Elites giving advice to elites giving advice to elites

I came across this post from political analyst/pundit Nate Silver:

Elites can have whatever tastes they want and there’s no reason they ought to conform to mainstream culture. But I do think a lot of elites would fail a pop quiz on how the median American thinks and behaves, and that probably makes them a less effective advocate for their views.

Silver was mocked for being an elite criticizing elites for being too elite (along the lines of columnist David Brooks’s asinine statement several years ago that “Very few of us . . . could name even five NASCAR drivers”), but that’s not really fair. Silver, like Brooks, earned his elite status, and part of being an elite pundit is that people will listen to what you have to say.

In this case, Nate is making two conjectures, one about the performance of a lot of elites on a hypothetical quiz, and one about the counterfactual that these elites would be more effective advocates if they were to gather the information that would allow them to pass that quiz.

I kinda wonder, though. On one hand, Nate’s claim is obviously true. On the other hand . . .

Let me start with the positive argument. It should better to have more information. There are various ways of learning how the median American (or, more precisely, most Americans, or many Americans who are near the median in family income and wealth, or something like that) thinks and behaves. There’s public opinion: you can read the news on the Gallup website or, my personal favorite, David Weakliem’s blog. There’s culture: you can look up what are the most popular songs, TV shows, movies, etc., each week and go watch them, maybe at 2x speed if they seem too boring. You can also study election outcomes—if you’re advocating for your views in the political arena, the median American voter might be more relevant than the median American including nonvoters. To see how people behave—or, at least, how they say they behave—you can look at time-use surveys. You can also just go out in the street, the supermarket, the mall, the hood, etc., and see what people are doing. Hang out in diners in rural Ohio or whatever it is that those political journalists do when they’re outside the Beltway taking the temperature of the country. I guess that, of all of these, the Gallup reports are the best place to start, as they’re professionally written and edited and should take less time than the other options on my list.

If you’re trying to advocate for your views in the U.S. political system, it’s evidently a good idea to know how Americans think and behave—so maybe we should flip it around and ask how it is that those elites are so ignorant? It’s hard to be sure without evidence from that hypothetical quiz, but my quick answer is: (a) public opinion is complicated (consider abortion, for example), (b) cultural artifacts keep being replaced, so it can take a continuing effort to be fully aware of the most popular songs, TV shows, and movies and (c) there’s no easy way to see what people are doing in places where you’re not.

In short, being aware of the thoughts and behaviors of most Americans should be useful, but it comes at some cost. And once we start thinking about opportunity costs, you can think of how else these advocates could be spending their time.

Who are these elites who are advocating for their views? I guess that some of these are the so-called power elite: leaders who have direct power, who can directly instigate changes in how people live. These elites include political officeholders and high-level bureaucrats, corporate executives, financiers, and labor leaders. The next level down are the influencers, elites whose power is to affect the national conversation: that would include media executives, journalists, popular artists, ummm . . . bloggers, I guess? Then you have ordinary folks who have local authority, people who are not elites in society at large but who have power in some circumscribed domains: cops, teachers, probably some other groups I’m not thinking of. Finally there are the elites whose jobs are to persuade the power elite: that would be lobbyists to persuade government officials and whoever it is whose jobs are to give advice to executives in private organizations. For those people, rather than knowing how the average American thinks and behaves, I’d guess it’s more important to know how the American power elites think and behave.

Strategic advice

But there’s another way to think about all of this. Do we want elites to have more power than they already do? It’s possible that Nate himself thinks elite lobbyists, politicians, executives, etc., already have too much power, and that a bit more of the will of the people would serve our country well. In that case, I could see him advising the elites to listen to the common people (“the median American”), not because it would help these elites be better advocates—remember, elites already have too much power, so the last thing we want is to make them better advocates—but rather because, if these elites stay closer to the communal experience of Americans, maybe they’ll start advocating for better things. Elite lobbyists go around advocating for all sorts of pork barrel for special interests and tax breaks for the rich, but what the average American wants is reasonable spending and fair taxes.

But then, if you take this perspective, I’m blowing Nate’s gaff by explaining all this. Paradoxically, I’m the one helping the elite influencers get around the popular will.

I don’t have any good way around that one. It’s the same thing as that I teach at an elite university. On one hand, I blog for free, and anyone can read this. On the other hand, our audience can include savvy manipulators. To put it another way, I write as if “you,” the audience, share my general values (here, I’m not talking about particular political positions but rather a general support for free and open elections, free and open research, etc., along with revulsion at liars, cheats, and willful ignorance) but if you’re on the other side, for example if your goal is to perpetuate election fraud or get fake data published in PNAS or whatever, then you might well want to follow this blog just to learn the tricks of the trade.

On the plus side, Nate’s audience is about a zillion times larger than mine, so if he’s really giving people advice that will improve the general welfare, even if he’s advertising it as helping their advocacy, then I don’t think this little post of mine will get in the way of that.

