Are Elites Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking? Evidence From Mba Students

Psychology looks like particle physics compared to fields like dentistry, and not a lot different from a lot of biomedical fields.

Psychology is just the messenger — meta-science goes under the radar but it's probably its biggest contribution to science at large.

I agree about replication in any case (not just psychological studies), but I have to say this seems like it probably would. If anything I think it underrepresents the phenomenon it studies because support for corruption and unethical behavior is likely to be underestimated in this kind of setting/design.

Yes, everyone looks after their own interests, but some more than others, like in this example the students above: > implement substantially more unequal earnings distributions than the average American

The group that maximizes their long-term reproduction is the one that inherits the earth.

My wife works for a very large company that you've heard of. Everyone is assigned a pay band that corresponds to their title. Everyone can go on to the portal and see approximately how much someone else earns (within a narrow range) based on their level and geographical location.

It hasn't brought compensation up. If anything, it has kept it down. My wife was objectively underpaid for a while and on the verge of leaving, but HR wouldn't allow higher pay because it didn't fit the band. They pointed to her peers and showed that they were earning the same amount. Eventually she did an end-run around it by transferring divisions and getting promoted to another level, but it would have been so much easier for everyone if her boss could have just given her a raise even though it violated the pay band.

I have friends who work for the local government including the state run university. There is a website where anyone can go search for their name and see exactly how much they were paid per year, down to the penny. Having browsed the website I can say it has not resulted in higher compensation, as they're all paid surprisingly little.

1. There are skillsets/capabilities that the organization finds difficult to get on the market, as well as brings disproportionate profits to the organization. For example, a database company may need to hire two software engineers, one writing CRUD apps or infrastructure automation, and the other one for distributed systems implementation. In such a setting, while both people's titles may say "software engineer", the reality is that one is paid much higher than the other, both because the database is the bread and butter for that company, while the CRUD/infrastructure thing may be a very small part used by an internal team or by a few customers.

2. People usually like to believe that they're at least better than average and bring the same level of contributions to the team. This is most definitely not the case, and an engineering manager, VP, sales manager who simply appears to talk to people all day long may actually have important contributions such as overseeing key projects, talking to customers etc. which may be the thing that the company needs to lock that large sale or prevent customer attrition, or whatever the case may be.

People will often jump to favoritism or bias or another explanation, and in some cases, they absolutely do happen. But that is not the only explanation, and without data to distinguish between the two, people will gravitate towards the uncharitable interpretation, which allows them to paint themselves in the most positive light.

Confidentiality only helps those in power to suppress compensation.

The other issue is that the majority of people think they generate more value than they actually do. This is the "almost everyone believes they are above average" phenomenon that consistently shows up across a diverse range of domains. People are usually happier when such beliefs are not publicly challenged on a regular basis.

This is not a statement about competence, but about inflated ego.

Milton Hershey is known for his candy company. Somewhat less known is the fact that his successful candy company was his fourth; his three previous bankrupted (mostly due to fluctuations in prices moving candy from tenable to untenable as a business) and he'd burned through so much of the family fortune pursuing them that his relatives cut him off from further loans. His father before him had liquidated his own piece of the family fortune speculating on opportunities. It could easily have been the case that those speculations might have paid off, which would have made Hershey the son elite category 1 (in status); similarly, if Hershey hadn't found one last source of investment money from a former employee, his candy-making aspirations would have ended when the family cut him off and we wouldn't know his story at all.

The system of stories we tell ourselves highlights the merit and downplays the luck; we don't remember the failure cases, including, often, the failures that predated the success. A lot of people who lacked support, didn't know there was a system to be leveraged, and grinded as far as they could before something critical broke are out there; they just don't get to give TED talks on what complete failure tastes like. Nobody gets to hear the lecture from Henry Hershey on "I mortgaged my family's future on opportunities that, had they paid off, would have made my son and wife wealthy and comfortable for the rest of their days... But none of them paid off and it was all ultimately objectively wasted effort, energy that would have been better spent tending a modest homestead and making it thrive in a small but sustainable way."

Or use the accurate term: elitists

The people popularly referred to as “elites” are in practice status seekers who adhere to elitism, the belief that certain people are superior to others. Using the word “elites” without quotes is really creepy

That is to say, if I'm expected to be a hard worker, I will work harder than if I'm expected to be a lazy sloth. If I'm expected to behave kindly, I will indeed behave kinder than if I'm called "that scoundrel" all my childhood. If people think I must be "a genius like my father/mother" I will picture myself one and study harder. And so on. Not just because I want to deceive or am afraid to disapoint, but also because personalities are made up of such expectations, coming from us or others, and who we want to be, even unconsciously, influence who we end up being.

I agree that 22% redistribution seems about fair, but I'm biased by a lifetime of rates of taxation.

Something I'm very curious about is what should we be trying to optimize for (economic growth, sense of well-being, energy output, raising the economic floor, etc.?) and then what gini coefficient optimally produces that outcome.

I understand it's outside the scope of this study, but my bias is my curiosity for what should we be aiming at and what principles will optimally produce the result, so then at least we know in theory what we should be trying to do.