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Comment by alejohausner | Hacker News Reader

A while ago I read a review of a book called "The trouble with diversity" by Walter Benn Michaels. I was struck by his claim that universities serve to "launder privilege into qualifications".

To me, this helps to emphasize the importance of class in America. Rich kids go to Harvard, after graduating from wonderful high schools, helped by private tutors, and, most importantly, knowing that their wealth and their parents' connections will guarantee them success. But since America is supposedly the land of equal opportunity, those kids must put on a facade to the world, which tells other people a lie: I succeeded because I'm smart, not because I'm rich.

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> I succeeded because I'm smart, not because I'm rich.

This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart. This is a major improvement over the old system where you just need to be rich.

This is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Top universities in the UK and top grandes ecoles in France are also dominated by the middle class. I'm sure other countries are like that too if not worse.

I think any system with inequality will have this issue. Parents want to help their children and some parents will have a greater ability to do so.

This is not unique to capitalism either. I'm sure those of us from the Soviet Union will be intimately familiar with the concept of блат, which is significantly more pernicious than wealthy children doing better because they have tutors.

>This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart.

Like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardasian, etc.? No, rich is still the only requirement. Those other things just give you more options.

How rich?

The only requirement for what? Financial success? Celebrity?

Seems your example only applies to a very narrow demographic: wealthy socialites. Does it apply to doctors, lawyers and software engineers? How often does it apply and how often does it not?

I think these nuances are important to answer before generalizing.

I'd lump beautiful women and gifted athletes into the "smart" category. While not necessarily the same in practice the effect of being either is basically the same as being incredibly smart except there's more luck involved. Neither are common enough to get their own category IMO

I'm not saying those women aren't "smart", I don't know them personally. I'm saying it doesn't matter if they are or not.

Being gifted is being gifted, yes, the area is important but secondary. And there is no more luck involved. It's probably the same mechanism, too (low mutational load).

> >This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart.

> Like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardasian, etc.? No, rich is still the only requirement. Those other things just give you more options.

For every person you cite as being wildly successful only because of the money they were born into, you could also cite people who came from nothing and became multi-millionaires. Or people who were born rich and didn't succeed.

You're not wrong - there are people who only needed to be rich to begin with. But giving examples like you have doesn't counter the above point.

There are probably 10,000 who only needed to be rich for every self made multi-milli)onaire who came from nothing.

If you have 10 rich people with a 50% shot of making it : 99,990 people with a 0.005% shot of making it then the number of people with both backgrounds who made it is reasonably balanced. But, in no way is this a meritocracy.

concept of блат

Can you explain that?

блат (blaht) means "nepotism", but used in a much more widespread way, to refer not just to jobs obtained through relations and connections, but also buying things you normally can't get in stores, getting invitations to selective summer caps for kids, etc. etc.

In the Soviet Union, things were typically inexpensive but unobtainable. So for example if you wanted a fully automatic washing machine that didn't break down after a few months, the problem wasn't that you couldn't afford it, the problem was that too few of them were imported or produced compared to the number of people who wanted them. In theory, these fancy washing machines went straight from producer/importer to distribution centers and then to regular stores to be bought by regular people. In practice, every chain in the distribution link was highly corrupt, and desirable items never reached regular stores (or, in some cases they did, but the knowledge of when exactly and in what store they'll be giving out something "good" was by itself desirable). Everybody worked intensely at cultivating connections with the right kind of people who were gatekeepers in some distribution chains, or officials in charge of those chains. Now repeat that for every kind of expensive item: furniture, cars, good clothes, shoes, some kinds of high-quality food (from caviar down to sausage), getting your kids into a good school, summer camps, vacation packages, a work trip abroad... all could be and were obtained through nepotism.

The problem with this is how class affects the WILL to be good at school, SAT, college and so on.

If you're high up in the middle class, you have a high-paying job. That means one of three things:

1) medical degree

2) high-end engineer

3) varia (like climbed-up MBAs) (but this is a small group)

Now when it comes to groups in society, the picture looks very different:

Largest groups are non-working people, and workers and tradesmen (from factory workers and construction workers to truck drivers) (total of these groups is like 90% of America)

Both of these groups are famous for disrespecting education, telling anyone who'll listen how college and university degrees are worthless (and for their positions in the world, I'm sure that's true).

And ... surprise ! Their kids mostly don't care about education, and don't score well on SATs (except the ones that figure out they really DO want to in time). Could this be ... because kids believe their parents ?

The "problem" is the entire feedback loop running through society, which mostly is the people itself, not that "rich" people tell their kids to achieve things. You cannot fix this without separating kids from their parents somehow, and you don't want to do that.

The only thing you can do is to prevent the middle class from achieving anything, or anything worthwhile. Which is exactly what is mostly happening in these diversity efforts.

Even that is disregarding the fact that there are already too many college and university graduates to make sure such a degree is definitely worth it. This is a problem akin to "let's make the lowest 50% of the population better off than average".

I think this depends on what you frame what an opportunity is. Giving everyone the opportunity to try and meet a certain criteria in order for you to accept them into whatever job/institution you represent is a binary opportunity in theory. They'll either meet the criteria or they won't. If you frame being able to cultivate the skills to meet your criteria as being an opportunity in itself then that negates your offering as being an 'opportunity'.

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