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Notes -
An Investigation into Privilege
In the most recent episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History, Gladwell invited 75 seniors from the University of Pennsylvania to participate in an experiment in which each student had to answer ten simple questions that were to investigate the nature of the privilege of the people in the room.
He then had his assistants use the answers to generate a numerical score for each student, which they wrote on large stickers that the students then affixed to their chests. The students were then invited to look around the room, examine each others’ numbers, then guess what the numbers meant. Gladwell hinted that his assistants spent only a few seconds for each student and didn’t use a computer, so it wasn’t the output of a complicated algorithm.
The students guessed a lot of things. One of the questions mentioned zip codes, was it about that? No. Public vs private schools? No. Race? No.
The answer was (last chance to avoid spoilers) the relative age of the students. Not only were there no students young enough to have skipped a grade, not a single student was born in 2001 or later (despite the fact that the potential birthdates for this cohort extended up to September 2001). It was a room of entirely (relatively) old seniors.
If you’ve read Gladwell’s book Outliers, this may ring a bell, as Gladwell dedicates a chapter to this phenomenon, but in that case focusing mostly on sports. The relative age effect occurs when relatively older members of a cohort (typically an annual age group) are disproportionately likely to be represented in the top levels of performance. This mainly occurs because a few months of age can matter a lot for size and maturity and younger ages, and then feedback loops exacerbate it.
Gladwell, however, had a suggestion for these students. There is an algorithm developed for competitive youth swimming that corrects for the fact that late-developers are disadvantaged by regular metrics. Would they have support a similar system if it were applied to adjusting test scores to birth dates?
Silence. Not a single student rose their hand in support. One student raised qualms with the possibility of the algorithm to be gamed. Another admitted they would oppose it solely out of self-interest.
Gladwell concluded that these Ivy League students have just made made aware of a totally arbitrary and unfair privilege they have been the beneficiaries of, but have no interest in fixing it.
What are the culture war connotations of this?
A snarky own-the-libs style reaction to this would go something like: “Look at all these Ivy Leaguers, most of whom will be undoubtedly be liberals, who will profess to caring about privilege and likely support affirmative action, but when it comes to a completely arbitrary and easily-correctable privilege they hold, they suddenly have no interest in abolishing it! Curious!”
A more thoughtful critique would note that progressive politics seems to be highly focused on very specific types of privilege (mostly race and gender, and occasionally class) to the almost complete exclusion of other types of privilege (such as relative age effects, but many others including heightism and lookism). A cynical explanation is that this is mostly to do with coalition politics (that there are e.g. gender and race-based advocacy groups in the Democratic coalition, but no “relative age” advocacy group exists, and heightism and lookism have a vague association with the very-much-outgroup incels). But a truly enlightened progressive would tackle unfair privilege wherever it emerged.
But I think there are lessons for the “anti-woke” too. That is, relative age effects are a proof-of-concept for significant arbitrary privilege being a real thing. A fair amount of anti-woke arguments claim that gender and racial disparities may disappear entirely when controlling for confounding variables (e.g. the gender wage gap or the racial policing gap). And perhaps in some cases this is true. Yet, while the motte of this argument is that “progressives can be misleading in their portrayal of group disparities”, I think there’s a bailey of “the world is pretty much meritocratic nowadays and any attempt to correct disparities is an unjust overreaction”. Yet in a world where something this seemingly insignificant can have such an outsized impact, it seems highly unlikely that other (perhaps harder to measure) disparities have all disappeared.
Personal notes
This episode resonated with me for another reason - I felt like I may represent the flip-side of those college students. I grew up as one of the youngest (and smallest) in my school cohort. Nonetheless, I was able and chose to skip a grade in math despite being explicitly warned that some students who did that in the past struggled in later years. A couple of years later, I struggled with my accelerated math course and dropped it the next year. I took math up again in university as a prerequisite but never really got the hang of it, which ultimately precluded me from taking up postgraduate study.
