Are elites meritocratic and efficiency-seeking? Evidence from MBA students
42 comments
·September 23, 2025lefstathiou
My two cents, I believe there is an nuance worth deliniating, specifically differentiating between being elite "in status" vs being elite "in nature." Painting broad strokes here for the sake of this post (so take with a grain of salt)...
Many people born into or groomed for an elite status (via inherited wealth, rich families, strong support systems, etc) are rationally self preservationists. They were born on third base and know it. Many subconsciously know they do not belong there and cannot live up to the level of performance, intellectualism and hard work that laid the foundation for their current state or that others had to endure. Thus, they need support from the system to preserve their current state.
People who became elite in nature, are far more likely to value meritocracy. They lacked support, didnt know there was a "system" to be leveraged (eg getting unlimited time for an SAT score with a doctors note), had a chip on their shoulder, grinded their way to be top of their class, were the most productive, knocked on more doors, took risks others would consider irrational, etc.
At every level they've had to fight for what they have in a world where the criteria is often opaque. Being genuinely competent, they don't have an innate imposter syndrome, and thus, they value a system that has a clear and objective criteria for them and others, because they are confident they will operate fine within it.
EDIT 1: to add: With the above in mind, the more useful analysis in my opinion would be to assess the extent to which ethical frameworks and the role of fairness and meritocracy differ between those who were self-made (eg 1st of their generation to go to an IVY or get an MBA) vs not in "elite" positions of wealth or power.
EDIT 2: I'm not suggesting all people born rich don't deserve their success or do not possess these qualities of hard work, etc.
aleph_minus_one
> Being genuinely competent, they don't have an innate imposter syndrome, and thus, they value a system that has a clear and objective criteria for them and others, because they are confident they will operate fine within it.
This is not a statement about competence, but about inflated ego.
shadowgovt
[delayed]
paulsutter
Easy solution - put quotes around “elites”.
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
busterarm
Most of the social sciences would have you believe that if you are white and/or male, that you are automatically in the former category even if you had to do all of those things mentioned by those in the later category.
bcrosby95
Nah, social sciences don't say that. It's a common misconception - borne out of people who don't want to engage with what they're actually saying, or from engaging with people who don't know what social sciences actually say.
All they really say is some people have an advantage. It doesn't mean they have it easy. We get advantages from all parts of life, and refusing to engage with recognizing them is a decision, but I don't find it particularly healthy.
Due to various reasons outside of my control, my life has been objectively easier than others. It doesn't mean it was easy. Just easier. If even one or two of those things changed my life could have ended up very different.
crmd
This paper perfectly demonstrates two HR axioms I have observed in a 20 year tech journey from IC system engineer to retired unicorn CTO:
1. Total compensation varies obscenely within the organization. It correlates moderately with intelligence and in no way with effort. Some of the most useless articles you work with make the most money.
2. Leadership really, really, really does not want peers sharing compensation info. I have been offered seven figure equity boosters on the condition of absolute confidentiality. This is the “efficiency” metric of the linked paper. If it is hard for leadership to distribute compensation in ways that would be seen as non-meritocratic, they lose an enormous amount of power over the management team.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
Aurornis
A lot of big companies outside of tech already do have semi-transparent pay structures, plus or minus some wiggle room within pay bands.
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.
nemomarx
How enforceable is a condition like that?
jldugger
Depends on how willing you are to drive a Lamborghini to work.
bryanrasmussen
surely that depends on the jurisdiction and provability.
lostmsu
It is illegal in several US states, including WA.
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biofox
Key sentence:
"Analyzing fairness ideals, we find that MBA students are less likely to be strict meritocrats than the broader population"
davidw
The so-called 'elite' in the US, from politicians to journalists to venture capitalists and business leaders, are not looking all that great right now from my point of view, with a few exceptions.
YeCKqkhM
This post feels like a political statement but is too vague to discern any specific point from it. Sounds like something a bad guy in a Call of Duty game would say
davidw
Hi random letters new account guy:
The point is that 'merit' and the 'elite' in the US feel like they're an ocean apart right now in a lot of cases.
kelseyfrog
Yawn. Call me back when it's been reproduced.
Remember folks, we cannot cherry pick from the failed science of psychology even when it appears to be interesting.
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KittenInABox
I think we should be more generous, given the fact that we cannot reproduce many findings in our own field (computer science) given the hardware to do so is limited to such few entities...
hearsathought
> I think we should be more generous
We really shouldn't.
> given the fact that we cannot reproduce many findings in our own field (computer science)
Computer science isn't a "science". Computer science is really a branch of mathematics. For example, when you study computation theory, you prove theorems (deduction). You don't generate a hypothesis and test it.
