Yeah, that's called regression to the mediocre mean.

I heard a motivational speaker once say that people are like crabs in a basket. If you put one crab in a basket, then it will promptly crawl out and escape. If you put several crabs in, then the first one who tries to crawl out will be actively discouraged from doing so by the other crabs, pulling the more enterprising ones back down.

Then there's the 12 monkey analogy. You start out with 4 or 5 monkeys. You put some highly desirable food at the top of a flight of stairs. When a monkey tries to go up the stairs, it gets soaked with a fire hose and knocked back down the stairs.

After a couple of days of this, all of the monkeys are well conditioned to not even try to climb the stairs.

Now you replace one of the monkeys with a new one. The other monkeys will immediately jump on the new one the moment he tries to climb the stairs.

After a few days, you replace another monkey. Repeat until none of the original monkeys are there.

Now, when you introduce yet another new monkey, the others, none of who have ever experienced the fire hose, or know *why* climbing the stairs is forbidden, will continue to condition the newcomers to NEVER climb those stairs no matter how tempting the treat is.

People and bureaucracies are like this. No one knows why some things are done that make no logical sense, but it's always been done that way, and no one really knows why it was originally.

Some affluenza kids are exempt from the consequences that kids born in the ghetto are.

Excellence isn’t rewarded because it upsets the system.  In the classroom,the teacher may have motivated children to read a book by building excitement for what happens next. If one enterprising student reads ahead and knows the outcome, it could demotivate others. So she took the lazy way out and punished the achiever instead of finding young Kizmet a more advanced book to read on her own.

They got their consequences later when they screwed up as adults and their parent could not fix it. Their parents did not do them any favors.

Yep. Monkey see, monkey do.

Showtalk said:

Excellence isn’t rewarded because it upsets the system.

Yep.

And then the world ends up mediocre because excellence was discouraged and often punished.

And yet excellence rises like cream to the surface. Bezos. Gates. Zuckerberg. Sports figures, although I can’t think of any right now.

Don't know what proportion is excellence vs what proportion is just a little luck and ruthless winner-take-all getting the upper hand on the competition.

Zuckerberg started out as an opportunist and made something of someone else’s idea.  The real geniuses were the ones who created early popular computing systems.