Another factor that we should not neglect is the influence of values, culture, and interests on individual wealth outcomes. I can identify several points in my career where if I had made a different choice I would have made more money, and I was aware of that at the time I made those choices. I knew it when I chose to study history. I knew it when I retired early to try to be a novelist. I knew at at several other career junctures along the way, like the time I was offered an opportunity to move into sales support from technical communication or the time I was offered an opportunity to move into consulting, or the time I had the opportunity to develop a highly lucrative training business. If I had turned towards money instead of away from it at some or all of those junctures, I would be a lot wealthier than I am today.
But I consistently turned the other way, towards the things that interested me, and also towards an easier life that let me work fewer hours and travel less so I could be at home more an work on my other interests more. And I could be spending my time now on almost anything other than the ludicrously unlucrative ambition of being a novelist. But that is what I am doing, knowing full well that it is costing me more than it is making me, and likely always will.
From a purely financial standpoint, therefore, I have not come close to realizing my full potential given the particular set of opportunities and advantages I started out with. And I made the choice not to do so with full knowledge that that was what I was doing. And that is true of most people. Given sufficient resources to live comfortably (by whatever standard we measure that, which is largely a matter of the expectations we grew up with) most of us will choose leisure and interests over spending every waking hour grubbing for cash.
In short, while it is certainly true that we don't all start life with the same resources and the same advantages, and therefore with the same theoretical earning potential, most of us don't come close to maximizing the resources and advantages we do have in that cause because we choose to live differently.
That choice to live differently is no doubt individual in part and cultural in part, and it undoubtedly has consequences for our children. My choices and values were undoubtedly influenced by my parents' values and choices, and by the environment I grew up in as a consequence of those choices. And why should I complain of that? Who says that having the greatest possible amount of money in the bank is the best of life choices? That is a particular cultural and personal value shared by very few human beings.
To argue that those who started with greater advantages might owe something to those who started with few advantages has some merit, though it lies in the realm of charity rather than justice. But to argue that those who chose to devote all their advantages to the pursuit of money owe something to those who chose to devote their advantages to other pursuits is absurd. If Jeff Bezos owes me money because I devoted my time to writing novels rather than to building an ecommerce giant, should it not follow that I owe Jeff a share of the things I devoted my resources to: the time spend with my wife and kids, the time spent reading great books and talking about them, the time spent dreaming up characters and settings and plots. Does it follow that the people who chose to go fishing rather than building an business empire owe Bill Gates a brace of trout and the joy of a lazy day in a boat on a lake?
1. People just naturally love underdog stories. Even conservatives. I think it's hardwired for people to cheer on those from scrappy backgrounds.
2. Some may argue that it's societally beneficial to engineer class mobility. I mean that's largely the same argument as race-based affirmative action. But I think where they went wrong with that one was just the sheer degree of weight put on race. Most normies thought that affirmative action was a bit of a "tie goes to the runner" type adjustment. If all else equal, then the favored races get in. I think even today, most don't know that it was worth ~400 points of SAT.
"If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor."
People would make the argument that the Janitor's son's achievement is better as he won't have had access to tutors, help from his father and his father's friends etc and that given the same conditions in college the probability favours him achieving more.
Bezos might not be the best example to illustrate a connection between good genes and family wealth. According to Wikipedia, his genetic father was an alcoholic circus unicyclist and his stepfather made the money.
I’ve actually had some success explaining this to people who would never go full hereditarian.
If you believe:
1) Intelligence is, on average, financially rewarded
2) Intelligence is somewhat heritable
Then you wouldn’t expect intelligence to be equally distributed across income bands. Both of those positions are trivially true (and an understatement in the case of the second).
Wouldn’t the Janitor’s son get a much bigger boost from the peer networks at elite schools? As a white trash kid in a fairly selective college, the biggest thing I learned was the habits and preferences of the professional class. I loved that you brought about the noblesse oblige aspect with JFK, for a genes first society to work you need the genetic winners to have compassion for the others and understand their duty toward them.
