[HN Gopher] The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800
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The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-11-01 15:16 UTC (7 days ago)
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| muscomposter wrote:
| nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take
| care of our children
|
| but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional
| power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or
| something like that)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's individualism vs collectivism (if I got my terms right),
| with one side being "got mine, fuck you", whereas the other
| says that we're better together.
|
| Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and
| hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the
| working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy
| and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > the super and hyper-rich who live like kings,
|
| Including having lots of offsprings. Apparently, "not
| procreating to save the planet" is for the poor.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why does the opinion of any 'side' outweigh the opinions of
| any other 'side', beyond the ballot box?
|
| Seems more sensible to just assume they all negate each other
| out in the long run, unless proven otherwise by voting
| records.
| Retric wrote:
| Politics is tricky because non wealthy very much support
| the wealthy politically. Agree or disagree it's just
| reality in modern politics.
|
| As for why we shouldn't actually care abstractly there
| simply aren't that many ultra wealthy. Any subsidies given
| to them just cost an incredible amount relative to the
| number of people helped etc. They also don't directly
| matter in terms of broad metrics like human health,
| lifespan, happiness etc.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How does this relate to my comment? Did you intend to
| reply to the other comment?
| Retric wrote:
| You brought up politics in relation to different economic
| class.
|
| My point was how we treat ultra wealthy as a political
| issue is independent from the underlying reality. They
| aren't directly outvoting poor people to revive more
| benefits, it's instead a question of influence.
|
| Billionaires tend to see positive ROI from getting
| involved in politics, which is self reinforcing over
| time. But, stepping back you can judge such systems not
| in terms of current politics parties operate, but in the
| broader context of how efficient systems are. In that
| context the ROI is negative for society even if it can be
| positive for some individuals that comes at significant
| cost.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Huh? A 'side' doesn't imply an 'economic class'?
|
| Many millions of people can genuinely believe in
| something, be on a 'side', while being spread across the
| entire economic spectrum.
|
| At best it can be said to be an ideological
| differentiation, not an economic differentiation.
| Retric wrote:
| > A 'side' doesn't imply an 'economic class'?
|
| It does when the side described was the edges of a
| distribution.
|
| > wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super
| and hyper-rich
|
| Replace a few words and:
|
| > height distribution, on the one side we have the tall
| and hyper-tall
|
| PS: To be clear the political interests of a group exist
| even if the group doesn't map to a specified political
| party or ideology. Groups have specific interests
| independent of which other stances they take. We don't
| think of short people in political terms, but there would
| be a real outrage if gas stations put their credit card
| readers 7 feet off the ground.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| HN users can write anything they want, but that doesn't
| automatically imply what they wrote is credible or must
| be assumed to be true for all subsequent replies...
|
| Hence why I wrote 'side' in quotation marks, because I
| didn't fully agree with the original parent comment's
| characterization.
|
| e.g. HN user 1 can say X part of the population is on the
| 'side' of the moon being made of blue cheese and Y part
| is on the 'side' of the moon being made of cheddar
| cheese. But future replies by HN user 2 and user 3 are
| free to treat that as all meaningless gibberish.
| Retric wrote:
| If you disagree with what someone posted then add a
| counter argument don't just pretend it didn't exist.
|
| It avoids this kind of pointless replies.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I read this comment a few minutes after it was posted and
| checked just now and you completely changed this comment
| to something else... I'm not going to engage with someone
| who does that without even putting an Edit: tag.
|
| So yes please do not reply...
| arethuza wrote:
| There were different kinds of kings though - before a certain
| point in the history of most countries kings had to actively
| fight and wage war to achieve and maintain their positions.
| Over time this became more of a position where the king would
| deserve their positions simply by having ancestors who were
| "stupendous badasses" but otherwise actually had to _do_ very
| little.
| organsnyder wrote:
| > otherwise actually had to _do_ very little
|
| The risk of being overthrown was always there. They had to
| maintain their power through some combination of force,
| propaganda, and actual good rulership.
| Maken wrote:
| Early medieval kings - like those of the Franks, the
| Visigoths or the Nordic people - were more often than not
| _elected_ for life.
