Other responses have touched on money not being power, but I think one of your examples makes it clearest. Let’s consider colleges:
Some kids are just an obvious “yes”, their skills or track record include insane things way beyond what a high schooler normally achieves. That’s the winners’ bracket.
The bulk of the slots will be filled out by a lot of people who look largely similar, with only marginal differences. That’s where various semipolitical games can bump one slightly ahead of other marginal people. That’s the losers’ bracket.
STEM programs are vastly more competitive, and higher-paying in the average case. At a typical university, the superstar physics professor is what give it great press. He spends all day and most of the night reading papers, trying out models of the universe, trying to push the frontier forward and immortalize his name. He may well succeed in this.
Meanwhile, a less-ambitious professor, perhaps in a less challenging discipline, with a much lower salary, is on every single committee. His name is all but unknown, but, rather than spending his time on research questions that have stumped generations of Earth’s greatest minds, he gets to adjust institutional policy such that it matches up perfectly with his whims alone. His grad students aren’t busy proving theorems, and can be ‘assigned’ towards campus activism that advances his goals further. If he and the superstar professor above have conflicting interests, it is likely that he will prevail—the other guy can’t spare the time or the resources to fight back.
One of the great coordination problems of our time is that the best people would all prefer to be in the former position rather than the latter. This, unfortunately, means that society ends up being governed by the “losers’ bracket”. This is amplified by the fact that the people aspiring to greatness are all in competition with each other, whereas the spoils system provides an immediate structural incentive for rent-seekers to help each other take a larger share of the pie. Moreover, a businessman or researcher who makes himself a target by taking a principled stand against rent-seeking now has a significant disadvantage over his peers who pay a smaller cost by toeing the line.
Other responses have touched on money not being power, but I think one of your examples makes it clearest. Let’s consider colleges:
STEM programs are vastly more competitive, and higher-paying in the average case. At a typical university, the superstar physics professor is what give it great press. He spends all day and most of the night reading papers, trying out models of the universe, trying to push the frontier forward and immortalize his name. He may well succeed in this.
Meanwhile, a less-ambitious professor, perhaps in a less challenging discipline, with a much lower salary, is on every single committee. His name is all but unknown, but, rather than spending his time on research questions that have stumped generations of Earth’s greatest minds, he gets to adjust institutional policy such that it matches up perfectly with his whims alone. His grad students aren’t busy proving theorems, and can be ‘assigned’ towards campus activism that advances his goals further. If he and the superstar professor above have conflicting interests, it is likely that he will prevail—the other guy can’t spare the time or the resources to fight back.
One of the great coordination problems of our time is that the best people would all prefer to be in the former position rather than the latter. This, unfortunately, means that society ends up being governed by the “losers’ bracket”. This is amplified by the fact that the people aspiring to greatness are all in competition with each other, whereas the spoils system provides an immediate structural incentive for rent-seekers to help each other take a larger share of the pie. Moreover, a businessman or researcher who makes himself a target by taking a principled stand against rent-seeking now has a significant disadvantage over his peers who pay a smaller cost by toeing the line.