This piece -- especially the part about the janitor's kid -- strikes me as an attempt to intellectualize/rationalize hatred of poor people. It explains why you think the right's delusions about the 2020 election and vaccines are somehow worse than the left's delusions about things as fundamental as gender and racial differences: The latter lies tend to be spread by wealthier people, ergo they can't be as bad as the lies spread by poorer people (even though they're obviously more harmful).
Acknowledging genetic differences is important because it helps us understand the world, not because it's a post-hoc justification to hold down people we might find distasteful, like a working-class kid who happens to be in the 99th percentile of intelligence but doesn't share your cultural sensibilities.
The "fairest" way to dole out admissions would probably be what the East Asian countries do. Make the standardized test significantly harder then rank everyone across the country from 1 to X. Admissions is purely based on rank.
Would that make society as a whole better though? I'm not sure.
"In other words, he’s a gene denier." This is universal. Mentioning genetic factors when talking about humans, individuals or groups, in anything except, possibly, medical issues, is the ultimate taboo. We are even supposed to pretend that men and women are interchangeable, which should be well over the border of insanity, but acquiescing to this absurdity is mandatory nonetheless. I suppose the idea is that mentioning genetic influence on personal behavior, group or individual, threatens civil peace since we have a racially divided society and everyone is obliged to maintain a pretense of literal, biological and not just legal equality. Some people even actually believe it, and become angry when that view is threatened by obvious facts and evidence. There are not many people who will say these things forthrightly and in their own name, in public. Respect for your willingness to do so.
This is what happens when you prioritize being contrarian over all else. If you are comparing two candidates who applied to a college, one who graduated from a prep school like Philip Exeter or Andover and another who graduated from a local public high school. Given the difference in opportunities in these two schools, the graduate from Andover would have better resume - more foreign language classes, enrichment volunteer trips, can excel at niche sports with low competition like Lacrosse but in a public high school, the student might have stellar GPA, good ACT and SAT score but not these extra curricular and niche sport achievements.
Maybe like Asia, we need to have standardized entrance exams to determine admissions, it is fair and is less bureaucratic as candidates can be ranked by entrance exam scores.
This is a non-solution, because it just lets the downward spiral of poverty to continue indefinitely, unless you are pinning all your hopes on genetic engineering to fix this. Actually, your view on poverty is incredibly trivial: my grandfather survived during the Great Depression by scraping leftovers off of the dirty pots and pans of prison kitchens, and today, I am a software developer. Heredity is not as simple as you're selling it.
It also makes all your mewling about women when it comes to abortion seem very dishonest, since it is clear you don't actually have compassion, so why invoke such arguments?
It doesn't matter to discriminate against the wealthy: they're gonna find a way anyways, it's not particularly important for them to get into an elite institution.
And the wealthy should have a sense of noblesse oblige anyway: there weren't really any major issues with the pre-Reagan tax rates, Kennedy certainly didn't complain he was paying too much.
Richard Hanania writes “Knowledge about your parents and grandparents can help predict things about you, even when we have individualized information. If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor. This might make the argument for class-based preferences that if anything go in the opposite direction, favoring the wealthy. The counterargument that it’s more impressive for a poor person to accomplish something isn’t obviously absurd, but it ignores the predictive power of heredity.”
Here is where you err. The predictive power of heredity works because it is unlikely the janitor’s son will have as high a SAT score as Einstein’s son.
But there are exceptions. Every so often an intelligent person would emerge from ordinary stock. For example, Johannes Bach, son of a baker and miller was a piper who began the musical tradition of the Bach family that culminated in his great grandson Johann S. Bach, the famous musician and composer. He had four children who became professional musicians, one of whom is considered top drawer, but after that, the talent seems to have dried up. My point is there was an initial person who stood out and founded the dynasty. Such a person would likely be analogous to the janitor’s son with the 800 SATs.
Another example are those children of talented parents who are lower economic status because of happenstance. I worked with a number of chemical technicians with a high school education who were very bright. I used to have one review my papers for grammar as he noted he’d been good in English in high school and he was (Our techs are co-authors on all our tech reports as they did the lab work, and sometimes made critical observations providing leads). Other techs had kids in the gifted program at school who went on to become PhDs like me. These guys were bright like me and could have taken the college path, but didn’t for various reasons. Some got their high school girlfriends pregnant, married them & got a job. Others were not into school or had bad home lives and went into the service, after which they got married and raised kids who then went to college. Here the parents were talented but not in a position to pursue college, but their children are.
