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By the end of World War II, however, American corporations were facing severe talent shortages. Their senior executives were growing old, and a dearth of hiring from the Depression through the war had resulted in a shortfall of able, well-trained managers. Finding people who had the potential to rise quickly through the ranks became an overriding preoccupation of American businesses. They began to devise a formal hiring-and-management system based in part on new studies of human behavior, and in part on military techniques developed during both world wars, when huge mobilization efforts and mass casualties created the need to get the right people into the right roles as efficiently as possible. By the 1950s, it was not unusual for companies to spend days with young applicants for professional jobs, conducting a battery of tests, all with an eye toward corner-office potential.

But companies abandoned their hard-edged practices for another important reason: many of their methods of evaluation turned out not to be very scientific.

this regime, so widespread in corporate America at mid-century, had almost disappeared by 1990. “I think an HR person from the late 1970s would be stunned to see how casually companies hire now,”

Many factors explain the change, he said, and then he ticked off a number of them: Increased job-switching has made it less important and less economical for companies to test so thoroughly. A heightened focus on short-term financial results has led to deep cuts in corporate functions that bear fruit only in the long term. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which exposed companies to legal liability for discriminatory hiring practices, has made HR departments wary of any broadly applied and clearly scored test that might later be shown to be systematically biased.

about a quarter of the country’s corporations were using similar tests to evaluate managers and junior executives, usually to assess whether they were ready for bigger roles.

Aptitude, skills, personal history, psychological stability, discretion, loyalty—companies at the time felt they had a need (and the right) to look into them all. That ambit is expanding once again, and this is undeniably unsettling. Should the ideas of scientists be dismissed because of the way they play a game? Should job candidates be ranked by what their Web habits say about them? Should the “data signature” of natural leaders play a role in promotion? These are all live questions today, and they prompt heavy concerns: that we will cede one of the most subtle and human of skills, the evaluation of the gifts and promise of other people, to machines; that the models will get it wrong; that some people will never get a shot in the new workforce.

Knack makes app-based video games, among them Dungeon Scrawl, a quest game requiring the player to navigate a maze and solve puzzles, and Wasabi Waiter, which involves delivering the right sushi to the right customer at an increasingly crowded happy hour. These games aren’t just for play: they’ve been designed by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and data scientists to suss out human potential. Play one of them for just 20 minutes, says Guy Halfteck, Knack’s founder, and you’ll generate several megabytes of data, exponentially more than what’s collected by the SAT or a personality test. How long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, how you solve problems—all of these factors and many more are logged as you play, and then are used to analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality. The end result, Halfteck says, is a high-resolution portrait of your psyche and intellect, and an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator.

When the results came back, Haringa recalled, his heart began to beat a little faster. Without ever seeing the ideas, without meeting or interviewing the people who’d proposed them, without knowing their title or background or academic pedigree, Knack’s algorithm had identified the people whose ideas had panned out. The top 10 percent of the idea generators as predicted by Knack were in fact those who’d gone furthest in the process.

What Knack is doing, Haringa told me, “is almost like a paradigm shift.” It offers a way for his GameChanger unit to avoid wasting time on the 80 people out of 100—nearly all of whom look smart, well-trained, and plausible on paper—whose ideas just aren’t likely to work out.

He has encouraged the company’s HR executives to think about applying the games to the recruitment and evaluation of all professional workers.

scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.”

consider the alternative. A mountain of scholarly literature has shown that the intuitive way we now judge professional potential is rife with snap judgments and hidden biases, rooted in our upbringing or in deep neurological connections that doubtless served us well on the savanna but would seem to have less bearing on the world of work.

We may like to think that society has become more enlightened since those days, and in many ways it has, but our biases are mostly unconscious, and they can run surprisingly deep. Consider race. For a 2004 study called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” the economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand put white-sounding names (Emily Walsh, Greg Baker) or black-sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones) on similar fictitious résumés, which they then sent out to a variety of companies in Boston and Chicago. To get the same number of callbacks, they learned, they needed to either send out half again as many résumés with black names as those with white names, or add eight extra years of relevant work experience to the résumés with black names.

a sociologist at Northwestern, spent parts of the three years from 2006 to 2008 interviewing professionals from elite investment banks, consultancies, and law firms about how they recruited, interviewed, and evaluated candidates, and concluded that among the most important factors driving their hiring recommendations were—wait for it—shared leisure interests.

Lacking “reliable predictors of future performance,” Rivera writes, “assessors purposefully used their own experiences as models of merit.” Former college athletes “typically prized participation in varsity sports above all other types of involvement.” People who’d majored in engineering gave engineers a leg up, believing they were better prepared.

the prevailing system of hiring and management in this country involves a level of dysfunction that should be inconceivable in an economy as sophisticated as ours. Recent survey data collected by the Corporate Executive Board, for example, indicate that nearly a quarter of all new hires leave their company within a year of their start date, and that hiring managers wish they’d never extended an offer to one out of every five members on their team

In the late 1990s, as these assessments shifted from paper to digital formats and proliferated, data scientists started doing massive tests of what makes for a successful customer-support technician or salesperson. This has unquestionably improved the quality of the workers at many firms.

In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention

the idea that hiring was a science fell out of favor. But now it’s coming back, thanks to new technologies and methods of analysis that are cheaper, faster, and much-wider-ranging than what we had before

Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”

Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building)

There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people

When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”

what most excites him are the possibilities that arise from monitoring the entire life cycle of a worker at any given company.

Mullainathan expressed amazement at how little most creative and professional workers (himself included) know about what makes them effective or ineffective in the office. Most of us can’t even say with any certainty how long we’ve spent gathering information for a given project, or our pattern of information-gathering, never mind know which parts of the pattern should be reinforced, and which jettisoned. As Mullainathan put it, we don’t know our own “production function.”

What begins with an online screening test for entry-level workers ends with the transformation of nearly every aspect of hiring, performance assessment, and management.

I turned to Sandy Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT. In recent years, Pentland has pioneered the use of specialized electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees’ interactions as they go about their days. The badges capture all sorts of information about formal and informal conversations: their length; the tone of voice and gestures of the people involved; how much those people talk, listen, and interrupt; the degree to which they demonstrate empathy and extroversion; and more. Each badge generates about 100 data points a minute.

he tried the badges out on about 2,500 people, in 21 different organizations, and learned a number of interesting lessons. About a third of team performance, he discovered, can usually be predicted merely by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. (Too many is as much of a problem as too few.) Using data gathered by the badges, he was able to predict which teams would win a business-plan contest, and which workers would (rightly) say they’d had a “productive” or “creative” day. Not only that, but he claimed that his researchers had discovered the “data signature” of natural leaders, whom he called “charismatic connectors” and all of whom, he reported, circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen at least as much as they talk.

His group is developing apps to allow team members to view their own metrics more or less in real time, so that they can see, relative to the benchmarks of highly successful employees, whether they’re getting out of their offices enough, or listening enough, or spending enough time with people outside their own team.

Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E‑mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.

people analytics will ultimately have a vastly larger impact on the economy than the algorithms that now trade on Wall Street or figure out which ads to show us. He reminded me that we’ve witnessed this kind of transformation before in the history of management science. Near the turn of the 20th century, both Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford famously paced the factory floor with stopwatches, to improve worker efficiency.

