Counterintuitively, preserving meritocracy is one of the reasons we should pursue more economic and social egalitarianism. When the child of two rich lawyers gets a C+ average and gets some office job and it’s a mild drop in the child’s status and not “Oh god how will our child ever afford a home” then rich parents will be more willing to let the chips fall where they may and will be less tempted to put their fingers on the scale.
Professional-class people usually don't get started with children until almost or after thirty, and their parents often live well into their eighties. Thus they are in their fifties, well after they need to have established a professional career, and after the children are out of college - before inheritance kicks in.
Love seeing Noah discussing the connection between progressive anti-meritocracy and Asian immigration. It’s been one of those things that I know people must notice, but too few on the left have talked about openly.
Asians are seen as a legitimate threat to White American supremacy. Even when the rising Asian power was Japan, one of the postwar US's closest, most reliable allies, there was a ton of anti-Asian sentiment in the US. A significant chunk of the white left in the US only promotes diversity in the understanding that they are still effectively in charge. Now that the rising Asian powers are not almost fully aligned with, or in complete opposition to, US global hegemony, there's only even more reason to suppress Asians.
In addition, many left wing support bases like the US auto industry, and many left wing controlled cultural institutions like entertainment, are strongly anti-Asian. Historically, they have been mostly anti-Japanese, since only Japan presented a legitimate threat (e.g., the auto industry, comics, etc.). However, as more and more of Asia presents a legitimate threat to White American supremacy, the anti-Asian sentiment has only expanded.
"upper middle class White families probably aren’t particularly eager to see their kids outcompeted by the hard-charging children of immigrants"
This is terribly sad and disappointing if true.
My husband and I are upper middle class white people, as (I'm guessing) are many other readers of this Substack. N = 1, I cannot speak for anyone else, but my husband and I have an 8-year-old son, and while I love him with all my heart and want what's best for him, I absolutely DO NOT want to give him some unfair advantage over a determined Asian/African/Middle Eastern immigrant child. This is *not* the way to have a thriving, successful society. I want my son to succeed, but I also want him to have integrity and not to seek unfair advantages. Also, trying to make it harder for immigrant children to succeed would be hideously hypocritical of me, because I was a poor immigrant child once.
"U.S. carbon emissions in 2021 were down to the level of 1979"
Not to be all negative, but isn't it at least partly because the U.S. was in the depths of the pandemic then, with all sorts of effects on CO2 emissions: work from home = less driving, a huge decrease in tourism and flying, etc.?
Where I'm conflicted is that, as bad as the under-the-table discrimination Harvard was doing was, how is it *meritocratic* for any group to leverage its advantages to game the KPIs in the system? We have people purchasing authorships on sham academic papers, we have people forcing their kids to play violin and piano even though they hate them... it doesn't make sense.
A lot of this is temporary selection effects. Second and third generation children tend to revert to the native population mean. And a lot of it is difficult to distinguish from our higher ed system also being a major export to the very same countries (India and China, primarily) from whom we got all that high-skilled immigration.
But in the abstract, any perfectly meritocratic system should match the underlying population distribution to within some reasonable range of accuracy. Whenever it doesn't, that means we're either (A) not doing meritocracy right, or (B) experiencing a temporary disruption that maybe we should pay attention to. Not trying to prescribe any specific policies here - and certainly not endorsing quotas - but I think we should be able to agree at bare minimum that the deviation itself is evidence of imperfection.
Why should a meritocratic system be expected to match the underlying population distribution?
High skilled immigrants are expected to be significantly more driven to succeed, and to care significantly more about education than the native population, so it should be expected that they and their descendants within a couple generations, are significantly more represented in higher education and high skill careers.
The US immigration system is overall fairly meritocratic, and specifically wants people to improve the overall population of the US. It should be expected that the people such a system brings in, will be over-represented in higher education and high skill careers. Over-representation of children of high skilled immigrants and communities with a high share of high skilled immigrants in higher education, shows that the immigration system is doing it's job incredibly well.
If you want a meritocratic system to represent the underlying racial distribution, then invite all the poorer and less educated people from Asia into the US as well.
>>If you want a meritocratic system to represent the underlying racial distribution, then invite all the poorer and less educated people from Asia into the US as well.
I... *do*. I support radically more open immigration policy.
To be clear, everything you just said was contained in my point (B) "experiencing a temporary disruption that maybe we should pay attention to". You're not proving me wrong, you're just fleshing out the nuance I was trying to encompass with my statement.
>>Why should a meritocratic system be expected to match the underlying population distribution?
As I said: "deviation itself is evidence of imperfection".
The base assumption is that raw talent is evenly distributed across all possible racial and ethnic groupings. Group differences and outlier groups can be pretty much entirely explained by either structural factors or random variation.
Meritocracy hinges on the notion that ALL raw talent should be rewarded and tracked into the best educational opportunities with zero regard for any identity characteristic - race, gender, creed, etc.
Therefore, a perfectly meritocratic society will have proportionally-distributed outcomes across any possible grouping, EXCEPT for random variation. This means that SMALL differences can be ignored -- if the ADOS population is 11% and the average at Harvard is 9%, it's probably not statistically significant. But if Yale's ADOS proportion is 20%, then we know that Yale is, as I said above, (A) not doing meritocracy correctly or (B) having some sort of temporary disruption. Note that this assessment doesn't normatively dictate WHAT about meritocracy Yale is doing imperfectly or WHAT the disruption must be, it just says that we can definitively know that it's either (A) or (B), period.
