. But it'd be worse if they're doing bad stuff efficiently!
...
> The American system of government was built on the assumption that the most salient political divides would reflect geography, not ideology or class. The senator from Massachusetts would share bonds in common with the lay citizenry of Boston that he did not share with a senator from South Carolina. On the national sphere this would allow him to represent the interests of his constituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in American history than others; yet because of the way American politicians are elected, this sense of representing the interests of a geographically bounded group of people is more true in the political arena than in most others.
> Things have not always been this way.
> Though commentators sometimes speak of the old WASP gentry as an earlier era's national elite, they were not really so: they were the business, cultural, and political elites of one region of America. They ruled the roost in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. During the WASP heyday these states had greater economic and demographic heft than other regions in the nation, and so families with names like Roosevelt, Adams, and Lodge had an outsized influence on national politics and culture. But those families were not competing against the best and brightest of the entire nation: they were competing with each other. Texas' best and brightest did not strive to get into Harvard—they strove to get into Baylor. They were generally satisfied to be Texas elites, and if they operated on the national stage they tended to think of themselves as such.
Churn on that list is largely an illusion.
The wealth required to maintain a spot on Forbes list is growing significantly faster than inflation. Wealth that would have put you in first place in 1992 ($6.3 Billion) or 12.49 Billion in 2020 money, is less than 1/2 what it takes make the top 20 today. Don’t worry Bill Gated may have lost the #1 spot, but hey he’s got 7x as much money despite giving away billions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2020/04/07/the...
It doesn’t, does it?