“The quantities of data that those earlier generations were working with,” he said, “were infinitesimal compared to what’s available now. There’s been a real sea change in the past five years, where the quantities have just grown so large—petabytes, exabytes, zetta—that you start to be able to do things you never could before.”

People analytics will unquestionably provide many workers with more options and more power. Gild, for example, helps companies find undervalued software programmers, working indirectly to raise those people’s pay. Other companies are doing similar work. One called Entelo, for instance, specializes in using algorithms to identify potentially unhappy programmers who might be receptive to a phone cal

He sees it not only as a boon to a business’s productivity and overall health but also as an important new tool that individual employees can use for self-improvement: a sort of radically expanded The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, custom-written for each of us, or at least each type of job, in the workforce.

the most exotic development in people analytics today is the creation of algorithms to assess the potential of all workers, across all companies, all the time.

The way Gild arrives at these scores is not simple. The company’s algorithms begin by scouring the Web for any and all open-source code, and for the coders who wrote it. They evaluate the code for its simplicity, elegance, documentation, and several other factors, including the frequency with which it’s been adopted by other programmers. For code that was written for paid projects, they look at completion times and other measures of productivity. Then they look at questions and answers on social forums such as Stack Overflow, a popular destination for programmers seeking advice on challenging projects. They consider how popular a given coder’s advice is, and how widely that advice ranges.

The algorithms go further still. They assess the way coders use language on social networks from LinkedIn to Twitter; the company has determined that certain phrases and words used in association with one another can distinguish expert programmers from less skilled ones. Gild knows these phrases and words are associated with good coding because it can correlate them with its evaluation of open-source code, and with the language and online behavior of programmers in good positions at prestigious companies.

having made those correlations, Gild can then score programmers who haven’t written open-source code at all, by analyzing the host of clues embedded in their online histories. They’re not all obvious, or easy to explain. Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist, told me that one solid predictor of strong coding is an affinity for a particular Japanese manga site.

Gild’s CEO, Sheeroy Desai, told me he believes his company’s approach can be applied to any occupation characterized by large, active online communities, where people post and cite individual work, ask and answer professional questions, and get feedback on projects. Graphic design is one field that the company is now looking at, and many scientific, technical, and engineering roles might also fit the bill. Regardless of their occupation, most people leave “data exhaust” in their wake, a kind of digital aura that can reveal a lot about a potential hire.

professionally relevant personality traits can be judged effectively merely by scanning Facebook feeds and photos. LinkedIn, of course, captures an enormous amount of professional data and network information, across just about every profession. A controversial start-up called Klout has made its mission the measurement and public scoring of people’s online social influence.

Now the two companies are working together to marry pre-hire assessments to an increasing array of post-hire data: about not only performance and duration of service but also who trained the employees; who has managed them; whether they were promoted to a supervisory role, and how quickly; how they performed in that role; and why they eventually left.

Over time, better job-matching technologies are likely to begin serving people directly, helping them see more clearly which jobs might suit them and which companies could use their skills. In the future, Gild plans to let programmers see their own profiles and take skills challenges to try to improve their scores. It intends to show them its estimates of their market value, too, and to recommend coursework that might allow them to raise their scores even more. Not least, it plans to make accessible the scores of typical hires at specific companies, so that software engineers can better see the profile they’d need to land a particular job

Knack, for its part, is making some of its video games available to anyone with a smartphone, so people can get a better sense of their strengths, and of the fields in which their strengths would be most valued. (Palo Alto High School recently adopted the games to help students assess careers.) Ultimately, the company hopes to act as matchmaker between a large network of people who play its games (or have ever played its games) and a widening roster of corporate clients, each with its own specific profile for any given type of job.

When I began my reporting for this story, I was worried that people analytics, if it worked at all, would only widen the divergent arcs of our professional lives, further gilding the path of the meritocratic elite from cradle to grave, and shutting out some workers more definitively. But I now believe the opposite is likely to happen, and that we’re headed toward a labor market that’s fairer to people at every stage of their careers

For decades, as we’ve assessed people’s potential in the professional workforce, the most important piece of data—the one that launches careers or keeps them grounded—has been educational background: typically, whether and where people went to college, and how they did there. Over the past couple of generations, colleges and universities have become the gatekeepers to a prosperous life. A degree has become a signal of intelligence and conscientiousness, one that grows stronger the more selective the school and the higher a student’s GPA, that is easily understood by employers, and that, until the advent of people analytics, was probably unrivaled in its predictive powers.

the limitations of that signal—the way it degrades with age, its overall imprecision, its many inherent biases, its extraordinary cost—are obvious. “Academic environments are artificial environments,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, told The New York Times in June. “People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment,” which is often quite different from the workplace.

because one’s college history is such a crucial signal in our labor market, perfectly able people who simply couldn’t sit still in a classroom at the age of 16, or who didn’t have their act together at 18, or who chose not to go to graduate school at 22, routinely get left behind for good. That such early factors so profoundly affect career arcs and hiring decisions made two or three decades later is, on its face, absurd.

I spoke with managers at a lot of companies who are using advanced analytics to reevaluate and reshape their hiring, and nearly all of them told me that their research is leading them toward pools of candidates who didn’t attend college—for tech jobs, for high-end sales positions, for some managerial roles. In some limited cases, this is because their analytics revealed no benefit whatsoever to hiring people with college degrees; in other cases, and more often, it’s because they revealed signals that function far better than college history,

Google, too, is hiring a growing number of nongraduates. Many of the people I talked with reported that when it comes to high-paying and fast-track jobs, they’re reducing their preference for Ivy Leaguers and graduates of other highly selective schools.

This process is just beginning. Online courses are proliferating, and so are online markets that involve crowd-sourcing. Both arenas offer new opportunities for workers to build skills and showcase competence. Neither produces the kind of instantly recognizable signals of potential that a degree from a selective college, or a first job at a prestigious firm, might. That’s a problem for traditional hiring managers, because sifting through lots of small signals is so difficult and time-consuming.

all of these new developments raise philosophical questions. As professional performance becomes easier to measure and see, will we become slaves to our own status and potential, ever-focused on the metrics that tell us how and whether we are measuring up? Will too much knowledge about our limitations hinder achievement and stifle our dreams? All I can offer in response to these questions, ironically, is my own gut sense, which leads me to feel cautiously optimistic.

Google’s understanding of the promise of analytics is probably better than anybody else’s, and the company has been changing its hiring and management practices as a result of its ongoing analyses. (Brainteasers are no longer used in interviews, because they do not correlate with job success; GPA is not considered for anyone more than two years out of school, for the same reason—the list goes on.) But for all of Google’s technological enthusiasm, these same practices are still deeply human. A real, live person looks at every résumé the company receives. Hiring decisions are made by committee and are based in no small part on opinions formed during structured interviews.

In the process, fit has become a catchall used to justify hiring people who are similar to decision makers and rejecting people who are not.

The concept of fit first gained traction in the 1980s. The original idea was that if companies hired individuals whose personalities and values — and not just their skills — meshed with an organization’s strategy, workers would feel more attached to their jobs, work harder and stay longer.

in many organizations, fit has gone rogue. I saw this firsthand while researching the hiring practices of the country’s top investment banks, management consultancies and law firms. I interviewed 120 decision makers and spent nine months observing

While résumés (and connections) influenced which applicants made it into the interview room, interviewers’ perceptions of fit strongly shaped who walked out with job offers.

