The Myth of American Meritocracy

I'm not dismissing the role of education, however. Education is vastly important. A formal education with an expensive stamp on it? Not so much.

Continuing my discussion of the startup/technology sector, there was a time when a great degree would get you into places where you worked with awesome folks doing hugely important jobs. Over time, more awesome folks and hugely important jobs existed separate from that great degree. We've now reached a point where having that great degree many times is counter-indicative of performance ability, so it becomes kind of a social club.

I hate to say it, but for run-of-the-mill high technology jobs where you interact heavily with a business customer and make some magic happen? I view deep dives in college as a warning sign that you might be validating yourself against a model that has little practical impact in the larger world.

I really hated to admit that, because I deeply love education. But dang it, I believe the tables are flipped. You are more likely to get great help in the startup/technology sector from some 20-year-old who knows everything about technology from his personal passions than you are from a 25-year-old with a Master's degree from an Ivy League institution. And in terms of organizations, it's a big red flag as far as productivity goes for those places with tight controls over collegiate applicant. Unless you're building the next LHC. Whenever I see some job that's a straight technology job that has "and a masters degree in CS" without the following "or equivalent experience"? I'm thinking this isn't a place I want to be associated with. They have no idea what they are doing.

When I was working in Italy I would sometimes listen to a US Forces radio station on my drive in each morning, and the success story propaganda was fascinating. Every so often, there would be a completely irrelevant and disconnected sixty second summary of some lucky chap who did really well in business, with an undertone that all you needed was to work hard and you'd become a millionaire.

There's not really a test for such qualities. I mean, you can try, but it's very difficult to see how someone performs in trying circumstances until you put them there.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow (which I'm sure many of HNers have read), Kahneman gives an anecdote about his time working for the Israeli Defence Force. The IDF wanted a way to identify who should be put through officer training, and they turned to a team of psychologists to develop a testing program.

Kahneman and his colleagues came up with a series of scenario-based tests. Some problem would be posed to a group of soldiers ("move this log over the top of this wall"). The group would be observed and notes taken.

One thing that the psychologists watched for was spontaneous leadership. Who in the group took charge? Surely such a soldier was bound to command!

The problem is that, upon reviewing the performance of their selections, Kahneman and his colleagues found that their candidates did no better -- either in training or in the field -- than candidates chosen by other means. Simply seeing the "obvious" leadership qualities of a particular individual in a highly artificial situation is a basically useless predictor of actual outcomes.

It's satisfying noise.

Around the middle of the article, the author argues that Jewish whites are overrepresented in top colleges relative to non-Jewish whites, also arguing that white Jew academic performance has declined over the past decade. He argues that in essence, Jewish whites disproportionately dominate colleges, and that both Asians and non-Jew whites are underrepresented relative to the proportions of top students that are Asian and non-Jewish white. However, much of his analysis is based on analyzing the last names of students who earned National Merit Scholarship awards (these are awards given out nationwide among nearly all high school students), a method which might work for Asian surnames (which are highly distinctive), but one that is highly flawed when trying to distinguish between a white Jewish and white non-Jewish surname. This is rather shaky ground. In the author's defense, this is probably the only source of data that he could get, given that it is difficult to find data on Jewish vs. non Jewish white scholarly performance and college admissions.

If there's any section you should skim, that's it.

The later sections of the article are particularly eye-opening: the author enters into a discussion of the personal biases that admissions officers can hold. One example is that a researcher found that participating in certain "high school activities actually reduced a student’s admission chances by 60–65 percent, ...these were ROTC, 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and various similar organizations." Another interesting fact is that people (and by extension admissions officers) have a tendency to drastically over-estimate the proportion of blacks/Hispanics/Jews in the US population.

However, the article ends rather weakly; the author basically suggests that the best solution is to have top colleges select a small portion of their students by pure talent (geniuses), and then select the rest by lottery out of a pool of academically qualified applicants. To me, this seems just as unfair as the alternatives, and de-motivational for academic success.

