The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800
link.springer.com
link.springer.com
That doesn’t sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad?
Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
It seems like the system of “nepotism” the paper describes is not bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes that when passing occupation from father to son would be inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less
Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them (within the bounds of what's acceptable and ethical) get a job they're qualified for is good. This is basically how every mutli generational family business works.
Giving an unqualified kid a no-show job or a real job they f-up is nepotism and bad.
Indeed. If some people are claiming that somehow giving your own child, uh, what shall I say, priority (?) and your full attention, teaching them skills and transmitting wisdom, and getting them opportunities is somehow bad, then sorry, but that's shockingly stupid, evil, and misanthropic. Doing these things basically describes what is more or less a core duty of parenthood. A parent has the obligation to prioritize his own children. The idea that such generational advantage is nepotism screams of envy. Inequality of opportunity is not unfair or wrong. Indeed, one of the purposes of meritocracy is to become better off so that you can give your own kids a better start than you had. It's wonderful to be able to give your kids opportunities that you have access to.
I think people are failing to distinguish two things, namely, prioritizing your own kin on the one hand, and on the other, prioritizing kinship favors at the gross expense of the common good. (At least that's the most charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is that the have-nots are just envious and feel entitled. There is no point in discussing anything with such twisted people.)
If a baker wants to hire his son, that's perfectly fine and completely his business. He doesn't have to open up the pool to check off some ridiculous meritocracy checkbox. It's his bakery. Of course, if he puts his son in a position of authority that he is grossly unsuited for, well, then he imperils his own business. Oh, well.
In a larger organization that's private, there is nothing wrong with hiring your own kid, either. Putting him in a position that he is completely unsuited for threatens the company, of course, and in that sense is simply stupid. It can also be argued that the company is harming the common good of the company. Private ownership doesn't mean you don't have certain moral obligations toward your employees. Good leadership is one such obligation, and putting an incompetent child in a position that harms the company is a failure of leadership.
Not every society struggles/struggled so poignantly with the contradiction between those things as we now do, but we do, and that's where the modern criticism of nepotism originates.
Teaching your children your trade by inviting them into your workshop or boardroom is sensible, but it inevitably means that there's less room in that workshop or boardroom for the scrappy, bright outsider whose supposed to have a fair chance.
There's not really one right answer under that kind of tension, so there's no surprise when criticism is levied in either direction.
If doing what is "right" means I have to hamstring my kid's chances, then I'm going to pass on "right" (or, more likely, re-orient my thinking to make it not "right") and help my kid.
Most societies do demand that workers for important roles be selected on merit or based on other criteria known to all participants, and not based on some individual's wish to care for their family or friends.
This is without anyone thinking of such a wish as illegitimate. However , acting on it is still nepotism and societies impose this prohibition on its members because it benefits all. In this sense, "parents providing for their children" is "losing out" in certain important domains all around the world.
Most societies become pretty practical after a while, and strive for people to be reliable and adequate for the roles they're appointed to play and celebrate the occasional master of some craft or pursuit. Being groomed for an opportunity from childhood, under the attention of one's family, often delivers on those and so a lot of societies don't worry about it except when it's obvious that somebody completely incompetent has ended up responsible for some influential or essential role.
It's actually a very peculiar modern experiment to expect every role to somehow be filled by the most capable person and for every person to be appointed a role that they're personally passionate about. Maybe it'll give us some amazing Star Trek utopia someday, but you don't see that idea expressed very much in history and so we don't really have reason to know what will happen if we try to make it so.
Nowadays I would also guess that the majority of people across the globe live in societies where nepotism is conceived of as bad. There might still be various amounts of it but people generally tend to discourage or punish nepotism when they can.
But there are a bunch of services helping "teach the test" for kids going to college/grad school, and in very, very many ways, middle class (or better off) parents do strive to give their kids tons of advantages that other kids do not have. Is it fair that my kid had access to their own computer and all the books they wanted to read, etc., when others didn't? No, but parents are still going to help their kids.
If we had something resembling a really fair system, kids and adults of any age would be able to take classes and learn whatever, with as much help as they needed. It would be expensive, but fair. That isn't what we have.
But yes, I would argue nepotism is prevalent in nearly all societies.
You can teach them your trade. You can show them that education is important, modelling and rewarding behaviours like reading. You can make sure you've got time to be there for them. You can introduce them to your friends in other lines of work. You can check their homework and help them when they struggle, within reason. You can make sure they never need a part-time job to get by while in school. You can get them tutors whenever they're having trouble. You can get them extra tuition outside school. You can pay for them to go to a great college. You can cover their living expenses when they're working an unpaid internship. You can invest in their startup. You can assure you that even if their startup crashes and burns, you'll make sure they always have a roof over their head and food in their belly. You can buy them a house, pay their bills, gift them millions of dollars.
