5 ms·

The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800

86 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

surprisetalk 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
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muscomposter 2y ago
nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or something like that)
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  It's individualism vs collectivism (if I got my terms right), with one side being "got mine, fuck you", whereas the other says that we're better together. Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
  - Joker_vD 2y ago
    > the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, Including having lots of offsprings. Apparently, "not procreating to save the planet" is for the poor.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Why does the opinion of any ‘side’ outweigh the opinions of any other ‘side’, beyond the ballot box? Seems more sensible to just assume they all negate each other out in the long run, unless proven otherwise by voting records.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Politics is tricky because non wealthy very much support the wealthy politically. Agree or disagree it’s just reality in modern politics. As for why we shouldn’t actually care abstractly there simply aren’t that many ultra wealthy. Any subsidies given to them just cost an incredible amount relative to the number of people helped etc. They also don’t directly matter in terms of broad metrics like human health, lifespan, happiness etc.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        How does this relate to my comment? Did you intend to reply to the other comment?
        Retric 2y ago
        You brought up politics in relation to different economic class. My point was how we treat ultra wealthy as a political issue is independent from the underlying reality. They aren’t directly outvoting poor people to revive more benefits, it’s instead a question of influence. Billionaires tend to see positive ROI from getting involved in politics, which is self reinforcing over time. But, stepping back you can judge such systems not in terms of current politics parties operate, but in the broader context of how efficient systems are. In that context the ROI is negative for society even if it can be positive for some individuals that comes at significant cost.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Huh? A ‘side’ doesn’t imply an ‘economic class’? Many millions of people can genuinely believe in something, be on a ‘side’, while being spread across the entire economic spectrum. At best it can be said to be an ideological differentiation, not an economic differentiation.
        Retric 2y ago
        > A ‘side’ doesn’t imply an ‘economic class’? It does when the side described was the edges of a distribution. > wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich Replace a few words and: > height distribution, on the one side we have the tall and hyper-tall PS: To be clear the political interests of a group exist even if the group doesn’t map to a specified political party or ideology. Groups have specific interests independent of which other stances they take. We don’t think of short people in political terms, but there would be a real outrage if gas stations put their credit card readers 7 feet off the ground.
  - arethuza 2y ago
    There were different kinds of kings though - before a certain point in the history of most countries kings had to actively fight and wage war to achieve and maintain their positions. Over time this became more of a position where the king would deserve their positions simply by having ancestors who were "stupendous badasses" but otherwise actually had to do very little.
    - organsnyder 2y ago
      > otherwise actually had to do very little The risk of being overthrown was always there. They had to maintain their power through some combination of force, propaganda, and actual good rulership.
    - Maken 2y ago
      Early medieval kings - like those of the Franks, the Visigoths or the Nordic people - were more often than not elected for life. Arguably the distinction between royalty, nobility and commonfolk grew larger the longer the feudal system was in place, to the point where kings inherited entire countries by birthright at the end of the XVIII century.
      - mountainb 2y ago
        In practice, even later English kings were effectively elected and could have their terms ended early. Taking a few Plantagenet examples, the nobles imprisoned Edward II as retaliation for the plots of Hugh Despenser, and then the king died mysteriously (adverb used ironically). Edward III was far more popular with the nobles due to his many victories in Scotland and France. His successor, Richard II, tried to make a lasting peace with France, but that was much less popular with the most powerful burghers and nobles. So Richard II was deposed, imprisoned, and died mysteriously. No doubt if they had security cameras in those days, they would have mysteriously ceased functioning at some critical moment. So ended the Plantagenets and began the line of Lancastrian kings. I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.
- michaelt 2y ago
  To me, nepotism is a classic principal-agent problem. Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it. If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism. If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money. But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.
  - Viliam1234 2y ago
    Yes, plus sometimes the "owner" is a group of people. Then it gets more difficult for them to coordinate against the agent. If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