Immigration into the US isn't a temporary disruption on the scale of human life though. Considering the US will not have open borders any time soon, it should be expected that any meritocratic system will favor immigrants and a few generations of their descendants.
If anything, the question should be, why is there so much institutional racism against Asians in the US, that despite the reasonably successful gaming of KPIs, Asians are still so underrepresented in top US universities and the US elite, vs what would be expected from a meritocratic system.
Rarely comment but this jumped out at me From. NY Times article
The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
We haven’t learned, and certain states don’t want us to learn, about systemic racism against African Americans? And now we’re building-in systemic racism against Asian Americans? And we think the U.S. believes in competition? We’re kidding ourselves if we allow any systemic racism.
James Lindsay, Chris Rufo and Kenny Xu have all written books recently about the influence of Paulo Freire, in particular, and Marcuse, Angela Davis, etc. on the education system. The modern woke movement's dialogue comes directly from these people. It's verbatim!
The ideas about standardized testing most certainly got started this way and got carried on through
So, yes, it's based on white people (dead, white Marxist philosophers.) But has been used by any and every group (black colleges, liberal arts colleges where you can "make up your own major") that "doesn't test well."
"The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds." - Ibrim X. Kendi
It’s a shame that Lindsay and to a lesser extent, Rufo, sound like deranged lunatics on 99% of issues such that it’s hard to take them seriously about anything.
I'm reading a biography of James Conant just now. He was president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. He explicitly adopted standardized testing in order to break up the Boston Brahmin contingent at the school. He explicitly sought to widen the range of Harvard students to include more scholarship students and students from other than the Mid-Atlantic. He explicitly sought meritocratic entrance standards.
There was no Marcuse, Friere or Davis progressives at the time.
Perhaps by today's standards it's conservative but back then conservative is better defined, I think, by loud claims about White Christian culture and the 'white man's burden'. The classic element of conservatism is arguably preservation of the status quo. Conant was breaking that at Harvard, not protecting it.
Maybe the problem is that there is no good way to figure out who 'the best' is let alone the best individual and what's best for a complex entity like a huge research university.
My memory of conservatives in the past is very different. The Moral Majority was always a minority. And it was the liberals who did "the white man's burden" thing, not conservatives. Maybe I misunderstood, but to my ear, it sounds like an educated-class excuse for self-segregation. If "those people" are all nasty and racist and culturally backward, we don't have to treat them as fellow citizens now, do we?
Yes, it's striking how the specific ideas of conservative vs. progressive ideas, can change.; much like Democrats used to be the Party of Slavery and Jim Crow and Republicans were of the Party of Lincoln.
Rather than filling the categories with actual ideas/policies I sought to broadly identify a stance of maintaining the status quo vs. breaking the status quo. Way back, TR used the egregious white man's burden to break the US out of its isolationism and play a bigger role on the world stage, think Panama Canal. These activities definitely shook up the status quo but today are anything but progressive though he unequivocally identified as such.
I remember when today's progressives started to call themselves that, and it was because the word "liberal" had become toxic in the national discourse. I don't see how you can have a theory of progress if you despise your country and most of the people in it. In that way they are "conservative" because if the status quo actually changed - if progress actually occurred - they'd have nothing to complain about.
This is as far away as possible from the TR-era progressives who claimed the right and obligation (as cultured, patriotic, righteous people) to assert the people's interest over the money power. I don't think this is incompatible with a conservative stance (TR always claimed he was a good Republican, and was protecting the best traditions of the nation against the selfishness of capitalists). But it incorporates a view of national progress that embraces the prosperity and development of all the people, high and low. Which is exactly what FDR said he was trying to do. So - conservative, liberal, take your pick.
I think TR's imperialism is part of that same fabric. I think he genuinely thought he was fulfilling the republic's historic mission of progressing the cause of human civilization. For him, it wasn't breaking the status quo, it was fulfilling it.
Yeah I would agree with that. I read the book "who gets in and why" and it's basically that. There are so many perfect candidates that they just have to make stuff up in order to choose who gets in.
I agree with this. I am a manager in a sought after field. We get tons of applications from students graduating Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. and we reject nearly all of them.
We have so many applications from the top schools with perfect grades, internships, and even their own projects. Dime a dozen.
What I end up doing is narrowing in on some specific expertise that is useful to us. These things can be taught however, especially to these very bright people, but we've got to sort on something.
On the other hand, we aren't trying to fill any racial quotas.
Nicolas Lehmann wrote a great book on this called the Big Test. Conant's counterpart over at MIT was a meritocrat as well - Vannevar Bush. The Endless Frontier is a great biography and snapshot across a lot of educational, military, scientific and technological slices of life that Bush encountered and affected.
Define "woke." Is it teaching that the US has warts and enslaved people and built lots of industry on their backs, only granted rights to vote other than non-white men 100 years ago, and acknowledging that the federal government had lending practices that prohibited GSE baking of lending in non-white areas until about 80 years ago? https://www.investopedia.com/the-history-of-lending-discrimination-5076948 Does that trigger people? I could go on but there's reasonable and there's just dumbism. Not you, Robert; you read this stack.
I'll set aside the ad hominen snark. Everything I said is true and scathingly attributed to Woke-ism. Shouldn't students be taught our history warts and all? Define it. Desantis is running half of his sputtering campaign on it, but he wants to use taxpayer money to attack the free speech rights of the largest employer in Florida on the basis that $DIS is woke. W.F. Buckley Jr. and Edmund Burke are rolling in their graves.
