> elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc.
I’d argue that it’s only money. Prestige, looks, charm, wit and even positions of power come and go and rich people have always surrounded themselves with those the same way they have always surrounded themselves with experts.
At its core, I don’t think human society has really changed that much since the dawn of organised civilisation. Sure we’ve tried different some very systems over the thousands of years, but if you zoom out to the helicopter perspective, the biggest “influencers” have always been the oligarchs and the sole requirement for joining their ranks is having lots and lots of money.
At least I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen, and I suspect the sole reason liberal democracy has been so successful is because it is the “safest” system to be extremely wealthy within.
> but if you zoom out to the helicopter perspective, the biggest “influencers” have always been the oligarchs and the sole requirement for joining their ranks is having lots and lots of money.
That, on the other side, sounds very American-centric and contemporary-centric to me. I would say that even though money generally correlates with influence, there were many other factors at play.
Feudal nobles of Europe resented and despised the merchant class even if they could not utterly suppress it. Wealthy commoners would have an influence, but holders of hereditary titles would still in many cases be considered above them legally. In countries such as Tsarist Russia, being of noble birth would be way more important than being rich; pre-revolutionary France wasn't too dissimilar.
There were strict theocracies where the priestly caste would hold sway. Notably, scholars were considered more prestigious in Jewish societies than businesspeople, which might have contributed to the intellectual strength of the nation that is obvious even now.
In Soviet-like systems, real power was held by the nomenklatura consisting of high level apparatchiks, senior members of the Party. You could bribe them, but money wasn't really the most important thing; the most important thing was their intra-Party position, earned over decades of patient scheming against other possible competitors in badly sewn grey suits.
Spartans (or, to be more precise, Spartiates, the hereditary top class) would never under any circumstances admit any outsider among them as an equal - even if it meant that their ranks were thinning with each generation to the point of near extinction.
Saddam Hussein only trusted his own Tikrit gang and anyone else, rich or smart, was second rank only.
> Feudal nobles of Europe resented and despised the merchant class even if they could not utterly suppress it. Wealthy commoners would have an influence, but holders of hereditary titles would still in many cases be considered above them legally.
This supports what I’m saying though. The reason the nobility who achieved their wealth through force wanted to suppress the rising merchant class was exactly because their power became threatened by the new wealthy class. Ultimately the nobility failed.
> There were strict theocracies where the priestly caste would hold sway. Notably, scholars were considered more prestigious in Jewish societies than businesspeople, which might have contributed to the intellectual strength of the nation that is obvious even now.
How did the church grow mighty? It wasn’t faith, it was money.
> In Soviet-like systems, real power was held by the nomenklatura consisting of high level apparatchiks, senior members of the Party.
Both Castro and Mao were sons of wealthy farmers. The Bolsheviks were funded by none other than the German Kaiser.
> Spartans
Sparta was a clear cut oligarchy. I’m not really sure why you being them up, as the very reason their financial class discouraged trade was because they reasoned it would weaken their power if other members of society saw any sort of wealth.
There is that and let's not forget that powerful nobles were nobles with estates and/or positions in the state apparatus that directly corresponded to receiving a rent.
I'd argue that OP's theory that the wealthy were always in control still holds but what has changed throughout history is what wealth has been (cattle, land, slaves, merchandise-money like gold, credit backed money you name it)
Doesn’t Jeff Bezos mostly own the means of logistics? Or is that bundled up in “means of production”. A warehouse full of iPhones isn’t worth much if it’s impossible to get them to your customers.
I feel it's just legacy in terminology - "means of production" imply "things you use to make stuff", because stuff was front-and-centre when it got coined as a political term. For most of the known history, humans didn't have much stuff. Making stuff was what seemed to bring all the money; logistical chains, being shorter, didn't seem that important. Additionally, all the stuff made was concrete, material things.
But if you extend the meaning of "means of production" to cover not production of stuff, but production of more abstract economic value, you can see that the same struggle between different groups of people happens today, over not just material goods, but also virtual ones, as well as services. So Jeff Bezos definitely owns the "means of production" of logistics service.
The means of distribution (or as you call it, the means of logistics) is part of the means of production, yeah. The mechanism by which products of labor are moved throughout the world is just as much a part of the means of production as anything else.
It's one of the reasons that folks are so keen on privatizing things like the Royal Mail (one of the places that the UK right is ahead of the curve on the US) and the ongoing attempts to do the same to the USPS.
> Feudal nobles of Europe resented and despised the merchant class even if they could not utterly suppress it.
Sure, and as with all rank, there is an element of pride driving this. You even have racial origin theories like the Sarmatian origin myth that held for a couple centuries among the Polish nobility to distinguish themselves from commoners. But the distaste for merchants I gather is more complex than absence of noble title, or rather, the noble title is presumed to have some association with certain virtues opposed to mercantile activity. For example, pre-industrial Polish nobility were actually forbidden from engaging in all commerce save for commerce of an agrarian nature. Probably whatever else they earned came from some kind of taxation, at least among those rich enough to own villages, towns, or even cities. But why forbid commerce? Either the Crown had managed to check the power of the nobility in some way (who had become obscenely wealthy by the 17th century), or the nobility themselves saw that they should not themselves partake in such commerce for some, ostensibly virtuous, reasons. But the fact is that the wealthier nobility nonetheless had the upper hand and the advantage. Poorer family members were known to work for their richer relatives. So you have segmentation within a given social class by wealth.