    - lthornberry 2y ago
      It also creates conflict of interest problems among the owners. How do you ensure that only your share of the business profit is getting siphoned off to support your kid? Does each owner get one fail-son slot?
- bell-cot 2y ago
  Nepotism is mostly a scaling problem. If you have a decent family and aren't an idiot about it - then for smaller stakes, and over shorter time-spans, nepotism usually works extremely well. And there is precious little damage to society, if Chuck hires his son Sam to drive one of his Chilly Chuck's Ice Cream Trucks for the summer. But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low. [Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  >nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement. Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people. This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Yes! Thank you so much for pointing this out! Our ideas about the nuclear family probably derive from the invention of agriculture, not from the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been in this earth.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > a natural mammalian instinct So what? I don't make decisions, and I don't think society should make decisions, based on "mammalian instinct". My standards are a little higher than that. It's a common, but bizarre way to try to argue something is inevitable. You don't have to act like a cow, or even a chimpanzee - if someone says you do, it's not a compliment. > it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts It reduces outcomes and fairness because productive work is shifted to unproductive people who lack merit.
carlosjobim 2y ago
In the age of unlimited free flow of information, it is quite ridiculous that academic institutions still exist - unless their purpose is something else than studies. Education as privilege laundering has pretty much played out its part, since degrees are much more accessible to the lower born classes who were never supposed to have access to the same easy and well paying careers as the rich.
- n4r9 2y ago
  Their purpose is also research. For many, that's their primary purpose.
- organsnyder 2y ago
  While vocational training is vital, a good education is so much more than that.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  Try setting an toddler in front of an iPad and see how well the toddler learns how to read academic papers and the limitations of unlimited free flow of information would become quite evident.* While there have always been autodidacts, education is still a needed role to delegate for most, especially those who aren't privileged to have parents who already possess both an education and the time to personally propagate it. *(Actually you probably shouldn't.)
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    You're trying your darnedest to not understand what I'm saying. Maybe you learned that in academia? You can instantly distribute any academic books and papers online and you can live broadcast lectures, even have two way communication between lecturer and student in text, voice or video, no matter where they are on the globe. So the idea is outdated that you should have to invest this amount of money or these many years of your youth and be in a specific place for a degree. It has been mostly an excuse for the rich to hire the children of other rich people for well paying jobs. "Oh, you don't have a degree. Sorry, we can't consider you". Now that everybody is getting degrees, that excuse doesn't work anymore.
netcan 2y ago
"examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence." Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism. I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood. Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.
- dash2 2y ago
  In particular (from a very quick glance!) it looks like they distinguish between nepotism and inherited human capital only by using a particular model. They have data on father-son pairs and the correlation between them in terms of publication record; and data on total number of publications of (a) academics' sons and (b) outsiders. They impose a model with just nepotism and inherited human capital and fit it to the data. I'd worry there might be other explanations for the observed patterns.
dash2 2y ago
Here's an interesting extract: > We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation. This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708
- red016 2y ago
  i’d be more interested in jewish numbers than protestant or catholic
  - wazoox 2y ago
    Judaism like Protestantism promotes education and reading for all. Plus Judaism promotes some form of debate.
    - arresin 2y ago
      Jews are the most clannish people I have ever met and the most prone to shameless nepotism (speaking as Jew).
      - ChuckNorris89 2y ago
        Agree. Hollywood and Wallstreet are great examples. Also the founders of Google and Facebook. It's no coincidence. Though I'm not sure this is nepotism as much as it is organized clan behavior. I think Indians are even more so but there it's about caste and not just being Indian. Humans are weird.
        alephnerd 2y ago
        I can't speak for all South Asian Americans, but in my experience caste is not a significant player in our community in the US at least. Alternatives like University Affiliation, Regional ties, Ethnic ties, Clan ties, and Workplace affiliation play a greater role due to the nature of South Asian immigration in the US (tends to be white collar professionals across all ethnic groups). Treating South Asian Americans homogeneously will lead to the same mistakes like treating all Latinos homogeneously - plenty of South Asian heavy battleground counties like Loudoun County, Middlesex County, Williamson County, Kern County, San Joaquin County, etc have seen Ds margins drop significantly in the current election. That said, we are a clannish bunch, and biradari (and every other South Asian language's equivalent of that word) is our guanxi.
