Faux meritocracy

When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked why his new cabinet had as many women as men, he replied “because it’s 2015”. But as Owen Jones notes, when it comes to the UK and educational background, many people still presume that our leaders should come from the elite universities.

In an ideal world these would be different issues. In a truly meritocratic society those going to elite universities would be doing so on the basis of their abilities rather than who their parents were. In the UK and I suspect elsewhere we are some way from that ideal. Although I am pretty sure the reasons for this largely occur before 18, I also agree that Oxbridge could improve matters greatly if they stopped selecting students on the basis of interviews. It is one of many reasons why Oxbridge interviews reduce social welfare.

Here is a more minor observation which I think is quite revealing. As Owen says a big part of the problem with Oxbridge is that those from many backgrounds are put off from applying because they think it is only for toffs. It isn’t, but sometimes Oxbridge seems to pretend otherwise. For example there is the ludicrous Oxford tradition of making every student dress up in gowns and worse when they take exams. It means that just at the time that prospective students come for open days they are sure to see a large number of students walking around wearing funny clothes. If I was thinking about coming to Oxford it would put me off. It is rather sad that Oxford students keep voting to continue this tradition, but perhaps it tells you something about the wisdom of elites.

Which brings me to what I think is the crucial point: why is there this presumption that we should be governed by a meritocratic elite? Ability in a particular subject does not seem to be critical. No one suggests the Chancellor should have an economics degree rather than a 2.1 in modern history. (In the past even numeracy seemed not to be required.) The idea that politicians are having to deploy skills that you can only develop at university is a little naive. Most do not have the time to think very deeply about anything, and when issues that involve any knowledge arise they take advice. This is why I have no problem with the kind of delegation you get with central banks or infrastructure commissions. The main difference in those cases is that the public get to hear about what the advice is.

People in universities talk a lot about non-subject specific skills, like developing critical faculties, but arguably some of the crucial critical faculties for a politician are better learnt by leaving university and doing a job. Good judgement does not come from intellectual ability: Chris Dillow argues there is little correlation between high IQ and career success. Now I’m not going to pretend that, other things being equal, I would be indifferent to whether my MP had an economics degree or an NVQ in catering. But other things are not equal. We have a representative democracy, and one way to make sure it works well is if the people chosen to represent us are to some degree representative of the population as a whole.

Of course compatibility between democracy and meritocracy, and the merits of a meritocracy itself, are big issues. It is telling that the book that coined the term meritocracy, by the great Michael Young, had difficulty finding a publisher and was not reviewed by any scholarly publication. But I suspect what is going on here, at least in some quarters, is far simpler, and is a reflection of Trudeau’s remark. It is 2015, so it is no longer acceptable in public to argue that we should be governed by people from a particular class or background. For people who would still like to make that argument, the next best thing is to talk about which university (if any) a politician has been to.        

An interview that will never happen

Interviewer. Chancellor, in your Mansion House speech you said we must reduce government debt rapidly to prepare for an uncertain future. What uncertain future do you have in mind.

Osborne. As my colleague the Prime Minister put it just six months ago, red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global economy. There is Greece, the Middle East, and Ukraine.

Interviewer. But Chancellor, economists are agreed that any imminent global downturn will be more difficult to deal with if fiscal austerity is also being a drag on growth.

Osborne. I am confident that the Bank of England can deal with any immediate threats to the economy.

Interviewer. Even with interest rates already near zero?

Osborne. As the Governor has often said, he has the tools to do the job.

Interviewer. Is that why inflation is currently negative?

Osborne. As you know that has a great deal to do with the fall in oil prices. More generally I think we should celebrate the fact that prices have stopped rising so that real wages and living standards can at last increase.

Interviewer. But isn’t core inflation, that excludes oil prices, at 0.8%? The 2% inflation target is yours, Chancellor. Mark Carney has also said that reducing fiscal deficits will be a drag on growth.

