That's the self fulfilling prophecy that modern democracies are/should be trying to avoid. Otherwise we are on the track of building up a new aristocracy where only the rich and powerful get the opportunity of making a difference.
Notably this list is missing most top-tier MBA schools like Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Wharton, Northwestern, U of Chicago, MIT, UC and others.
If you want to say some of these schools are overrated, fine, but if none of them made the top 90 you've got a weird rankings methodology that isn't gonna be useful to most people.
https://whichmba.economist.com/ranking/full-time-mba/2021/me...
What exactly do you base your doubt on? Publicly he can be quite inarticulate, but there's accounts of him being highly intelligent.[1]
Yale University/Typical SAT scores 2019–20 Reading and Writing 720-770, Math 740-800
Of cause there could be an inflation.
and
"Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics."
He had a 77% average in college, which made him a C student. He even characterized himself as an average student, which is accurate. The idea that he was a secret genius is patently ludicrous and is only proffered by political hacks.
But take kim kardashian or Paris Hilton. Without envy you have to agree that they are very successful entrepreneurs. Yet they likely were not top 5% in SAT scores.
Cannot find any sources at the moment other than tabloids and blog posts, but I recommend checking out a fairly recent documentary on Netflix (either 2020 or 2019, I forgot) that talks about "influencers" and such. Paris Hilton got a giant segment dedicated to her on it, and she indeed was extremely articulate in her description of that whole "dumb blonde" public persona schtick. After watching it, I had zero doubt that she was indeed a very intelligent person, despite me having zero interest in her as an entertainer or a public persona.
Ivy League Universities have always existed to provide a finishing school for the elite, rather than providing some sort of public good. While I don't think that's a particularly noble endeavor, it's not an especially malicious one either given the abundance of top-notch (and lower cost) public universities in the U.S.
If some rich parent wants to spend an order of magnitude more money on an ivy league school to give their kid more or less the same education they could have gotten at a state school, what's the big deal?
I suspect by "genetics" here you really mean something like "network you are born into", no?
In what way would genetics have a huge influence on future impact? That sounds like eugenics.
It's not helpful to trivialize terms like "eugenics".
For liberals (not saying you) who think Bush is dumb: is it because his policies disagree with you? Maybe people who come to different conclusions to you aren't dumber, but just have different values. Do we really think all of our political beliefs are based on intellect only? That's very arrogant imo.
Of nine Supreme Court justices, only one didn't go to Harvard or Yale.
They are only a tiny portion of students, but they have a huge impact on who holds power in society.
> This is not their main priority.
I think you're right to say that this is not their main priority, but I think they actually do quite good letting in more more poor kids (at least better than most people expect).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/09/th...
Many schools did not participate:
- Harvard
- Wharton
- Yale
- Columbia
- Chicago
- Berkeley
- Stanford
These ratings have limited utility if you leave out the top schools.
Either way, those 7 would make minor difference to the list.
Those were just 7 examples.
I will go out on a limb and say that those seven would be at or near the top of the rankings and would set the rating curve.
I personally think it would make a big difference in this list.
I dont think that article is written in good faith its more like it has been written to keep the poor's and the "enthics" in their place
A rich person is subsidized by society. Why should we optimize fiscal policy to enable them and let them leave an outsized impact on the world?
Especially when the outsized impact of the rich is inequality, anti-democratic political norms, and environmental destruction?
They have no skills, or information advantage. Just a network effect advantage through monopoly of a shared value store. I see little difference with this system compared to monarchy or theology rule, which were also hierarchical, with ones power based on closeness to power, and monopoly of value store and public time economy.
To clarify, I mean wealthy non-doers. Hedge funds, old wealth, etc.
Doctors, engineers, etc., sure let us give them our ear. Unskilled rich are a drain on public agency.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
What does this mean? How are hedge funds unskilled or non-doers in the manner that heirs are? I'd say the average hedge fund analyst is probably as accomplished/skilled/hard working as the average doctor or engineer.
The people who made the investments and ran the fund came from State University of New York at Buffalo. The count had a team of three assistants and one's entire job was to coordinate shipping cases of wine from his vanity winery to everyone their kids encountered to lubricate the wheels of their success in life. Elite squash trainer might take on the son? Case of wine to the wife. College tour? Case of wine to the tour leader. I was an analyst reporting directly to the CFO and wasn't an assistant but would routinely get asked to do lifestyle chores like help the count's uncle hook up their ipod to their Range Rover's bluetooth.
Hence why I left finance and went into medicine which is more of a meritocracy.
People need logistics to move materials to enable people to do stuff.
Not speculative emotional guidance on ephemeral value stores.
Most of them are, or are funded by, inherited wealth to service fiscal policy memes.
Someone who is wealthy may not have skills as you describe it, but if they are investing their wealth in the stock market for example, it could be argued they have a much more outsized positive impact on society than the average person.
Stock markets are recent inventions; some hand wavy way of saying “this is exactly the right way to store value!”
Why must that ideal be externalized onto others? Why do I have to believe some hedge fund is indeed worth N dollars?
Mendacity of the elderly is not a good enough justification for belief.
Correctly engineering a road, medicine, or making art does not at all rely on such belief.
I quoted this as a neutral fact. That things might or could be better otherwise is a total different question.
Some search engine can come along in N days, weeks, months, and provide that snippet out of the context you intended.
Social media is not a friends backyard fire pit. The information peddled here isn’t necessarily lost to memory the next day.
I don’t know you so none of this should be considered a personal attack. I’m just taking information and expanding on it.
It is unfortunate that people seem not to be able to distinguish between a neutral fact and an endorsement. Just recently I posted something I consider a fact and since I was afraid if could be controversial, added that this is not meant in a judgmental way. The bulletin board owner took this to a meta level and argued that it was exactly this add-on that showed that it was meant in a judgmental way and banned me.
One brain is not composed of the same experiential model, and as a result, neurological model, as others.
Physics > chemistry -> biology -> humans -> metaphor and analogy. Kind of my mental road map for information hierarchy.
If it’s not physically quantifiable it probably falls into some category like “relative metaphor and analogy”.
What?
A rich kid is much more likely to leave an impact on the world and this is what these schools want. I once (10 years ago?) read an article about exactly this. The comparison were some US elite high school that strictly select on IQ and alumni were much less successful than expected (yet, more happy in live). George W went to Yale as far as I remember. I doubt that he scored super high in any IQ test. But he was undoubtedly very successful in live.
"Ivies really wanted to promote social justice, they would let in more poor kids"
This is not their main priority.
As a side note: The Economist MBA rankings 2021 have raised eyebrows because European schools rankings increased so much: https://whichmba.economist.com/ranking/full-time-mba