19 thoughts on “Elites giving advice to elites giving advice to elites

  1. Isn’t it time for the elites to stop worrying about the median American and start thinking about the distribution? Medians are important politically, particularly since most races have binary outcomes. But as discussed on this blog many times, most real analysis will show that different people act/are affected/believe in different ways and the distribution is what we should be interested in. So, I think the elites should be leading the way to think about distributions rather than medians. Otherwise, I question their elite status.

      • Let’s see, it’d be:

        A white bisexual (median between liking men and liking women, obviously) woman, aged 38, working retail and earning $34k, partway through an undergrad degree, who owns her own home, who voted Biden and lives somewhere in Indiana.

  2. Andrew, this made me laugh: “There’s culture: you can look up what are the most popular songs, TV shows, movies, etc., each week and go watch them, maybe at 2x speed if they seem too boring.” Well, there’s your prescription!

    I think you may have meant it facetiously, but then you go on to talk about time-use surveys, Gallup polls, etc. Other “cultural artifacts,” as you put it. But the reason the elites are ignorant is not because they don’t listen to Doja Cat or have to guess at the price of a gallon of milk; it’s that they’re not in situations where either of those things have meaning. Having a Median American dashboard that provides this information isn’t going to help.

    The design profession struggles with this. Designers are mostly privileged elites (at least in the economic if not the political sense) but are often in a position to design for people who are not. It would absolutely be good to have broader representation in the design community (i.e. take some of the power away from the elites), but that’s a process, and until (and after) that happens it’s good for designers of any stripe to work toward empathy for the people they’re trying to help. This is why good designers go out and observe and listen to people–to do their best to step outside their own context to better understand others’, and to involve those folks in figuring out what would actually make a difference.

    So perhaps the goal should be thinking about the Median American less as a subject to be measured and more as an experience (or, to echo Dale’s point, a range of experiences) to be understood, and to convince the designers of policy of the benefits of doing so.

  3. I take it slightly differently. The underlying presumption here is that elites argue for things not because these are the things the elites want, but because they are superior interpreters to what the people want than the people are. They are “elite” because they have (a) superior powers of analysis and persuasion; and (b) have admirable social goals as their lodestar. Without (b), there’s no reason to listen to them at all — our name for people with (a) but not (b) is “grifter.”

    If you buy this, then their knowledge of (b) has one of two sources — eiither (a) a thorough understanding of what people profess to want and like [that’s the Nate Silver critique here]; or (b) the People are systematically misled, or foolish, or ignorant (rationally or not) and therefore their notion of what they want isn’t that important. It’s hard to adopt position (b) to the exclusion of (a) without soundng like an arrogant prick, so it undercuts persuasiveness, since most people don’t find arrogant pricks persuasive. Thus, every pundit, no matter how much they believe the People to be in error, must at least make some nod to Vox Populi. And the stupider they look doing it, the less persuasive they are… or as Andrew says, you’re giving away the gaff for the elites who’d just as soon rule by fiat, not acclamation.

  4. This seems to me like another installment in Nate’s owning the dumb and hypocritical libz contrarian takes that mostly serve to confirm his superiority.

    Sure, it’s probably axiomatic that if members of our society gain a better understanding of other members of our society, it benefits our society on the whole. But….

    Is it any more important for elites to gain a better understanding of non-elites than it is for non-elites to gain a better understanding of elites?

    Even more than that, how is this dichotomous categorization even practically useful? Are we supposed to draw some meaningful lesson from generalizing about non-elites from rural Kentucky and Hispanic LA and Black Detroit and White Pittsburgh, and then comparing them to elites from Orange County, CA, and Seattle, and Palm Beach, and Austin, TX?

    Seems to me that this whole framing of elites vs. non-elites, actually, is counterproductive for the most part – in the sense of leading to some kind of sustainable progress as a society.

  5. > The underlying presumption here is that elites argue for things not because these are the things the elites want, but because they are superior interpreters to what the people want than the people are.

    Or is it the underlying presumption here that elites are just out of touch posers and virtue signalers, who argue for things not because they are the things the elites (let alone anyone else) want, but because they are so far up their own assess that they lack the basic common sense to see what’s obviously better and like to pretend they want things to confirm their sense of superiority? What else could explain, for example, why elites want to let immigrants into the country, when said immigrants will only destroy the country? I saw a segment on Tucker the other night where that was the basic argument.

    I think we can create a mirror framing for all of this, and that doing so stems from a starting orientation of identity-aggressive and identity-defensive cognition.

  6. I think judging from Silver’s Twitter stream, by “elite” he means “progessives on Twitter who he disagrees with, either in terms of covid restrictions, economic policy, or “rights” issues. (It’s hard to even describe that group without making it seem I either agree with them or disagree with them: I’m trying to be neutral, but I think even the term “progressive” is rhetorically loaded).

