False merit, appearing real (E)

0:00In 1942, the United States, at war, had a problem. There wasn't enough metal and we needed more planes. Howard Hughes came up with the solution. He built the biggest airplane. in the history of the world, and he built it out of birch wood. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:35Yes, the Spruce Goose, the biggest airplane in the history of the world, was made out of birch, and it only flew once. And the reason is pretty simple. Unless you have no choice in the matter, it's a bad idea to make an airplane out of wood. Metal has better merit. Metal is better. Engineers understand the idea of merit when it comes to natural materials and other technological contributors to what they are building. It gets really interesting and really problematic when we start dealing with people instead of raw materials. How, for example, to decide who should go to Harvard or who should play basketball at Stanford or Illinois.

1:31How to decide what merit is. And as people seeking the comfort that comes with being picked, the comfort from being awarded merit from an outsider, the leverage that we get from walking in the front door, how do we get more of that? What are the rules? Are there quotas? Do quotas matter? What are we measuring? I don't talk about organized sports a lot on Akimbo, mostly because I'm totally not into it, but they are a fascinating way to understand the contributors to winning and losing. Take, for example, the average NBA salary for players based on where they went to college. If you went to Illinois, it's reported you're making about$11 million a year, whereas players who went to Stanford only make$6 million a year.

2:33So if you're a player in high school seeking to maximize your future income, it's not surprising that you will choose to go to a school that puts you on the fast track to higher income. The same thing is true for the height and weight of players in the NBA. It has steadily gone up. So if you seek to make a living in the NBA, it's probably pretty smart to eat your Wheaties from a young age. That makes sense. But then what do we do with the lesson from Billy Bean, as chronicled by Michael Lewis in his book Moneyball? What Billy Bean did was he understood that what people thought were the key contributors to success were actually incorrect.

3:18That by drafting players who had different attributes, different sorts of merit, he put together a baseball team that was two standard deviations better than it should have been based on his payroll. In other words, by seeing what was really true, as opposed to merely associating past performance with guesses about what was true, Billy Bean was able to beat the system. 14 years ago, Jerome Carabell wrote a book called The Chosen. And what it's about is who gets into Harvard, who gets into Yale, who gets into Princeton. It's an important topic. And the reason it's an important topic is just as we saw with NBA players, where you go to college has a lot to do with where you go in life.

4:16Now, there's one conversation to be had, which is, why is that? Is that fair? Is it useful? Is it like building an airplane out of birch? Or is there something that's happening at those three institutions, whether it's by their selection or by what happens to you when you are there, that makes you more likely to contribute in a way that others can't? or is it simply that people are hiring and trusting people who are like them and so the system perpetuates itself? But putting that discussion aside for a minute, thinking about who gets in, who gets the keys to the front door is a fascinating way to begin thinking about merit.

5:06In the 1900s, in order to get in, you needed to have gone to a school. like Exeter. You needed to be people like us, people of a certain race and religion and social standing and geographical basis, so that the system could be perpetuated. These schools did not pretend that they were looking for or training brainiacs. What they said was, we are a finishing school for people like us. Well, in the 1910s and the 1920s, waves of new immigrants, particularly Jews, didn't get the message, and they applied. Well, the way that these schools had put themselves out to the world was that they were going to admit people based on their intellectual prowess.

5:57And it turned out that the new wave of applicants were better at intellectual prowess than the people who had traditionally gone. And year by year, the percentage of people who weren't like Franklin Delano Roosevelt went up. But at the same time that the intellectual horsepower was going up, the other things inside the institution, call them soft skills, if you will, stayed the same. From 1900 to 1930, 1 ,200 Jews entered Yale, and not one of them, according to David Brooks, reporting on the book, was elected to a senior society. These senior societies, things like Skull and Bones, which George Bush belonged to, were really at the heart of what these Ivy League schools were contributing.

6:53Zero out of 1 ,200. That's because culturally, the institutions weren't really changing. But as the percentage of non-traditional, non-WASP-y applicants continued to go up, the institutions faced a crisis. Harvard's provost, Paul Buck, said that they were going to try to have fewer of the sensitive, neurotic boys, people who were intellectually overstimulated. In the 1950s, Yale's president, a man named Alfred Griswold, said, we're going to try to avoid beetle-browed, highly specialized intellectual people, and instead seek out the well-rounded man. This statistic will let you really understand how the institutions fought back.

