Response to epidemics
There were two widely cited shortcomings in the response of the government of China to the emergence of COVID 19 in Wuhan:- a lack of openness and transparency, and
- a lack of strong, decisive measures to contain the virus.
Openness cannot be expected in such an environment.
This regime has a habitual determination to deny any sort of social problem in China.
In fact, it cannot seem to admit these problems to itself.
Thus, the government failed to take the kind of tough action that one would expect from such an authoritarian regime.
It's the worst of both worlds.
So there might be several lessons to be learned from this episode.
- A combination of openness and toughness is the best policy.
- People tend to have temperamental inclinations to embracing exclusively either openness or rigorousness, making a combined policy less likely.
- Without a combination of both openness and rigor, the policy outcome might end up exhibiting neither openness nor rigor.
Primaries
Idealists and populists want a political system to be as open as possible.That in itself is not a bad thing.
In fact, it is an excellent thing insofar as it brings in new ideas and perspectives and new talent.
But by itself it is a very bad thing.
A competitive system should be as open as possible, but also as rigorous as possible.
For example, in the early stages of the primary season in a US presidential election, there should be as many people on that stage as possible.
But there should be a steady process of weeding.
For those who do get weeded out, it feels like yet another example of the great injustices in the world.
That is irrational.
That's like the contestants on "American Idol" being given the boot because they just don't have the talent.
Even the nice judges are saying, "Look, honey, you just cannot sing."
With tears in her eyes the contestant protests that "I know in my heart that I can sing!"
The weeding process can fail to happen during the primaries.
The top candidates may switch places in the polls, but they are secure in their overall status as the serious contenders.
It's not a nice thing to say, but everyone else is a waste of time.
That's just simply the reality.
Can the principle that a system should be as open as possible and as rigorous as possible be applied to sports?
Sports
"Sudden-death elimination" seems too arbitrary.It seems neither rigorous nor open.
It's less open because a competitor who loses just one match is sidelined for the season.
It is less rigorous because the element of luck takes on a more central role in such a system of rapid elimination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-elimination_tournament
A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final match-up, whose winner becomes the tournament champion.The arbitrariness of single-elimination competitions can be seen in tennis tournaments.
Sometimes a champion having a bad day will be suddenly and unexpected defeated and eliminated from further play by a middling player having a great day.
Because the lucky middling player will soon enough be defeated and eliminated makes this system absurd.
Single-elimination competition does have the benefit of providing an exciting life-or-death gladiatorial struggle.
But by taking a top-ranked contender out of contention for the rest of the season, matches that would have been even more exciting at the higher levels are not going to happen.
A more thorough system of competition would be "round robin".
It is more open because each competitor plays against every other competitor.
It is more rigorous in that it insures that it is the better competitor advances up through the ranks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_tournament
A round-robin tournament (or all-play-all tournament) is a competition in which each contestant meets all other contestants in turn.[1][2] A round-robin contrasts with an elimination tournament, in which participants are eliminated after a certain number of losses.One problem with round-robin systems is that because each competitor must play every other, the playing season is long and tedious.
But there might be a way of addressing this.
Games would be scheduled earlier in the year than the current system.
The first games would involve the lowest ranked competitors from the previous year.
So the very first game would involve the competitor that came in last place versus the competitor who came in second-to-last place.
Only later in the season would the top-ranked competitors from the previous year begin to play.
But there might be an additional measure taken to make the competition more intense.
There would be two leagues, major and minor.
A major league competitor could be demoted into the minor-leagues for losing too many games in a season.
A minor-league competitor could be promoted into the majors by, say, winning enough championships over the years.
Can openness and rigor be applied to the educational system?
Education
Meritocracy consists of the promotion based on talent and effort rather than inheritance.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
Meritocracy (merit, from Latinmereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος kratos 'strength, power') is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class.[1] Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement.The NYT columnist David Brooks claims that there are two forms of meritocracy at work in the USA -- one that produces the elite and one for the rest of us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/opinion/markovits-meritocracy.html
There are at least two kinds of meritocracy in America right now. Exclusive meritocracy exists at the super-elite universities and at the industries that draw the bulk of their employees from them — Wall Street, Big Law, medicine and tech. And then there is the more open meritocracy that exists almost everywhere else.Those who manage to survive and thrive in the hyper-competitive world of the elite meritocracy tend to become ultra-liberal in order to broadcast their virtue.