Probably in an alternative world where age-cutoffs put me in a lower grade, or I wasn’t accelerated in math, I would have done better academically. I guess I’m a “victim” in that respect. Still, if I were to objectively measure my privileges in all its domains, I would come out highly positive overall.
Which does make me think about the validity of worrying about privilege in the highest levels of achievement. Sure, they may be completely unfair and arbitrary reasons why people may fail to get into Ivies. But the people just on the cusp of getting into an Ivy can probably expect pretty good lives nonetheless. Perhaps the experiences of people at the median and below are more important when it comes to privilege, in which case some of these effect sizes seem likely to be smaller. B
Still, if I have kids, I’m not accelerating them in school.
I think acceleration is a good idea because it gives talented kids access to resources that may help them in terms of careers or continuing education, instead of having to wait.
For talented people, things are much better today compared to in the 70s and 80s, when the boomers were coming of age. Being smart and talented, even despite political correctness today, didn't; confer nearly as many benefits career-wise compared to today. Talented teens today can pick up coding and get internships or land lucrative jobs by their early 20s, instead of having to do the dead-end summer job grind for 5 years. Boomers didn't have a choice because society didn't as much use for cognitive talent like it does today.
Boomers were born as early as 1946. Its more GenX that came of age in the 80s
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My objections have been always on the meta-level: I don't doubt that there are some structural isms, but can we have an honest discussion about how much of inequality of outcomes is due to them and how better to approach that? We can't, and that's bad because I'm pretty sure that in several important aspects the pendulum has swung too far a long time ago and this hurts the supposed beneficiaries of anti-ism discriminatory policies as well, in unexpected ways even. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae#1990s left a lot of black and poor people homeless and with a destroyed credit rating, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_States#Race_and_gender put the majority of educated blacks in the US into a sort of indefinite indentured servitude, and having a 60:40 college+ educated female to male ratio makes dating not very fun for those women. This is what you get if you shut down open discussion because you think that the only problem is evil ciswhitemales and nothing could possibly go wrong if you shut them off and follow the road paved with good intentions.
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Hang on a minute - though I think I'm careening off a cliff here - it seems as if age-norming could lead to really weird outcomes if done over large-enough gaps. Could students arbitrarily young be given enough of a norming boost that they can pass a class by "doing well enough for their age," if standards are to be made relative instead of absolute? Could a baby obtain a college degree by dint of being, once you account for his age, at the top of his class?
Obviously it could never get that far, and I share this post mainly because it was an amusing mental image to me, but I do hope that there's some useful illustration in this reductio-ad-absurdum of the idea that absolute standards are often what we really care about. Relative standards are useful for putting people in order, and if you're ideologically opposed to there being such an order as it's inequitable or inegalitarian, then I don't think norming by age or gender or race is going to be enough - you're going to need to norm by everything, that is, abandon the tests.
I think you could largely avoid the weird issues by truncating the algorithm at a 1-year gap, tapering it off, having it conservative, or perhaps best of all (but less practical) try to test over smaller age cohorts.
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I doubt it, but there are absolutely people who could intellectually handle college coursework by age ten or twelve. The alternative is sticking smart kids with boring work that is neither challenging nor necessary, just to kill time until they are "old enough" to move on. Which is a great way to build someone who will gut your school because he has nothing but time and is smarter than the administration.
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I'm confused by this comment, because it seems to be missing the point. You would still have orderings after age-norming, or after changing the structure of activities and institutions to avoid this phenomenon. They would just not be correlated to what time of year you're born in. To take the reductio-ad-absurdum to the other end, would you directly compare a 3 year old and a 10 year old, and expect to get a meaningful prediction of which of them is more likely to be a professional athlete based on their relative athletic performance now? Of course not. But we do exactly that on a smaller scale when we put 3 year olds and 4 year olds on the same team.
