All three of those examples are missing a step of like 5-20 years in the middle. Nobody is running a venture fund as a 22 year old ivy grad (barring someone who's taking over for their family member, but in that case it has nothing to do with being an ivy grad), nobody is running the FED right out of a PhD, nobody is a director at a big corporation right out of a PhD.
Presumably once those people are in such high-power positions, they also have a track record of real accomplishments behind them; it's certainly possible they've lied and cheated their entire career but it's definitely less likely they'll make it that far that way.
Part of the point is that the gap in the middle often doesn't matter. I've hung around the Stanford crowd and as I enter my thirties I am awestruck by the opportunities they have regardless of what they have done since graduation. The credential is almost all that matters, as long as they dont mess up massively.
A common path is:
Graduate Stanford => Work at Mckinsey => Get hired into VC.
Graduate Stanford => Raise 15 Million dollar series A with your buddy => Doesn't matter what happens you will end up rich.
It's not a cynical opinion, I have seen it myself and I am doing very well for myself. I worked under an Economics PhD who was the number one in his class (top 5 phd program) and graduated top of his undergrad at UPenn. His incompetence relative to his credentials shattered my respect for the way that we allocate positions of power
>The credential is almost all that matters, as long as they dont mess up massively.
Maybe the west coast is different but everyone I know (including a fair number of people who went to Harvard) who's in any position of power didn't have "tool around doing whatever and don't F up" as their career summary until that point. They had success upon success. While some of them didn't necessarily choose big grand things to spend that time doing, they were all successful at it. Nobody just went with the flow.
The "not bad but not great either" people who were just lucky enough to have opportunity early on but don't have the skill to keep turning the opportunity into success (or just want to chill and raise a family) tend to seem shoehorned onto career paths that dead end somewhere in middle management.
I'm familiar with this path as well, and have myself also probably benefited significantly from a slightly lower tier version of it.
I think the issue is more that we have a lot of positive feedback cycles/signal boosting that occur based on early career opportunities. I don't think research fraud is necessarily part of it though, because once you're accepted into a PhD program at a top program you're probably going to graduate anyway; same with undergrad. But the signal boosting is very real, and I find it especially problematic given how much luck there is in things like getting into a certain college.
Of every 2,000 graduating seniors at Stanford every year, far less than 1% end up in top consulting companies. Even fewer raise a Series A 2-3 years out of school. I am personally not so shocked that these individuals end up succeeding at other social games. They have a track record of doing so.
What about GSB? I think 20% of their students hail from MBB, same as with HBS.
I'd imagine that these to-be MBA-holders will seek positions at less grind-y places. Would not surprise me if a lot of them went to join VC firms, or product manager jobs at larger firms, before VC.
I think most people who raise series A and then fail don't get rich. I've certainly known people who raised more than that, couldn't make the business work and then wound up personally bankrupt.
That some aspects of the self-fulfilling nepotistic bureaucracies are meritocratic begs the question if those meritocratic elements only exist to justify the nepotism, and indirectly, the gatekeeping meritocracy.
> it's certainly possible they've lied and cheated their entire career but it's definitely less likely they'll make it that far that way.
The number of people who make "correct, active decisions" is vanishingly small.
It's less they've cheated than "Did you really make correct decisions or did your coin just come up heads 8 times in a row?" Other people may have been as smart or smarter, but if the coin flip went tails, they get politically hammered.
Success has a large part of "survivor bias" to it.
See sibling comment. I agree there is a lot of survivorship bias but the reality is more like the first coin flip has a 25% chance and all the subsequent ones are closer to like 80-90% because there are a lot of positive feedback mechanisms you can take advantage of to maximize early career advantages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_R._Orszag
(NOTE: NOT suggesting he cheated, just noting that lots of people have fast-tracks pre-planned for them w/o the hassle of working their way up.)
Not quite running the FED, but look at the years, pretty close.
Orszag earned an A.B. summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University in 1991 after completing an 80-page long senior thesis titled "Congressional Oversight of the Federal Reserve: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives."[11] He then received a M.Sc. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1997) in economics from the London School of Economics.
He served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy (1997–1998), and as Senior Economist and Senior Adviser on the Council of Economic Advisers (1995–1996) during the Clinton administration.
Director of the OMB by 2008.
He was "Senior Advisor" before even graduating.
He was a WH Director within 10yrs. Three years later, he was Vice Chairman of a global bank (Citigroup).
Presumably once those people are in such high-power positions, they also have a track record of real accomplishments behind them; it's certainly possible they've lied and cheated their entire career but it's definitely less likely they'll make it that far that way.