This piece actually surprised me. I thought your main point of your Case Against Education was that right now, most of the benefits of a degree was signaling, and a lottery seemed like a good way to limit the signaling. Obviously signaling you are competent is useful for the individual, but for larger society, do you think that college is best way of signaling competence? If we did a lottery, the prestige of college would lessen, and employers would look towards other signals, which would probably have less government subsization and interference. What am I missing?
Are Handerson and Hess advocating the government requires such a lottery? If so, I understand Bryan's opposition, but it is not clear from this piece. I thought from how Bryan described their position that they were advocating the colleges institute it on their own.
I dont recall specifics but the dishonest Marxist claim that economics=politics is very influential but little-recognized view, even among people who hate Marxism. Ayn Rand says that production is not force.
You say that meritocracy is the fairest social ideal. I tend to agree. But the problem is how do you measure merit.
In a profit-maximizing business, people who are judged based on quantitative measures, like sales or or who makes the most widgets, have clear standards of merit. Arguably, the people with the most merit are the people who have the greatest ability to maximize those quantitative measures (subject to ethical and legal constraints and taking into account costs). Even in business, not everything is easily quantifiable. How do you choose the HR person with the most merit? Not so easy.
A university is a non-profit, so it has different considerations than a business. What is merit to a university? I suppose it depends on the goals of the university. Unlike a business with a focus on profit, a university could have many different goals beyond just education. Supposing a university was narrowly focused on education, then the most meritorious applicants (to undergraduate studies) might be those who graduate and are widely considered to be very smart and knowledgeable. In other words, the people who get good grades and test scores.
It turns out that having good grades and test scores tends to be correlated with a lot of other positive things in life. Probably will make more money than others, be healthy, etc. But while there is a correlation between having good grades/scores with life outcomes, that doesn't mean that they are the same thing as the merit that matters to a business. No doubt, many businesses will find these people to be highly meritorious. But being smart isn't the only thing that matters in business.
It's not that hard to determine intelligence. You can find out with fairly high accuracy with a three-hour test. And not just the IQ test. All standardized tests approach the measurement of general intelligence, which is generally fixed throughout life.
It should be the business of universities to impart and sharpen knowledge. They can never do so with wisdom. It is innate. And any attempt to stray from imparting and sharpening knowledge only corrupts the system.
My point is that intelligence =/= merit. Merit is a bit of a nebulous concept.
Think about it as applied to a meritocratic government. Does that mean we should be governed by the people in Mensa? That’s government by the high IQ, not necessarily government by the meritorious.
2. When Sandel gets sick, does he use a doctor who flunked med school?
To understand the meaning and motives of egalitarianism, project it into the field of medicine. Suppose a doctor is called to help a man with a broken leg and, instead of setting it, proceeds to break the legs of ten other men, explaining that this would make the patient feel better; when all these men become crippled for life, the doctor advocates the passage of a law compelling everyone to walk on crutches—in order to make the cripples feel better and equalize the “unfairness” of nature.
Do you shop around among doctors to separate the top 2% of MDs from the rest of the top 10%? I don’t think many do. Along the lines of what George Carlin said, there is an MD who graduated at the bottom of his class out there, and someone has an appointed with him tomorrow.
Each individual should judge, to the best of his knowledge, whats best for his life. He is the best judge, including learning from others. Govt should protect the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happineess
Is that your rationalization for totalitarianism? Mans independent mind is his basic method of survival. This is true of man as man. It is a metaphysical fact of man. It does not change because some people are unable to use their minds. Your hidden context, your hidden attack on mans mind, is a politics based on people who can use their minds but choose to evade thinking. This unites Left and Right as both different from the rational Enlightenment which created America to protect mans independent mind.
Criticism of platitudes inspired by the holy writ of St. Rand does not entail support for totalitarianism.
Observation of what is necessary for human survival is not a metaphysical fact. Further, the enlightenment (particularly the thought of Locke et al) was a rejection of metaphysics in favor of empiricism.
You quote Rand a lot. Fair enough, we all have our favorite thinkers. The best way to distinguish critical appreciation from ideological dogmatism is from hearing one’s criticism of their favorite thinker. In that spirit, I would be interested to hear your observations on what Rand got wrong.
