Mr Hanson's "elites" here are just as simple, emotional, and irrational critters as any of the rest of us, and their kindergarten politics are no more (or less) noble than our "who stole my lunch?" bullshit. By being big fish in a smaller pond the waves of silliness they slop go further, that's all.
There doesn't need to be a mind behind a process. Many things, including some of society's worst troubles and the confluences of malfeasance in politics, are simply emergent properties of large social systems. No intent necessary.
[1] I use this phrase to replace "intent", because outside of requiring the "intender" to be person who can be held to account with punishment or reward, the reward mechanism is the same environmental pressure.
"Yes Minister" is widely regarded as a politician's manual and not as a conspiracy theory.
But perhaps if the elite BBC makes a series that is surprisingly accurate, it is the truth. If an internet commentator makes the same points, it is a conspiracy theory.
Which proves the first paragraph of this very essay.
It doesn't need to be a manual because it is accurately describing human weakness in the face of a complex world, and the results are (as in the real world) often highly absurd.
Like, whether they happened or not, they're good ideas. "Good" in that they can be executed successfully. Obviously this depends no which conspiracy comes to mind when you hear "conspiracy theory", but many can be inspirational.
On the other hand ..
> What this says is that, even in a democracy, the ~90th percentile rich have the most influence, business interest groups have about half as much, and mass interest groups have about a third as much. We less rich folks only get what we want, to the extent we do, because these elites mostly agree with us, and because we sometimes influence mass interest groups.
.. this is Marxism 101, the most basic set of observations about how classes work made over a century ago. I don't thing any sensible person would deny that there is such a thing as an elite, or that the elite have their agendas, but if you want to make specific claims about specific real people then you need evidence.
Here's a short list of organizations (off the top of my head) who discuss and advocate for policies that benefit the extremely wealthy over others:
* Davos
* WTO
* IMF
* World Bank
I remember reading an article in 2000 from some Brown professor encouraging Bangladesh (my home country) not to listen to the World Bank and IMF and instead do indigenous agriculture or something like that.
Good thing nobody gives a shot what Brown professors think because Bangladesh has developed tremendously over the last two decades thanks to following those policies.
Paper is at: https://sci-hub.tf/10.1017/s1537592714001595
Another quirk is that it appears even supermajorities often don't get their way (the graphs show that if 80-90% of the elite favour a policy, it is enacted a little under half the time. Which is better than the probability if 80-90% of the median voters favour it, but still means they usually don't get their way...)
The headline finding is their model which essentially suggests that the median voter doesn't have much influence except where their views align with wealthier people and/or interest groups, but the thing is, they usually do align with one or other and none of the groups actually get their way that often!
It'd also be interesting to see the findings disaggregated by administration and by policy area. It is not difficult to imagine that some of the most consistent disagreements between the median American and the elite American regards issues like upper tax brackets (which elites pay and median Americans don't). To what extent politicians are seeking the favour of 90th percentile Americans when they (sometimes) don't raise upper income tax brackets even when the average American supports it and to what extent they are simply pleasing themselves and following their preferred economic theory are open questions. Disaggregation would also help evaluate other theories, like one of American's political parties being aligned with the elite, or the reverse causation hypothesis where in a political environment where proposed change often fails, the 90th percentile American is [incidentally] happier with the status quo.
> Another quirk is that it appears even supermajorities often don't get their way (the graphs show that if 80-90% of the elite favour a policy, it is enacted a little under half the time. Which is better than the probability if 80-90% of the median voters favour it, but still means they usually don't get their way...)
I think those two things oppose each others.
When it comes to surveillance, a lot of people are easily swayed and convinced as long as the ones who are under surveillance are the "bad guys". "I've got nothing to hide" is the go to argument.
When it comes to unfair economic policies, a lot of voters genuinely believe in small state policies. A common policy package is known as neoliberalism.
With housing, a lot of home owners are politically active and they often want to slow down change and avoid an underwater mortgage. What happens is that they vote for short sighted policies that benefit them over the short term, without realizing that they aren't the only ones benefiting. They vote in various things that restrict housing supply or they freeze property taxes. What they didn't think of, is that they prevented residential development but they left commercial developers free to whatever they wanted because they provide jobs. Yet when you have too many jobs, more and more people will come to your city making housing worse. Freezing property taxes helps landlords who never sell their property or speculators who don't intend on actually renting out the unit.
The average voter gets hurt by the way they vote but they don't realize it. Lots of unintended consequences but that doesn't mean there are people out there conspiring against you. There are lots of greedy people looking out for their own self interest who don't care about others, but that describes pretty much everyone.
Looking at the author's CV, he's an economics professor, and that's a very Econ view of the world. So, I would not be surprised if he doesn't feel like he needs to explain that perspective on his blog.
Anyway, nice to see the filter bubbles working so well. Haha, localized versions of controlling groups. No, but really, the flaw behind these master controlling group theories is that there are so many of them that would have to compete that its the same as none existing.
