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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

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

I’d argue that it’s only money. Prestige, looks, charm, wit and even positions of power come and go and rich people have always surrounded themselves with those the same way they have always surrounded themselves with experts.

At its core, I don’t think human society has really changed that much since the dawn of organised civilisation. Sure we’ve tried different some very systems over the thousands of years, 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.

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, and I suspect the sole reason liberal democracy has been so successful is because it is the “safest” system to be extremely wealthy within.

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> 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.

> 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.

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)

It's always the means of production, the means just change with the era.

Doesn’t Jeff Bezos mostly own the means of logistics? Or is that bundled up in “means of production”. A warehouse full of iPhones isn’t worth much if it’s impossible to get them to your customers.

The means of distribution (or as you call it, the means of logistics) is part of the means of production, yeah. The mechanism by which products of labor are moved throughout the world is just as much a part of the means of production as anything else.

It's one of the reasons that folks are so keen on privatizing things like the Royal Mail (one of the places that the UK right is ahead of the curve on the US) and the ongoing attempts to do the same to the USPS.

I feel it's just legacy in terminology - "means of production" imply "things you use to make stuff", because stuff was front-and-centre when it got coined as a political term. For most of the known history, humans didn't have much stuff. Making stuff was what seemed to bring all the money; logistical chains, being shorter, didn't seem that important. Additionally, all the stuff made was concrete, material things.

But if you extend the meaning of "means of production" to cover not production of stuff, but production of more abstract economic value, you can see that the same struggle between different groups of people happens today, over not just material goods, but also virtual ones, as well as services. So Jeff Bezos definitely owns the "means of production" of logistics service.

> Feudal nobles of Europe resented and despised the merchant class even if they could not utterly suppress it.

Sure, and as with all rank, there is an element of pride driving this. You even have racial origin theories like the Sarmatian origin myth that held for a couple centuries among the Polish nobility to distinguish themselves from commoners. But the distaste for merchants I gather is more complex than absence of noble title, or rather, the noble title is presumed to have some association with certain virtues opposed to mercantile activity. For example, pre-industrial Polish nobility were actually forbidden from engaging in all commerce save for commerce of an agrarian nature. Probably whatever else they earned came from some kind of taxation, at least among those rich enough to own villages, towns, or even cities. But why forbid commerce? Either the Crown had managed to check the power of the nobility in some way (who had become obscenely wealthy by the 17th century), or the nobility themselves saw that they should not themselves partake in such commerce for some, ostensibly virtuous, reasons. But the fact is that the wealthier nobility nonetheless had the upper hand and the advantage. Poorer family members were known to work for their richer relatives. So you have segmentation within a given social class by wealth.

> 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.

I would say that even in Catholic Europe, which was Catholic-confessional but never theocratic and could not legitimately be by virtue of the Christian distinction between secular and religious estates (something unique in history; e.g. neither Jews nor Muslims understand this concept natively, only as something borrowed ill-fittingly and ad hoc from the Christian worldview), the priesthood was (and among Catholics still is) regarded as the higher calling owing to man's supernatural end. Thus Catholics understand the supreme pontiff as the highest ranking authority on earth and the bishops as very literally the princes of the Church. This places them above the nobility in a certain sense, even if this is more of a partial rather than total order. And of course the clergy were the best educated members of society and among whom no hereditary advantages existed in the strict sense (even if the nobility within its ranks did promote "nephews" to various positions, but this is an aberration). Perhaps we can understand this as the result of the Catholic priesthood being heir to the Jewish priesthood. Which is to say that here, a bishop has higher rank than a wealthy noble.

I am thinking the disagreement with GP can be resolved by assuming money is representation of influences and connections.

I’d argue that you can’t be poor with tons of connections with rich, and sole currency accumulation is not sufficient to be influential because it is only an aspect of your portfolio, but are usually well correlated with the level of influences as money exists as a representation of connections.

> 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.

This supports what I’m saying though. The reason the nobility who achieved their wealth through force wanted to suppress the rising merchant class was exactly because their power became threatened by the new wealthy class. Ultimately the nobility failed.

How did the church grow mighty? It wasn’t faith, it was money.

> In Soviet-like systems, real power was held by the nomenklatura consisting of high level apparatchiks, senior members of the Party.

