The Case Against Credentialism
The Atlantic Monthly
December, 1985
"The case against credentialism"
By James Fallows
In 1961, David McClelland, a psychologist at Harvard, , published The Achieving Society, an extravagantly ambitious attempt to discover why certain cultures "worked" better than others. Why, among West African tribes were the Ashanti and the Ibo so economically dominant? Why was so much of the commerce of Southeast Asia run by expatriate Chinese, and so little by the Malays among whom they lived? Why had Jewish immigrants to the United States risen faster than southern Italians?
