Academia's 1%

When you're 22, almost everything you've done has been measured in relative terms to your peers (in part, because almost no one at that age has real accomplishments by adult standards, except in athletics; so it's a favorable curve). You think that the world is more competitive than it actually is, because you've been rewarded (or punished) based on individual performance. Of course, people who are academically strong tend to be socially weak when younger. Academia appeals because you're not around the "jocks" with superior social skills. Let's be honest: most people who go into academia do so because they're afraid that if they go into the big, bad business world, they'll be out-shouldered by "asshole jocks".

Here's the trap. The real world is a lot more cooperative than competitive. If you're a social "4", you do better being the weakling in a crowd of 7's (business)-- you'll rise up to that level, from exposure, in a couple of years-- than the relative leader in an ivory tower full of 2's. Why? Because social skills aren't about competition; you want to be around skilled people who have your back. Those "jocks" don't out-shoulder you, because adulthood isn't middle school: they teach you how to get what you want. If anything, the worst bullies in adulthood are the ex-nerds who have something to prove.

Then there are the tribal effects. Why do bankers and traders earn 3x what programmers do, and why do we as programmers earn 3x what academics do, at each level? Because the worst place you want to be in a market is side-by-side with someone who's similarly competent in the rendered service but has no organizational or social skill, nor sense of self-worth; he'll sell himself very short, and drag you down with him by lowering your market value as well.

Academia's appeal is that it's some sort of safe haven for the socially awkward beings that smart people usually are in their early 20s (and usually grow out of by age 25-30). However, because it's full of socially inept people who are terrible at making a case for their own value, the resource pool declines over time, and we're now at the point where the academic job market is kaputt. There are a few star professors who manage to work their way out of the hell that is academia for the bottom 99+ percent, but the irony is that to do that requires a great deal of social ability anyway.

Academia's promise is that you don't need to be socially skilled and you'll keep being rewarded for being smart. First, that's a stupid promise in the first place. Those skills aren't hard to learn (unless you have a hard neurological deficit, but that covers maybe 1% of the population) and you just need to grow up. Second, in the cutthroat environment you get amid dwindling resources and social investment in academia, it turns out that you need those skills to survive, making a joke of that promise.

But realistically, I know of no society where parents don't favor the interests of their own children, resulting in a trend towards increasing disparity.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is to remember that perfect meritocracy is utopian, and can't be reconciled with fairness, so long as individuals can choose to whom they share their advantages -- indeed when we can't even all agree on what those advantages are. So we look for second best, for instance, endorsing social and economic measures that counteract that disparity.

It isn't something that they are necessarily responsible for, and it is a small amount. But it is paid in their name.