Income v. vocabulary

The Audacious Epigone has a fun table of average incomes relative to vocabulary skills for a whole bunch of occupations. Not surprisingly, Author is the worst paid relative to size of vocabulary. Next worst is Librarian. When I was in the marketing research business, I always suggested to the Human Resources department that they try to hire away librarians, if they could find some with at least modest quantitative skills/orientation. Marketing research doesn't pay well, but it pays better than being a librarian, and the skills and personalities required to be a successful worker bee are similar in the two fields.

The numbers are in IQ points relative to income (assuming that the General Social Survey's ten word vocabulary test is a decent measure of IQ, which is reasonably true, but obviously has weaknesses for quantitative jobs). Thus, doctors make money as if they are 44.1 IQ points smarter than they are. At the top of the list are:

Occupation	Diff
1. Physician	44.1
2. Dentist	29.8
3. Commercial airline pilot	19.3
4. Pharmacist	17.4
5. Attorney	13.4
6. Farmer	10.4
7. Economist	10.3
8. Bricklayer	9.7
9. Telephone installer and repairer	9.6
10. Sheet metal worker	9.0
11. Civil engineer	8.2
12. Butcher	8.2

Doctors make a lot of money in America these days. 

I vaguely recall that dentists went through a spell when they weren't making as much because fluoride ruined their cavity-drilling business, but they seem to have rebounded with a lot of cosmetic offerings. Orthodontist is a great job -- regular hours and the pay is kept high through a dental school cartel. Being a dentist is like being a specialized surgeon, so it takes eye-hand coordination.

Airlines have been trying to crush the salaries of pilots forever, but in crunch time it's still useful to have a Captain Sullenberger at the controls. Is it a good job? Pilots have to travel a lot (duh) and the hours are weird.

Pharmacists have to spend a lot of time on their feet, they often have weird hours, and they have to have good memories.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Forbes' 2011 List of "Most Miserable Cities"

A countdown from Forbes of the bottom 20:

20. Bakersfield, CA
19. Jacksonville, FL
18. Salinas, CA
17. Fresno, CA
16. Washington, DC
15. Detroit, MI
14. Youngstown, OH
13. Fort Lauderdale, FL
12. Toledo, OH
11. Flint, MI
10. Cleveland, OH
9. Vallejo, CA
8. West Palm Beach, FL
7. Chicago, IL
6. Memphis, TN
5. Sacramento CA
4. Modesto, CA
3. Merced, CA
2. Miami, FL
1. Stockton, CA

Keep in mind, these kind of magazine lists have to have joker methodological elements or they just wind up being pretty much the same every year (Detroit has more greenspace!)

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Amy Chua compared to Ron Unz

A commenter writes:

I knew Amy Chua in passing while we were undergrads at Harvard. She was a typical Asian grind who barely stood out in either talent or looks. There were certainly no indications that she had a fetish for the difficult or Western Classical music – only a knack for craven careerism. She majored in Economics, which was a notoriously easy undergrad major at Harvard, certainly compared to, say, mathematics or physics or the classics. Economics, along with Folklore & Mythology or Psychology, were areas of concentration students chose when they were either strategizing their way to the highest possible GPA or trying to free up the maximum amount of time for golf or tennis.

Actually, Chua is a canonical example of regression to the mean: her father is a five sigma talent in the general population while she is a pitiful three. When measuring Amy Chua's "brilliance," one useful calibration point is Ron Unz -- also a contemporary of Chua at Harvard, who I also knew in passing. Ron was Phi Beta Kappa, too, but won a Churchill Fellowship after pursuing a double major in Physics and the Classics. Moreover, he did original publishable work in both fields before getting his BA!

(Hey, I know Ron Unz, too. Ron is a lot smarter than me, as well.)

The commenter's assessment of Chua sounds harsh, but that coincides with Chua's own take on herself. (What she has as an intellectual is energy, personality, and a certain degree of fearlessness about offending people by saying out loud, backed up by lots of research, what lots of people think but you aren't supposed to admit.) From Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

Thank goodness I'm a lucky person, because all my life I've made important decisions for the wrong reasons. I started off as an applied mathematics major at Harvard because I thought it would please my parents. I dropped it after my father, watching me struggling with a problem set over winter break, told me I was in over my head, saving me. But then I mechanically switched to economics because it seemed vaguely sciencelike. I wrote my senior thesis on commuting patterns of two-earner families, a subject I found so boring I could never remember what my conclusion was. 