In the exclusive meritocracy, prestige is defined by how many people you can reject. The elite universities reject 85 to 95 percent of their applicants. Those accepted spend much of their lives living in neighborhoods and attending conferences where it is phenomenally expensive or hard to get in. Whether it’s the resort town you vacation in or the private school you send your kids to, exclusivity is the pervasive ethos. The more the exclusivity, the thicker will be the coating of P.C. progressivism to show that we’re all good people.The elite meritocracy has a serious work ethic.
People in this caste work phenomenally hard to build their wealth. As Daniel Markovits notes in his powerful new book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of workers in the top quintile of earners who work more than 50 hours a week nearly doubled.Their talents and efforts translate into massive productivity.
People in this caste are super-skilled and productive. There are more than 70 law firms, Markovits notes, that generate over $1 million in annual profit per partner. When Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion, it had only 13 full-time employees.It has been asserted that the problem with growing social inequality is with inequality of wealth, not income.
That is, the problem is not high incomes of professionals but with stock and real estate ownership of businessmen.
Actually, the problem might be the income of the elite-educated professional classes, not stock owners.
That is, the problem is not the top 1% of stock owners, but the top 20% of income earners.
A few years ago, people in this elite professional caste seized on research by Thomas Piketty, who argued that rising inequality is caused by the shift in income away from labor and toward capital. The investors are to blame! But, Markovits argues, roughly 75 percent of the increase in the top 1 percent of earnings is caused by shifts in income within labor. These highly educated professionals attract vast earnings while everybody else gets left behind. A cardiologist used to earn four times as much as a nurse; now it’s seven times as much.The liberal professional classes have become a quasi-aristocracy that reproduces itself by passing its advantages on to its own children.
Parents in the exclusive meritocracy raise their kids to be fit fighters within it. Markovits calculates how much affluent parents invest on their kids’ human capital, over and above what middle-class parents can afford to invest. He concludes that affluent parents invest $10 million more per child. The resulting highly honed, high-performing young people are amazing — and endure the stresses you’d expect. At the best law school in the country, Yale, 70 percent of the students say they experience mental health challenges.It's a closed system.
The elite meritocracy promotes talent, but from a limited, over-educated pool of students, typically from the liberal professional classes.
What Brooks does not mention is that the professional classes are really just highly paid super-technicians.
The result is a kind of clueless sterility, devoid of creativity and critical thought.
Here is the Amazon description from William Deresiewicz's 2015 "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life":
A groundbreaking manifesto about what our nation’s top schools should be—but aren’t—providing: “The ex-Yale professor effectively skewers elite colleges, their brainy but soulless students (those ‘sheep’), pushy parents, and admissions mayhem” (People).The poster child of the liberal upper-middle class professional caste might be Mark Zuckerberg, son of a dentist and a psychiatrist.
As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively and how to find a sense of purpose. Now he argues that elite colleges are turning out conformists without a compass.
Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to “practical” subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it.
“Excellent Sheep is likely to make…a lasting mark….He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America….Mr. Deresiewicz’s book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness” (The New York Times).
For all his bold talk -- "Move fast and break things" -- he is a technician, not a rebel.
For all his technical brilliance, Zuckerberg is devoid of critical thought and creativity -- perhaps less reflective than the average person.
Zuckerberg was once naively idealistic, but now all he has is a reactive combativeness and a determination to win.
At no point has he attained any wisdom.
Following the 2016 election, President Barack Obama gave Zuckerberg a long personal lecture about how Facebook is hurting and not helping American democracy.
Zuckerberg came away puzzled.
The sole life experience of affluent technicians from the professional class is a harsh technical education.
These people have assumed positions of leadership.
The leaders of old -- say, George Washington -- might have been less intelligent.
But the old elite was educated into the humanities at elite schools, and they did serves as officers in wartime, they did have life experience.
The Excellent Sheep are closed.
The are over-trained too narrowly and are inbred within the professional class.
Oddly, however, by being "hothouse flowers", their education is not truly rigorous.
They are admirably scholarly in their method and focus, but not erudite in their breadth.
Brooks contrast this closed elite with what he calls an "inclusive meritocracy".
Arizona State University, which is led by Michael Crow[,] defines itself not by how many people it can exclude but by how many it can include. The need for higher education is greater than ever, so A.S.U. has rapidly expanded to meet that need. Between 2013 and 2018, undergraduate enrollment rose by 45 percent. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of engineering students grew to 22,400 from about 6,400.
A.S.U. has done it by increasing its reach into those who are underserved. The number of first-generation students has more than quadrupled since 2002.