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I started college multiple years multiple as a consequence of living in a rural area where the local school didn't really have any resources for kids like me and parents that just wanted to try to find a way to help me learn as much as I could. The result is that I went to a university and then a graduate program that were probably beneath the tiers that I could have landed based on my apparent academic ability relative to peers, but that I got to start on my career much earlier than most people would. I was young enough at each step that there wasn't just some "youngest in cohort" style of effect, but so young that I stood out and everyone knew it. I've often wondered what life would have turned out like if I had the same basic abilities, but had instead lived in an affluent urban district where I would have just been another bright kid striving to get into good schools, and I really just have no way of conceptualizing what that life would have been.
In the Gladwellian context above, this would presumably make me severely underprivileged - always the youngest in my cohort by a mile, coming from a background that tends to not be academically successful in the first place. Really though, that just makes me think of how individualized these things actually are and how little these types of "privilege" have to do with how we actually experience life. At no point did I ever feel like I was held back by the unfairness of being years younger than my classmates and colleagues. I've always felt incredibly lucky to have the natural advantages I have in life - complaining about it would just seem remarkably tone deaf to me.
I'm on the far "disadvantaged" end here and my response would literally be a snort of derision that I should get bonus points for being young. The scores are what they are, you earn them as fairly as you can at any point in life. We have different backgrounds, different strengths and weaknesses, and the impulse to level all that off seems utterly perverse to me. Personally, I'm perfectly happy to extend that across all forms of supposed privilege, but I suspect that the students wouldn't find that all that compelling.
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This post had me wondering about how much untapped talent is out there. Is there someone who would have been the GOAT of their sport if they had been born in September instead of May? I would say probably not; at least for baseball, although there is an advantage, there's still a good number of players with unlucky birthdays: https://www.billjamesonline.com/article1191/ indicates the effect is about 20% for one year. This is substantial, but a top-tier natural talent will still most likely emerge. Of course, that also makes me wonder: how did they get all 75 to be from 1 third of the year? That's an incredible effect size. It would require mental development to be VASTLY fast and more consistent than physical development, which doesn't sound right. The link above even says
Which is nowhere near enough to get the result described. I wonder if there was any other filter in this process:
As far as solutions go, I wonder if it's feasible to separate kids into finer-grained groups when they're young. Say 4 months? Not for everything, but anything competitive or comparative ("don't make kids compete until they're 10 or so" seems like an even better solution, but I don't see any way to require that to happen). Given teacher shortages and limited participation in various activities, it's probably not practical. On the other hand, kids used to all gather together at wildly different ages, especially in low-population areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-room_school). If children are manifestly wildly different, with few children even within a year of each other, perhaps you also avoid this problem as you can't possibly compare children to anything but their own age.
It wouldn't be too hard to implement a grade school semester system. Everyone would have to be 5 1/2 to go into Kindergarten. Kids who are 5 1/2 in July go to Kindergarten A in September, Kids who are 5 1/2 in January to to Kindergarten A in January (and the previous group goes on to Kindergarten B). And then so on for all the grades.
It would be a very small school that didn't have two classrooms per grade level in the first place.
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My wife and I have already decided to hold back our November kids a year so they can be the oldest instead of youngest. I've observed this phenomenon but never realized there is actual data to back it up (though it was always pretty much true on it's face). The older kids always seemed to be better behaviorally, academically, socially (first one to drive, confers status).
I would just say watch out for this if they are very academically inclined. I was always the youngest in my grade (I was technically accelerated a year, but I only missed the age cutoff by a few days so I basically just went from being the oldest to the youngest in my grade) and I was always extremely glad for that fact. School was always easy and boring enough as it was even with advanced classes, it would have been so much worse for me to be learning everything a year later. While I’m sure there are advantages on average to being older, to me it would have been a big negative.
It's a fair concern - our boys (twins) were born 5 weeks premature and have always been noticeably behind on milestones. Not something we're super concerned about, but our biggest issue is that one of the twins is a little bit behind the other. Tough to decide if it would be worth it to put them in separate grades...i think that would just cause more issues.