Not rising to the bait, but thanks. I'm not ranting against any well held belief that can stand up to questioning. A Replicant running a presidential campaign on laws like the "STOP WOKE" act is working out very well for him, ya think? The vast majority of people I know are within 30% left or right of the middle but the body politic is driven by the fringes. I carry and can use a handgun (and have carbines) and have many of them. On the other hand I think lots of laws passed to protect "voter integrity" are thinly veiled voter suppression attempts. I can hold different thoughts in my head at the same time, instead of OSFA definitions, I'd gladly consider discussing bans on drag queen library and pre-pubescent beauty queen contests a la JonBenet. Wrong time wrong place for that.
I find it amusing that the Left (which I'm on) uses deconstruction to avoid defining wokeness. i think about that during the land acknowledgment before our local university hockey games...
Okay, I'll define it. Woke is a cultural tendency whose adherents are characterized by performative faux-militant politics, self-righteous cultural elitism, reflexive negativity about America and visceral hostility to ordinary white people. The content of your post is a product of woke framing, whether or not you, personally, fit this description.
RE Econ102 episode with Moment of Zen, what is the deal with El Salvadorian criminal justice policy all of a sudden being a meme among libertarian-leaning people? Is it the Bitcoin connection?
I'm going to have to disagree with you on theory number 4. I'm guessing you don't have children yet, and, in particular, that you have not had to vicariously experience the pressure cooker that college admission has become. Kids are killing themselves over this now. It's awful. I am a person of color and I don't see the value in taking tons of APs, drilling the SATs, loading up on extra-curriculars and volunteer work, doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't actually interest you just so you can squeeze past the arbitrary bar set by admissions officers. Sure, standardized tests and grades are useful signals and we should keep them, but I think this is only the case up to a point. I don't believe that somebody with a 1600 is appreciably more intelligent or able than somebody with a 1550 or even a 1500. Above a certain limit, it just starts to be money burning to me, but in this case the money that's being burned is your childhood, which you will never get back.
I'd rather we just set a bar, 1500 for example, and everybody above that bar gets thrown into a lottery. If that doesn't seem meritocratic enough for you, we could reserve 10% of spots for the genius kids--math olympiads, professional violinists, etc--who get in purely on merit. In conjunction with this, we should double or triple the class sizes of the ivy+ schools so that we can both spread the privilege around, and dilute their prestige.
If you believe that over a certain bar doesn't matter, then instead of some weird lottery system that can be easily manipulated, just have everyone take the test exactly once, and take the top X. The luck component of the lottery system is just the applicants luck during their one shot at making it into the top X.
There's no need to debate what the bar really is, or question the fairness of the lottery system. The fairness of the test can certainly be questioned, however, all else equal, it's much better than letting people take the test multiple times as is currently done in the US.
Taking in the top X from a test taken once is a system that is used in other parts of the world, and is the simple obvious choice. The US invented admissions-as-a-complex-process to discriminate against Jews, and continues the system to discriminate against Asians.
"This is also highly likely to backfire in terms of advancing equity, since standardized tests tend to be less biased toward rich kids than other admissions criteria like essays."
Nope, the reason to abandon stardarized testing is to cover up blatant racist quotas more effectively. Those quotas will advance Kendian equity, as they are designed to do.
> What we don’t have, yet, is direct evidence that White people understand that moving from “hard” to “soft” admissions criteria privileges White applicants over Asian ones.
I am pretty sure they do understand that, at some level, especially the decision makers setting college admission policy. After all, we have primary sources documenting how "holistic admissions" was originally invented to keep the Jews out of Harvard. (Despite how forcefully most self-identified progressives try to ignore this point when confronted with it, in my experience.)
"What we don’t have, yet, is direct evidence that White people understand that moving from “hard” to “soft” admissions criteria privileges White applicants over Asian ones."
Is there evidence is a "soft" admission criteria would benefit whites? The quote you provided only concerns white admission counselors response to a specific, isolated variable. that's not real life. It may be accurate to say that it would harm Asians, but it doesn't follow that it would benefit whites.
Considering the overwhelming progressive worldview of college administrators -- something like 85%+ left-wing, Dan Klein at George Mason tracks these things -- it seems far more likely that a "soft" criteria would benefit blacks, Hispanics and anyone whose application demonstrates allegiance to the progressive pantheon of diversity, inclusion and victimhood. Basically, college admission would become like faculty hiring.
RTS would be a gamechanger for climate change. We already have zero marginal cost energy from solar and wind. If it can also be distributed at zero marginal cost, the only issue will be how to monetize the it. Fossil fuels can continue to be used up to the point where the MC of their CO2 emissions = MC of CCS.
I made a few VC investments in recent years and was pitched many over the same period. Typically, I would sit on conference calls with a group of like-minded investors that shared investment opportunities with each other. As we were a diverse group of investors, I doubt these conversations were atypical. I have a few anecdotal insights about the goings-on in the space.
Crypto was definitely a massive trend, which has ground almost to a halt in the past year. We had frequent and frank conversations with VC managers about their exposure to crypto. Managers uniformly wanted to position themselves as balanced-- seeking opportunities in Crypto whilst avoiding becoming overly concentrated there.
