Danny Crichton

I just finished reading Lauren Rivera's Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, and I have to say it was a highly interesting read into the internal dynamics of hiring at what she calls elite professional services (EPS) firms like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.

Her argument is simple: while sociologists have heavily focused on elite reproduction through universities (what might be termed the "Harvard" thesis), the reality is actually more complicated. Getting admission to a top school is insufficient to guarantee entrance to the elite. Rather, elites are generated partly as part of the process of entering the labor markets, namely through EPS firms.

Much of the book is devoted to her fieldwork working at one of these firms and describing each of the stages of the interview process for new graduates. We see constantly that definitions of cultural fit are key to getting hired, and that these definitions tend to be similar (although not identical) to the culture of elites. In other words, firms hire elite students from elite backgrounds not because of their parentage, but because of the social norms and cultural capital those parents provided. In this mission of illuminating inequality at the upper-end of the income spectrum, the book does an admirable job.

However, I felt the book did not probe deep enough into why these firms hire the way they do. Rivera makes the point that almost none of the EPS firms actually keep track of their applicant data and connect it with actual on-the-job work outcomes, particularly at law firms where interviews were entirely unstructured. How do they get away with this? Having written about one startup in this space, why have competitors been unable to disrupt this industry (at least so far)?

The answer is sort of lurking in the book:

I am starting a new monthly post where I share what I have been working on what I am hoping to work on shortly. This is the first edition. If you see something you think is interesting, don't hesitate to email me.

Research

• I posted a copy of a working paper I did as a term paper for Economics of Science. The paper looks at the Pentagon's research budget over the past twenty years, and how it has moved money between basic and applied science. One really interesting facet of the budget data is just how large of an impact presidential initiatives have on this budget (one example: the Bush missile shield). This was sort of a side project, but I think the data is interesting, and there are lots of opportunities for follow ups if anyone is interested.

• I am doing a historical study of the rise of public policy schools and their curriculums. One example of this research is a post I wrote two weeks ago about how economics became the center of public policy due to its perceived legitimacy within Harvard. I am really interested in epistemology in public policy, and why we continue to use a narrow set of tools rather than a richer one.

• My larger research project looks at the creation, dissemination, and growth of rankings and other ordinal measures of performance. As quantification becomes increasingly popular in everything from business to politics, I believe there needs to be increasing skepticism and critical analysis of precisely how these measures get created and used. This is part of a long discourse on power and knowledge. One great new book on this is The Quiet Power of Indicators which discusses how indicators like Freedom House's came into being and how they are used today.

• A smaller

ProPublica's report on the Red Cross' horrific mismanagement of aid dollars in Haiti should not be surprising to anyone who has followed development studies over the past two decades (and really, the antecedents go much further back).

The quotes though don't get much worse than this:

One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.

And

None of that ever happened. Carline Noailles, who was the project’s manager in Washington, said it was endlessly delayed because the Red Cross “didn’t have the know-how.”

And

“They collected nearly half a billion dollars,” said a congressional staffer who helped oversee Haiti reconstruction. “But they had a problem. And the problem was that they had absolutely no expertise.”

And

“Going to meetings with the community when you don’t speak the language is not productive,” she said. Sometimes, she recalled, expat staffers would skip such meetings altogether.

Ad nauseum.

This is exactly the sort of situation that we can expect when development studies ignores the importance of actual situational knowledge of the land in which an aid organization operates. Yet, academic programs focused on development eschew area studies in favor of economics, since these are "practical" skills that are supposedly "universal."

Economics is actually the easy part of developing a country. It's obvious (in most cases) what the problems are: chronic lack of housing, chronic malnourishment, bad sanitation, poor infrastructure, and the list goes on. The hard part is going from objectives to actual actions on the ground where culture and local dynamics will play the decisive role in the success or failure of the mission.

The world needs far more people who are attuned to the local

There are increasing criticisms of the public policy field from both the right and the left. The left criticizes public policy schools for inadequately addressing issues like inequality (Thomas Piketty's work comes to mind) or justice in places such as Baltimore or Ferguson. The right is concerned that public policy schools emphasize solutions led by governments rather than a more balanced mix of public and private options.

Both sides are correct: public policy schools aren't equipping their students for the modern world. Part of the challenge is that public policy schools are remarkably narrow in their disciplines. Professors in public policy schools come predominantly from economics, which means that normative questions are avoided and there is a large emphasis on model building at the expense of, well, actual policy.

I have been curious how we ended up with this situation, so I spent some time this summer dredging up the history of the field.

Before I get to some findings though, a brief aside. I really love how academic knowledge becomes legitimate in the eyes of other scholars. My undergraduate thesis was on the intellectual development of computer science, and one of the main results that came from that research is that the first CS professors in the 1960s were under constant attack from other disciplines in the natural sciences. This led them to (eventually) focus on the algorithm as the key area of research in the field, in order to prove the discipline's legitimacy inside the university.

These wars were so bad, that Stanford's CS department, for instance, didn't create an undergraduate major in the field for almost two decades, lest the department be considered less worthy by other academics. The substitute major during that period was actually Mathematical and Computational Sciences -- my major in college.

