Determinants of Success: Merit, Connections, Luck

As illustrated by my personal quest to enter Moscow University

In the previous post, we looked at how young elite aspirants in China get on the Stairway to Heaven. The goal is to be accepted into one of the top Chinese universities. But what happens next, once they graduate? This will be the topic of my next post, but before continuing with China’s case, let’s talk more generally about factors determining success in climbing up social hierarchies. And, to make it more concrete, I’ll appeal to my personal experience with these factors in my quest to enter the university when I was still living in the USSR — 50 years ago.

In their book The Highest Exam, Jia and Li, following standard sociological literature, identify three such factors: merit, connections, and luck. The importance of luck is often underestimated. It’s natural for successful people to claim (and even believe) that their achievements are entirely due to their brilliance and hard work. (On this topic, I recommend reading Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank.) But it’s hard to quantify the effect of luck, and in statistical analyses we often have to assign the unexplained, residual variance to this factor.

Merit, on the other hand is, in principle, measurable. Different professions use a variety of metrics to rank people by merit. In academia, which I know well, the department head usually has a point system of assigning merit to each faculty, based on their publications (and how many citations they get), getting research proposals funded, serving on committees, and such. In my department this system was known to the faculty and generally agreed to be fair.

This leaves us connections, which is an important, but not the only component of, more generally, social power. After all, there are four sources of social power. One can advance up the hierarchy by means of coercion, economic power, and persuasion (threatening or intimidating people, paying them off, or talking them over to one’s side). Still, the political or relational form of power — being embedded in a power network — is, of course, most important. The structures and dynamics of social power is a key topic in cliodynamics. I will be talking more in this blog about its role in elite dynamics and overproduction, but for now let’s not worry about this broader context.

One striking feature of the Chinese education system is that merit, or performance, weighs so heavy in university admission. Yes, luck is always present — getting questions on the exam with which one is familiar, avoiding mistakes, etc. And connections (plus wealth) are important in getting into the right schools and securing tutors. But these influences all percolate through the grade you get on the Gaokao.

Having grown up in the Soviet Union and then living in the United States, I can attest that each country has unique features, distinguishing them from China. In the Soviet Union, there were no private schools, all schools were public. But they were not all equal. There was a number of elite schools, with different specializations. For example, after the 7th grade I transferred from the regular neighborhood school to School No. 2, which specialized in math and sciences, and was considered to be the top choice for such schools in Moscow.

For me it was relatively easy. Both my parents had university degrees, and my father was a scientist. I grew up wanting to be a scientist and to use mathematics in my future work. As a result, I simply learned material by voracious reading. I also went to the evening class at the school, which was taught by senior students. I passed the entrance exam without any problems.

My wife went to a school that specialized in languages — one of the top three-four such schools in Moscow. Graduating from an elite school was a huge boost for both of us, helping to get us into the Moscow State University (MSU), the top university in the USSR, as well as contemporary Russia. I studied Biology, my wife was in the Faculty (meaning Division or School) of Philology.

MSU Main Building

Our parents hired tutors for both of us (this is similar to the Chinese case). This was quite a stress on their finances. Thus, wealth, since we didn’t have it, gave us no advantage over other aspirants (of course, we profited from human capital, having a practicing scientist as a parent). Neither did connections.

In fact, in my case connections had, on balance, a negative effect, because by the time I was finishing school and studying to enter the university, my father, who was a dissident, was already fired from his position and was regularly interrogated by the KGB. It was pure luck that this didn’t prevent me getting into the university (unlike many, I readily acknowledge the role of luck in my life and career). Additionally, unlike everybody else, I didn’t join the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), which was thought to be a requirement for the university. As a result, I was the only non-Komsomol member in the Faculty of Biology (and perhaps the whole university).

But my route to the university was not straightforward. The competition was brutal. On my first attempt, I failed to score high enough on the entrance exams. In the USSR there was no general exam, like Gaokao. Instead, in those times your score was the sum of five components: the average grade from the school final exams, plus grades from four University entrance exams.

Having failed entering the university, I had a second chance to try for an “institute” (at that time only one tertiary school in a city could be designated as university, the rest of them were called institutes of this or that). We decided to try for the Second Medical Institute, the Division of Biomathematics. Only later we learned that this was a terrible mistake, because all student places in this division were assigned when children were still in their fifth grade. Children were ranked by the positions of their parents in the Soviet hierarchy, and someone like me, who had an “anti-ranking” had no chance. I actually still don’t understand why this division was so popular among the Soviet elites.

The very first exam was Math, which weirdly took the oral, rather than the usual written form. This mystery was soon dispelled, when the examiners began posing really tough questions to me, got me flustered (I was just a kid), and soon enough they failed me and that was the end of it. Keep in mind that I was always friends with math and I graduated from a school where math was taught at the college level. This is how I got my first personal encounter with the importance of connections, or “blat” as it was known then (and still is now).

To my Soviet friends, my experience in trying to enter this college, where blat ruled all, was an indication of extreme naivete by my parents, who should have known better. Partly this is true, but also partly this was a result of the kind of person my father was. He was a man of honor and integrity (which is how he ended up dissident in the Soviet Union), and actually, now that I am thinking about it in retrospect, a bit of a saint. (To be clear, I don’t blame him at all for this fiasco and have no regrets that the fates assigned me such a wonderful father.)

Next year I managed to score high enough and was admitted to the MSU Faculty of Biology. There was a lot of luck involved — I didn’t get drafted and the KGB clearly never issued explicit instructions to prevent me from being accepted (in which case I would be toast). Somehow I slipped in.

Overall, life in the late Soviet Union wasn’t that bad (despite the “evil empire” propaganda). Connections — blat — were all important. Some institutes were completely closed to anybody “unconnected.” The one I failed to get in was one, but most such “forbidden” institutes were those that trained for professions in Foreign Affairs, which were extremely desirable for the children of the Soviet elites. At the same time, it was quite possible for an unconnected person to get into the Number 1 University (MSU), as happened to my wife and me (eventually). Growing up in Moscow in a scientific family, of course, was a huge advantage.

There are some similarities with the situation in China, in particular, the importance of living in the capital. But China doesn’t have the same system of specialized elite schools like the Soviet Union had. There are functional equivalents, such as “key schools”; as well, many regular high schools run specialized classes. But in China wealth plays a much greater role than in the late Soviet Union. There is a large “private ecosystem” that coaches students for exams and Olympiads, if parents can afford to pay (quite a lot). On the other hand, no amount of wealth or connections can guarantee a high grade on the Gaokao, whereas in the late Soviet Union entrance exams were much easier to manipulate (as I experienced personally).

---

Notes on the margin: I am currently in Morocco, attending the Cultural Evolution Conference. Next week I will continue with the Stairway to Heaven series, where we will look into how merit and connections influence careers of the Chinese mandarins.