The Myth of American Meritocracy

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

by edderly • 14 years ago

122 129 14 years ago

Its much longer than I expected (I'm .25 of the way through), but so far a much higher quality read than I expected from the domain of 'the american conservative'

jacques_chester11• 14 years ago

That was a cheap shot.

There is an intellectual foundation for many parts of conservatism; see Michael Oakeshott in particular as the leading 20th century philosopher of conservatism as a serious intellectual movement.

For the pro-market counter-case, see FA Hayek's Why I Am Not A Conservative; though I think Hayek later contradicted himself in The Origins and Effects of Our Morals.

EliRivers4• 14 years ago

The greatest trick the ruling classes in the US ever pulled was convincing everyone else, especially those who suffer the most from the current system, that they're not poor and they're not an underclass - they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

When I was working in Italy I would sometimes listen to a US Forces radio station on my drive in each morning, and the success story propaganda was fascinating. Every so often, there would be a completely irrelevant and disconnected sixty second summary of some lucky chap who did really well in business, with an undertone that all you needed was to work hard and you'd become a millionaire.

gadders8• 14 years ago

Well, lottery and inheritances excepted, you won't become one if you don't work hard.

EliRivers4• 14 years ago

I disagree. If you have the right connections and someone willing to bankroll you, you can coast through school, get into a top university, and coast your way into a high-paying job that your connections arranged for you.

potatolicious• 14 years ago

Hard work is a (mostly) necessary but insufficient condition for becoming successful.

The main problem here is that much of US society believes it is a necessary and sufficient condition - i.e., they've perverted "you need to work hard to get rich" to "if you work hard you will get rich", or the more pernicious format: "if you're not rich you didn't work hard".

The last form of this thought is one of the most persistently toxic concepts of modern US society.

1337biz2• 14 years ago

This "greatest trick" is in other news also called the "American Dream". It's all a matter of perspective.

EliRivers4• 14 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you agreeing that the "American Dream" is now (to some extent, which may have been different in the past) part of the effort of convincing people that the game isn't rigged against them, or are you disagreeing with that?

refurb• 14 years ago

I guess it all depends on what your definition of the American Dream is. It's all relative.

Definition 1 - In America, it doesn't matter who you are, you can be successful. You could run your own business or attain a high-level political office (to name a few).

Definition 2 - In America, if you work hard, you will always attain a high level of success. You will never be treated unfairly or have to obstacles you need to overcome in order to succeed.

I think if you ask most immigrants who came to the US from countries with authoritarian regimes, they'll agree the "American Dream" still exists. Of course their perspective is quite different. In their home country no matter how hard they worked they could never be successful because they were the wrong race, member of the wrong political party, didn't have connections to the right people, didn't go to the right schools, etc.

I don't think any reasonable definition of the "American Dream" demands that America is perfect. It's just an observation that America is very unique in the world in the opportunities it offers people from all backgrounds. Heck, I've spoke to European friends who feel that the US offers more opportunities for everyone than their home country does.

jakeonthemove2• 14 years ago

It's a better way of thinking than "I'm poor, I don't think I stand a chance". Even if people don't become rich or successful, they still feel better about themselves.

The "work hard and you may become a millionaire" undertone is a good thing.

smutticus• 14 years ago

Is it still a good thing if it convinces the poor to not act in their self interest by not advocating for change?

If we agree the american dream is fallacy then is the only purpose of it to keep the rich from being guillotined?

I'm not sure what I think of the american dream or even what it means. But I find the idea of lying to the disenfranchised so they can feel better about themselves condescending.

tonyedgecombe2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure about that, the trouble is if you flip it around you end up saying people are poor because of their own failings.

Modern society looks down on poor people, labelling them as losers when they are really a product of unfortunate circumstances. Unfortunate because they had no books in their house, unfortunate because they were surrounded by family who derided learning, unfortunate because they had the wrong colour skin or wrong gender for the career they wanted.

I'm not even sure I buy your argument that they feel better about themselves. Being constantly reminded of your supposed failings isn't a great place to be.

The worst part of "work hard and you may become a millionaire" is for the majority it is a lie.

paganel• 14 years ago

> Even if people don't become rich or successful, they still feel better about themselves.

That's the thing, this line of thinking has come to equate "being successful" with "being rich/having material wealth". The fact is we cannot all be rich, because "being rich" it's relative (a "poor" American is "rich" compared to someone from Laos, for example), so what should we do?