paganel 2y ago
> the gap in science that emerged during the Counter-Reformation was enormous, lasted centuries Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way above the Brits, that's for sure. If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself. Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country, had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia [1]: > He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent. Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a Catholic canon. So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most respected economists in the history of the dismal science were actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of their times in many domains of economics.
- _glass 2y ago
  Germany anyway is a special case, because at this time it was quite heterodox. And even in protestant countries like Prussia, you could have a positive effect from Catholic countries surrounding like Poland. Also the quoted articles don't really support the position.
hammock 2y ago
>”human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children” That doesn’t sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad? Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent? It seems like the system of “nepotism” the paper describes is not bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes that when passing occupation from father to son would be inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less
- watwut 2y ago
  The article is not about toddlers. It is about adult children.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    You're missing the point. Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them (within the bounds of what's acceptable and ethical) get a job they're qualified for is good. This is basically how every mutli generational family business works. Giving an unqualified kid a no-show job or a real job they f-up is nepotism and bad.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
      > Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them [...] get a job they're qualified for is good. Indeed. If some people are claiming that somehow giving your own child, uh, what shall I say, priority (?) and your full attention, teaching them skills and transmitting wisdom, and getting them opportunities is somehow bad, then sorry, but that's shockingly stupid, evil, and misanthropic. Doing these things basically describes what is more or less a core duty of parenthood. A parent has the obligation to prioritize his own children. The idea that such generational advantage is nepotism screams of envy. Inequality of opportunity is not unfair or wrong. Indeed, one of the purposes of meritocracy is to become better off so that you can give your own kids a better start than you had. It's wonderful to be able to give your kids opportunities that you have access to. I think people are failing to distinguish two things, namely, prioritizing your own kin on the one hand, and on the other, prioritizing kinship favors at the gross expense of the common good. (At least that's the most charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is that the have-nots are just envious and feel entitled. There is no point in discussing anything with such twisted people.) If a baker wants to hire his son, that's perfectly fine and completely his business. He doesn't have to open up the pool to check off some ridiculous meritocracy checkbox. It's his bakery. Of course, if he puts his son in a position of authority that he is grossly unsuited for, well, then he imperils his own business. Oh, well. In a larger organization that's private, there is nothing wrong with hiring your own kid, either. Putting him in a position that he is completely unsuited for threatens the company, of course, and in that sense is simply stupid. It can also be argued that the company is harming the common good of the company. Private ownership doesn't mean you don't have certain moral obligations toward your employees. Good leadership is one such obligation, and putting an incompetent child in a position that harms the company is a failure of leadership.
vivekd 2y ago
I think many of the posters defending nepotism are missing a very important issue. Which is that it is bad for diversity and may be a factor limiting the participation of some ethnic groups in academia
a_bonobo 2y ago
A very related article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04936-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04936-1 >Nobel laureates cluster together. 696 of the 727 winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics belong to one single academic family tree. 668 trace their ancestry to Emmanuel Stupanus, 228 to Lord Rayleigh (physics, 1904). Craig Mello (medicine, 2006) counts 51 Nobelists among his ancestors. Chemistry laureates have the most Nobel ancestors and descendants, economics laureates the fewest. Chemistry is the central discipline. Its Nobelists have trained and are trained by Nobelists in other fields. Nobelists in physics (medicine) have trained (by) others. Economics stands apart. Openness to other disciplines is the same in recent and earlier times. The familial concentration of Nobelists is lower now than it used to be.
mmooss 2y ago
The link is to a footnote in the paper. A better link is: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-024-09244-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-024-09244-0

