Finally got around to reading the Sunday NYT 12/9/18 from which I have learned:
1/ A STUDENTS
From a Wharton professor: "A" students are often not as successful as "B" students who go into the real world with the mindset they have something to prove.
This was something my brother observed years ago as he assessed talent among the students he had to judge. I noticed the same thing. Not to say the kid who never got a "B" throughout high school, got into Harvard or Princeton was not bright. But there are all sorts of modes of "bright."
When my younger son's girlfriend took command of him in college she forbid him from getting too interested or enthralled in any particular assignment: You've done the work to get your "A" now move on. Leave that stuff you find so fascinating behind. You're not here to fall in love with gene splicing; you're here to get your "A."
Before she arrived on the scene, he was struggling to get "B's." After, he got nothing but "A's." She became valedictorian. He went on to medical school where he fell in love with "big vessels"--he really loved anatomy, vascular diseases and became a vascular surgeon. She went off to Yale and got a PhD in something and hasn't been heard from since. The A student who won the game; the B student who loved a particular subject.
For the most part, Harvard, Yale and Princeton grads go on to become middle managers, semi rich and undistinguished. They are worker ants, the drone bees. The movers and shakers are the kids with something to prove.
The professor notes the almost complete lack of correlation between grade point averages in subsequent success in the work place.
It must mean something neither Gates nor Zuckerberg stayed long at Harvard.
Now, there are only one or two of these types, even at Harvard, so for most students staying with the faculty, getting the merit badges works out. But still.
There are plenty brilliant scientists and scholars on the Harvard faculty, but if you had to choose between universities and the business world to power innovation and progress in your nation, for its economy, for its science and technology, for its art and vigor, you'd probably be smart to pick the business community.
2/THE CASE AGAINST MERITOCRACY
From Ross Douthat I learned American "meritocracy" has replaced American aristocracy. Privilege based on birthright and family money has given way to a "meritocratic elite" which from Douthat's perspective is too bad, because it is a driven by an "ambition untempered by self-sacrifice," a group which wants to move fast and break things and which gave us the crash of 2008. Like the aristocrats of the 20th century, they feel entitled to their privilege and wealth and advantages, but they do not know who or what they are.
This is what is wrong with so much of American journalistic punditry: It is unconnected to the real world. It is a dreamworld, the way the Douthat's of the world think things ought to be. Mostly, it's like so many of the big numbers cited on the internet or in polls or studies--either completely made up or the product of garbage in, garbage out.
There are some people who live mostly in the coffee houses of the upper West Side of New York City, or the green pastures of Harvard yard who can, somehow, see the truth occasionally. Reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan's memos to Richard Nixon is a trip, not just to the past but to the present and future. He is utterly dispassionate and he notes:
1/ The welfare system of the 1970's, well meaning as it was, was utterly destructive of the very people it sought to help. It was based on providing services which corrupted those in the service industry and injured those receiving the services and provoked profound resentment among the working class Whites who saw their taxes supporting undeserving poor.
2/ The basic lesion in American society was unemployment among Black males, especially men who might otherwise be heads of households, but the African American family had collapsed, leaving working mothers trying to raise children alone, with absent fathers.
All of this was dynamite at the time and Moynihan was reviled as a racist. Somehow, from his White world, his offices in government and academia, he managed to understand what was happening in the inner city ghettos and he tried to speak truth to power.
Even in the era of Trump, it turns out, there is such a thing as truth, and reading Moynihan today is a bracing tonic.
Someday, maybe some college will gather together Jill Lepore, Elizabeth Kolbert, Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gloria Steinem, Bill Gates, and other actual truth seekers and seers and lock them in a dormitory, make them eat meals together and talk about what they know and what they'd like to know and we might actually make some progress.
1/ A STUDENTS
From a Wharton professor: "A" students are often not as successful as "B" students who go into the real world with the mindset they have something to prove.
This was something my brother observed years ago as he assessed talent among the students he had to judge. I noticed the same thing. Not to say the kid who never got a "B" throughout high school, got into Harvard or Princeton was not bright. But there are all sorts of modes of "bright."
When my younger son's girlfriend took command of him in college she forbid him from getting too interested or enthralled in any particular assignment: You've done the work to get your "A" now move on. Leave that stuff you find so fascinating behind. You're not here to fall in love with gene splicing; you're here to get your "A."
Before she arrived on the scene, he was struggling to get "B's." After, he got nothing but "A's." She became valedictorian. He went on to medical school where he fell in love with "big vessels"--he really loved anatomy, vascular diseases and became a vascular surgeon. She went off to Yale and got a PhD in something and hasn't been heard from since. The A student who won the game; the B student who loved a particular subject.
For the most part, Harvard, Yale and Princeton grads go on to become middle managers, semi rich and undistinguished. They are worker ants, the drone bees. The movers and shakers are the kids with something to prove.
The professor notes the almost complete lack of correlation between grade point averages in subsequent success in the work place.
It must mean something neither Gates nor Zuckerberg stayed long at Harvard.
Now, there are only one or two of these types, even at Harvard, so for most students staying with the faculty, getting the merit badges works out. But still.
There are plenty brilliant scientists and scholars on the Harvard faculty, but if you had to choose between universities and the business world to power innovation and progress in your nation, for its economy, for its science and technology, for its art and vigor, you'd probably be smart to pick the business community.
2/THE CASE AGAINST MERITOCRACY
From Ross Douthat I learned American "meritocracy" has replaced American aristocracy. Privilege based on birthright and family money has given way to a "meritocratic elite" which from Douthat's perspective is too bad, because it is a driven by an "ambition untempered by self-sacrifice," a group which wants to move fast and break things and which gave us the crash of 2008. Like the aristocrats of the 20th century, they feel entitled to their privilege and wealth and advantages, but they do not know who or what they are.
This is what is wrong with so much of American journalistic punditry: It is unconnected to the real world. It is a dreamworld, the way the Douthat's of the world think things ought to be. Mostly, it's like so many of the big numbers cited on the internet or in polls or studies--either completely made up or the product of garbage in, garbage out.
There are some people who live mostly in the coffee houses of the upper West Side of New York City, or the green pastures of Harvard yard who can, somehow, see the truth occasionally. Reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan's memos to Richard Nixon is a trip, not just to the past but to the present and future. He is utterly dispassionate and he notes:
1/ The welfare system of the 1970's, well meaning as it was, was utterly destructive of the very people it sought to help. It was based on providing services which corrupted those in the service industry and injured those receiving the services and provoked profound resentment among the working class Whites who saw their taxes supporting undeserving poor.
2/ The basic lesion in American society was unemployment among Black males, especially men who might otherwise be heads of households, but the African American family had collapsed, leaving working mothers trying to raise children alone, with absent fathers.
All of this was dynamite at the time and Moynihan was reviled as a racist. Somehow, from his White world, his offices in government and academia, he managed to understand what was happening in the inner city ghettos and he tried to speak truth to power.
Even in the era of Trump, it turns out, there is such a thing as truth, and reading Moynihan today is a bracing tonic.
Someday, maybe some college will gather together Jill Lepore, Elizabeth Kolbert, Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gloria Steinem, Bill Gates, and other actual truth seekers and seers and lock them in a dormitory, make them eat meals together and talk about what they know and what they'd like to know and we might actually make some progress.
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