I know of some countries that have created a "happiness index", in place of the GDP-based index, but I don't think that's the best solution, just a realization that things are probably not on the right track. For example, my personal solution is to base my views when it comes to "life success" on the views of Seneca (who was a very rich guy, incidentally), whose views have also been borrowed by early Christianity, if I'm not mistaken.

king_jester• 14 years ago

> The "work hard and you may become a millionaire" undertone is a good thing.

I disagree. Few people will become millionaires compared to the general population, and many people who come into wealth didn't do so because of hard work. This undertone obscures the actual facts about wealth and who is wealthy, things which have a lot to do with social inequality.

venus• 14 years ago

For a long time I have had this theory that the reason the poorer classes in the US seemed so paradoxically opposed to higher taxes, or just taxes at all, for the super-rich was because they secretly believed that, one day, they'd be super-rich and those taxes were going to be on them.

It's indeed an excellent trick. Appeals nicely to people's greed and wishful thinking.

geori• 14 years ago

It's not a theory, it's a fact that people vote aspirationally.

LDale• 14 years ago

I disagree - I believe that when these people make such statements as "I never got a job from a poor man" they actually understand, and accept, their low social position in relation to the wealthy. It is a product of an authoritarian mindset. They respect, or at least accept, the authority of the wealthy - to whom they serve in one way or another - while claiming privilege over those they perceive to be of lower status (say - public servants, minorities, foreigners, immigrants, sexual deviants, etc. and so-on). The wealthy or influential understand that many, if not most, men have a desire to be led - so they conveniently choose to lead these men in such a way that benefits their own status and wealth.

A question of importance, then, is what happened to noblesse oblige...

iskander• 14 years ago

I think Steinbeck's original phrasing is better:

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

snowwrestler• 14 years ago

No one becomes rich by not trying, and quietly accepting their lot in life.

Not everyone who tries to get rich, will get rich. In fact, most won't. That is true.

That doesn't mean that trying is foolish. Quite the contrary; it is the basis of free market capitalism. When everyone tries, our collective choices in the marketplace can select for the best ideas, most organized managers, most inspiring leaders.

If no one tries, we're stuck with whoever is on top now, staying on top. That's not a recipe for improvement in a changing world.

olalonde2• 14 years ago

> The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students.

I find the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg examples poorly chosen. Silicon Valley is probably one of the few remaining industries that largely resembles a meritocracy in America. There are countless cases of people succeeding despite lacking a formal/prestigious education or having the right connections.

jwoah12• 14 years ago

Can you give a few of those examples? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do have this (possibly unwarranted) feeling that most of the supposedly unconnected people succeeding in the startup world today at least have wealthy parents allowing them to work full-time on their startup ambitions without worrying about a job.

MrScruff• 14 years ago

Exactly. This is true for a lot of careers, eg. acting. It's a lot harder to risk everything pursuing your dream if you know there's no safety net when things don't work out.

gadders8• 14 years ago

Steve Jobs? I don't believe his adopted family was particularly wealthy.

carbocation• 14 years ago

I completely agree with you. These are examples (Zuckerberg a more pure example than Gates) of Harvard having chosen well based on merit. At least, in retrospect, it is easy to say this.

atlantic• 14 years ago

On the contrary, these examples seem well chosen. If it is true that the elite is essentially a closed society that looks after its own, while trying to maintain the illusion that a meritocracy is still in operation, then you would expect a certain number of people of modest background to make it into the ranks of the millionaires (thus providing the material for the "success stories" in the media), but none at all into the ranks of the billionaires.

nuje• 14 years ago

Anyone know how big the Asian demographic is in the US? Would help in guesstimating sincerity of this (vs just a play to get their vote after losing the black and hispanic groups)

Regardless, the bigger story of the alarming anti-meritocratic direction in the US is the poor social mobility in general.

edit: WP says Asians are 5.6% of US population.

bane5• 14 years ago

Caveat for those outside the U.S. American vernacular generally does not include people from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Central Asian countries or Siberia as "Asian".