Both Castro and Mao were sons of wealthy farmers. The Bolsheviks were funded by none other than the German Kaiser.

> Spartans

Sparta was a clear cut oligarchy. I’m not really sure why you being them up, as the very reason their financial class discouraged trade was because they reasoned it would weaken their power if other members of society saw any sort of wealth.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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.

How does this dispute what I say? Fortunes change hands, and sometimes people who just so happen to be friends with the Ceasars can suddenly rise to fortune through the positions they achieve through their network, but which of them were able to do so without a rich oligarch?

Modern America is probably the best example of people obtaining “elite” status from nothing, but it’s very rare, and it’s the money they obtain on the way that solidify their positions.

> How does this dispute what I say? Fortunes change hands, and sometimes people who just so happen to be friends with the Ceasars can suddenly rise to fortune through the positions they achieve through their network, but which of them were able to do so without a rich oligarch?

That is exactly it. The example of Gaius Julius Caesar in particular such an example; he was able to marry into money through family connection, was stripped of it all, but was able to get some crucial positions and claw his way back into power...from which he then became wealthy.

Some of the most powerful houses in England (Spencer, Cromwell, Beaufort have been intertwined with the monarchy over the centuries. They queen not even the head of the richest family but by definition she has the most status.

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.

That's a nostalgic sentiment.

It’s possible to return to that prelapsarian state (at least to the degree it actually existed)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508

Ah, the good ol' days.

Exactly

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

Though I agree with the sentiment and am all-in on democracy in general, personal stories are selection and survivor bias all the way down.

It might just be that you are the lucky one, and by definition, are surrounded by other lucky ones who landed similar jobs. Many millions others might have tried and failed and live in poverty or are dead. You'd need data on all those millions to talk about the % chance of someone succeeding, and to show it's better here vs there.

But that's all unhelpful. I think hope is important. I'd love to see us have a national consensus around equal opportunity, egalitarianism, and tolerance to different ways of life (and not just the "different" that I agree with!).

Looking at the top 10 richest people [0], most of them weren't born into anything close to the level of wealth they have now. None of them were poor, so "essentially anyone can become successful" is almost certainly an overstatement, but the ability to go from "raised by dentists/lawyers/professors/engineers" to "among the richest in the world" is evidence of considerable mobility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#Ann...

I spent more than a year working for the guy who went from "raised by ..." to "the richest man in the world". And when I say "working for", I mean "worked in the same converted garage".

Bezos' stratospheric economic "mobility" is not evidence of a more generalized economic mobility. In a system that is even vaguely capitalist, there will always be people who become incredibly wealthy without inheriting most of it. Their existence is not evidence of "considerable mobility", it's merely evidence of some sort of capitalistic economy.

The fact that the 10 richest people on earth were not born into stratospheric wealthy is a testament (of sorts) to capitalism; if you want to know about economic mobility, you're better off focusing on statistics, not the exceptions that prove the rules.

Exactly. We could have a system where every year 10 random poor people are chosen to become super wealthy. That isn't "economic mobility" in any meaningful or healthy sense.

How many of those 10 richest people came from families which weren't already in the top 5th income percentile?

Is that the social mobility that we care about? Anyone who is willing to work hard and already has the means to attend an Ivy League school can become a billionaire.

Top 5% in the USA, or top 5% in the world?

Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Sergey Brin were NOT top 5% in the USA. Depending what period in his childhood that you look at, Sergey Brin wasn't top 5% in the world either. (His family was educated, but they arrived in the USA as refugees from the Soviet Union.)

Several others started with rather less than you might expect. For example Elon Musk arrived in North America with only a few thousand dollars to his name, and had to work manual labor to get by. (Yes, his father was a businessman, but the two of them have a..difficult..relationship.)

> The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have

which is why governments and corporations continue to expand and add more and more rules, regulations, verifications, safety checks, privacy violations etc... they have a vested interest in restricting, rather than promoting, freedom.

Right, and it's up to us to try and vote in politicians that militate against those tendencies, for example the way many financial regulations were swept away in the UK in the 1980s, or many examples of deregulation on airline industries (long way still to go), long distance telecoms and haulage industries.

Regulation is very much a two edged sword though. Too little and cartels and monopolies are unconstrained, and individual customers are too easily cheated by deceptive practices. Too much regulation and the cost of entry into markets gets too high. It's a constant balancing act.

governments have no such vested interest.

existing corporations do, and yes, they are often successful at regulatory capture.

but ... private citizens, families, communities (geographic and of interest) also have a vested (and legitimate) interest in more rules and regulations, verifications, and safety checks, and sometimes (just sometimes) they are successful are getting government to implement these things.

when you look at a rule or regulation, you'd better be really sure about its history before you lay the blame at the feet of corporations seeking to restrict freedom.

In fact many regulations were fought tooth and nail by corporations. Environmental protection, tobacco health warnings, seat belt mandates, nutritional and content warning labels on food. Limitations on misleading adverts. Many, many more.

Arguably these regulations promoted competition. By raising awareness of these issues consumer information regulations helped new entrants promote innovative healthier or safer products. Increasing public confidence in a class of products can even make those products more popular.

Absent regulation individual companies can become locked into a race to the bottom that can turn a market into a cess pit. But introduce minimum quality standards and consumer confidence and participation can rise. There are spectacular examples of this in developing countries where effective regulation of financial services builds consumer trust and adoption of banking services. Used car sales and prices in many countries boomed when regulations were brought in to ensure customers were properly informed about the car's history and that the cars passed basic checks, because suddenly customers could trust that they weren't being ripped off. The narrative that regulations are necessarily bad for markets is simply not always true.

"Liberal democracies" are conflated with being part of the global upper class. Which major wealthy liberal democracy hasn't participated in colonialism or invasion in the last 200-300 years?

I assume there are proper aristocrats making your same argument about their way of life. That they are wealthy because they have the "right" system and not because they were born into a corner of the globe made prosperous by modern economic exploitation.

> "Liberal democracies" are conflated with being part of the global upper class. Which major wealthy liberal democracy hasn't participated in colonialism or invasion in the last 200-300 years?

There are a few. Switzerland, Norway, Sweden (depending on how far back you go), Iceland, Ireland.

And, if you're going back 200 years and thinking about Great Britain, well, sure, they had colonies. They also arguably were not a liberal democracy. They had parliament, but they also had the king. Who controlled international policy (which determined whether they had colonies)? I don't know enough to answer that, but I'm not sure they should automatically be put in the "liberal democracy" bucket.

The list of countries anywhere that haven't enthusiastically engaged in warfare at one point or another is rather short. Yes Britain conquered India, we have a bloody history, but show me any period in India's history before then that wasn't soaked in blood.

I'm not excusing anything, I'm just saying human nature is what it is, or has been historically. Power has generally been in the hands of warrior elites, because if it wasn't a warrior elite would come along and seize it. Liberal democracy, when it works, is a massive improvement on that state of affairs.

* 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*

I think that is mostly unique to the US . Not at all a feature of all democracies. The meritocracy is still mostly intact in the US, whereas in other areas talent is not as greatly rewarded.

> 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.

Not necessarily. Regulation can free citizens and business owners from enslaving business practices of powerful business. The mistake is to think that "free market", and much more so "free society", is the same as "no regulation". This is not true. Free markets, and especially free societies, need some regulation to keep the rich in their place and from smothering everyone around them.

I agree completely, see one of my other replies on this. I only meant the less influence they have on who wins and who loses, in the sense of picking and choosing.

> 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.

I am personally concerned that gatekeeping is increasing significantly lately, and I'm concerned about the effects that will have on long term economic growth and inequality.

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.

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/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.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.

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.

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.

I don’t think that Bill and Hillary Clinton are representative examples of elites that the blog post above is talking about.

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-...

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.

> 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.

This seems naive to me. You imagine that Krugman's columns in the NYT, Greenwald's pontifications on whatever platform he's on now, or little Matty Y's ruminations on substack are actually "dominating the discourse" ?

Well, yes, of course they are dominating the discourse, but that's wildly different from dominating policy formation. To do that, you make a big donation an important politician, and then you follow up with friendly but firm reminders of (a) the size of your donation (b) the social importance of whatever it is that you do (c) your preferred policy direction.

Krugman or Matt Y will write a column about this later, post-facto, and you'll have moved on, smiling.

