>”human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children”
That doesn’t sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad?
Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
It seems like the system of “nepotism” the paper describes is not bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes that when passing occupation from father to son would be inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less
I think it's fine in a true "family business" e.g. you wholly own a hardware store or a restaurant and you have your family working there and eventually you hand it off to your children (assuming they want it).
In large public companies or institutions that have shareholders or state owners then it's unfair for an executive or senior administrator to carve out a job for a family member. He's giving them something he doesn't own, unlike in the family business example.
Even in the family business, there should be limits. What if the family business becomesand empire worth >20% of a contries GDP - e.g. Samsung. It is absolutely not reasonable to pass this amount of wealth to children of the founder.
No, we can't, because it rarely ever works out that way.
I've yet to work at a family owned company where the children were anywhere near as competent as their parents, and I've worked at multigenerational companies, so imagine that.
The one I spent the most time with was a publisher whose founders were Tulane educated intellectuals who walked the walk and talked the talk. The next generation sounded like they fell off an alligator tour air boat with the intellect to match. Their children are the dumbest group of human beings I've ever seen graduate from high school. Utterly and completely useless for anything other than getting hammered on the weekends and keeping random desk chairs from rolling away. Yet they were guaranteed jobs, even as the company's numbers continued to dwindle and they continued to use far more resources than they contributed. No Christmas bonus? That's because they needed to pay these morons enough to live in the same neighborhood as their father, meaning that they needed to make about 80% more than anyone else in their roles.
Ownership is not leadership. Leadership takes a set of skills that many people don't possess, and it's less common with the children of the well-off.
That is likely to be true if we take a limited firm-centric view (the local shop will never be the best it can be if the next guy has to be the first son of the last guy). But having a multigenerational shop and shopkeeper, or farms and farmers, may be better for the larger community than a Walmart headquartered in another country or a commercial farm that couldn't give two shits about the locals.
Not saying it is better, but in some cases it probably is. Certainly could be in some cases
We currently live in a society that valorizes meritocracy and equal opportunity and also providing for one's descendants. It supposes that you're you should have equal opportunity to enjoy a middle class or greater lifestyle if you're not a total mess, and that your success is something you can provide to your children as a leg up.
Not every society struggles/struggled so poignantly with the contradiction between those things as we now do, but we do, and that's where the modern criticism of nepotism originates.
Teaching your children your trade by inviting them into your workshop or boardroom is sensible, but it inevitably means that there's less room in that workshop or boardroom for the scrappy, bright outsider whose supposed to have a fair chance.
There's not really one right answer under that kind of tension, so there's no surprise when criticism is levied in either direction.
Well... the "right answer" is going to be subjective. But I think parents providing for their children is going to win out 1000 times out of 1000. It's got human psychology and biology behind it.
If doing what is "right" means I have to hamstring my kid's chances, then I'm going to pass on "right" (or, more likely, re-orient my thinking to make it not "right") and help my kid.
Honestly, I think "nepotism" and "occupational persistence" are more about how we feel or judge the phenomenon, and what are prior expectations are.
If sons and nephews are bad managers and a business suffers... that's nepotism. If they're good managers and the business succeeds, that's a family business. if the local authorities hire family... that's nepotism, because we have an expectation that it should be done differently.
A lot of words are like this. Positive and negative words with positive or negative associations that we use to describe the same thing... depending on the association we want to emphasize.
But once homo retcom has words... we think in those words. So, we think of nepotism (for example) as this distinct thing, and expect this nuanced definition to account for the negative or positive aspects.
This paper is basically a formalization of that process.
It seems to me that academia grew out of the church doctors who grew out of the knighthood: thé eldest son of an aristocrat would inherit the land without lifting a finger, but to earn their spurs they needed to convince existing knights they were capable of doing equivalent work in the field. So, out of major feudal institutions, it was among the least nepotist.
Nah, we can't. We can't redefine words to make us feel better.
