A short two-minute video of Yale law professor Daniel Markovits discussing meritocracy:
Why rich kids always win at life
One of the complaints against DEI in admissions and hiring is that it’s unfair to otherwise qualified people whose “slots are taken” by DEI hires. The argument is that meritocracy is fair, or at least fairer than DEI. Markovits’s point, with which I agree, is that even a pure meritocracy is unfair because it doesn’t reward intrinsic talent and effort — it rewards intrinsic talent plus effort plus ‘investment’, by which Markovits means educational investment.
He’s speaking at the Oxford Union, and he points out that even at Oxford, which he regards as a true meritocratic institution, the student body skews rich relative to the general population because of the educational advantages that rich kids enjoy.
Proponents of pure meritocracy might argue that even if it’s unfair, a meritocratic system is better because it selects the most capable people for positions, even if that capability reflects privilege as well as intrinsic talent and effort.
Anyway, I thought a thread on the DEI vs meritocracy question would be interesting. Hence this OP.
You are not in the”Epstein Files” and that’s why you created another attention seeking behaviour post like Erika Krill …
I think I recall that Harvard, defending its admission policies, testified that if they used pure merit as well as it can be determined, 80% of their student body would be Asian. And mostly because of the educational investment they’ve put into it.
Another story, perhaps apocryphal, from the 1980s. At that time, there was I suppose you could call a philosophy that there is no intrinsic distinction between various racial and ethnic populations in terms of merit. The conviction (or perhaps faith?) was that white males got all this preferential treatment not out of merit, but because those in a position to hire and promote were also white males. This tied in closely with Affirmative Action, the notion that the fully qualified minority candidates for hiring or promotion are out there, but their merit is being discounted rather than properly recognized.
So the civil service instituted a general test, kind of like the SAT, that everyone would take. Then when a government department wanted someone, they were assigned the candidate with the highest score then available, regardless of sex, age, race, ethnicity, etc.
It wasn’t too long before many government departments started complaining that these “cream of the crop” applicants were pretty seriously incompetent! How could they possibly have scored so high? Well, it turned out that the civil service looked at their test results, and saw that very very few racial or ethnic minorities were even in the top 50%. The conclusion was that these people are just as smart and capable as anyone else (this was a given, not to be questioned) but scored poorly for various reasons having to do with social status, educational opportunities, lack of “investment” for some reason.
The civil service, to correct for this as well as they could, started rating candidates on two scales – one for everyone, and one just for minorities. This allowed minority applicants to get competitively high scores despite doing poorly on the test – and subsequently on the job. So this approach was abandoned, essentially in favor of outright quotas. Quota-fillers were then assigned busywork, meaningless jobs while competent peoples’ workloads increased. Which in turn led to further resentment and low opinion of the competence of minorities.
Ultimately, I think the concept of equal at-birth potential is likely correct, but keeping the minorities down starts almost immediately after birth and continues through life. I think DEI initiatives are well intentioned, but are addressing serious problems far too late in life to be effective.
(And I recall a story about a college football player who wasn’t able to find a position in the NFL after he graduated, and sued his university because he was basically illiterate, and others had been doing his classwork to keep him on the team. I wonder how that worked out. I myself was nominally in several classes with Dave Bing, who went on to a great NBA career. I never saw him, of course, because he didn’t attend classes. Merit has many meanings.)
Flint:
Yeah, I would much prefer that the inequalities be addressed earlier in life. For instance, I think it’s tragic that schools are mostly funded locally in the US, because the quality of school districts varies so dramatically between poor areas and wealthy ones.
Money spent on schools does not correlate with success or opportunity.
A better predictor would be income of the peer group. Even better, the number of books in the parents’ home.
Disadvantaged children can match the achievement of the more affluent until adolescence, at which time, their peers have more influence than their teachers.