So there are lots of qualifications needed for what constitutes this number. If it is a self-selected demographic choice it may include these groups, e.g. many peoples from the Indian subcontinent refer to themselves as "Asian" even though this doesn't align with the American use of the word.

codegeek• 14 years ago

I know where you are coming from. But on paper, Asians include people from Indian subcontinent etc. See this wp link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_Americans

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

I believe this article specifically states that it inludes Indian subcontinent, Cambodia, Phillipines, and Vietnam with the typical Orientals.

ht_th• 14 years ago

To me, these two paragraphs below were enlightening. Not only the admission is sketchy, but the study program can be as well. I wonder why other USA-ians as a community/society seem to accept this kind of favoritism. As the author repeatedly notes, here in Western Europe this is unthinkable. Time and time I am confronted with the differences between USA and Western Europe, even though we seem so close culturally. I find it fascinating. Thanks for linking the article here on HackerNews.

""" Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.90

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”91

"""

guelo• 14 years ago

Damn, there should be a length warning before you start down that thing. Looks like about an hour read.

digitalsushi• 14 years ago

Are we so ardently lazy, so passionate about sloth that we should feel entitled to warnings that we might inadvertently devote ourselves to something? Would someone make a similar claim were they to accidentally sit down at a free, seven course dinner?

pfortuny2• 14 years ago

Like "warning, deep reasoning ahead and with a lot of examples to clarify"?

DanielBMarkham2• 14 years ago

For anybody that's been paying attention in the last 20 years, the collegiate funnel to success is broken in the technology/startup sector.

I'm not dismissing the role of education, however. Education is vastly important. A formal education with an expensive stamp on it? Not so much.

Continuing my discussion of the startup/technology sector, there was a time when a great degree would get you into places where you worked with awesome folks doing hugely important jobs. Over time, more awesome folks and hugely important jobs existed separate from that great degree. We've now reached a point where having that great degree many times is counter-indicative of performance ability, so it becomes kind of a social club.

I hate to say it, but for run-of-the-mill high technology jobs where you interact heavily with a business customer and make some magic happen? I view deep dives in college as a warning sign that you might be validating yourself against a model that has little practical impact in the larger world.

I really hated to admit that, because I deeply love education. But dang it, I believe the tables are flipped. You are more likely to get great help in the startup/technology sector from some 20-year-old who knows everything about technology from his personal passions than you are from a 25-year-old with a Master's degree from an Ivy League institution. And in terms of organizations, it's a big red flag as far as productivity goes for those places with tight controls over collegiate applicant. Unless you're building the next LHC. Whenever I see some job that's a straight technology job that has "and a masters degree in CS" without the following "or equivalent experience"? I'm thinking this isn't a place I want to be associated with. They have no idea what they are doing.

jacques_chester11• 14 years ago

Disclaimer: I earned my BCompSci with 1st Class Honours -- ie, a miniature research degree -- last year and I am damn proud of the work I did to get it.

> You are more likely to get great help in the startup/technology sector from some 20-year-old who knows everything about technology from his personal passions than you are from a 25-year-old with a Master's degree from an Ivy League institution.

This is a false dichotomy with a side order of strawman.

Here, let me play:

"You are more likely to get great help in the startup/technology sector from some 25-year-old who pursued their passion for websites and earned a Masters from a dissertation on HTTP than you are from a 20-year-old with a who reads two dozen blogs and keeps up with the tweets".

See how that works?

Whether a person has a degree or not is orthogonal to their passion for a subject. But it so happens that you don't get a top score in a research degree by just ticking the boxes or colouring between the lines. You need to be passionate about the topic.

And it so happens that this is true of mastery of any subject. Those who are passionate about a subject will obsessively read about it, study it, tinker with it and spend the time to deeply grok a topic because that's what they love doing.

Sometimes this happens in academia. Sometimes in industry.

DanielBMarkham2• 14 years ago

Great job of picking apart the logic flaws in my argument. Thank you.

But I think you missed my goal. I was making a sweeping generalization about my personal preferences. Much as "I've found I like ice cream with chocolate in it more than others" Such statements are by necessity overly broad and full of false dichotomies.

I do appreciate your comment, however. It helps clarify further discussion. Just wanted to point out that my goal wasn't a deep dive on all things graduate-degree related. It was to announce (mostly to myself) a heuristic that I have been carrying for a while without recognizing it.

Congrats on your degree. It's great to achieve a goal. Now go make a difference in the world. Getting a degree wasn't it.

paulsutter3• 14 years ago

So you would expect similar [technology startup] success rates between a YC participant and a BCompSci with 1st Class Honours?

