Today’s Elites

In a widely-read column, Ross Douthat disparages them.

But Tyler Cowen asks, compared to what?

A couple thoughts.

1. A hundred years ago, elites gave us World War I; fifty years ago, they gave us the Vietnam War.

2. As the economy becomes more specialized, there are going to be more aspects of it with which elites are unfamiliar. Someone in the elite fifty years ago had a decent probability of having grown up on a farm. And a high probability of having done physical labor or worked on a car–changing a tire if nothing else. Consequently, even if today’s elites are better educated and have broader experience than their predecessors, the gaps in what they know may be larger.

40 thoughts on “Today’s Elites

  1. For what is probably a mis-designation of “elites:”

    Among the things “missing” are commonalities of experiences.

    The experiences have probably been more narrow than broader than in the past (pre 1960s); or, at least, occurred in narrower circumstances (almost “controlled” environments).

    It is possible there are no actual elites – only the self-anointed.

    • Well said, Mr. Schweitzer.

      It strikes me that the contemporary self-anointed/self-appointed “Elites” of today have merely adopted the roles of the self-anointed/self-appointed “Nobilities” (Emperors, Kings, Czars and Kaisers and their supportive minions ) of the past. The most prominent characteristic, of course, is the imposition of various tyrannies on the “masses”. All for their own good, of course. As stated concisely by one contemporary “Elite”, “Americans are stupid”.

      But tyranny remains the common denominator.

  2. Arnold,

    A very important lack of knowledge is for running a business. If you haven’t tried to run and business, meet a payroll, satisfy customers, dealt with the daily avalanche of issues to resolve, you are missing a critical piece of experience. When I see discussions of issues affecting businesses amongst economists, I am struck by how they never seem to mention asking business people about these issues. It is as if they start with an issue and perform a gedanken experiment to answer questions and to formulate explanations for why their point of view is correct. This doesn’t seem to be confined to any particular political view.

    I get that a lot of economic work is done by downloading economic databases from various sources. I also remember how academia felt like a bubble universe when I was in graduate school. I just don’t know how so much government policy and economic theory can be created without knowledge of what real business people and workers in our economy are actually thinking and doing.

  3. If there is greater residential segregation, elites are partly / largely shielded from some of the negative consequences of heavy immigration (now) or collapse in public order from violent crime (New York City might be an exception 20 years ago).

    They not compete against Mexican carpenters in the labor market. If they have kids, they don’t send their kids to school where only a minority of students have native or near-native proficiency in English. They don’t send their kids to “minority majority” schools in failing large urban school districts (except maybe magnet schools).

    You could generalize like this. Elites may choose to live in neighborhoods where public school teachers live. They don’t live in neighborhoods where most school teachers teach in but decline to live in.

    Farm work is definitely a good index. It’s practical, it can be physical demanding, there are all kinds of things that can go wrong, it can be dangerous, and inarticulate people can be much better at than the articulate ones. “Verbal virtuosity” (a Thomas Sowell phrase) is no advantage in farm work.

    • Farm work is definitely a good index. It’s practical, it can be physical demanding, there are all kinds of things that can go wrong, it can be dangerous, and inarticulate people can be much better at than the articulate ones.

      I find the “anti-elite” writing about the value of farm-work seems a little bit contradictory here. My experience in California the people most supportive of immigrant immigration are large family owned farms in which they depend upon seasonal immigrant immigration for their business. They have no high cosmopolitan values but like the lower wages and expectation of seasonal work.

  4. Charles Murray put it like this (in part) at AEI:

    “Another problem with the experts — and I think that this gets to a lot of the visceral anger that people have — is that the experts have been recommending policies for other people for which they do not have to bear the consequences.”

    Murray discusses immigration in particular. Architecture is another example (architects don’t live in the cities they reshape). Traffic Engineers probably don’t walk down the sidewalks they plan. I’m just about positive that real estate developers don’t take the bus anywhere.

    The people who make excuses for predatory criminality don’t live in the neighborhoods where crime is greatest.

    Educational experts tend to be bookish and literate anyway–they might not sympathize with hard it can be for some people to learn to read. Phonics is apparently better than “whole language” but whole language was new and interesting and you could build a career out of advocating it, even if it didn’t improve reading instruction. Phonics was already existing, old, boring. Nothing much to be gained from advocating it.

