Elsewhere, Prodigal Son Dylan Matthews has assumed full prelate power over Perspective, the long-slumbering liberal monthly. Take a look at their new site for some interesting commentary.

To think that I have always remained a staunch partisan of small-d democracy throughout all of its harder trials. I guess it’s about time to rethink that position.

¹ Via MeFi

Katie Which animal has the stinkiest poo?

[David Attenborough Golly. Well, that’s a very good question. Quite a lot of animals make a stinky poo, because they want to show other animals that that’s where they’ve been and that’s where they live. And so they have stinky poo that says, “Poo: get out of here!” It says, “If you don’t like this, you go away.” And, er, let me see. Lions have a stinky poo.

Katie Eugh!

DA Yes. Badgers have stinky poo.

Katie Course they do!

DA Can you tell me something that doesn’t?

Katie Well, I don’t know.

DA Oh, well, I’ll tell you. Elephants don’t have a stinky poo. Elephants’ poo actually smells quite nice.

Katie That’s yuck!

DA What?

Katie Every poo is yuck. Yucky.

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children’s success directly.

[...]

By gradually chipping away at the abuse of credentials, you could probably make them more airtight. But what a long fight it would be. Especially when the institutions administering the tests don’t really want them to be airtight.

Fortunately there’s a better way to prevent the direct transmission of power between generations. Instead of trying to make credentials harder to hack, we can also make them matter less.

Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.

[...]

Credentials are a step beyond bribery and influence. But they’re not the final step. There’s an even better way to block the transmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend toward an economy made of more, smaller units. Then you can measure what credentials merely predict.

Or, to put it another way, ultimately you succeed or fail in life not based on whether you graduate from Harvard summa or not, but based on whether or not you are actually able to succeed or fail in life. The guideposts along the way—Harvard degrees, extracurricular clubs founded, merit badges awarded—may correlate with general historical success. But they don’t predict it perfectly, and they certainly don’t generate it.

Which is why it’s so troubling when you see us here at the upper echelons of the academic credentialing world acting as if guideposts really mattered. To many of our contemporaries, the guideposts have become the item themselves; the correlates to success have become success itself. What was once a signifier is now a metonym.

And that’s, I think, one reason why so many of the ideas which are driving innovation forward aren’t coming from places like Harvard, or, when they are, they are coming from its dropouts. Graham correctly points out that smaller corporate units are better at plucking out successes from failures independent of credentials than are larger corporate units. There is, however, a better arbiter still: history. In the long term, the world doesn’t pivot on Harvard degrees. It may pivot on a few people who happen to hold Harvard degrees. Unfortunately, we seem to operate under a confused etiology wherein credentials take on much more personal significance than they are worth.

And this sounds like the most insane TV marathon I’ve ever heard of:

On Thursday, from noon to midnight, ARTE, a French-German cultural television channel, showed nothing but Lévi-Strauss, with documentaries, films and interviews with him and with those inspired or influenced by his work, including the novelist Michel Tournier.