All this talk about the top 1% just sounds like envy. Why do we compare ourselves to that?

I live in a neighborhood of a thousand 3000 square foot houses with three car garages. I imagine all the people in them reading that article and shaking their fists with anger at the 1% and realizing they're all failures who will never get ahead.

I just don't get that mentality.

""" Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.90

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”91

"""

But this is just a tip of the iceberg. The American groupthink of political correctness, lowest common denominator, and political posturing toward various political/ethnic/religious/sexual orientation groups is rotting this country inside out.

Worse things are yet to come.

/rant over

I'm not entirely sure the author appreciates the likelihood of various strange outcomes using a purely random lottery for admissions, for example "outlier" admissions classes that heavily over-represent one racial/gender group by chance.

Another rather damning point of the article is that university admission officers may be spectactularly unqualified to actually make admissions decisions. But I have been privy to the admissions decision process at the graduate level and bucketing applicants into the "will succeed" and "will not succeed" and "who knows" bucket usually winds up with a rather sizable number in the "who knows" bucket. So maybe the critque on the admission officers should be less worrisome than presented. I think PG has made statements that one of the biggest problems with YC applicants is that there just isn't an easy way to look at many applicants and make any reasonable determination about whether or not they could create successful startups.

Anyway, this is an excellently thought-provoking article and thanks for bringing it here.

Regardless, the bigger story of the alarming anti-meritocratic direction in the US is the poor social mobility in general.

edit: WP says Asians are 5.6% of US population.

The American right hates higher education for reasons that have nothing to do with meritocracy. Higher education takes young people away from their small often rural and suburban cultural bubbles and exposes them to a larger world. This exposure undermines the parochial teachings of fundamentalism, and tends to corrode prejudices through contact. (E.g. seeing that gay people are not monsters or twisted freaks that only want to get in your pants.) The cosmopolitan influence of universities is deeply hated and resented by social conservatives.

I find the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg examples poorly chosen. Silicon Valley is probably one of the few remaining industries that largely resembles a meritocracy in America. There are countless cases of people succeeding despite lacking a formal/prestigious education or having the right connections.

Success doesn't strike me as something that you just stumble upon. There is always work to be done, but most people just won't do it. I'm not saying most people are lazy, I just think that they decide to work on the wrong things.

Furthermore, if your determination can be deterred by an article, I wouldn't bet for you to be successful to begin with.

[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...

I was going to write more on this topic but I'm tired of it like I am with the religious. Instead I will say the following condensed sentence.

Libertarianism/conservatism/Republicans/meritocracy are merely derivations of humanity's sociopathic bias known as the just world fallacy. Furthermore most explanations in all business books, magazines and articles focusing on the people make the fundamental attribution error and are mostly bunk.

Finally once you understand the complexity of the world you live in you see how people have no fucking clue what they are taking about outside of the hard sciences.

There's an inherent exploit/explore tradeoff in "social". Or, more to the point, are you going to document social relationships or improve them (in spite of the fact that there are powerful people who don't want improvements to occur)? There's a lot more money and less risk in the former, but I'm more a fan of the latter, because that's where the great companies come from. Which is why I like Meetup a lot (with its unusual focus on growing the social graph) and feel more tepid about LinkedIn. They're a great company and they've executed well, but their model is still stuck in the old, broken, credential-and-resume way of doing things.

Since my colorful Google history has (against my will) been exposed to public digestion, I'll admit that what started that fracas was a document-vs.-improve debate regarding Google+ that I, unwisely and half-unintentionally, got myself caught in. (I was on the "improve" side.)

What on earth does this have to do with the Ivy League and college admissions? Well, this talk about "disrupting" education through online courses (e.g. edX, Coursera) is really about improving social and knowledge graphs, and that's really exciting. Admissions officers just document; they take notes on who looked impressive at a young age. I see admissions as a less interesting problem with time. If our generation does its job, no one will give a shit about college admissions in 30 years.