Crucially, though, for these gatekeepers, fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about personal fit. In these time- and team-intensive jobs, professionals at all levels of seniority reported wanting to hire people with whom they enjoyed hanging out and could foresee developing close relationships with

To judge fit, interviewers commonly relied on chemistry. “

Many used the “airport test.” As a managing director at an investment bank put it, “Would I want to be stuck in an airport in Minneapolis in a snowstorm with them?”

interviewers were primarily interested in new hires whose hobbies, hometowns and biographies matched their own. Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit; sharing a love of teamwork or a passion for pleasing clients was not

it has become a common feature of American corporate culture. Employers routinely ask job applicants about their hobbies and what they like to do for fun, while a complementary self-help industry informs white-collar job seekers that chemistry, not qualifications, will win them an offer.

Selection based on personal fit can keep demographic and cultural diversity low

In the elite firms I studied, the types of shared experiences associated with fit typically required large investments of time and money.

Class-biased definitions of fit are one reason investment banks, management consulting firms and law firms are dominated by people from the highest socioeconomic backgrounds

Also, whether the industry is finance, high-tech or fashion, a good fit in most American corporations still tends to be stereotypically masculine.

Perhaps most important, it is easy to mistake rapport for skill. Just as they erroneously believe that they can accurately tell when someone is lying, people tend to be overly confident in their ability to spot talent. Unstructured interviews, which are the most popular hiring tools for American managers and the primary way they judge fit, are notoriously poor predictors of job performance.

Organizations that use cultural fit for competitive advantage tend to favor concrete tools like surveys and structured interviews that systematically test behaviors associated with increased performance and employee retention.

For managers who want to use cultural fit in a more productive way, I have several suggestions.

First, communicate a clear and consistent idea of what the organization’s culture is (and is not) to potential employees. Second, make sure the definition of cultural fit is closely aligned with business goals. Ideally, fit should be based on data-driven analysis of what types of values, traits and behaviors actually predict on-the-job success. Third, create formal procedures like checklists for measuring fit, so that assessment is not left up to the eyes (and extracurriculars) of the beholder.

But cultural fit has become a new form of discrimination that keeps demographic and cultural diversity down

Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate add up the six scores ... Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better — try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking.

than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as "I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw."

This corruption map of France seems to be a local initiative. Similar maps of other countries would make for equally compelling reading. Except of course the corruption maps of Somalia, South Sudan and North Korea – they would be totally blank.

The lack of disclosure surrounding Hacker’s List is one reason the hackers-for-hire service has drawn considerable scorn from security consultants, who say the website is an invitation to illegal and unethical behavior.

It’s inappropriate for someone like Mr. Tendell, who calls himself a “white hat hacker,” to be involved in any way with an operation that potentially is profiting from illegal activity, Mr. Solomonson said.

it’s impossible to know for sure, but, according to one publisher’s estimate, book sales in the U.S. now make up no more than seven per cent of the company’s roughly seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue.

A monopoly is dangerous because it concentrates so much economic power, but in the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.

“The key to understanding Amazon is the hiring process,” one former employee said. “You’re not hired to do a particular job—you’re hired to be an Amazonian. Lots of managers had to take the Myers-Briggs personality tests. Eighty per cent of them came in two or three similar categories, and Bezos is the same: introverted, detail-oriented, engineer-type personality. Not musicians, designers, salesmen. The vast majority fall within the same personality type—people who graduate at the top of their class at M.I.T. and have no idea what to say to a woman in a bar.”

According to Marcus, Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” Publishers kept no data on customers, making their bets on books a matter of instinct rather than metrics. They were full of inefficiences, starting with overpriced Manhattan offices.

For a smaller house, Amazon’s total discount can go as high as sixty per cent, which cuts deeply into already slim profit margins. Because Amazon manages its inventory so well, it often buys books from small publishers with the understanding that it can’t return them, for an even deeper discount

According to one insider, around 2008—when the company was selling far more than books, and was making twenty billion dollars a year in revenue, more than the combined sales of all other American bookstores—Amazon began thinking of content as central to its business. Authors started to be considered among the company’s most important customers. By then, Amazon had lost much of the market in selling music and videos to Apple and Netflix, and its relations with publishers were deteriorating

In its drive for profitability, Amazon did not raise retail prices; it simply squeezed its suppliers harder, much as Walmart had done with manufacturers. Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees and better shipping terms; publishers knew that they would stop being favored by the site’s recommendation algorithms if they didn’t comply. Eventually, they all did.

Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”

ithout dropping co-op fees entirely, Amazon simplified its system: publishers were asked to hand over a percentage of their previous year’s sales on the site, as “marketing development funds.”

The figure keeps rising, though less for the giant pachyderms than for the sickly gazelles. According to the marketing executive, the larger houses, which used to pay two or three per cent of their net sales through Amazon, now relinquish five to seven per cent of gross sales, pushing Amazon’s percentage discount on books into the mid-fifties. Random House currently gives Amazon an effective discount of around fifty-three per cent.

In December, 1999, at the height of the dot-com mania, Time named Bezos its Person of the Year. “Amazon isn’t about technology or even commerce,” the breathless cover article announced. “Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play.” Yet this was the moment, Marcus said, when “content” people were “on the way out.”

In 2004, he set up a lab in Silicon Valley that would build Amazon’s first piece of consumer hardware: a device for reading digital books. According to Stone’s book, Bezos told the executive running the project, “Proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”

By 2010, Amazon controlled ninety per cent of the market in digital books—a dominance that almost no company, in any industry, could claim. Its prohibitively low prices warded off competition

Lately, digital titles have levelled off at about thirty per cent of book sales.

The literary agent Andrew Wylie (whose firm represents me) says, “What Bezos wants is to drag the retail price down as low as he can get it—a dollar-ninety-nine, even ninety-nine cents. That’s the Apple play—‘What we want is traffic through our device, and we’ll do anything to get there.’ ” If customers grew used to paying just a few dollars for an e-book, how long before publishers would have to slash the cover price of all their titles?

As Apple and the publishers see it, the ruling ignored the context of the case: when the key events occurred, Amazon effectively had a monopoly in digital books and was selling them so cheaply that it resembled predatory pricing—a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Since then, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped, levelling off at about sixty-five per cent, with the rest going largely to Apple and to Barnes & Noble, which sells the Nook e-reader. In other words, before the feds stepped in, the agency model introduced competition to the market

But the court’s decision reflected a trend in legal thinking among liberals and conservatives alike, going back to the seventies, that looks at antitrust cases from the perspective of consumers, not producers: what matters is lowering prices, even if that goal comes at the expense of competition. Barry Lynn, a market-policy expert at the New America Foundation, said, “It’s one of the main factors that’s led to massive consolidation.”

The combination of ceaseless innovation and low-wage drudgery makes Amazon the epitome of a successful New Economy company. It’s hiring as fast as it can—nearly thirty thousand employees last year.

brick-and-mortar retailers employ forty-seven people for every ten million dollars in revenue earned; Amazon employs fourteen.

Since the arrival of the Kindle, the tension between Amazon and the publishers has become an open battle. The conflict reflects not only business antagonism amid technological change but a division between the two coasts, with different cultural styles and a philosophical disagreement about what techies call “disruption.”