7:48In 1950, 278 people from prep school applied to Harvard. 245 of those men were admitted, more than 90%. The thing is that it couldn't last. the institutions realized that the world and america was bigger than a little tiny corner of new england prep schools so they began to rely on the sat the sat a score that lives on just a few axes of all the many skills somebody can have the sat and some institutions simply picked people who ranked the highest on the SAT. But the most elite institutions didn't do that. How else were they going to find, quote, the well-rounded man? Well, one place they went was sports.

8:45By some estimates, 50 % of the people admitted to Harvard have a note appended to their file by a coach that this person is going to contribute to our water polo team, our fencing team. Notice that most of the sports on the list are sports you can play at Exeter. Again, what we're seeing is a search by elite institutions to redefine what merit is. So in the NBA, merit might be height and weight. But Billy Bean showed us that in baseball, merit could be on base percentage. And at these elite institutions that have the key to the front door, the definition of merit keeps changing. What we know is that it's extremely likely that your father also went to college.

9:43It's extremely likely that you grew up in a literate home. It's extremely likely that you have a whole bundle of soft skills that aren't tested by the SAT. For those of you who are paying attention to current events, it's pretty clear that as soon as an institution that can award merit chooses an axis of performance that can be gamed, people will begin to cheat. And that's where this all leads. Now, let's compare that to some other badges of merit where the gatekeeper isn't quite as obvious. Consider the top 25 TED Talks of all time. One of them is done by a Brit who walks with a cane. Ten of them are from women.

10:37There are popular TED Talks from people of color, from people who are 12 years old, from people who are professors. Is there a gatekeeper? Of course there is. There's still the bias of people like us get invited to do something like this. There's still the almost impossible to overcome impact of, did you have breakfast every day when you were five years old? What language was spoken in the place where you grew up? Did you grow up in a place or were you shuttled around? Were you raised by people who believed in you? Is there a voice in your head that's telling you you have no business to even begin thinking about giving a TED Talk?

11:21When people on the outside look at you, are they judging you by your appearance, by your disability, by the way you present? All of these things happen long before you get a chance to give a TED Talk. Where is merit? But merit might begin in our head. How did it get in our head? Who brainwashed us into believing we could achieve? Who brainwashed us into believing that we couldn't? So then back to this idea of bias. The Guardian reports that blind auditions for orchestras, where the people applying for a job at the orchestra apply by playing behind a screen so that the judges can't see who's performing, increase the percentage of women that get the job by 50%.

12:25Oh wait, they don't. A recent paper by John Pallison shows that even elementary statistical analyses demonstrate that the paper that's being quoted is wrong six different ways. That, in fact, blind auditions don't increase the percentage of women who get picked. Or consider the work of Kingman Brewster at Yale, as written about in a book, The Guardians. In the 1960s, Brewster shifted what Yale thought they were looking for when people applied. He shifted the very definition of what merit was. The Tour de France, another sports reference, is apparently a race where your judgment of someone's background doesn't matter.

13:17All that matters is the time. It's little like your SAT score, except just like the SAT score, there are problems. The SAT score doesn't really measure your aptitude for anything. The SAT score has very little relationship with how well you're going to do in college. The SAT score is a measure of where did you grow up, how did you grow up, and how much did your parents spend on preparing you for the SAT. And as we've seen with the doping in the Tour de France, at this point among elite competitors, winning the Tour de France is more about how close can you get to skirting the rules without getting caught than it is about your particular genetic makeup or grit.

14:10And so that brings us to the current news. Current news about helicopter parenting, about cheating, about pushing kids to get into a famous college. Two economists, Depke and Zilbadi, report that helicopter parenting is most rampant in countries with the biggest income inequality. Now, you could come to the conclusion that helicopter parenting causes income inequality, but I think it's probably more likely that the opposite is true, that income inequality, the sense that every decision is fraught, that people aren't truly going to be judged on the merits, that there will be winners and many losers, pushes parents who think they are doing the best they can for their kids to overdo it, to push too hard, to be present all the time because in their mind, the stakes are so high, it makes sense for them to act that way.

15:16They are amplified by the current economic setting, misjudging what merit really is. They're over-indexing for the keys to the front door and for however those institutions are currently judging. And they are doing the equivalent of doping their kids. So doping your kids might get them a better time on a particular time trial, but it doesn't open the door for them to earn true merit, the merit of actually making a contribution, a contribution that they and their parents can be proud of. There's a long history of us misjudging what merit is, mostly trying to measure things that will help us, people like us, kids of people like us, get ahead.