|
| Arguably the distinction between royalty, nobility and
| commonfolk grew larger the longer the feudal system was in
| place, to the point where kings inherited entire countries
| by birthright at the end of the XVIII century.
| mountainb wrote:
| In practice, even later English kings were effectively
| elected and could have their terms ended early. Taking a
| few Plantagenet examples, the nobles imprisoned Edward II
| as retaliation for the plots of Hugh Despenser, and then
| the king died mysteriously (adverb used ironically).
| Edward III was far more popular with the nobles due to
| his many victories in Scotland and France. His successor,
| Richard II, tried to make a lasting peace with France,
| but that was much less popular with the most powerful
| burghers and nobles. So Richard II was deposed,
| imprisoned, and died mysteriously. No doubt if they had
| security cameras in those days, they would have
| mysteriously ceased functioning at some critical moment.
| So ended the Plantagenets and began the line of
| Lancastrian kings.
|
| I would push back slightly and say that this trend is
| more even and there is less disruption to it than
| sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution
| of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th
| century is often presented as a sharp break with
| tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings
| usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined
| with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like
| business as usual.
| arethuza wrote:
| It probably didn't help Edward II that he had Robert the
| Bruce in Scotland to fight who was most certainly an
| actual stupendous badass but even he was employed on
| condition that:
|
| _" if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to
| make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or
| the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive
| him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights
| and ours, and make some other man who was well able to
| defend us as our King"_
| michaelt wrote:
| To me, nepotism is a classic principal-agent problem.
|
| Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it.
|
| If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the
| best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid
| internships? Not nepotism.
|
| If _you_ , the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six
| figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money.
|
| But if _I_ want my dumb kid paid six figures of _your_ money?
| So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to
| look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you 're
| not going to like me ripping you off.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Yes, plus sometimes the "owner" is a group of people. Then it
| gets more difficult for them to coordinate against the agent.
|
| If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong
| incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a
| treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them
| will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
| lthornberry wrote:
| It also creates conflict of interest problems among the
| owners. How do you ensure that only your share of the
| business profit is getting siphoned off to support your
| kid? Does each owner get one fail-son slot?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Nepotism is mostly a scaling problem. If you have a decent
| family and aren't an idiot about it - then for smaller stakes,
| and over shorter time-spans, nepotism usually works extremely
| well. And there is precious little damage to society, if Chuck
| hires his son Sam to drive one of his Chilly Chuck's Ice Cream
| Trucks for the summer.
|
| But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil.
| The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent -
| not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the
| chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level
| physicist is pretty damn low.
|
| [Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course,
| is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble
| blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to
| replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to
| take care of our children
|
| Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing
| in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on
| family lines, and "it takes a village" was a _literal_
| statement.
|
| Humans have an instinct to take care of _babies_ , not just our
| own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of
| that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet
| will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people.
|
| This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct
| genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a
| scientific one.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| In the age of unlimited free flow of information, it is quite
| ridiculous that academic institutions still exist - unless their
| purpose is something else than studies. Education as privilege
| laundering has pretty much played out its part, since degrees are
| much more accessible to the lower born classes who were never
| supposed to have access to the same easy and well paying careers
| as the rich.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Their purpose is also research. For many, that's their
| _primary_ purpose.
| organsnyder wrote:
| While vocational training is vital, a good education is so much
| more than that.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Try setting an toddler in front of an iPad and see how well the
| toddler learns how to read academic papers and the limitations
| of unlimited free flow of information would become quite
| evident.* While there have always been autodidacts, education
| is still a needed role to delegate for most, especially those
| who aren't privileged to have parents who already possess both
| an education and the time to personally propagate it.
|
| *(Actually you probably shouldn't.)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're trying your darnedest to not understand what I'm
| saying. Maybe you learned that in academia?
|
| You can instantly distribute any academic books and papers
| online and you can live broadcast lectures, even have two way
| communication between lecturer and student in text, voice or
| video, no matter where they are on the globe.
