Discrimination of excellence

Discrimination is unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things.[6] Attempts exist to legally abolish, economically counter-weight and societally alleviate the negative consequences of discrimination around the world.[7] The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution ban the federal and state governments from discriminating. The United States Employment Discrimination laws seek to prevent discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, physical disability, and age by employers. The United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lists as especially sensitive areas of discrimination attention age, disability, equal pay and compensation, genetic information, harassment, national origin, pregnancy, race and color, religion, retaliation, sex and sexual harassment.[8] The European Union introduced an Anti-Discrimination Directive[9] to ban discrimination on the grounds of age, disability, religion or belief and sexual orientation. The Lisbon Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union serves as legal protection against discrimination acknowledging equal rights for all human to be treated unbiased and with equal fairness and dignity.[10]

Discrimination of excellence includes the 2019 college admission fraud scandals, standardized admission test outperformers suing a U.S. higher education institution and the United States Department of Justice scrutinizing higher education over potential systemic biases in college admission standards that would underweight transparent standardized testing criteria.[4]

University and college admission and promotion criteria are critical career gatekeeping events, in which unexpectedly overweighting intransparent, non-merit based criteria can result in merit-based outperformers underperforming in admissions. Discrimination bias can occur in merit-based up-or-out placement and promotion criteria in hierarchical rank orders, when performance is partially measured on intangible or intransparent performance criteria implying potential economic inefficiency.[1]

Outperformance[11] is the foundation of excellence. Overachievement is related to investments. Outperformance and overachievement are bases of the intellectual elites and related to luxury consumption.[12]

Overachievement may instigate economic growth. John Maynard Keynes' multiplier effect attributes investments of overachievers as some of the drivers of economic growth. Investments of the striving elite multiply in economic spending in the overall economy.[13]

Consumption of the elite is an economic growth factor. Thorstein Veblen's trickling down of excellence emphasizes that luxury consumption is a driver of economic growth and accelerator of social enhancement and cultural advancement.[14]

The American Dream ideals of striving to outperform are foundations of economic productivity.[15]

Slowing down overachievers and abolishing intellectual outperformance has occurred throughout history. Various regimes attempted to eradicate, cut down or slow performance and discourage individual striving.[16]

Discrimination of excellence theory[1] integrates the 'übergroup'[17] in the social psychology social identity theory categorization of society into so-called 'ingroups' and 'outgroups.'[18]

• Law of Jante
• Tall poppy syndrome