From the world Bank (page taken down now)
Systems approach
From the world bank
If you’re like us, there is so much talk about systems that it can be easy to get lost. At a recent event, we asked a mixed group of operational teams and researchers, “How confident are you that you know what a systems approach is?” Nearly 40 percent had little to no idea.
How confident are you that you know what a systems approach is?
To take education as an example, a systems approach to education recognizes the following:
1. An education system is made up of different actors (students, teachers, administrators, political leaders), accountability relationships (management, politics), and design elements (financing, information) (see Pritchett or Scur).
2. Changes to one part of the system are moderated by other parts of the system. For example, the effectiveness of investments to get children to school will be limited (or enhanced) by the quality of the schooling.
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more on systems
ults
Why a Systems-Based Approach Matters in Global Education Reform
https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/blog/why-systems-based-approach-matters-global-education-reform
Confronting the learning crisis effectively requires adopting a systems-approach towards supporting countries in developing their education systems.
Systemic Approach to Financial Inclusion | CGAP
https://www.cgap.org/topics/collections/market-systems-approach
Explore CGAP's guidance on how to apply a systemic approach in funders programming. A systemic approach aims to catalyze systemic change that is significant ...
Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER)
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/collections/3c3a08e5-faef-514b-a4ae-db3b5968e23d
The Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) initiative produces comparative data and knowledge on education policies and institutions, ...
A Market Systems Approach to Financial Inclusion
The new funder guidelines,. “A Market Systems Approach to Financial Inclusion,” build on our collective experience and learning over the past decade and suggest ...
For these reasons, the Bank is developing new knowledge approaches to help evaluate these system capacities and guide education reforms. The SABER program is a ...
A Market Systems Approach to Financial Inclusion | CGAP Research & Publications
https://www.cgap.org/research/video/market-systems-approach-to-financial-inclusion
A market systems approach to financial inclusion means considering all aspects of a market system, and working to break down barriers that exclude the poor ...
How countries deliver high-quality early learning: Insights through a systems approach
One approach developed by the World Bank is the Systems Approach for Better Education Results- Early Childhood Development module (SABER-ECD). It assesses ...
New Funder Guidelines: Market Systems Approach to Financial Inclusion | CGAP Research & Publications
These guidelines are intended to provide guidance for funders promoting financial inclusion or pro-poor financial services markets as part of their ...
GEI Approach | Global Evaluation Initiative
https://www.globalevaluationinitiative.org/zh-hans/node/62167
What do we mean by an M&E System? When we talk about GEI's focus on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) “systems” we do not mean just the feedback systems that ...
Beyond the theory and rationale for moving toward a systems approach to social protection, there is a need to collaborate on supporting operational aspects. The ...
Principles for Effective Use of Systems Thinking in Evaluation
https://www.betterevaluation.org/sites/default/files/SETIG-Principles-FINAL-DRAFT-2018-9-9.pdf
“Taking a systems approach” generally refers to using systems concepts or methods. Methods such as system dynamics, social network analysis, soft systems ...
Setting the Stage for a Market Systems Approach | Blog | CGAP
https://www.cgap.org/blog/setting-stage-for-market-systems-approach
A market systems approach to financial inclusion seeks to identify the root causes that prevent low-income people from accessing and using financial ...
TOWARD QUALITY EARLY LEARNING: SYSTEMS FOR SUCCESS
Adopting a systems approach to ECE investments can help ensure their efficient implementation, increase overall child learning, and support the transition from ...
Publication: Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia Early Childhood Development: SABER Country Report 2015
https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/24436
The Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) initiative produces comparative data and knowledge on education policies and institutions, with the ...
The systems approach to education analysis and reform is at the heart of the World Bank Group's Education Strategy. 2020: Learning for All. It recognizes that ...
Calibration of macroeconomic models with incomplete data : a systems approach (English)
A three-stage systems approach is developed. In Stage One, a quadratic loss function, involving the discrepancies between the observed actual values and the ...
Moving towards the systemic approach: developing systems that work for poor people. CGAP | A SYSTEMIC APPROACH TO FINANCIAL INCLUSION: TRAINING FOR FUNDERS.