I went to law school, mainly because I didn't want to go to medical school. I did well at law school, by working psychotically hard. I even made it onto the highly competitive Harvard Law Review, where I met [future husband] Jed and became an executive editor. But I always worried that law really wasn't my calling. I didn't care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me.  I also wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it. 

After graduating I went to a Wall Street law firm because it was the path of least resistance. I chose corporate practice because I didn't like litigation. I was actually decent at the job; long hours never bothered me, and I was good at understanding what the clients wanted and translating it into legal documents. But ... while everyone else was popping veins over the minutiae of some multibillion-dollar deal, I'd find my mind drifting to thoughts of dinner ...

Jed, meanwhile, loved the law, and the contrast made my misfit all the more glaring. ... The next thing we knew he got a call from the dean of Yale Law School, and even though I was the one who always wanted to become an academic (I guess because my father was one), he got a job as a Yale law professor... It was a dream job for Jed. ...

I'd always thought of myself as someone imaginative with lots of ideas, but around Jed's colleagues, my brain turned to sludge. ...

That's when I decided to write an epic novel [about Chinese-American mother-daughter relationships spanning multiple generations]. Unfortunately, I had no talent for novel writing ... What's more Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Jung Chang all beat me to it ... At first, I was bitter and resentful, but then I got over it and came up with a new idea. Combining my law degree with my own family's background (as Overseas Chinese in the Philippines), I would write about law and ethnicity in the developing world. Ethnicity was my favorite thing to talk about anyway.

The person Amy Chua reminds me of is ... well ... me. (Although she has a lot more energy and willpower.)

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Classical music and IQ

Linda Gottfredson of the U. of Delaware has said that perhaps the single most accurate casual conversation question for judging whether somebody has a 3-digit IQ is something along the lines, "How much do you like classical music?" To be precise, you get the fewest false positives this way. In modern America, lots of people with 3-digit IQs don't like classical music, but very few people with 2-digit IQs like it a lot.

Other times and places, this wouldn't be so accurate, but in 21st Century America, it's pretty close to a slam dunk.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

East Asians and Western classical music

In response to questions about why East Asian parents are so enthusiastic for their children to be able to play Western classical music, I'm going to quote Amy Chua and the Chinese film director Chen Kaige of Farewell, My Concubine and Together.

Chua writes in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

"That's one of the reasons I insisted [her two daughters -- I disapprove of Chua mentioning their first names and so I won't do it] do classical music. I knew that I couldn't artificially make them feel like poor immigrant kids. ... But I could make sure that [daughter #1] and [daughter #2] were deeper and more cultivated than my parents and I were. Classical music was the opposite of decline, the opposite of laziness, vulgarity, and spoiledness. It was a way for my children to achieve something I hadn't. But it was also a tie-in to the high cultural tradition of my ancestors."

Chua is particularly proud that she is descended in the direct male line from Chua Wu Neng, Imperial Astronomer to a 17th century emperor.

"To me, the violin symbolized respect for hierarchy, standards, and expertise. For those who know better and can teach. For those who play better and can inspire. And for parents.

"It also symbolized history. The Chinese never achieved the heights of Western classical music -- there is no Chinese equivalent of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony -- but high traditional music is deeply entwined with Chinese civilization."

Amusingly, Chua's progressive Jewish art critic mother-in-law disapproves of the violin and suggests Javanese gamelan percussion instruments for her granddaughter as something simple, low-pressure, and multi-culti: "Could she learn to play the gong?" After all, Debussy had been captivated by the gamelan music and it helped inspired his shimmering Impressionist compositions like Afternoon of the Faun. Chua responds:

"Personally, I think Debussy was just going through a phase, fetishizing the exotic. The same thing happened to Debussy's fellow Frenchmen Henri Rousseau and Paul Gaugin who started painting Polynesian natives all the time. A particularly disgusting variation of this phenomenon can be found in modern-day California: men with Yellow Fever, who date only Asian women -- sometimes dozens in a row -- no matter how ugly or which kind of Asian. For the record, Jed did not date any Asian women before me.

