Kieran Healy

Nepotism

Both Armed Liberal and Kevin Drum are bemused and I think a little disgusted by Adam Bellow’s article “In Praise of Nepotism,” which appears in the current issue of The Atlantic. (It isn’t available online.)

The Marxist daemon who lives on my left shoulder says with enthusiasm that it would be great if the national myth of meritocracy were replaced by a shameless defence of jobs-for-the-boys. At least it’s more empirically accurate. Bellow seems to be advocating an old-fashioned deferential conservatism:

Above all, it is high time for us to get over our ambivalence about the “return” of dynastic families. … There is much to be said for these “aristocratic” features of dynastic families, and as long as these families observe the meritocratic rules of the new nepotism, we really have no basis for complaint. Indeed we should not only respect great families, but try to be more like them.

Nepotism as the new meritocracy! You can see how this angle would appeal to magazine editors. Counter-intuitive. Whiff of paradox. Like it. The new rules, by the way, are as follows:

1. Don’t embarrass me.The first rule of patronage has always been that the protégé’s actions and manner reflect on the patron. By holding a patron responsible for his protégé’s performance, the Mandarins of the Chinese imperial bureaucracy introduced a powerful corrective to the potential for nepotistic abuses. This is also the corrective built into the modern nepotistic equation.
   
2. Don’t embarrass yourself, or You have to work harder than anyone else. … This is what distinguishes the new nepotism from the old: other people must prove their merit before the fact, but nepotees must prove it after.
   
3. Pass it on. Although nepotism is considered selfish, it proceeds from the generous impulse to pass something on to one’s children, and this we think of as entirely praiseworthy. … This wholesome consciousness implies a certain humility and an acceptance of morality.

Sounds great! Sign me up, Dad! Bellow’s argument is much more generally applicable than he realises. Forget the Mayflower crowd. If we’re going to endorse the New Nepotism, there is an obvious policy area where all these virtuous mechanisms should apply: Affirmative Action. Let’s see. Don’t Embarrass Me. Check. Being admitted to, oh, Michigan Law School is a big deal. As a patron, the Law School sets a high standard, like the Chinese Mandarins did. This is a “powerful corrective” to the dangers of abuse. Don’t Embarrass Yourself. Check. The AA admittee surely feels the need to “work harder than anyone else.” This is a powerful spur to success. Pass it On. Check. Although it might be considered an unfair advantage, AA originates in a desire to do good and encourages a wholesome consciousness that is entirely praiseworthy.

So there you have it. Although he probably just wanted to purge that “I’m only getting read because I’m Saul Bellow’s kid” feeling that he gets at 4am, Bellow has provided us with a brilliant conservative justification of Affirmative Action. The stock conservative critique of modest AA programs—that their beneficiaries are unable to compete, are “tarred as undeserving” (to borrow a phrase from Justice Thomas) and suffer terribly as a result—is shown up as so much nonsense. In fact, by Bellow’s argument the mechanisms of the New Nepotism are likely to work even better in AA programs than the Nation’s Great Families. After all, if even the boss’s callow offspring, ruined by years of entitlement, can be transformed into a worthy character, then a hungry young minority kid who’s just got the break they’ve always needed poses no challenge at all. As Bellow’s argument makes clear, Nepotism has always been with us, it isn’t going away, and AA is just one of the forms it takes in a society dominated by complex organizations rather than kinship networks.

I expect to see this line of thought fleshed out in Bellow’s forthcoming book, and fully endorsed in the good-natured reviews his Dad’s buddies will write for the chattering-class weeklies.

Most of us on the right oppose both nepotism and affirmative action, at least if they’re done as instruments of government policy. I don’t have any objection to a privately owned company staying in family hands, nor do I object to a minority business owner deciding to hire primarily employees of his own kind. It’s much more problematic when done by goverment, though.

Aside from the 14th Amendment, a major difference between affirmative action and nepotism, though, is that the former tars all and the latter just the one involved. It’s not so much that the affirmative action admittee is a suspect but that all members of his race are suspect, whether they got in on their own merit or not.

And most minority kids aren’t “hungry.” Indeed, I’m guessing the vast majority of the black and Hispanic kids who got into Michigan Law were from the middle or upper middle classes, not hard-bellied kids from the ‘hood pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. We need to get over this idea that all blacks live in the ghetto.