|
| So the idea is outdated that you should have to invest this
| amount of money or these many years of your youth and be in a
| specific place for a degree. It has been mostly an excuse for
| the rich to hire the children of other rich people for well
| paying jobs. "Oh, you don't have a degree. Sorry, we can't
| consider you". Now that everybody is getting degrees, that
| excuse doesn't work anymore.
| lthornberry wrote:
| Eh, I teach in a university and that experience makes me
| extremely skeptical of most high-school graduates' ability
| to get an education from online resources. If you can do
| that, great, it's certainly a much cheaper and convenient
| route. I don't think we should discriminate against people
| who got their education that way. But most people need more
| structure and expert guidance.
| netcan wrote:
| " _examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus
| nepotism to occupational persistence._ "
|
| Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its
| conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works.
| They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated
| measure of nepotism.
|
| I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood.
|
| Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between
| occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.
| dash2 wrote:
| In particular (from a very quick glance!) it looks like they
| distinguish between nepotism and inherited human capital only
| by using a particular model. They have data on father-son pairs
| and the correlation between them in terms of publication
| record; and data on total number of publications of (a)
| academics' sons and (b) outsiders. They impose a model with
| just nepotism and inherited human capital and fit it to the
| data. I'd worry there might be other explanations for the
| observed patterns.
| dash2 wrote:
| Here's an interesting extract:
|
| > We find evidence of nepotism for 5-6.6% of scholars' sons in
| Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies.
| Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human
| capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain
| the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after
| the Reformation.
|
| This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed
| Protestantism was associated with scientific progress:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708
| red016 wrote:
| i'd be more interested in jewish numbers than protestant or
| catholic
| wazoox wrote:
| Judaism like Protestantism promotes education and reading for
| all. Plus Judaism promotes some form of debate.
| bn-l wrote:
| Jews are the most clannish people I have ever met and the
| most prone to shameless nepotism (speaking as Jew).
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Agree. Hollywood and Wallstreet are great examples. Also
| the founders of Google and Facebook. It's no coincidence.
| Though I'm not sure this is nepotism as much as it is
| organized clan behavior.
|
| I think Indians are even more so but there it's about
| caste and not just being Indian.
|
| Humans are weird.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I can't speak for all South Asian Americans, but in my
| experience caste is not a significant player in our
| community in the US at least.
|
| Alternatives like University Affiliation, Regional ties,
| Ethnic ties, Clan ties, and Workplace affiliation play a
| greater role due to the nature of South Asian immigration
| in the US (tends to be white collar professionals across
| all ethnic groups).
|
| Treating South Asian Americans homogeneously will lead to
| the same mistakes like treating all Latinos homogeneously
| - plenty of South Asian heavy battleground counties like
| Loudoun County, Middlesex County, Williamson County, Kern
| County, San Joaquin County, etc have seen Ds margins drop
| significantly in the current election.
|
| That said, we are a clannish bunch, and biradari (and
| every other South Asian language's equivalent of that
| word) is our guanxi.
| yapyap wrote:
| sure... only because you haven't experienced the inner
| circles of other religions (speaking as another relgion
| than Jewish)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Lol I guess you haven't met Mormons?
| dash2 wrote:
| I'm not sure how the above relates to the argument.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| What does that have to do with nepotism?
| chownie wrote:
| Jewish communities are more tightly knit, and the families
| in these communities more interwoven with one another than
| the average Protestant would be to their own.
|
| My intuition would be that nepotism would be more rife with
| this kind of community makeup, if you know your distant
| family and your family friends very well they're much more
| likely to try to help you out.
| stonesthrowaway wrote:
| > Judaism like Protestantism
|
| Judaism is nothing like protestantism or even catholicism.
| If it were, we wouldn't have protestantism or catholicism.
| Judaism ( by that I mean real judaism ) is racial/ethnic
| and centered around bloodlines while protestantism is
| universal.
|
| > promotes education and reading for all.