That just sounds pretty awful from a social perspective if nothing else, the lower-year twin would forever be tagged as the "dumb twin". Yeah, they might get some of that effect anyway if that twin performs worse on tests, but it'd be much less obvious than "actually in a lower grade".
And also it seems that twins have a special bond that might be spoiled a bit if they were forced apart.
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We had a pair of mismatched male twins in different grades in high school. They literally just put the smaller boy a grade behind to separate them, which worked ok for him. But the taller twin was definitely behind everyone else in our grade.
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While I am certainly anti-woke. As a earlier reply suggests the older have quantitatively more 'lived experience'. I'm not sure this is arbitrary, nor is gaining more experience through aging denied anyone except the dead. They say the living have all the privilege. If only the dead had better advocacy groups.
Another not infrequent privilege target is height, at least among men. I've not seen suggestions that the short to median heighted should be given subsidized lifts, though this only makes them appear tall. The height version of stolen valor. It won't grant them the lived experience of being tall. Though dating apps could easily show women more short men. There'd need to be some sort of enforced quota system, women would be required to match and date 4n short men for every n tall man. My suspicion is that because this a privilege deficit that affects men, no one cares. My wife had to show me my height percentile before I accepted I was tall, I'm not NBA tall, or fit, or sporty. The tall in the far right tail of the distribution appear to have more tall privilege than me, do I get an accommodation too? Unless you go too far right and the height is pathological or diagnostic, I don't want that.
'Privilege' to me has always been a bit like dark matter or dark energy, it fills the gaps for people that need an easy explanation of unequal outcomes, where the results of investigating too throughly or deeply would conflict with a preferred orthodoxy.
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As someone quite "anti-woke", I have no trouble believing that there are systemic problems that advantage and disadvantage certain groups at a population level. I'm just extremely skeptical that these systemic issues map cleanly onto race, sex or sexuality lines, and believe that emphasizing these divisions exacerbates the political problem of trying to solve the issue in the first place.
There is no "just world", and all sorts of bigotry exists. But, if you looked at this case without studying anything and determined that the lack of whatever group was a result of the school being RACIST, rather than some esoteric maturation thing, you would have inflamed the issue with a bunch of racialized nonsense, none of which had a goddamned thing to do with the inequality you intended to "fix". You know, like BLM did.
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I don't think this line works because the age effect is a meritocratic difference. The kid who is 8 months older than their peer isn't the beneficiary of unfair favoritism, or subtle preference effects. They actually are bigger, stronger. They actually have had more time to develop their coordination. Their brain actually is more developed, and was for the entire process of schooling.
the favoritism is that the older kids are being compared to their younger peers in the same group, which, for example, makes them more likely to be placed in 'gifted' programs.
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The anti-meritocratic part isn't that older kids are allowed to outperform younger kids. It's that someone born in August is automatically slotted in to be the "older kid", whereas the person born in September is forced to be the younger kid for every social, physical, or intellectual competition from ages 6-22.
I'm lukewarm on the motte of the social justice movement when they apply this kind of logic to race and sex/gender. I just disagree that they have identified the most important sources of unfair disparate outcomes, or that a society is illegitimate if it doesn't hunt those specific categories of unfair advantage out, whatever the human or societal cost. I basically think "born rich in a rich country" makes a rounding error of any other kind of privilege in the modern world.
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Is this a novel lesson for many people? The first thing that comes to mind in terms of significant arbitrary privilege is "being born to wealthy parents." Probably many people would support some balancing against that privilege--trying to recruit students from low-income or first in family to go to college backgrounds is relatively non-controversial--but algorithmically adjusting test scores to correct for parental wealth strikes me as a fringe, though findable, preference.
Similarly, "not having significant developmental or learning disorders." Generally arbitrary, but algorithmically adjusting test scores in this case would defeat much of the sorting purpose of test scores to begin with.
