ELITES OVER TIME

8/8/2022

According to opinion surveys, public trust in leadership is at an all-time low. This applies to leadership of all kinds: corporate, cultural, political, etc.

But if trust in elites has declined from where it used to be, the question is raised: are the people who run our society simply worse at their jobs than their predecessors were? It certainly feels that way sometimes, yet I've never seen a decent explanation for why that might be. 

At the very least, I doubt that elites have gotten stupider. If you took a random cross-section of Harvard grads from today and compared them to Harvard grads from forty years ago, my guess is they would perform just as well or better on standardized tests like the SAT. 

Consider that college admissions are more competitive than they used to be. It's become more common to attend university, so more people apply. US colleges have also become internationalized, adding an additional layer of competition from abroad. So even if the acceptance rate at Harvard was the same now as before (it’s actually lower) you’d expect the average admitted student to be smarter simply because the applicant pool has grown larger. 

If our system of selecting future leaders has become more thorough and competitive, it's too easy to say our elites are simply getting dumber, so we can set that hypothesis aside for now.

Another possibility is that the rise of social media has increased transparency, so when elites make mistakes we find out about it much more easily. Perhaps our leaders only appear to be getting worse, but if past elite cohorts were in charge today, they’d seem just as hapless.

That gets us closer to the truth, but not all the way. Technology may call greater attention to our elites’ shortcomings, but that doesn’t change the fact that certain societal outcomes have clearly been declining over time: gains in life expectancy relative to peer countries, the amount of time it takes to complete infrastructure projects, the cost of basic goods like education and health care. The general sense of malaise is not a mere artifact of perception—some things are just not working.

Also, trust in elites has not declined at the same rate in every country. This is decent evidence that something real is going on, and it can’t all be social media distorting people’s perception. After all, every country has social media. 

So there are a few data points we need to explain here: First, our leaders probably aren’t any dumber than in the past. If anything, they might be somewhat brighter; Second, despite our egghead elites, it certainly seems as though certain things are not going well; Third, some of this may be due to increased transparency (and demagoguery) on the internet, but that can’t explain the whole phenomenon because every country has the internet, and yet not every country has the same problem of declining trust and/or worsening societal outcomes. 

Then what’s going on?

I have a few ideas. One is it’s just harder to manage the country than before. Every decade that goes by, layers of laws and bureaucracy are added on top of society. A capable technocrat from forty years ago who time travelled to today would have a harder time doing the same exact job because bureaucracies don’t tend to become nimbler over time. This applies to both governmental and corporate bureaucracies. 

Another idea is that even though our elites aren’t actually dumber than before, they’re dumber in practice. Our society has become polarized along partisan and ideological lines. Not only are elites not immune to this trend, they may actually be uniquely susceptible to it. 

Partisanship/Ideology makes you artificially dumber, and that’s why our elites, despite perhaps being slightly brighter than past elite cohorts, appear stupider than their SAT scores would predict. 

Then there’s the standard problem of elite entrenchment. When a country has been rich for awhile, those in charge tend to entrench themselves by making rules to preserve their power, rather than to serve the public good. This often leads to bad societal outcomes, but it’s not necessarily an indictment of our current elite—put any crop of elites in the same position and they’d likely behave in the same way.

So over time, just like an old piece of machinery, dust and residue builds up in the gears of an open society, gumming up the works. Bad ideas, lumbering bureaucracies, entrenched interests, bloated corporations cause the machine to sputter. When that happens, you can blame the operator, but that’s probably not fair. The operator just happened to be in charge when the machine broke. 

It’s worth pointing out that living in a society paralyzed by this kind of buildup is not the worst-case scenario. It would be much worse to live in a place where instead of having bloated and ineffective institutions, you have no institutions at all. Then you’re in a failed state, and that’s no fun.

But the main issue here is whether there's something uniquely wrong with the people in charge today. Increasingly I’ve come to believe no, they’re probably decent people doing the best they can. But they were put in charge during a period when that may not be enough.

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