It's not a question of passion, it's a question of goal orientation. My experience is that results-oriented environments (like YC) have better outcomes than status-oriented environments (anyplace that confers come thing called a "BCompSci with 1st Class Honours").

geebee• 14 years ago

I agree, but there's one difference I see here. The general public still has a greater expectation that a 25 year old with a Master's degree from an Ivy League institution will be knowledgeable than a 20 year old who reads two dozen blogs and keeps up with the tweets.

So yes, you can create any favorable/unfavorable comparison you want with the words by adding "passion" before the comma. But there are some instances where people still need this reminder.

Just recently, a recruiter wrote that a CS degree from Brown would count for a lot more than one from UIUC or U Tex. I was personally sort of shocked by this, because I thought that it was widely understood that the rigor and quality of CS programs at these universities was very high (absolutely nothing against Brown, which has great students, I was just sort of amazed that a recruiter would discount degrees from two "top 10" programs simply because, as large state schools, they're easier to "get into"... yeah, and anyone can "get into" basic training in the marines, it's getting through that's the tough part). So I'd say "a student who has excelled in a highly rigorous CS program is better prepared than an indifferent student from an elite college."

See, I just did it. But is this as vacuous as any statement you can construct using this trick/tactic?

I will say one thing - you've added something to my "alert phrases." You're entirely right that people do abuse this rhetorical trick, so I'll be on the lookout for it. However, I wouldn't dismiss these sorts of comparisons outright, they can be meaningful.

BCM43• 14 years ago

I've been looking through sysadmin and programming job ads, and I've been wondering what "equivalent experience" means. Would you mind shedding some light?

mcguire5• 14 years ago

I find it strange that you would bring up the (possibly mythical) "20-year-old who knows everything about technology" in the same statement as "deep dives in college as a warning sign". In my, admittedly limited, experience, the big difference between someone with "a formal education with an expensive stamp" and someone without is breadth.

There are, as far as I've seen, very few "20-year-olds who know everything about technology", but there are plenty of 20-year-olds who know a great deal about some specific technology or technologies. And if that technology is what you need (note, not what you want), they're golden. And if by "startup/technology sector", you mean the "web startup sector", that's fairly likely. On the other hand, if it isn't, you may not be. If all you have is a hammer and a screwdriver, everything is going to look like a threaded nail.

jacques_chester11• 14 years ago

One thing he mentions in passing is that the Ivy League process is built on looking for "future leaders".

There's not really a test for such qualities. I mean, you can try, but it's very difficult to see how someone performs in trying circumstances until you put them there.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow (which I'm sure many of HNers have read), Kahneman gives an anecdote about his time working for the Israeli Defence Force. The IDF wanted a way to identify who should be put through officer training, and they turned to a team of psychologists to develop a testing program.

Kahneman and his colleagues came up with a series of scenario-based tests. Some problem would be posed to a group of soldiers ("move this log over the top of this wall"). The group would be observed and notes taken.

One thing that the psychologists watched for was spontaneous leadership. Who in the group took charge? Surely such a soldier was bound to command!

The problem is that, upon reviewing the performance of their selections, Kahneman and his colleagues found that their candidates did no better -- either in training or in the field -- than candidates chosen by other means. Simply seeing the "obvious" leadership qualities of a particular individual in a highly artificial situation is a basically useless predictor of actual outcomes.

It's satisfying noise.

bane5• 14 years ago

Ivy League process is built on looking for "future leaders".

One of the problems with this of course is that the kinds of things that get you into such a school (grades, tests and extracurriculars) really have almost nothing to do with finding a leader. Even tests looking for dominant personality types (Type-A types) tend to find extroverts, not leaders. And even worse, it's been my observation that formal leadership training programs seems to churn out emotionally aloof general managers than "leaders".

One thing that the psychologists watched for was spontaneous leadership.

This is tough too. It ends up selecting for hardship leaders, not daily grind leaders. It's easy to start barking orders and look like you know what you are doing when there's an immediate task to accomplish and nobody else wants to. It's very hard to motivate a workforce for years at a time doing grind work.

An anecdote:

When I was a youngster, I knew a kid who was one of those emergent leader types. In any group activity he instantly tried to take charge and started organizing the other kids, barking orders etc. It didn't really matter what the activity was, kickball, hide and go seek, and when we were a bit older volunteer community work like habitat for humanity type things. And there were usually a few of the kids that would follow him.