Osborne. To repeat, I have complete confidence in the Governor of the Bank of England to keep the economy on track. I have not been disappointed in my choice of Governor so far, but if I need to reprimand him for any failures in the future I will not shirk from that responsibility.

Interviewer. Going back to the proposed legislation to outlaw deficits, you have also made election commitments to cut some taxes, and intend to legislate to outlaw raising others. That means that public spending will have to be cut to achieve these surpluses. Some people have suggested these laws are just a backdoor means to achieve an ideological objective of a smaller state.

Osborne. That is nonsense. I just think it is important not to place any further burden on this country’s hard working families. These families also know that you cannot go on borrowing forever.

Interviewer. Many people borrow for years to buy a house, and many successful companies continue to borrow to grow. These companies also know that it is best to borrow when interest rates are low, and interest rates on UK government debt are currently very low.

Osborne. And I will never stop trying to take credit for that. But as a prudent Chancellor, I need to ensure we have room to run deficits safely in abnormal times.

Interviewer. Is that to enable the government to undertake fiscal stimulus to support the economy during a major recession?

Osborne. No, that would not be appropriate, as I said in 2009. But as I have also said many times, it is important to allow the automatic stabilisers to operate.

Interviewer. The automatic stabilisers operate even during mild economic downturns, because low growth reduces tax revenues for example. So does your definition of abnormal simply mean when growth would be below average?

Osborne. No, I am talking about more serious events than that, but I will leave the experts at the OBR to decide precisely what is abnormal.

Interviewer. I am sure they would welcome your guidance. But if abnormal does not include mild downturns, and you want to make it a legal requirement to run surpluses during those times as well, that will require either switching the automatic stabilisers off during these mild downturns, or running pretty large surpluses when the economy is on track so as to avoid going into deficit if a negative shock of the normal kind hits.

Osborne. As I said, I think it is important to allow the automatic stabilisers to operate.

Interviewer. Chancellor, I may be being stupid here, but why is it important to allow taxes to fall automatically in a recession, but wrong to actually cut taxes further to help bring the recession to an end quickly, particularly if interest rates are stuck at zero?

Osborne. I think the experience of 2010 shows us the limits of what governments should do. It was right to let the automatic stabilisers increase the deficit following the 2009 recession, but any action by the government to increase those deficits puts our credibility at risk.

Interviewer. Now I’m a little confused. You and your colleagues said repeatedly during the recent election that the deficit in 2010 was so large due to the profligacy of the last Labour government, and not because of the recession. Austerity was because you had to clear up the mess that Labour created. It also seems that a significant proportion of the public sees it that way too. Are you now saying that is wrong?

Osborne. Look, no one is denying that 2008 saw a global financial crisis. It is to prepare for that kind of event that we need to run surpluses, perhaps as you suggest quite large surpluses when the economy is growing normally, to get debt down quickly.

Interviewer. So we need to bring debt down rapidly so that we can afford to bail out the banks again when the next financial crisis hits. I thought you had taken the measures necessary to prevent us having to rescue the banks again.

Osborne. We have done what we can, but it is important to maintain London as the leading financial centre, which means keeping banks profitable and allowing them to pay large bonuses to attract the best international talent. We do not want to impose regulations so severe that these banks and other financial companies go elsewhere. We made these points many times before 2008.

Interviewer. Thank you, Chancellor. That has been very helpful in understanding why you believe we need to legislate for budget surpluses. One last question if I may. Can you tell me what percentage of donations to the Conservative party come from the financial sector?

Delegating to the wrong people: the strange case of interviewing undergraduate candidates at Oxford

This post starts off talking about something rather parochial, but it then moves to a wider point about decision making in a particular type of large organisation.

This is a strange time of year at Oxford University. Very few UK universities interview prospective undergraduates to help select who should be admitted, but both Oxford and Cambridge do. As a result, all but the most senior academics will generally spend at least two solid days interviewing something like 3 times as many undergraduate candidates as there are places. The personal and social cost of this is pretty high - quite a few research papers will not get written as a result, and maybe the odd important discovery will be delayed by years. Yet Oxford and Cambridge are also relatively unusual among UK universities in still allowing academics considerable control over the way the institution is run. Is this a paradox?

