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> elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc.

• fidesomnes 5y ago
  > looks, fame, charm, wit Imagine if any of our elites had this, would a wonderful world it would be. Instead we get ruled by dementia patients and big mouths.
• R0b0t1 5y ago
  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.
  • chaircher 5y ago
    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.
• ummonk 5y ago
  There are plenty of nations or periods of history where the ultra rich acquired their fortunes due to their power rather than vice versa.
• WaitWaitWha 5y ago
  I am not sure, but I conjecture that Internet "influencers" fall into the elites group. They often do not have money when they start out.
  • moksly 5y ago
    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?
    • listenallyall 5y ago
      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.
      • moksly 5y ago
        Those billionaires still have the means to impact the world in ways that you or I do not, should they chose to do so.
        • listenallyall 5y ago
          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.
        • filmgirlcw 5y ago
          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.
• simonh 5y ago
  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.
  • jvanderbot 5y ago
    That's a nostalgic sentiment.
    • gumby 5y ago
      It’s possible to return to that prelapsarian state (at least to the degree it actually existed)
      • mcguire 5y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 Ah, the good ol' days.
        • gumby 5y ago
          Exactly
    • simonh 5y ago
      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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Ibrahim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Ibrahim
• xyzzyz 5y ago
  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.
  • luckylion 5y ago
    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.
    • xyzzyz 5y ago
      I don’t think that Bill and Hillary Clinton are representative examples of elites that the blog post above is talking about.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    this 10x 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. http://greyenlightenment.com/2021/09/06/the-class-structure-of-america/ http://greyenlightenment.com/2021/09/06/the-class-structure-... 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.
• gumby 5y ago
  > 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.
  • rkk3 5y ago
    > 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius 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.
    • gumby 5y ago
      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.
  • moksly 5y ago
• inglor_cz 5y ago
  > 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.
  • shakow 5y ago
    > pre-revolutionary France wasn't too dissimilar. In appearance maybe; if you dig a bit under the varnish, the power exerted by creditors over nobles and even kings quickly appears.
    • cassepipe 5y ago
      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)
• cryptica 5y ago
  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.
• tommymachine 5y ago
  Am I missing something here? The United States at least is a constitutional republic. I must have missed the day in college government class when they renamed that form of government "liberal democracy", presumably in an effort to convince more people to vote for "liberal democrats" as their representatives.
  • whatshisface 5y ago
    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.
    • tommymachine 5y ago
      Ya, if nothing else, the events of the last 2 years have assured me of the United States' "stability".
  • nohuck13 5y ago
    "Liberal" here is just the adjective form of liberty. A "liberal" democracy is a democracy is one that enshrines the classic individual freedoms (speech, assembly, religion...) e.g. the United States. A "illiberal" democracy is a democracy that doesn't, e.g. 20th century Singapore.
    • tommymachine 5y ago
      Weird how none of the founding documents of the US government use either of those words ("liberal" or "democracy"), but they do use the words "constitution" and "republican". I'm sure that artful re-defining of our government format has nothing to do with the infiltration of communism into the education system here.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  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.
• j7ake 5y ago
  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.
• robocat 5y ago
  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.". The book is Lauren A. Rivera’s 'Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs' https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691155623/pedigree https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691155623/pe... which gives the tagline "How social class determines who lands the best jobs". Robin Hanson's review of the book: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/what-makes-prestige.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/what-makes-prestige.h... 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.
• netcan 5y ago
  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.
• andreilys 5y ago
  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.
  • fisheuler 5y ago
    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.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  Bingo. The people with all the political power, and the people with all the economic power, are always the same people. In every civilization in history.
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  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.
• narrator 5y ago
  How about communist societies? What about feudalism? In modern China, billionaires get cancelled and even executed on a regular basis if they go against the party.