14 ms·

Elite Biases Make Policy Biases

153 points by sfg 5y ago

mojaaa 5y ago
No policy is the best policy when things get too complex. You dont even have to analyse it too deeply. 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.
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mgh2 5y ago
American elites have used the free will bias to justify everything from inequality, healthcare, and faith; for it is easier to blame than to help the unfortunate https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf8095812 https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  If "helping the unfortunate" always worked, why is there still homelessness in the west coast? 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.
  - geofft 5y ago
    Doesn't this analysis miss the fact that homeless people migrate around the country to places with better policies? If you're going to die in the midwest because there are no social institutions to support you and you don't see a realistic way for work and effort to keep you alive, you may as well use your last couple of bucks to take a Greyhound out west to Skid Row and take your chances there. 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.
    - gotoeleven 5y ago
      Homeless people move to CA because it has great weather and social services and so its great to be homeless there compared to other places. Homeless people are rational so that's where they go. The crucial fact, though, is that none of these great conditions in CA do anything to actually get people out of homelessness, they just subsidize homelessness and make it easier to be homeless. So naturally, homeless people being rational, the effect of these policies is to increase homelessness overall. There are people who are legit mentally ill and somehow as a society we've decided that the best we can do is have them live like dogs, scrounging around and shitting in the streets. There are other people who just really like heroin and would rather do heroin than anything else and california is the probably the best place in the world if that's what you want to do. A truly humane homeless policy would institutionalize mentally ill people, not subsidize drug addicts, and help people on the edge of homelessness find jobs and housing.
      - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
        >A truly humane homeless policy would institutionalize mentally ill people, not subsidize drug addicts, and help people on the edge of homelessness find jobs and housing. But that sounds mean and hard so we can't do that! No I agree 100%. I personally think mental institutions need to be reestablished by the state because frankly, there are too many severely mentally ill homeless people that need to be off the streets for everyones safety. Drug addicts honestly I'm incredibly apathetic to. I understand it's a big deal but frankly, they've gone the way of ruining their lives. Not much you can do to help them. Placating them only keeps the cycle going. The real people who are just down on their luck tend not to stick with homelessness (except for Californian homeless people where honestly it's the only way for lower income people to get by).
- xondono 5y ago
  > free will bias As in the belief to having free will? I find it odd to describe that as a bias. > 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?
h2odragon 5y ago
This fits in with many of the grand old conspiracy theories. What the conspiracy theorists miss is there doesn't need to be a unified agenda behind this process, simple banal human tribalism suffices. 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.
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  Essentially, elites come from among the people. People generate elites, who generate policy. Bias flows the same way. In any given nation, the people are very likely biased. Which generates biased elites. Who, in turn, generate biased policy. 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.
  - wussboy 5y ago
    I agree with everything except your last sentence. Much CAN be done to ensure those biases do not manifest in the results of their work. More generally, this is the power of our institutions.
    - DamnYuppie 5y ago
      Which are formed by people with biases who are attracted to other people with biases. It is turtles all the way down.
      - h2odragon 5y ago
        Turtles would be so much simpler, tho. A tortoise will copulate with a boot for hours with no pretense about what he's doing or why. No justifications or excuses. Us hairless apes on the other hand, we'll act contrary to all our good sense in the firm belief that "the job requires it" or "the boss wants it this way" or worst yet "the rule book specifies it thus". We can knowingly compound our stupidity and decry the results. Then expect praise for following the rules. At least the tortoise gets the idea, at the bottom of the hole, "dig up, stupid!"
vmception 5y ago
> 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. 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.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Go hang out at some fundraiser dinners and other places politicians, specifically the kind of things that federal congresscritters, state representatives and governors speak at. Bring a camera and write a blog post about it and they'll often let you in as a journalist for free, and might even feed you. 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.
  - vmception 5y ago
    > 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. 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.
phreeza 5y ago
In Germany in the 60s there was the concept of the "long march through the institutions", implying that the rebels of then would become the elites of tomorrow, with the purpose of then putting into practice the revolutionary policies. It worked to a certain degree, many formerly left-wing policies have now become mainstream, but of course a lot of compromises had to be made and the ideals got watered down.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  The policies may have changed, but the people are the same.
  - WJW 5y ago
    Many people alive in the 60s will have died by now, and the rest will have had 50-60 extra years of life experience. They're hardly the same, except in a very strict "person with the same name as then" sense.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > They're hardly the same, except in a very strict "person with the same name as then" sense. In terms of identity that is correct, but don't forget that when we refer to a particular person we are really using a label to point at a specific continuity of experience and agency through time, and unless qualified somehow (twelve-year-old Bob, Alice last year, you committed after yesterday's meeting, etc.) the default time point is either at the moment of reference or a moment just prior (the rest of the 4D 'worm' is incorporated transitively), and (again, by default) the 'now' pointer is thereafter updated continuously (at least in casual conversation in natural languages such as English). It is pretty rare for continuity of experience (and agency) to be broken, and outside of science fiction physical continuity never is, so it isn't too surprising that English (and other natural languages I'm familiar with) largely elide the point-in-time qualifier by default. We - both individually and in groups - are all of us Ships of Theseus, passing in the night.