I have never been more convinced that the time is right for founding a few new universities in the US that reject holistic admissions. Admission would be based on a published formula that weighs standardized test scores and high school grades in a transparent way. You would publish the admission cutoffs reached in the prior years. You could possibly consider some bonus points for strong performance on certain competitions like the AMC. No personal essays of any kind, no extracurricular analysis, no sports or legacy preferences and no interviews. Don’t even ask about race or sex. You could consider using high achievement in extracurricular or sports to offer some scholarships but it should not impact admissions.
I do think a school like this with the right backers could attract applicants. For one thing, it is way easier and less stressful to apply. All kinds of high IQ but unpolished kids who are feeling defeated by the current admission preferences, especially white and asian boys, could be lured in. Ideally you would brand it as being a tough program that will push you to your intellectual limits (kind of like the appeal of SEAL training).
Starting from scratch you could also change many other things about colleges that our currently warped in designing a new school. Plus, with the cratering of commercial real estate prices in cities around the nation, you might be able to pick up a campus on the cheap these days (to say nothing of the dozens of small colleges that are going bankrupt each year).
I wonder if there are historical examples of this sort of thing that could lend some insight. I guess the closest thing would be Ottoman Janissaries, where the state "saved" them from Christian (read: bad, underclass, and poor) parents to train them to be ultimate warrior fanatics.
It is strange, the desire to help "the least of us" is so deeply Christian but the people promoting societal leveling are such embarrassing moral cowards that they refuse to do with their own money what they demand institutions and others do with theirs. There's nothing stopping the wealthiest progressives from establishing massive privately run direct wealth transfer programs with their fortunes, but no, the state and institutions have to do the dirty work of their ideology.
Isn't it weird how denying evolution is low-status, but denying genetics is high-status?
Another factor that we should not neglect is the influence of values, culture, and interests on individual wealth outcomes. I can identify several points in my career where if I had made a different choice I would have made more money, and I was aware of that at the time I made those choices. I knew it when I chose to study history. I knew it when I retired early to try to be a novelist. I knew at at several other career junctures along the way, like the time I was offered an opportunity to move into sales support from technical communication or the time I was offered an opportunity to move into consulting, or the time I had the opportunity to develop a highly lucrative training business. If I had turned towards money instead of away from it at some or all of those junctures, I would be a lot wealthier than I am today.
But I consistently turned the other way, towards the things that interested me, and also towards an easier life that let me work fewer hours and travel less so I could be at home more an work on my other interests more. And I could be spending my time now on almost anything other than the ludicrously unlucrative ambition of being a novelist. But that is what I am doing, knowing full well that it is costing me more than it is making me, and likely always will.
From a purely financial standpoint, therefore, I have not come close to realizing my full potential given the particular set of opportunities and advantages I started out with. And I made the choice not to do so with full knowledge that that was what I was doing. And that is true of most people. Given sufficient resources to live comfortably (by whatever standard we measure that, which is largely a matter of the expectations we grew up with) most of us will choose leisure and interests over spending every waking hour grubbing for cash.
In short, while it is certainly true that we don't all start life with the same resources and the same advantages, and therefore with the same theoretical earning potential, most of us don't come close to maximizing the resources and advantages we do have in that cause because we choose to live differently.
That choice to live differently is no doubt individual in part and cultural in part, and it undoubtedly has consequences for our children. My choices and values were undoubtedly influenced by my parents' values and choices, and by the environment I grew up in as a consequence of those choices. And why should I complain of that? Who says that having the greatest possible amount of money in the bank is the best of life choices? That is a particular cultural and personal value shared by very few human beings.
To argue that those who started with greater advantages might owe something to those who started with few advantages has some merit, though it lies in the realm of charity rather than justice. But to argue that those who chose to devote all their advantages to the pursuit of money owe something to those who chose to devote their advantages to other pursuits is absurd. If Jeff Bezos owes me money because I devoted my time to writing novels rather than to building an ecommerce giant, should it not follow that I owe Jeff a share of the things I devoted my resources to: the time spend with my wife and kids, the time spent reading great books and talking about them, the time spent dreaming up characters and settings and plots. Does it follow that the people who chose to go fishing rather than building an business empire owe Bill Gates a brace of trout and the joy of a lazy day in a boat on a lake?