Bezos told Charlie Rose, “Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.”

n Grandinetti’s view, the Kindle “has helped the book business make a more orderly transition to a mixed print and digital world than perhaps any other medium.” Compared with people who work in music, movies, and newspapers, he said, authors are well positioned to thrive. The old print world of scarcity—with a limited number of publishers and editors selecting which manuscripts to publish, and a limited number of bookstores selecting which titles to carry—is yielding to a world of digital abundance. Grandinetti told me that, in these new circumstances, a publisher’s job “is to build a megaphone.”

it offers an extremely popular self-publishing platform. Authors become Amazon partners, earning up to seventy per cent in royalties, as opposed to the fifteen per cent that authors typically make on hardcovers. Bezos touts the biggest successes, such as Theresa Ragan, whose self-published thrillers and romances have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But one survey found that half of all self-published authors make less than five hundred dollars a year.

The business term for all this clear-cutting is “disintermediation”: the elimination of the “gatekeepers,” as Bezos calls the professionals who get in the customer’s way. There’s a populist inflection to Amazon’s propaganda, an argument against élitist institutions and for “the democratization of the means of production”—a common line of thought in the West Coast tech world

“Book publishing is a very human business, and Amazon is driven by algorithms and scale,” Sargent told me. When a house gets behind a new book, “well over two hundred people are pushing your book all over the place, handing it to people, talking about it. A mass of humans, all in one place, generating tremendous energy—that’s the magic potion of publishing. . . . That’s pretty hard to replicate in Amazon’s publishing world, where they have hundreds of thousands of titles.”

By producing its own original work, Amazon can sell more devices and sign up more Prime members—a major source of revenue. While the company was building the

Like the publishing venture, Amazon Studios set out to make the old “gatekeepers”—in this case, Hollywood agents and executives—obsolete. “We let the data drive what to put in front of customers,” Carr told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have tastemakers deciding what our customers should read, listen to, and watch.”

book publishers have been consolidating for several decades, under the ownership of media conglomerates like News Corporation, which squeeze them for profits, or holding companies such as Rivergroup, which strip them to service debt. The effect of all this corporatization, as with the replacement of independent booksellers by superstores, has been to privilege the blockbuster.

Publishers sometimes pass on this cost to authors, by redefining royalties as a percentage of the publisher’s receipts, not of the book’s list price. Recently, publishers say, Amazon began demanding an additional payment, amounting to approximately one per cent of net sales

the long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don’t read as many books as they used to—they are too busy doing other things with their devices—but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces.

he digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while r

Amazon believes that its approach encourages ever more people to tell their stories to ever more people, and turns writers into entrepreneurs; the price per unit might be cheap, but the higher number of units sold, and the accompanying royalties, will make authors wealthier

In Friedman’s view, selling digital books at low prices will democratize reading: “What do you want as an author—to sell books to as few people as possible for as much as possible, or for as little as possible to as many readers as possible?”

The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.

These trends point toward what the literary agent called “the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.” A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy.

“If they did, in my opinion they would save the industry. They’d lose thirty per cent of their sales, but they would have an additional thirty per cent for every copy they sold, because they’d be selling directly to consumers. The industry thinks of itself as Procter & Gamble*. What gave publishers the idea that this was some big goddam business? It’s not—it’s a tiny little business, selling to a bunch of odd people who read.”

Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? ♦

The internet stripped institutions of their gatekeeping powers, thus making it possible for anyone to publish—and making it inevitable that many writers would create audiences independent of media institutions.

The internet destroyed the apprenticeship system that had dominated American journalism for generations. Under the old system, an aspiring writer took a low-level job at a media institution and worked her way up the ladder until she was trusted enough to write.

Under the new system, people started their careers writing outside of institutions—on personal blogs—and then were hired by institutions on the strength of their work.

In practice, these outsiders were primarily hired not on the merits of their work, but because of the size of their audience.

what it really did was transform the nature of audiences. Once the internet existed it became inevitable that institutions would see their power to hold audiences wane while individual writers would have their power to build personal audiences explode.

this meant that institutions would begin to hire based on the size of a writer’s audience. Which meant that writers’ overriding professional imperative was to build an audience, since that was the key to advancement.

Twitter killed the blog and lowered the barrier to entry for new writers from “Must have a laptop, the ability to navigate WordPress, and the capacity to write paragraphs” to “Do you have an iPhone and the ability to string 20 words together? With or without punctuation?”

If you were able to build a big enough audience on Twitter, then media institutions fell all over themselves trying to hire you—because they believed that you would then bring your audience to them.2

If you were a writer for the Washington Post, or Wired, or the Saginaw Express, you had to build your own audience not to advance, but to avoid being replaced.

For journalists, audience wasn’t just status—it was professional capital. In fact, it was the most valuable professional capital.

Everything we just talked about was driven by the advertising model of media, which prized pageviews and unique users above all else. About a decade ago, that model started to fray around the edges,3 which caused a shift to the subscription model.

Today, if you’re a subscription publication, what Twitter gives you is growth opportunity. Twitter’s not the only channel for growth—there are lots of others, from TikTok to LinkedIn to YouTube to podcasts to search. But it’s an important one.

Twitter’s attack on Substack was an attack on the subscription model of journalism itself.

since media has already seen the ad-based model fall apart, it’s not clear what the alternative will be if the subscription model dies, too.

All of which is why having a major social media platform run by a capricious bad actor is suboptimal.

And why I think anyone else who’s concerned about the future of media ought to start hedging against Twitter. None of the direct hedges—Post, Mastodon, etc.—are viable yet. But tech history shows that these shifts can happen fairly quickly.

“What companies are looking for,” says Mary Jo King, the president of the National Résumé Writers’ Association, “is someone who can be all, do all, and pivot on a dime to solve any problem.”

The phenomenon is sped by automation, which usurps routine tasks, leaving employees to handle the nonroutine and unanticipated—and the continued advance of which throws the skills employers value into flux

Or, for that matter, on the relevance of the question What do you want to be when you grow up?

By 2020, a 2016 World Economic Forum report predicted, “more than one-third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations” will not have been seen as crucial to the job when the report was published

I asked John Sullivan, a prominent Silicon Valley talent adviser, why should anyone take the time to master anything at all? “You shouldn’t!” he replied.

Minimal manning—and the evolution of the economy more generally—requires a different kind of worker, with not only different acquired skills but different inherent abilities

It has implications for the nature and utility of a college education, for the path of careers, for inequality and employability—even for the generational divide.

Then, in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld arrived at the Pentagon. The new secretary of defense carried with him a briefcase full of ideas from the corporate world: downsizing, reengineering, “transformational” technologies. Almost immediately, what had been an experimental concept became an article of faith

But once cadets got into actual command environments, which tend to be fluid and full of surprises, a different picture emerged. “Psychological hardiness”—a construct that includes, among other things, a willingness to explore “multiple possible response alternatives,” a tendency to “see all experience as interesting and meaningful,” and a strong sense of self-confidence—was a better predictor of leadership ability in officers after three years in the field.

Because there really is no such thing as multitasking—just a rapid switching of attention—I began to feel overstrained, put upon, and finally irked by the impossible set of concurrent demands. Shouldn’t someone be giving me a hand here? This, Hambrick explained, meant I was hitting the limits of working memory—basically, raw processing power—which is an important aspect of “fluid intelligence” and peaks in your early 20s. This is distinct from “crystallized intelligence”—the accumulated facts and know-how on your hard drive—which peaks in your 50

Others noticed the change but continued to devote equal attention to all four tasks. Their scores fell. This group, Hambrick found, was high in “conscientiousness”—a trait that’s normally an overwhelming predictor of positive job performance. We like conscientious people because they can be trusted to show up early, double-check the math, fill the gap in the presentation, and return your car gassed up even though the tank was nowhere near empty to begin with. What struck Hambrick as counterintuitive and interesting was that conscientiousness here seemed to correlate with poor performance.

he discovered another correlation in his test: The people who did best tended to score high on “openness to new experience”—a personality trait that is normally not a major job-performance predictor and that, in certain contexts, roughly translates to “distractibility.”

