Almost Every Powerful Economist We Have Went to 1 of 6 Schools. That’s Not Great

If you want to listen to a very illuminating episode on law firms hiring based on a handful of firms, how bad this is, I highly recommend this episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-tort...

You should start listening around 31m:30s in the podcast, where he interviews someone who has analyzed the correlations between how successful a lawyer will be in different firms and the actual features/statistics of candidates. And one of the biggest conclusions this person says is that one feature that doesn't matter much (close to 0) in predicting how successful a lawyer will be is the school they went to (this is around 34m:35s in the podcast). And that for obvious reasons, this is actually what law firms pay most attention to, which is actually a big mistake. This is in fact a very big market inefficiency and an opportunity for law firms to correct in their recruiting.

I would guess a similar pattern exists in many fields, e.g., software engineering.

Another excellent and illuminating thing to read about recruiting mistakes is Daniel Kahneman's work (he has a chapter on this in his "Thinking Fast and Slow" book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow). This article describes a good summary of Kahneman's advice when recruiting: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/hiring-job-interviews-d....

Pareto principle. With the dawn of AI systems and the scale they require I wonder how much more unequal things will get. Previously you would have no issues running the state of the art CIFAR classifier model on your laptop, now running your own semi-state of the art LLM is not even worth doing for many companies.