Of course not.
Few other thoughts:
1. People just naturally love underdog stories. Even conservatives. I think it's hardwired for people to cheer on those from scrappy backgrounds.
2. Some may argue that it's societally beneficial to engineer class mobility. I mean that's largely the same argument as race-based affirmative action. But I think where they went wrong with that one was just the sheer degree of weight put on race. Most normies thought that affirmative action was a bit of a "tie goes to the runner" type adjustment. If all else equal, then the favored races get in. I think even today, most don't know that it was worth ~400 points of SAT.
"If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor."
People would make the argument that the Janitor's son's achievement is better as he won't have had access to tutors, help from his father and his father's friends etc and that given the same conditions in college the probability favours him achieving more.
Bezos might not be the best example to illustrate a connection between good genes and family wealth. According to Wikipedia, his genetic father was an alcoholic circus unicyclist and his stepfather made the money.
I’ve actually had some success explaining this to people who would never go full hereditarian.
If you believe:
1) Intelligence is, on average, financially rewarded
2) Intelligence is somewhat heritable
Then you wouldn’t expect intelligence to be equally distributed across income bands. Both of those positions are trivially true (and an understatement in the case of the second).
Wouldn’t the Janitor’s son get a much bigger boost from the peer networks at elite schools? As a white trash kid in a fairly selective college, the biggest thing I learned was the habits and preferences of the professional class. I loved that you brought about the noblesse oblige aspect with JFK, for a genes first society to work you need the genetic winners to have compassion for the others and understand their duty toward them.
This piece -- especially the part about the janitor's kid -- strikes me as an attempt to intellectualize/rationalize hatred of poor people. It explains why you think the right's delusions about the 2020 election and vaccines are somehow worse than the left's delusions about things as fundamental as gender and racial differences: The latter lies tend to be spread by wealthier people, ergo they can't be as bad as the lies spread by poorer people (even though they're obviously more harmful).
Acknowledging genetic differences is important because it helps us understand the world, not because it's a post-hoc justification to hold down people we might find distasteful, like a working-class kid who happens to be in the 99th percentile of intelligence but doesn't share your cultural sensibilities.
The "fairest" way to dole out admissions would probably be what the East Asian countries do. Make the standardized test significantly harder then rank everyone across the country from 1 to X. Admissions is purely based on rank.
Would that make society as a whole better though? I'm not sure.
"In other words, he’s a gene denier." This is universal. Mentioning genetic factors when talking about humans, individuals or groups, in anything except, possibly, medical issues, is the ultimate taboo. We are even supposed to pretend that men and women are interchangeable, which should be well over the border of insanity, but acquiescing to this absurdity is mandatory nonetheless. I suppose the idea is that mentioning genetic influence on personal behavior, group or individual, threatens civil peace since we have a racially divided society and everyone is obliged to maintain a pretense of literal, biological and not just legal equality. Some people even actually believe it, and become angry when that view is threatened by obvious facts and evidence. There are not many people who will say these things forthrightly and in their own name, in public. Respect for your willingness to do so.
This is what happens when you prioritize being contrarian over all else. If you are comparing two candidates who applied to a college, one who graduated from a prep school like Philip Exeter or Andover and another who graduated from a local public high school. Given the difference in opportunities in these two schools, the graduate from Andover would have better resume - more foreign language classes, enrichment volunteer trips, can excel at niche sports with low competition like Lacrosse but in a public high school, the student might have stellar GPA, good ACT and SAT score but not these extra curricular and niche sport achievements.
Maybe like Asia, we need to have standardized entrance exams to determine admissions, it is fair and is less bureaucratic as candidates can be ranked by entrance exam scores.