I think Justice Rhenquist’s daughter failed the first test of new nepotism. Her embarresing tenure as inspector general at GAO should illustrate to Bellow that the new often works as badly as the old

I know the difference between nepotism as private practice and AA as public policty. However, it annoys me that many of Bellow’s examples of “Great Families” come not from business but from politics: “Americans admire the Adamses, the Roosevelts, and the Kennedys …” So he’s arguing that we should defer to our oligarchical betters who control a good chunk of the state’s power. But if someone suggests using the state’s power to do something similar for minorities, then I suppose Bellow would trot out arguments about individualism, meritocracy, and all the rest of it.

a major difference between affirmative action and nepotism, though, is that the former tars all and the latter just the one involved. It’s not so much that the affirmative action admittee is a suspect but that all members of his race are suspect,

Why? I’ve never understood this objection when it’s made by people who are arguing that individuals should be assessed on their merits and not promoted as a class. If that’s what you believe, why should you then turn around and decide that an entire racial category is “tarred” if a particular individual isn’t up to snuff? If you worked in a company where the CEO’s incompetent daughter got quickly promoted, would you conclude that “all rich people’s children are tarred by her failures”? I doubt it.

And most minority kids aren’t “hungry.”

That’s a metaphorical hunger for success I was talking about, not a literal hunger for food.

I didn’t mean to suggest you didn’t know the arguments involved; I’m just stating why I think the analogy isn’t perfect.

By treating people as a class, we invite thinking of people as a class. We actually do tend to think the progeny of the rich get ahead because of this, whether true in specific cases or not. Indeed, a lot of people seem to think GW Bush got elected because Daddy had been president, despite the fact that this is a situation where Daddy can’t really help all that much. Everyone assumes, for example, that Clarence Thomas got into Yale because he was black. Maybe he did. Or maybe he was just smart as hell.

Fair enough on “hungry for success.” But then there really isn’t any reason to prefer one color of hungry kid to another. If the program really was going to help kids trapped in the ghetto, I’d be a lot more likely to support the outreach.

>>But then there really isn’t any reason to prefer one color of hungry kid to another.

Except that one color of hungry kid has experienced discrimination based on his race and one hasn’t and won’t.

>>By treating people as a class, we invite thinking of people as a class

I know research on Indian affirmative action programs reveals quite the opposite, that affirmative action attenuates ‘class’ consciousness, and even programs which primarily benefit the better-off members of discriminated groups also improve the lot of the worse-off members. See for example Jonathan Parry’s work on the Bhilai Steel Plant, in Institutions and Inequalities.

I’m sure there must similar work on American affirmative action?

“There is much to be said for these “aristocratic” features of dynastic families.”
I say the same about slavery. I mean, just look at those cool plantation houses! And Scarlett O’Hara had those great dresses! What could be wrong with that?
I look forward to the second-rate Bellow’s third-rate, but rather lucky, offspring making that argument. He can talk about it at receptions, maybe to George W. Bush.

Only one half of Bellow’s ‘nepotism’ argument concerns the advantages of connections and contacts. Bellow also argues that the “new nepotism” arises from inter-generational intellectual capital. Children of academics, e.g., know what it means to be a academic, they’ve picked up elements of the academic way of thinking, and thus possess a real advantage over the children of non-academics. Thus, Bellow seems to be suggesting that we should expect ‘nepotism’ to be a feature of a well-functioning meritocratic system—much like ethnic ‘clusters’ in certain professions.

NEPOTISM VS. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Kieran Healy weighs in on the Adam Bellow Atlantic Monthly piece that’s getting a lot of attention of late. He applies Bellow’s rationale in favor…

Hmm…

Mark A. R. Kleiman provides a link to a well-written hostile review of Adam Bellow’s book in praise of nepotism, a tome so embarrassingly stupid that it has to be a parody, but isn’t. The reviewer is one Kelly Kleiman….

Hmm…

Mark A. R. Kleiman provides a link to a well-written hostile review of Adam Bellow’s book in praise of nepotism, a tome so embarrassingly stupid that it has to be a parody, but isn’t. The reviewer is one Kelly Kleiman….