"Maybe the reason I can't appreciate gamelan music, which I heard when we visited Indonesia in 1992, is that I fetishize difficulty and accomplishment. ... Gamelan music is mesmerizing because it is so simple, unstructured, and repetitious. By contrast, Debussy's brilliant compositions reflect complexity, ambition, ingenuity, design, conscious harmonic exploration -- and yes, gamelan influences, at least in some of his works. It's like the difference between a bamboo hut, which has its charm, and the Palace of Versailles."

Movie director Chen Kaige comes from a more consciously cultured high stratum of Chinese society. One of his most searing memories is of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution smashing his father's collection of Western classical LPs. His 2003 movie "Together" is about a 13 year old violin prodigy in Beijing. From my review in The American Conservative:

Asia has produced countless young technical virtuosos, but "Together" acknowledges that often their nimble fingers and admirable work ethics have not been matched by the emotional depths required by the 19th Century Romantic repertoire.

In "Together," a working class father and his 13-year-old son move to Beijing to find a violin teacher who can help the prodigy fulfill his staggering potential....

Some American critics have praised "Together" for attacking modern China for becoming too materialistic, too conformist, too American. But that merely reflects the self-absorbed ignorance of anti-Western Westerners who confuse the unworldly Tibetan Buddhists with the worldly Chinese. The Chinese have never needed foreigners to teach them how to be materialistic.

Instead, Chen hopes Western classical music can educate his people in spirituality and individualism. "One of the biggest differences between Chinese and Western culture," Chen said in an interview with MovieWeb.com, "is that we don't have religion. We don't worship anything. Western classical music has elements of love and forgiveness that come from religion. Chinese music is very intellectual, very exotic, but there is no love. You don't feel warm after you listen to it."

The cult of the Romantic hero, as exemplified by virtuosi like Franz Liszt, first emerged in a Christian culture whose theology valued each unique soul, rather than a Confucian culture that emphasized orderly social relations.

"I always hope one day we'll see real individuals in Chinese society," Chen remarked. "But we have to hope for the young generation; it's too late for my generation to become real individuals. 'Individual' is a bad word in China…. Why did I denounce my father? Because of the fear I would be kicked out of society."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A cynical view of the Camp David Accords

A friend writes:

In my opinion, Jimmy Carter decided to buy a foreign policy success.  One with zero content.  But I guess noticing that Sadat has kicked out the Soviets years earlier, that the Suez canal was already open, that even before Camp David  the Mossad had already tipped off Sadat about an assassination plot hatched by Qaddafi - Palestinians backed by Libya  - that'd be cynical. Begin thought that Sadat was satisfied, someone he could live with. And Sadat was satisfied. The purpose of the '73 war had been regaining the canal and self-respect among the Egyptian military, who had been totally humiliated in 67.  That had been achieved.

Real peace happens when the players have decided that they have compatible strategic goals.  That had already happened before Camp David. I guess someone people think that signing treaties is what really defines peace, but of course that is nonsense.   Peace was already a fact well before we paid anyone off.

In much the same way, people seem to think that some clever diplomat caused the rapprochement between China and the US  in the early 1970s. Some silver-tongued devil.  But the real cause was the Soviet threat: they came real close to a nuclear strike [on China's nascent nuclear weapons capability.]  In those circumstances, even _I_ could have been an effective diplomat, even if I had continually addressed the Chinese  as  the "Yellow Peril" in the negotiations.

That reminds me that my son had one of those excruciatingly meta assignments in high school history that have become fashionable: how has the "historiography" of events has changed over time? E.g., how did Northern views of abolitionist terrorist John Brown change from 1859 to 1862 to 1885 to 1975? (The history of history is a great topic for grad school, but just absurdlyhard for high school students who need to learn history first.)

This one was about how have views of the Camp David Accords changed over the last three decades? 

The answer, he found, was that nobody's views had changed at all. The kind of people who had liked it in 1978 -- Washington, Israel, American Jews, and a few at the top of the Egyptian government -- still liked it 30 years later. The kind of people who didn't like it in 1978 -- Palestinians, other Arabs, Russians, and American Arabists -- still didn't like it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

It was a very good year for Carlos Slim

Whenever  I read about how it's America's moral duty to take in Mexicans, it warms my heart to think that at least one Mexican won't have to be leaving his family and home behind. From the Wall Street Journal:

How to Invest like the World's Richest Man

by Robert Frank

No, this isn’t an article about Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. It is about Carlos Slim, who has been pulling far ahead of his two closest competitors in the race for world’s richest man.