I think also, in the case of somebody like Greenwald, it doesn't really matter how many people he reaches because he's essentially an empty envelope - he doesn't really hold substantive opinions. For example, he supported the Iraq war, only to moralize about how awful it was when US soldiers killed Iraqi soldiers. There's a lot of moral-stand-taking but no real incisiveness or heart.

PS: That's also kind of how you get a broad audience - by articulately broadcasting the sort of opinions that most people already have.

> This seems naive to me. You imagine that Krugman's columns in the NYT, Greenwald's pontifications on whatever platform he's on now, or little Matty Y's ruminations on substack are actually "dominating the discourse" ?

One could argue one way or another, but the point here is that they unarguably more impact on public discourse and policy than Jimmy John Liautaud has, despite having much less money than he has.

I don't consider it even close to inarguable. The fact that there are some "big names" that help shape, shift and constrain public discourse does not imply that the same people also shape policy decisions.

[ EDIT: I don't know that the JJ founder does anything at all on policy, but he seemed to be playing the role of "stand-in for rich people that potentially push policies but nobody knows who they are". ]

> Having a lot of money does not in any way equal power or influence.

No, but I'd argue only in the sense that having a lot of dollar bills in your wallet does not equal having an equivalently-valued watch or a car. But one can be converted into the other.

I'm not sure why this whole thread doesn't bring this point. Even today, we don't really grade people's wealth by the actual money they have in hand, we count up their assets. And influence is just another asset, even if it's hard to quantify[0].

So Mr. Jimmy John Liautaud may not be famous and influential, but were he to take his $1 billion of assets and try to convert it to influence, I'm plenty sure he'd succeed at becoming no less influential than Glenn Greenwald. Conversely, Krugman, Greenwald and Yglasis may not be swimming in money or "traditional" assets, but were they to try to convert their influence into money, I'm also convinced they'd succeed.

I think the missing mental model for people claiming influence/power != money is that you need to actually spend influence/power to make money. You only go from influential to influential+wealthy if you have enough influence at the beginning that there's something left after the conversion. Similarly, if you don't have enough money, converting your wealth to influence will leave you with little wealth.

In this way, I think money and power are equivalent in a similar way that cash and the house you own are.

[0] - It's not something the economists haven't seen before. Even stocks can hard to value in terms of "how much dollars would you have after selling them all", because if you have enough of them, their price starts changing while you sell them.

> but were he to take his $1 billion of assets and try to convert it to influence, I'm plenty sure he'd succeed at becoming no less influential than Glenn Greenwald.

And how would he do that, exactly? Oh yes, that’s right, by paying people like Glenn Greenwald to spread his message (or rather, paying journalists more corrupt than Greenwald is), paying NGO operatives and lobbyists to massage the public and politicians into what he wants. So yes, his billion can buy influence (maybe), but only through the actual elites who have a lot of personal influence of their own, unlike Jimmy John Liautaud.

Yup. That's the part where he'd burn the money on creating influence. After which, he would have influence - and possibly no money. Then, at some point, some other wealthy person could use him as a platform to convert their wealth to influence. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald could launch a book and/or start a company and/or run for an office, and leverage his audience and name recognition to get into a position of wealth... most likely significantly damaging his platform in the process. An influence to wealth conversion.

I don't see anything strange in here, or anything countering my point. Yes, to exchange money for $thing, you often need to give it to people already having $thing.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Those billionaires still have the means to impact the world in ways that you or I do not, should they chose to do so.

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.

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.

even if they wanted to, I think they would find that their success to be quite limited. Without using google, what is the name of Ray Dalio's 2017 book. It got some media attention at the time, but surely being how rich he is you should have heard about it. Or Bill Gates' latest book.

I am reminded of how Bloomberg spent $500 million dollars on his ill-fated presidential campaign that lasted 100 days....about 4 months. It was clear proof that money does not always result in impact.

> have the Kardashians (or whoever is the biggest influencer) impacted the world the same way that someone like Rudolph Murdoch has?

believe you are referring to Rupert Murdoch.

They do have some similarities... both are billionaires with widely successful tv shows about their family drama.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are plenty of nations or periods of history where the ultra rich acquired their fortunes due to their power rather than vice versa.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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