> given the hardware to do so is limited to such few entities...
Unless you are talking about computer engineering, which isn't really science either but engineering. Computer science isn't done in "hardware". Maybe you should go learn what computer science is.
eirikbakke
CS theory is indeed closer to mathematics. But other areas--database systems, computer architecture, networking, user interface design etc., is in fact evaluated via experiments, which is what makes it "science".
For example, if you propose some new technique to make databases faster (e.g. "store tuples column-wise instead of row-wise"), you'll implement it and run various workloads with and without the technique enabled. That gives you a quantitative measurement of the merit of the technique.
js8
Not true, have seen many CS papers that run experiments lately. And arguably experimental mathematics is a science.
yjftsjthsd-h
> given the fact that we cannot reproduce many findings in our own field (computer science)
Sounds like we should be less generous to CS findings, not more generous to other fields. (And yes, we should be skeptical of findings in CS as well.)
> given the hardware to do so is limited to such few entities...
That said - what research is happening in CS that needs specific hardware? The theoretical stuff can still happen on chalk boards, and interesting algorithmic or technical advances tend to propagate quickly precisely because someone will reproduce them.
lostmsu
Have you actually tried training a 10MB MoE (that would train in a few days on 3090)?
I came to an opinion that most of the current AI research can be easily reproduced on the small scale. CoT is possibly the only exception as it sounds like it requires certain emergent behavior, but even there I am not sure it is impossible to retrofit to tiny models.
panabee
A more accurate title: "Are Cornell Students Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking? Evidence from 271 MBA students and 67 Undergraduate Business Students."
This topic is important and the study interesting, but the methods exhibit the same generalizability bias as the famous Dunning-Kruger study.
The referenced MBA students -- and by extension, the elites -- only reflect 271 students across two years, all from the same university.
By analyzing biased samples, we risk misguided discourse on a sensitive subject.
@dang
awesome_dude
Are elites meritocratic?
No.
How do you tell?
We need laws to stop people discriminating against whole swathes of people for reasons that have zero to do with merit.
josefritzishere
This paper contorts itself to reclassify greed as efficiency. Can greed cut costs? Well sure, but isn't that beside the point? It's like measureing GDP by the amount of dollars in circulation.
slt2021
[dead]
mytailorisrich
People, animals, everyone look after their own interests and the interests of their offsprings. Any studies that might be conducted will, shockingly not, come to that conclusion.
You can't escape 3+ billion years of evolution through natural selection.
mihaic
Human evolution actually escaped the trap of this short term thinking twice: first some 100k years ago, when altruism bloomed (see E O Wilson), and some 2500 years ago with the universal moralistic religions.
The group that maximizes their long-term reproduction is the one that inherits the earth.
BartjeD
That's the malthusian fallacy. The winners are the ones that maximize survival. Reproduction is what all the shills did anyway
mytailorisrich
It is not short-term thinking. It is how we all think on a daily basis, even unconsciously, because it maximizes survival and reproduction, at least on evolutionary scales.
> The group that maximizes their long-term reproduction is the one that inherits the earth.
Yes, that's an interesting paradox in a world where the poorer tend to have more (surviving) children that the richer. But it emerged only very recently on evolutionary scales.
mihaic
Before it meant the group that even sometimes risked their life for the children of everyone in the tribe. I think you're discounting natural human altruism, which is well studied.
amanaplanacanal
On a longer time scale, the poor having more children than the rich is a minor temporary aberration. Their fertility is going the same direction, just with a bit of a lag.
Romario77
But the experiment compares MBA Ivy league students to the general population.
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
mytailorisrich
If you are, or consider yourself, part of the top "performers" you have a self-interest incentive to favour this because you expect to be among the "winners" and don't want to share with the "losers".
I.e., unequal earnings distribution looks better and better as you climb the social ladder because you benefit more and more. On the other hand, if you are at the bottom you may strongly support more equal distibution because that can only benefit you.
Same reasoning as to why workers unions emerged from the bottom, not the top.
teamonkey
Don’t hire the best people in order to make yourself look better. Got it.
"On average across worker pairs, spectators implemented a Gini coefficient of 0.56 and redistributed $1.30 of the winner’s earnings to the loser. "
"In the efficiency cost treatment, the winner was determined by a coin flip and redistribution incurs an “adjustment cost” that reduces the total earnings available to participants. For every $1.00 reduction in the winner’s earnings, the loser’s earnings increase by only $0.50"
So out of $6, the average MBA of the 271 sampled redistributed $1.30 to the loser who was not obligated to receive any of it. So 22% redistribution. Less if the redistribution has costs. Seems fair?