> There were strict theocracies where the priestly caste would hold sway. Notably, scholars were considered more prestigious in Jewish societies than businesspeople, which might have contributed to the intellectual strength of the nation that is obvious even now.
I would say that even in Catholic Europe, which was Catholic-confessional but never theocratic and could not legitimately be by virtue of the Christian distinction between secular and religious estates (something unique in history; e.g. neither Jews nor Muslims understand this concept natively, only as something borrowed ill-fittingly and ad hoc from the Christian worldview), the priesthood was (and among Catholics still is) regarded as the higher calling owing to man's supernatural end. Thus Catholics understand the supreme pontiff as the highest ranking authority on earth and the bishops as very literally the princes of the Church. This places them above the nobility in a certain sense, even if this is more of a partial rather than total order. And of course the clergy were the best educated members of society and among whom no hereditary advantages existed in the strict sense (even if the nobility within its ranks did promote "nephews" to various positions, but this is an aberration). Perhaps we can understand this as the result of the Catholic priesthood being heir to the Jewish priesthood. Which is to say that here, a bishop has higher rank than a wealthy noble.
I am thinking the disagreement with GP can be resolved by assuming money is representation of influences and connections.
I’d argue that you can’t be poor with tons of connections with rich, and sole currency accumulation is not sufficient to be influential because it is only an aspect of your portfolio, but are usually well correlated with the level of influences as money exists as a representation of connections.
> I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen
You presumably haven’t lived in a society where the powerful become wealthy rather than the wealthy becoming powerful.
In republican Rome, the elite families controlled (to a major degree) the expenditures of the state, but their own fortunes waxed and waned. Gaius Julius Caesar came from an old but not especially wealthy family (his was a cadet branch), worked his way up the system (elected a tribune etc — didn’t start at the bottom!) but made his fortune in the usual way, by running Spain and then winning some wars. His chief asset was the Julian name.
His friend amd heir, Augustus inverted this system (e.g. was able to pay the national budget out of his own assets).
Aristocracies worked this way too — you gained or lost wealth due to your power and proximity to the king, not the other way around. In fact if you became too wealthy it could cost you your fortune or even your life.
Modern kleptocracies still operate this way, on scales from Congo to Russia to China.
> Gaius Julius Caesar came from an old but not especially wealthy family (his was a cadet branch), worked his way up the system (elected a tribune etc — didn’t start at the bottom!) but made his fortune in the usual way, by running Spain and then winning some wars. His chief asset was the Julian name.
Gaius Julius Caesar family didn't have the Auctoritas or wealth, but His uncle was Marius, the most important man in Rome and he married at a young age Marius's successor's daughter.
Sharp contrast to Pompey Magnus who was so rich his first foray into public life was using his own funds to raise a private army, without being elected or having imperium, to support Sulla.
You point out another great factor in the example of Julius Caesar: though he married into wealth he was stripped of it before he had any real power, but was able to use other family connections to get back on his feet.
How does this dispute what I say? Fortunes change hands, and sometimes people who just so happen to be friends with the Ceasars can suddenly rise to fortune through the positions they achieve through their network, but which of them were able to do so without a rich oligarch?
Modern America is probably the best example of people obtaining “elite” status from nothing, but it’s very rare, and it’s the money they obtain on the way that solidify their positions.
> How does this dispute what I say? Fortunes change hands, and sometimes people who just so happen to be friends with the Ceasars can suddenly rise to fortune through the positions they achieve through their network, but which of them were able to do so without a rich oligarch?
That is exactly it. The example of Gaius Julius Caesar in particular such an example; he was able to marry into money through family connection, was stripped of it all, but was able to get some crucial positions and claw his way back into power...from which he then became wealthy.
Some of the most powerful houses in England (Spencer, Cromwell, Beaufort have been intertwined with the monarchy over the centuries. They queen not even the head of the richest family but by definition she has the most status.
The reason liberal democracy is so successful is because it's the safest system to become wealthy in through means that don't involve influence in a bureaucracy or paying off gatekeepers*. That means essentially anyone can become successful, which unleashes the potential of a much bigger proportion of the populace. This makes freer societies dramatically more innovative, industrious and successful.
* Gatekeepers still exist in liberal democracies, no system is perfect, but they don't control everything. The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have, and the bigger the incentives are for gatekeepers to help others achieve success.
> The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have, and the bigger the incentives are for gatekeepers to help others achieve success.
Not necessarily. Regulation can free citizens and business owners from enslaving business practices of powerful business. The mistake is to think that "free market", and much more so "free society", is the same as "no regulation". This is not true. Free markets, and especially free societies, need some regulation to keep the rich in their place and from smothering everyone around them.
I agree completely, see one of my other replies on this. I only meant the less influence they have on who wins and who loses, in the sense of picking and choosing.
> The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have
which is why governments and corporations continue to expand and add more and more rules, regulations, verifications, safety checks, privacy violations etc... they have a vested interest in restricting, rather than promoting, freedom.
existing corporations do, and yes, they are often successful at regulatory capture.
but ... private citizens, families, communities (geographic and of interest) also have a vested (and legitimate) interest in more rules and regulations, verifications, and safety checks, and sometimes (just sometimes) they are successful are getting government to implement these things.
when you look at a rule or regulation, you'd better be really sure about its history before you lay the blame at the feet of corporations seeking to restrict freedom.
In fact many regulations were fought tooth and nail by corporations. Environmental protection, tobacco health warnings, seat belt mandates, nutritional and content warning labels on food. Limitations on misleading adverts. Many, many more.