The Enlightenment is one of only two basically rational cultures, the indirect influence of Aristotle via Aquinas. And the only basically individualist culture, as Christian supernaturalism was replaced by naturalism. Thus the Amer. Rev, the Dec Of Ind and Constitution. Thats why Leftists and Rightists, both advocates of the unfocused mind and collectivism, hate it. But the rationalist and empiricist subjectivism of the basic philosophy of that era quickly ended it. Still, its influence has been concretely massive: science, tech, industry, capitalism and historically rare self-confidence.
Your attack on mans independent mind is the historical cause of the statism that has dominated history.
Nation Of The Enlightenment-Leonard Peikoff, in Ominous Parallels.
The Enlightenment is one of only two basically rational cultures. And the only basically individualist culture. Thus the Amer. Rev, the Dec Of Ind and the Constitution. Thats why Leftists and Rightists, both advocates of the unfocused mind, hate it. But the
Elite colleges pair old money with new talent. This has a lot of value to both.
They also make sure there is a wide enough array of talent that the graduates of the elite colleges always know someone in a position of power on any given matter of importance.
Finally they want as best they can to select people they feel will be loyal to the institution.
You might not get that balance with a lottery.
Whether the rest of us should care I don't know, but I get why the colleges care.
Instead of a lottery, top schools use other criteria for admissions (legacy, affirmative action, etc.). While eliminating unqualified candidates is easy, once we get to certain academic criteria, differentiating between candidates is generally not possible nor practical. So they invent non-academic criteria.
While I'm all for meritocracy, I rarely see advocates of meritocracy address the elephant in the room. The role of luck in outcomes - uncontrollable and often unpredictable circumstances that signal boost one individual at the expense of thousands of others. For rare outcomes, luck is arguably *the* most important factor in choosing the winner (i.e., entrepreneurs). The lottery concept makes that factor explicit, at least in part.
There's nothing wrong with luck - we call it risk in finance. Risk-taking is an essential part of innovation and productivity growth. And the rewards make it worthwhile for individuals to take those bets. But let's not kid ourselves into believing outcomes are entirely driven by "merit" (whatever "merit" actually means).
How do we even measure luck's contribution though? It's weird to ask people to address the elephant in the room, when the room's dark and big and people keep claiming there's an elephant in there but have no photos of it. If entrepreneurship was largely luck, you'd expect successful serial entrepreneurs to basically not exist, as they'd need to get lucky twice or more.
Especially since a lot of the luck that we can measure is the consequence of anti-meritocratic barriers (such as being born in the wrong country).
What is luck? What is merit? Is it lucky to be born an American? To be born at all?
What is the sample size of serial entrepreneurs, relative to the overall sample? How much is the second success a function of the first success (contacts, fund raising, etc.)?
What is the definition of success? Most "successful" entrepreneurs make a living, but don't get rich. Many flame out when their company gets too big. Overall failure rate is pretty high.
Granted, luck is not really quantifiable. Risk is quantified with large sample sizes, which gives the illusion of measurability, even though the distributions don't always fall into the right patterns - partly because "luck" in the risk sense probably refers to non-continuous events.
Your nihilist hatred of reality, mind, knowledge, mans life and effort is noted. Get thee to a California tent sidewalk with addicts, crazies, needles, piss and shit and a smiling ,tolerant Newsom.
I tell folks that while the best time in all of history to be born is now, 1952 in Cincinnati wasn't bad. In fact I have lived a better life than near anyone who came before me and better than most people alive today because I fell off the rock in the USA. I'm in the top 0.000000000001% (approximately) of humans in all of history.
So let's all complain about the unfairness of it all in Higher Education.
There's still no benefit to the lottery approach. What you want is transparent admissions criteria and then admission of whoever scores the best on those criteria. If you have 100 slots, you don't get anything by putting the top 200 applicants into a lottery for admission when you could just take the top 100 applicants.
look out onto reality, not inward,/ focus your mind. Human survival is metaphysical. Youre trying to get high without having to pay. Man needs philosophy to survive. Philosophy is a tool of survival.