One exception was a Crypto-only fund being launched by a billion-plus-dollar VC firm. The fund was to have the traditional 10 year lockup and 2+20 fee structure, but differed from typical VCs in a key way. Namely, the fund's mandate would be much more flexible. The fund was certainly going to make investments in early stage equity, but would not be limited to that. Cryptocurrency investments as well as staking, lending, and other schemes were also on the table.
The whole rationale for the 10 year lockup is that early stage equity investments are illiquid and can't be easily liquidated to meet redemptions (or increased to meet subscriptions). No such rationale applied to the coin holdings, staking schemes, etc. I suggested to these managers that they should really be raising two funds. One for early stage equity, with the lockup period, and another, with no lockup, for the liquid investments. They didn't seem to care too much. We got the sense that no one really liked what they were doing, but the eagerness of many to get into the space made it possible for them to look the other way.
One of my friends ended up following up with the managers to invest in the Crypto fund. The fund ended up telling him that they were at capacity, but there was additional capacity in a particular investment that was their best performing. They were willing to facilitate an investment in that slice of the fund, a crypto ecosystem called "Terra Luna". My friend ended up declining, but this tidbit should give you some indication of why that funds has since marked down about half it's value.
Another interesting conversation we had with this Crypto fund was their simple exposure to the BTC price, however indirect. I was looking to see whether they were planning to hedge this, or focus on investments that were "hedged" in some way to have less exposure to the overall cryptocurrency price level. I basically reasoned that, after accounting for fees, simply buying coin would capture the overwhelming upside, whilst avoiding many risks. They didn't seem to have given it a lot of thought. They were full go on all things crypto.
It seems like the VC funding environment will be picking up shortly, focused on AI. Noah predicts, "If generative AI isn’t the world-transforming tech that some people think it will be, then the long-term future of VC over the next couple of decades could be a general pullback". I am not seeing that. The mere belief that AI will be world-transforming tech is enough to propel the VC industry, which thrives on hype. Crypto was similar and went bust, but VC funds will not be asked to return any of their management fees.
You might think that subpar returns (from crypto investments, or AI investments) will cause investors to sour on the space. This suggestion imagines VCs as being like mutual funds. Why would you invest with a mutual fund manager that has lagged the market for years? That's not how VC investing works though.
VC investments have a minimum lockup of 10 years and the full realization timeline can be more like 15. So, very unlike mutual funds we need to follow a VC manager for 10-15 years before we can say *anything* about their performance. OK, sure, so just look for the managers with 10-15 years experience that have been successful. That's not possible. First, there just aren't many managers like that.
"VC funds haven’t significantly outperformed the public markets since the late 1990s, and since 1997 less cash has been returned to VC investors than they have invested"
OK, but at least *some* managers have outperformed right? Well, yes, but those managers don't do VC anymore! There is too much capital seeking to invest with them for them to be able to allocate it all to early stage equity. So they drift to later stage equity. The next crop of actual early stage managers are the analysts that worked for the successful managers over the previous decade. Those analysts go out and raise their own funds.
This was my experience. It is not possible to invest in a VC fund with a good track record. You can only invest with new managers that had lesser roles at funds that did well, or with successful managers' newer products focusing on later stages of equity investment. People invest nonetheless. The fundamentally untethered relationship between these investment flows and past returns tends to move emphasis to especially: the general pedigree of the investment team, and whether the thesis is compelling. These theses are extremely faddish (crypto, AI, etc.).
Long comment, but my piece of advice for those seeking to invest in startups is-- access is everything. Evaluating early stage companies and technology is hard. Finding people with such rare skills is hard. Some managers have access to deals (due to their connections) that others do not. Access to exclusive dealflow is the strongest indication a fund will succeed. Ask yourself, does this manager have especially good access to dealflow? If you are being pitched a startup, ask yourself, "Why am I being pitched this?". Are you exploiting an important connection, or are they exploiting you?
I think the upper middle class white reasoning is well-intentioned, not sinister, but has sinister effects. Parents look at their kids, and obviously think their kid is great. If you ask them why they’re great, they’ll look around at other kids and say “they may not be the smartest or the most athletic, but they’re well-rounded.” And then parents come to value well-roundedness as a virtue (which it is). And then it gets taken a bit too far and turns into a privilege-based extracurricular arms race with some racist implications about who is and isn’t well-rounded.
Counterintuitively, preserving meritocracy is one of the reasons we should pursue more economic and social egalitarianism. When the child of two rich lawyers gets a C+ average and gets some office job and it’s a mild drop in the child’s status and not “Oh god how will our child ever afford a home” then rich parents will be more willing to let the chips fall where they may and will be less tempted to put their fingers on the scale.
Professional-class people usually don't get started with children until almost or after thirty, and their parents often live well into their eighties. Thus they are in their fifties, well after they need to have established a professional career, and after the children are out of college - before inheritance kicks in.
Love seeing Noah discussing the connection between progressive anti-meritocracy and Asian immigration. It’s been one of those things that I know people must notice, but too few on the left have talked about openly.
Asians are seen as a legitimate threat to White American supremacy. Even when the rising Asian power was Japan, one of the postwar US's closest, most reliable allies, there was a ton of anti-Asian sentiment in the US. A significant chunk of the white left in the US only promotes diversity in the understanding that they are still effectively in charge. Now that the rising Asian powers are not almost fully aligned with, or in complete opposition to, US global hegemony, there's only even more reason to suppress Asians.