Arguably these regulations promoted competition. By raising awareness of these issues consumer information regulations helped new entrants promote innovative healthier or safer products. Increasing public confidence in a class of products can even make those products more popular.
Absent regulation individual companies can become locked into a race to the bottom that can turn a market into a cess pit. But introduce minimum quality standards and consumer confidence and participation can rise. There are spectacular examples of this in developing countries where effective regulation of financial services builds consumer trust and adoption of banking services. Used car sales and prices in many countries boomed when regulations were brought in to ensure customers were properly informed about the car's history and that the cars passed basic checks, because suddenly customers could trust that they weren't being ripped off. The narrative that regulations are necessarily bad for markets is simply not always true.
Right, and it's up to us to try and vote in politicians that militate against those tendencies, for example the way many financial regulations were swept away in the UK in the 1980s, or many examples of deregulation on airline industries (long way still to go), long distance telecoms and haulage industries.
Regulation is very much a two edged sword though. Too little and cartels and monopolies are unconstrained, and individual customers are too easily cheated by deceptive practices. Too much regulation and the cost of entry into markets gets too high. It's a constant balancing act.
> The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have, and the bigger the incentives are for gatekeepers to help others achieve success.
I am personally concerned that gatekeeping is increasing significantly lately, and I'm concerned about the effects that will have on long term economic growth and inequality.
Looking at the top 10 richest people [0], most of them weren't born into anything close to the level of wealth they have now. None of them were poor, so "essentially anyone can become successful" is almost certainly an overstatement, but the ability to go from "raised by dentists/lawyers/professors/engineers" to "among the richest in the world" is evidence of considerable mobility.
I spent more than a year working for the guy who went from "raised by ..." to "the richest man in the world". And when I say "working for", I mean "worked in the same converted garage".
Bezos' stratospheric economic "mobility" is not evidence of a more generalized economic mobility. In a system that is even vaguely capitalist, there will always be people who become incredibly wealthy without inheriting most of it. Their existence is not evidence of "considerable mobility", it's merely evidence of some sort of capitalistic economy.
The fact that the 10 richest people on earth were not born into stratospheric wealthy is a testament (of sorts) to capitalism; if you want to know about economic mobility, you're better off focusing on statistics, not the exceptions that prove the rules.
Exactly. We could have a system where every year 10 random poor people are chosen to become super wealthy. That isn't "economic mobility" in any meaningful or healthy sense.
How many of those 10 richest people came from families which weren't already in the top 5th income percentile?
Is that the social mobility that we care about? Anyone who is willing to work hard and already has the means to attend an Ivy League school can become a billionaire.
Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Sergey Brin were NOT top 5% in the USA. Depending what period in his childhood that you look at, Sergey Brin wasn't top 5% in the world either. (His family was educated, but they arrived in the USA as refugees from the Soviet Union.)
Several others started with rather less than you might expect. For example Elon Musk arrived in North America with only a few thousand dollars to his name, and had to work manual labor to get by. (Yes, his father was a businessman, but the two of them have a..difficult..relationship.)
It's my lived experience. I've watched it happen. Two of my jobs, both of my favourite ones in my careers, were working for companies founded by ordinary people from what I suppose are reasonably call disadvantaged backgrounds. One of them was started by Mo Ibrahim, who started life in Sudan too poor to afford shoes.
Though I agree with the sentiment and am all-in on democracy in general, personal stories are selection and survivor bias all the way down.
It might just be that you are the lucky one, and by definition, are surrounded by other lucky ones who landed similar jobs. Many millions others might have tried and failed and live in poverty or are dead. You'd need data on all those millions to talk about the % chance of someone succeeding, and to show it's better here vs there.
But that's all unhelpful. I think hope is important. I'd love to see us have a national consensus around equal opportunity, egalitarianism, and tolerance to different ways of life (and not just the "different" that I agree with!).
* The reason liberal democracy is so successful is because it's the safest system to become wealthy in through means that don't involve influence in a bureaucracy or paying off gatekeepers*
I think that is mostly unique to the US . Not at all a feature of all democracies. The meritocracy is still mostly intact in the US, whereas in other areas talent is not as greatly rewarded.
"Liberal democracies" are conflated with being part of the global upper class. Which major wealthy liberal democracy hasn't participated in colonialism or invasion in the last 200-300 years?
I assume there are proper aristocrats making your same argument about their way of life. That they are wealthy because they have the "right" system and not because they were born into a corner of the globe made prosperous by modern economic exploitation.
> "Liberal democracies" are conflated with being part of the global upper class. Which major wealthy liberal democracy hasn't participated in colonialism or invasion in the last 200-300 years?
There are a few. Switzerland, Norway, Sweden (depending on how far back you go), Iceland, Ireland.
And, if you're going back 200 years and thinking about Great Britain, well, sure, they had colonies. They also arguably were not a liberal democracy. They had parliament, but they also had the king. Who controlled international policy (which determined whether they had colonies)? I don't know enough to answer that, but I'm not sure they should automatically be put in the "liberal democracy" bucket.
The list of countries anywhere that haven't enthusiastically engaged in warfare at one point or another is rather short. Yes Britain conquered India, we have a bloody history, but show me any period in India's history before then that wasn't soaked in blood.
I'm not excusing anything, I'm just saying human nature is what it is, or has been historically. Power has generally been in the hands of warrior elites, because if it wasn't a warrior elite would come along and seize it. Liberal democracy, when it works, is a massive improvement on that state of affairs.