Bloomberg reports that Carlos’ publicly disclosed holdings soared 37 % to $70 billion in 2010. Meantime, Warren Buffett’s returns were a more modest 22%, while Bill Gates’ shares in Microsoft fell.

So how did Slim do it?

Mainly by keeping his money at home in Mexico and selling into the gold rush. Telefonos de Mexico, the state-owned monopoly he acquired, was a dud last year, but his stake in American Movil [his cellular spinoff of his monopoly] soared 15%....

His biggest loser was his stake in the New York Times, down 21%. 

You know, every time Carlos Slim picks up the NYT and reads an article or editorial pipelined straight from the SPLC about how only frothing-at-the-mouth racists worry about illegal immigration, I think he feels like he's getting his money's worth out of his bailout of the Times.

... Of course, it helps to have Slim’s overwhelming power and market share in Mexico, which is hard to replicate in many other countries.

Slim bought the Mexican telephone monopoly from the corrupt ruling party a couple of decades ago. Mexico has ridiculously high telephone rates, which reduces economic growth, which incentivizes more illegal immigration. But, Slim makes a fortune on expensive long-distance calls between Mexico and America, so it's all good.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A short life expectancy job

CNN reports:

World's oldest person dies at 114

I see this headline about once a month. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.  Is it a conspiracy? Perhaps there's some sicko serial killer out there stalking each successive world's oldest person. Whatever, it's clearly not a career with good job security, so I don't see why people seem to be dying to get the job.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Deal

The deal struck at Camp David in 1978 was, very roughly, that, in return for no more war, the U.S. would give Israel $3 billion per year and Egypt $2 billion per year, or $50 per Egyptian per year. That wasn't bad money back then. 

But the payoff hasn't gone up since then. And the population of Egypt has doubled, so now rather than $50 per Egyptian per year in 1978 dollars, the bribe is now $25 per Egyptian per year in crummy 2011 dollars.

Meanwhile, the wealth of the American wing of the Israel Fan Club has skyrocketed. This is not a secret in Cairo: they can go to the Forbes 400 website and do the math.

This doesn't mean that a new Egyptian government would want war with Israel. War is stupid; it kills people and breaks stuff. War doesn't pay. 

On the other hand, perhaps under a new regime, the Egyptian border guards who currently keep the Egypt-Gaza Strip border locked down pretty tight might get, say, a little sleepy. And maybe a few shipments of longer range missiles might get through to the hotheads in Gaza, with unfortunate but predictable incidents to follow. 

War doesn't pay, but maybe, ambitious younger men in Egypt might be thinking: Peace can pay. And a lot better than a stinking $25 per head. Mubaruk just wanted to die in luxury and hand his throne over to his son. Younger men might have more to prove.

If peace was worth $2 billion per year in the 1970s, they might reason, what would it be worth in the 2010s? $20 billion? Younger, more energetic Egyptian politicians with less to lose might  have some strong opinions on this subject.

But how could the Egyptians intimidate Israel? Perhaps they could co-opt the Jewish State. After all, if Egypt were to demand an order of magnitude cost of living adjustment up to $20 billion, then it would only be right and fitting for Israel to get $30 billion from the U.S. taxpayers. 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Winter's Bone"

Over at Taki's Magazine, I review Winter's Bone, which received four Oscar nominations:

Winter’s Bone, an arthouse detective drama now out on DVD, is the Scots-Irish hillbilly equivalent of all those fine recent movies about the Irish Catholic Massachusetts underclass such as The Fighter and The Town (which Winter’s Bone edged out for a Best Picture Oscar nomination). It’s splendidly written and acted, although poorly lit.

In passing, I recount my own quite different (but not wholly dissimilar) experience in the heart of the Ozarks.

Two decades ago, I would frequently set out from my corner office across Wacker Blvd. from Chicago’s Sears Tower for remote Bentonville, Arkansas, where I would be severely out-negotiated by Walmart’s Ozark Avengers. Sam Walton had made himself the richest man on Earth in part by demanding that us city-slicker salesmen leave behind corporate America’s expense-account bonhomie of skyboxes and wine lists to come wrestle over bottom-line terms with his hungry staffers in his headquarters’ windowless interrogation cells.

Read the whole thing there.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My review of Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother"

Over at VDARE.com, I review Amy Chua's bestseller.