  7. But I do think a lot of elites would fail a pop quiz on how the median American thinks and behaves, and that probably makes them a less effective advocate for their views.

    This is a rather ambiguous sentence. I first read “them” as being the elite and thought they were pretty good at advocating for their views.

    If we are talking about the “private school > elite university that daddy went to > unpaid internship > world class consulting company” elite I really doubt that they have any idea of how the median American thinks and behaves though with a lot of work they may be able to get some understanding.

    An elite person who may understand how the poor, not median, Chinese thinks is Xi Jinping. He came from an elite background then spent several years as a poor peasant and then got back into the elite. This is unlikely to happen to most US elites.

  8. Agreed about the first part.

    Do you find a specific (positive or negative) rhetorical loading to progressive, or just that it isn’t a neutral label? I mean, aren’t all these terms (e.g., liberal, conservative) rhetorically loaded?

  9. > I could see him advising the elites to listen to the common people (“the median American”), not because it would help these elites be better advocates—remember, elites already have too much power, so the last thing we want is to make them better advocates—but rather because, if these elites stay closer to the communal experience of Americans, maybe they’ll start advocating for better things.

    Some evidence that this strategy works:

    Joshua Kalla & David Broockman

    American Political Science Review, forthcoming

    > Campaigns regularly dispatch activists to contact voters. Much research considers these conversations’ effects on voters, but we know little about their influence on the implementing activists—an important population given the outsized influence politically active Americans wield. We argue personal persuasion campaigns can reduce affective polarization among the implementing activists by creating opportunities for perspective-getting. We report unique data from three real-world campaigns wherein activists attempted to persuade voters who had opposing viewpoints: two campaigns about a politicized issue (immigration) and a third about the 2020 presidential election. All campaigns trained activists to persuade voters through in-depth, two-way conversations. In preregistered studies, we find that these efforts reduced affective polarization among implementing activists, with reductions large enough to reverse over a decade’s increase in affective polarization. Qualitative responses are consistent with these conversations producing perspective-getting, which reduced animosity by humanizing and individuating out-partisans. We discuss implications for theories of prejudice reduction.

    • Max:

      I’m a big fan of the work of these researchers, and these results make sense.

      I don’t think they directly relate to the above post, though, in that Kalla and Broockman are talking about activists who are dispatched to voters. I wouldn’t consider these actors to be “elites.” Politicians are elites, business and labor leaders are elites, I guess you can say that Kalla, Brockman, Nate Silver, and I are elites in that we have some intellectual influence. But I wouldn’t say that campaign volunteers or employees are elites. (From Merriam Webster, the two relevant definitions of elite: “the socially superior part of society” and “a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence.”

      Here’s the issue. Kalla and Broockman refer to “the outsized influence politically active Americans wield.” This is kind of a circular statement: if you’re talking about influence in politics, then, yes, people who are politically active have more influence: that’s the point of political activity! But being politically active doesn’t make you elite: lots of ordinary people participate in politics. It’s the people in charge who are the elites, right?

  10. >Silver, like Brooks, earned his elite status

    Citations needed. The problem with the current year circle jerk “elites” is none of them have earned their status, and none of them ever pay a price for their numerous sins the way everyone else in the country does. Sane people look at people like Silver and Brooks as clowns; goblins put on the Teevee machine because they’re in a clique, not because of any earned virtue.

    The lack of feedback for this class of people has brought us to a very dangerous moment. Now, the “elite” class can’t even tolerate feedback from the smelly masses to the point where censorship on social media platforms is widely advocated. The whole “disinformation” saw is simply your “elite” are wrong most of the time, and people notice online. Your “elites” just spent two years advocating for solutions to a pandemic which were almost entirely incorrect, forgetting about it in a moment of pique as you foment a war with the 2nd largest nuclear power. At some point the bill will come due. I wouldn’t stand too close to Silver and Brooks if I were you.

    • Scott:

      When I said that Silver and Brooks earned their elite status, I mean that they earned it in the economic sense: Silver gets clicks, Brooks sells newspapers. You might love them, hate them, or feel indifferent to them; the point is that there are people who are interested in what they want to say. Malcolm Gladwell is an elite science writer. I find much of his writing to be annoying, but lots of people like to read him; he’s earned his status, for better or worse.

      Regarding your second paragraph, I don’t see what’s gained by putting “elites” into a single category. If you look at “elites” as a whole, they gave lots of contradictory advice regarding the coronavirus: that’s no surprise, as different elites gave different advice. There have been big debates among elites as well. Similarly with foreign policy: there’s lots of variation. Some elites have proposed steps that are close to war with Russia; the elites within the U.S. governments have carefully avoided this; and some elites have flat-out supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don’t think Silver and Brooks are in that category. I’d recommend you focus your anger on particular elites who are supporting invasions and war rather than generically slamming the entire undefined category of elites.

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