This is from a twitter post by Arnaud Bertrand:
Interesting anecdote that illustrates the different approach to wealth in China and the US.
A few months ago I was having dinner in Shanghai with a very wealthy friend of mine. We’re talking about someone with a net worth of 9 figures, in dollars. He was telling me he was thinking of moving to the U.S., to California to be precise.
“Why?” I asked him, pointing out that he’d made his fortune in China so surely he must be pretty satisfied with the country. He went out to explain that basically, with his wealth, his children could have enormous advantages for their education in the U.S. vs the average kids there, which wouldn’t be possible in China. Indeed, his plan was to buy a house in the very best neighborhood in California, get them into the best schools, pay the best tutors money could afford and they’d eventually end up getting into the most prestigious American universities and having very successful professional lives. Pretty sound logic actually.
Why isn’t this possible in China? Because China has invested considerable efforts - and continues to do so - to ensure that wealth couldn’t “game” the education system. This includes:
1) When you buy a property somewhere, you aren’t guaranteed assignment to the corresponding local school. It used to be the case and property prices around public schools that had a good reputation skyrocketed until there was a legislative change that meant you could have your kids assigned to just any school in the wider area. I actually have a friend who bought a studio flat - something like 15 sq meters - for an insane price (can’t remember anymore but we’re talking millions of RMB) right in front of Shanghai’s best public school right before the change in legislation was announced (which she didn't know about). From one day to the next, her property lost something like 80% of its value 😅
2) You can’t game the system by putting your kids into private schools. Private schools do exist but there’s a lottery system that means that if you put your kid in a private school you effectively cannot choose which one, it is determined by the lottery. Which obviously makes it much less attractive as your kids might end up in a mediocre private school.
3) Tutoring has now famously been entirely banned as an industry in China, so it is not possible to pay expensive tutors to have your kids gain a competitive advantage.
And there are scores of other measures… To be fair, it is still the case that wealth does give you an advantage. For instance there’s a large underground tutoring industry: you can theoretically hire a “maid” with a PhD… It’s basically a game of whac-a-mole between China’s wealthy and the government where the former always find loopholes and the government always moves in to plug them.
But there’s no denying the fact that all this makes it considerably harder for a wealthy person in China to give their kids an unfair advantage in the education system compared to the average Chinese kid. And that it therefore does make good sense for them to move to the U.S. where not only there are little to no restrictions in this regard - in fact the contrary is true: the system is gamed to favor the wealthy - but also, due to the Chinese culture of considering education as a quasi-religion, they naturally have an advantage.
This all raises the bigger question of the reproduction of elites. In the long run, which society is more sustainable and fares better: one that does little to avoid the reproduction of elites like the U.S. (which - contrary to the “American dream” narrative - is one of the high-income economies with the lowest rates of relative upward mobility: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/intergenerational-mobility-across-world-where-socioeconomic-status-parents-matters) or one that actively fights it to enforce, to the extent possible, a meritocracy? The answer, at least to me, sounds obvious: I don’t think that kids from wealthy parents are inherently smarter or more deserving than other kids; and society as a whole benefits from selecting the best out of the biggest possible pool of talents. Plus I actually do think that kids from disadvantaged families - those who “ate bitterness” as children - are “hungrier” and if society allows them, will end up being more productive than their counterparts born with a silver spoon. Lastly there’s the question of representativity: you want elites who come from the people and understand life at the bottom…
What my friend’s story illustrates is actually even more than this: in the U.S. you don’t even only have a reproduction of the local elites but you also have elites from other countries who come to the U.S. because it’s easier to reproduce there! And this arguably makes the space for “non-elites” to rise to “elite” level even smaller, since you can only have so many elites in a country… And paradoxically then makes it easier for countries like China to promote upward social mobility since (at least some of) their elites go reproduce elsewhere…
To conclude all of this is of course somewhat theoretical. China still has a lot of problems with inequality and America does still have a lot of opportunities if you work hard… But at the end of the day it’s a question of culture: there is undeniably a growing culture of enforcing meritocracy in China, trying to make the country fairer (sometimes with questionable initiatives like the complete shutdown of the tutoring industry, but at least they’re trying) whilst America is culturally becoming somewhat of a institutionalized plutocracy, where the “American dream” is increasingly… a dream (!) more than a reality.
These types of cultural evolutions take time to make a dent in society as a whole, often 1 or 2 generations, but over time are extremely consequential and potentially very corrosive. You want your society to be perceived as fair and meritocratic by its people, especially if it’s how you define yourself, because otherwise you cultivate cynicism and resentment.
In addition, entrance to college is based on the performance on the college exam score rather than any letters of recommendation, or extra-curricula activities that always benefit the wealthy. So, China works hard at removing the advantage of wealth in getting into the Chinese universities. Meritocracy is further instilled within the Party-state through the entrance examinations, the careful checking of applicant’s backgrounds, and the constant validation and revalidation of the individual’s performance over the decades required to climb to important positions.
In the US even the reliance on the SAT and ACT scores are being removed, to allow for the use of full subjective flexibility in the admissions process. There has also been a widely used process of utilizing “social” criteria to greatly reduce the number of Asian entrants, far below the Asian share of the best candidates. Otherwise, the children of the faculty (allowed automatic entry to the university a parent is faculty at) and the children of the wealthy alumni benefactors may find that there are not enough places for their mediocre offspring.