|
| No. Judaism promotes the study of torah/tanakh and even
| that is only within their own people. Judaism most
| certainly does not promote education in the general sense
| and not to the general public. That modern jews in the west
| pursue education is not due to judaism but to european
| culture.
|
| > Plus Judaism promotes some form of debate.
|
| In a superficial manner. Like how protestants and catholics
| debate. Certainly not in the socratic way of the greeks.
|
| Judaism didn't go around the world spreading literacy like
| Catholicism and especially Protestantism did. After all the
| jewish god is only for the jews while the christian god is
| for all humanity.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| > In a superficial manner. Like how protestants and
| catholics debate. Certainly not in the socratic way of
| the greeks.
|
| Isn't it basically a meme now that when you ask a rabbi a
| question you get a question in return? I think that's a
| cultural difference.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Judaism isn't immune to anti-intellectual fundamentalism.
|
| A good example is the 11th Century Mediterranean world.
|
| In the Muslim sphere of influence, Jewish culture was
| highly intellectual, and produced numerous scholars.
|
| In the Christian sphere of influence, Jewish culture was
| highly fundamentalist, and produced almost no native Jewish
| scholars.
|
| Heck, modern day Israel or New York offers almost the same
| contrast, as did the first century Middle East.
|
| Judaisms tendency to split into these two camps, usually
| simultaneously, is one of its many fascinating features.
| Hilift wrote:
| "Protestants also tried to impose their own bigotry but lacked
| sufficient coordination and authority. Had they been more
| effective, modern science and sustained economic growth might
| have never taken off."
|
| That's an interesting take. It seems to have a continental
| Europe perspective. In the first 150 years of the American
| colonies, Catholicism was illegal, except for Pennsylvania.
| However, even there, Catholics remained disenfranchised. The
| first Catholic university in the US, Georgetown, opened in
| 1789. (Harvard: 1636, Yale: 1701). The first amendment was
| ratified in 1791 (meaning Catholicism could no longer be made
| illegal). Catholics were mostly unwelcome to attend other
| schools, that was the reason for divergence and almost
| certainly assured a high nepotism rate. Also note that in the
| 1700's/1800's nepotism in government was considered normal.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >Also note that in the 1700's/1800's nepotism in government
| was considered normal.
|
| I think this is still common. People like to think a son or
| daughter will govern just like a parent. But it sometimes
| doesn't work that way.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress
|
| I've always blamed this on there not being an "orthodox"
| Protestantism. Since every protestant preacher is a different
| religion, it enabled atheists to work freely (as unspecified
| mystery protestants.)
| paganel wrote:
| > the gap in science that emerged during the Counter-Reformation
| was enormous, lasted centuries
|
| Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job
| about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead
| towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way
| above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way
| above the Brits, that's for sure.
|
| If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy
| and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose
| that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought
| starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly
| economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself.
| Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country,
| had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia
| [1]:
|
| > He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a
| teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably
| with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently
| bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop
| of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of
| Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand
| still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run
| round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno
| had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading
| Bruno to return to the continent.
|
| Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a
| Catholic canon.
|
| So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
|
| Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most
| respected economists in the history of the dismal science were
| actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only
| words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written
| about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to
| explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of
| their times in many domains of economics.
| _glass wrote:
| Germany anyway is a special case, because at this time it was
| quite heterodox. And even in protestant countries like Prussia,
| you could have a positive effect from Catholic countries
| surrounding like Poland. Also the quoted articles don't really
| support the position.
| hammock wrote:
| >"human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to
| children"
|
| That doesn't sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad?
|
| Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and
| giving them great opportunities, and "nepotism" where people are
| put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
|
| It seems like the system of "nepotism" the paper describes is not
| bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes
| that when passing occupation from father to son would be
| inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less
| watwut wrote:
| The article is not about toddlers. It is about adult children.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You're missing the point.
|
| Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually
| giving them or helping them (within the bounds of what's
| acceptable and ethical) get a job they're qualified for is
| good. This is basically how every mutli generational family
| business works.
|
| Giving an unqualified kid a no-show job or a real job they
| f-up is nepotism and bad.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and
| eventually giving them or helping them [...] get a job
| they're qualified for is good.
