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Rory Hester's avatar

What we really need to do is just put a social stigma on hiring Harvard or Ivy League graduates.

I also think that Matt might focus a little too much on income, I suspect being a graduating or attending an Ivy League also increases the odds of getting an influential job.

For instance, I have a brother-in-law that runs a construction company that clears over seven figures, but he is not nearly as influential as say Matt is.

Matt has hired two awesome interns, but for whatever reason both of them have come from well to do families and attended Ivy League schools. I have to imagine that writing for Slow boring will give them a boost up if they decide to go into politics or public policy or writing. However, I also have to wonder if there are not more talented riders out there that didn’t attend Ivy League schools, that just didn’t have the connections to get the job.

No, I am not coming at Maya or Milan, they are hard driven talented young adults. Just pointing out how the world works.

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David Abbott's avatar

Hierarchy is sustained by three powerful forms of inheritance-- genetic, cultural and financial. The combined force of inheritance+ is so powerful that policy tweaks will do little to curb it. Even communist regimes have disproportionate numbers of brahmins in charge-- Lenin was the son of an aristocrat, Ho the son of a senior civil servant, Che of a doctor and Castro of a haciendado. Even Mao was the son is a self made kulak. The only way to seriously curb privilege would be to stunt or ostracize those from good families, and, even if politically possible, it would give us a far less capable professional class.

The focus should be on providing good lives for people in the bottom half of the status distribution, not on obsessing about who gets into the 1% versus merely the 3%.

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