To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker’s formulation, people with this trait are less focused on doing things right, and more likely to wonder whether they’re doing the right things.

High in fluid intelligence, low in experience, not terribly conscientious, open to potential distraction—this is not the classic profile of a winning job candidate. But what if it is the profile of the winning job candidate of the future?

One concerns “grit”—a mind-set, much vaunted these days in educational and professional circles, that allows people to commit tenaciously to doing one thing well

These ideas are inherently appealing; they suggest that dedication can be more important than raw talent, that the dogged and conscientious will be rewarded in the end.

he studied West Point students and graduates.

Traditional measures such as SAT scores and high-school class rank “predicted leader performance in the stable, highly regulated environment of West Point” itself.

It would be supremely ironic if the advance of the knowledge economy had the effect of devaluing knowledge. But that’s what I heard, recurrentl

“Fluid, learning-intensive environments are going to require different traits than classical business environments,” I was told by Frida Polli, a co-founder of an AI-powered hiring platform called Pymetrics. “And they’re going to be things like ability to learn quickly from mistakes, use of trial and error, and comfort with ambiguity.”

“We’re starting to see a big shift,” says Guy Halfteck, a people-analytics expert. “Employers are looking less at what you know and more and more at your hidden potential” to learn new things

advice to employers? Stop hiring people based on their work experience. Because in these environments, expertise can become an obstacle.

“The Curse of Expertise.” The more we invest in building and embellishing a system of knowledge, they found, the more averse we become to unbuilding it.

All too often experts, like the mechanic in LePine’s garage, fail to inspect their knowledge structure for signs of decay. “It just didn’t occur to him,” LePine said, “that he was repeating the same mistake over and over.

The devaluation of expertise opens up ample room for different sorts of mistakes—and sometimes creates a kind of helplessness.

Aboard littoral combat ships, the crew lacks the expertise to carry out some important tasks, and instead has to rely on civilian help

Meanwhile, the modular “plug and fight” configuration was not panning out as hoped. Converting a ship from sub-hunter to minesweeper or minesweeper to surface combatant, it turned out, was a logistical nightmare

So in 2016 the concept of interchangeability was scuttled for a “one ship, one mission” approach, in which the extra 20-plus sailors became permanent crew members

“As equipment breaks, [sailors] are required to fix it without any training,” a Defense Department Test and Evaluation employee told Congress. “Those are not my words. Those are the words of the sailors who were doing the best they could to try to accomplish the missions we gave them in testing.”

These results were, perhaps, predictable given the Navy’s initial, full-throttle approach to minimal manning—and are an object lesson on the dangers of embracing any radical concept without thinking hard enough about the downsides

a world in which mental agility and raw cognitive speed eclipse hard-won expertise is a world of greater exclusion: of older workers, slower learners, and the less socially adept.

if you keep going down this road, you end up with one really expensive ship with just a few people on it who are geniuses … That’s not a future we want to see, because you need a large enough crew to conduct multiple tasks in combat.

hat does all this mean for those of us in the workforce, and those of us planning to enter it? It would be wrong to say that the 10,000-hours-of-deliberate-practice idea doesn’t hold up at all. In some situations, it clearly does

A spinal surgery will not be performed by a brilliant dermatologist. A criminal-defense team will not be headed by a tax attorney. And in tech, the demand for specialized skills will continue to reward expertise handsomely.

But in many fields, the path to success isn’t so clear. The rules keep changing, which means that highly focused practice has a much lower return

In uncertain environments, Hambrick told me, “specialization is no longer the coin of the realm.”

It leaves us with lifelong learning,

I found myself the target of career suggestions. “You need to be a video guy, an audio guy!” the Silicon Valley talent adviser John Sullivan told me, alluding to the demise of print media

I found the prospect of starting over just plain exhausting. Building a professional identity takes a lot of resources—money, time, energy. After it’s built, we expect to reap gains from our investment, and—let’s be honest—even do a bit of coasting. Are we equipped to continually return to apprentice mode? Will this burn us out?

Everybody I met on the Giffords seemed to share that mentality. They regarded every minute on board—even during a routine transit back to port in San Diego Harbor—as a chance to learn something new.

C is to collect a lot of information. Thirty years ago, the challenge was finding information in a card catalog at the library. Now it's, how do we separate the good stuff from the bad stuff?

A is to analyze both sides. Lawyers have to turn the coin over and exhaust counterarguments or we'll lose in court.

So lawyers are trained to look for the gray areas, to look for the questions are not the answers. And if we kind of orient our thinking that way, I think we're less likely to shut down competing points of view.

My argument in the book is, we can feel good about a decision even if we don't get everything that we want. We have to make compromises.

I tell my students, you'll get through the bar. The key is to look for questions and not answers. If you could answer every legal question with a Wikipedia search, there would be no reason to hire lawyers.

Lawyers are hired because there are arguments on both sides, you know? Every Supreme Court decision that is split 6-3, 5-4, that means there were really strong arguments on both sides.

T is, tolerate the fact that you won't get everything you want every time

So we have to be very careful about the source of what you're getting, OK? Is this source neutral? Is this source really care about facts and not so much about an agenda?

Step 3, the collecting information piece. I think it's a new skill for all of us that we are overloaded with information into our phones. We have algorithms that somebody else developed that tailor the information that comes into our phones based on what the computer thinks we already believe

No. 2 - this is the beauty of social media and the internet - you can pull original sources. We can click on the indictment. Click on the new bill that has been proposed in the United States Congress.

then the book explains ways that you can then sort through that information for yourself. Skills are empowering.

Maybe as a replacement for sort of being empowered by being part of a team - a red team versus a blue team - that's been corrosive, I think, in American politics and American society. But arming ourselves with good facts, that leads to self-determination.

MARTINEZ: Now, you've written two other books - "How To Read The Constitution" and "What You Need To Know About Voting" - along with this one, "How To Think Like A Lawyer - And Why.

It kind of makes me think, Kim, that you feel that Americans might be lacking a basic level of civics education or understanding. So what is lacking when it comes to teaching civics or in civics discourse today?

studies have shown that around a third of Americans can't name the three branches of government. But if we don't understand our government, we don't know how to hold our government accountable

Democracies can't stay open if we've got elected leaders that are caring more about entrenching their own power and misinformation than actually preserving democracy by the people. I think that's No. 1.

No. 2 has to do with a value system. We talk about American values - reward for hard work, integrity, honesty. The same value system should apply to who we hire for government positions. And I think Americans have lost that.

in my own life, I'm very careful about who gets to be part of the inner circle because I have a strong value system. Bring that same sense to bear at the voting booth. Don't vote for red versus blue. Vote for people that live your value system

just like the Ukrainians are fighting for their children's democracy, we need to do that as well. And we do that through informing ourselves with good information, tolerating competing points of view and voting - voting, voting, voting - to hold elected leaders accountable if they cross boundaries that matter to us in our own lives.