And you can hire them to work for you - as long as you make a point to clearly not favour them in the workplace, by insisting they work hard every day, don't use your name, and that they start at the bottom and work their way up on their own merits.
And you can overlap these things! In your role as CEO give them an unpaid internship in the mailroom of your company, and in your role as a parent give them a $10,000/month allowance? Technically not nepotism.
The only things you can't do is give them undeserved promotions, or hire them directly into a senior job.
[0] "Harm" doesn't need to be catastrophic. Misuse of company funds is a kind of theft, and paying someone a salary who is basically on perpetual holiday is unjust, for example.
According to Cambridge Dictionary, nepotism is "the act of using your power or influence to get good jobs or unfair advantages for members of your own family." As soon as you favored your kid, it's nepotism, and it's bad. It undermines meritocracy and contributes to an unjust society. It's pretty straightforward to understand.
One of the things that modern life has messed up is the idea that you should always be happy. No, sometimes you just have to accept that what you are doing sucks, that you will have to power through it, and that's life.
More broadly, the issue of "unfair advantages" and the demonization of those who have them is explored rather poignantly in the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut [1]. The story takes place in a dystopian future where beautiful people are forced to wear masks to make their faces look ugly, those with beautiful voices have to use devices to make their voices sound awful, and anyone with above-average intelligence has to wear a radio headset which constantly plays annoying and distracting noises to prevent them from thinking too deeply. The title character is forced to endure multiple of these "handicaps", including heavy weights to slow him down and tire him out so that he cannot make use of his athletic gifts.
- fridgescaping
- Fanum tax
- Quit-Tok
- runglasses
- boomerocracy
- appification
And that does include adding definitions to existing words. "Literally" can also be defined by its antonym.
I've yet to work at a family owned company where the children were anywhere near as competent as their parents, and I've worked at multigenerational companies, so imagine that.
The one I spent the most time with was a publisher whose founders were Tulane educated intellectuals who walked the walk and talked the talk. The next generation sounded like they fell off an alligator tour air boat with the intellect to match. Their children are the dumbest group of human beings I've ever seen graduate from high school. Utterly and completely useless for anything other than getting hammered on the weekends and keeping random desk chairs from rolling away. Yet they were guaranteed jobs, even as the company's numbers continued to dwindle and they continued to use far more resources than they contributed. No Christmas bonus? That's because they needed to pay these morons enough to live in the same neighborhood as their father, meaning that they needed to make about 80% more than anyone else in their roles.
Ownership is not leadership. Leadership takes a set of skills that many people don't possess, and it's less common with the children of the well-off.
Not saying it is better, but in some cases it probably is. Certainly could be in some cases
That difference is only on paper, purely academical. In reality, almost all the time, this quickly morphs into pushing your kin into positions of power where they make a mess but you still tolerate them because supposedly they are at least somewhat predictable and you don't want to invest the time and effort to build trust with a stranger.
(Or whatever their actual motivation is -- to me it remains mostly a mystery.)
If sons and nephews are bad managers and a business suffers... that's nepotism. If they're good managers and the business succeeds, that's a family business. if the local authorities hire family... that's nepotism, because we have an expectation that it should be done differently.
A lot of words are like this. Positive and negative words with positive or negative associations that we use to describe the same thing... depending on the association we want to emphasize.
But once homo retcom has words... we think in those words. So, we think of nepotism (for example) as this distinct thing, and expect this nuanced definition to account for the negative or positive aspects.
This paper is basically a formalization of that process.
In large public companies or institutions that have shareholders or state owners then it's unfair for an executive or senior administrator to carve out a job for a family member. He's giving them something he doesn't own, unlike in the family business example.
100% ? 50% ? Something in the middle?
It's not as correct decision-making influence-wise. The power balance of "family vs remaining shareholders" is different from what would be assumed purely based on those numbers.
It can be said that Samsung C&T is the actual head subsidiary/control vehicle through which the other subsidiaries are run at the top level, and the family is easily the biggest shareholder in C&T.
The KOSPI, which is what the subsidiaries are listed on (the "group" is not listed), is seen as a bit of a joke by both foreign and domestic investors for that reason. Besides its obvious downsides, it does have upsides as well - the "sacrifice everything for the short-term stock price" that is the norm in the US is less common in Korea for this reason. Corporations work differently.
> We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.
This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708
I think Indians are even more so but there it's about caste and not just being Indian.
Humans are weird.
