Presumably once those people are in such high-power positions, they also have a track record of real accomplishments behind them; it's certainly possible they've lied and cheated their entire career but it's definitely less likely they'll make it that far that way.
A common path is:
Graduate Stanford => Work at Mckinsey => Get hired into VC.
Graduate Stanford => Raise 15 Million dollar series A with your buddy => Doesn't matter what happens you will end up rich.
It's not a cynical opinion, I have seen it myself and I am doing very well for myself. I worked under an Economics PhD who was the number one in his class (top 5 phd program) and graduated top of his undergrad at UPenn. His incompetence relative to his credentials shattered my respect for the way that we allocate positions of power
Maybe the west coast is different but everyone I know (including a fair number of people who went to Harvard) who's in any position of power didn't have "tool around doing whatever and don't F up" as their career summary until that point. They had success upon success. While some of them didn't necessarily choose big grand things to spend that time doing, they were all successful at it. Nobody just went with the flow.
The "not bad but not great either" people who were just lucky enough to have opportunity early on but don't have the skill to keep turning the opportunity into success (or just want to chill and raise a family) tend to seem shoehorned onto career paths that dead end somewhere in middle management.
I think the issue is more that we have a lot of positive feedback cycles/signal boosting that occur based on early career opportunities. I don't think research fraud is necessarily part of it though, because once you're accepted into a PhD program at a top program you're probably going to graduate anyway; same with undergrad. But the signal boosting is very real, and I find it especially problematic given how much luck there is in things like getting into a certain college.
I'd imagine that these to-be MBA-holders will seek positions at less grind-y places. Would not surprise me if a lot of them went to join VC firms, or product manager jobs at larger firms, before VC.
The number of people who make "correct, active decisions" is vanishingly small.
It's less they've cheated than "Did you really make correct decisions or did your coin just come up heads 8 times in a row?" Other people may have been as smart or smarter, but if the coin flip went tails, they get politically hammered.
Success has a large part of "survivor bias" to it.
Not quite running the FED, but look at the years, pretty close.
Orszag earned an A.B. summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University in 1991 after completing an 80-page long senior thesis titled "Congressional Oversight of the Federal Reserve: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives."[11] He then received a M.Sc. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1997) in economics from the London School of Economics.
He served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy (1997–1998), and as Senior Economist and Senior Adviser on the Council of Economic Advisers (1995–1996) during the Clinton administration. Director of the OMB by 2008.
Obamas speechwriter were in their early 20s as well for instance.
The Fed is way more stringent - - a fresh PhD would be an analyst or research associate, nothing more.
State departments and organizations have a lot more hierarchy for better or worse.
Perhaps we should focus on drawing more actual talent rather than excluding the phonies (even at the highest levels, status and influence isn’t zero sum in my experience).
Ultimately, I think the "phonies" need to be addressed directly because I believe they are effectively a cabal.
I also think it requires the broader culture to take active steps to help make this happen: work harder to think about what bad behavior is and take action to avoid / penalize it.
FWIW, I have traveled in the finance / startup circles and kept looking for "better places" but have come to the conclusion that they are few and far between and the issue is the business culture and the broader culture that celebrates it.
Name a better indicator then for being competent.
This suggestion is so detached from both the problem and the very nature of academia that it's straight-out laughable.
I mean, what do product launches have to do building knowledge on the state of the art, identifying a novel idea, doing the iterative work to refine the idea, and finally document it to the public? Product launches at best require you to manage people and expectations. Do you honestly believe that a guy who launched a product is more qualified to drive science forward than a PhD with an outstanding academic track record just because your PM had a knack to cut corners, descope requirements, and pass the buck to underlings? Because that's the bulk of the job of all PMs I ever met, including from FANGs.
Your suggestion is the poster child of the old mantra "if the only tool you have is a hammer you tend to see every problem as a nail".
Academia is a cesspit of politics and dishonesty. Forming the most effective cartels, sensationalizing your results, and being well networked with other academics is not aligned with getting results on actual problems.
The private sector does research with researchers, not product managers.
