"What proportion (of x ethnic group) would you like?" is a question that greatly devalues the contributions of the individual student. Would you say, "You're a great interview candidate, but we already have a tall guy,"?
Discrimination happens when you treat equals as unequal, or unequals as equal. There is a world of difference between "we already have enough asian compsci majors", and "we already have enough compsci majors, but there is room for a sociologist".
Surely you're aware that this literally and explicitly happens in the context of college admissions. "We already have a couple tuba players, try Yale."
Sorry, but I don’t think your idea of meritocracy is very much in line with what most Universities are looking for.
That’s why they have things like essays and consider extracurricular activities. Most of the selective Universities specifically exclude people with high grades and very little else that they were involved in.
Moreover, I recall reading at some point that at least some of the Ivy’s, during at least the first half of the 20th century, specifically avoided students with the highest grades in favor of those who were more like a B+ average and were more social, which they determined through the very subjective means of interviewing students on campus. (I’m old enough that I recall some of my friends visiting Universities for such meetings, but I have no idea if they still meet prospective students like this).
Sorry I cannot tell what “this” is since that article neither mentions downplaying grades or interviewing students.
I believe the specific things I am talking about were discussed in relation to introversion and The Ivy’s specifically wanting to lean toward extroverts who were well-rounded and had good social skills.
Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values.
It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc.
Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values
Sure, go ahead and see what happens when you disconnect negative behavior from negative outcomes. I'm sure that has no long-term consequences for your civilization.
That's a straw man you've constructed. I've never said that negative behaviour is going to be rewarded.
Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent. You seem to be suggesting that they'll be accepting slackers and truants.
> Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent
Now. Once they start admitting students absent an IQ test, don't be surprised when it's prestige and the assumed quality of it's graduates is diminished.
>Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values.
>It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
By that logic, the alternative is you get more people in government, commerce etc. who are significantly less conscientious and dutiful? That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.
"greater equality" is tautological when you have instituted equality of outcome, but does it produce greater happiness? I don't believe it to do so. It reduced overall outcome - as those who are forced down will not produce as much as they could've.
Meritocracy is a fine ideal, but in practice is based on selection algorithms, and like any algorithm it can be and is used to launder whatever biases you like. Who decided what was meritorious? who wrote the tests?
Given what you're replying to, it sounds like you're suggesting that Asian Americans dominate power in this country, which I must be misinterpreting because that's ridiculous. I do agree with the general sentiment that what high achievers deserve is not necessarily what's good for society, but I'd say we should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
Something I never see people talk about is the difference between:
(1) each job being filled by the person who's better suited for it than any other person
*versus*
(2) each job being filled by a person who's better suited for it than for any other job
I think this is where narratives and assumptions about "meritocracy" and free markets fall down.
You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict. And it's hard to be honest from the point of view of hiring people, that (1) is basically not a realistic option. Everybody says their goal is to hire the best person for a job without acknowledging that the best person is not, and should not, be available.
Is (2) optimal for society? I'm not sure, but I think society is closer to that than (1). But "meritocracy" sounds more like (1) to me.
> You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict.?
They are not in conflict at all, this is what the basic welfare theorems of economics say.
It's just that #2 and #1 are impossible to achieve because it requires perfect information about each person and each job, and a unified labor market, which just isn't realistic, as information has a cost and labor markets are fragmented.
In the real world, we are lucky to get some aspects of both #1 and #2, in the sense that people do search for jobs best suited for them, but imperfectly, and employers do search for workers best suited for each job, but imperfectly, and you kinda meet in the middle. If you want, you can call "meritocracy" the freedom of the employer to hire the best worker available, but I'm not sure of a snappy phrase to describe the freedom of the worker to search for the best job available. Maybe someone came up with a label for that. But really they are flipsides of a process that leads to an optimum, they are not two opposing forces where one makes the other impossible. It is like buying and selling, the supply curve does not make the demand curve impossible; both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet. If you mess with either the demand curve or the supply curve, you do not end up at the optimum price, you end up losing welfare somehow.
Obviously anything that can reduce frictions helps you get closer to the meeting of 1 and 2. For example, greater availability of job boards and pay transparency, working condition transparency to get information about available jobs to workers, or things like more accurate information about worker skills and talents to employers (e.g. meaningfulness of degrees play a role here as do rigorous interviews). Really both worker and employer are facing a murky question trying to figure out "how good is the other side here?". Both need as much information as possible.
It is the costliness of information that keeps us away from 1 and 2 simultaneously.
Yes they are. Imagine World War II. The best person to dig a particular ditch might be Alan Turing. But that's completely different from the best job for Alan Turing being digging that ditch.
>both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet
I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
And plus these 300 year old Ivy League universities existed before the educated workforce … existed ... and will to continue survive long after the workforce thinks Ivy League has anything to do with on the job performance.
It is purely happenstance that these institutions have even had to consider caring about how they gatekeep genpop’s upwards mobility for the last half a century.
They literally have no reason to care. They believe attendees want higher education for the pursuit of academic knowledge and are so disconnected from the desperate reality. And they’re right, they can weather this fad.
The ombudsman closes the thick book in the monestary, blows dust off the back, walks outside and says “there are third generation people with Asian heritage in this country? huh, how about that.” Goes back into their monk quarters after replacing the wax, lights another candle and goes back into the books. This is how these institutions function. They don’t know anything about how passionate, desperate or how much energy has been put into simply getting in, they don’t know why its important to people except for them loving the attention and pride and money.
I would like to see some evidence that this is how you create a “healthy” society. Excluding high achievers on the basis of factors beyond their control is how wars are started.
> If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society.
That's fine, but the question is, who gets to decide? Individuals.
> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
Receiving unearned money doesn't lead to happiness due to lack of fulfillment. Having earned money taken away doesn't lead to happiness due to a lack of reward. Equality of outcome always ends up killing the initiative and freedoms needed for prosperity to support such a society to begin with.
> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
"Equality of outcome" == "greater equality"... Well yea, assuming outcome is definable and changing those outcomes to be "equal" is possible, by definition, things would be more "equitable" by that same definition.
"Greater happiness" - I assume you mean greater overall societal happiness. That's quite a subjective claim. I'm not sure that's even a measurable thing, but do you have any evidence of this?
I think this is a bad way to choose who gets to be a doctor, because if it is common knowledge then some demographic classes of doctors will be viewed as sub-par, regardless of individual merit.