BTW, it can be rather amusing to see how the culture of different societies is reflected in their respective conspiracy tropes. For example, in US, we have "sovereign citizens", while Germany has "Reichsburgers". Both groups make broadly similar claims - asserting inapplicability of most laws to themselves etc. But while sovereign citizens are completely decentralized and don't even claim any legitimate central authority, the Reichsburgers have an ostensible shadow government-in-exile (although they disagree on which of the many is the legitimate one). And said "government" actually issues documents such as IDs and driver licenses, that are anathema to the sovereign citizens as a matter of principle. Ordnung muss sein?
Andrew Gelman has made this same observation, which he calls "the piranha problem", in the context of sociology and psychology papers. The typical paper identifies a random-looking stimulus that nevertheless has a large effect on some behavior like voting or accepting a romantic partner. And the problem is, there are so many of these papers, all showing large effects, that it's impossible for any of the effects to be reliable, because even if the effect a particular paper identifies is real, there are so many other effects influencing the same outcome that the effect described by the particular paper cannot have any meaningful influence.
The problem is not biased elites. The problem is that humans are biased, and little can be done to remove their biases. Much less to ensure they don't manifest those biases in the results of their work.
That's just false! In every society, the elite class is overwhelmingly comprised of families who maintain their high social standing and wealth over decades or centuries. The lower classes are similarly static over the generations, and all classes have a class-specific bias.
If you need proof, take a sampling of the 'Early Life' Wikipedia section of any elite you can think of. Even tech founders, who are more likely socially mobile than most other elites, have overwhelmingly had an upper-middle class upbringing at _least_.
Being biased against the extermination of all human life is a bias, but I think we'd agree it's a good one.
To avoid this mistake, focus on the status quo of policies that facilitate comparison. Taxes are an excellent candidate. Everyone would rather have someone else pay the taxes. True power will arrange for it to be so. Look for tax privilege (types of income, industries, etc) and you will find true power.
I'm unclear why you think these are wedge issues. I've copied what I think is the relevant paragraph describing the sample:
These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible political alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda." At the same time—since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about—they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence.
The concept of the Overton Window is instructive here. Policies like "should local property taxes go up by .5 percentage points to fund school safety" are safely within the range of allowable discussions. These are issues on which the "elites" disagree, or don't have particular attachment to.
But questions that threaten their status, like "Is it good that individuals own the means of production?" are not going to be in the Overton Window any time soon, mainly because those elites agree that they like the status quo.
Also, as you point out, there are tons of indirect taxes on the poor, but other aspects of the policy status quo really drive it home -- poor social safety net, bad public transport, "public" schools funded with property tax, policies that make rent go up, shipping the jobs overseas, etc, etc. We even allow homeless spikes!
My general point isn't so much that taxes are an ideal metric, it's that we should focus on measuring the status quo rather than measuring who won yesterday's wedge issue battles.
No:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...
>indirectly they pay the corporate taxes
Corporation tax incidence falls squarely on shareholders. Profit taxes affect those who are the beneficiary of profits, and the vast majority of the stock market is owned by the very, very wealthy.
It's not unusual for people to be spoon-fed the exact opposite impression, of course.
Re: nonprofits, I don't think those are the best counterexample to the "look at taxes" strategy because they are absolutely notorious for playing a part in the tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy. That doesn't mean there aren't nonprofits that write open source software, shelter animals, feed starving kids in impoverished reasons... but there are also nonprofits that serve primarily as a mechanism for getting money from point A to point B with the lowest taxes. The two are difficult to tease apart, and unfortunately that is the entire point.
>Thus elites support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business taxes, regulations, and legal liability. Yes when the super-rich are taxed, these elites are also taxed, but that may seem worth the price to take them down a peg or two. Most ordinary people miss this conflict by not distinguishing these two different kinds of “rich”.
Arne't the super-rich a subset of the elite?
Absolutely not, not in any traditional society.[1] The elite are governors; the super-rich are merchants. Those super-rich are what the term "middle class" used to refer to.
[1] Phoenician city-states may be an exception.
The “anti-elite” sentiment, when it becomes overloaded with education status or domain expertise, really pushes my buttons for getting causality wrong in the world’s problems.
I digress here, but in other words: yes, it’s a problem that rich folks have more opportunities to become educated and to become experts in their fields, and that regular folks don’t have the same opportunities to do so. But the world’s injustices and problems are not caused by “elites” in the sense of “people who have expertise and authority in their fields”.
As an analogy, you can blame (in part) society and government for your lack of maths skills, but you can’t blame “mathematics” (the pure science) or even “mathematicians” for your problems. Pointing the finger in the right direction is super important if you care about accountability and justice.
It is a lazy way to get people to agree with your argument when they wouldn't if you were forced to define who you precisely mean.
If you care about regular folks having a good life and having good opportunities, if you want the American dream (work hard and get rewarded) to be true, then a big part of that requires “vertical mobility”, and that means that you should want regular people to be able to achieve “elite status”.
It’s not the existence of elites that is the problem, it’s how fairly opportunities are distributed and how fairly people are rewarded. Stated in another way, the problem is not the elite, the problem is how the elite is made.