I don't know about this. There are too many examples of people who exerted influence due to reasons other than having money: for example, coming from an old family has meant a lot throughout most of history, and while accumulated wealth is a common side effect of that, a king is not typically made a king because they have the most money in the bank, instead because of what I guess Hanson would call the "prestige" of coming from a particular bloodline.
The aristocracy in many places and times in history have been influential while being cash poor, at least compared to those filthy parvenus in the merchant and banking classes.
In terms of soft power influence, I think it's easy to mix up cause and effect. Is Jeff Bezos one of the most influential people in the world? Yes. Is he one of the richest people in the world? Yes. But, is he influential because he's rich, or rich as a side effect of the influential company he started? I'd argue the latter.
There have also been too many changes to what we call wealth to consider it the single constant in the history of power: would money today even be recognizable as a concept to someone from 3000 BC? The same goes with what we call influence: Martin Luther was one of the most influential people in history, and wealth was not a factor in that.
The whole quote was "As a book I recently reviewed explains in great detail, elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc.".
I completely disagree money is all that matters. I expect the book explains why other markers of prestige/status are deeply important. We can all name influential people that are not wealthy - which proves that money isn't everything.
I think it is rude to selectively quote someone who has gone to the effort to point to what backs up their statement. You are disagreeing with a book, not Robin.
There are plenty of wealthy people who have little claim to any sort of elite status, and plenty of elite people who don’t have a lot of wealth. It’s easiest to see it in the following way: there are plenty of elite people in America whose net worth might be “only” a couple million of dollars, but less than $10M. Think, a typical high profile journalist. For comparison, there are probably something like 3-4 million people in America whose household’s net worth is above $10M. Are they all elite? Clearly, not.
That's the current net cash-wealth, though. If you considered their potential, you might come to a different result.
E.g. Bill & Hillary Clinton leaving the White House was, according to him, $16m in debt. His net worth was negative.
Two decades later, they made over $200m. But it's obviously not like that money didn't come from the power and influence they've had when they left the White House. Nobody would have paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a speech of the wife of the former governor of Arkansas and failed presidential candidate.
Some have $10m and that's it, and I'd agree, they're not elite. Others have much more, but little of it in cash, and they are elite. Influence can typically be transformed into cash, as the Clintons have shown.
Having a lot of money does not in any way equal power or influence.
Does anyone know who Jimmy John Liautaud is? He's the founder of the Jimmy Johns sandwich chain. Worth over $1 billion, but people with like Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, and Mathew Yglasis, who have huge platforms, keep dominating the discourse on important issues.
Being rich is hardly sufficient to have a large platform. It means you can buy a big house, which looks cool, but it's not nearly enough to make people want to care about your opinions. Having credentials is no guarantee either although i think it helps way more than just having a lot of money.
I think the category for these people would be priests. Elite implies having a lot of power. These journalists and commentators do not have much power in so far as policy or the ability to hire or fire people, but they have considerable influence and reach in terms of having large followings.
> Does anyone know who Jimmy John Liautaud is? He's the founder of the Jimmy Johns sandwich chain. Worth over $1 billion, but people with like Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, and Mathew Yglasis, who have huge platforms, keep dominating the discourse on important issues.
This seems naive to me. You imagine that Krugman's columns in the NYT, Greenwald's pontifications on whatever platform he's on now, or little Matty Y's ruminations on substack are actually "dominating the discourse" ?
Well, yes, of course they are dominating the discourse, but that's wildly different from dominating policy formation. To do that, you make a big donation an important politician, and then you follow up with friendly but firm reminders of (a) the size of your donation (b) the social importance of whatever it is that you do (c) your preferred policy direction.
Krugman or Matt Y will write a column about this later, post-facto, and you'll have moved on, smiling.
I think also, in the case of somebody like Greenwald, it doesn't really matter how many people he reaches because he's essentially an empty envelope - he doesn't really hold substantive opinions. For example, he supported the Iraq war, only to moralize about how awful it was when US soldiers killed Iraqi soldiers. There's a lot of moral-stand-taking but no real incisiveness or heart.
PS: That's also kind of how you get a broad audience - by articulately broadcasting the sort of opinions that most people already have.
> This seems naive to me. You imagine that Krugman's columns in the NYT, Greenwald's pontifications on whatever platform he's on now, or little Matty Y's ruminations on substack are actually "dominating the discourse" ?
One could argue one way or another, but the point here is that they unarguably more impact on public discourse and policy than Jimmy John Liautaud has, despite having much less money than he has.
I don't consider it even close to inarguable. The fact that there are some "big names" that help shape, shift and constrain public discourse does not imply that the same people also shape policy decisions.
[ EDIT: I don't know that the JJ founder does anything at all on policy, but he seemed to be playing the role of "stand-in for rich people that potentially push policies but nobody knows who they are". ]
> Having a lot of money does not in any way equal power or influence.
No, but I'd argue only in the sense that having a lot of dollar bills in your wallet does not equal having an equivalently-valued watch or a car. But one can be converted into the other.
I'm not sure why this whole thread doesn't bring this point. Even today, we don't really grade people's wealth by the actual money they have in hand, we count up their assets. And influence is just another asset, even if it's hard to quantify[0].
So Mr. Jimmy John Liautaud may not be famous and influential, but were he to take his $1 billion of assets and try to convert it to influence, I'm plenty sure he'd succeed at becoming no less influential than Glenn Greenwald. Conversely, Krugman, Greenwald and Yglasis may not be swimming in money or "traditional" assets, but were they to try to convert their influence into money, I'm also convinced they'd succeed.