    Academic philosophers who peddle nihilism or “the social construction of reality” try to avoid unpleasant encounters with large real objects.

    I can’t help but think of the provocateur Gavin McInnes who titled one of his articles “Never trust anyone who hasn’t been punched in the face.”

    • I’m a fan of the Tom Wolfe line: “The important thing was not to admit you were wrong in any fundamental way.”

      Surprisingly it doesn’t come from his architecture book. But Marxist groupthink and whole language groupthink and every other kind of tyranny of experts is numbingly repetitive from one decade to the next.

      Robert McNamara’s a great example of failure in both peace and war, first in Vietnam and then globally, with the World Bank version of imperial rule.

    • To clarify, for a lot of what I wrote above, I’m not thinking about a narrow elite but rather the top 15% of the population measured by some composite of income and formal educational credentials.

      In _Coming apart_ Charles Murray discusses what he means by the elite, and his definition is much narrower. Still, I think he focused on perhaps a top 5% for a “broad elite.” If I recall correctly, Coming Apart also spends much time comparing the top and bottom quintiles of “White America.”

      For much of what I’ve written above on this post I’m not talking about any 1% but maybe a 15%.

      My residential zip code (Brighton) is 91st percentile income, and it’s a big one numerically and geographically. House prices aren’t that high in Monroe County, NY State, but there has been substantial loss of manufacturing jobs in the last 30 years.

      The place I live is fairly brainy. There are at least 4 Jewish synagogues (2 quite large) that I can walk to within 20 minutes from my house. Asians outnumber Blacks 3 to 1 in my zip code. There is considerable employment in Arnold’s “new commanding heights” associated with universities and medical complexes (especially University of Rochester but also RIT and MCC).

      One thing Murray wrote in _A curmudgeon’s guide to getting ahead_ is that many people in the top quintile of the USA never actually spend a year living outside that quintile. They don’t exist in a narrow bubble, but they do exhibit a tendency to reside in a top quintile bubble. This is an assertion that might wilt under empirical scrutiny.

      Around here, there is a disinclination among many to live in the City of Rochester when one’s children would attend city schools. So you could live in the city for a while–then move to the suburbs again for child raising.

      Perhaps the top quintile of socioeconomic status lives outside the top quintile of residential areas–but the top 5% of SES never leaves the top quintile of residential areas?

      • Yes, elites move to some neighborhood in the top 20% instead of the top 1% and all of a sudden they are brave people piercing their bubble. Because living in an exurb of DC is exactly the same as learning what its like to deal with the underclass in Baltimore.

        So we get Charles Murray talking about how proud and open he is to live in a 99.3% white town in an area with a median household income above the national average and low exurban cost of living. A short drive from Frederick (think of the fancy ethnic food!) and only an hour from Rockville/Bethesda.

        • Because I am a geographer, I often think in terms of “scale.” Scale matters, and of course there are different scales. There is “how far you are from a good grocery store” or “how far from ethnic restaurants.” So, there are drivability factors.

          There is also “who do your kids go to school with.” These are largely school district effects.

          There is also “Who do you live next to?” “What is the SES profile of the people on your street?” What jobs do they work at? Do they work? Are they neighborly? Do you exchange house keys?”

          That list of questions could be extended indefinitely

  5. “Someone in the elite fifty years ago had a decent probability of having grown up on a farm. And a high probability of having done physical labor or worked on a car–changing a tire if nothing else.”

    And out of those experiences, how did this view of farming as the most noble profession, and the car as the truest expression of American ingenuity play out? We constructed a series of stupid policies in the hope that we could protect this vision, damaging both these industries and the American economy as a whole.

    • You’ve reminded me: Elites hate cars, don’t they, and freeways too. They especially hate SUVs. They always talk about poor people in cars with huge carbon footprints. Rich people, on the other hand, emit more CO2 in a single flight than any shlub driving around in his car.

  6. It seems like the sweet spot is to find elites who don’t

    a) Start stupid wars

    b) Allow/encourage the 3rd world to invade their countries to replace their own people so they can virtue signal to other elites.

    Seems like it shouldn’t be that hard, but the data seems to disagree. It would also be nice to have elites who don’t lie about who and what they really are, but that’s just extra credit.

  7. Further to a previous comment:

    Who or what constitutes the “Elite” in this current time?

    What are the determining characteristics for membership in THE elite?

    What were the defining characteristics of an American elite in prior periods?