Publication: Mozambique Teachers: SABER Country Report 2014
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/b8871d85-6aee-5849-9460-b176b0f3d184
A new tool, systems approach for better education results (SABER) - teachers, aims to help fill the gap by collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, and ...
Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) workforce development (Inglês)
Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) workforce development (Inglês). Equipping the workforce with job-relevant skills is a continuing ...
Social Protection & Labor Policy Note
UNICEF approaches to building social protection systems, us- ing a focus on children to illustrate the premise and promise of a systems approach. It is part ...
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First principles approach with Elon Musk from ted talk
“Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are -- what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. “
https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity
19.23
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework, Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”
Instead of buying a finished rocket for tens of millions, Musk decided to create his own company, purchase the raw materials for cheap, and build the rockets himself. SpaceX was born.
Within a few years, SpaceX had cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10x while still making a profit. Musk used first principles thinking to break the situation down to the fundamentals, bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry, and create a more effective solution.
First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there.
in progress
One point I keep pushing on this blog is that it’s a bad idea to demand downstream solutions to upstream problems. For example, I’ve argued that if a company’s applicant pool is only 20% women, and the company engages in gender-blind hiring and gets 20% women employees, it’s more useful to focus on the factors shaping the applicant pool composition than it is to yell at the company. For some reason nobody (sometimes including me) seems very good at this.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/25/highlights-from-the-comment-thread-on-meritocracy/
Welcome to Slate Star Codex, a blog about science, medicine, philosophy, politics, and futurism. SSC is the project of Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist on the US West Coast. You can email him at scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. Note that emailing bloggers who say they are psychiatrists is a bad way to deal with your psychiatric emergencies, and you might wish to consider talking to your doctor or going to a hospital instead.
Targeting Meritocracy
I.
Prospect Magazine writes about the problem with meritocracy. First Things thinks meritocracy is killing America. Feminist Philosophers comes out against meritocracy. The Guardian says “down with meritocracy”. Vox calls for an attack on the false god of meritocracy. There’s even an Against Meritocracy book. Given that meritocracy sounds almost tautologically good (doesn’t it just mean positions going to people with merit?), there sure do seem to be a lot of people against it.
Some of these people are just being pointlessly edgy. The third article seem to admit that a true meritocracy would be a good thing, but argues that we don’t have one right now. This hardly seems “against meritocracy”, any more than saying we don’t have full racial equality right now means you’re “against racial equality”, but whatever, I guess you’ve got to get clicks somehow.
The other articles actually mean it. Their argument seems to be gesturing at the idea that elites send their kids to private schools, where they get all A+s and end up as president of the Junior Strivers Club. Then they go to Harvard and dazzle their professors with their sparkling wit and dapper suits. Then they get hired right out of college to high-paying management positions at Chase-Bear-Goldman-Sallie-Manhattan-Stearns-Sachs-Mae-FEDGOV. Then they eat truffle-flavored caviar all day and tell each other “Unlike past generations of elites, we are meritocrats who truly deserve our positions, on account of our merit”, as the poor gnash their teeth outside.
Grant that this is all true, and that it’s bad. Does that mean we should be against meritocracy?
II.
There’s a weird assumption throughout all these articles, that meritocracy is founded on the belief that smart people deserve good jobs as a reward for being smart. Freddie de Boer, in his review of yet another anti-meritocracy book, puts it best:
I reject meritocracy because I reject the idea of human deserts. I don’t believe that an individual’s material conditions should be determined by what he or she “deserves,” no matter the criteria and regardless of the accuracy of the system contrived to measure it. I believe an equal best should be done for all people at all times.
More practically, I believe that anything resembling an accurate assessment of what someone deserves is impossible, inevitably drowned in a sea of confounding variables, entrenched advantage, genetic and physiological tendencies, parental influence, peer effects, random chance, and the conditions under which a person labors. To reflect on the immateriality of human deserts is not a denial of choice; it is a denial of self-determination. Reality is indifferent to meritocracy’s perceived need to “give people what they deserve.”