|
| Indeed. If some people are claiming that somehow giving
| your own child, uh, what shall I say, priority (?) and your
| full attention, teaching them skills and transmitting
| wisdom, and getting them opportunities is somehow bad, then
| sorry, but that's shockingly stupid, evil, and
| misanthropic. Doing these things basically describes what
| is more or less a core duty of parenthood. A parent has the
| _obligation_ to prioritize his own children. The idea that
| such generational advantage is nepotism screams of envy.
| Inequality of opportunity is not unfair or wrong. Indeed,
| one of the purposes of meritocracy is to become better off
| so that you can give your own kids a better start than you
| had. It 's wonderful to be able to give your kids
| opportunities that you have access to.
|
| I think people are failing to distinguish two things,
| namely, prioritizing your own kin on the one hand, and on
| the other, prioritizing kinship favors at the gross expense
| of the common good. (At least that's the most charitable
| interpretation. The less charitable one is that the have-
| nots are just envious and feel entitled. There is no point
| in discussing anything with such twisted people.)
|
| If a baker wants to hire his son, that's perfectly fine and
| completely his business. He doesn't have to open up the
| pool to check off some ridiculous meritocracy checkbox.
| It's his bakery. Of course, if he puts his son in a
| position of authority that he is grossly unsuited for,
| well, then he imperils his own business. Oh, well.
|
| In a larger organization that's private, there is nothing
| wrong with hiring your own kid, either. Putting him in a
| position that he is completely unsuited for threatens the
| company, of course, and in that sense is simply stupid. It
| can also be argued that the company is harming the common
| good of the company. Private ownership doesn't mean you
| don't have certain moral obligations toward your employees.
| Good leadership is one such obligation, and putting an
| incompetent child in a position that harms the company is a
| failure of leadership.
| swatcoder wrote:
| We currently live in a society that valorizes meritocracy and
| equal opportunity _and also_ providing for one 's descendants.
| It supposes that you're you should have equal opportunity to
| enjoy a middle class or greater lifestyle if you're not a total
| mess, _and that_ your success is something you can provide to
| your children as a leg up.
|
| Not every society struggles/struggled so poignantly with the
| contradiction between those things as we now do, but we do, and
| that's where the modern criticism of nepotism originates.
|
| Teaching your children your trade by inviting them into your
| workshop or boardroom is sensible, but it inevitably means that
| there's less room in that workshop or boardroom for the
| scrappy, bright outsider whose supposed to have a fair chance.
|
| There's not really one right answer under that kind of tension,
| so there's no surprise when criticism is levied in either
| direction.
| adamc wrote:
| Well... the "right answer" is going to be subjective. But I
| think parents providing for their children is going to win
| out 1000 times out of 1000. It's got human psychology and
| biology behind it.
|
| If doing what is "right" means I have to hamstring my kid's
| chances, then I'm going to pass on "right" (or, more likely,
| re-orient my thinking to make it not "right") and help my
| kid.
| staunton wrote:
| You seem to be claiming that nepotism is good and that it
| is prevalent in all societies. Surely I misunderstood?
|
| Most societies _do_ demand that workers for important roles
| be selected on merit or based on other criteria known to
| all participants, and not based on some individual 's wish
| to care for their family or friends.
|
| This is without anyone thinking of such a wish as
| illegitimate. However , _acting_ on it is still nepotism
| and societies impose this prohibition on its members
| because it benefits all. In this sense, "parents providing
| for their children" is "losing out" in certain important
| domains all around the world.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > Most societies do demand that workers for important
| roles be selected on merit or based on other criteria
| known to all participants
|
| Most societies become pretty practical after a while, and
| strive for people to be _reliable_ and _adequate_ for the
| roles they 're appointed to play and celebrate the
| occasional master of some craft or pursuit. Being groomed
| for an opportunity from childhood, under the attention of
| one's family, often delivers on those and so a lot of
| societies don't worry about it except when it's obvious
| that somebody completely incompetent has ended up
| responsible for some influential or essential role.