The problem was that he was also terribly annoying. When facing a complex activity, one where there was no way he knew anything about the task or how to direct it. He'd still inevitably march up and start pointing and ordering like he had been doing this task for 20 years. The parents thought that he was such a wonderful natural leader. The other kids wanted to punch him in the face. It was only because of the trouble we'd get in that we didn't do exactly that (but oh where there backroom conspiracies about how to deal with him).

Now, decades later, I look back and realize that a great deal of my problem with him was likely due to differences in Keirsey Temperaments. He was obviously a Fieldmarshal [1] (correlate to Myers-Briggs ENTJ) while I'm very strongly a Mastermind [2] (MB:INTJ). According to the theory, my personality type will assume a leadership role IFF they feel the dominant Fieldmarshal personality has fundamentally failed. Basically I'm a coup maker and there was nothing more that I wanted to do with this kid than to undermine him, usurp him and delegitimize his assumption of power. I didn't want to necessarily be his replacement, but boy oh boy did I ever want to humble him. What troubled me the most was that there was inevitably a group of kids that would follow him simply because he was giving the appearance of organizing things.

I've reflected on this interaction deeply in my life to expose my own flaws, but also to learn from. Even though he wasn't qualified to run things, the fact that he simply stepped up and acted like he knew what he was doing was a terribly useful leadership technique. He really didn't seem to care that it was resented by his peer group, and as children I'm sure there was an element of parent pleasing to his behavior.

I've used this simple technique many times in business to organize out of control efforts that have floundered under the "emotionally aloof general manager types" mentioned before. Now that I'm aware of my Mastermind type tendencies, I can also watch out for destructive "coup" traits.

I don't know if I have a point other than to say that "leadership" is a very complex thing and that there are many many kinds of leadership we have to be aware of.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieldmarshal_(role_variant)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(role_variant)

sigkill2• 14 years ago

I identify with the INTJ type as well, and I'm curious to know what destructive traits you're talking about. Also, I do somewhat identify with the description that you've given although I hate to put labels on people.

jacques_chester11• 14 years ago

Two thoughts.

The first is that taking control of a new group is easy. Just start; people will fall into line. I can't remember where I first learned that, but I do from time to time consciously take control of groups to speed up the process.

(Being a tall white male is, um, helpful when pulling this stunt ... YMMV).

The secret to leadership, apparently, is delegation. It helps that I am naturally lazy.

The second thought is: avoid the MBTI. It's not a very good psychometric system. The current best classification approach is the "five factor model".

... and even then it's only weakly predictive and only for certain kinds of behaviour.

MMXII• 14 years ago

I think the idea of looking for a leader is poorly constructed.

Different tasks can be approached with different structures, which also depends on the composition of the group. The kind of person to lead (or not to lead) the group effectively would vary greatly.

So how does it make any sense to pick a leader without knowing the context?

mcguire5• 14 years ago

Sure, there's a test for "future leaders": whether or not they are accepted by the Ivy League process. If someone gets that, they'll find it much easier to be a leader in the rest of their career.

Oh, you meant identifying individuals who would be good leaders? Yeah, you're hosed there.

jacques_chester11• 14 years ago

Ah. Quite. Well you have me there!

brianchu• 14 years ago

I am proud (or ashamed) to admit that I read the whole thing. The article is pretty dense and it took me a little over two hours to get through it.

Around the middle of the article, the author argues that Jewish whites are overrepresented in top colleges relative to non-Jewish whites, also arguing that white Jew academic performance has declined over the past decade. He argues that in essence, Jewish whites disproportionately dominate colleges, and that both Asians and non-Jew whites are underrepresented relative to the proportions of top students that are Asian and non-Jewish white. However, much of his analysis is based on analyzing the last names of students who earned National Merit Scholarship awards (these are awards given out nationwide among nearly all high school students), a method which might work for Asian surnames (which are highly distinctive), but one that is highly flawed when trying to distinguish between a white Jewish and white non-Jewish surname. This is rather shaky ground. In the author's defense, this is probably the only source of data that he could get, given that it is difficult to find data on Jewish vs. non Jewish white scholarly performance and college admissions.

If there's any section you should skim, that's it.

