Is 'elite human capital' overrated?

Is the Anglosphere’s leadership class too clever by half?

Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash

Two-minute video summary

Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have so much corruption that it would head towards collapse. This is why conservatives cannot build scientific institutions, and only a very small number of credible journalistic outlets. Right-wingers are discriminated against in academia and the media, but they mostly aren’t in these professions because they select out of them, since they lack intellectual curiosity and a concern for truth. If it doesn’t make them money or flatter their ego in a very simplistic way — in contrast to the more complicated and morally substantive ways in which liberals improve their own self-esteem — conservatives are not interested.
Richard Hanania, 7/9/24

"The proper role of Elite Human Capital is to decide which goals are humane and noble, and which attitudes and preferences should be ignored or even suppressed."
Absolutely! And there's definitely never going to be any negative blowback – race riots, for instance – as a result of the mouth-breathing masses having policies they never voted for and don't want imposed on them by their social betters.
Me, commenting on a Hanania post, 7/10/24

Sure, that sometimes happens, but much more often they just stew for a while and then move on and then when they’re replaced by their kids these concerns go away. First worlders have never shown much of an inclination to riot against immigration, though the Trump Republican Party is doing its best to try and third worldize the population.
Hanania’s reply

First off, can we all bow down and thank the Internet Gods for the existence of Substack?

This week, I’ve had the opportunity to engage in some back and forth with two interesting thinkers – Richard Hanania and Lorenzo Warby – whose erudition and insights I always admire, even when I disagree with their conclusions. I haven’t been so excited since Bridget Phetasy liked one of my posts. (I don’t flatter myself that she actually read it. But she was gracious enough to grace it with her Substackian imprimatur after I name-checked her, so let’s not split hairs here.)   

‘Lorenzo Warby Thought’ will have to wait for another Musing, but hang on while I desperately attempt to shamelessly leverage a brief nod in my direction from a ‘heterodox’ heavy hitter by addressing ‘Richard Hanania Thought’.

Specifically, his enthusiasm for ‘elite human capital’.   

Technocracy and its discontents
Hanania is at the pointy end of the IQ bell curve. Like many people in that position, he apparently believes societies would function much better if people like him were just left alone to run things, without input or interference from lesser mortals.

This is not an original idea. William Henry Smyth, an American engineer, is credited with coining the term ‘technocracy’ around a century ago. Smyth imagined a society where “the rule of the people [was] made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers".

There are differences between technocracy and meritocracy, but not of any great import. But while ‘technocracy’ and ‘technocrat’ now have negative connotations, almost everyone – Left, Right and Centre – remains in favour of meritocracy.

Even in these hyperpolarised times, the idea of creating societies where bright individuals can rise from unpromisingly humble origins to great heights retains broad appeal. Indeed, it’s so appealing even politicians from not-so-humble backgrounds regularly ‘prole wash’ their life stories. (The Donald got his start in life with only a “small loan” from his father, Kamala’s upbringing was unimpeachably middle class, and so on.)     

Most people who throw the word meritocracy around are presumably unaware of how the term came into common usage. In 1958, Michael (father of Toby) Young, an Anglo-Australian activist/barrister/sociologist/politician/life peer, published a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. I’m yet to get around to reading it, but here’s the Wikipedia summary:

It describes a dystopian society in a future United Kingdom in which merit (defined as IQ + effort) has become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a meritorious power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less meritorious… The narrative of the book ends in 2034 with a revolt against the meritocratic elite by the "Populists".

The book was rejected by the Fabian Society and then by 11 publishers before being accepted by Thames and Hudson… the word was adopted into the English language without the negative connotations that Young intended it to have and was embraced by supporters of the philosophy. Young expressed his disappointment in the embrace of this word and philosophy by the Labour Party under Tony Blair.

If high school students are still required to read books, perhaps they should now be expected to study Young as well as Huxley and Orwell?

The perils of intellectual hubris
If you want to identify a post-war politician who ticks all the meritocratic boxes, it’s hard to go past that charming sociopath Bill Clinton. The son of a bigamist travelling salesman who died before he was born, Clinton was raised by his nurse mother and an abusive, alcoholic car salesman stepfather in flyover country.

But Slick Willy was blessed with an off-the-charts IQ that saw him win a scholarship to Georgetown University and a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, then get a JD from Yale before becoming a law professor, governor (at 32), and two-term US president.

Say what you will about Clinton, but you can’t accuse him of lacking exceptional cognitive horsepower. The one thing those who’ve interacted with him invariably comment on, apart from his irresistible charisma, is his astonishing intellect.

Clinton is, by any metric, smart. But being smart isn’t quite the same thing as being wise.  

Here’s Clinton in 2000 explaining why China poses no real threat to the US and should be warmly welcomed into the WTO:      

Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street. It requires China to open its markets — with a fifth of the world's population, potentially the biggest markets in the world — to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways…

For the first time, our companies will be able to sell and distribute products in China made by workers here in America without being forced to relocate manufacturing to China, sell through the Chinese government, or transfer valuable technology — for the first time. We'll be able to export products without exporting jobs…

So if you believe in a future of greater openness and freedom for the people of China, you ought to be for this agreement. If you believe in a future of greater prosperity for the American people, you certainly should be for this agreement. If you believe in a future of peace and security for Asia and the world, you should be for this agreement. This is the right thing to do.

The case for consulting the plebs
Academic, corporate, media and political elites are full of brilliant individuals. Individuals who’ve regularly been catastrophically mistaken in recent times.

Indeed, there now seems to be a cottage industry devoted to churning out ‘Maybe we elite human capital types aren’t so clever after all’ think pieces. Here’s a recent classic of the genre from Ross Douthat in the New York Times:

This is the constant pattern of the Western elite over the last generation. A form of aggressive groupthink takes hold among the best and brightest, ideology gets laundered into supposed expertise or consensus, and the result is post-9/11 debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya… or Davos-man naïveté about the downsides of globalization and the rise of China… or Eurocrat myopia about the wisdom of a common currency, the manageability of mass migration and the true cost of Russian energy … or the recent phase of progressive mania that closed schools, legalized hard drugs, wrecked educational standards and warped curriculums, licensed dubious medical experiments in the name of transgender rights and turned the U.S. immigration system into a disaster area.

Then the bill comes due, the elites backpedal and obfuscate and conveniently forget (What do you mean, Kamala Harris endorsed publicly funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens? Sounds like Fox News nonsense!) 

Democracy is the worst system, except all the others
To be fair to Hanania, he readily concedes that individuals with 140-plus IQs “can make a lot of mistakes”. But his argument appears to be that elite human capital will reliably make better decisions than non-elite human capital. And, presumably, that it’s regrettable that the hoi polloi still have the vote and can use it to put a buffoon like Trump in the White House.

Either because I’m older or stupider than Hanania, I’m not so sure about that proposition. I can think of plenty of instances where the low-information, uncredentialed masses have proven to be far more prescient and clear-eyed than elites, and globalisation is just one of them.

Maybe there’s something to be said for the wisdom of the crowd after all.