16:10That these institutions have a long history of making choices that make it likely that they will award points to people like the people who are currently running the institutions. But as we open more doors, as there isn't one front door but multiple front doors, because our culture is being so radically shifted from so many directions, it turns out that one axis, how tall are you? How fast were you on this time trial? How well did you do on the SAT? Is less and less important. What's so much more important is A, the story we tell ourselves. The story we tell ourselves about possibility, about our ability to contribute.

16:58The story we tell ourselves about grit and resilience and speaking up when we need to speak up. And number two is the idea that we are in many, many circles. There isn't one line that we have to get to the front of. There are many lines. Where can we contribute? How can we pick ourselves to earn merit through the way we help others as opposed to stealing merit? Because in any given moment, we've earned more points on a system that can be gamed because we have the resources to game it and others don't. It all comes back to this idea of picking yourself. That if you are going to seek merit from a system that awards merit based on corruption, you will inherently become corrupted.

17:55That instead, you can earn merit by picking yourself, by giving yourself the challenge of showing up, turning on a light, solving interesting problems, and leading the others. Hey Seth, it's Maria Hey Seth, my name's Kyle Greetings Seth, this is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here Hi Seth, this is Anupam Hi, this is Caitlin Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Hey Seth, this is Rex Hey Seth, hi this is Vasilis from Greece Hi, this is Roberta Perry My question is And that completes my question I'm recording this one remote, didn't want to miss a week.

18:39We got a great question. I'll get to that in a second. But first, we really do need to hear from you. We love your questions. Visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K. You'll see the show notes there. And then there's a big button that you can hit to ask your question. Thanks. Hey, Seth. Matt Thielman here just outside Detroit, Michigan. In the Five Monkeys episode, you brought up a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, and that's Goliaths being trampled by David when they seem to be playing by different rules. I'm all in with you in the idea that it wasn't in Blockbuster's DNA to become a subscription company, that maybe they had become too focused on late fees.

19:23And I'm wondering if there's a larger memetic context at work as well, given that Blockbuster was a publicly traded company expected to provide profits to their shareholders. As far as I know, Netflix has never produced a profit, and especially when they were venture funded, they had the freedom to lose money as they gained market share. I might use Amazon versus Borders as a similar example in the early days, of course. So my question is this. Are there cultural rules that also influence whether companies lose focus on who they serve versus keeping that top of mind? And if so, how do big, specifically public companies, manage shareholder and market expectations against a willingness to shift and serve who they serve in a new way?

20:17And as a PS, I introduced my girlfriend to you last night as we read V is for vulnerable to each other and had a lot of fun doing it. Thank you for shipping your art. Thanks for the question. Here's the thing. Working for a public company is a choice. Becoming a public company is a choice, and it often carries baggage with it. So MailChimp is not a public company, and working at MailChimp feels very different than working at, say, General Motors, because the owner is in the room with you when you are working at MailChimp. Different choices get made. And you are correct that one of the things that happened to a company like Blockbuster is that the easy thing to do with Wall Street is to please what Wall Street wants in the short run.

21:09But that's not the only available path. It's worth mentioning that Netflix actually does make a profit. But the interesting comparison right now is between Amazon and Apple, two of the most valuable companies in the world. One of them has created billions and billions and billions of dollars of quarterly profits. That's what Apple does on a regular basis. They extract every penny that they can from the market and Wall Street likes that. But the other one, Amazon, hasn't had anything close to Apple's profits. They've chosen not to take the profits and Wall Street likes them as well. So the choice that the CEO makes, the very well-paid CEO who doesn't have to answer the phone or sort the paperclips or dig holes in the ground for a living, the hard choices are things like, what will we tell Wall Street?

21:59What is the promise? What are they buying when they invest in us? And Amazon has been great from the first day at making it clear to investors what was on offer. So the interesting challenge that companies have when the world changes is, did they make a bargain with an organization, a marketplace, the stock exchange, that's going to ultimately lead to their demise. We certainly see this happen, for example, for certain retailers like Sears. Sears certainly saw what was coming. Sears had many, many chances to do things right. But the combination of their internal mimetic DNA with the support that they got from the stock market for acting in ways that didn't make a lot of sense doomed them.

22:49So is anyone listening to this podcast going to be able to fix that in one minute? Of course not. But I think seeing it, understanding that there is no right answer. You choose to build the culture you want to have and it brings you the future that that culture determines. That's on us. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.