I think the missing mental model for people claiming influence/power != money is that you need to actually spend influence/power to make money. You only go from influential to influential+wealthy if you have enough influence at the beginning that there's something left after the conversion. Similarly, if you don't have enough money, converting your wealth to influence will leave you with little wealth.
In this way, I think money and power are equivalent in a similar way that cash and the house you own are.
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[0] - It's not something the economists haven't seen before. Even stocks can hard to value in terms of "how much dollars would you have after selling them all", because if you have enough of them, their price starts changing while you sell them.
> but were he to take his $1 billion of assets and try to convert it to influence, I'm plenty sure he'd succeed at becoming no less influential than Glenn Greenwald.
And how would he do that, exactly? Oh yes, that’s right, by paying people like Glenn Greenwald to spread his message (or rather, paying journalists more corrupt than Greenwald is), paying NGO operatives and lobbyists to massage the public and politicians into what he wants. So yes, his billion can buy influence (maybe), but only through the actual elites who have a lot of personal influence of their own, unlike Jimmy John Liautaud.
Yup. That's the part where he'd burn the money on creating influence. After which, he would have influence - and possibly no money. Then, at some point, some other wealthy person could use him as a platform to convert their wealth to influence. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald could launch a book and/or start a company and/or run for an office, and leverage his audience and name recognition to get into a position of wealth... most likely significantly damaging his platform in the process. An influence to wealth conversion.
I don't see anything strange in here, or anything countering my point. Yes, to exchange money for $thing, you often need to give it to people already having $thing.
In the middle ages some nobility could be quite cash poor and still have influence. Go back far enough and rulership came out of how many armed men you had loyal to you.
Today, certainly, having lots of money generally gives a person a lot of decisive power as well as general influence (the wealthy are indeed called the ruling class by some).
But OP's argument kind of falls into incoherence given that "elites" is an utterly vague term. The famous and the attractive have some influence, some uniqueness but so do those with expertise, they're a kind of "elite" if we're being that vague.
It's interesting how we all project a moral position, in defining what sits across from elites... representing everyone else.
The blog puts a lot of weight on prestige and attention, celebrity in it's expert-elite division.
"People are far more interested in talking with elites in elite mode on most topics, than in talking with the clear relevant experts in expert mode"
There's a "some animals are more equal" retort to this, IMO. If attention and prestige was showered onto the real experts, in expert mode, then they would be the celebrities. Are you concerned about elitism, or the quality of elites?
You're addressing elitism more broadly. I sort of agree with you in principle, but I think you're discounting how much breadth the principle allows. It's definitely true that most societies have elites and power structures. But, there's a pretty big range of how that works. Nobel prizes are actually a good example. It's an intentional, symbolic piece of elitism... they kind of things that an archaeologist or historian might note. It doesn't relate to majhor power structures very directly though.
Are they really impactful though? Maybe in terms of selling things, but have the Kardashians (or whoever is the biggest influencer) impacted the world the same way that someone like Rudolph Murdoch has?
You're picking and choosing. Murdoch is rich AND (or because) he owns a global media organization, which provides influence/impact. Plenty of billionaires have tiny impact or influence, or just in a small niche, in fact, most of them you probably wouldn't even recognize their name.
Make a coherent argument. You were comparing to the Kardashians, who are massively influential, not to "you or I". And so what "if they choose to"? They've chosen not to.
I am reminded of how Bloomberg spent $500 million dollars on his ill-fated presidential campaign that lasted 100 days....about 4 months. It was clear proof that money does not always result in impact.
even if they wanted to, I think they would find that their success to be quite limited. Without using google, what is the name of Ray Dalio's 2017 book. It got some media attention at the time, but surely being how rich he is you should have heard about it. Or Bill Gates' latest book.
But to use your example, the Kardashian’s are billionaires, meaning they could impact the world should they choose to. And Murdoch, to use your other example, didn’t start to build his global influence until the 1980s, some 30 years into his career. And although the global influence of his media groups isn’t debatable, it is important to note that the vast majority of his newspaper properties are tabloids.
The halo effect means that attractive people are more likely to end up in charge or wealthy. Many qualities contribute to attractiveness, mainly height, but charm and wit also work.
Additionally it's another feedback loop: Wealth makes people physically attractive. Posture, retinol creams, tailored clothes, and a good hair cut can do a lot to transform someone's life.
At least I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen
Bolshevik Revolution, China's revolution, Iran's Islamic revolution... Plenty of examples of middle class/upper middle class leaders overthrowing the richest families and seizing control. Now in most cases those who take control end up enriching themselves but the point still stands.
yes, especially the culture revolution initialed and directed by Mao in the sixties period of china。 Mao wanted to throw the top Party bureaucracy with the help of the bottom people, but the endeavor have failed. Hope we can find a suitable mechanism
to cope with this worldwide hard problem.
I think in United States it has always been money. But in other cultures it may be something else.
For example, during the Edo society in Japan, merchants were near the bottom of the social hierarchy even though they could have been richer than some aristocrats.
The United States is a liberal democracy, a constitutional republic, an oligarchy, a military kleptocracy; it is centralized, federated, and a union of equal states; it is an authoritarian scientific bureaucratic apparatus, a traditional common-law community; its judges are elites skimmed from the top of Harvard, men elected by peers, and unqualified friends of the Mayor; it is unicameral and bicameral depending on your location. It is all of these things balanced against one another precariously and stably, at minima, maxima, and saddle points in thousands of millions of dimensions.