According to Cambridge Dictionary, nepotism is "the act of using your power or influence to get good jobs or unfair advantages for members of your own family." As soon as you favored your kid, it's nepotism, and it's bad. It undermines meritocracy and contributes to an unjust society. It's pretty straightforward to understand.
Right, but that definition is so incredibly broad as to include any and all ways you might provide for your children. If you're wealthy and you use your money to buy more expensive, healthier food for your kids then that could be argued to be "using your power or influence to get an unfair advantage for members of your own family" since many other families can't afford that better food.
More broadly, the issue of "unfair advantages" and the demonization of those who have them is explored rather poignantly in the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut [1]. The story takes place in a dystopian future where beautiful people are forced to wear masks to make their faces look ugly, those with beautiful voices have to use devices to make their voices sound awful, and anyone with above-average intelligence has to wear a radio headset which constantly plays annoying and distracting noises to prevent them from thinking too deeply. The title character is forced to endure multiple of these "handicaps", including heavy weights to slow him down and tire him out so that he cannot make use of his athletic gifts.
Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them (within the bounds of what's acceptable and ethical) get a job they're qualified for is good. This is basically how every mutli generational family business works.
Giving an unqualified kid a no-show job or a real job they f-up is nepotism and bad.
> Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
That difference is only on paper, purely academical. In reality, almost all the time, this quickly morphs into pushing your kin into positions of power where they make a mess but you still tolerate them because supposedly they are at least somewhat predictable and you don't want to invest the time and effort to build trust with a stranger.
(Or whatever their actual motivation is -- to me it remains mostly a mystery.)
> We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.
"Protestants also tried to impose their own bigotry but lacked sufficient coordination and authority. Had they been more effective, modern science and sustained economic growth might have never taken off."
That's an interesting take. It seems to have a continental Europe perspective. In the first 150 years of the American colonies, Catholicism was illegal, except for Pennsylvania. However, even there, Catholics remained disenfranchised. The first Catholic university in the US, Georgetown, opened in 1789. (Harvard: 1636, Yale: 1701). The first amendment was ratified in 1791 (meaning Catholicism could no longer be made illegal). Catholics were mostly unwelcome to attend other schools, that was the reason for divergence and almost certainly assured a high nepotism rate. Also note that in the 1700's/1800's nepotism in government was considered normal.
Catholicism was legal for some of those 150 years in Maryland; the colony was founded by Catholics and intended as a haven for them. Protestants moved in from elsewhere and eventually outlawed Catholicism though.
> indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress
I've always blamed this on there not being an "orthodox" Protestantism. Since every protestant preacher is a different religion, it enabled atheists to work freely (as unspecified mystery protestants.)
"examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence."
Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism.
I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood.
Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.
In particular (from a very quick glance!) it looks like they distinguish between nepotism and inherited human capital only by using a particular model. They have data on father-son pairs and the correlation between them in terms of publication record; and data on total number of publications of (a) academics' sons and (b) outsiders. They impose a model with just nepotism and inherited human capital and fit it to the data. I'd worry there might be other explanations for the observed patterns.
>Nobel laureates cluster together. 696 of the 727 winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics belong to one single academic family tree. 668 trace their ancestry to Emmanuel Stupanus, 228 to Lord Rayleigh (physics, 1904). Craig Mello (medicine, 2006) counts 51 Nobelists among his ancestors. Chemistry laureates have the most Nobel ancestors and descendants, economics laureates the fewest. Chemistry is the central discipline. Its Nobelists have trained and are trained by Nobelists in other fields. Nobelists in physics (medicine) have trained (by) others. Economics stands apart. Openness to other disciplines is the same in recent and earlier times. The familial concentration of Nobelists is lower now than it used to be.
>nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children
Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement.
Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people.
This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.
Yes! Thank you so much for pointing this out! Our ideas about the nuclear family probably derive from the invention of agriculture, not from the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been in this earth.
It's individualism vs collectivism (if I got my terms right), with one side being "got mine, fuck you", whereas the other says that we're better together.
Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
There were different kinds of kings though - before a certain point in the history of most countries kings had to actively fight and wage war to achieve and maintain their positions. Over time this became more of a position where the king would deserve their positions simply by having ancestors who were "stupendous badasses" but otherwise actually had to do very little.
To me, nepotism is a classic principal-agent problem.
Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it.
If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism.
If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money.
But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.
Yes, plus sometimes the "owner" is a group of people. Then it gets more difficult for them to coordinate against the agent.
If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
Nepotism is mostly a scaling problem. If you have a decent family and aren't an idiot about it - then for smaller stakes, and over shorter time-spans, nepotism usually works extremely well. And there is precious little damage to society, if Chuck hires his son Sam to drive one of his Chilly Chuck's Ice Cream Trucks for the summer.
But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low.
[Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
So what? I don't make decisions, and I don't think society should make decisions, based on "mammalian instinct". My standards are a little higher than that.
It's a common, but bizarre way to try to argue something is inevitable. You don't have to act like a cow, or even a chimpanzee - if someone says you do, it's not a compliment.
> it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts
It reduces outcomes and fairness because productive work is shifted to unproductive people who lack merit.
> the gap in science that emerged during the Counter-Reformation was enormous, lasted centuries
Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way above the Brits, that's for sure.
If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself. Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country, had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia [1]:
> He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent.
Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a Catholic canon.
So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs.
Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most respected economists in the history of the dismal science were actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of their times in many domains of economics.
Germany anyway is a special case, because at this time it was quite heterodox. And even in protestant countries like Prussia, you could have a positive effect from Catholic countries surrounding like Poland. Also the quoted articles don't really support the position.
I think many of the posters defending nepotism are missing a very important issue. Which is that it is bad for diversity and may be a factor limiting the participation of some ethnic groups in academia
Readit News
That doesn’t sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad?
Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
It seems like the system of “nepotism” the paper describes is not bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes that when passing occupation from father to son would be inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less
In large public companies or institutions that have shareholders or state owners then it's unfair for an executive or senior administrator to carve out a job for a family member. He's giving them something he doesn't own, unlike in the family business example.
100% ? 50% ? Something in the middle?
I've yet to work at a family owned company where the children were anywhere near as competent as their parents, and I've worked at multigenerational companies, so imagine that.
The one I spent the most time with was a publisher whose founders were Tulane educated intellectuals who walked the walk and talked the talk. The next generation sounded like they fell off an alligator tour air boat with the intellect to match. Their children are the dumbest group of human beings I've ever seen graduate from high school. Utterly and completely useless for anything other than getting hammered on the weekends and keeping random desk chairs from rolling away. Yet they were guaranteed jobs, even as the company's numbers continued to dwindle and they continued to use far more resources than they contributed. No Christmas bonus? That's because they needed to pay these morons enough to live in the same neighborhood as their father, meaning that they needed to make about 80% more than anyone else in their roles.
Ownership is not leadership. Leadership takes a set of skills that many people don't possess, and it's less common with the children of the well-off.
Not saying it is better, but in some cases it probably is. Certainly could be in some cases
Not every society struggles/struggled so poignantly with the contradiction between those things as we now do, but we do, and that's where the modern criticism of nepotism originates.
Teaching your children your trade by inviting them into your workshop or boardroom is sensible, but it inevitably means that there's less room in that workshop or boardroom for the scrappy, bright outsider whose supposed to have a fair chance.
There's not really one right answer under that kind of tension, so there's no surprise when criticism is levied in either direction.
If doing what is "right" means I have to hamstring my kid's chances, then I'm going to pass on "right" (or, more likely, re-orient my thinking to make it not "right") and help my kid.
If sons and nephews are bad managers and a business suffers... that's nepotism. If they're good managers and the business succeeds, that's a family business. if the local authorities hire family... that's nepotism, because we have an expectation that it should be done differently.
A lot of words are like this. Positive and negative words with positive or negative associations that we use to describe the same thing... depending on the association we want to emphasize.
But once homo retcom has words... we think in those words. So, we think of nepotism (for example) as this distinct thing, and expect this nuanced definition to account for the negative or positive aspects.