This is a non-solution, because it just lets the downward spiral of poverty to continue indefinitely, unless you are pinning all your hopes on genetic engineering to fix this. Actually, your view on poverty is incredibly trivial: my grandfather survived during the Great Depression by scraping leftovers off of the dirty pots and pans of prison kitchens, and today, I am a software developer. Heredity is not as simple as you're selling it.
It also makes all your mewling about women when it comes to abortion seem very dishonest, since it is clear you don't actually have compassion, so why invoke such arguments?
It doesn't matter to discriminate against the wealthy: they're gonna find a way anyways, it's not particularly important for them to get into an elite institution.
And the wealthy should have a sense of noblesse oblige anyway: there weren't really any major issues with the pre-Reagan tax rates, Kennedy certainly didn't complain he was paying too much.
The argument starts from a faulty premise: that the singular goal of college admissions policy is to drive the best result for society.
But, like it or not, fairness matters to voters on the left and right.
Race-based policies are broadly unpopular because they offend most folk’s basic sense of fairness. Class-based policies are aligned with it.
Richard Hanania writes “Knowledge about your parents and grandparents can help predict things about you, even when we have individualized information. If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor. This might make the argument for class-based preferences that if anything go in the opposite direction, favoring the wealthy. The counterargument that it’s more impressive for a poor person to accomplish something isn’t obviously absurd, but it ignores the predictive power of heredity.”
Here is where you err. The predictive power of heredity works because it is unlikely the janitor’s son will have as high a SAT score as Einstein’s son.
But there are exceptions. Every so often an intelligent person would emerge from ordinary stock. For example, Johannes Bach, son of a baker and miller was a piper who began the musical tradition of the Bach family that culminated in his great grandson Johann S. Bach, the famous musician and composer. He had four children who became professional musicians, one of whom is considered top drawer, but after that, the talent seems to have dried up. My point is there was an initial person who stood out and founded the dynasty. Such a person would likely be analogous to the janitor’s son with the 800 SATs.
Another example are those children of talented parents who are lower economic status because of happenstance. I worked with a number of chemical technicians with a high school education who were very bright. I used to have one review my papers for grammar as he noted he’d been good in English in high school and he was (Our techs are co-authors on all our tech reports as they did the lab work, and sometimes made critical observations providing leads). Other techs had kids in the gifted program at school who went on to become PhDs like me. These guys were bright like me and could have taken the college path, but didn’t for various reasons. Some got their high school girlfriends pregnant, married them & got a job. Others were not into school or had bad home lives and went into the service, after which they got married and raised kids who then went to college. Here the parents were talented but not in a position to pursue college, but their children are.
I have never been more convinced that the time is right for founding a few new universities in the US that reject holistic admissions. Admission would be based on a published formula that weighs standardized test scores and high school grades in a transparent way. You would publish the admission cutoffs reached in the prior years. You could possibly consider some bonus points for strong performance on certain competitions like the AMC. No personal essays of any kind, no extracurricular analysis, no sports or legacy preferences and no interviews. Don’t even ask about race or sex. You could consider using high achievement in extracurricular or sports to offer some scholarships but it should not impact admissions.
I do think a school like this with the right backers could attract applicants. For one thing, it is way easier and less stressful to apply. All kinds of high IQ but unpolished kids who are feeling defeated by the current admission preferences, especially white and asian boys, could be lured in. Ideally you would brand it as being a tough program that will push you to your intellectual limits (kind of like the appeal of SEAL training).
Starting from scratch you could also change many other things about colleges that our currently warped in designing a new school. Plus, with the cratering of commercial real estate prices in cities around the nation, you might be able to pick up a campus on the cheap these days (to say nothing of the dozens of small colleges that are going bankrupt each year).
I wonder if there are historical examples of this sort of thing that could lend some insight. I guess the closest thing would be Ottoman Janissaries, where the state "saved" them from Christian (read: bad, underclass, and poor) parents to train them to be ultimate warrior fanatics.
It is strange, the desire to help "the least of us" is so deeply Christian but the people promoting societal leveling are such embarrassing moral cowards that they refuse to do with their own money what they demand institutions and others do with theirs. There's nothing stopping the wealthiest progressives from establishing massive privately run direct wealth transfer programs with their fortunes, but no, the state and institutions have to do the dirty work of their ideology.