In addition, many left wing support bases like the US auto industry, and many left wing controlled cultural institutions like entertainment, are strongly anti-Asian. Historically, they have been mostly anti-Japanese, since only Japan presented a legitimate threat (e.g., the auto industry, comics, etc.). However, as more and more of Asia presents a legitimate threat to White American supremacy, the anti-Asian sentiment has only expanded.
Fascinating post, Noah, thank you!
"upper middle class White families probably aren’t particularly eager to see their kids outcompeted by the hard-charging children of immigrants"
This is terribly sad and disappointing if true.
My husband and I are upper middle class white people, as (I'm guessing) are many other readers of this Substack. N = 1, I cannot speak for anyone else, but my husband and I have an 8-year-old son, and while I love him with all my heart and want what's best for him, I absolutely DO NOT want to give him some unfair advantage over a determined Asian/African/Middle Eastern immigrant child. This is *not* the way to have a thriving, successful society. I want my son to succeed, but I also want him to have integrity and not to seek unfair advantages. Also, trying to make it harder for immigrant children to succeed would be hideously hypocritical of me, because I was a poor immigrant child once.
"U.S. carbon emissions in 2021 were down to the level of 1979"
Not to be all negative, but isn't it at least partly because the U.S. was in the depths of the pandemic then, with all sorts of effects on CO2 emissions: work from home = less driving, a huge decrease in tourism and flying, etc.?
Where I'm conflicted is that, as bad as the under-the-table discrimination Harvard was doing was, how is it *meritocratic* for any group to leverage its advantages to game the KPIs in the system? We have people purchasing authorships on sham academic papers, we have people forcing their kids to play violin and piano even though they hate them... it doesn't make sense.
A lot of this is temporary selection effects. Second and third generation children tend to revert to the native population mean. And a lot of it is difficult to distinguish from our higher ed system also being a major export to the very same countries (India and China, primarily) from whom we got all that high-skilled immigration.
But in the abstract, any perfectly meritocratic system should match the underlying population distribution to within some reasonable range of accuracy. Whenever it doesn't, that means we're either (A) not doing meritocracy right, or (B) experiencing a temporary disruption that maybe we should pay attention to. Not trying to prescribe any specific policies here - and certainly not endorsing quotas - but I think we should be able to agree at bare minimum that the deviation itself is evidence of imperfection.
Why should a meritocratic system be expected to match the underlying population distribution?
High skilled immigrants are expected to be significantly more driven to succeed, and to care significantly more about education than the native population, so it should be expected that they and their descendants within a couple generations, are significantly more represented in higher education and high skill careers.
The US immigration system is overall fairly meritocratic, and specifically wants people to improve the overall population of the US. It should be expected that the people such a system brings in, will be over-represented in higher education and high skill careers. Over-representation of children of high skilled immigrants and communities with a high share of high skilled immigrants in higher education, shows that the immigration system is doing it's job incredibly well.
If you want a meritocratic system to represent the underlying racial distribution, then invite all the poorer and less educated people from Asia into the US as well.
>>If you want a meritocratic system to represent the underlying racial distribution, then invite all the poorer and less educated people from Asia into the US as well.
I... *do*. I support radically more open immigration policy.
To be clear, everything you just said was contained in my point (B) "experiencing a temporary disruption that maybe we should pay attention to". You're not proving me wrong, you're just fleshing out the nuance I was trying to encompass with my statement.
>>Why should a meritocratic system be expected to match the underlying population distribution?
As I said: "deviation itself is evidence of imperfection".
The base assumption is that raw talent is evenly distributed across all possible racial and ethnic groupings. Group differences and outlier groups can be pretty much entirely explained by either structural factors or random variation.
Meritocracy hinges on the notion that ALL raw talent should be rewarded and tracked into the best educational opportunities with zero regard for any identity characteristic - race, gender, creed, etc.
Therefore, a perfectly meritocratic society will have proportionally-distributed outcomes across any possible grouping, EXCEPT for random variation. This means that SMALL differences can be ignored -- if the ADOS population is 11% and the average at Harvard is 9%, it's probably not statistically significant. But if Yale's ADOS proportion is 20%, then we know that Yale is, as I said above, (A) not doing meritocracy correctly or (B) having some sort of temporary disruption. Note that this assessment doesn't normatively dictate WHAT about meritocracy Yale is doing imperfectly or WHAT the disruption must be, it just says that we can definitively know that it's either (A) or (B), period.
Immigration into the US isn't a temporary disruption on the scale of human life though. Considering the US will not have open borders any time soon, it should be expected that any meritocratic system will favor immigrants and a few generations of their descendants.
If anything, the question should be, why is there so much institutional racism against Asians in the US, that despite the reasonably successful gaming of KPIs, Asians are still so underrepresented in top US universities and the US elite, vs what would be expected from a meritocratic system.
Rarely comment but this jumped out at me From. NY Times article
The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
Article should be free to read
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/trump-meritocracy-educated.html?unlocked_article_code=T3TVKwxTTFpXCeTGEUn_tNwNyTAQsaTGqci4QVwYjRBAHlZUseEDtAULy25F6NQjc4PRqUiOcSTugvjJXLNUtxenAYIlBj3Ap9or9JbJgprusj_XP97IZ4ayiFq8a45TiBnptMMsVTUc7TPHJccVRdtui-8zM0mTT5wxtE1P8DkVp7F36FS_ENEFHSsLhURPNvFMqW8hOKC0h5hnrZVl9U8QkXCVw1H7_55AOvrTbGc96Kg-w4EB_vGvzuPlsY2oE1Jk-tPzIHAQQZ-LaQ4qTt6dtlhY7Y7VWE7XHd-h9L4ivzkVpj3hm2SUz-8Cf8U1aNqKF15vkw5mH_Klgda-6p4F0gA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Yes. Speak less and build more.