Reasons for a lottery: (1) Harvard (e.g) admissions really can't distinguish differences in merit among all those excellent academic records and test scores, (2) trying to create signal for Harvard to do its illusory merit-sniffing makes life miserable for ambitious high school students, (3) it favors grinds and resume-packers over intellectuals, and (4) the sense that of being "the very best" makes many elite college students insufferable.
In theory, it is impossible to argue against meritocracy. But in practice, talent evaluation is incredibly hard and plagued with uncertainties. Take something like sports - the purest of meritocracies perhaps. Teams have millions riding on selecting the right players, have years of evaluating talent, a large body of work to judge that is directly related to the skill being selected. And yet… the greatest quarterback of all time is drafted 199th/254. The second greatest quarterback was selected in the 82nd slot (Joe Montana). Kurt Warner wasn’t only not drafted, he was cut as a free agent and took five seasons to get a backup position. It isn’t just football either. Jokic wasn’t only not a lottery pick, he was a second rounder. Jordan was passed over by two teams.
But when we think about college admissions, the signal is even noisier. What makes a great college student is not as well quantified as being a great quarterback, the signals are saturated, and the evaluators have a lot less skin in the game than professional sport franchises (picking Bowie over Jordan is a career ender - not so for an admissions clerk). How well can we distinguish the top 1% from the remaining 10%? What counts as merit for a college student? Is it capacity for intellectual growth, the height of one’s academic ceiling, the notoriety one brings to the school, one’s predicted lifetime donations to the school, devotion to the institutional mission, or social utility of one’s intended major?
Assuming we decide that the criteria should be focused on selecting students with the highest academic ceiling, we have a problem if we rely on the SAT because the top 1% is 10x the size of Harvard’s entering class. So we have to add some other metrics to decide. But these all have potential for bias - grades are inflated and there is strong evidence of bias against boys in k12. What extracurriculars should count? How do you know if they were taken seriously or not? Why wouldn’t it be fairer to say, I want to randomly sample the top 10% as measured by the SAT and leave it at that? You aren’t giving up anything in terms of academic quality, you draw a broad distribution among the smart, and disincentivize kids gaming the system by participating in bs clubs.
Given that Harvard is more hedge fund than school with a huge tax exempt endowment they could if they wished double or triple their enrollment at least. Why don't they? Because it would make them less elite and reduce brand value because Harvard at core is exactly a brand, not a school, it's value is like an expensive watch, all watches tell time but some watches have brand value. The problem is there shouldn't be any Harvards in the first place in a modern society. Remove the endowment mechanism and they will educate a lot more people, and this problem resolves itself.
I'm curious: Bryan, how do you feel about "universal exams", in the style of Imperial China's "keju" as an alternative to the academic model? If all we care about is a strong signal, that should be a way for the state to fund the most important part while keeping the other options open for people.
It's funny in a way that Bryan has so much vehemence against a system - that is mostly exactly what is in place now. You've got no reason to trust me on this, but when my son was applying for colleges a few years ago, he was very interested in Brown for a particular program so we visited the school. Maybe because it was very early in the cycle that year, we actually got an interview with one of the people in the admissions office. To paraphrase, since it's been a few years, he said "As you'd expect we get a huge number of applications. After culling out the obviously unqualified we're left with 4 to 5 times the number of qualified applicants as we have places available. At that point, it essentially becomes a lottery". Ok, the word he used was essentially, but one has to ask what's the alternative? I'm sure there are some number of 18 year olds that stand out above all the others, but for all those others who can reliably pick out the "best"? It's not like Nobel Prize where you've got a lifetime of work in a field from the candidates to judge. It's a bunch of 18 year old kids most of whom have very few distinguishing characteristics.
This piece actually surprised me. I thought your main point of your Case Against Education was that right now, most of the benefits of a degree was signaling, and a lottery seemed like a good way to limit the signaling. Obviously signaling you are competent is useful for the individual, but for larger society, do you think that college is best way of signaling competence? If we did a lottery, the prestige of college would lessen, and employers would look towards other signals, which would probably have less government subsization and interference. What am I missing?