It’s not that young women aren’t feminists, or don’t care about sexism. For college-age women — Mr. Sanders’s female base — sexism tends to be linked to sex.

Young women are neither ungrateful to their feminist foremothers nor complacent; rather, they are activists for feminist causes that reflect their needs.

College-educated women see only a tiny pay gap in their early- and mid-20s, making 97 cents for every dollar earned by their male colleagues.

That experience starts to change a few more years into the work force. By 35, those same college-educated women are making 15 percent less than their male peers. Women’s earnings peak between ages 35 and 44 and then plateau, while men’s continue to rise.

When women have children, they’re penalized: They’re considered less competent, they’re less likely to be hired for a new job and they’re paid less

one of the few female partners always seemed to be in charge of ordering lunch

For the many women who live at the center of that time crush, Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on the wage gap, paid family leave and universal prekindergarten may be particularly appealing. Mr. Sanders, who also supports paid leave and universal pre-K, takes a different rhetorical tone, usually stressing affordable higher education and universal health care.

I watched as men with little or irrelevant experience were hired and promoted, because they had such great ideas, or they fit in better. “We want a woman,” the conclusion seemed to be, “just not this woman.”

in the now-common refrain about Hillary Clinton: “I want a woman president, just not this woman president.”

a 19-year-old aspiring lawyer who is volunteering for Mr. Sanders today will work for firms with more female partners and live in a world where the wage gap has shrunk. But the trends show that her experience in a decade is unlikely to be that different from mine.

Many more women over 25 are in the work force than those under, and women over 25 also do about twice as much unpaid domestic work as their younger counterparts.

I listened as some of my male colleagues opined on the need to marry a woman who would stay home with the children — that wasn’t sexist, they insisted, because it wasn’t that they thought only women should stay home; it was just that somebody had to, and the years in which they planned on having children would be crucial ones for their own careers.

Child care is just as expensive in many places as sending a kid to public university, but a college kid can get a part-time job. A toddler can’t.”

There are many other reasons women in the 30-and-over cohort may lean toward Mrs. Clinton. They’ve already seen promises of revolutionary change fall short. They may prefer a candidate with a progressive ideology but a more restrained, and potentially more effective, strategy for putting that ideology in place.

If it’s not this woman, this year, then who and when?

Muslim women who cover their heads encounter some of the biggest problems. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — which sued Abercrombie on Elauf's behalf — saw a 250% increase in religion-based discrimination charges involving Muslims. In 2012, more than 20% of its 3,800 religious discrimination claims were filed by Muslims

The ruling continued the high court's practice of providing legal protection for religious beliefs and customs. In recent years, it has allowed employers with religious objections to avoid covering some forms of birth control, upheld the practice of opening local government meetings with a prayer and allowed a Muslim inmate to keep his beard in prison.

In his dissent, however, Thomas defended the company, claiming that its "neutral look policy" did not constitute intentional discrimination.

The court's decision — hailed by virtually all religious groups, from Baptists to Jews to Sikhs — could have implications for religious minorities' job opportunities as well as companies' hiring practices.

rule for disparate-treatment claims based on a failure to accommodate a religious practice is straightforward," Scalia wrote. "An employer may not make an applicant's religious practice, confirmed or otherwise, a factor in employment decisions."

American Muslim community is facing increased levels of Islamophobia

Businesses, on the other hand, claim that requiring them to cater to all religious minorities' observances is an undue hardship.

"Shifting this burden to employers sets an unclear and confusing standard, making business owners extremely vulnerable to inevitable discrimination lawsuits,"

"Whether employers ask an applicant about religious needs or not, there is a good chance they will be sued."

1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Must the job applicant request a religious accommodation, or should the employer recognize the need for it? During her job interview, Elauf never brought up her religion, and her interviewer never asked.

The federal government maintained that Abercrombie discriminated "when it intentionally refused to hire Samantha Elauf because of her hijab, after inferring correctly that Elauf wore the hijab for religious reasons."

Part of the reason this happens at these firms in particular is just very logistical. The firms end up dedicating HR staff to a specific school—so they'll have a team for Harvard, they'll have a team for Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and so forth. When you are from one of those schools and you submit your resume, there's a designated person or team whose job it is to review your resume. When you're not at one of those listed schools what ends up happening is that your resume just goes into this big broad bucket where they may or may not be a certain person who's charged with reviewing those resumes.

But you may not be identifying people who are best at the job and, crucially, you're restricting the class diversity and racial diversity to those who tend to attend the most elite schools.

But this creates a Catch 22 in two ways: The first is that individuals who come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds don't often know that telling these deeply personal stories is appropriate. Second, some people actually want to hide information about coming from an underprivileged background because they think it could harm the perceptions of fit. So they don't know that telling these stories can be advantageous.

In competitive fields that have classically been dominated by men, such as law and engineering, women with sexually ambiguous names tend to be more successful.

Our names can even influence what cities we live in, who we befriend, and what products we buy since, we’re attracted to things and places that share similarities to our names.

Teachers tend to hold lower expectations for students with typically black-sounding names while they set high expectations for students with typically white- and Asian-sounding names. And this early assessment of students’ abilities could influence students’ expectations for themselves.

A first name can imply race, age, socioeconomic status, and sometimes religion, so it’s an easy—or lazy—way to judge someone’s background, character, and intelligence.

On this year’s French baccalaureate, an exam that determines university placement for high school students, test-takers named Thomas (for boys) and Marie (for girls) tended to score highest. These are, you will note, typically white, French, middle- or upper-class names.

A 2004 study showed that all else being equal, employers selected candidates with names like Emily Walsh and Greg Baker for callbacks almost 50 percent more often than candidates with names like Lakisha Washington and Jamal Jones.

The researchers concluded that there was a great advantage to having a white-sounding name, so much so that having a white-sounding name is worth about eight years of work experience. “Jamal” would have to work in an industry for eight years longer than “Greg” for them to have equal chances of being hired,

I liked the joy my students found when they actually earned a grade they’d been reaching for. But whereas I once thought we needed to contain grades, I now see that we may as well let them float skyward. If grade inflation is bad, fighting it is worse. Our goal should be ending the centrality of grades altogether. For years, I feared that a world of only A’s would mean the end of meaningful grades; today, I’m certain of it. But what’s so bad about that?

It’s easy to see why schools want to fight grade inflation. Grades should motivate certain students: those afraid of the stigma of a bad grade or those ambitious, by temperament or conditioning, to succeed in measurable ways. Periodic grading during a term, on quizzes, tests or papers, provides feedback to students, which should enable them to do better. And grades theoretically signal to others, such as potential employers or graduate schools, how well the student did. (Grade-point averages are also used for prizes and class rankings, though that doesn’t strike me as an important feature.)

But it’s not clear that grades work well as motivators. Although recent research on the effects of grades is limited, several studies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s measured how students related to a task or a class when it was graded compared to when it was ungraded. Overall, graded students are less interested in the topic at hand and — and, for obvious, common-sense reasons — more inclined to pick the easiest possible task when given the chance. In the words of progressive-education theorist Alfie Kohn, author of “The Homework Myth,” “the quality of learning declines” when grades are introduced, becoming “shallower and more superficial when the point is to get a grade.”

Even where grades can be useful, as in describing what material a student has mastered, they are remarkably crude instruments. Yes, the student who gets a 100 on a calculus exam probably grasps the material better than the student with a 60 — but only if she retains the knowledge, which grades can’t show.