86 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

surprisetalk 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

muscomposter 2y ago

nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or something like that)

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
It's individualism vs collectivism (if I got my terms right), with one side being "got mine, fuck you", whereas the other says that we're better together. Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  > the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, Including having lots of offsprings. Apparently, "not procreating to save the planet" is for the poor.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Why does the opinion of any ‘side’ outweigh the opinions of any other ‘side’, beyond the ballot box? Seems more sensible to just assume they all negate each other out in the long run, unless proven otherwise by voting records.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Politics is tricky because non wealthy very much support the wealthy politically. Agree or disagree it’s just reality in modern politics. As for why we shouldn’t actually care abstractly there simply aren’t that many ultra wealthy. Any subsidies given to them just cost an incredible amount relative to the number of people helped etc. They also don’t directly matter in terms of broad metrics like human health, lifespan, happiness etc.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      How does this relate to my comment? Did you intend to reply to the other comment?
      - Retric 2y ago
        You brought up politics in relation to different economic class. My point was how we treat ultra wealthy as a political issue is independent from the underlying reality. They aren’t directly outvoting poor people to revive more benefits, it’s instead a question of influence. Billionaires tend to see positive ROI from getting involved in politics, which is self reinforcing over time. But, stepping back you can judge such systems not in terms of current politics parties operate, but in the broader context of how efficient systems are. In that context the ROI is negative for society even if it can be positive for some individuals that comes at significant cost.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Huh? A ‘side’ doesn’t imply an ‘economic class’? Many millions of people can genuinely believe in something, be on a ‘side’, while being spread across the entire economic spectrum. At best it can be said to be an ideological differentiation, not an economic differentiation.
        Retric 2y ago
        > A ‘side’ doesn’t imply an ‘economic class’? It does when the side described was the edges of a distribution. > wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich Replace a few words and: > height distribution, on the one side we have the tall and hyper-tall PS: To be clear the political interests of a group exist even if the group doesn’t map to a specified political party or ideology. Groups have specific interests independent of which other stances they take. We don’t think of short people in political terms, but there would be a real outrage if gas stations put their credit card readers 7 feet off the ground.
- arethuza 2y ago
  There were different kinds of kings though - before a certain point in the history of most countries kings had to actively fight and wage war to achieve and maintain their positions. Over time this became more of a position where the king would deserve their positions simply by having ancestors who were "stupendous badasses" but otherwise actually had to do very little.
  - organsnyder 2y ago
    > otherwise actually had to do very little The risk of being overthrown was always there. They had to maintain their power through some combination of force, propaganda, and actual good rulership.
  - Maken 2y ago
    Early medieval kings - like those of the Franks, the Visigoths or the Nordic people - were more often than not elected for life. Arguably the distinction between royalty, nobility and commonfolk grew larger the longer the feudal system was in place, to the point where kings inherited entire countries by birthright at the end of the XVIII century.
    - mountainb 2y ago
      In practice, even later English kings were effectively elected and could have their terms ended early. Taking a few Plantagenet examples, the nobles imprisoned Edward II as retaliation for the plots of Hugh Despenser, and then the king died mysteriously (adverb used ironically). Edward III was far more popular with the nobles due to his many victories in Scotland and France. His successor, Richard II, tried to make a lasting peace with France, but that was much less popular with the most powerful burghers and nobles. So Richard II was deposed, imprisoned, and died mysteriously. No doubt if they had security cameras in those days, they would have mysteriously ceased functioning at some critical moment. So ended the Plantagenets and began the line of Lancastrian kings. I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.
michaelt 2y ago
To me, nepotism is a classic principal-agent problem. Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it. If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism. If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money. But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  Yes, plus sometimes the "owner" is a group of people. Then it gets more difficult for them to coordinate against the agent. If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
  - lthornberry 2y ago
    It also creates conflict of interest problems among the owners. How do you ensure that only your share of the business profit is getting siphoned off to support your kid? Does each owner get one fail-son slot?
bell-cot 2y ago
Nepotism is mostly a scaling problem. If you have a decent family and aren't an idiot about it - then for smaller stakes, and over shorter time-spans, nepotism usually works extremely well. And there is precious little damage to society, if Chuck hires his son Sam to drive one of his Chilly Chuck's Ice Cream Trucks for the summer. But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low. [Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
mrguyorama 2y ago
>nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement. Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people. This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Yes! Thank you so much for pointing this out! Our ideas about the nuclear family probably derive from the invention of agriculture, not from the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been in this earth.
mmooss 2y ago
> a natural mammalian instinct So what? I don't make decisions, and I don't think society should make decisions, based on "mammalian instinct". My standards are a little higher than that. It's a common, but bizarre way to try to argue something is inevitable. You don't have to act like a cow, or even a chimpanzee - if someone says you do, it's not a compliment. > it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts It reduces outcomes and fairness because productive work is shifted to unproductive people who lack merit.