No government subsization and interference in college
Are Handerson and Hess advocating the government requires such a lottery? If so, I understand Bryan's opposition, but it is not clear from this piece. I thought from how Bryan described their position that they were advocating the colleges institute it on their own.
I dont recall specifics but the dishonest Marxist claim that economics=politics is very influential but little-recognized view, even among people who hate Marxism. Ayn Rand says that production is not force.
You say that meritocracy is the fairest social ideal. I tend to agree. But the problem is how do you measure merit.
In a profit-maximizing business, people who are judged based on quantitative measures, like sales or or who makes the most widgets, have clear standards of merit. Arguably, the people with the most merit are the people who have the greatest ability to maximize those quantitative measures (subject to ethical and legal constraints and taking into account costs). Even in business, not everything is easily quantifiable. How do you choose the HR person with the most merit? Not so easy.
A university is a non-profit, so it has different considerations than a business. What is merit to a university? I suppose it depends on the goals of the university. Unlike a business with a focus on profit, a university could have many different goals beyond just education. Supposing a university was narrowly focused on education, then the most meritorious applicants (to undergraduate studies) might be those who graduate and are widely considered to be very smart and knowledgeable. In other words, the people who get good grades and test scores.
It turns out that having good grades and test scores tends to be correlated with a lot of other positive things in life. Probably will make more money than others, be healthy, etc. But while there is a correlation between having good grades/scores with life outcomes, that doesn't mean that they are the same thing as the merit that matters to a business. No doubt, many businesses will find these people to be highly meritorious. But being smart isn't the only thing that matters in business.
It's not that hard to determine intelligence. You can find out with fairly high accuracy with a three-hour test. And not just the IQ test. All standardized tests approach the measurement of general intelligence, which is generally fixed throughout life.
It should be the business of universities to impart and sharpen knowledge. They can never do so with wisdom. It is innate. And any attempt to stray from imparting and sharpening knowledge only corrupts the system.
My point is that intelligence =/= merit. Merit is a bit of a nebulous concept.
Think about it as applied to a meritocratic government. Does that mean we should be governed by the people in Mensa? That’s government by the high IQ, not necessarily government by the meritorious.
the tyranny of merit,
-Sandel
1. Sandel's idea has merit.
2. When Sandel gets sick, does he use a doctor who flunked med school?
To understand the meaning and motives of egalitarianism, project it into the field of medicine. Suppose a doctor is called to help a man with a broken leg and, instead of setting it, proceeds to break the legs of ten other men, explaining that this would make the patient feel better; when all these men become crippled for life, the doctor advocates the passage of a law compelling everyone to walk on crutches—in order to make the cripples feel better and equalize the “unfairness” of nature.
-Ayn Rand
Do you shop around among doctors to separate the top 2% of MDs from the rest of the top 10%? I don’t think many do. Along the lines of what George Carlin said, there is an MD who graduated at the bottom of his class out there, and someone has an appointed with him tomorrow.
Each individual should judge, to the best of his knowledge, whats best for his life. He is the best judge, including learning from others. Govt should protect the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happineess
Pretty sure my grandmother with alzheimer’s is not the best judge of what is best for her life.
Is that your rationalization for totalitarianism? Mans independent mind is his basic method of survival. This is true of man as man. It is a metaphysical fact of man. It does not change because some people are unable to use their minds. Your hidden context, your hidden attack on mans mind, is a politics based on people who can use their minds but choose to evade thinking. This unites Left and Right as both different from the rational Enlightenment which created America to protect mans independent mind.
Criticism of platitudes inspired by the holy writ of St. Rand does not entail support for totalitarianism.
Observation of what is necessary for human survival is not a metaphysical fact. Further, the enlightenment (particularly the thought of Locke et al) was a rejection of metaphysics in favor of empiricism.
You quote Rand a lot. Fair enough, we all have our favorite thinkers. The best way to distinguish critical appreciation from ideological dogmatism is from hearing one’s criticism of their favorite thinker. In that spirit, I would be interested to hear your observations on what Rand got wrong.