The later sections of the article are particularly eye-opening: the author enters into a discussion of the personal biases that admissions officers can hold. One example is that a researcher found that participating in certain "high school activities actually reduced a student’s admission chances by 60–65 percent, ...these were ROTC, 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and various similar organizations." Another interesting fact is that people (and by extension admissions officers) have a tendency to drastically over-estimate the proportion of blacks/Hispanics/Jews in the US population.

However, the article ends rather weakly; the author basically suggests that the best solution is to have top colleges select a small portion of their students by pure talent (geniuses), and then select the rest by lottery out of a pool of academically qualified applicants. To me, this seems just as unfair as the alternatives, and de-motivational for academic success.

aidenn0• 14 years ago

"However, the article ends rather weakly; the author basically suggests that the best solution is to have top colleges select a small portion of their students by pure talent (geniuses), and then select the rest by lottery out of a pool of academically qualified applicants. To me, this seems just as unfair as the alternatives, and de-motivational for academic success."

Not only that, but part of the value of the Harvard education is that you end up being at the school where everyone recruits from. They are on shaky legal ground giving you an IQ test, but "Was admitted to Harvard 4 years ago" is a decent proxy for one.

valgaze• 14 years ago

Yah it's very long- truth be told, when I first came across the talk about Jewish administrators & saw the length of the article I assumed it was written by some crank with an axe to grind. Whatever one makes of the analysis & conclusions, if you hear the author out it becomes clear that this was done in a very thoughtful & thorough manner.

For some context: The author is Ron Unz, an "activist" type & former financial software guy whose company was acquired by Moodys in the mid 00s. He's quite difficult to pin down with traditional USA political shorthand (see his other positions on social services for immigrants vs bilingual education in CA for example.) It seems that whatever subject on which he focuses, he really goes all in.

This is a pretty interesting profile of him from the late nineties: http://www.onenation.org/9907/071999.html

If you're familiar with Steven Colbert's SuperPAC shenanigans you might remember that someone named Trevor Potter (former FEC) was Colbert's legal advisor & "straight" counterbalance. This is what that Potter said about Unz's unsuccessful campaign finance reform initiative:

"[...] Unz's "California Voters Bill of Rights" includes voluntary spending limits accompanied by partial public financing, a ban on corporate giving to candidates, overnight Web-based disclosure, and reasonable contribution caps (e.g., $5,000 for statewide races) that should survive a court challenge. "It's far wider-reaching than McCain-Feingold," says Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission

This post was provocative & definitely passed the "...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" test.

sayYaeah• 14 years ago

Wow, I'd be pissed reading this as an Asian American.

confluence3• 14 years ago

You know what I find funny? The creator of the word meritocracy created it to parody how people think the world is mostly just. Curious no?

I was going to write more on this topic but I'm tired of it like I am with the religious. Instead I will say the following condensed sentence.

Libertarianism/conservatism/Republicans/meritocracy are merely derivations of humanity's sociopathic bias known as the just world fallacy. Furthermore most explanations in all business books, magazines and articles focusing on the people make the fundamental attribution error and are mostly bunk.

Finally once you understand the complexity of the world you live in you see how people have no fucking clue what they are taking about outside of the hard sciences.

pfortuny2• 14 years ago

As if people in the "hard sciences" as you call them had any fucking clue what they are talking about. To wit: SUSY, String Theory &c...

Not even mathematicians have a clue what we are talking about (apart from 'abstractions' which relate very little to the world we live in).

confluence3• 14 years ago

I'm sorry I couldn't hear you over all the advanced tech keeping us all alive. Please continue.

String theory is not fact. Currently accepted theories in physics are relativity and quantum mechanics. You know the shit running the computer you typed that insightful comment on and the fibre optics that brought your great wisdom to me.

/sarcasm

cantastoria• 14 years ago

The creator of the word meritocracy created it to parody how people think the world is mostly just. Curious no?

It would be if it were true. The satire you're referring to, used the word as a way to criticize how the British government of the period was selecting people into an elite ruling class based on suspect standards of intelligence and aptitude. The word itself was invented as a shorthand to refer to that process and its justifications. It was not a parody of the idea of meritocracy as it is understood today.

From wikipedia; Meritocracy is the implementation of advancement based upon intellectual talent. Often, advancement is determined by demonstrated achievement in the field where it is implemented.