carlosjobim 2y ago

In the age of unlimited free flow of information, it is quite ridiculous that academic institutions still exist - unless their purpose is something else than studies. Education as privilege laundering has pretty much played out its part, since degrees are much more accessible to the lower born classes who were never supposed to have access to the same easy and well paying careers as the rich.

n4r9 2y ago
Their purpose is also research. For many, that's their primary purpose.
organsnyder 2y ago
While vocational training is vital, a good education is so much more than that.
Nasrudith 2y ago
Try setting an toddler in front of an iPad and see how well the toddler learns how to read academic papers and the limitations of unlimited free flow of information would become quite evident.* While there have always been autodidacts, education is still a needed role to delegate for most, especially those who aren't privileged to have parents who already possess both an education and the time to personally propagate it. *(Actually you probably shouldn't.)
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  You're trying your darnedest to not understand what I'm saying. Maybe you learned that in academia? You can instantly distribute any academic books and papers online and you can live broadcast lectures, even have two way communication between lecturer and student in text, voice or video, no matter where they are on the globe. So the idea is outdated that you should have to invest this amount of money or these many years of your youth and be in a specific place for a degree. It has been mostly an excuse for the rich to hire the children of other rich people for well paying jobs. "Oh, you don't have a degree. Sorry, we can't consider you". Now that everybody is getting degrees, that excuse doesn't work anymore.

netcan 2y ago

"examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence." Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism. I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood. Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.

dash2 2y ago
In particular (from a very quick glance!) it looks like they distinguish between nepotism and inherited human capital only by using a particular model. They have data on father-son pairs and the correlation between them in terms of publication record; and data on total number of publications of (a) academics' sons and (b) outsiders. They impose a model with just nepotism and inherited human capital and fit it to the data. I'd worry there might be other explanations for the observed patterns.

dash2 2y ago

Here's an interesting extract: > We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation. This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708

red016 2y ago
i’d be more interested in jewish numbers than protestant or catholic
- wazoox 2y ago
  Judaism like Protestantism promotes education and reading for all. Plus Judaism promotes some form of debate.
  - arresin 2y ago
    Jews are the most clannish people I have ever met and the most prone to shameless nepotism (speaking as Jew).
    - ChuckNorris89 2y ago
      Agree. Hollywood and Wallstreet are great examples. Also the founders of Google and Facebook. It's no coincidence. Though I'm not sure this is nepotism as much as it is organized clan behavior. I think Indians are even more so but there it's about caste and not just being Indian. Humans are weird.
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        I can't speak for all South Asian Americans, but in my experience caste is not a significant player in our community in the US at least. Alternatives like University Affiliation, Regional ties, Ethnic ties, Clan ties, and Workplace affiliation play a greater role due to the nature of South Asian immigration in the US (tends to be white collar professionals across all ethnic groups). Treating South Asian Americans homogeneously will lead to the same mistakes like treating all Latinos homogeneously - plenty of South Asian heavy battleground counties like Loudoun County, Middlesex County, Williamson County, Kern County, San Joaquin County, etc have seen Ds margins drop significantly in the current election. That said, we are a clannish bunch, and biradari (and every other South Asian language's equivalent of that word) is our guanxi.