I would submit that Dr Fauci typically holds very little power, and that he has had an unusual amount of influence lately because there’s a pandemic.
https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
> justify everything from inequality,
No one justifies inequality, because the word by itself is meaningless. There’s a spectrum from total equality of outcome to total equality of opportunity. People find themselves in different positions on that spectrum.
> healthcare I’m guessing that by this you mean socialized medicine, because Americans have a level of healthcare that’s way above most nations, including european ones.
While there can be a healthy debate about what option makes a better medical system, it’s pretty obvious that the recent attempts have been disastrous, with the government trying to solve problems that the government created long ago, only to create more problems for the future.
>faith Call me crazy, but I thought that in liberal democracies we did not mind police people, so why would they need to justify faith?
You can only help those who wish to help themselves. People who are in this category are willing to put in work and effort, regardless of success. People who are not just want a free handout and will quit if things don't go there way. Which ironically, is the social institution in much of the midwest, whom mostly have some of the lowest homeless populations in the US. Because they don't placate people contributing to the problem. They make people feel ashamed for contributing to it but empower them when they work towards getting out of it.
Or, more brutally, doesn't this analysis miss the fact that without a social safety net, homeless people die? If you can get nutritious meals at a soup kitchen on Skid Row and you have a safe place to keep a tent and some belongings, you're going to be alive and contributing to the homelessness numbers in LA. If you die in the midwest, you don't contribute to their homelessness numbers.
It’s quite strange to see a paper about economic power exerting control over government policy being summarized as “elites support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business taxes, regulations, and legal liability.”
> Most ordinary people miss this conflict by not distinguishing these two different kinds of “rich”.
The British refer to these classes as the academic elite and the commercial elite. They compete with each other.
Citation needed. The paper does indeed limit the meaning, but also concedes that this interpretation of what they are measuring is possible.
> Not all “elite theories” share this focus. Some emphasize social status or institutional position
> What we cannot do with these data is distinguish definitively among different versions of elite theories.
https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-have-favorable-v...
The Cambridge Princeton study found the same thing. When "less rich folks" get what they want, it was only because of coincidence with something elites were already pursuing, with sometimes there being mass influence of what the elites were doing, but never really influence of the agencies heads or representatives.
And so there is neither direct democracy (which, duh, but people act like there is at the federal level), nor is there representative democracy unless you elevate an amorphous group of "elites" as the idea of representatives.
We do have a representative democracy, and a shockingly effective one. It represents the people who can drop $50k + annually on political donations. My time in that world is some time in the past so I'm probably badly underestimating the amount.
Not that these elected representatives don't consider the actual constituents and citizenry, but they listen to their donor list. With all the goodwill and the best people having the best intentions, the system would still have flaws; and these people are just people like the rest of us.
Ha! Yes this is true.
I don't find this controversial, I find it sad that poorer people were lied to about their ability to participate or what the vote means or its weight.
What? CEOs (example from the paragraph before, along with doctors, judges lawyers etc) want socialism?
Quite often, yes. For example, that's how we got universal public education in the US. The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto is a reasonable look at how it happened.
The argument about policy influence implies that everyone is in theory equally capable of influencing policy. (Note this is orthogonal to whether everyone should be equally capable of influencing policy.) But you wouldn't argue that everyone is equally capable of earning high salaries (again, orthogonal to whether everyone should be) - you can empirically see that 10% of households make over $210K and 90% make under that, for whatever reasons. Why wouldn't we expect those reasons to also apply to people's empirical capability to influence policy?
Bingo. The age of clerks is upon us - when everyone should be a clerk, because we're governed by clerks, who cannot possibly imagine any worthy person being anything other than a clerk ...
But you know the chimp troupe will then start crying about how timid leaders are and brave leaders get propped up who dig the hole deeper.
Anyway, a related thought, I've been increasingly noticing one phenomenon:
A surprisingly large fraction of human behavior and thinking is driven by an often subconscious desire to maintain or advance social status and respect, this is true for both individual and group identities. I think it's one of the most underrated hidden forces behind political preferences. Some examples:
- Obama becoming the president has increased the relative social status of black people. Some whites used to have or still have a subconscious perception that whites are at the top of the hierarchy and Obama was a threat to their position in the ladder, that's why they hated him.
- China's growth has lead to a relative decrease in the international status of the US. Which is why Trump's anti-China rhetoric resonated so well.
- When someone is rude or dismissive to you, they're subtly saying that you're not important for them and they don't respect you, which is the cause for the anger.
This sentence was a red flag in terms of the author’s credibility. The wealthy educated class the author generalizes about overwhelmingly despises socialism. This sentence also indicates that the author has internalized that tired misunderstanding “socialism is when the government does stuff”.
> Their highest hopes tend to be of gaining positions in, getting promoted in, or creating, such organizations. When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.)
Must be nice to live in such a cartoon-view of the world.
That said, I didn't have access to the full linked research article in the story but the actual scientific research, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278151684_Testing_T..., sounds interesting.