This reminds me of the recent experiments with dropping standardized tests (or making them optional) for college admissions.
The critics bemoaned the advantage that rich kids had when studying for the exams... but when colleges temporarily switched to essay writing, grades and extracurriculars as the bar for admission, the incoming class was even more heavily skewed to rich kids.
It turns out that rich kids have much less of an advantage on standardized exams than any other form of evaluation.
The standardized test, scored by an anonymous grader, still requires you to know some things and to engage your brain. Being born to rich parents (or members of the imperial court) doesn't automatically give you passing scores... You still have to work for them.
Was there some mechanism to ensure/confirm that the scoring for those remaining factors didn't get changed during the process?
I imagine someone judging an essay or extracurricular activities would behave differently if they thought it mattered a lot versus whether they thought it was just a tiebreaker to apply after a standardized test.
The Duke of Westminster is going to pass Mayfair down to his kids forever, but the CEO of Google can only do so much for his kids. In all likelihood, they will be well educated but never get the top seat at this kind of corporation.
If you couldn't pass down anything, eg if you had to put your kids in the same schools as everyone else and not give them any advantage, it would seem to be against our instincts as parents. Yet it also isn't good for society if we gave guarantees.
> the practical effect being that the well off were already advantaged. ... In both instances a class perpetuates itself.
by contrast, the article says:
> You could be a farmer, and then you took the exam, you succeeded, and then you became an official. So in that sense, it’s not social mobility, it is political mobility.
> Ilari Mäkelä: But there was genuine political mobility.
> Yasheng Huang: Oh, absolutely.
> Ilari Mäkelä: How would you convince a skeptic of that?
> Yasheng Huang: Very easily. Again, going back to our earlier conversation about data, this is not something you can just use stories to illustrate. You kind of have to use statistics and data. An earlier historian, Ping-ti Ho 何炳棣 who really pioneered research on the keju showed that it was meritocratic. There are later historians who study keju, and they say, “Oh, so-and-so came from a prominent family, and he also succeeded. He got promoted.” But the problem with that is, how do you know it is the prominent family part that contributed to his mobility? Maybe he was extremely smart.
> I’m not saying that the second view is necessarily wrong, but all I’m saying is that just telling that story itself is not convincing enough to make your point. In my work with Clair Yang from the University of Washington, we ran statistical tests to determine the effect of family backgrounds on exam performance. Whether or not you came from a rich family, whether or not you came from a politically prominent family, your father was a government official, your grandfather was a government official. Statistically, if that background influenced your exam score, we should be able to see it. We should be able to detect that effect in the statistical results we generate.
> Indeed, because you had three rounds, in the first two rounds that were anonymized, we didn’t see any effect of family backgrounds on exam scores. That’s quite impressive — going back to the 6th century, 7th century, 9th century, and 13th centuries — that your backgrounds didn’t influence your exam scores.
it sounds like you disagree with dr. huang's research conclusions, but you don't seem to be offering any argument against them, just bare contradiction
If you have more children, you can’t give the same amount of individual love and care to each. That said they can give love and care to each others, though not with the same level of experience and self-control as (some) adults can do.
Yes love and care are tremendously important to foster mentally healthy people.
But this alone won’t teach them literacy, swimming, mastering of self attention, math, music, biology, active listening, critical thinking, humility, sane cooperation at scale, and so on. For all that you need a safe generous educative environment that could be logistically scaled to all humans but that we will fail to put in place as we let the most capricious wealth-drainers deteriorate harmony in societies.
My attempt to explain would be a high income family aim to provide their kids the same opportunity, and they know with seven children they won’t be able to provide the personal attention to provide that. For example, consider how parental involvement in a child’s schooling is the number one predictor of educational outcome. Well, you can’t spend thirty minutes each night helping each of seven kids with their homework.
You seem to be trying to model social phenomena as linear functions. That's going to fail on almost every time.
The GP is also claiming monotonic behavior. Please understand it as constrained into a "reasonable" interval that he didn't disclaim. Otherwise it certainly won't hold either.
They are, but in a different way. They worry if they can still afford to pay the mortgage while also paying for a second daycare/preschool tuition and then later a second private school tuition.
> The cost of raising a kid might go up with income, but probably not at the same slope as income, which would mean they get cheaper in relative terms.
FAFSA allows colleges to perform perfect price discrimination, so the cost of raising a kid through college absolutely goes up with the same slope as income. When colleges know you have significant retirement savings and a high income, your kids will get zero financial aid.
A talking point endlessly repeated by those trying to push an agenda but those of us who climbed the ranks from poverty because the children of the well off chose not take advantage of the privilege they had and instead chose to be indolent would beg to differ. Meritocracy is alive and well, thank you very much.
No solution to anything in sight, just complains about unfairness. I know its an easy position in life, but its a lazy one.
But what about some concrete, achievable realistic steps to improve current situation even further? Or even better, what about bringing less fortunate parts of the world at least to this, apparently still miserable level? Now that would be an interesting discussion.
Unhinged from any concrete counter-critique, latching on to nebulous nonsense like “human nature”, hand-waves towards “whole human history” as if that means anything. That’s your comment.
One common example of this is in policy discussions about the tests, where figures tend to only present means, with no variances or scatterplots. I remember this, for instance, from a report at Dartmouth not too long ago arguing for the use of standardized tests, where the authors only presented means, and not the huge variances around them which is really the heart of the issue.
It starts to become especially problematic when people get canalized into lifetime paths based on essentially invalid measures, especially when the targets themselves are changeable. "Meritocracy" starts to become sort of a misnomer at that point.
Of course, relying on anything too heavily starts to be an issue, and tests are a source of information. But when you start to overrely on anything, or rely on it to an extent that is empirically unwarranted, you start to have problems institutionally and societally.
Even if the variance is so high that it becomes a lottery, it still looks better than any alternative people have come up with.
The West is fairly meritocratic. The attempt to deny this is catastrophizing e.g. "everything is awful and unfair." And in practice, critics of Western meritocracy have mainly had a negative effect by erroding the good things we do have.
Sounds like Winston Smith wound up in the Outer Party due to poor A level results?
And here we are, with all these automatons, but still with a societies that prepare people for more slavery systems anyway.
it doesn't help that we impede the progress of automation by outsourcing labour overseas where the cost of labour makes manual processes still viable or by importing temporarily cheap labour until they realize they're getting a raw deal and move up the ladder with everyone else.
if we want to develop the technology needed to alleviate the burden of manual labour then we have to disallow these temporary quick fixes. if we do nothing they'll run their course in a few decades anyways, it'll just be a slow walk to the same destination giving the people who are acting in exploitative ways ample time to stuff their coffers with the fruits of their schemes while letting the rest of society rot on the vine mere steps away from the solution that would benefit everyone.