This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: For a True MeritocracyHoisting this & separating it out so I can find it easily in the future: from 2021-12-28...Hoisting this & separating it out so I can find it easily in the future: from 2021-12-28.. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/against-meritocracy>.If you have a test or another activity to select who is “the best”, you had better make damned sure that the test or activity accurately measures or reflects what you really want done. In the limit, you optimize for test-takers—and people who have devoted all of their time to become expert test-takers have spent none of their time learning to do anything else. They are thus likely to be far from “the best” at what will be their real job. How can you tell if you are falling into this trap? Divide your population up into groups. See how well the best test-takers are spread out among those groups, If there is no reason to think that those who will actually be best at the real job are anything other than uniformly distributed among the groups you have chosen, and yet if it turns out that those who score highest on the test are strongly concentrated—then it is highly likely that you are missing huge numbers of potential candidates, and wasting a huge amount of talent. Rajiv Sethi ran across a very interesting paper on Finland that is on point here:
If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…#hoisted-from-the-archives#meritocracy#affirmative-action#rajiv-sethi#for-a-true-meritocracy#against-meritocracy#finlandPlease forward the email & otherwise share it to everyone you think would appreciate it… |
HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: For a True Meritocracy
Sunday, 16 November 2025
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