Do check out this video from the 1990s of Mrs. Noh Nang Ning encouraging her 9-year-old niece's white rival in figure skating to practice hard by describing to the child the glowing future that she's building for herself in the Ice Capades:

"First, you play Beauty. Then you play ... Beast! Then you get too fat they kick you out of show, you have to scrape ice to make snowcone to sell in stands. Nobody want you, nobody love you, then you die."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Has there been a change in the gender gap?

In my 1997 National Review article "Is Love Colorblind?" I calculated, based on 1990 Census data, that in interracial married couples featuring one black spouse and one white spouse, the husband was black and the wife was white 72% of the time. Judging by this graph in the New York Times using 2009 data (warning: smaller sample sizes in years not divisible by 10), this proportion has fallen from 72% black husbands to 68% black husbands over the last 19 years.

In contrast, in 1990, 28% of the white-Asian married couples featured an Asian husband. By 2009, that figure had risen to 29%. 

Hence, we see some narrowing of the famous gender gap (famous among my readers, and among people with eyes in their heads), but not much overall. 

Of course, there could be more complicated things going on within subgroups. I'd be particularly interested in looking at native-born v. immigrants. And what about all the people cohabiting without benefit of clergy? Also, the Asian group has shifted significantly toward South Asians since 1990.

In my 1997 article, I couldn't find data on Asian-black marriages (e.g., Tiger Woods' parents, although Tiger's dad was 1/4 Chinese), but I surmised that the gender gap ratio was extreme, which would support my theory of causation for the gender gaps (racial differences in average levels of masculinity and femininity -- P.S., before responding huffily to this, please read "Is Love Colorblind?" so you can at least engage in an informed discussion). The NYT reports than in 2009, of the tiny number of Asians married to blacks, 7/8ths are Asian wives married to black husbands.

In 2009, overall, 95% of married non-Hispanic whites are married to another non-Hispanic white. So, interracial marriage (and its side effects, such as the gender gap) continues to have more impact on minorities.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Interracial marriage

Here's an interesting graph on trends in interracial marriage 1980-2009. Interracial marriage rates for Asians and white Hispanic have been dropping over the last couple of decades as their communities grow more around them. It would have been helpful to break out figures for the large fraction of Hispanics who answer "Other" to the race question (e.g., darker mestizos tend to say that). It would also be helpful to have broken out Asians by native born and immigrant.

Here's my 1997 classic Is Love Colorblind? It used 1990 Census data. Not all that much has changed since then.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Guys create Wikipedia for free: that's a problem

From the NYT:

Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor List

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.

But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women. 

I would imagine that if less than 15% of the contributors are women, then much less than 15% of the work is done by women.

Considering that almost nobody gets paid for Wikipedia, the most obvious thing that can be said about its existence from a gender point of view is that the human race owes a debt of gratitude to the male sex.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; ...

Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women. ...

Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?

I note that the Mexican Simpson's character Bumblebee Man only gets a subarticle on Wikipedia, and I'm much more interested in Bumblebee Man than in Mexican feminist writers, so, guys, get back to work!

The notion that a collaborative, written project open to all is so skewed to men may be surprising. 

Unless you stop and think about it.

After all, there is no male-dominated executive team favoring men over women, as there can be in the corporate world; Wikipedia is not a software project, but more a writing experiment — an “exquisite corpse,” or game where each player adds to a larger work.

But because of its early contributors Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.

“It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.” 

Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.”

To the extent that not having more articles about Mexican feminist writers is a problem, it's a problem caused not by evil misogynists, but by women (in particular, by Mexican women), who are less likely than men (especially non-Mexican men) to see the point (assuming there is one) in working for free to expand access to information for people they don't know. But blaming any problem, even one as exiguous as women not contributing much unpaid labor to Wikipedia, on women is a no-no, so the fault must lie with "misogynists."

 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The elite firm-elite college connection

Steve Hsu, professor of physics at U. of Oregon, blogs about a recent study of hiring at firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Wachtell, Lipton, documenting their obsession with hiring from only the top half of the Ivy League universities. He draws the following conclusions:

See earlier post for Lauren Rivera study of recruitment at elite law firms, consultancies and I-banks. I refer to these as "soft" elite firms, whereas I will refer to hedge/venture funds, startups and technology companies as "hard" elite firms. ... In the latter category performance is a bit easier to measure, and raw prestige plays less of a role in marketing to customers or clients -- i.e., the customer can directly tell whether the gizmo works ("these search results suck!") or the fund made money. Whether or not the advice received from a law/consulting/M&A firm is any good is much more nebulous and, well, soft. 