We haven’t learned, and certain states don’t want us to learn, about systemic racism against African Americans? And now we’re building-in systemic racism against Asian Americans? And we think the U.S. believes in competition? We’re kidding ourselves if we allow any systemic racism.
James Lindsay, Chris Rufo and Kenny Xu have all written books recently about the influence of Paulo Freire, in particular, and Marcuse, Angela Davis, etc. on the education system. The modern woke movement's dialogue comes directly from these people. It's verbatim!
The ideas about standardized testing most certainly got started this way and got carried on through
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/War+on+the+SAT%3A+with+affirmative+action+rolled+back%2C+University+of...-a085522761 future DEI initiatives. And can be found in current strategies like Loudon County (black parents wanting to remove testing due to Asian immigrants.)
So, yes, it's based on white people (dead, white Marxist philosophers.) But has been used by any and every group (black colleges, liberal arts colleges where you can "make up your own major") that "doesn't test well."
https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/fight-standardized-testing-diverse-think/
I mean, just look at this and the links at the end of this *National Education Association* article.
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing
"The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds." - Ibrim X. Kendi
It’s a shame that Lindsay and to a lesser extent, Rufo, sound like deranged lunatics on 99% of issues such that it’s hard to take them seriously about anything.
yeah, Lindsay is kinda nuts. His book wasn't that good. Rufo is more reasonable. not really a fan of either but on this issue they're not wrong.
I'm reading a biography of James Conant just now. He was president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. He explicitly adopted standardized testing in order to break up the Boston Brahmin contingent at the school. He explicitly sought to widen the range of Harvard students to include more scholarship students and students from other than the Mid-Atlantic. He explicitly sought meritocratic entrance standards.
There was no Marcuse, Friere or Davis progressives at the time.
That's interesting, I didn't know that. Though, obviously, that motive is actually basically the "conservative" side of the debate now.
Perhaps by today's standards it's conservative but back then conservative is better defined, I think, by loud claims about White Christian culture and the 'white man's burden'. The classic element of conservatism is arguably preservation of the status quo. Conant was breaking that at Harvard, not protecting it.
Maybe the problem is that there is no good way to figure out who 'the best' is let alone the best individual and what's best for a complex entity like a huge research university.
My memory of conservatives in the past is very different. The Moral Majority was always a minority. And it was the liberals who did "the white man's burden" thing, not conservatives. Maybe I misunderstood, but to my ear, it sounds like an educated-class excuse for self-segregation. If "those people" are all nasty and racist and culturally backward, we don't have to treat them as fellow citizens now, do we?
Yes, it's striking how the specific ideas of conservative vs. progressive ideas, can change.; much like Democrats used to be the Party of Slavery and Jim Crow and Republicans were of the Party of Lincoln.
Rather than filling the categories with actual ideas/policies I sought to broadly identify a stance of maintaining the status quo vs. breaking the status quo. Way back, TR used the egregious white man's burden to break the US out of its isolationism and play a bigger role on the world stage, think Panama Canal. These activities definitely shook up the status quo but today are anything but progressive though he unequivocally identified as such.
I remember when today's progressives started to call themselves that, and it was because the word "liberal" had become toxic in the national discourse. I don't see how you can have a theory of progress if you despise your country and most of the people in it. In that way they are "conservative" because if the status quo actually changed - if progress actually occurred - they'd have nothing to complain about.
This is as far away as possible from the TR-era progressives who claimed the right and obligation (as cultured, patriotic, righteous people) to assert the people's interest over the money power. I don't think this is incompatible with a conservative stance (TR always claimed he was a good Republican, and was protecting the best traditions of the nation against the selfishness of capitalists). But it incorporates a view of national progress that embraces the prosperity and development of all the people, high and low. Which is exactly what FDR said he was trying to do. So - conservative, liberal, take your pick.
I think TR's imperialism is part of that same fabric. I think he genuinely thought he was fulfilling the republic's historic mission of progressing the cause of human civilization. For him, it wasn't breaking the status quo, it was fulfilling it.
Yeah I would agree with that. I read the book "who gets in and why" and it's basically that. There are so many perfect candidates that they just have to make stuff up in order to choose who gets in.
I agree with this. I am a manager in a sought after field. We get tons of applications from students graduating Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. and we reject nearly all of them.
We have so many applications from the top schools with perfect grades, internships, and even their own projects. Dime a dozen.
What I end up doing is narrowing in on some specific expertise that is useful to us. These things can be taught however, especially to these very bright people, but we've got to sort on something.
On the other hand, we aren't trying to fill any racial quotas.
Perhaps you use: "Who can bring something different to the table," not just legacies and perfect SAT scores...
Nicolas Lehmann wrote a great book on this called the Big Test. Conant's counterpart over at MIT was a meritocrat as well - Vannevar Bush. The Endless Frontier is a great biography and snapshot across a lot of educational, military, scientific and technological slices of life that Bush encountered and affected.
Define "woke." Is it teaching that the US has warts and enslaved people and built lots of industry on their backs, only granted rights to vote other than non-white men 100 years ago, and acknowledging that the federal government had lending practices that prohibited GSE baking of lending in non-white areas until about 80 years ago? https://www.investopedia.com/the-history-of-lending-discrimination-5076948 Does that trigger people? I could go on but there's reasonable and there's just dumbism. Not you, Robert; you read this stack.
Dumbism would be pretending that you don't know what woke means, at this point.
I'll set aside the ad hominen snark. Everything I said is true and scathingly attributed to Woke-ism. Shouldn't students be taught our history warts and all? Define it. Desantis is running half of his sputtering campaign on it, but he wants to use taxpayer money to attack the free speech rights of the largest employer in Florida on the basis that $DIS is woke. W.F. Buckley Jr. and Edmund Burke are rolling in their graves.
You're actually seriously pretending you can't define woke? Ok, define MAGA.
Not rising to the bait, but thanks. I'm not ranting against any well held belief that can stand up to questioning. A Replicant running a presidential campaign on laws like the "STOP WOKE" act is working out very well for him, ya think? The vast majority of people I know are within 30% left or right of the middle but the body politic is driven by the fringes. I carry and can use a handgun (and have carbines) and have many of them. On the other hand I think lots of laws passed to protect "voter integrity" are thinly veiled voter suppression attempts. I can hold different thoughts in my head at the same time, instead of OSFA definitions, I'd gladly consider discussing bans on drag queen library and pre-pubescent beauty queen contests a la JonBenet. Wrong time wrong place for that.
I find it amusing that the Left (which I'm on) uses deconstruction to avoid defining wokeness. i think about that during the land acknowledgment before our local university hockey games...
"Conservatives" in the US stopped being conservative decades ago.
Okay, I'll define it. Woke is a cultural tendency whose adherents are characterized by performative faux-militant politics, self-righteous cultural elitism, reflexive negativity about America and visceral hostility to ordinary white people. The content of your post is a product of woke framing, whether or not you, personally, fit this description.
Should be “highly _likely_ to lead to backlash” I think?
RE Econ102 episode with Moment of Zen, what is the deal with El Salvadorian criminal justice policy all of a sudden being a meme among libertarian-leaning people? Is it the Bitcoin connection?
I think it's the chaos in SF.
Brilliant post
I'm going to have to disagree with you on theory number 4. I'm guessing you don't have children yet, and, in particular, that you have not had to vicariously experience the pressure cooker that college admission has become. Kids are killing themselves over this now. It's awful. I am a person of color and I don't see the value in taking tons of APs, drilling the SATs, loading up on extra-curriculars and volunteer work, doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't actually interest you just so you can squeeze past the arbitrary bar set by admissions officers. Sure, standardized tests and grades are useful signals and we should keep them, but I think this is only the case up to a point. I don't believe that somebody with a 1600 is appreciably more intelligent or able than somebody with a 1550 or even a 1500. Above a certain limit, it just starts to be money burning to me, but in this case the money that's being burned is your childhood, which you will never get back.
I'd rather we just set a bar, 1500 for example, and everybody above that bar gets thrown into a lottery. If that doesn't seem meritocratic enough for you, we could reserve 10% of spots for the genius kids--math olympiads, professional violinists, etc--who get in purely on merit. In conjunction with this, we should double or triple the class sizes of the ivy+ schools so that we can both spread the privilege around, and dilute their prestige.
If you believe that over a certain bar doesn't matter, then instead of some weird lottery system that can be easily manipulated, just have everyone take the test exactly once, and take the top X. The luck component of the lottery system is just the applicants luck during their one shot at making it into the top X.
There's no need to debate what the bar really is, or question the fairness of the lottery system. The fairness of the test can certainly be questioned, however, all else equal, it's much better than letting people take the test multiple times as is currently done in the US.
Taking in the top X from a test taken once is a system that is used in other parts of the world, and is the simple obvious choice. The US invented admissions-as-a-complex-process to discriminate against Jews, and continues the system to discriminate against Asians.
"This is also highly likely to backfire in terms of advancing equity, since standardized tests tend to be less biased toward rich kids than other admissions criteria like essays."
Nope, the reason to abandon stardarized testing is to cover up blatant racist quotas more effectively. Those quotas will advance Kendian equity, as they are designed to do.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/
There is nothing inconsistent in advancing "Kendian equity" and white elite privilege. The former can be cover for the latter.
Of course, that's exactly why it's so popular among the white elite
Asian Americans proved equality of opportunity is alive and well. So the goalposts needed to be moved.
> What we don’t have, yet, is direct evidence that White people understand that moving from “hard” to “soft” admissions criteria privileges White applicants over Asian ones.
I am pretty sure they do understand that, at some level, especially the decision makers setting college admission policy. After all, we have primary sources documenting how "holistic admissions" was originally invented to keep the Jews out of Harvard. (Despite how forcefully most self-identified progressives try to ignore this point when confronted with it, in my experience.)
"What we don’t have, yet, is direct evidence that White people understand that moving from “hard” to “soft” admissions criteria privileges White applicants over Asian ones."
Is there evidence is a "soft" admission criteria would benefit whites? The quote you provided only concerns white admission counselors response to a specific, isolated variable. that's not real life. It may be accurate to say that it would harm Asians, but it doesn't follow that it would benefit whites.
Considering the overwhelming progressive worldview of college administrators -- something like 85%+ left-wing, Dan Klein at George Mason tracks these things -- it seems far more likely that a "soft" criteria would benefit blacks, Hispanics and anyone whose application demonstrates allegiance to the progressive pantheon of diversity, inclusion and victimhood. Basically, college admission would become like faculty hiring.
RTS would be a gamechanger for climate change. We already have zero marginal cost energy from solar and wind. If it can also be distributed at zero marginal cost, the only issue will be how to monetize the it. Fossil fuels can continue to be used up to the point where the MC of their CO2 emissions = MC of CCS.
I made a few VC investments in recent years and was pitched many over the same period. Typically, I would sit on conference calls with a group of like-minded investors that shared investment opportunities with each other. As we were a diverse group of investors, I doubt these conversations were atypical. I have a few anecdotal insights about the goings-on in the space.
Crypto was definitely a massive trend, which has ground almost to a halt in the past year. We had frequent and frank conversations with VC managers about their exposure to crypto. Managers uniformly wanted to position themselves as balanced-- seeking opportunities in Crypto whilst avoiding becoming overly concentrated there.
One exception was a Crypto-only fund being launched by a billion-plus-dollar VC firm. The fund was to have the traditional 10 year lockup and 2+20 fee structure, but differed from typical VCs in a key way. Namely, the fund's mandate would be much more flexible. The fund was certainly going to make investments in early stage equity, but would not be limited to that. Cryptocurrency investments as well as staking, lending, and other schemes were also on the table.
The whole rationale for the 10 year lockup is that early stage equity investments are illiquid and can't be easily liquidated to meet redemptions (or increased to meet subscriptions). No such rationale applied to the coin holdings, staking schemes, etc. I suggested to these managers that they should really be raising two funds. One for early stage equity, with the lockup period, and another, with no lockup, for the liquid investments. They didn't seem to care too much. We got the sense that no one really liked what they were doing, but the eagerness of many to get into the space made it possible for them to look the other way.
One of my friends ended up following up with the managers to invest in the Crypto fund. The fund ended up telling him that they were at capacity, but there was additional capacity in a particular investment that was their best performing. They were willing to facilitate an investment in that slice of the fund, a crypto ecosystem called "Terra Luna". My friend ended up declining, but this tidbit should give you some indication of why that funds has since marked down about half it's value.
Another interesting conversation we had with this Crypto fund was their simple exposure to the BTC price, however indirect. I was looking to see whether they were planning to hedge this, or focus on investments that were "hedged" in some way to have less exposure to the overall cryptocurrency price level. I basically reasoned that, after accounting for fees, simply buying coin would capture the overwhelming upside, whilst avoiding many risks. They didn't seem to have given it a lot of thought. They were full go on all things crypto.
It seems like the VC funding environment will be picking up shortly, focused on AI. Noah predicts, "If generative AI isn’t the world-transforming tech that some people think it will be, then the long-term future of VC over the next couple of decades could be a general pullback". I am not seeing that. The mere belief that AI will be world-transforming tech is enough to propel the VC industry, which thrives on hype. Crypto was similar and went bust, but VC funds will not be asked to return any of their management fees.
You might think that subpar returns (from crypto investments, or AI investments) will cause investors to sour on the space. This suggestion imagines VCs as being like mutual funds. Why would you invest with a mutual fund manager that has lagged the market for years? That's not how VC investing works though.
VC investments have a minimum lockup of 10 years and the full realization timeline can be more like 15. So, very unlike mutual funds we need to follow a VC manager for 10-15 years before we can say *anything* about their performance. OK, sure, so just look for the managers with 10-15 years experience that have been successful. That's not possible. First, there just aren't many managers like that.
https://hbr.org/2013/05/six-myths-about-venture-capitalists
"VC funds haven’t significantly outperformed the public markets since the late 1990s, and since 1997 less cash has been returned to VC investors than they have invested"
OK, but at least *some* managers have outperformed right? Well, yes, but those managers don't do VC anymore! There is too much capital seeking to invest with them for them to be able to allocate it all to early stage equity. So they drift to later stage equity. The next crop of actual early stage managers are the analysts that worked for the successful managers over the previous decade. Those analysts go out and raise their own funds.
This was my experience. It is not possible to invest in a VC fund with a good track record. You can only invest with new managers that had lesser roles at funds that did well, or with successful managers' newer products focusing on later stages of equity investment. People invest nonetheless. The fundamentally untethered relationship between these investment flows and past returns tends to move emphasis to especially: the general pedigree of the investment team, and whether the thesis is compelling. These theses are extremely faddish (crypto, AI, etc.).
Long comment, but my piece of advice for those seeking to invest in startups is-- access is everything. Evaluating early stage companies and technology is hard. Finding people with such rare skills is hard. Some managers have access to deals (due to their connections) that others do not. Access to exclusive dealflow is the strongest indication a fund will succeed. Ask yourself, does this manager have especially good access to dealflow? If you are being pitched a startup, ask yourself, "Why am I being pitched this?". Are you exploiting an important connection, or are they exploiting you?
I think the upper middle class white reasoning is well-intentioned, not sinister, but has sinister effects. Parents look at their kids, and obviously think their kid is great. If you ask them why they’re great, they’ll look around at other kids and say “they may not be the smartest or the most athletic, but they’re well-rounded.” And then parents come to value well-roundedness as a virtue (which it is). And then it gets taken a bit too far and turns into a privilege-based extracurricular arms race with some racist implications about who is and isn’t well-rounded.
Perhaps a mix of both