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> • those who had political roles before they became billionaires, like Sheryl Sandberg, are excluded because "they reflect a different dynamic than the wealth-

by gwern 3y ago

> • those who had political roles before they became billionaires, like Sheryl Sandberg, are excluded because "they reflect a different dynamic than the wealth-to-politics trajectory that we explore in this paper" (?!) That seems sensible to me. Official corruption seems like an entirely different phenomena to successful businessman interested in second careers in politics or philanthropy. Xi Jinping is a billionaire, and Mike Bloomberg is a billionaire, but when they are seeking votes for an elected position, it's rather different things...

gojomo 3y ago
Sure, that's what they want to focus on & they have a high-contrast read on "Forbes-certified-billionaire-then-politics". But without even accusing Sandberg of any "official corruption", she was already in the sort of "feeder roles" towards politics (Ivy-league Economics BA, MBA, position at global QUANGO World Bank) – that I find this paper under-considers as useful comparison-classes – before her first US government position. And, she was already potentially a centi-millionaire (via her Yahoo exec then SurveyMonkey CEO late husband) before her roles at Google & Facebook. (If there were enough data, it might be found that centi-millionaires are in even more of a "sweet spot" for politics than "billionaires", given the extra attention/resentment towards the upperest-top.) So while I don't blame the authors too much for their choice of what to emphasize, & data-limitations, she's indicative of other parts of the full picture. Characterizing the full probabilistic 'state-machine' of people's transitions between [education, inheritances of money or name-recognition, levels-of-wealth, private-sector-offices, public-offices, etc] could be a valuable extension of this tiny cross-sectional analysis. And, given that they did enough analysis to exclude Sandberg-types from their counts, it'd be good to have seen how many such people were so-excluded – a salient detail I didn't notice from a skim of their paper.

by gwern 3y ago

gojomo 3y ago

Sure, that's what they want to focus on & they have a high-contrast read on "Forbes-certified-billionaire-then-politics". But without even accusing Sandberg of any "official corruption", she was already in the sort of "feeder roles" towards politics (Ivy-league Economics BA, MBA, position at global QUANGO World Bank) – that I find this paper under-considers as useful comparison-classes – before her first US government position. And, she was already potentially a centi-millionaire (via her Yahoo exec then SurveyMonkey CEO late husband) before her roles at Google & Facebook. (If there were enough data, it might be found that centi-millionaires are in even more of a "sweet spot" for politics than "billionaires", given the extra attention/resentment towards the upperest-top.) So while I don't blame the authors too much for their choice of what to emphasize, & data-limitations, she's indicative of other parts of the full picture. Characterizing the full probabilistic 'state-machine' of people's transitions between [education, inheritances of money or name-recognition, levels-of-wealth, private-sector-offices, public-offices, etc] could be a valuable extension of this tiny cross-sectional analysis. And, given that they did enough analysis to exclude Sandberg-types from their counts, it'd be good to have seen how many such people were so-excluded – a salient detail I didn't notice from a skim of their paper.