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I think a lot of the reasons come from the elites no longer having significant skin in the game and little connection to the real meat potatoes and dirt road.
If you see the world through a laptop full of spreadsheets and as long as the spreadsheet makes graphs that make them look good, they don’t see a problem. Problems will only show up after I’m gone. And thus why not make pretty graphics that make the boss happy? You get paid, it feels good, and you don’t have to deal with the aftermath.
And even when the aftermath comes, you’ll be pretty insulated from it. If the economy tanks, you have money, international investments, and a passport. You probably don’t even know anyone affected by it. All of your friends live like you do, visiting Europe and the Caribbean and wherever else. You have people to handle the cooking, shopping, cleaning, you have security to keep people from bothering you.
I have chosen to make this the drum I'm beating every time I see institutional failure raise it's head. Which is near-daily.
The people who have been appointed to make the decisions are insulated from any negative consequences for policy failure (here defining failure as "not achieving purported objectives") but are allowed to reap benefits of their decisions. Hell they often get to reap benefits even if there's a failure. Lori Lightfoot leaves Chicago worse off than when she found it (quite a feat!) and immediately gets a cushy job at Harvard teaching leadership. It's like they're intentionally mocking the idea that rewards go to those with merit and that outcomes matter when judging a person's competence.
Chesa Boudin allows crime to run rampant in San Fran to the point it becomes a national embarrassment. He gets FUCKING RECALLED BY VOTERS because it was too much for even SF libs to stomach... and he lands a teaching job at Berkeley "Failing upward" doesn't even begin to describe it.
And the Biden family, especially Hunter. ye Gods.
When the rewards the elites reap are completely uncorrelated with the impact their decisions have on the rest of us proles then you simply can't expect them to make good decisions, to implement functional policies, or to listen to feedback from constituents. Quite the opposite, you'd expect them to exploit the system for personal benefit at every chance, given that they know that the institutions that are supposed to be holding them accountable are just as compromised and ineffectual.
They've gotten so far entrenched that it is impossible to even discuss consequences for them. Post-Covid it's becoming clear just how many ways various institutions failed, and not just missing goals, but straight up making the situation worse through their action or inaction. And not a single person who had decision-making authority will be taken to task or suffer any lick of punishment.
EDIT: I revise the previous statement to point out that Andrew Cuomo did in fact get punished. But this ends up being the exception that proves the rule because his removal from office had NOTHING TO DO WITH HIS BUNGLING OF COVID and of course he was still hailed as a shining beacon of competence for his handling of Covid.
Just farcical.
Eventually the proles will start to conclude that the system is in fact SET UP so as to ensure elites are guaranteed to thrive regardless of the state of the country and that perhaps the only way skin gets re-inserted to the game is if the proles taken action themselves.
I'm not sure going from being the Mayor to the third largest city or a District Attorney to teaching at a college is failing up. In terms of salary it might be, since Lightfoot only made 216k as mayor of Chicago and the average Harvard professor makes 190k she could easily see a raise. I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect one term politicians to sink into ignominy. If you lose in a 70-30 landslide there's still going to be someone with a cushy job to hand out in that thirty percent. And if you look at what Happens to right wing Failures like Sam Brownback or Paul Ryan they usually end up at some Christian College or on the Board of a Major Company.
I'd say the incentive problem is on the other side. Being a high ranking politician is low paid compared to the other options available to those with the skills and connections to get elected, and attracts considerably more unpleasant scrutiny and stress. Teaching undergrads is probably about as remunerative and much more fun than being a prominent politician. That means elected positions attracts narcissists and ideologues and if you want to fix that you have to make retaining the position lucrative and pleasant, so that people do whatever they can to keep winning rather than doing one term, cashing out and kicking back..
Let us be clear: he's a "founding executive director" for a program at a Law School Ranked NUMBER 10 IN THE COUNTRY, and probably making around $300,000/year if he's paid similar to their professors. He was making About $140,000 at his previous job.
EDIT: He was making $210,000 in 2023
Calling it "teaching at a college" is GROSS understatement.
Failing.
Upward.
Teaching his tactics and ideas that have already failed in practice (although perhaps not by his definition), no less! The message here is "we don't care that your ideas got roundly rejected when actually implemented, we want to teach a whole new generation to do the exact same thing everywhere!" Literally ENDORSING the ideas that the people who actually had to endure them decided to reject.