The process is exactly the same. It's not a public vs private thing. It's a research vs production thing. Research is open-ended and iterative and exploratory. Product design is close-ended, focused, and with hard requirements. Research has zero to do with product management, and you don't change the nature of the problem by pretending that a scientific discovery is a product expecting to be launched.
> Academia is a cesspit of politics and dishonesty.
Oh awesome. Have you ever did any corporate work? Because if you believe that academia suffers from this problem but corporations don't then I have a few bridges I'd like to sell you.
At least in academia you do need to have your publications to back you up. In corporate environments all you have is the cesspool part.
And in my experience teams with these academic data "scientists" are far worse cesspools than normal engineering teams who deliver actual products and value.
Also, what are publications supposed to show? They are often a negative indicator of actual capability. Ever interviewed a data scientist who looks good on paper with tons of publications who can't even write a for loop? I have.
I could write a book about this stuff. The stories I could tell about what's behind those "outstanding academic track records"...
The problem, if anything, is trying to apply a business model to academics, equating research quality with federal grant dollars, taking away real intellectual freedom protections, and then ignoring all the ponzi scheming and exploitation that occurs. Everyone has their heads in the sand, knows academics (at least biomedical research) is full of BS, and just goes on pretending like it's not because no one knows of a good alternative, or doesn't have the courage or power to change things.
What's funny [sad?] to me is that your description of PMs sounds exactly like the most credentialed, accomplished researchers I know on paper.
It's interesting to me regarding some of the examples in the linked piece. Ghostwriting reviews, for example, is actually seen as a good practice in a lot of circles because it provides experience to grad students with the review process. Those guest authorships? Very grey area between that and collaborative authorships. It's not the grunt work, it's the idea, right? Or is it that ideas are a dime a dozen, and actually doing the work is important? I can't tell which it is anymore -- it seems to depend on what benefits those in power.
Someone else posted something about how 1% of research is fraud, and 80% is bad. I think the percent of fraud is probably higher, the percent bad research is lower, and the difference is much more fuzzy than you'd think initially. The really difficult thing is that tiny incremental contributions is how things actually work. No one wants to admit this though. Bad research is actively incentivized, and there's credit bubbles everywhere.
The worst problem is that this credentialing bubble is everywhere with everything, as another posted noted. The problem isn't the credentialing per se, it's how it's detached from reality, the real demands of the tasks. Having a credential doesn't mean that the person is competent for all the tasks it nominally encompasses; conversely, those tasks don't necessarily require the credential that's often demanded.
This definitely has zero to do with quality research being published, and even in startup land, those things are nice to have but still don't prove anything, unless they were the directing agents of those initiatives.
The problem is that you're incentivized to cheat, because it's either that or your career.
Academia suffers from incredible power asymmetry, and an obsession with prestige. It's shit culture that rots from the head and down.
Of course, the vast majority of research groups are not like that - but it seems to be a problem which has always been there, but just been swept under the rug.
Again, it's difficult to find informants. Groups are small, and most advisors have very few people under their wing. It is probably very easy to identify and black-ball whistleblowers. It gets more difficult, the more you're invested in your work/degree.
1. Purpose. what is it that drives one?
2. Integrity. when does one compromise it?
3. Awareness. is one able to disengage when one's ego (fueled by credentials) is activated.
The corporate world is exactly the same. Since my last promotion,I now have a nice title. People now listen to what I have to say. They even take me seriously. I can now go to some guy who's got 20 times more experience and start selling my consulting services(I'm not a consultant).
It's like the old joke: what do you call the worst-performing graduate from medical school (or a PhD program), the one who was at the bottom of their class? You call them "Doctor"!
Never have any takers, I wonder why.
If high credentials run society, surely somebody would offer me a bribe of a few million dollars by now, in order to make use of my 'society running' abilities.
"Your parents are rich, so you have a chance."
If I read a paper and have a great appreciation for the ideas, and have a sense that an author contributed significantly to the aspects I appreciate (either from explicit descriptions of the authors' contributions in the publication, or by speaking to them), why would that not be impressive to me?
"You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund."
"You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man for the job."
"You got a PhD in ML by making some incremental improvement on some already existing model and then doing massive hyper parameter tuning? Here, become director of research at this big corporation."
Research will never be fully productive in this system, there are too many people who have too much to gain from gaming the publication system.