The US process which both subtly and unsubtly selects for wealth and connections rather than scholastic aptitude, when combined with rampant grade inflation which sees anything less than an A as a failing grade (85% of grades at Yale tend to be “A’ for example) and the acceptance of utterly mediocre written language skills, produces a much lower quality of elite than a truly meritocratic system would. In addition, so many of the people gaining senior positions take higher degrees in business (MBA) and law (LLB) which are basically trade-school qualifications as against real intellectually-challenging higher degrees.
Foreign wealthy families gaming the US system for their more mediocre children, a game played by Hong Kong families for many decades with respect to US and UK universities, only makes things worse. Especially when the Western universities are hungry for the high foreign tuition fees and more than ready to overlook mediocrity when large sums of cash are on offer. With many decades of such collapsing standards, even among the most elite of universities, the increasingly mediocre product has become evident within the business, academic and political realms. Hiring driven by notions of identity diversity (but not class or ideological diversity) only exacerbates the problem.
I was in "advanced" arithmetic in grade school. Same class, but teachers gave special assignments to me & a classmate to work on alone while she helped the rest of the class struggle with the lesson of the day.
When I entered jr high, the liberal school dropped the "tracking" system. I learned lessons in the 1st 5 minutes of class & spent the rest of the class waiting. I was hated & bullied & didn't know why until one boy finally told me they hated me because I was "ruining the curve."
My grades plummeted. The school recommended private school for gifted. The only fight my father ever won against my mother. "Education is wasted on girrls," with a sneer.
I took a shortened mensa test once. 20 questions/20 minutes. Bonus point if you finished in under 15.
I finished in 5. That included stopping to answer the door when my cousin came by for a visit.
My iq has tested at 155. In high school I learned to sit & wait. I've been waiting ever since. Now I'm waiting to die. Can't come fucking soon enough. Fucking waste of a life.
The US education system sucks.
i don't know where to begin with this.
for one, wasn't the guy that coined the word "meritocracy" meaning it in a very underhanded, slap-back way?
for two, people who bruit this concept about in this way (all too common now) don't understand the concept of social capital, habitus, etc.
"merit" has always and probably will always be defined by the ruling classes. they design it around the qualities that they feel themselves to have because they have the positive freedom to obtain them easily, having been trained in that kind of "culture" for that kind of thing from the earliest of ages --and told that it was INEVITABLE for their future--. as for whining about university, it was designed as a finishing school for the upper class to give them culture and values in common with each other. it has only been slightly repurposed since then because the masses needed to be kept busy and out of the job market for a few additional years, and because the society got more difficult to manage and needed more training. meanwhile, "technical" or junior colleges taught the rest of us to do "real" things, although even those fell by the wayside when i was young and had very limited openings for the poor to be able to learn those things, and usually even if the program wasn't rigorous it was spread out over 2plus years on the college's schedule (not yours) so very easy to fall behind or not be able to complete even if you could get in.
in this neoliberal society, understanding the fake social science/religion of "economics" of the neoliberal variety, and marketing as a skill above all other values, is what was valuable to the elite. that's why everyone above a certain level for the last few decades, regardless of their other degrees, skills, or "merits" has run out and gotten an MBA on top of their other degrees.
a poor kid studying books is going to have book learning and possibly street smarts (depending). they are never going to have the incredible bonuses that actually having money, social status, and proper parental investment of various kinds is going to have. they may academically excel and may be able to do "the job" after struggling to do what the well off kids do in their sleep. i saw it many a time growing up, because i was from the poor side of town and spent all of my time commuting to the side where the well-off (but not incredibly well off, since those kids all went to private schools) and struggled to earn the same grades that those kids did in their sleep.
it was very easy for those kids whose parents had already been through college and perhaps had professions and/or advanced degrees, owned their own homes and probably never spent any significant time jobless and praying for government handout cheese, to run rings around everyone else and get into all of the AP classes and obtain the merit people keep harping on. they could do it in their sleep, didn't break a sweat and were assured that they were going on to college and bigger and better things (or at least not abject poverty forever).
they also had computer skills before the rest of us even knew what computers were, or what they were for.
social and other capital is used to achieve the merit you speak of, thus becoming a caste system. those kids also had less learning loss over summer break, had travelled to cultural destinations within the US and/or abroad, had time, money and tutoring for "extracurricular" activities (i would have loved to have learned music, but ohwell) and had parents who helped them actively plan their futures. some of us had parents who told us long before we were 18 that they had no time or money to help us at all, and that we'd best get packing ASAP and absolutely to forget about college because it was "four years of sitting on your behind trying to figure out what to do in life that we can't afford to support" (yes, almost a verbatim quote from one of my family members i received at 16 y.o. i had to pay for my own orthodontic braces AND my own driving lessons. my friend on the hill got a brand new truck as soon as he turned 16 and when he wrecked it they bought him a new one. he also got to go to two of the most expensive private high schools in town, and had parents planning for him even though he was probably dyslexic, and is now a some kind of well paid medical tech even though he never cracked a book until he was 20 (this is not saying that he was dumb, but he was not a good reader and if you aren't, you are not going to do well in the U.S. ed system, period). you may not think this is relevant, but it is incredibly relevant---poor people do not have the resources to compete and are usually suffering from attention and attendance problems because they barely have the resources to participate in the worthless public "free" system.
what you may want to rant about rather than this is that our society has the wrong value system, and does not value "the real" much, only the image and how much you can sell it for. it also only values the rich. it appears to have been this way from BEFORE its founding (only reason those assholes stepped off the boat at Plymouth was to make money) and has continued on until today.