Everything is on a mass scale. A.S.U.’s honors college alone is bigger than Stanford’s entire undergraduate enrollment. It graduates more Jews than Brandeis and more Muslims than Jews.The system seems open enough.
But is it rigorous?
The quality has risen along with the size. Research expenditures double every six to eight years, and a number of academic departments are nationally recognized as among the best for the quality of their research.Despite all this research, the focus is pragmatic.
The atmosphere is much more democratic and accessible to all. Faculty members are treated less as scholars within rarefied disciplines and more as interdisciplinary intellectual entrepreneurs. The goal is immediate social impact as much as expanding knowledge, so, for example, A.S.U.’s Watts College of Public Service & Community Solutions is enmeshed with local residents to transform a Phoenix neighborhood.ASU might be inclusive.
But is ASU rigorous?
There was once a comment in the Chronicle of Higher Education as to the rigor of state universities.
The comment asserted that there are three types of higher educational institutions:
- Elite universities for the best and the brightest.
- Small college for those who want to teach and learn.
- State universities for those who need credentials for the job market.
It then said that when one visits the library at a state university on a Thursday evening, the place is vacant of patrons because "The drinking has commenced."
The research done at a state university might be rigorous, but the academic program is probably not at the level of a prestigious college or elite university.
To increase rigor at a state university, the rigor would have to be built in to the primary and secondary levels of public education.
For example, academic standards and funding of public elementary and high schools would be raised in order to create a "college ready" student body.
But then, in another strategy to improve rigor, students who are not academically inclined would be prepared for a non-college career track -- despite being given a high quality academic education in K-12.
That's probably not going to happen.
It might be added that inclusiveness must be an active process.
That is, inclusiveness is not just admitting large numbers of people into what is a self-selecting process dominated by the upper classes.
And insofar as inclusiveness is active, it has its own rigor and exclusiveness.
One example is giftedness.
Most students in gifted and talented programs are supposedly not really classic gifted students.
They might be better understood as the kind of very bright, high-achieving students who attend small prestigious liberal arts colleges, who are generally:
- from New England or the northeast in general,
- Asian or Jewish, at least in part, and/or
- the offspring of schoolteachers or professors.
Such underprivileged gifted students can be identified, but it does take some effort to do so.
Yet such efforts are usually not taken.
The exception might be sports, because coaches will approach tall, fast or large students and try to entice them into a program.
Would society dedicate resources to identifying gifted and potential high-achieving students hidden among the academically unremarkable student population?
More pointedly, would the upper-middle class, which values the education of their own offspring so highly, push for such a policy?
That is, would they want such a policy of active evaluation even if it created more competition for their own kids?
So far, they have not.
What about the working class?
They generally don't value things that have little practical purpose, and they don't want their kids to develop abnormally (which is what giftedness is).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindergarten_Teacher_(2018_film)
This is a tragedy of the commons because developing talent is a matter of national security.
This might shift the focus away from colleges and universities in terms of inclusive meritocracy.
That is, the real focus should be on cultivating all students at the elementary level, and later at middle school and high school.
The process now seems quite passive and unsophisticated.
But even if a more advanced form of evaluation were implemented, it seems inherently difficult and expensive.
Moreover, creativity in particular is difficult to identify.
Certainly, there does seem to be a need to find some sort of upward path for the working class.
In 2005, the New York Times published a series on social stratification in the USA entitled "Class Matters".
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/
https://www.amazon.com/Class-Matters-New-York-Times/dp/0805080554/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111595026421432611
The articles mention that in the 1950s, when C. Wright Mills wrote "The Power Elite", there was a barrier to entry to the tiny ruling class.
That barrier between the "power elite" of policy decision makers -- politicians, elite bureaucrats, corporate leaders -- has disappeared.
Today, most of the elite decision makers derive from the upper-middle professional classes.
However, a new barrier has appeared between the working class and the middle class -- something that did not exist in the 1950s.
Back in 2005, the intuitive solution to this unexpected development was to send the working class to college.
In retrospect, that is problematic.
The working class, even when they are academically prepared for college -- and even when they are gifted -- do not understand college, and cannot relate to it.
There is a tendency for them to amass student debt and then drop out.
College may be synonymous with opportunity for those who have ascended through the academic ranks, but for the working class, there is no such connotation.
In equating personal and social progress with higher education in such a narrow fashion, the system is ironically closed to the working class.
The system is neither really open nor is it rigorous.