You tell me how to fix this.
petrushka:
It depends on how the money is spent. Hiring more and better teachers helps. Spending money on fancy new football stadiums doesn’t. (I caused a minor kerfuffle in high school by writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, pointing out how ridiculous it was that we were building a new football stadium when half of the equipment in our physics and chemistry departments was broken due to age.)
Those are causes, but the question is how to ameliorate the problem. Sometimes the most effective away of dealing with a problem is to attack its causes, but at other times it’s more practical and cost-effective to find ways to compensate for the damage.
Not sure where you’re getting your information, but educational gaps show up long before adolescence.
Equalize spending (or even direct more toward poor communities) and focus on evidence-based solutions. That won’t be a panacea, but it will help.
You might start by looking at the culture of asian-americans. In that culture, education is prized, accomplishment is rewarded, and parents pay close attention to (and help as much as possible with) their children’s academic progress. Yeah, there’s peer pressure but the pressure is to achieve and succeed, not the opposite. And all these pressures start right at birth.
Keith:
I’ve seen plenty of graphs comparing achievement as measured by standardized testing, with money spent per student, and the correlation is nearly zero. Poor neighborhoods where parents value education and pay attention do better than wealthier neighborhoods where this is less the case. The worst cases, I think, are where too many of the kids are from broken homes, have single parents who work two jobs, and must find peer recognition and acceptance outside the home. Financial issues (read: poverty) tends to break homes.
But a reading of American history shows waves of immigrants from places where educational opportunities are poor, language skills lacking, and customs different enough for social rejection. This has happened to Finns, Swedes, Irish, Italian, Asian (mostly Japanese, but also Chinese) and black. All but the blacks assimilated and escaped poverty within a generation or two, and the Asians have excelled. The blacks remain at the bottom after many generations. They can’t really help looking non-white, but neither can the Asians. And the Asians have never had any need for DEI, or affirmative action, or headstart programs. I’m guessing the problem comes down to culture.
Yes, because the intense programs required to make up for lack of home reading and such have only been done on an experimental basis.
Whether it’s parents or other kids, children learn their expectations from those around them. Neither I, nor anyone else knows how to overcome this.
I am not opposed to trying things, but I am skeptical that money is necessary.
I could preach my own theories, but they are probably no better than anyone else’s.
and
You just told yourself how to fix it, and it involves money.
The problem with the US system is that the key drivers of success are all correlated. It’s ghetto-ized. My personal prejudice is that parental engagement is the biggest driver, but it is geographically correlated with parental education level, books in houses, family dinners together, disposable income, you name it. Exacerbating the differences, when the parents value education highly enough to spend extra money ensuring their kids get a good one (outside the US, that’s a fee-paying school, inside the US, it’s paying extra for a house in a good school district, and voting for tax over-rides to fund the schools…) then they make sure their kids are making the most of the opportunities offered. Kid gets in trouble at school, the parents are pissed at the kid, not the school. Way too many US schools are viewed as day-care, because the parents in that district are too busy working 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet.
I suspect you are getting your graphs from the likes of this analysis, which tries very very hard view the data in the most useless way possible. I mean, trends over time? WTF? By state? Why? Let’s compare wealthy districts with not so well-off, as grown-ups would…
Agreed.
Well, headstart benefits the poor of all skin-tones. Can I use “All but the blacks assimilated and escaped poverty within a generation or two” because that’s absolutely EPIC!
I guess it comes down to culture.
I don’t think we disagree here. Wealthy districts tend to be populated by educated parents who take active interest in their kids’ progress. The whole point of these analyses is to try to control for all factors other than spending per student. The policy has been that the solution to underperforming schools is to throw money at them, which I believe misses the point.
I have also read that the advantages conferred by headstart are real, but temporary. By 3rd grade, the advantage has faded and we’re back to the cultural issues. I’ve read that in inner cities, peer pressure for blacks is against education, which is regarded as “acting white” and ridiculed. If only we could substitute “acting Asian”.