> But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo.
I don't think people who are merely responding to the game and people who would want the game to be sustained are exactly the same populations.
Even with that, I think moral failings alone might not explain what is going on. Detecting competence signals is hard. Even in occupations where skills are highly explicated (e.g. software engineering) interviews suck at being good classifiers of good future employees. In which case we fallback to available data such as credentials as a proxy, which is also not completely irrelevant. This doesn't mean some people are not going to be explicitly credentialist (Marisa Mayer comes to mind as a well know example), cronyist or nepotist at the expense of competent alternatives, but it means one of the ways to innovate is going to be through amplifying competence signals (e.g. github repos and other public work can be thought as one example to this).
Hmm, perhaps I should have elaborated more, because I never intended to say moral failings alone explains what's going on or even blame certain people. I believe that many institutions and systems created by people exhibit zero-sum dynamics partly because people just don't think there's a viable (competitive) alternative. Amplifying competence signals is certainly one way we could help change that.
I don't think people who are merely responding to the game and people who would want the game to be sustained are exactly the same populations.
Even with that, I think moral failings alone might not explain what is going on. Detecting competence signals is hard. Even in occupations where skills are highly explicated (e.g. software engineering) interviews suck at being good classifiers of good future employees. In which case we fallback to available data such as credentials as a proxy, which is also not completely irrelevant. This doesn't mean some people are not going to be explicitly credentialist (Marisa Mayer comes to mind as a well know example), cronyist or nepotist at the expense of competent alternatives, but it means one of the ways to innovate is going to be through amplifying competence signals (e.g. github repos and other public work can be thought as one example to this).