    Has our society exhausted its capacity to create, rather than anoint, *an* elite?

    As our social order is fragmenting, do its various segments designate differing “elites?”

    • Look up Charles Murray’s definition of ‘Narrow Elite’. In the US about 100K people at the top of various hierarchies related to wealth, influence, fame, prestige, ability, and usually occupying the leadership positions of various institutions and fields. Ideological and power conflicts between the narrow elites basically determine the shape of politics and debate for everyone else.

      Human beings are extraordinarily sensitive to whatever these prestigious people say and do, and their brains will automatically adjust beliefs and actions in order to signal affiliation with these high status people. Sometimes this is beneficial – as with the old mission civilisatrice, and sometimes it is incredibly maladaptive and socially pathological.

      • Is their influence earned or granted?

        The inability to get rid of Hillary Clinton and the rise of Trump largely on ne recognition suggests it isn’t necessarily earned.

        • It’s a combination of both, and every hierarchy has a slightly different mix, but in general the most able and well adapted rise to the top. Politics is by definition an exceptional field where loyalty to the cause matters more than capability, but still, the best loyalists rise to the top of any field with such gatekeeping. If inheritance was what really mattered, then we’d still be stuck with Jeb! instead of Trump.

          • For president we are getting someone who has already started the overt arrogant scandals (Tarmacgate to name just one) we know her for (do we really know her for anything else) before she is even in office.

      • The passive acceptance of specialized dominances in wealth, prestige, etc. by the majority non-individualists (“Mass Man”) does not produce a true “elite” (even in the Greek polis sense, let alone for the American quest for governance by delegated authority.

        “Human beings are extraordinarily sensitive to whatever these prestigious people say and do, and their brains will automatically adjust beliefs and actions in order to signal affiliation with these high status people.”

        That may be a description of “Mass Man,” or even of the anti-individual, but it is not applicable to individuality – particularly *informed* individuality.

  8. I can rattle off a bunch of lies and bone headed errors (lying about the NSA to lying about Tray von Martin) that should make everyone never trust them ever again, but maybe smart choices are not as easily identified. We sure don’t need an evendors worse elite.

  9. I don’t see much evidence of quantitative literacy in the elite set. They have some pet economists, but are they the right ones? Hillary’s bathroom email server. Futile projects to control internet speech+encryption.

    • I can never tell if they are wrong or just lying. Sure, global warming, for example, may be a problem, but probably not in the top 10. In fact it is obviously below developing solar and nuclear energy capacity and that is just two obviously more important problems.

    • I think you are correct about quantitative literacy or its lack. In the “broad elite” you cannot address a well educated audience using simply verbal language to communicate straight forward statistical concepts and expect that the vast majority of the audience is following you.

      What’s the cause? lack of effective distribution requirements for a B.A. is part of it–unless you go to some place like U of Chicago you can probably dodge most math courses. Many people at many colleges spend much of their math coursework taking or retaking remedial high school math (pre-calc) and perhaps some “baby calculus” that they forget very soon. They may take statistics–but it doesn’t sink in.

      (Disclaimer: I am not a math whiz, but I have taken a variety of college level math classes and thought they were hard. I think I got a C in linear algebra and a D in calculus based probability. etc. etc. And I did have to take remedial pre-calc in college after dropping calc the first time. Despite the fact that I had a great algebra teacher in 8th grade–a martinet (Mrs Philbin of blessed memory, who I always resented) who made us work. (end disclaimer) )

      I don’t think calculus is the solution–but calculus drills functional notation into many students’ heads, which enables them to understand multiple regression, especially for topics of intrinsic interest). If someone can’t intuitively think in terms of multiple regression, I think they have an impoverished understanding of the “causes” of many social phenomena such as income, crime, health, etc.

      Charles Murray (he has good clarity of exposition) says that he cannot address an audience of motivated listeners where everyone has a B.A. and expect that they have all had a course in college level statistics.

      This sounds right intuitively to me. It might be different in Germany or Japan or some other parts of the world. US college education allows people to avoid many hard courses.

      I believe this point is well developed in Charles Murray’s _Real education_. Many people, including members of our mandarinate and the 15% of people best qualified to benefit from college, are permitted to avoid classes that push them to the limits of their cognitive ability. Many elites went through 4 years of college without ever taking a class where they had to say “I just can’t do this stuff.”

