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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 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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