Agreed, it's 100% about money. Sometimes looks and charm can help you to get money, but you need money first in order to be considered an elite.
Another effect which I've noticed in the tech industry is how engineers who work at big name, wealthy, monopolistic corporations are treated as superior to engineers who work for no-name companies, even when the engineer's role at the no-name company is far more challenging end requires far more expertise and skill.
The intriguing part is not that elites get to make decisions instead of experts (that's practically the definition of elite), but that people seem to prefer listening to elites. The panel vs talk example resonated with me.
I think a resolution, though, is that real expert knowledge -- things we know for sure -- quickly becomes commoditized, disseminated, and boring. You wouldn't ask a panel how to repair a car engine that's developed a knock. But you might ask them how long until electric vehicles outsell gasoline. So most "interesting" questions, by definition fall outside of anyone's range of expertise (even if expertise can be relevant to answering well).
In fact, influenced by Taleb, I wonder if a better model of the world is that almost every question is actually either "every expert knows and agrees on the answer" or "nobody knows and any predictions or arguing about it are almost purely entertainment". Nobody's interested in discussing Type 1 questions, and you might as well listen to elites as experts when it comes to Type 2.
> Nobody's interested in discussing Type 1 questions, and you might as well listen to elites as experts when it comes to Type 2.
Technical issues matter, though. If experts disagree on something, it doesn't mean they disagree on everything, and this sublety is unfortunately often lost when the discussion moves on to "full elite mode".
It's patently obvious on IT/software development/AI subjects, where people who can't write hello world come out of the blue to inform us there's going to be a singluar aipocalypse or whatever it's called now.
There definitely exist topics where it's anybody's guess, but my model is that this is - once more - an epiphenomenon of our inability to effectively incorporate proper science and scientific thought in the public debate.
Hmm. Maybe the elites know how to be more entertaining. If you're listening to an answer to a type 2 question, you might as well get entertainment with the answer, because you're not going to get actual knowledge.
They prefer to side with people who look more powerful and give them a sense of identity, especially when it comes to contrarian opinions. Nerdy experts certainly don't cut it
> As we saw early in the pandemic, the elites are always visibly chattering among themselves about the topics of the day, and when they form a new opinion, the experts usually quickly cave to agree with them, and try to pretend they agreed all along.
My experience was the opposite in most of the world, where experts recommended lockdowns and masks and most political "elites" (especially in the US and UK) ignoring that to the chagrin of the experts.
> It was Jan. 31, 2020, and a leading infectious disease expert, Kristian Andersen, had been examining the genetic characteristics of the newly emerging SARS-CoV virus.
> “Some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” Andersen wrote in an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, noting that he and other scientists “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
> But, he added, “we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.”
> Change they did. Just four days later, Andersen gave feedback in advance of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine letter that was referenced in the prestigious Lancet medical journal to argue against the idea that the virus had been engineered and brand it a conspiracy theory.
> In his email, Andersen called the ideas that the virus was engineered “crackpot theories,” writing, “engineering can mean many things and could be done for basic research or nefarious reasons, but the data conclusively show that neither was done.”
It appeared that the expert gave an unbiased opinion, and 4 days later, not only did they retract the opinion but denounced it as a conspiracy theory.
Maybe he just had more time to review the information or maybe the elite told them that this theory is politically sensitive and should be dismissed.
His unbiased opinion was clearly not that strong - he literally put the word "potentially" in parentheses in the first sentence you quoted. Then he specifically said that his opinions could change because the analyses weren't done. Then his opinion changed.
If this is the best evidence you could come up with that elites are telling experts to change their opinions and experts are acquiescing, it doesn't make for a strong case.
Cases when experts propose something and then elites disagree with the experts are not surprising. It is the default state of affairs everywhere in the world. That's a "dog bites man" situation---essentially a non-story.
What is really surprising (and revealing) is when elites do propose something and then experts follow along even though it runs against their previous opinion from just a week ago. For a vivid example: most experts before the pandemic agreed that masks help limit spread of respiratory diseases, yet nevertheless in the very first few weeks of the pandemic most of them followed along with the completely unscientific claim that masks do not help and that everyone should simply wash their hands instead. Likewise, we had expert voices making sophisticated arguments that shutting down international travel would do nothing to limit spread of the virus---a claim that a middle-schooler would call out as largely bullshit.
I suspect that by the time anybody suggested shutting down international travel (at least in the US), it was far too late to make a difference. The virus was already widespread, with no hope of containing it.
in fields as crowded as public health and medicine, experts voice all sorts of advice, citing all kinds of research, and often contradicting each other. At the end of the day, we regular citizens usually hear from those experts that got their voices amplified by operators of platforms (journalism, political institutions, etc.). In Robin's terms, the elites choose from the crowd of experts those that they like the advice the best.
The author throws away their own and our power - it's up to you (and me) to evaluate elites and experts and to influence your community and decide what happens there. All elites and experts can do is attempt to persuade other people, but it's really up to those other people. There are endless examples of the public ignoring the elites and experts.
> This also helps explain why artists are said to “contribute to important conversations” by making documentaries, etc. that express “emotional truths.” They present themselves as qualifying elites by virtue of their superior art abilities.
Artists are 'experts' in observing, conceiving, and expressing the world that is and the world that isn't. Many experts in their own domains overlook the real issue, misunderstand it, have failures of imagination, and fail to express themselves effectively.
I don't think he means to claim that we don't have an active role in this. The argument is that when you're trying to listen to the experts, you have to be careful, because it's easy to end up listening only to elites who claim to represent the experts.
> All elites and experts can do is attempt to persuade other people
Experts rarely persuade anyone, and when they do it's usually another expert in the same field. So much for expertise.
Meanwhile, being successful at persuasion is one of the defining characteristics of high social status. Napoleon was dead broke when he escaped from Elba, but by the time he made it to Paris virtually the entire French army was marching with him. It's hard to be more elite than being a beloved emperor who persuades the usurping king's army to join him.
Another way you can tell social status is mate selection. For example, Elon Musk is clearly not just rich, but socially elite. Consider the difference between the women he is with compared to the obvious wildly rich but low sociosexual status nerds like Zuckerberg.
Finally, consider that recently I went into clear expert mode to release a formal preprint on grabby aliens, which induced almost no (< 10) comments on this blog or Twitter, in contrast to far more comments when arguable-elites discuss it in panelist/elite mode: Scott Aaronson (205), Scott Alexander (108), and Hacker News (110). People are far more interested in talking with elites in elite mode on most topics, than in talking with the clear relevant experts in expert mode.
This can obviously be explained by them having bigger audiences/platforms.
Partly that, but I think there are also other explanations.
1: I think Scott Aaronson is a better communicator than Robin Hanson, at least in the posts in question. Having read some of the blog posts that went into the pre-read, and then Scott Aaronson’s summary of it, Aaronson does a better job at summarizing the research, connecting it with our day-to-day lives, and making it more fun to read. It has less detail, but that’s arguably a good thing: I don’t need a huge amount of detail on theoretical models for extraterrestrial civilizations, I don’t have the time or energy for that. It’s interesting, but I don’t want to spend hours today reading multiple different blog posts and an academic paper trying to grok the particulars.
(I personally have a pet peeve in that I feel like the typical “style” of academic papers is very bad for communication in general.)
2: WRT Hacker News and /r/SlateStarCodex, people comment there because they want to discuss it among their “tribe”. Wandering onto a stranger’s blog and putting something in the comments can be an anxiety-inducing affair: you don’t know what the people there are like, you don’t what their rules or (sub-)culture is like. You might not fit in, or you might even piss off the author. Meanwhile, I could probably guess pretty accurately what kind of comments are going to show up in any given popular HN story, and how to discuss things in such a way that it would go over well here.
Good analysis. And maybe the expert vs elite distinction is similar to the distinction between low-level detail vs higher-level summary combined with accessible analogies.
There's a certain kind of innocence to this. "Elites" are one half of many popular dichotomies, and the term takes a lot of meaning from whatever it's being compared to.
Elite is a morally evocative term, and that tends to surface a users values, and what we find outrageous. Robin associates elite with celebrity, prestige and credit... expertise with a lack of it. Unfairness and dishonesty in how status and prestige are allocated.
Personally, I separate large parts of the celebrity aspects from this whole tangle. Celebrity scientists, engineers and such are a great thing. Why should the celebrity sphere only contain socialites, athletes, actors, musicians, billionaires.
Something like the nobel prize ceremonially designates someone a celebrity scientist. That's not a terrible thing. Like any other idol, they represent something. Reality is always more complex, but idols embody simple stereotypes that they represent.Watch a small nation bring home a gold in women's judo. Two years later judo is often a thriving sport with many
high achievers. Idols are values, and values impacts like this. Doing the same for medicine or physics works the same way.
I get that people feel celebrity worship is vapid idolatry, but every society worships stuff... often designated hero types. Subcultures too. Led Zeppelin, Elon Musk, Mother Theressa, etc. Why not worship a scientist, if we're always worshipping somebody anyway?
Experts vs Elites are made-up categories. More categories can be arbitrarily created. For example, Experts vs Elites vs Workers. Or Experts vs Elites vs Workers vs Long-term unemployed.
I haven't seen solid evidence for splitting the world in such categories. It definitely makes for entertaining demagoguery but not much more.
Such categories also completely exclude the concept of time from the analysis. It's like trying to judge a movie from a single random screenshot.
I.e. a person might be a worker today, expert in 3 years, and later suffer from depressive symptoms and be chronically unemployed.
I am happy that there are such a discussion exists, understanding the problem is the first step toward resolving it. I hope we as humans being, would eventually learn and apply a better system for handling decisions that affect the public. I do think that it might take time however I am kinda optimistic.
I'd contrast this by watching a season of HBO's "Entourage".
I find it interesting that actors who are those with the least expertise and least value of conversation have talent agents and publicists whereas the experts have little to no talent agents or publicists.
Why not just hire a publicist to write popular versions of the technical stuff that the expert feels accurately portray the technical innards?
The ability to communicate with the masses is talent independent of other expertise. One can be talented in both that's what it is, two talents.
Finally, America's corruption right now is off the charts. One cannot take seriously any critique of America's elite without factoring in the huge amount of influence corruption is having at all levels of elitism in this country. So I couldn't take this seriously.
What corruption exists in the US? Short of politicians and lobbyists (since thats obvious), where else does it occur? As far as I'm concerned, family politics and inheritances are not corrupt.
The author is lumping management & aristocracy into one group and calling it "elites". This sort of unjustified & useless ontologizing is one of the mainstays of the Rationalist crowd. But it sure is fun.
Now we have "influencers", which are neither experts nor elites, but merely visible. That used to be a tiny niche. Now it's a career path.
Angelyne was probably the first to pull this off in modern times. She used to have billboards all over LA, with her name and picture. She became famous for being famous, without performing or accomplishing much. She's on the California recall election ballot right now.
