IQ + Effort + Achieved Desirable Outcome = Merit

From Top of the Class a review by Austin Bramwell of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, Shamus Khan.

An essay which highlight's one of my convictions; that we have too long focused on the wrong issue regarding social and monetary inequality. It is not now race (though it once was), it is now class (as it has ever been in most parts of the world). And by being blind to the root cause, we exacerbate the issue.

Status has always been hereditary. A warlord establishes a dynasty; a merchant buys a title; a politician gets his son elected to office. The desire to pass power, rank, and wealth down to one’s descendants is a universal that human institutions have always flexed to accommodate. Even communist dictators have consolidated rule within their families.

[snip]

The central vehicle for cementing upper-class loyalty was the English-style boarding school. Founded (or revitalized) in the mid to late 19th century, schools such as Groton, Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss, and St. Paul’s ostensibly sought to rescue boys from the corruptions of the city. The habits and attitudes formed there became indelible. At school boys learned how to dress, what to say, which interests to pursue. Only at boarding school could one pick up what Tom Wolfe called the “Northeast Socially Acceptable Honk,” or, more vulgarly, “Locust Valley Lockjaw.” A man’s school made his class background as unmistakable as his gait or the sound of his voice.

Today, the Ivy League no longer recruit exclusively from prep schools. At least since the SAT was introduced in the 1920s, they have instead claimed to admit the most promising candidates regardless of background. After short-lived reaction, when admissions offices, fearing that their campuses were becoming “too Jewish,” emphasized “character” as well as aptitude, the meritocratic ideal triumphed. Any youth today who combines extraordinary talent and extraordinary effort can in theory get into Harvard and ascend from there to the pinnacles of government, business, and academia.

Boarding schools and private academies, meanwhile, have not only survived but flourished. Recent graduates of my own alma mater, St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, are more likely to attend Harvard than any other college. Eighty percent matriculate at one of the top 30 colleges in the nation (according to U.S. News & World Report’s famous rankings). That is a falling off from my father’s day, whose entire St. Paul’s class, apart from a handful of “thickies,” went on to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Still, St. Paul’s admissions rates at the top colleges have remained remarkably high. Parents no longer send their children to St. Paul’s School so that they can affect the proper sense of entitlement. Instead, they send their children to St. Paul’s because it’s a great place to get ahead.

The book and the review focus on private education as a means of sustaining and privileging class but does so in a fairly sophisticated way. Most people naively and ignorantly think it is all about old-boy networks and secret compacts. It is nothing of the sort. The essay does a good job of demonstrating how it is a fairly straightforward process of the most productive people making the best opportunities available to their children by sending them to the best private school institutions which in turn do their best to select the most prepared and seek to smooth the way for the children's next hierarchical step up. Nothing nefarious or secret, just poorly understood. For example:

At the same time, Khan, who graduated from St. Paul’s the same year I did, takes a jaundiced view of its claims to promote meritocracy. Merit, he argues, is manufactured, if not simply bought and paid for. Start with the “effort” side of the meritocratic equation (“IQ + effort = merit”). To get into Yale today, mere brilliance is not enough. You also need some distinctive achievement. One undergraduate I met recently had directed and produced an award-winning documentary. Another had founded a fashionable nonprofit.

These students’ successes are genuine but also artificial. Only rich kids, after all, have the resources even to think about directing documentaries. Their parents and teachers urge them relentlessly to develop their passions, preferably ones that can set them apart from all the other applicants with perfect SAT scores. (Once admitted, students often abandon the very pursuits that helped get them in.) The rich, in other words, can afford both to create more dimensions in which their children can excel and to place them in an environment where such excellence is rewarded.

I take issue with defining Merit as IQ + Effort. I suspect it is more accurately "IQ + Effort + Achieved Desirable Outcome = Merit". Still, the observation remains true: "The rich, in other words, can afford both to create more dimensions in which their children can excel and to place them in an environment where such excellence is rewarded."

The saving grace is that random genetic variation, circumstantial change and natural selection tend to ensure, regardless of any one person's desires, that inheriting status, money and power has a short half-life. The average family fortune exhausts after three generations (clogs to clogs in three generations). There are few families, fortunes, companies, etc. that are comparably positioned in 2012 as they were in 1912. Beneficially privileged to some degree perhaps but not comparable. In fact, forget few, there are hardly any.

That said, in a perfect meritocracy, you wouldn't theoretically have any non-meritocratic privileges. Every person would justify their position on an earn-as-you-go basis. We are not there but we are reasonably close. The question becomes, at what cost do you close the gap even further between theory and practice? How confident are we in the theory in the first place? Isn't part of achievement usually sourced in the motivation to provide and protect those whom we hold dear? Remove the capacity to deliver on that motivation and do you lose some or much of the resulting productivity which is the basis for so much progress?

It is interesting to juxtapose this book (Privilege) with Charles Murray's recently published Coming Apart which focuses on the unexplored behavorial attributes which characterize the top 20%. Khan is focused on how educational institutions facilitate the process of meritocratic selection and sorting and Murray is concerned about the consequence of merit driven assortative sociological processes. Murray's specific concern is that the elite are drifting away from and becoming isolated from their fellow citizen. Those who, by generally meritocratic means, end up at the top marry others in their class and have children whom they seek to advantage in the very ways that Khan identifies. Murray's concern is what happens to a democracy when the meritocratic elite do not comprehend their fellow citizen?

A focus on meritocracy which rewards desired outcomes will inherently create a divide between the most and the least productive and to the extent that that productivity differential is large, then so will be the divide. If the equation for success is IQ + Effort + Achieved Desirable Outcome (IQ + EF + ADO) then there are some constraints and some opportunities. We can influence IQ marginally with good diet, prenatal care and good parenting practices. Effort can be influenced by focusing on the sources of an individual's value system (what motivates them to accomplish what outcomes?) Finally, we can have greater clarity about the Achieved Desired Outcomes, establish better incentives aligned with the desired outcome and communicate more effectively what behaviors and attributes are likely to lead to the ADOs.

Focusing on relative tax burdens is fairly sterile after a while. We know taxes have a negative impact on productivity; we know that we can't spend more than our productivity allows over the long term; we know that the burden for whatever level of expenditure is deemed necessary has to be carried by the bulk of the populace; Now how do we square those constraints?

What are the actions we can take to mitigate the short term impact of natural efforts to propogate advantage? Focus on productivity would be my answer. It is an uncomfortable one because a large source of individual and group productivity resides with certain value systems and therefore, for some to improve their productivity, requires them to change their values, behaviors and culture.