In India, years‑long cramming for scarce, high‑paying government posts creates queues that build no marketable skills and sideline the country’s most educated youth. Back‑of‑envelope losses are about 1.4% of GDP annually for India, while Brazil’s modeled rent‑seeking costs from public job applications reach 3.61% of output. Meritocratic exams can function as large‑scale rent extraction when pay is mispriced.
— It shifts debates on 'meritocracy' toward incentive design by showing exam systems can drain human capital at national scale.
Alex Tabarrok
2025.09.02
65% relevant
Tabarrok explicitly connects Hong Xiuquan’s repeated failures on China’s civil‑service exams to the modern Indian 'mass exams' phenomenon that produces large numbers of educated but frustrated youth, echoing the idea that exam‑centric systems misallocate talent and create instability costs.
Alex Tabarrok
2025.08.27
70% relevant
By highlighting Italy’s 85,000 applicants for 30 bank jobs and noting Singapore doesn’t need mass entrance exams when wages are market-aligned, it connects rent-seeking queues to wasted human capital.
Alex Tabarrok
2025.08.25
100% relevant
Tabarrok’s India estimates and Cavalcanti & Santos’s 3.61% output loss for Brazil.