So I

The NYT recently ran a great long-form story on the plight of nail salon workers (Part 1 and Part 2] The main gist of the story is that nail salons, facing incredible competition in recent years, have decreased pay for workers far below any semblance of a minimum wage. Oftentimes, workers don't get paid at all for their first few months of service until they have "proven" themselves to their owners.

One aspect of this story really annoys me, and that is the issue surrounding tips. Nail salons, like many other personal care industries, rely on a tipping culture that systematically underpays workers, complicates regulations, and encourages discrimination. Tipping should be phased out immediately throughout the United States.

Under our current labor regulations, employers in establishments with tipping are required to pay a base wage that is below minimum wage, with the idea that tips will fill in the gap. When wages plus tips fall below minimum wage, owners are supposed to make up the difference to guarantee that workers are paid appropriately.

Of course, this is where the complications in the regulations start, because calculating tips and minimum wages in order to follow the law is not at all clear in these contexts, particularly in personal care establishments with notoriously poor record keeping.

I focus on simplifying labor rules since this can have benefits both for employees (who can understand their rights better) as well as employers (easier accounting and more clarity over who is owed what). Tipping and the legal complications around it is just another example where the law has been written to create litigation and costs. This was also the theme of the article I wrote in the National Review a few weeks ago about wage theft.

I want every person providing me service

The politics of college admissions continues to fascinate me. This past week, a group of Asian-American students sued Harvard University, arguing that the school discriminates against them by keeping "quotas" for the number of Asian students allowed through the ivy-covered gates.

The statistical evidence, at least based on SAT scores, is pretty strong. Studies have shown that admitted Asian students have higher SAT scores than other racial groups, implying that the bar for admission is higher for them. We also have natural experiments in California -- where affirmative action was banned -- and the percentage of Asian students in University of California schools rose dramatically.

Those with an eye on history would know that university admissions relies on a "holistic" process. The design of that process was spearheaded by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton almost a century ago as a means of preventing academically-successful Jewish students from entering these bastions of Protestant thought. (For a really, really long historical take on this, read The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion by Jerome Kerabel).

I cannot support the current model of holistic admissions given this history. So necessarily, one has to look for alternatives, and the obvious choice is a college entrance exam model, used by countries throughout the world including Korea, China, Japan, France, and much of the Commonwealth nations.

These models are fundamentally more fair and democratic, ensuring that in societies where relationships are often more important than numbers, that fairness reigns supreme.

There are two main strains of argument against this model. The first is that it narrows education to exclusively book learning, at the expense of the arts and athletics that are a hallmark of an American education. The other is that these systems are not fair, since access to resources to

I have been a lifelong foreign language learner. I studied French in high school, Arabic in my freshman year of college (which by now is almost completely forgotten in the recesses of my brain), and then Chinese and Korean since sophomore year. Of these, Korean is probably the most advanced, followed by French, although I don't read it very often anymore in my research.

There is a wide belief that learning languages is impossible as an adult. If you challenge people on this, then they argue something about how adults can never be "native" speakers of the language if they didn't start learning as kids. The latter is probably true, but then, I can get into arguments with almost anyone about authenticity and accents (the obsession with Parisian French at the expense of every other accent, for instance).

But adults do have a tougher time learning foreign languages. The usual reasons given are lack of time due to other commitments and the fact that adults are less willing to make mistakes than kids, and thus, are unwilling to practice the language as frequently.

One argument I almost never hear though is that learning a language as an adult is just sheer boring.

Really, the language materials we use today in foreign language training are anything but practical and interesting. In every single language book I have ever been assigned, we have learned words and phrases about registering for courses, giving directions, eating food, etc. Never once have we learned anything substantive about politics, economics, or society.

This is such a shame. One of the benefits that adult foreign language learners bring to the table is their experience with current events and their opinions. Yet, we force them to leave behind all of their knowledge and start talking like

It goes without saying that there are a lot of foreign policy challenges on the Obama administration's radar screen. Negotiations with Iran are reaching their final make-or-break point, ISIS continues to roam throughout Iraq and Syria, and relations with Israel are at their nadir. There is another issue though that has now boiled over that risks the long-term engagement of the United States with Asia.

Due its weak standing in both the IMF and the World Bank, China created the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank as an alternative international financial institution to engage more heavily in overseas development. The United States responded by criticizing the new bank and urging its allies to avoid joining. At issue is whether the governance standards for projects run by the new bank will be as high as those at the World Bank.

Now, almost 50 nations have joined or have applied to join, including France, Germany, the UK, South Korea, and Australia. Only Japan and the United States seem to be left outside of the new organization, a travesty of strategy in Asia that will take serious time to undo.

This all might be okay for now, since Japan essentially runs the Asia Development Bank and the United States, the World Bank. The new bank's budget today is relatively minuscule compared to the traditional development institutions.

My concern though is that over time, the AIIB has the potential to be massively more effective in its projects than the World Bank, further eroding the United States' standing in the world. We have all seen China's rise over the past few decades, with massive infrastructure investments built in incredibly short periods of time, fueled by the power of an authoritarian government.

With lower governance standards and Beijing's motivation to see the bank succeed, there is little doubt