Whence nepotism?

There’s a discussion going on at the moment about an article from the New York magazine regarding the rise of nepotism in the entertainment industry. It seems like every singer, actor, comedian, nowadays etc. got a leg up from a famous relative. Let me give an experience from my own life and draw out how it relates.

My view on the subject is pretty simple. Nepotism is the ground state of any field you need favors to get started in, because people generally only want to do favors for people they already know and like. Academia, writing, acting and music are all areas in which the supply of prospective professionals is so high, and assessing potential talent takes so long, that it can be very hard to get a foot in the door without a favor [in fairness this may be somewhat less true of academia than the others, but I think it still applies.] Ergo, nepotism is the state of play. This used to be somewhat mitigated by an “let’s give ‘em’ a chance” attitude, but elite overproduction has halted that.

My experiences are in academia and writing. It’s not at all uncommon for people to get a leg up from a family member in these areas, but even more common is friendship connections acting as a surrogate family. As someone who’s been quite bad at playing the game of making well-placed friends, and who was the first person in my family to go to university, I have some bitter, bilious and no doubt envy-glazed observations for you. Despite my bitterness, this is not about whether I personally have been mistreated. Many, many people have had it rougher than me- and if anything that makes my case stronger. This essay is about grasping a general pattern- a necessary working out of a social logic- in the particular.

Also, I’m drunk and I wrote this in an hour, so disclaimers apply.

My experiences

Recently, via email, I asked an academic who happened to work in my area to have a look at a chapter of my thesis related to their work. The situation, which I explained in the email, is that I’m doing my Ph.D. in the economics department, but it’s on the philosophy of economics, and I desperately need insight regarding a specific philosophical problem I touch on in the thesis. I wanted to check in to make sure I’m not speaking in ignorance. You see, in philosophy, as in many academic disciplines, there is a kind of expertise -a kind of grokking or phronesis- that can only be transmitted informally. Something one can miss no matter how much one reads the literature. The request was polite, and decidedly not weird. I can’t reprint it here because it has potentially identifying information- but I confirmed its normality with my supervisor who is, most eminently, not a weirdo.

The academic in response:

1. Acted sus.

2. Implied I was maybe lying about my identity.

3. Contacted my supervisor to confirm I was a real person.

4. Said he would read it (he didn't)

5. Half an hour after our email conversation, made a weird passive-aggressive joke tweet about only being willing to read work from people he respected.

Now if he'd just said:

"Sadly, due to the pressure of time I cannot read this, blah blah blah, have a good life, best wishes, prominent academic"

That would be one thing. Indeed, even not replying would be understandable. All of us have to make recourse to the non-reply from time to time. Instead, he implied through his response -whether as a result of conscious intention or not- that my request was out of bounds. What was being communicated is that for this field asking for a hand-up *unless you already know the person*, is inappropriate. In this field in which you almost need a hand up to get started, I was being told you need to know the person to ask. It’s disciplinary gatekeeping.

While aspects of the response to my email were extreme, the overall attitude is not entirely unreasonable, I doubt there is anything particularly douchey about this guy. We're all fucking busy. No one without a sainthood complex or a devious scheme to acquire social capital exactly wants to do unpaid favors. And yet…

If those are the ground rules, nepotism will be the rule. If there are no favors for strangers, but favors for friends, and favours are necessary to win or start playing, then people with influential friends win . This is obvious. It’s the basic mechanism of nepotism.

I probably wouldn’t be so damn sensitive about his reponse it if it weren’t for the fact that this is the second time it’s happened to me. That is, the second time I’ve asked for some advice or help and been passive-aggressively attacked. A younger, more naive me wrote to a famous fiction author on Facebook, who I happened to be distantly acquainted and FB friends with:

Hey, I am sorry to bother you and you must get this a lot, but I have been working on a novel for about six months now. I was wondering if you'd be willing to take a look at a brief, two-page writing sample and let me know if you think it is worth pursuing, and if you had any tips.

That was the whole communication on the subject. Maybe it was a bit abrupt, and maybe I should have made the request more organically, but I try to be honest and straightforward about these things.

She never responded, which is not necessarily a terrible thing. More aggravatingly though, shortly after (maybe even within half an hour) she posted on a link to a Jane Caro article about the evils of asking for unpaid mentorship. Here’s the piece (which caused a little controversy itself in its own time):

No, I can’t be your unpaid mentor.