And in all likelihood, this is just a temporary position and he'll be called up to some other high position of authority in a few years. It is completely possible that a future Democratic president appoints him as head of the DOJ, because why not?
I think it is unreasonable for politicians whose track record demonstrates they're incapable of leading well to be given a position teaching leadership. But of course her entire claim to fame is being the first LGBT and Black Female Mayor of Chi town, so it's easy to explain this all as simply keeping her around as a useful example of how well they treat their people so long as they check the right boxes.
It really wouldn't do to throw her under the bus if they're trying to claim they're committed to diversity and inclusion even at the expense of maintaining functional institutions.
It is GENUINELY FARCICAL at this point, when the voters express their intense displeasure and yet the elites decide that such outcomes don't matter and simply shuffle a failed politician off to a position where they don't need voter approval to keep their job, making them EVEN MORE INSULATED than before.
I'm not asking for them to 'fade into ignominy,' just... go away? Like, you had your shot, you blew it. Go try something else. Maybe come back after you've had some time to contemplate and come up with better ideas, beg forgiveness, see if they'll let you make another go of it.
What other options do they have? Be explicit. If you lack any technical skills or knowledge, if your background is in law or activism, and if you've spent most of your career in the public sector, how can you expect to thrive in a private sector job without a truckload of nepotism?
What high-paying role would you slide into that ISN'T directly related to your connections in government?
I think you're missing the part of the equation where political positions bring significant status and often power over some particular area of interest, which can usually be converted into renumeration, and can definitely be used to push forward you own ideological goals even if you don't personally benefit. Especially if you lack any real talents that might get you such status outside of the halls of government.
The overarching issue is that no matter how much damage an elite causes through their decisions, no matter how foreseeable that damage was, no matter how incompetent and unsuited for their position they are, the system as it currently operates does not allow them to actually suffer in any way that matters. There's no 'feedback loop' or filter that catches bad elites early on and keeps them from advancing to positions of greater power or enacts harsh consequences when needed to dissuade others from misbehavior.
This is exactly what Nassim Taleb was getting at in his book. We don't just want properly aligned incentives, we want sufficient negative incentives that bad actors are deterred from entering critical positions, and bad actors that slip through are filtered out rather than sticking around indefinitely, causing increasing damage by their mere presence.
Elites are basically acting with impunity because they've got a safety net for their wealth, and status below which they cannot fall. If you crack into the ranks of the elite, there is literally all upside available to you and no downside, so your decisions need not consider the needs of anyone outside your bubble.
If the worst possible outcome for screwing up an entire fucking city is you get to teach at one of the pre-eminent educational institutions in the country making a comfy six figure salary, what possible motivation is there to take actions that will make things better for others when you could instead focus on enriching yourself and boosting your cronies' careers to create a self-perpetuating wealth siphoning machine that allows you to live the good life regardless of what happens to everyone?
This is what happens virtually EVERYWHERE ELSE in history when the incentives become so asymetric. We're just at the point where it is impossible to hide and ignore, and they're quite openly favoring themselves to the point that they consider voter sentiment irrelevant to the operation of government.
The situation with Trump's latest indictment is also indicative of the issue. If mishandling classified docs is indeed a criminal offense to be punished, regardless of whether there was any harm resulting, then we KNOW both Hillary Clinton and, eventually, Joe Biden should face the exact same consequences.
But they won't.
They know they won't.
We know they won't.
We and they know there's no mechanism available to us through which we can impose consequences within the system they control.
Everyone who sees this happen is going to make certain calculations based on this knowledge. I expect the elites will realize that as long as they don't upset the gravy train as Trump tried to, they are protected. The proles, however...
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It’s a step up in prestige. Being anything (or at least above janitor) in an Ivy League school is prestigious just for the name on the door. And for most people who go into high level politics, the money is rarely the issue, they already have generational wealth, connections, and access to the prestige of being able to walk into a room and be respectable.
Even failing that, the real money in politics isn’t the paycheck, it’s the graft that happens during and after. Insider trading, lucrative lobbying jobs, free tuition and guaranteed entrance to the elite schools. Being able to move your money around the stock market to take advantage of information that you have and others don’t is a pretty lucrative perk. How many millions were made when politicians knew covid was coming months before the plebs did?
Let's talk about the fact that we can see Nancy Pelosi using insider knowledge to make stock trades. EVERYONE knows she's doing it, but she's never even forced to fucking acknowledge it because the whole journalism class is effectively a captured entity, and they couldn't impose any consequences on her if they wanted to anyway.
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