      Two consequences. First, many members of our elite can’t think mathematically. Second, they have minimized personal academic failures by dodging a mathematically demanding curriculum. Many lawyers fit this description–though engineers, doctors, programmers and perhaps even nurses do not.

      • I disagree that not doing math courses or not having the ability is the problem. I work in a specialized field for mathematics full of people that passed a number of lengthy math exams with a heavy statistic focus, and people often get smile statistical concepts and logic wrong all the time. If I had to guess the problems are the following:

        1) You can’t separate cognitive ability from emotion or intuition. If someone doesn’t want to accept an answer, their ability to figure out the answer isn’t relevant. Statistics allows for enough bullshitting that even when the answer is obvious one is never FORCED to accept it.

        I learned this when I played poker to pay for college. A lot of STEM friends tried to copy me and failed, because they didn’t have emotional control. And that is in a relatively simple game with a huge incentive to get it right.

        How hard would it be to get people to agree to uncomfortable but right answers on things they can’t profit from? Murray says that people denying HBD will have egg on their face in a decade when genetic sequencing proves HBD. But there is already enough enough strong evidence for HBD and for genetics mattering, and not just on race, and yet you still get Watsoned for mentioning it. Additional evidence isn’t going to change the fact that people who don’t want to accept an answer can’t be forced to accept an answer even if that answer is obviously correct.

        2) Incentives matter at least as much as ability. My profession is in the top 1% of mathematical ability, but they still make dumb decisions they should know better. Like say the LTC insurance fiasco. Why did they make that mistake? Because for the most part it wasn’t their money and they were rewarded for telling people what they wanted to hear. The people paying the price where uninformed stakeholders with little power (shareholders, the public). These people didn’t lack mathematical ability, they lacked incentive.

        • You make an excellent point!

          Arnold said something about “markets are better at changing behavior than education.” Markets give people incentives for understanding reality, while education tells people something and (even assuming the educational content is true) it might not change behavior.

          (I’m kind of using behavior as a proxy for understanding–assuming that we market driven behavior reflects some form of cognition and understanding, rather than just random behavior and agent survival.)

          Arnold said this far more concisely than I–maybe sometime in the last month of so. If I can turn up the quote I’ll put it here. If commenting remains open.

          = – = – = – =

          Some odd examples and anecdotes pop into my head. I think they involve leaders “doubling down” in their stupidity, usually in the political arena. You would think they are smart, but you want their behavior and a “tenacious, stubborn stupidity” is somehow “revealed preferred.”

          Offhand I think of

          (1) Hitler and Nazis treating the Soviet nationalities as Untermenschen and alienating them. Not quite the way the win the war.

          (2) Angela Merkel inviting a million plus poorly screened refugees and economic migrants to move to Germany. Within the kernel of Christian charity and duty to rescue there is something deeper and obtuse in the measure.

          3. IMHO I think of the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq–with little effective planning for what happens next.

          4. There is an essay on this general topic in Clive James’s _Cultural Amnesia_. It partakes of the Clive James digressive style. His essential point is that stupidity is not simply ignorance or lack of understanding, but some sort of motive force of its own. I’m not sure which chapter the point is in. It’s a big book. Its the chapter where he also talks about the movie “Where Eagles Dare.” Maybe s.v. Hitler–maybe not.

          5. More generally, I believe this is probably Kipling’s point in the “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” That stupidity is not just lack of understanding.

          6. Probably the Greeks had a name for this. But I don’t think offhand it’s hubris (as I understand the term).

  10. Compared to what, TC asks. That would seem to betray a lack of imagination on his part. Ask what Churchill would have thought of today’s mandarins, and go from there. Or the old WASP establishment of pre-1960 America.

    • Indeed. The old elite brought us the industrial revolution and non-stop rapid human improvement for hundreds of years, transforming the entire nature of the world. We live in a world that isn’t “nasty, brutish, and short,” because of them.

      I’d take that 1914 elite in a heartbeat, at least they would fight an invasion. Europe of 2016 simply invites the barbarian hordes in and says, “please replace us.” Anyone who questions this gets locked up for hate speech. Europe of 2116 will be a demographically low IQ violent shithole.

      Let’s face facts. The West reached its high point before the summer of ’68, and its all been downhill from there.

      • “The old elite brought us the industrial revolution and non-stop rapid human improvement for hundreds of years, transforming the entire nature of the world.”

