The Meritocracy Trap
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It’s almost like industries that are more focused on skills don’t give a shit about what school you went to! It’s always the capped jobs (law, medicine, accounting) that arbitrarily limit who can work in the industry that care most about prestige labels.
If everyone who _did_ hire fresh college grads gave preference only to those coming from exclusive schools, only those from exclusive schools end up with the experience, interview skills and references you look for. In this way, exclusivity perpetuates itself.
The best way to _actually_ focus on hiring for skill? Find those who haven't been given a chance before, such as not having attended a top-name school and subsequently didn't end up at top-name firms, then invest in them. It's more expensive to do, but a lot of the top talent doesn't have the experience, interview skills and references you may be looking for.
That does seem to apply for experience and references. If interview skills benefit from practice, I think it works the other way there.
So even that part can have some component of perpetuated exclusivity.
https://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/12/citigroup-pluton...
The greatest threat identified was "equal voting power with the rich." Actually, more given they're 99% versus 1%. The threat is so great that those with capital spend absolutely enormous amounts of money on media convincing people to vote for candidates that are great for the rich but do a tiny thing here and there for everyone else. Also, that the activities facilitating the rich will get them there, too.
It's working so far... Similar kind of crap with these "elite" schools and hiring strategies.
All of that is better than just schoolwork.
And if you're still being asked where you graduated from 5+ years into your career ... something might be wrong. Have you really nothing better to show?
Sometimes, the fact that someone didn't go to a top-name school limited their choices. If they went to local state school far from Silicon Valley, and they didn't have money to move to the Silicon Valley right away, they may have worked at small, non-engineering-focused companies. So yeah, maybe they're really capable, but 5+ years into their careers, they haven't had the chance to demonstrate it yet.
Exclusive meritocracy exists at the super-elite universities and at the industries that draw the bulk of their employees from them — Wall Street, Big Law, medicine and tech.
Okay, I can believe that both tech companies and universities have an "exclusive meritocracy" attitude. But later:
In the exclusive meritocracy, prestige is defined by how many people you can reject.
No, that doesn't sound right at all. Nobody cares what percent of applicants Amazon or Google rejects. They get a lot more prestige from their market cap, and from the huge amount of people using their products.
This is borderline doublespeak. Is not about how many you reject, Its about finding the best. Obviously you will have to reject the not-best, for that particular task.
The way this is phrased reveals it as an obvious and clumsy attempt at social engineering.
Edit: The best is defined as the optimum person to complete the required task. The "best" is found by measuring his aptitude (tests, etc.).
If this is social engineering I’m fine with it. The real social engineering is the intentional social stratification that has been cemented over the last 50 years among ethnic (redlining, blockbusting), cultural and economic lines.
How do we know that hiring “the best” is a valid concept to begin with if it’s quite arbitrarily defined?
I think there is more behind those two words than you are willing to admit. Appealing to hiring only “the best” appeals to our common sense, appeals to simplicity, a simplicity that simply does not exist at all. There is more to it than it just being “the best”.
And I’m not talking about out there conspiracies and evil intent. I do not think that plays any meaningful role, and it does not have to for “the best” being more complex than you think.
No, there is no more to it. It's a trivial concept. If you think otherwise, then explain.
You(and probably everyone else) have an intuitive understanding of what being the best means and that’s alright, but it’s important to question our underlying assumptions.
University rejection rates are actually used in college rankings. The more you reject, the higher your ranking.
US News just recently removed this as a factor in their most recent rankings, so maybe this measure is on its way out. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/09/12/us-news-...
What about long-term potential? Someone may solve the current task well, but will they grow in skill in order to take on larger challenges? Someone who can grow in this way may be better to keep on the same project because they will also have historical context while scaling with the project.
> The "best" is found by measuring his aptitude (tests, etc.).
Measurements for "aptitude", especially tests, are easily gamed and don't in any way guarantee actual competency.
Dude...
If it works, this is sort of a "fake it until you make it" strategy.
But as a result, many colleges have lower acceptance rates and students have to apply to more schools to make sure they get in somewhere.
Dunno about Amazon but people have pitched Google as “more selective than Harvard” before. I’m sure people internally love taking about how selective they are too.
(I used to work for Google at some point. The perks are nice, the compensation is generous but not at the top of the market.)
Nobody if you mean end users. Developers certainly do apply prestige to those companies based on how strictly they hire...
Radical inclusion may not be the right away to describe this. It makes it sound like a new idea.
$10M investment per child? How is that possible? Even top boarding schools and private US universities would not add up to that amount. You could hire several teachers full time for your kid and it wouldn't get that high.
That's not a meritocracy but feudalism.
Exactly, there isn't any merit about being born with wealth. They are bending the meaning of the word Meritocracy.
Often, the wealthy can get better trained and have more time and resources and they end up being the best candidate for some projects, product of the advantage they had.
This doesn't negate the fact that they are still the best and if you want to get shit done right, you have to hire them. Anything else is charity.
This should not occur in a society uniquely positioned as one that emphasizes social and class mobility.
It does say it was coined pejoratively, though. That's interesting, I didn't know that.
I feel that with unlimited applications, you heavily inflate the rejection rate - anyone can apply to Harvard just for the sake of it, even though it's completely unrealistic.
For schools, it's a great PR tool - as rejection rate is directly tied to the elite and prestige of a school; But only in context, of course.
Many cashier jobs get something like 10 times more applicants pr position than the most prestigious college spots or professional jobs, but you rarely hear anything about that.