I think this is both entirely true and entirely missing the point. The intuition behind meritocracy is this: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.
The Federal Reserve making good versus bad decisions can be the difference between an economic boom or a recession, and ten million workers getting raises or getting laid off. When you’ve got that much riding on a decision, you want the best decision-maker possible – that is, you want to choose the head of the Federal Reserve based on merit.
This has nothing to do with fairness, deserts, or anything else. If some rich parents pay for their unborn kid to have experimental gene therapy that makes him a superhumanly-brilliant economist, and it works, and through no credit of his own he becomes a superhumanly-brilliant economist – then I want that kid in charge of the Federal Reserve. And if you care about saving ten million people’s jobs, you do too.
III.
Does this mean we just have to suck it up and let the truffle-eating Harvard-graduating elites at Chase-Bear-Goldman-Sallie-Manhattan-Stearns-Sachs-Mae-FEDGOV lord it over the rest of us?
No. The real solution to this problem is the one none of the anti-meritocracy articles dare suggest: accept that education and merit are two different things!
I work with a lot of lower- and working-class patients, and one complaint I hear again and again is that their organization won’t promote them without a college degree. Some of them have been specifically told “You do great work, and we think you’d be a great candidate for a management position, but it’s our policy that we can’t promote someone to a manager unless they’ve gone to college”. Some of these people are too poor to afford to go to college. Others aren’t sure they could pass; maybe they have great people skills and great mechanical skills but subpar writing-term-paper skills. Though I’ve met the occasional one who goes to college and rises to great heights, usually they sit at the highest non-degree-requiring tier of their organization, doomed to perpetually clean up after the mistakes of their incompetent-but-degree-having managers. These people have loads of merit. In a meritocracy, they’d be up at the top, competing for CEO positions. In our society, they’re stuck.
The problem isn’t just getting into college. It’s that success in college only weakly correlates with success in the real world. I got into medical school because I got good grades in college; those good grades were in my major, philosophy. Someone else who was a slightly worse philosopher would never have made it to medical school; maybe they would have been a better doctor. Maybe someone who didn’t get the best grades in college has the right skills to be a nurse, or a firefighter, or a police officer. If so, we’ll never know; all three of those occupations are gradually shifting to acceptance conditional on college performance. Ulysses Grant graduated in the bottom half of his West Point class, but turned out to be the only guy capable of matching General Lee and winning the Civil War after a bunch of superficially better-credentialed generals failed. If there’s a modern Grant with poor grades but excellent real-world fighting ability, are we confident our modern educationocracy will find him? Are we confident it will even try?
I don’t think the writers of the anti-meritocracy articles above really disagree with this. I think they’re probably using a different definition of meritocracy where it does mean “rule by well-educated people with prestigious credentials”. But I think it’s important to defend the word “meritocracy” as meaning what it says – decision by merit, rather than by wealth, class, race, or education – and as a good thing. If we let the word be tarnished as some sort of vague signifier of a corrupt system, then it’s too easy for the people who really are in that corrupt system to exploit the decline and fall of the only word we have to signal an alternative. “Oh, you don’t like that all the important jobs go to upper-class people instead of the people who are best at them? You’d prefer they be given out based on merit? But haven’t you read The New Inquiry, First Things, and Vox? Believing in so-called ‘meritocracy’ is totally uncool!” And then we lose one of the only rallying points, one of the few pieces of vocabulary we have to express what’s wrong with the current system and what would be a preferable alternative. We ought to reject the redefinition of “meritocracy” to mean “positions go to people based on their class and ability to go to Harvard”, and reclaim it as meaning exactly what we want instead – positions going to those who are best at them and can best use them to help others. Which is what we want.
(None of this solves one of the biggest problems that the anti-meritocracy folk are complaining about: the fact that there’s a distinction between millionaire Goldman Sachs analysts and starving poor people in the first place. I’m just saying that in a world where somebody has to be an investment banker, a surgeon, or a Federal Reserve chair, I’d rather choose them by true meritocracy than by anything else.)
[see here for more discussion]
This entry was posted in Uncategorized on July 24, 2017 by Scott Alexander.