The Enlightenment is one of only two basically rational cultures, the indirect influence of Aristotle via Aquinas. And the only basically individualist culture, as Christian supernaturalism was replaced by naturalism. Thus the Amer. Rev, the Dec Of Ind and Constitution. Thats why Leftists and Rightists, both advocates of the unfocused mind and collectivism, hate it. But the rationalist and empiricist subjectivism of the basic philosophy of that era quickly ended it. Still, its influence has been concretely massive: science, tech, industry, capitalism and historically rare self-confidence.
Your attack on mans independent mind is the historical cause of the statism that has dominated history.
Nation Of The Enlightenment-Leonard Peikoff, in Ominous Parallels.
The Enlightenment is one of only two basically rational cultures. And the only basically individualist culture. Thus the Amer. Rev, the Dec Of Ind and the Constitution. Thats why Leftists and Rightists, both advocates of the unfocused mind, hate it. But the
Elite colleges pair old money with new talent. This has a lot of value to both.
They also make sure there is a wide enough array of talent that the graduates of the elite colleges always know someone in a position of power on any given matter of importance.
Finally they want as best they can to select people they feel will be loyal to the institution.
You might not get that balance with a lottery.
Whether the rest of us should care I don't know, but I get why the colleges care.
Instead of a lottery, top schools use other criteria for admissions (legacy, affirmative action, etc.). While eliminating unqualified candidates is easy, once we get to certain academic criteria, differentiating between candidates is generally not possible nor practical. So they invent non-academic criteria.
While I'm all for meritocracy, I rarely see advocates of meritocracy address the elephant in the room. The role of luck in outcomes - uncontrollable and often unpredictable circumstances that signal boost one individual at the expense of thousands of others. For rare outcomes, luck is arguably *the* most important factor in choosing the winner (i.e., entrepreneurs). The lottery concept makes that factor explicit, at least in part.
There's nothing wrong with luck - we call it risk in finance. Risk-taking is an essential part of innovation and productivity growth. And the rewards make it worthwhile for individuals to take those bets. But let's not kid ourselves into believing outcomes are entirely driven by "merit" (whatever "merit" actually means).
How do we even measure luck's contribution though? It's weird to ask people to address the elephant in the room, when the room's dark and big and people keep claiming there's an elephant in there but have no photos of it. If entrepreneurship was largely luck, you'd expect successful serial entrepreneurs to basically not exist, as they'd need to get lucky twice or more.
Especially since a lot of the luck that we can measure is the consequence of anti-meritocratic barriers (such as being born in the wrong country).
What is luck? What is merit? Is it lucky to be born an American? To be born at all?
What is the sample size of serial entrepreneurs, relative to the overall sample? How much is the second success a function of the first success (contacts, fund raising, etc.)?
What is the definition of success? Most "successful" entrepreneurs make a living, but don't get rich. Many flame out when their company gets too big. Overall failure rate is pretty high.
Granted, luck is not really quantifiable. Risk is quantified with large sample sizes, which gives the illusion of measurability, even though the distributions don't always fall into the right patterns - partly because "luck" in the risk sense probably refers to non-continuous events.
“Mediocrity” does not mean an average intelligence; it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.
-ayn rand
> But let's not kid ourselves into believing outcomes are entirely driven by "merit" (whatever "merit" actually means)
Outcomes
>(whatever "merit" actually means)
Your nihilist hatred of reality, mind, knowledge, mans life and effort is noted. Get thee to a California tent sidewalk with addicts, crazies, needles, piss and shit and a smiling ,tolerant Newsom.
I tell folks that while the best time in all of history to be born is now, 1952 in Cincinnati wasn't bad. In fact I have lived a better life than near anyone who came before me and better than most people alive today because I fell off the rock in the USA. I'm in the top 0.000000000001% (approximately) of humans in all of history.
So let's all complain about the unfairness of it all in Higher Education.
There's still no benefit to the lottery approach. What you want is transparent admissions criteria and then admission of whoever scores the best on those criteria. If you have 100 slots, you don't get anything by putting the top 200 applicants into a lottery for admission when you could just take the top 100 applicants.
look out onto reality, not inward,/ focus your mind. Human survival is metaphysical. Youre trying to get high without having to pay. Man needs philosophy to survive. Philosophy is a tool of survival.