Now all this might make sense from a social point of view if interviewing meant we clearly got much better students at Oxford than we would otherwise. However all the evidence I have ever seen on interviews is that they are pretty unreliable as a selection procedure. In this particular case, there are well known biases: those from certain schools or families will be practiced at giving a good impression in such situations, whereas others will not. We (and I think I’m justified in using that collective pronoun) do our very best to get round those biases, but it is hard. We can fail to compensate, or over compensate. We all think we can judge someone by talking to them for 30 minutes, but in reality our ability to assess academic potential that way is pretty small. Indeed, even if information gleaned from interviews contains some useful information, I strongly suspect those making decisions give this information far more weight than it deserves. My suspicions receive some local support from Bhattacharya et al (2012)[1].

So, if there is no clear evidence that students are much better selected as a result of interviews, why do we continue with them? One familiar idea is that this is a form of concealed class bias, but I suspect this is not the general case. The evidence from Bhattacharya et al suggest that for PPE at Oxford, the marginal student from an independent (private) school faces significantly higher admission thresholds than those from state schools. A slightly less politically charged version of this argument is that we want to select students who are easy and interesting to teach, and as the interviews are like mini tutorials they achieve this goal. This would also explain why interviewing is largely confined to the two universities that still have a traditional tutorial system (teaching in small groups of two to four).

Even if there is some truth in this, there still seems to be a puzzle. From the self-interested point of view of the research oriented and highly competitive academic, the effort involved in interviewing seems out of proportion to any gain in getting more congenial students. I spend the equivalent of 12 full days a year teaching in tutorials, so spending 2+ days each year in a process that might make those 12 days slightly easier is just not worth it.

One of the other unusual aspects of Oxford and Cambridge is that they remain - in theory at least - self-governing. The individual colleges that make the admission decisions certainly are run by the academics.[2] So why are Oxford academics so attached to interviewing, when it just does not seem to be in their interests?

But maybe this is not the right question. Perhaps the majority of Oxbridge academics would happily give up interviewing, but for some reason this preference is not getting realised. I could at this point talk about the peculiarities of decision making at Oxford (and peculiar is the right word), but I think there may be a more general issue here.

Decision making in large organisations like universities is often run through committees, or through delegation to ‘volunteers’. Most academics, even though they may enjoy teaching students, are primarily interested in research (either intrinsically, or because it determines future career prospects). As a result, they will tend to avoid taking positions where they have to think about non-research related issues (like being on department or university teaching committees), and try and avoid administrative duties more generally. However a minority will have different priorities, and so they will take those positions. They may as a result take decisions which divert academics away from research, given their own interests and responsibilities. It may be these people who are taking decisions about interviewing, and not your more typical research focused academic.

Some of my former (non-Oxford) colleagues wrote a paper about this general issue some time ago [3], and although they did not apply it to universities, I suspect it may have been their inspiration. In many organisations this problem is dealt with by a strong central authority, but universities often do not have that, and Oxford and Cambridge certainly do not. So even if the majority of academics did want to stop interviewing, they cannot exercise this preferences, because they have delegated decision making to others who have different interests and priorities. Who knows if this is right, but maybe I have just thought up a good interview question!
    
[1] Bhattacharya, Kanaya and Stevens (2012), Are University Admissions Academically Fair? Oxford University Discussion Paper No. 608. Note (Table 2) that interview scores are very significant in deciding who is admitted, but have a weaker correlation with first year exam results compared to other pre-admission evidence.

[2] For UK universities, research performance is the key incentive, because of the UK’s research assessment exercise. So I suspect a strong, top down central authority would quickly decide that interviewing was a non productive distraction. 

[3] Bulkley, G., Myles, G.D. and Pearson, B.R. (2001), On the Membership of Decision-Making Committees, Public Choice, 106, 1-22.