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
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erikerikson 5y ago
Maybe I missed something written here but very few of the elites I've known meet the description of them offered here. This does tend to describe what I have observed of the U.S. elite left. I would be very surprised to learn that Bezos or Gates were socialists, for example.
jjoonathan 5y ago
Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology that focuses on battles and misses the war. Would you rather win at 100 wedge issues or would you rather win at 0 wedge issues but the policies you wanted were already in place and not under attack? 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.
- jrexilius 5y ago
  By that logic the poor in the US have the most power? As they pay generally close to zero direct taxes (indirectly they pay the corporate taxes and gas taxes and such as hidden costs in their daily consumption)...
  - techbio 5y ago
    Perhaps? If not individually then collectively, whether as motivation toward a cheaper food supply, or as a caution to those who are not poor but only a couple of defiant decisions from losing what they've gained. It seems counterintuitive, but GPs rule of thumb may hold even there. I think the problem is in comparing a few wealthy individuals or cabals (in control) to an enormous number of real people (each without much control at all). Poverty is negative power under the same hierarchy responsible for controlling positive power.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    We are looking for policy concessions. Not taking money from someone who doesn't have money to take isn't much of a policy concession. 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.
mrxd 5y ago
The original paper refers to specifically to economic elites, but this article quite strangely redefines this group as a credentialist/cultural elite that is motivated by status and influence within bureaucracies and favors socialism. This seems to be a description of the author’s personal experiences within his university, but it ends up being a significant misrepresentation of the actual paper, which refers to an economic elite, where support for socialism is lowest. 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.”
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- xondono 5y ago
  > where support for socialism is lowest. 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.
  - mrxd 5y ago
    > Citation needed. https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-have-favorable-views-capitalism-59-have-unfavorable-views-socialism https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-have-favorable-v...
- jackcosgrove 5y ago
  The author touches on this: > 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.
KarlKemp 5y ago
> 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.) What? CEOs (example from the paragraph before, along with doctors, judges lawyers etc) want socialism?
- webmaven 5y ago
  > 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.
paulpauper 5y ago
>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. >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?
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  American libertarians like Hanson want to be pro-private business/capitalism and anti-elite at the same time. Hence the distinction between the credentialed, academic, govt institute and bureaucracy based elites ("bad") and the business owner class ("good"). I doubt how much these are actually distinct. Rich business owner types still send their kids to be credentialed and some will go into more bureaucratic roles than others and if you get rich based on govt roles and political lobbying etc, you will invest.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    your connection in one direction is "send their kids to be credentialed"? That's pretty weak, and I think you might not really have a case for an equivalence relation.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    There is absolutely no reason you can’t be a capitalist and against elitism at the same time. If the superrich paid their fair share I don’t think there would be as much animosity towards that group.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > 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.
carabiner 5y ago
Normal eyes normalize normal lies.
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geofft 5y ago
Causation seems wholly unattested, and I would guess that the attributed causation is backwards. People who are skilled/talented/privileged/whatever enough to meaningfully influence policy and the world around them will start by using that influence to get themselves to a $210K+ household income, because that's the individually-rational thing to do. As the article notes, there are a bunch of professions where this is median for a single earner and a whole lot of professions where this is median for a dual-income household. 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?
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hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
What a bunch of bullshit. I love that the title of this is "overcoming bias", but then the bias in this article is so blatantly transparent: > 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_Theories_of_American_Politics_Elites_Interest_Groups_and_Average_Citizens https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278151684_Testing_T..., sounds interesting.
epgui 5y ago
I really dislike the conflation of the many different meanings of “elite”. It’s such an emotionally overloaded word. If you define elite status as a top X percentile of income or wealth, then just use the words “rich people”, “wealthy people”, or even better, “high income people”. Using these more specific words get to the core of the matter. 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.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  There was an earlier comment on a different discussion where someone referred to "elites" as basically anyone who worked for the government or had a bachelors degree. 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.
  - epgui 5y ago
    Indeed, and it’s also terribly counter-productive in that it borders on anti-intellectualism. 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.
  - pjc50 5y ago
RivieraKid 5y ago
Very thought-provoking article. I think the narrative has a truthful core but it exaggerates reality, almost to a caricature. 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.
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rrsmtz 5y ago
This is a classic Marxist talking point (cultural hegemony): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
> These elites who set policy [...] love, large bureaucratic organizations. 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 ...
abvdasker 5y ago
> When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.) 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”.
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153 points by sfg 5y ago

No policy is the best policy when things get too complex. You dont even have to analyse it too deeply. 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.