Some people are luckier than others; initial inequality is inevitable. But luck exists across a tremendous number of dimensions; only some of those dimensions can be corrected-for socially; and many fewer of them should be.
I think we can make a distinction between "meritocratic" and "un-meritocratic" privilege-correction.
A learning disorder is unfair, but someone with a learning disorder may struggle to ever be as good a doctor as someone without one.
Whereas the theory behind relative age adjustment is that there are some people who have the potential to become a doctor nonetheless don't because of arbitrary factors holding them back.
That's where a lot of the controversy over affirmative action comes from. Supporters often claim that it's about finding "diamonds in the rough" who have the potential to do just as well as someone with a privileged background, but their scores need to be adjusted to reflect their lack of privilege. Opponents claim that it will result in less capable graduates. Part of the reason why genetic claims of IQ differences are so controversial is that if true they make the "meritocratic privilege correction" argument much less persuasive
Learning disorders are pretty close to being a special case of an IQ differential. Someone with a lower IQ will struggle to ever be as good a doctor as someone with a higher IQ, holding other attributes constant. (Lower IQ does not directly indicate a better bedside manner, or other benefits; that sort of "fairness/balancing/whatever" is for video games, not reality.)
Affirmative action has many problems, and "less capable graduates" barely makes the list. Even if you set aside the naked racial preferences and the reputation hit to successful minorities, you still have the mismatch between students and institutions, leading to much higher minority dropout rates from institutions above their level, when they could have been successful at institutions closer to their testing levels. Testing has a tight correlation with academic performance and graduation rates; when minorities end up thoroughly dominating the lowest quintile in class, it should come as no surprise that they also dominate the list of dropouts. (Of course, when you add in predatory student loans, and the worst case scenario is "loans + no degree," affirmative action starts to look like a perfect storm of how to screw over minorities most efficiently. I guess advocates of affirmative action can rest on their good intentions?)
"Adjusting" is never free; there is always a tradeoff. Even the mere knowledge that "adjusting" is happening generates second-order effects. Sometimes the specific policy is net-positive--the tradeoff was worth it. All too often, though, the effects are net-negative, as with affirmative action.
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Okay, I'm very puzzled here. If "senior" means in American terms, in the last year of a four-year degree course, and if generally third level students are 18 when they enter college, then the seniors should be a minimum of 22 years of age.
If he ran the experiment this year, 2022, then 2022-22 = born in 2000. So where is the shock about "nobody was born in September 2001"?
What this really seems to be about is "nobody was super-smart enough to have skipped a year and so be under 22 in their final year", never mind all the discussion we hear about "really bright kids could be finished their degree by 16".
This seems to be saying I should be surprised that in a four year degree course, where students enter at age 18, they will be age 22 this year, so they can't be born later than 2000. I'm not seeing why I should be surprised? But then again, I was too stupid to go to university.
If they're eighteen when they enter (their first year of) college, then when they enter their fourth year of college, they should be twenty-one, as three years elapse from the first year to the fourth, not four.
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I have a Spring birthday, so without skipping a grade or doing anything unusual I was 21 throughout most of my senior college year.
Most school districts have a cutoff for kindergarten the first day of school. So if someone just turned five September 1st, they could go to kindergarten the next week (if their school starts in September.)
I'm feeling pretty awesome right now because I did really well in school despite my apparent "disadvantage."
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It's about kids being the oldest in their age cohort, and so more developed relative to their peers all throughout school. You're more likely to do well in school, sports, all sorts of things if you were born in the earliest part of your school cohort, and are thus six to eleven months older than half your competition.
The years are important because the birth cohort for seniors would have run from Sept. 2000 to Sept 2001. So mathematically, only a third should have been born in 2000, but 100% were. Somehow all the seniors in this class were from the first three or four months of their school-year birth cohort.
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I turned 21 in spring of my senior year of college because I skipped a grade. That wasn’t terribly uncommon in my experience, I met others in a similar situation. Personally it surprised me to read that zero students in the class were a year ahead.
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