Alternatives like University Affiliation, Regional ties, Ethnic ties, Clan ties, and Workplace affiliation play a greater role due to the nature of South Asian immigration in the US (tends to be white collar professionals across all ethnic groups).
Treating South Asian Americans homogeneously will lead to the same mistakes like treating all Latinos homogeneously - plenty of South Asian heavy battleground counties like Loudoun County, Middlesex County, Williamson County, Kern County, San Joaquin County, etc have seen Ds margins drop significantly in the current election.
That said, we are a clannish bunch, and biradari (and every other South Asian language's equivalent of that word) is our guanxi.
That said I do agree with you to a certain extent that pre-Tech immigration absolutely was a thing (and a major factor in the Punjabi community across western US).
> more similar to Guyana. (My great grandfather came during that 1920s era but jumped ship in NYC instead
Oh dang, that's pretty wild! I thought most immigration to Guyana from South Asia during that era was primarily from Eastern UP, Bihar, and West Bengal, not Sindh/Punjab.
My intuition would be that nepotism would be more rife with this kind of community makeup, if you know your distant family and your family friends very well they're much more likely to try to help you out.
Judaism is nothing like protestantism or even catholicism. If it were, we wouldn't have protestantism or catholicism. Judaism ( by that I mean real judaism ) is racial/ethnic and centered around bloodlines while protestantism is universal.
> promotes education and reading for all.
No. Judaism promotes the study of torah/tanakh and even that is only within their own people. Judaism most certainly does not promote education in the general sense and not to the general public. That modern jews in the west pursue education is not due to judaism but to european culture.
> Plus Judaism promotes some form of debate.
In a superficial manner. Like how protestants and catholics debate. Certainly not in the socratic way of the greeks.
Judaism didn't go around the world spreading literacy like Catholicism and especially Protestantism did. After all the jewish god is only for the jews while the christian god is for all humanity.
Isn't it basically a meme now that when you ask a rabbi a question you get a question in return? I think that's a cultural difference.
A good example is the 11th Century Mediterranean world.
In the Muslim sphere of influence, Jewish culture was highly intellectual, and produced numerous scholars.
In the Christian sphere of influence, Jewish culture was highly fundamentalist, and produced almost no native Jewish scholars.
Heck, modern day Israel or New York offers almost the same contrast, as did the first century Middle East.
Judaisms tendency to split into these two camps, usually simultaneously, is one of its many fascinating features.
Hum... Just have a look at a list of Nobel prize winners.
That's an interesting take. It seems to have a continental Europe perspective. In the first 150 years of the American colonies, Catholicism was illegal, except for Pennsylvania. However, even there, Catholics remained disenfranchised. The first Catholic university in the US, Georgetown, opened in 1789. (Harvard: 1636, Yale: 1701). The first amendment was ratified in 1791 (meaning Catholicism could no longer be made illegal). Catholics were mostly unwelcome to attend other schools, that was the reason for divergence and almost certainly assured a high nepotism rate. Also note that in the 1700's/1800's nepotism in government was considered normal.
I think this is still common. People like to think a son or daughter will govern just like a parent. But it sometimes doesn't work that way.
I've always blamed this on there not being an "orthodox" Protestantism. Since every protestant preacher is a different religion, it enabled atheists to work freely (as unspecified mystery protestants.)
Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism.
I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood.
Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04936-1
>Nobel laureates cluster together. 696 of the 727 winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics belong to one single academic family tree. 668 trace their ancestry to Emmanuel Stupanus, 228 to Lord Rayleigh (physics, 1904). Craig Mello (medicine, 2006) counts 51 Nobelists among his ancestors. Chemistry laureates have the most Nobel ancestors and descendants, economics laureates the fewest. Chemistry is the central discipline. Its Nobelists have trained and are trained by Nobelists in other fields. Nobelists in physics (medicine) have trained (by) others. Economics stands apart. Openness to other disciplines is the same in recent and earlier times. The familial concentration of Nobelists is lower now than it used to be.
but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or something like that)
Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
Including having lots of offsprings. Apparently, "not procreating to save the planet" is for the poor.
Seems more sensible to just assume they all negate each other out in the long run, unless proven otherwise by voting records.
As for why we shouldn’t actually care abstractly there simply aren’t that many ultra wealthy. Any subsidies given to them just cost an incredible amount relative to the number of people helped etc. They also don’t directly matter in terms of broad metrics like human health, lifespan, happiness etc.
My point was how we treat ultra wealthy as a political issue is independent from the underlying reality. They aren’t directly outvoting poor people to revive more benefits, it’s instead a question of influence.