Somewhere between a third and three-quarters of kids, depending on survey, now want to be YouTubers when they grow up.
I read the examples as a different architype. Not elites but communicators. Experts write to be carefully technically correct, standing up to the scrutiny of other experts. Pop-sci or more general communicators write to express the ideas in a fun or relatable way, sometimes mangling them.
Just like other mass media, popular = lowest common denominator.
> Consider news articles versus columnists. The news articles are written by news experts, in full expert mode.
I read much more skeptically from this point on. It almost seems the motivation for the entire post is due to the lack of reaction to his "grabby aliens" post
I'd posit that elites are just the objects of mimetic desire, where experts have expertise, they're almost completely unrelated outside narrow fields. Elites are the people you want to be like, and sometimes who we envy as a result.
"When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. At which point they often start to wax philosophic, and writing op-eds. They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. Elites far less often lust after becoming experts, because we are often willing to treat elites as if they are experts. For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science, they are often willing to field science questions when they give a talk on their book. And the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about."
Not one single sentence of that paragraph is true.
When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. No, they've achieved celebrity status (perhaps well-earned by being a top expert). There are those who are experts, but who do not get Nobel prizes. It's not a perfect prize.
They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. They don't get the prize because the ask for it or buy it, and the celebrity status comes with it automatically. Some recipients capitalize on it, for sure. I think "the elites" bring them into their circles on their own.
Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. No, we all don't.
For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science...the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about. I think many (maybe not enough, for sure) don't see 'journalists' as scientific experts. For your Sanjay Guptas it may be true, but he's not a true journalist .
> When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. No, they've achieved celebrity status (perhaps well-earned by being a top expert). There are those who are experts, but who do not get Nobel prizes. It's not a perfect prize.
You’re mistaking a claim of necessity for a claim of sufficiency.
> They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. They don't get the prize because the ask for it or buy it, and the celebrity status comes with it automatically. Some recipients capitalize on it, for sure. I think "the elites" bring them into their circles on their own.
Hanson is talking about what they do to garner additional publicity with the prize now that they have it, not getting the prize and its status in the first place. You conveniently left out the sentence before that.
> Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. No, we all don't.
Steelmanning Hanson here would suggest reading it as hyperbole. I think a good thought experiment would be “ho many people wanted to hang out with the pre-Nobel winner vs the post-Nobel winner”, however, to illustrate what he is getting at.
It's also worth noting the time delay between winning a Nobel prize and the work for which the prize is received - which generally is 20 or perhaps even 30 years.
They were at a pinnacle of expertise decades before winning the Nobel prize, and arguably might not be there anymore when they do get the award - which essentially is the point of transforming from an expert to elite status.
>For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science...the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about. I think many (maybe not enough, for sure) don't see 'journalists' as scientific experts. For your Sanjay Guptas it may be true, but he's not a true journalist .
Yeah, this seems dubious to me. For one thing, I think people are plenty interested in pop sci books written by experts—hence all the books by doctors that include "MD" after their name on the cover. Of course, sometimes the MD doesn't indicate expertise in the topic they're writing in, but I suspect a book marketed as "pediatrician and pediatrics researcher Dr. So-and So writes about [childhood health topic]" would probably do better than "Dr. So-and-So, MD, writes about [childhood health topic]."
For another thing, there are other plausible explanations than a preference for elites—journalists are more experienced at writing for a general audience and they may have more connections to mass market publishers (rather than academic publishers).
I'd also argue communicating science is a separate skill from doing science. I think all scientists have at least a modicum of skill at communicating science to their peers, but journalists can very well have more experience in communicating science to the public than scientists. It's confusing since Hanson acknowledges communication as a kind of expertise when he refers to journalists as "news experts" elsewhere in the post.
His science journalist part is also not convincing. Neil deGrasse Tyson far outstrips the popularity of science journalists, because unlike other scientists he is not boring to everyday people
I recently ran into a reddit post in which a young individual (low 30's) just got a job at University of California, and was seeking advice on retirement investments. He claimed that he expected to make 300+ grand a year at the UC. New assistant professors start sub 100k, and most top-tier professors near the end of their careers can reach 200+k a year, not counting benefits. What job is this 30 year old getting at the UC that starts at 300k? It must be in the CEO track, where they assume they should be paid most, and somehow, do so.
It is often argued that CEO's deserve extraordinary salaries on the basis that they are smarter than most people...but when you work at a University, you know a lot of people who extraordinarily intelligent people who are familiar with running large, complex organizations/programs. There is no way those CEO's deserve more than they do. It purely a culture and power thing. And its bloody disgusting.
You're generalizing too much by averaging averages, so that your numbers are off. Salaries depend on university, campus, field, etc.
These are average salaries over 5 years ago:
"The Daily Californian created a database of professor pay-checkers in 2016 that shows the variation in inter-departmental salaries for the 2015 year. For example, average professor salary was $326,230 for the economics department, $202,711 for the electrical engineering department and $163,035 for the English department."
I’d argue that it’s only money. Prestige, looks, charm, wit and even positions of power come and go and rich people have always surrounded themselves with those the same way they have always surrounded themselves with experts.
At its core, I don’t think human society has really changed that much since the dawn of organised civilisation. Sure we’ve tried different some very systems over the thousands of years, but if you zoom out to the helicopter perspective, the biggest “influencers” have always been the oligarchs and the sole requirement for joining their ranks is having lots and lots of money.
At least I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen, and I suspect the sole reason liberal democracy has been so successful is because it is the “safest” system to be extremely wealthy within.