|
| It's actually a very peculiar modern experiment to expect
| every role to somehow be filled by the most capable
| person and for every person to be appointed a role that
| they're personally passionate about. Maybe it'll give us
| some amazing Star Trek utopia someday, but you don't see
| that idea expressed very much in history and so we don't
| really have reason to know what will happen if we try to
| make it so.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Given the age of this piece, where it was common to
| determine your kids' spouses well before they can
| conceptualize what marriange is, I can see nepotism being
| farther down the list of great immoral acts.
|
| But yes, I would argue nepotism is prevalent in nearly
| all societies.
| michaelt wrote:
| It's pretty easy to give your kid loads of advantages
| _without_ engaging in nepotism. The definition of nepotism
| is actually very narrow!
|
| You can teach them your trade. You can show them that
| education is important, modelling and rewarding behaviours
| like reading. You can make sure you've got time to be there
| for them. You can introduce them to your friends in other
| lines of work. You can check their homework and help them
| when they struggle, within reason. You can make sure they
| never need a part-time job to get by while in school. You
| can get them tutors whenever they're having trouble. You
| can get them extra tuition outside school. You can pay for
| them to go to a great college. You can cover their living
| expenses when they're working an unpaid internship. You can
| invest in their startup. You can assure you that even if
| their startup crashes and burns, you'll make sure they
| always have a roof over their head and food in their belly.
| You can buy them a house, pay their bills, gift them
| millions of dollars.
|
| And you can hire them to work for you - as long as you make
| a point to clearly not favour them in the workplace, by
| insisting they work hard every day, don't use your name,
| and that they start at the bottom and work their way up on
| their own merits.
|
| And you can overlap these things! In your role as CEO give
| them an unpaid internship in the mailroom of your company,
| and in your role as a parent give them a $10,000/month
| allowance? Technically not nepotism.
|
| The _only_ things you can 't do is give them undeserved
| promotions, or hire them directly into a senior job.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| And it doesn't need to be the mail room (though that's
| not a bad thing to have exposure to, perhaps, but
| circumstances will determine what's appropriate). The
| most important thing is not to put them in a position
| that harms[0] the company and that they're not (at least
| not yet) qualified for. This is not only bad for the
| company, but for the child, as they are not put a
| position that allows them to grow, but one in which they
| can't help but fail in. So it's a failure of parenting.
|
| [0] "Harm" doesn't need to be catastrophic. Misuse of
| company funds is a kind of theft, and paying someone a
| salary who is basically on perpetual holiday is unjust,
| for example.
| novakboskov wrote:
| Nah, we can't. We can't redefine words to make us feel better.
|
| According to Cambridge Dictionary, nepotism is "the act of
| using your power or influence to get good jobs or unfair
| advantages for members of your own family." As soon as you
| favored your kid, it's nepotism, and it's bad. It undermines
| meritocracy and contributes to an unjust society. It's pretty
| straightforward to understand.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Define unfair.
| octopoc wrote:
| If there is someone better suited that could have had the
| position, then it's unfair.
| chongli wrote:
| Doesn't that just reward the children of families who can
| pay for private tutoring and other resources that give
| them an advantage over the competition?
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| If you just keep reading, a couple sentences later they say
| "It undermines meritocracy" which makes it pretty clear
| what "unfair" means in the context of that comment.
| chongli wrote:
| Right, but that definition is so incredibly broad as to
| include any and all ways you might provide for your children.
| If you're wealthy and you use your money to buy more
| expensive, healthier food for your kids then that could be
| argued to be "using your power or influence to get an unfair
| advantage for members of your own family" since many other
| families can't afford that better food.