Aside from that, I'm curious, If you believe that meritocracy is indeed evidence of right-wing sociopathic behavior. What would be the Communist/Liberal/Democratic alternative? Surely you're not advocating a kakistocracy (i.e. rule by the worst).

confluence3• 14 years ago

The liberal version is paternalistic totalitarianism. You need a mix.

I'm not against meritocracy or ownership. I'm against not capping poverty and I'm against worshipping those who are lucky in life.

adjwilli• 14 years ago

While I agree with the premise of academia not really being a meritocracy, this article limited scope focusing solely on academia just comes across as thinly veiled anti-intellectualism that conservatives have been preaching forever. Why didn't the author take any time to focus on the lack of meritocracy in corporate culture or even political culture? They hate science, they hate facts, and they want to "defund the left" but destroying our institutions of higher learning and research.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

I wiped my LinkedIn profile. I have no problem with them as a business, but this touches on one of the things that's been getting to me about "social" (and I will bring this around to education) over the past few years.

There's an inherent exploit/explore tradeoff in "social". Or, more to the point, are you going to document social relationships or improve them (in spite of the fact that there are powerful people who don't want improvements to occur)? There's a lot more money and less risk in the former, but I'm more a fan of the latter, because that's where the great companies come from. Which is why I like Meetup a lot (with its unusual focus on growing the social graph) and feel more tepid about LinkedIn. They're a great company and they've executed well, but their model is still stuck in the old, broken, credential-and-resume way of doing things.

Since my colorful Google history has (against my will) been exposed to public digestion, I'll admit that what started that fracas was a document-vs.-improve debate regarding Google+ that I, unwisely and half-unintentionally, got myself caught in. (I was on the "improve" side.)

What on earth does this have to do with the Ivy League and college admissions? Well, this talk about "disrupting" education through online courses (e.g. edX, Coursera) is really about improving social and knowledge graphs, and that's really exciting. Admissions officers just document; they take notes on who looked impressive at a young age. I see admissions as a less interesting problem with time. If our generation does its job, no one will give a shit about college admissions in 30 years.

pitt19802• 14 years ago

that's one of the most profound comments I've read in a really long time, an upvote doesn't really seem sufficient

I wish I had thoughts that could further this comment, right now they are failing me though

tangentially related thoughts http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?forum_id=2&thread_id=2...

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I had the courage(?) to click an xoxohth link at work.

I think people are going to be averse to having their minute-by-minute activity mined for any purpose, so I don't see that as a recruiting angle. What I do think is that there's more signal in a person's willingness to learn later in life rather than at age 20 when it's expected. I'm more impressed by the 37-year-old who picked up a machine learning course or textbook on his own and, in a year, picked up a respectable working knowledge of it. Whether he went to college is immaterial, at that point.

tom_b• 14 years ago

The proposed "inner ring/outer ring" admissions solution is interesting. The inner ring of admission slots (say 20%) are filled purely on academic merit metrics (NMS, GPA, SAT score, etc), then 80% of slots are filled based on dumping everybody else who meets some much lower cut-off on those academic merits into a lottery for the remaining admissions slots.

I'm not entirely sure the author appreciates the likelihood of various strange outcomes using a purely random lottery for admissions, for example "outlier" admissions classes that heavily over-represent one racial/gender group by chance.

Another rather damning point of the article is that university admission officers may be spectactularly unqualified to actually make admissions decisions. But I have been privy to the admissions decision process at the graduate level and bucketing applicants into the "will succeed" and "will not succeed" and "who knows" bucket usually winds up with a rather sizable number in the "who knows" bucket. So maybe the critque on the admission officers should be less worrisome than presented. I think PG has made statements that one of the biggest problems with YC applicants is that there just isn't an easy way to look at many applicants and make any reasonable determination about whether or not they could create successful startups.

Anyway, this is an excellently thought-provoking article and thanks for bringing it here.

flurie• 14 years ago

I find it a bit curious to call Harvard's entrance exam[1] a "simple objective test of academic merit". I would call it a glorified spelling bee whose word list was handed out only to the most privileged.

[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...

nsxwolf5• 14 years ago

Why does everyone seem to ignore today's standards of living for even the poorest classes in America?

All this talk about the top 1% just sounds like envy. Why do we compare ourselves to that?