paganel 2y ago

> the gap in science that emerged during the Counter-Reformation was enormous, lasted centuries Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way above the Brits, that's for sure. If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself. Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country, had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia [1]: > He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent. Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a Catholic canon. So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most respected economists in the history of the dismal science were actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of their times in many domains of economics.

_glass 2y ago
Germany anyway is a special case, because at this time it was quite heterodox. And even in protestant countries like Prussia, you could have a positive effect from Catholic countries surrounding like Poland. Also the quoted articles don't really support the position.

hammock 2y ago

>”human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children” That doesn’t sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad? Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent? It seems like the system of “nepotism” the paper describes is not bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes that when passing occupation from father to son would be inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less

watwut 2y ago
The article is not about toddlers. It is about adult children.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  You're missing the point. Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them (within the bounds of what's acceptable and ethical) get a job they're qualified for is good. This is basically how every mutli generational family business works. Giving an unqualified kid a no-show job or a real job they f-up is nepotism and bad.
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  - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
    > Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them [...] get a job they're qualified for is good. Indeed. If some people are claiming that somehow giving your own child, uh, what shall I say, priority (?) and your full attention, teaching them skills and transmitting wisdom, and getting them opportunities is somehow bad, then sorry, but that's shockingly stupid, evil, and misanthropic. Doing these things basically describes what is more or less a core duty of parenthood. A parent has the obligation to prioritize his own children. The idea that such generational advantage is nepotism screams of envy. Inequality of opportunity is not unfair or wrong. Indeed, one of the purposes of meritocracy is to become better off so that you can give your own kids a better start than you had. It's wonderful to be able to give your kids opportunities that you have access to. I think people are failing to distinguish two things, namely, prioritizing your own kin on the one hand, and on the other, prioritizing kinship favors at the gross expense of the common good. (At least that's the most charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is that the have-nots are just envious and feel entitled. There is no point in discussing anything with such twisted people.) If a baker wants to hire his son, that's perfectly fine and completely his business. He doesn't have to open up the pool to check off some ridiculous meritocracy checkbox. It's his bakery. Of course, if he puts his son in a position of authority that he is grossly unsuited for, well, then he imperils his own business. Oh, well. In a larger organization that's private, there is nothing wrong with hiring your own kid, either. Putting him in a position that he is completely unsuited for threatens the company, of course, and in that sense is simply stupid. It can also be argued that the company is harming the common good of the company. Private ownership doesn't mean you don't have certain moral obligations toward your employees. Good leadership is one such obligation, and putting an incompetent child in a position that harms the company is a failure of leadership.

vivekd 2y ago

I think many of the posters defending nepotism are missing a very important issue. Which is that it is bad for diversity and may be a factor limiting the participation of some ethnic groups in academia

a_bonobo 2y ago

A very related article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04936-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04936-1 >Nobel laureates cluster together. 696 of the 727 winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics belong to one single academic family tree. 668 trace their ancestry to Emmanuel Stupanus, 228 to Lord Rayleigh (physics, 1904). Craig Mello (medicine, 2006) counts 51 Nobelists among his ancestors. Chemistry laureates have the most Nobel ancestors and descendants, economics laureates the fewest. Chemistry is the central discipline. Its Nobelists have trained and are trained by Nobelists in other fields. Nobelists in physics (medicine) have trained (by) others. Economics stands apart. Openness to other disciplines is the same in recent and earlier times. The familial concentration of Nobelists is lower now than it used to be.

mmooss 2y ago

The link is to a footnote in the paper. A better link is: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-024-09244-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-024-09244-0