        That may be a bit of misconception:

        What happened in England, for example, was that the “elite” or predominant class “opened up” to take in new members from new sources (commerce, etc.) and Open Access (see, North, Wallis & Weingas) to the formation of associations, freedom of relationships became prevalent.

        The “elite,” actually coalitions of powers and influence in western societies, were in constant churn and recomposition.

        • Isn’t Gregory Clarke’s The Sun Also Rises a refutation of that statement?

    • Compared to efficient meritocracy and no coercion would be my standard. How to get there is my question.

  11. Farming is famously “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” and the British empire had no success at all in getting foragers in Australia to become farmers like the British themselves.

    Farming is harder than foraging. And farming leads to hierarchy, and bureaucracy, and a state. So this is an example of an imperialist elite literally trying to impose their way of life on natives who don’t see the appeal. For a relevant analogy today, replace “British empire” with “European Union.”

    • I’ve never really bought that argument. Being a primitive peasant was no fun and required large social pressure to enforce adaptive behaviors, but all Malthusian situations are comparable in a ‘pick your poison’ way. The total forager population was mostly stable a long time too, and the reason is obviously a steady state of constant savage homicide, infanticide, genocide and population replacement, which is what the old anthropologists and explorers told us before the field was taken over by people pushing a false ‘gentle, noble primitive’ narrative. Not exactly a kumbaya world.

      • I completely agree with Chagnon and Edgerton and Pinker and Keeley: Constant battles is the reality. What I’m saying is that, from the perspective of the foragers themselves, agrarian society is better left to the imperialists, the heralds of progress, the elites.

        To us, murder is abhorrent, worse than bear-baiting and all the other relics of a bygone era. But we’re bourgeois capitalists, so that’s our weird perspective. We’re even weirder, and more squeamish, than farmers. But to foragers, murder isn’t gross or wrong. Justice and survival demand sacrifice and death, from their perspective.

        • Now we tread near Randianism. YOUR survival may require rapaciousness, but not necessarily net survival.

  12. WW I was a terrible cultural choice of “imperial nationalism” — because the forces were too evenly matched. WW II (unmentioned above) continued this too-equal forces fighting — not so different from the US Civil War (from our elites of the time, including Lincoln).
    Post WW II peace in Europe was due to US occupation & support for local nation-building as well as such military & economic superiority that it deterred any commie or other organized attack.
    The anti-commie Korean War of 1951 shows one way the elites accommodated commies — by splitting the country. With the US supported South being run by a market-oriented anti-commie dictator, pushing some development. and eventually evolving (developing) into a functioning market democracy. But market & capitalist development success first, then democracy.

    In Vietnam, after finally “winning” a Peace Accord (Paris 1973), the newly elected Dems in Congress decided to cut funding of US ally S. Vietnam and run away, allowing the commies to win in Vietnam and Cambodia. Immediately after commie victory, mass re-education camps & killings in Vietnam, plus the horrendous 25% killed genocide of educated Cambodians in those Killing Fields.

    Anti-war elites vs pro-Capitalism & humanitarian imperialism elites. On war, the “elites” are not united. But they failed to learn the lessons of Korea and WW II — after the war, the US needs to keep a large army to avoid losing the peace.

    Wherever one is unwilling to tax for the upkeep of a substantial post-war US army, one should be very unwilling to take any military action.

    Maybe the new elites, farther away from WW II, are more anti-war than previously and not interested in war — but war is interested in them. It would be better if more elites knew more about real war, and even real guns.

  13. Cowen seems to have really big blindspot on war. I suppose it’s typical of most Keynesians, but his NYT column a couple of years ago where he basically commits the broken window fallacy wrt war really reduced my respect for him.

    • As I recall, wasn’t that about technological advancement? He’s not a Keynesian, strictly speaking, so it wasn’t the Keynesian trope about forcing economic churn.

      • His empirical claim that war brings liberalization (in the classical sense) is so laughably absurd that I can’t take Cowen seriously.

  14. It isn’t what they know that’s so; it’s what they know that isn’t so.

    – with apologies to Will Rogers

    • It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
      Mark Twain

      Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/marktwain109624.html

      The big problem with current elites is that they are both smart enough to lie to themselves & believe it, plus there are so few consequences to them for being wrong.

      All smart folk have always been smart enough to believe their own lies.

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