e pur si muove

The Annals of Improbable Research blog digs up recordings of brilliantly funny satirical songs by Tom Lehrer. Also a referral to an absolutely ludicrous patent (U.S. No 6,293,874) entitled “User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user’s buttocks”. What is even more hilarious, in my opinion, is the existence of prior art. U.S. Patent No. 920,837, issued almost a century ago, was an electricuting-cum-spanking machine targeted at secret societies for use in initiation rites.

Something more serious now: David Bacon, in his blog entitled The Quantum Pontiff, describes a trick question which neatly encapsulates the fundamental difference between classical and quantum mechanics.

‘Democracy takes an ambivalent stand in the face of specialized examinations, as it does in the face of all the phenomena of bureaucracy – although democracy itself promotes these developments. Special examinations, on the one hand, mean or appear to mean a “selection” of those who qualify from all social strata rather than a rule by notables. On the other hand, democracy fears that a merit system and educational certificates will result in a privileged caste.
– Max Weber, Bureaucracy. In Essays in Sociology.

Thanks to V link removed by request, who offered to put me up for the night during my road trip to Chicago. (SQ kindly drove there and back while I just sat around mulling at my planned itinerary.) She also introduced me to Max Weber, doyen of sociology, who wrote that prescient paragraph decades before Young wrote his book. (Weber also wrote a tome entitled The Chinese Literati, in which he reportedly describes the engaging history of the examination meritocracy of Imperial China. I have yet to locate it)

The trip, by the way, was fun, even though we didn’t do half the things that were on the list. You know what they say about the best laid plans. One could perhaps say the same about governance using the principle of meritocracy. The lofty goal of giving the most opportunities, the most incentives and responsibilities to the most deserving eventually becomes subverted to form an elitist caste.

I discovered a book in the university’s library stacks, entitled Elitism and Meritocracy in Developing Countries: Selection Policies for Higher Education by Robert Klitgaard. Here are some interesting tidbits from it (please don’t sue me for plagiarism):

• A Tang Dynasty politician, Li Ti-Yu, argued in favor of nepotism, that family background should be considered in selecting future officials. The reason given was:
  

  Because from childhood on [the sons of the highest officials] are accustomed to this kind of position; their eyes are familiar with court affairs; even if they have not been trained in the ceremonies of the palace, they automatically achieve perfection.

  As translated by historian Karl A. Wittfogel, Public Office in The Liao Dynasty and The Chinese Examination System, Harvard J. Asiatic Studies

• Appointments for officials above a certain rank had to be underwritten by sponsors, who not unlike the sureties of the present were held responsible for the future performance of the person whom they had underwritted. While not financially liable, sponsors received a reduced form of whatever punishment the future official received as a consequence of not performing up to expectations. Klitgaard reasons that this was a mechanism for reducing corruption in the system.
• p.19: ‘The Soviet Union provides a lesson: its universities produce a privileged stratum of bourgeois intellectuals who are the “elite” of society sitting on the backs of the working people.’ What consequences does this lesson have for we the people of the mass-education, post-industrial era?
• During the Cultural Revolution, the imperial examination system was abolished on the grounds that it was inefficient at producing pragmatic problem-solvers, was elitist and hence counter to the communist ideology, and also did not have the right incentives for selecting the right people. Immediately after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, the infamous Gang of Four were scapegoated with the worst excesses of the Revolution, including the endemic corruption and nepotism that ensued following the abolition of the examination system. A standardized exam system was immediately reinstated the following year.
• p.34: “In most developing countries, [university] admissions policy is public policy; private universities and professional schools are relatively scarce… Selectivity is necessitated by the large number of candidates for a few educational slots.”
• pp.35-36: “The analogy to the simple micro-economic model for hiring would have students pay tuition according to their willingness to pay for the product the university provides and their contributions to the university’s objectives… If students’ willingness to pay and contributions to the university could be easily assessed and charged and unsatisfactory students could be expelled without cost, there would be little need for preselection [via examinations]… If an auction were used to allocate university slots or civil service openings, the selection problem would disappear. The problem exists because for political or other reasons we refuse to let the selection of future elites be subject entirely to market forces or because transactions costs are so high that it is uneconomical for us to do so.”
• Julius K. Nyerere, President of Tanzania, is quoted eloquently from his essay The Intellectual Needs Society:
  

  There is, in fact, only one reason why underdeveloped societies like ours establish and maintain universities. We do so as an investment in our future. We are spending large and disproportionate amounts of money on a few individuals so that they should, in the future, make a disproportionate return to the society. We are investing in a man’s brain in just the way as we invest in a tractor; and just as we expect the tractor to do many times as much work for us as a hand-hoe, so we expect the student we have trained to make many times as great a contribution to our well-being as the man who had not had this good fortune. We are giving to the student while he is at the university, so that we may receive more from him afterwards.

• “Educational systems are a key instrument in ensuring the reproduction of the prevailing social structure and must necessarily adopt a social defintion of talent or achievement that favors the maintenance of the power and prestige of the privileged groups.” Dorotea Furth, Selection and Equity: An International Viewpoint, Comparative Education Review, 22 (June 1978): 260.
• Klitgaard’s list of measures for “future performance”, in approximately increasing time scales: freshman GPA, graduating GPA, Starting salary, performance ratings, discounted income streams, measure of professional competence/social contribution. Economic and academic metrics aside, he is also unable to come up with more specific measures.
• Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University, 1892:
  

  The secondary schools of the United States, taken as a whole, do not exist for the purpose of preparing boys and girls for colleges. Only an insignificant percentage of the graduates of these schools go to colleges or scientific schools… A secondary school program intended for national use must therefore be made for those childredn whose education is not to be pursued beyond secondary school.

• The existence of discretionary admissions, or back-door admissions based on the personal judgement of a university adminstrator, quickly lends itself to abuse and corruption. First granted in the University of the Philippines in 1971 to the university president, who was upset that he could not admit a student due to not making the grade cutoff despite his apparent worthiness, discretionary admissions grew in popularity until in 1981, over 22% of incoming freshmen were admitted on discretionary grounds. Klitgaard also reports evidence that such admissions were heavily biased in favor of those from wealthy and well-connected backgrounds, resulting in unequal representation across social strata.From the report of the University of the Philippines PDS Study Team’s report on University Admissions, 1982, p. 12,16:
  

  [T]he ‘powerful’ and ‘influential,’ hearing that such things as presidential discretion do exist in the University, become all too eager to test whether they are indeed ‘powerful’ and ‘influential’ by seeking to become beneficiaries of its exercise… [D]oes one really expect the disadvantaged to have access, in significant numbers, to the discretion wielders of the University? Who, other than the privileged, does one really expect to be able to whishper, all too audibly, ‘I am a personal friend of VIP So-and-so?