1) Rivera's work confirms that in the real world, people believe in folk notions of brainpower or IQ. ("Quick on the uptake", "Picks things up really fast", "A sponge" ...) They count on elite educational institutions to do their g-filtering for them. In the past, as noted by one commenter, firms often asked for SAT scores.

Why don't firms that hire 22-year-olds ask college seniors to take the GMAT or GRE or LSAT and have those scores sent to them?

2) Elite soft firms generally want people who are smart, but not too smart. Other factors, like personality, communication and leadership skills, etc. are valued as well. Startups, hedge funds, MSFT/GOOG, etc. generally want the smartest people they can get their hands on, at least for technical roles.

3) The soft firms know that what they do isn't "rocket science" -- it just isn't that hard, and any academic admit to a top university is smart enough. They just have to appear elite and smart enough to snow their clients and sell the work. Thus the emphasis on factors other than intelligence, once the threshold requirement is satisfied. Someone who appears smart and inspires confidence in clients is better than a smarter person who doesn't get along with (often middlebrow) clients.

4) In Rivera's research school prestige was the number one signal used by soft elite firms in evaluating prospective hires. Extracurricular activities came in second, but this is probably just a way to differentiate between applicants who have already been filtered using school prestige.

5) It is odd that the soft firms, which market themselves to clients as being super-smart repositories of brainpower (of course this is largely a fiction; see point 3 above), would rely so heavily on university admissions committees. They effectively outsource a big chunk of due diligence on their most important investment (human capital) to a group of people whose judgement they somehow trust, but perhaps without detailed understanding. When I was on the faculty at Yale I knew people in admissions and it's not clear to me that they were the best able to spot potential in 18 year olds. In studies of expert performance admissions people are less good at predicting UG GPA than a simple algorithm. (The "algorithm" is simply a weighted sum of SAT and HS GPA!)

But this doesn't matter if the success of HYPS grads becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once soft elite firms and large parts of the rest of society (in particular, clients) have accepted the idea that elite universities should be trusted to do the filtering, these schools will automatically produce large numbers of successful alumni -- the imprimatur itself has value.  

I've met a lot of College Admissions staffers over the years, and most of them struck me as very nice young ladies. I finally met the top guy at a top ten small liberal arts college and was impressed by him, so I guess there are a few people in the system who understand how things really work.

Still, another oddity here is that elite firms are hiring 22-year-olds based on how college Admissions Committees feel about them at age 18. That's kind of like the NFL drafting college players based on their ranking by Rivals.com when they were in high school.

When I was in charge of introducing personal computers to the marketing research firm where I worked in 1986, I put an ad in the Chicago Tribune asking for somebody who could solve PC problems. I specified "must have college degree," because ... well, I'm not sure why I did that. I got 400 resumes from college graduates.

Fortunately, I didn't throw out a detailed letter sent me by one high school grad -- a farm boy who had enlisted in the Navy's nuclear submarine powerplant engineering program out of high school. He explained the problems I was encountering and how he would solve them for me. I called him in for an interview, and he was so much sharper than anybody else I'd talked to -- hell, he was a lot sharper than I was -- so I put aside my college-only rule and hired him.

He was ridiculously good at dealing with personal computers, and he went on to make a lot of money. A decade later he was living on the North Shore two houses down from Scottie Pippen. He was a handful to manage, a little ornery, which caused me some office politics problems. Four years of college might have put a little more social polish on him. But, basically, so what?

I can only recall one specific time that my six additional years of higher education taught me anything that he didn't know. He came in one day convinced that we could save money by buying all the parts for PCs and assembling them ourselves instead of buying them from Dell. Being an Econ major, I said that the PC business was highly competitive, so the cost of assembling them ourselves would no doubt be slightly higher than what we could buy them from an assembler like Dell for. He went off and spent two hours building a spreadsheet with the prices for all the parts ... and found my top-of-the-head guess based on economic theory had been right.

But, that's the only time my half dozen years of expensive higher education (BA triple major and MBA double concentration) taught me something that would have saved him a few hours.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer