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Notes -
American Elites
https://www.rmgresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Elite-One-Percent.pdf
I found this recent Rasmussen presentation, it focuses on subsections of the elite. It was funded by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a libertarian thinktank. One might consider them elite heretics or counter-elites (and sure enough they have a slide at the end saying ‘oh there are some elites who are good and trustworthy'). Us non-Gold Circle normies only get the slides, so it's a little unclear what they mean.
Anyway, they define elite as postgrad urbanite with 150K per year income. They further split elites into those who went to 12 top colleges and the ‘politically obsessed’ (definition unclear but I imagine it means they spend a certain number of hours reading/watching/discussing political media). For instance, I imagine we would be considered ‘politically obsessed’.
As you might expect, the elite are the ones who approve of Biden and Congress. They trust the government to do the right thing. I imagine that even if they don’t think the government’s doing a great job they’re friends with high ranking officials and feel a certain amity for them. In my experience, their brother might be an ambassador, they might have an AI regulator over for lunch. Even if they’ve been astonished by the stupid questions journalists ask them, they’ve still got fairly positive impressions of the prestige press and read at least two or three newspapers.
Elites are also much more likely to say ‘there’s too much individual freedom in the US’ than voters, especially the politically obsessed elites. Likewise, they favour strict restrictions on private usage of gas, vehicles, meat and electricity. It’s bizarre that 55% oppose non-essential air travel since this class is the most likely to go on overseas holidays, I don’t understand how this works. Anyway, they want restrictions on everything except border security, which they couldn’t care less about. Plebs hold the opposite beliefs.
I was most surprised by how 29% of the elite thinks that China is an ally, compared to 9% of ordinary voters. I would’ve thought the elites were the hawks! Maybe some of them have commercial interests in China or they want to work with China on climate change or they’re ethnically Chinese, anyway this is really odd to me. The hawk faction may be in control but the doves haven’t been totally eviscerated. Does anyone have any explanations or observations on this matter?
35% of the elite would rather cheat than lose a close election, rising to 69% of the ‘politically obsessed’. Only 7% of pleb voters would cheat. That seems like an underestimate to me – who goes and says ‘I would rather cheat than lose an election’ on a poll? Wouldn’t people be embarrassed (or tactical) and lie – they’re cheats after all! Again, I don’t know the exact definition of cheat but I imagine many more would do something subversive like hold back successful COVID vaccine results until after the election or engage in various procedural manipulations. Edit for an example of what I mean for 'non-cheating' manipulation: https://twitter.com/stevenmackeyman/status/1764876192648499220
I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.
It’s not like it’s hard to close the US border. The US is a global power after all. The US seems to think it can defend Ukraine’s borders against the Russian army from the other side of the world and secure Taiwan’s borders against the PLA, it must be at least 1000x easier to defend the US border against stateless, unarmed mobs. They just don’t care, indeed their energy seems to swing the other way – see the recent US-Texas standoff over barbed wire and the border. The survey said not one respondent cared about the border as a priority, presumably some think immigration is quite a good thing and want more, illegal or otherwise.
On other fronts, we observe these creeping changes – everyone seems to need a college degree if they want to do anything. That’s not the will of the majority but it is what the elite want. You can see these articles that go ‘relax nobody’s coming to take your gas stove’, how they struck down the federal bill. But the state legislation in New York and other cities is proceeding, it’s clear that this is the path that the US is on. Likewise, the disputes over the 2020 election. I'm suspicious but can't prove that the election was rigged, or that Epstein didn't kill himself. Nevertheless, US democracy doesn't seem in very good shape if its elites are so willing to win by fraud.
This is classic social psych bullshit in a right-wing wrapper. There are two lying-with-statistics tricks going on here:
Non-standard terminology. The definition of "elite 1%" excludes the vast majority of elites who live in rich suburbs. They define elite 1% as meeting all 3 of postgraduate degree (this covers 14% of the population), household income over $150k (trivial for a two-income PMC couple in a HCOL city - two schoolteachers with masters degrees would probably qualify) and living in a zip code with a population density over 10k/square mile (only a few % of the population - looking at zipatlas.com these zip codes are mostly downtown districts, prisons and campuses with their own zip codes, NYC, and dense inner suburbs of LA.) So the most restrictive condition is the population density one, which is not a measure of eliteness - it is a proxy for alignment with the tribe Rasmussen wants to bash.