This paper is basically a formalization of that process.
According to Cambridge Dictionary, nepotism is "the act of using your power or influence to get good jobs or unfair advantages for members of your own family." As soon as you favored your kid, it's nepotism, and it's bad. It undermines meritocracy and contributes to an unjust society. It's pretty straightforward to understand.
More broadly, the issue of "unfair advantages" and the demonization of those who have them is explored rather poignantly in the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut [1]. The story takes place in a dystopian future where beautiful people are forced to wear masks to make their faces look ugly, those with beautiful voices have to use devices to make their voices sound awful, and anyone with above-average intelligence has to wear a radio headset which constantly plays annoying and distracting noises to prevent them from thinking too deeply. The title character is forced to endure multiple of these "handicaps", including heavy weights to slow him down and tire him out so that he cannot make use of his athletic gifts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
- fridgescaping
- Fanum tax
- Quit-Tok
- runglasses
- boomerocracy
- appification
And that does include adding definitions to existing words. "Literally" can also be defined by its antonym.
Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them (within the bounds of what's acceptable and ethical) get a job they're qualified for is good. This is basically how every mutli generational family business works.
Giving an unqualified kid a no-show job or a real job they f-up is nepotism and bad.
That difference is only on paper, purely academical. In reality, almost all the time, this quickly morphs into pushing your kin into positions of power where they make a mess but you still tolerate them because supposedly they are at least somewhat predictable and you don't want to invest the time and effort to build trust with a stranger.
(Or whatever their actual motivation is -- to me it remains mostly a mystery.)
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
> We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.
This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708
That's an interesting take. It seems to have a continental Europe perspective. In the first 150 years of the American colonies, Catholicism was illegal, except for Pennsylvania. However, even there, Catholics remained disenfranchised. The first Catholic university in the US, Georgetown, opened in 1789. (Harvard: 1636, Yale: 1701). The first amendment was ratified in 1791 (meaning Catholicism could no longer be made illegal). Catholics were mostly unwelcome to attend other schools, that was the reason for divergence and almost certainly assured a high nepotism rate. Also note that in the 1700's/1800's nepotism in government was considered normal.
I think this is still common. People like to think a son or daughter will govern just like a parent. But it sometimes doesn't work that way.
I've always blamed this on there not being an "orthodox" Protestantism. Since every protestant preacher is a different religion, it enabled atheists to work freely (as unspecified mystery protestants.)
Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism.
I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood.
Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04936-1
>Nobel laureates cluster together. 696 of the 727 winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics belong to one single academic family tree. 668 trace their ancestry to Emmanuel Stupanus, 228 to Lord Rayleigh (physics, 1904). Craig Mello (medicine, 2006) counts 51 Nobelists among his ancestors. Chemistry laureates have the most Nobel ancestors and descendants, economics laureates the fewest. Chemistry is the central discipline. Its Nobelists have trained and are trained by Nobelists in other fields. Nobelists in physics (medicine) have trained (by) others. Economics stands apart. Openness to other disciplines is the same in recent and earlier times. The familial concentration of Nobelists is lower now than it used to be.
but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or something like that)
Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement.
Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people.
This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.
Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
Seems more sensible to just assume they all negate each other out in the long run, unless proven otherwise by voting records.
Including having lots of offsprings. Apparently, "not procreating to save the planet" is for the poor.
Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it.
If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism.
If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money.
But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.
If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low.
[Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
So what? I don't make decisions, and I don't think society should make decisions, based on "mammalian instinct". My standards are a little higher than that.
It's a common, but bizarre way to try to argue something is inevitable. You don't have to act like a cow, or even a chimpanzee - if someone says you do, it's not a compliment.
> it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts
It reduces outcomes and fairness because productive work is shifted to unproductive people who lack merit.
Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way above the Brits, that's for sure.
If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself. Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country, had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia [1]:
> He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent.
Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a Catholic canon.
So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most respected economists in the history of the dismal science were actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of their times in many domains of economics.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-024-09244-0