I still can’t say very well what separates a B from an A. What’s more, I never see the kind of incompetence or impudence that would merit a D or an F. And now, in our grade-inflated world, it’s even harder to use grades to motivate, or give feedback, or send a signal to future employers or graduate schools.

According to a 2012 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education, GPA was seventh out of eight factors employers considered in hiring, behind internships, extracurricular activities and previous employment. Last year, Stanford’s registrar told the Chronicle about “a clamor” from employers “for something more meaningful” than the traditional transcript. The Lumina Foundation gave a$1.27 million grant to two organizations for college administrators working to develop better student records, with grades only one part of a student’s final profile.

Some graduate schools, too, have basically ditched grades. “As long as you don’t bomb and flunk out, grades don’t matter very much in M.F.A. programs,” the director of one creative-writing program told the New York Times. To top humanities PhD programs, letters of reference and writing samples matter more than overall GPA (although students are surely expected to have received good grades in their intended areas of study). In fact, it’s impossible to get into good graduate or professional schools without multiple letters of reference, which have come to function as the kind of rich, descriptive comments that could go on transcripts in place of grades.

suggests that GPAs serve not to validate students from elite schools but to keep out those from less-prestigious schools and large public universities, where grades are less inflated. Grades at community colleges “have actually dropped” over the years, according to Stuart Rojstaczer, a co-author of the 2012 grade-inflation study. That means we have two systems: one for students at elite schools, who get jobs based on references, prestige and connections, and another for students everywhere else, who had better maintain a 3.0. Grades are a tool increasingly deployed against students without prestige.

The trouble is that, while it’s relatively easy for smaller colleges to go grade-free, with their low student-to-teacher ratios, it’s tough for professors at larger schools, who must evaluate more students, more quickly, with fewer resources. And adjuncts teaching five classes for poverty wages can’t write substantial term-end comments, so grades are a necessity if they want to give any feedback at all.

It would mean hiring more teachers and paying them better (which schools should do anyway). And if transcripts become more textured, graduate-school admission offices and employers will have to devote more resources to reading them, and to getting to know applicants through interviews and letters of reference — a salutary trend that is underway already.

When I think about getting rid of grades, I think of happier students, with whom I have more open, democratic relationships. I think about being forced to pay more attention to the quiet ones, since I’ll have to write something truthful about them, too. I’ve begun to wonder if a world without grades may be one of those states of affairs (like open marriages, bicycle lanes and single-payer health care) that Americans resist precisely because they seem too good, suspiciously good. Nothing worth doing is supposed to come easy.

Alfie Kohn, too, sees ideology at work in the grade-inflation panic. “Most of what powers the arguments against grade inflation is a very right-wing idea that excellence consists in beating everyone else around you,” he says. “Even when you have sorted them — even when they get to Harvard! — we have to sort them again.” In other words, we can trust only a system in which there are clear winners and losers.

this week’s immodest proposal: Abolish racial preferences in college admissions, phase out preferences in government hiring and contracting, eliminate the disparate-impact standard in the private sector, and allow state-sanctioned discrimination only on the basis of socioeconomic status, if at all. Then at the same time, create a reparations program — the Frederick Douglass Fund, let’s call it — that pays out exclusively, directly and one time only to the proven descendants of American slaves.

But right now, giving every single African-American $10,000, perhaps in a specially-designed annuity, would cost about $370 billion, modest relative to supply-side tax plans and single-payer schemes alike. The wealth of the median black household in the United States was $11,200 as of 2013; a $10,000 per-person annuity would more than double it.

There is no clear or easy path to becoming a multiracial nation that isn’t divided politically by race. But reparations for the descendants of slaves today, rather than affirmative action for nonwhites forever, might be a better path than the one we’re on right now.

Economic literacy contributes to a second class of knowledge.

For some economic decisions, such as buying a home or investing in the stock market, it is possible to hire professional or technical help when making a choice, but in most cases it is neither economical nor practical for an individual to hire a skilled professional every time an economic decision needs to be made.

Economic literacy improves the competence of each individual for making personal and social decisions about the multitude of economic issues that will be encountered over a lifetime.

The development of economic literacy must begin in the schools. Even young children are capable of learning basic economic concepts that help them understand their economic world. In the secondary years, that initial foundation can be expanded to include instruction in a broader set of economic ideas and concepts

Some may think that economics is too difficult a subject to be taught to children and youth, and that such instruction should wait until college

Waiting until students are in college to teach economics is simply a matter of "too little and too late." The majority of students end their formal education with secondary school, and even those students who continue their learning at a college or university may not take an economics course.

There are three essential ingredients for effective economic education in the schools.

First, teachers must be knowledgeable about the subject and be able to help students learn how to use basic economic concepts to analyze personal and social issues. Second, good curriculum guides and instructional materials are needed that present economic content at an appropriate level for the student to understand. Third, economics must have a central place in the school curriculum—similar to math, science, history and language arts—so that substantial classroom time is devoted to economics instruction

Over the past 40 years there has been a significant improvement in each area.

A study of high school transcripts shows that only about 44 percent of high school students take a separate course in economics. This course is usually offered in the 12th grade as an elective and lasts for only a semester.

Given this situation—that fewer than half of high school graduates take a course in economics—it should not be surprising that study after study show that there is widespread economic illiteracy among youth and the American public.

Some 87 percent of high school seniors rated their knowledge and understanding of economic and economic issues as only fair or poor.

Knowing what determines prices in a market economy and accepting the outcomes are two different things. If demand or supply conditions change, prices in a competitive market will rise and fall. Having a basic understanding of how markets work does not always mean that people will like price changes, especially if prices rise, but it should increase the probability of accepting the market outcome

The development of basic economic literacy is an important goal for a democratic society that relies heavily on informed citizenry and personal economic decision-making.

To achieve that goal will require that significant gaps in the economic education of youth be closed by giving economics a more central place in the school curriculum. More economics coursework at the precollege level sets a foundation for economic literacy, but it is only the beginning.

when it comes to mistaken judgments and unfortunate decisions, there is another type of error that attracts far less attention: noise.

To see the difference between bias and noise, consider your bathroom scale. If on average the readings it gives are too high (or too low), the scale is biased

It is hard to escape the conclusion that sentencing is in part a lottery, because the punishment can vary by many years depending on which judge is assigned to the case and on the judge’s state of mind on that day. The judicial system is unacceptably noisy.

While bias is the average of errors, noise is their variability.

Although it is often ignored, noise is a large source of malfunction in society.

The average difference between the sentences that two randomly chosen judges gave for the same crime was more than 3.5 years. Considering that the mean sentence was seven years, that was a disconcerting amount of noise.

If it shows different readings when you step on it several times in quick succession, the scale is noisy.

How much of a difference would you expect to find between the premium values that two competent underwriters assigned to the same risk?

Executives in the insurance company said they expected about a 10 percent difference.

But the typical difference we found between two underwriters was an astonishing 55 percent of their average premium — more than five times as large as the executives had expected.

Many other studies demonstrate noise in professional judgments. Radiologists disagree on their readings of images and cardiologists on their surgery decisions

Wherever there is judgment, there is noise — and more of it than you think.

Noise causes error, as does bias, but the two kinds of error are separate and independent.

A company’s hiring decisions could be unbiased overall if some of its recruiters favor men and others favor women. However, its hiring decisions would be noisy, and the company would make many bad choices

Where does noise come from?