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mgh2 5y ago

American elites have used the free will bias to justify everything from inequality, healthcare, and faith; for it is easier to blame than to help the unfortunate https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf8095812 https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
If "helping the unfortunate" always worked, why is there still homelessness in the west coast? 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.
- geofft 5y ago
  Doesn't this analysis miss the fact that homeless people migrate around the country to places with better policies? If you're going to die in the midwest because there are no social institutions to support you and you don't see a realistic way for work and effort to keep you alive, you may as well use your last couple of bucks to take a Greyhound out west to Skid Row and take your chances there. 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.
  - gotoeleven 5y ago
    Homeless people move to CA because it has great weather and social services and so its great to be homeless there compared to other places. Homeless people are rational so that's where they go. The crucial fact, though, is that none of these great conditions in CA do anything to actually get people out of homelessness, they just subsidize homelessness and make it easier to be homeless. So naturally, homeless people being rational, the effect of these policies is to increase homelessness overall. There are people who are legit mentally ill and somehow as a society we've decided that the best we can do is have them live like dogs, scrounging around and shitting in the streets. There are other people who just really like heroin and would rather do heroin than anything else and california is the probably the best place in the world if that's what you want to do. A truly humane homeless policy would institutionalize mentally ill people, not subsidize drug addicts, and help people on the edge of homelessness find jobs and housing.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
      >A truly humane homeless policy would institutionalize mentally ill people, not subsidize drug addicts, and help people on the edge of homelessness find jobs and housing. But that sounds mean and hard so we can't do that! No I agree 100%. I personally think mental institutions need to be reestablished by the state because frankly, there are too many severely mentally ill homeless people that need to be off the streets for everyones safety. Drug addicts honestly I'm incredibly apathetic to. I understand it's a big deal but frankly, they've gone the way of ruining their lives. Not much you can do to help them. Placating them only keeps the cycle going. The real people who are just down on their luck tend not to stick with homelessness (except for Californian homeless people where honestly it's the only way for lower income people to get by).
xondono 5y ago
> free will bias As in the belief to having free will? I find it odd to describe that as a bias. > 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?

h2odragon 5y ago

This fits in with many of the grand old conspiracy theories. What the conspiracy theorists miss is there doesn't need to be a unified agenda behind this process, simple banal human tribalism suffices. 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.

bilbo0s 5y ago
Essentially, elites come from among the people. People generate elites, who generate policy. Bias flows the same way. In any given nation, the people are very likely biased. Which generates biased elites. Who, in turn, generate biased policy. 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.
- wussboy 5y ago
  I agree with everything except your last sentence. Much CAN be done to ensure those biases do not manifest in the results of their work. More generally, this is the power of our institutions.
  - DamnYuppie 5y ago
    Which are formed by people with biases who are attracted to other people with biases. It is turtles all the way down.
    - h2odragon 5y ago
      Turtles would be so much simpler, tho. A tortoise will copulate with a boot for hours with no pretense about what he's doing or why. No justifications or excuses. Us hairless apes on the other hand, we'll act contrary to all our good sense in the firm belief that "the job requires it" or "the boss wants it this way" or worst yet "the rule book specifies it thus". We can knowingly compound our stupidity and decry the results. Then expect praise for following the rules. At least the tortoise gets the idea, at the bottom of the hole, "dig up, stupid!"

vmception 5y ago

> 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. 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.

h2odragon 5y ago
Go hang out at some fundraiser dinners and other places politicians, specifically the kind of things that federal congresscritters, state representatives and governors speak at. Bring a camera and write a blog post about it and they'll often let you in as a journalist for free, and might even feed you. 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.
- vmception 5y ago
  > 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. 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.

phreeza 5y ago

In Germany in the 60s there was the concept of the "long march through the institutions", implying that the rebels of then would become the elites of tomorrow, with the purpose of then putting into practice the revolutionary policies. It worked to a certain degree, many formerly left-wing policies have now become mainstream, but of course a lot of compromises had to be made and the ideals got watered down.

fallingknife 5y ago
The policies may have changed, but the people are the same.
- WJW 5y ago
  Many people alive in the 60s will have died by now, and the rest will have had 50-60 extra years of life experience. They're hardly the same, except in a very strict "person with the same name as then" sense.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > They're hardly the same, except in a very strict "person with the same name as then" sense. In terms of identity that is correct, but don't forget that when we refer to a particular person we are really using a label to point at a specific continuity of experience and agency through time, and unless qualified somehow (twelve-year-old Bob, Alice last year, you committed after yesterday's meeting, etc.) the default time point is either at the moment of reference or a moment just prior (the rest of the 4D 'worm' is incorporated transitively), and (again, by default) the 'now' pointer is thereafter updated continuously (at least in casual conversation in natural languages such as English). It is pretty rare for continuity of experience (and agency) to be broken, and outside of science fiction physical continuity never is, so it isn't too surprising that English (and other natural languages I'm familiar with) largely elide the point-in-time qualifier by default. We - both individually and in groups - are all of us Ships of Theseus, passing in the night.
- KarlKemp 5y ago