|
| More broadly, the issue of "unfair advantages" and the
| demonization of those who have them is explored rather
| poignantly in the short story _Harrison Bergeron_ by Kurt
| Vonnegut [1]. The story takes place in a dystopian future
| where beautiful people are forced to wear masks to make their
| faces look ugly, those with beautiful voices have to use
| devices to make their voices sound awful, and anyone with
| above-average intelligence has to wear a radio headset which
| constantly plays annoying and distracting noises to prevent
| them from thinking too deeply. The title character is forced
| to endure multiple of these "handicaps", including heavy
| weights to slow him down and tire him out so that he cannot
| make use of his athletic gifts.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| We do it all the time. Let's see what was added to cambridge
| this past month:
|
| - fridgescaping
|
| - Fanum tax
|
| - Quit-Tok
|
| - runglasses
|
| - boomerocracy
|
| - appification
|
| And that does include adding definitions to existing words.
| "Literally" can also be defined by its antonym.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| No, we can't, because it rarely ever works out that way.
|
| I've yet to work at a family owned company where the children
| were anywhere near as competent as their parents, and I've
| worked at multigenerational companies, so imagine that.
|
| The one I spent the most time with was a publisher whose
| founders were Tulane educated intellectuals who walked the walk
| and talked the talk. The next generation sounded like they fell
| off an alligator tour air boat with the intellect to match.
| Their children are the dumbest group of human beings I've ever
| seen graduate from high school. Utterly and completely useless
| for anything other than getting hammered on the weekends and
| keeping random desk chairs from rolling away. Yet they were
| guaranteed jobs, even as the company's numbers continued to
| dwindle and they continued to use far more resources than they
| contributed. No Christmas bonus? That's because they needed to
| pay these morons enough to live in the same neighborhood as
| their father, meaning that they needed to make about 80% more
| than anyone else in their roles.
|
| Ownership is not leadership. Leadership takes a set of skills
| that many people don't possess, and it's less common with the
| children of the well-off.
| hammock wrote:
| That is likely to be true if we take a limited firm-centric
| view (the local shop will never be the best it can be if the
| next guy has to be the first son of the last guy). But having
| a multigenerational shop and shopkeeper, or farms and
| farmers, may be better for the larger community than a
| Walmart headquartered in another country or a commercial farm
| that couldn't give two shits about the locals.
|
| Not saying it is better, but in some cases it probably is.
| Certainly could be in some cases
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids
| and giving them great opportunities, and "nepotism" where
| people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?_
|
| That difference is only on paper, purely academical. In
| reality, almost all the time, this quickly morphs into pushing
| your kin into positions of power where they make a mess but you
| still tolerate them because supposedly they are at least
| somewhat predictable and you don't want to invest the time and
| effort to build trust with a stranger.
|
| (Or whatever their actual motivation is -- to me it remains
| mostly a mystery.)
| netcan wrote:
| Honestly, I think "nepotism" and "occupational persistence" are
| more about how we feel or judge the phenomenon, and what are
| prior expectations are.
|
| If sons and nephews are bad managers and a business suffers...
| that's nepotism. If they're good managers and the business
| succeeds, that's a family business. if the local authorities
| hire family... that's nepotism, because we have an expectation
| that it should be done differently.
|
| A lot of words are like this. Positive and negative words with
| positive or negative associations that we use to describe the
| same thing... depending on the association we want to
| emphasize.
|
| But once homo retcom has words... we think in those words. So,
| we think of nepotism (for example) as this distinct thing, and
| expect this nuanced definition to account for the negative or
| positive aspects.
|
| This paper is basically a formalization of that process.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I think it's fine in a true "family business" e.g. you wholly
| own a hardware store or a restaurant and you have your family
| working there and eventually you hand it off to your children
| (assuming they want it).
|
| In large public companies or institutions that have
| shareholders or state owners then it's unfair for an executive
| or senior administrator to carve out a job for a family member.
| He's giving them something he doesn't own, unlike in the family
| business example.
| fooker wrote:
| What fraction of ownership would make it okay?
|
| 100% ? 50% ? Something in the middle?
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| 50% + 1 share.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Shareholders can put pressure on the board to fire the
| exrcutive. If they don't, that means they're fine with the
| situation.
| axus wrote:
| As a shareholder in many companies, I cannot put pressure
| on a board, and I'm mostly unaware of how they are
| internally managed.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Shareholders are basically fine with fraud as long a they
| benefit in the end .
| vivekd wrote:
| [delayed]
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