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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.
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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