Essentially, the argument of the piece was that the constant requests Caro faced to provide freely of her time to aspiring writers didn’t recognize the value of her talents which deserved to be financially recognized, etc.

There’s a passage I find particularly telling:

“What I cannot do is endlessly have coffee with people I hardly know (or do not know at all) so they can pick my brains. I cannot indiscriminately read manuscripts…”

Caro is describing the foundations of nepotism. She makes it sound so innocent because, in a way, it is.

No doubt she can’t indiscriminately read manuscripts- I’ve no reason to think she’s lying about that. Not only does she probably get so many requests she can’t fulfill them all, but worse, if she somehow did fulfill them all, word would get around and her problems would multiply. So she falls back on a very understandable rule. Only people she knows well get their manuscript read. And where does this leave us in relation to the titular question?

To be clear, I’m not accusing Jane Caro of being an awful person. I find her liberal board-room style smash-the-glass ceiling feminism a bit trite from my more socialist perspective, but, she is, as far as I can tell, a person of real social conscience, which prompts the question if someone with a social conscience is doing this- out of necessity as much as anything- can you imagine what people without a social conscience are doing?

To be clear, these aren’t the only times people have declined to help me. Like everyone else in this world, I’ve experienced it many, many times. It’s not even the only times that people have rudely declined to help me find a way into writing. These were just two particularly blunt (and yet pass-ag) examples. I’ve sent pitches to dozens of publications and basically never heard back. These include:

1. The Guardian

2. The Conversation

3. Current affairs

I understand that. Maybe they were bad pitches. Maybe they weren’t right for the venue. What is more troubling to me is when I’ve talked about this with people a little more in the knowand they’ve basically said “oh you can’t just expect to send a pitch into a publication cold and get it published. Don’t be so impossibly naive. You need to work a connection. Link up with the right people on Twitter. Maybe S*** a d***.” I don’t know whether they’re right about not sending pitches through the front door being a bad idea, but it’s disturbing that that’s the scuttlebutt.

Further, let me be absolutely crystalline about this because I’m sure if this piece goes anywhere this point will be misrepresented. I’m not saying that this famous fiction author and famous academic I contacted were individually obliged to help me out. Nor am I saying that I’m some kind of unique genius who absolutely must be assisted or else the system is an abject failure. I’m saying that 1. They probably should have been nicer about saying no but 2. More relevantly, regardless of what you think an individual’s obligations are in this area, a favors-are-only-for-friends mindset will lead by necessity to nepotism in areas where you need advice- and frankly, often, an advocate, to get started. If it’s this tough in writing and academia, I can only imagine it’s vastly worse in singing and acting.

What’s going on

Much of what I said above follows near tautologically from the definition of nepotism. But the thesis of the New Yorker piece about nepotism is that it’s getting worse. The structural incentives I describe have existed forever.

True, but I think- and I don’t know how to account for this, but I do think it’s also true- that there used to be much more of a “damn it, let’s give the kid a chance” culture.

I’m currently going through a very broad-ranging pop history of aspects of machine learning at the moment, and it’s startling how many times computer scientists, neurologists, etc. run into some first-year college kid or guy who hasn’t even finished high school and say “fuck it, I’ll wager a chunk of my time, reputation, and possibly even grant money on you.” Of course, there’s a survivorship bias here. We only hear the stories of the kids who made it good. Still, when you read about, for example, Wittgenstein’s eccentric entrance into academia, it’s hard not to think something has changed.

I can’t account for the change entirely, but I do think I know part of the story. An overproduction of intellectuals. When I talk about the overproduction of intellectual here, I don’t mean relative to some baseline of the number of intellectuals I would like. I think it would be a fine thing if 10% of the population wrote a book at some point in their lives. I mean relative to the number of positions capitalism has for them. A tweet I read recently suggested we’re now at the point that Harvard humanities professors can’t get their best-loved graduate students even non-tenure track positions. Under those conditions, do you think they’re interested in volunteer talent skimming?

I do not have blinders about the past. The willingness to take a chance on randoms once upon a time coincided with an era in which those randoms who had the space to even try were overwhelmingly white and male, and most often of at least middle-class origin. This isn’t about saying the past is better.

It would be nice to think that, the bright side of this tightening of demand relative to supply would be that at least the people who do make it are the creme de la creme. In some cases, I’m sure it does mean that. No one is denying that many people are still successful on the basis of the firey potency of their talent alone. In other cases though, it might mean that only the people who can hit the ground punching can get started. Who can hit the ground punching? People with backers.

Bah humbug.