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erikerikson 5y ago

Maybe I missed something written here but very few of the elites I've known meet the description of them offered here. This does tend to describe what I have observed of the U.S. elite left. I would be very surprised to learn that Bezos or Gates were socialists, for example.

jjoonathan 5y ago

Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology that focuses on battles and misses the war. Would you rather win at 100 wedge issues or would you rather win at 0 wedge issues but the policies you wanted were already in place and not under attack? 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.

jrexilius 5y ago
By that logic the poor in the US have the most power? As they pay generally close to zero direct taxes (indirectly they pay the corporate taxes and gas taxes and such as hidden costs in their daily consumption)...
- techbio 5y ago
  Perhaps? If not individually then collectively, whether as motivation toward a cheaper food supply, or as a caution to those who are not poor but only a couple of defiant decisions from losing what they've gained. It seems counterintuitive, but GPs rule of thumb may hold even there. I think the problem is in comparing a few wealthy individuals or cabals (in control) to an enormous number of real people (each without much control at all). Poverty is negative power under the same hierarchy responsible for controlling positive power.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  We are looking for policy concessions. Not taking money from someone who doesn't have money to take isn't much of a policy concession. 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.

mrxd 5y ago

The original paper refers to specifically to economic elites, but this article quite strangely redefines this group as a credentialist/cultural elite that is motivated by status and influence within bureaucracies and favors socialism. This seems to be a description of the author’s personal experiences within his university, but it ends up being a significant misrepresentation of the actual paper, which refers to an economic elite, where support for socialism is lowest. 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.”

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xondono 5y ago
> where support for socialism is lowest. 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.
- mrxd 5y ago
  > Citation needed. https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-have-favorable-views-capitalism-59-have-unfavorable-views-socialism https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-have-favorable-v...
jackcosgrove 5y ago
The author touches on this: > 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.

KarlKemp 5y ago

> 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.) What? CEOs (example from the paragraph before, along with doctors, judges lawyers etc) want socialism?

webmaven 5y ago
> 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.

paulpauper 5y ago

>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. >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?

bonoboTP 5y ago
American libertarians like Hanson want to be pro-private business/capitalism and anti-elite at the same time. Hence the distinction between the credentialed, academic, govt institute and bureaucracy based elites ("bad") and the business owner class ("good"). I doubt how much these are actually distinct. Rich business owner types still send their kids to be credentialed and some will go into more bureaucratic roles than others and if you get rich based on govt roles and political lobbying etc, you will invest.
- dnautics 5y ago
  your connection in one direction is "send their kids to be credentialed"? That's pretty weak, and I think you might not really have a case for an equivalence relation.
- gremloni 5y ago
  There is absolutely no reason you can’t be a capitalist and against elitism at the same time. If the superrich paid their fair share I don’t think there would be as much animosity towards that group.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> 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.

carabiner 5y ago

Normal eyes normalize normal lies.

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geofft 5y ago

Causation seems wholly unattested, and I would guess that the attributed causation is backwards. People who are skilled/talented/privileged/whatever enough to meaningfully influence policy and the world around them will start by using that influence to get themselves to a $210K+ household income, because that's the individually-rational thing to do. As the article notes, there are a bunch of professions where this is median for a single earner and a whole lot of professions where this is median for a dual-income household. 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?

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hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

What a bunch of bullshit. I love that the title of this is "overcoming bias", but then the bias in this article is so blatantly transparent: > 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_Theories_of_American_Politics_Elites_Interest_Groups_and_Average_Citizens https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278151684_Testing_T..., sounds interesting.

epgui 5y ago

I really dislike the conflation of the many different meanings of “elite”. It’s such an emotionally overloaded word. If you define elite status as a top X percentile of income or wealth, then just use the words “rich people”, “wealthy people”, or even better, “high income people”. Using these more specific words get to the core of the matter. 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.

MattGaiser 5y ago
There was an earlier comment on a different discussion where someone referred to "elites" as basically anyone who worked for the government or had a bachelors degree. 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.
- epgui 5y ago
  Indeed, and it’s also terribly counter-productive in that it borders on anti-intellectualism. 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.
- pjc50 5y ago

RivieraKid 5y ago

Very thought-provoking article. I think the narrative has a truthful core but it exaggerates reality, almost to a caricature. 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.

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rrsmtz 5y ago

This is a classic Marxist talking point (cultural hegemony): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago

> These elites who set policy [...] love, large bureaucratic organizations. 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 ...

abvdasker 5y ago

> When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.) 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”.

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