There is much evidence that irrelevant circumstances can affect judgments.

for instance, a judge’s mood, fatigue and even the weather can all have modest but detectable effects on judicial decisions.

people can have different general tendencies. Judges often vary in the severity of the sentences they mete out: There are “hanging” judges and lenient ones.

People can have not only different general tendencies (say, whether they are harsh or lenient) but also different patterns of assessment (say, which types of cases they believe merit being harsh or lenient about).

Underwriters differ in their views of what is risky, and doctors in their views of which ailments require treatment.

Once you become aware of noise, you can look for ways to reduce it.

independent judgments from a number of people can be averaged (a frequent practice in forecasting)

Guidelines, such as those often used in medicine, can help professionals reach better and more uniform decisions

imposing structure and discipline in interviews and other forms of assessment tends to improve judgments of job candidates.

No noise-reduction techniques will be deployed, however, if we do not first recognize the existence of noise.

Organizations and institutions, public and private, will make better decisions if they take noise seriously.

I was hesitant with the Times. They were far out of my comfort zone, but I felt that the people I was talking to had a sincerity greater than their confusion. Nothing that has happened since then has dissuaded me from that impression.

If you’re reading this, especially on the internet, you are the teacher for those institutions at a local, national, and global level. I understand that you didn’t ask for this position. Neither did I. History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are. When the backlash began, I got the call from the person who had sought me out and recruited me. The fear I heard in that shaky voice coming through my mobile phone was unmistakable. It was the fear of a mob, of the unknown, and of the idea that maybe they had gotten it wrong and done something terrible. I have felt all of those things. Many of us have. It’s not a place of strength, even when it seems to be coming from someone standing in a place of power. The Times didn’t know what the internet was doing—tearing down a new hire, exposing a fraud, threatening them—everything seemed to be in the mix.

I had even written about context collapse myself, but that hadn’t saved me from falling into it, and then hurting other people I didn’t mean to hurt. This particular collapse didn’t create much of a doppelgänger, but it did find me spending a morning as a defensive jerk. I’m very sorry for that dumb mistake. It helped me learn a lesson: Be damn sure when you make angry statements. Check them out long enough that, even if the statements themselves are still angry, you are not angry by the time you make them. Again and again, I have learned this: Don’t internet angry. If you’re angry, internet later.

I think if I’d gotten to write for the Times as part of their editorial board, this might have been different. I might have been in a position to show how our media doppelgängers get invented, and how we can unwind them. It takes time and patience. It doesn’t come from denying the doppelgänger—there’s nothing there to deny. I was accused of homophobia because of the in-group language I used with anons when I worked with them. (“Anons” refers to people who identify as part of the activist collective Anonymous.) I was accused of racism for use of taboo language, mainly in a nine-year-old retweet in support of Obama. Intentions aside, it wasn’t a great tweet, and I was probably overemotional when I retweeted it.

In late 2015 I woke up a little before 6 a.m., jet-lagged in New York, and started looking at Twitter. There was a hashtag, I don’t remember if it was trending or just in my timeline, called #whitegirlsaremagic. I clicked on it, and found it was racist and sexist dross. It was being promulgated in opposition to another hashtag, #blackgirlsaremagic. I clicked on that, and found a few model shots and borderline soft-core porn of black women. Armed with this impression, I set off to tweet in righteous anger about how much I disliked women being reduced to sex objects regardless of race. I was not just wrong in this moment, I was incoherently wrong. I had made my little mental model of what #blackgirlsaremagic was, and I had no clue that I had no clue what I was talking about. My 60-second impression of #whitegirlsaremagic was dead-on, but #blackgirlsaremagic didn’t fit in the last few tweets my browser had loaded.

I had been a victim of something the sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd call context collapse, where people create online culture meant for one in-group, but exposed to any number of out-groups without its original context by social-media platforms, where it can be recontextualized easily and accidentally.

Not everyone believes loving engagement is the best way to fight evil beliefs, but it has a good track record. Not everyone is in a position to engage safely with racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and homophobes, but for those who are, it’s a powerful tool. Engagement is not the one true answer to the societal problems destabilizing America today, but there is no one true answer. The way forward is as multifarious and diverse as America is, and a method of nonviolent confrontation and accountability, arising from my pacifism, is what I can bring to helping my society.

Here is your task, person on the internet, reader of journalism, speaker to the world on social media: You make the world now, in a way that you never did before. Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots. But humanity is the most complicated thing we’ve found in the universe, and so far as we know, we’re the only thing even looking. We are miracles by the billions with powers and luxuries beyond the dreams of kings of old.

We are powerful creatures, but power must come with gentleness and responsibility. No one prepared us for this, no one trained us, no one came before us with an understanding of our world. There were hints, and wise people, and I lean on and cherish them. But their philosophies and imaginations can only take us so far. We have to build our own philosophies and imagine great futures for our world in order to have any futures at all. Let mercy guide us forward in these troubled times. Let yourself imagine, because imagination is the wellspring of hope. Here, in the beginning of the 21st century, hope is our duty to the future.

The political and methodological stresses within the historical profession are intensified by economic troubles. For a long time, but especially since the economic crisis of 2008, university students have turned away from the humanities, preferring to major in fields that seem to offer more certain and lucrative employment. Consequently, academic jobs in the humanities and especially in history have become radically more precarious for younger faculty—even as universities have sought to meet diversity goals in their next-generation hiring by expanding offerings in history-adjacent specialties, such as gender and ethnic studies.

The result has produced a generational divide. Younger scholars feel oppressed and exploited by universities pressing them to do more labor for worse pay with less security than their elders; older scholars feel that overeager juniors are poised to pounce on the least infraction as an occasion to end an elder’s career and seize a job opening for themselves. Add racial difference as an accelerant, and what was intended as an interesting methodological discussion in a faculty newsletter can explode into a national culture war.

One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.

Much of academia is governed these days by a joke from the Soviet Union: “If you think it, don’t speak it. If you speak it, don’t write it. If you write it, don’t sign it. But if you do think it, speak it, write it, and sign it—don’t be surprised.”

Yet this silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking

mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place—and that insertion sometimes requires that new history be fabricated altogether, the “bad history” that Sweet tried to warn against.

If it is not the job of the president of the American Historical Association to confront those questions, then whose is it?

Sweet used a play on words—“Is History History?”—for the title of his complacency-shaking essay. But he was asking not whether history is finished, done with, but Is history still history? Is it continuing to do what history is supposed to do? Or is it being annexed for other purposes, ideological rather than historical ones?

Advocates of studying the more distant past to disturb and challenge our ideas about the present may accuse their academic rivals of “presentism.”

In real life, of course, almost everybody who cares about history believes in a little of each option. But how much of each? What’s the right balance? That’s the kind of thing that historians do argue about, and in the arguing, they have developed some dismissive labels for one another

Those who look to the more recent past to guide the future may accuse the other camp of “antiquarianism.”

The accusation of presentism hurts because it implies that the historian is sacrificing scholarly objectivity for ideological or political purposes. The accusation of antiquarianism stings because it implies that the historian is burrowing into the dust for no useful purpose at all.

In his mind, he was merely reopening one of the most familiar debates in professional history: the debate over why? What is the value of studying the past? To reduce the many available answers to a stark choice: Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one?

Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?

The August edition of the association’s monthly magazine featured, as usual, a short essay by the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Within hours of its publication, an outrage volcano erupted on social media. A professor at Cornell vented about the author’s “white gaze.”