Garden of forking paths. The authors switch between "the elite 1%", "elite 1% graduates of a semi-arbitrary list of 12 schools" and "politically obsessed members of the elite 1%" as needed to make the point they are making. We don't know how many other cuts of the data they ran before they chose those ones.
Rasmussen are saying that they have surveyed the elite and found that they are out of touch with America. What they have actually done is surveyed the subset of the PMC that chooses to live in the densest 2% of zip codes, and their interns played with crosstabs until they found some subsets of that group who are, indeed, profoundly out of touch with America. This is about as meaningful as doing some vox pops with stoners in downtown Portland.
See this Arnold Kling post and comments for more details.
Apart from Manhattanites, quite the opposite. Who has more power and influence - the residents of DC or the government officials who commute in from the burbs? The people of Anaheim and Inglewood or the people of Beverley Hills? 90210 is by the definition used in this study a non-elite zip code.
Well, do the suburbs have great political power in the USA? Compared to the cities?
All civilizations concentrate around their cities, they're the most valuable real estate for a reason. The central Parisian has more influence on politics than a distant suburbanite in the banlieues, their rioting potential alone is significant. We observe that inner-city progressives have more influence on politics than their numbers or wealth alone would suggest, they have heightened access to the commanding heights of a country, the urban core where politics is done. Proximity is power.
And Manhattan is one hell of an exception to make, is New York not the most famous and important city in the US? Isn't it the quintessential American city?
In most US cities the important thing to remember about downtown is that no one lives there- there might be a few trendy high rise apartments charging above the median income in rent for a one bedroom, but aside from a few young, wealthy hipsters the people who work in those downtown office parks commute in from suburbs, blue collar ones in the case of the janitors and security guards, nice HOA ruled ones in the case of the managers and lawyers and accountants. This means no one really cares if downtowns go to shit; there’s very little additional political influence to be had by actually living there. The suburbs typically rule the inner city, not the other way around, and not-downtown inner city neighborhoods are generally quite crappy and distinctly ‘ruled’ not ‘rulers’. Indeed, ‘the inner city’ is an American euphemism for a crappy neighborhood.
NYC is the exception to every rule about America and is not, generally, very popular elsewhere in the country. It’s definitely the biggest and wealthiest metropole but using it as some kind of benchmark about the modern U.S. is questionable.
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The people of Beverley Hills are mostly rich Iranian Jewish dentists and dermatologists, the people of Anaheim are more likely to run the city.
More broadly I don’t disagree that the study is awful and clearly hacked to produce a specific result.
But it is important to delineate what we’re saying when we talk about ‘the elite’. There are New York Times opinion columnists on $130k a year who have more ‘political and cultural’ (and perhaps even economic) power than many billionaires. There are mid level bureaucrats in the State Department who have more power than foreign or even domestic lobbyists and their clients who have spent nine or perhaps even ten figures trying to make things happen. It took thirty years and billions of dollars for Silicon Valley to acquire lobbying power equivalent to those of legacy industries.
It is true that people with great political influence can usually parlay it into wealth (as the Obamas and Clintons did), and it is true that people with great wealth can buy some political influence (as Soros, the Kochs and others have). But the relationship isn’t clear, linear or guaranteed. A single academic in a top education faculty that produces teachers who will go on to work at elite private schools may well have more influence on the next generation of American elites than every billionaire on the top 20 combined.
Musk certainly has more influence compared to a single academic
Musk is the richest or second richest man in the world and spent tens of billions on media influence.
Your point?
He’s unusual even for billionaires, and I’m not sure your point is correct, Musk’s impact is immediately visible, the unknown academic’s might take decades to understand.
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