Billionaires tend to see positive ROI from getting involved in politics, which is self reinforcing over time. But, stepping back you can judge such systems not in terms of current politics parties operate, but in the broader context of how efficient systems are. In that context the ROI is negative for society even if it can be positive for some individuals that comes at significant cost.
Many millions of people can genuinely believe in something, be on a ‘side’, while being spread across the entire economic spectrum.
At best it can be said to be an ideological differentiation, not an economic differentiation.
It does when the side described was the edges of a distribution.
> wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich
Replace a few words and:
> height distribution, on the one side we have the tall and hyper-tall
PS: To be clear the political interests of a group exist even if the group doesn’t map to a specified political party or ideology. Groups have specific interests independent of which other stances they take. We don’t think of short people in political terms, but there would be a real outrage if gas stations put their credit card readers 7 feet off the ground.
Hence why I wrote ‘side’ in quotation marks, because I didn’t fully agree with the original parent comment’s characterization.
e.g. HN user 1 can say X part of the population is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of blue cheese and Y part is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of cheddar cheese. But future replies by HN user 2 and user 3 are free to treat that as all meaningless gibberish.
It avoids this kind of pointless replies.
So yes please do not reply…
Your behavior is simply unworthy of attempting an intellectual discussion.
Edit: Consider yourself lucky I’m not requesting a mod to ban this account ‘Retric’ for deception.
The site encourages people to delete unproductive comments that haven’t been responding to as it improves the reading experiences for 3rd parties. Which is one of the reasons there’s a big old delete button and you can edit posts for a full hour.
Adding “Edit:” is important for clarity when a post has been responded to, without that it’s just clutter.
That’s the issue.
Looking at your posting history, I’m not convinced you’re capable of meaningful dialogue.
The risk of being overthrown was always there. They had to maintain their power through some combination of force, propaganda, and actual good rulership.
Arguably the distinction between royalty, nobility and commonfolk grew larger the longer the feudal system was in place, to the point where kings inherited entire countries by birthright at the end of the XVIII century.
I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.
"if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us as our King"
Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it.
If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism.
If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money.
But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.
If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low.
[Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement.
Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people.
This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.
So what? I don't make decisions, and I don't think society should make decisions, based on "mammalian instinct". My standards are a little higher than that.
It's a common, but bizarre way to try to argue something is inevitable. You don't have to act like a cow, or even a chimpanzee - if someone says you do, it's not a compliment.
> it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts
It reduces outcomes and fairness because productive work is shifted to unproductive people who lack merit.
Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way above the Brits, that's for sure.
If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself. Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country, had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia [1]:
> He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent.
Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a Catholic canon.
So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most respected economists in the history of the dismal science were actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of their times in many domains of economics.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-024-09244-0
*(Actually you probably shouldn't.)
You can instantly distribute any academic books and papers online and you can live broadcast lectures, even have two way communication between lecturer and student in text, voice or video, no matter where they are on the globe.
So the idea is outdated that you should have to invest this amount of money or these many years of your youth and be in a specific place for a degree. It has been mostly an excuse for the rich to hire the children of other rich people for well paying jobs. "Oh, you don't have a degree. Sorry, we can't consider you". Now that everybody is getting degrees, that excuse doesn't work anymore.
High school graduates won't be structured, because they're not supposed to sit in a school bench at that stage of life. They've been there for ten years already. Continuing studies without even tasting real life stunts your development.
Here are some purposes of academia, besides education:
– Research
– Privilege laundering for the rich
– Hiding youth unemployment
– Brain washing youths (Not in your country or university, where it's merely influencing them in the right direction)
– Continue to instill a leader-follower mindset into the population
– A nice and leisurely lifestyle without having to work
– Getting connections with rich and influential families
– Finding young people for romantic adventures
– Impressing older generations, who value degrees religiously
* In-person access to professors who can competently discuss topics that go beyond the syllabus.
* Fairly realistic appraisal of what it's like to continue on to graduate studies.
* Being immersed in an environment of self-driven learning.
* Building independence in a safe space away from home.
* Very wide range of sports clubs, societies, hobby groups etc... and the time to pursue several of them.
* Opportunity to demonstrate excellence. The degree class and academic prizes still count for something at many universities.
> Opportunity to demonstrate excellence.
This is the best point, and probably the top reason why young people who are excellent workers find themselves quitting after some years and going back to school.
Fair - to be honest I'm holding in mind a fairly idealised version of university where the professors excel in both teaching and research and are open to discussing all reasonable viewpoints. Possibly because I was in the sciences I don't have much familiarity with struggles with closed-minded lecturers. Also I was thinking about the environment outside of studies - students have financial loans and grants to ease their transition, opportunities to socialise and avoid loneliness, and easy access to free advice and therapy etc... .