Reasons for a lottery: (1) Harvard (e.g) admissions really can't distinguish differences in merit among all those excellent academic records and test scores, (2) trying to create signal for Harvard to do its illusory merit-sniffing makes life miserable for ambitious high school students, (3) it favors grinds and resume-packers over intellectuals, and (4) the sense that of being "the very best" makes many elite college students insufferable.
In theory, it is impossible to argue against meritocracy. But in practice, talent evaluation is incredibly hard and plagued with uncertainties. Take something like sports - the purest of meritocracies perhaps. Teams have millions riding on selecting the right players, have years of evaluating talent, a large body of work to judge that is directly related to the skill being selected. And yet… the greatest quarterback of all time is drafted 199th/254. The second greatest quarterback was selected in the 82nd slot (Joe Montana). Kurt Warner wasn’t only not drafted, he was cut as a free agent and took five seasons to get a backup position. It isn’t just football either. Jokic wasn’t only not a lottery pick, he was a second rounder. Jordan was passed over by two teams.
But when we think about college admissions, the signal is even noisier. What makes a great college student is not as well quantified as being a great quarterback, the signals are saturated, and the evaluators have a lot less skin in the game than professional sport franchises (picking Bowie over Jordan is a career ender - not so for an admissions clerk). How well can we distinguish the top 1% from the remaining 10%? What counts as merit for a college student? Is it capacity for intellectual growth, the height of one’s academic ceiling, the notoriety one brings to the school, one’s predicted lifetime donations to the school, devotion to the institutional mission, or social utility of one’s intended major?
Assuming we decide that the criteria should be focused on selecting students with the highest academic ceiling, we have a problem if we rely on the SAT because the top 1% is 10x the size of Harvard’s entering class. So we have to add some other metrics to decide. But these all have potential for bias - grades are inflated and there is strong evidence of bias against boys in k12. What extracurriculars should count? How do you know if they were taken seriously or not? Why wouldn’t it be fairer to say, I want to randomly sample the top 10% as measured by the SAT and leave it at that? You aren’t giving up anything in terms of academic quality, you draw a broad distribution among the smart, and disincentivize kids gaming the system by participating in bs clubs.
Given that Harvard is more hedge fund than school with a huge tax exempt endowment they could if they wished double or triple their enrollment at least. Why don't they? Because it would make them less elite and reduce brand value because Harvard at core is exactly a brand, not a school, it's value is like an expensive watch, all watches tell time but some watches have brand value. The problem is there shouldn't be any Harvards in the first place in a modern society. Remove the endowment mechanism and they will educate a lot more people, and this problem resolves itself.
Meritocracy is a little like communism. It's a nice idea, but you don't actually want to do it.
And, merit is only by skill in one perspective of the world. And that perspective is not necessarily the entire picture.
I'm curious: Bryan, how do you feel about "universal exams", in the style of Imperial China's "keju" as an alternative to the academic model? If all we care about is a strong signal, that should be a way for the state to fund the most important part while keeping the other options open for people.
Here is my take on making college admissions more merit-based:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/lets-make-college-admissions-merit
It's funny in a way that Bryan has so much vehemence against a system - that is mostly exactly what is in place now. You've got no reason to trust me on this, but when my son was applying for colleges a few years ago, he was very interested in Brown for a particular program so we visited the school. Maybe because it was very early in the cycle that year, we actually got an interview with one of the people in the admissions office. To paraphrase, since it's been a few years, he said "As you'd expect we get a huge number of applications. After culling out the obviously unqualified we're left with 4 to 5 times the number of qualified applicants as we have places available. At that point, it essentially becomes a lottery". Ok, the word he used was essentially, but one has to ask what's the alternative? I'm sure there are some number of 18 year olds that stand out above all the others, but for all those others who can reliably pick out the "best"? It's not like Nobel Prize where you've got a lifetime of work in a field from the candidates to judge. It's a bunch of 18 year old kids most of whom have very few distinguishing characteristics.
Bryan, would you say that meritocracy is anti social desirability bias?
Agreeble people tend to be against free markets appearently, do they also tend to be anti meritocracy?