In fact, when I studied at a top university, they were conducting a internal study on whether good math grades from HS worked as a good predictor of success in college - and there turned out to be a relationship. Later on, one proposal was to put more weight on specific grades like that, and then be more lax on overall GPA - but this was quickly shot down because the "perceived prestige" of said school could get hurt, if employers learned that future students with lower overall GPA would get admitted, even though they had stellar grades in the classes that mattered most.
But with that said, I can understand why prestigious companies want to hire people from top schools and with top grades: It signals that the students are willing to do anything for success, and are willing to work around the clock to achieve something. After all, many have been doing this since they were teenagers.
If you look at consulting, banking, law, etc. junior programs are basically set up so that the workers will forego their private lives, and work 100 hour weeks if needed. And they will do that, if you also entice them with a nice bonus and attractive exit prospects.
Almost every investment banking analyst I've ever known, went into the analyst program because of exit options (good business school, hedge funds and private equity firms, etc.) .
Me: So why do you work for FAANG company X? Interviewer: Mainly so that other companies will take me seriously when I'm looking for my next gig
I appreciated the honesty, but disappointed that this was the honest response
Media is spending a suspiciously big amount of money to try to disprove this very simple fact.
Some companies believe the most skilled people are the ones who have demonstrated certain technical abilities. Under this form of meritocracy, the companies delude themselves into thinking they've hired the most skilled people, but they haven't.
The inclusive meritocracy in the article solves that problem by expanding the definition of skilled, and by investing in a more diverse group of individuals. This results in more (in number) skilled people at the end of the investment.
Then it's a testing/measurement problem, not a meritocracy problem.
> The inclusive meritocracy in the article solves that problem by expanding the definition of skilled, and by investing in a more diverse group of individuals. This results in more (in number) skilled people at the end of the investment.
There is no problem to solve. If you don't choose the best, you choose sub-optimal personal. Also the definition of "inclusiveness" is ridiculous, as it assumes that diversity means hiring different sex or race, but not diversity of thoughts or culture.
In fact, it opposes different ideas, it's exactly the inverse of diversity. It's a thought monoculture.
Connections and the ability to play politics seem to be much more important for getting to the top. Current systems, managers, etc., are just not setup to evaluate skill from what I've seen, you have to sell yourself, which means "ability to sell yourself" is how the system is stratified, and that's not merit.
So when you say "the best", often what you get is "best at selling self", which is not actually the best.
Then the test is wrong. Not meritocracy.
But here's some points on why I feel it's problematic to only rely on the top 5 school -> top firm feeding pipeline
1. These companies have A LOT of influence on how the world operates. For example, has there ever been a more influential company than McKinsey?
So if these firms only hire from certain schools, that in turn mostly accept people from certain socioeconomic backgrounds, you can wind up with a serious diversity problem.
2. For many people, their lives are already decided by their teenage years. Or maybe better said; many powerful careers are already excluded by the time they go to high-school.
If many prestigious firms only care about what college you went to, then those career paths have already been decided - depending on what school you've been accepted to.
3. It's not really meritocracy. There are probably students that are just as intelligent and hard-working at state schools, as there are in the top schools, but for whatever reason didn't get accepted or didn't apply for the top schools.
But yet, they may not get a chance, simply because of the school name.
I know many big firms have started to expand their view on this mater, and have realized that the top x students at large state schools are just as capable as their top private school counterparts, so hopefully a problem which will disappear with time.
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In short, I think a lot of the meritocracy you see is just time/money saving measures masquerading as meritocracy. And if you want to succeed at following the current rules, you either need to be exceptionally talented and driven, or be driven enough but with LOTS of help from your family (i.e born into right class)
In economics, in a competitive market, both buyers and sellers are price takers. That is, the market sets the price, and buyers and sellers simply determine their spending (or selling) decisions based on this. In a monopoly market (or monopsony), the monopolist is a price maker. Total quantity is still determined by the market, but the monopoly seller or monopsony buyer can choose the price which maximises their profits. (Basic market theory, BTW, but probably not widely known outside econ majors.) There is a specific dynamic to this, and the power isn't unlimited, but it's a fundamental difference between competitive, and monopolistic / ologopolistic markets.
On to law:
The poor, the proletariat, the masses, all but the non-elites and major corporations, are law takers. The law, the rule of law, is a given. It may be contested in court, but that's about the limit of it. The wealthy, the elite, are law makers. Elite interests can, and do, specifically influence law, legislators, executives, even courts and law enforcement, to an extent. Rather than accepting law as a given, it becomes fungible. Also to an extent within courts, where the wealthy can bring to bear vastly more legal talent (much of it aimed at process complication, that is, increasing costs of prosecution or civil suits), but very much in the case of policy and legislation.
As mentioned, the idea turnes up 50 minutes into Daniel Markovits's LSE lecture. This is based on The Meritocracy Gap, though that doesn't seem to include the concept itself.
As Markovits says, the wealthy can change the rules which make it easier for them to both gain and hold wealth, in ways the non-wealthy cannot.
The Meritocracy Trap [Audio]. LSE: Public lectures and events
Duration: 1:31:17
Published: Wed, 8 May 2019 18:30:00 GMT
Episode: http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/pub...
Media: https://media.rawvoice.com/lse_publiclecturesandevents/richm... (MP3)
There's a book with a similar title, though I've yet to look at it in depth. Based on related web searches, the term seems to come into currency about 2010-2011, so timing seems about right.
Non-State Actor Dynamics in International Law: From Law-Takers to Law-Makers, by Cedric Ryngaert (2010)
“Everything is on a mass scale. A.S.U.’s honors college alone is bigger than Stanford’s entire undergraduate enrollment. It graduates more Jews than Brandeis and more Muslims than Jews.”