I live in a neighborhood of a thousand 3000 square foot houses with three car garages. I imagine all the people in them reading that article and shaking their fists with anger at the 1% and realizing they're all failures who will never get ahead.

I just don't get that mentality.

ditonal• 14 years ago

It's in everyone's best interest to have fair, just economic systems. Good systems where wealth is more strongly linked to economic output rather than birthrights lead to more prosperity and justice for everyone. Too much wealth inequality hurts growth, and it also creates political inequality that can create a feedback cycle that worsens the problem. Social justice and economic justice are inexorably linked, if one group has all the power, bad things happen.

Also, you clearly live in a very wealthy neighborhood, but many people are struggling. Even if people aren't struggling, the "you can't complain about anything being injust because someone, somewhere is in a more unjust situation" is an absurd line of reasoning.

nsxwolf5• 14 years ago

I know I'm not struggling and I know that other people are. I was just trying to demonstrate how silly it can look when people complain. No matter how much people have they're always comparing themselves against these impossible outcomes. I don't see how others having more in any way diminishes what you have.

Also, why can't owning a hot dog stand that pays the bills and puts your kids through college be considered the American Dream? When did that turn into yachts and trips to the International Space Station?

gadders8• 14 years ago

"Too much wealth inequality hurts growth" - that's just an assertion. China, for instance, would appear to defy this rule.

randomdata6• 14 years ago

I, like most programmers, am comfortably in the top 5% and cannot even imaging being able to own a home like you describe at my income level. There is a good chance those people are part of the 1% themselves. It actually doesn't take that much money to get there. Though it has been sold as a domain of people making tens of thousands of dollars per hour, so I can see why some may not even realize where they stand.

twoodfin3• 14 years ago

I, like most programmers, am comfortably in the top 5% and cannot even imaging being able to own a home like you describe at my income level.

Sure you can. Anyone "comfortably in the top 5%" can afford a very large home, it just might not be exactly where you'd want it to be.

You're choosing instead to devote more of your income to being close to where you work and/or living in an area with ready access to services you find valuable.

nsxwolf5• 14 years ago

I should note that I live in Illinois. Your housing dollar goes a lot farther here.

I usually make the wild assumption that most people who post here are in San Fran.

aetherson2• 14 years ago

"Most programmers" are not in the top 5%. For example: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer_%2...

api• 14 years ago

Some good points in here, but one thing to keep in mind:

The American right hates higher education for reasons that have nothing to do with meritocracy. Higher education takes young people away from their small often rural and suburban cultural bubbles and exposes them to a larger world. This exposure undermines the parochial teachings of fundamentalism, and tends to corrode prejudices through contact. (E.g. seeing that gay people are not monsters or twisted freaks that only want to get in your pants.) The cosmopolitan influence of universities is deeply hated and resented by social conservatives.

twoodfin3• 14 years ago

That must be why Harvard and Yale grads are automatically disqualified from being nominated for President by America's mainstream right-wing party.

Your comment might make sense in the bubble in which you live, but it's balderdash.

mudil• 14 years ago

As some who is Jewish from the former Soviet Union, and who was denied even to take an entrance exam to a Moscow college, I am saddened to see that American educational admission process looks more and more "Soviet" nowadays. Kids are denied opportunities because of their ethnic or social background, in a supposedly free and fair country!

But this is just a tip of the iceberg. The American groupthink of political correctness, lowest common denominator, and political posturing toward various political/ethnic/religious/sexual orientation groups is rotting this country inside out.

Worse things are yet to come.

/rant over

mcguire5• 14 years ago

"American educational admission process looks more and more 'Soviet' nowadays"

Be careful when choosing your enemies. You become them.

joshbert• 14 years ago

This is a massive over simplication, but my personal take is that the people who make it big always had a nag that they were going to be successful.

Success doesn't strike me as something that you just stumble upon. There is always work to be done, but most people just won't do it. I'm not saying most people are lazy, I just think that they decide to work on the wrong things.

Furthermore, if your determination can be deterred by an article, I wouldn't bet for you to be successful to begin with.

hudibras• 14 years ago

The chart showing the number of Asian students at Caltech vs. the Ivy League is shocking. Caltech's numbers have risen in proportion to the number of Asian-Americans aged 18-21, but the Ivy League numbers have been flat for many years. There's no doubt that a de facto quota system exists for Asians in the Ivy League.

The Myth of American Meritocracy

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