The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800

>”human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children”

That doesn’t sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad?

Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?

It seems like the system of “nepotism” the paper describes is not bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes that when passing occupation from father to son would be inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less

Here's an interesting extract:

> We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.

This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708

A very related article:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04936-1

>Nobel laureates cluster together. 696 of the 727 winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics belong to one single academic family tree. 668 trace their ancestry to Emmanuel Stupanus, 228 to Lord Rayleigh (physics, 1904). Craig Mello (medicine, 2006) counts 51 Nobelists among his ancestors. Chemistry laureates have the most Nobel ancestors and descendants, economics laureates the fewest. Chemistry is the central discipline. Its Nobelists have trained and are trained by Nobelists in other fields. Nobelists in physics (medicine) have trained (by) others. Economics stands apart. Openness to other disciplines is the same in recent and earlier times. The familial concentration of Nobelists is lower now than it used to be.

"examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence."

Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism.

I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood.

Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.

The link is to a footnote in the paper. A better link is:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-024-09244-0

I think many of the posters defending nepotism are missing a very important issue. Which is that it is bad for diversity and may be a factor limiting the participation of some ethnic groups in academia

nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children

but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or something like that)

> the gap in science that emerged during the Counter-Reformation was enormous, lasted centuries

Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way above the Brits, that's for sure.

If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself. Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country, had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia [1]:

> He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent.

Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a Catholic canon.

So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most respected economists in the history of the dismal science were actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of their times in many domains of economics.

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In the age of unlimited free flow of information, it is quite ridiculous that academic institutions still exist - unless their purpose is something else than studies. Education as privilege laundering has pretty much played out its part, since degrees are much more accessible to the lower born classes who were never supposed to have access to the same easy and well paying careers as the rich.