The course of people's lives in the US now seems to be determined less by credentials and more by performance than it was 25 years ago. Where you go to college still matters, but not like it used to.

What happened?

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly.

I couldn't help but think of copyright extensions when I read this passage.

Paul Graham just finished Outliers and figured he could turn it into a story about Y Combinator.

Let's think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.

Daniel Lemire:

Paul writes good essays, but they are thin on research.

Recently:

Although merit varies widely in many fields, only a few have developed effective methods of performance evaluation.

Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.

From the archive:

The Artemis archetype represents a capacity for resisting the fall into 'Organization Man' or the 'Organizational Society', which uses patterns of rewards, sanctions and other inducements to achieve social conformity. Symbolic management again represents an important ideological tool in the desire to inculcate images for social compliance and the internalization of corporate values and goals. The Artemis archetype, therefore, is important in the contemporary era for preserving individual integrity and difference.

From The Organization Man:

An ideal of individualism which denies the obligations of man to others is manifestly impossible in a society such as ours, and it is a credit to our wisdom that while we preached it, we never fully practiced it.

But in searching for that elusive middle of the road, we have gone very far afield, and in our attention to making organization work we have come close to deifying it. We are describing its defects as virtues and denying that there is--or should be--a conflict between the individual and organization. This denial is bad for the organization. It is worse for the individual. What it does, in soothing him, is to rob him of the intellectual armor he so badly needs. For the more power organization has over him, the more he needs to recognize the area where he must assert himself against it. And this, almost because we have made organization life so equable, has become excruciatingly difficult.