No adults in the room
How smart are our political elites?
Stupid elites theory is a meme theory that is often brought up as a joke when discussing current events. As we will see, there is truth in mirth. The theory describes the lack of competence and foresight at the top echelons of western societies. In this essay, I will go over some examples, ballpark where these elites stand cognitively, and discuss some causes. I will mostly focus on political elites.
Revealing events
In late 2019, news of a disease propagating rapidly near Wuhan, China were making the rounds on most platforms, including the legacy media. As the weeks went on, it became clear that things were getting out of hand. We were seeing videos of overwhelmed hospitals and local doctors sounding the alarm. After an initial attempt to cover up the events, the Chinese government imposed drastic measures, quarantining Wuhan (a 13-million people provincial capital) and a few neighboring cities on January 23rd, 2020. Despite these efforts, isolated cases were popping up left and right, including in neighboring countries such as South Korea. At that point, all we knew about the disease is that it was highly contagious, seemed to cause a number of those affected to need medical attention, and that the CFR was low when people could be treated, but potentially a lot higher when they could not. From their reaction, we could tell that the Chinese government thought it was hazardous enough to warrant placing tens of millions of people under lockdown - a previously unheard of policy - despite the economic fallout.
Some decisions are only easy to criticize in hindsight, but this was not that. The problem was not very complicated, and while implementing proactive policies is difficult in democracies, western political elites almost uniformly failed the test of discerning the threat. Instead, they remained in blissful ignorance and denial even as local epidemics were spreading around the world. I remember specifically that for a while, a region of Italy (Lombardy) was suffering a significant outbreak, and the predominant discourse in France was about the differences between our two countries that caused them to have an outbreak and not us. Experts speculated about party culture, the aging Italian population, diet, infrastructure, population density etc. instead of the obvious explanation: in their early stages, epidemics grow exponentially, so a one-week difference in how early the outbreaks happen can manifest as a 10-fold difference in the number of cases at a given moment.
Amusingly, this was not limited to political elites. Medical professionals joined in the fun, just like the WHO and CDC had done towards the beginning of the crisis. At that moment (before the first wave), it would have been reasonable to advise social distancing, build temporary hospitals, gather medical supplies and subsidize our industrial capacity to quickly produce respirators, masks etc. Contact-tracing, limiting international travels and imposing quarantines on small affected areas would also have slowed down the spread of the disease. None of that happened, because our political (and in this case, medical) elites could not apprehend the nature of the problem.
When it hit, they went into panic mode and imposed repeated lockdowns on whole countries. These were pointless by that time - what are you containing if outbreaks are already everywhere? They scrambled for medical supplies and did a 180 on their risk assessment. This was particularly absurd, because it was precisely around that time (late march) that the picture was becoming clearer: the CFR was very low if people could be treated, and would probably not go much above 1-2% even if they could not. So, we got off easy. It was fairly serious, but only 2-3 times worse than the flu, because it was more contagious. Very manageable.
When do lockdowns work? - A relevant article by ZeroContradictions.
When the disease was unknown and could have been very bad, they failed to recognize the danger. When the disease became better known, they failed to quantify the danger. Our elites underreacted for months, and then overreacted for years. For astute observers, that was a learning opportunity: it is very rare for nature to provide a collective psychometric test for our decision-makers. What did we learn?
- Like common people, elites tend to uncritically adopt the beliefs of their social circle.
- Only a very small fraction of them can understand exponential growth.
- The independent-minded rely on naive historical pattern-matching (SARS, AIDS).
Astonishing data
This famous article by Anatoly Karlin attempts to quantify, in his terms, the "idiocy of the average". He is not discussing elites, but average 15 and 16-year-olds. This article is useful for getting a feel for what normal people can do. Since people learn some things as they grow older, I don't think it is wise to take those figures as they are, but they provide a basis for two mental shorthands I have abstracted from this source :
- In a typical western country, roughly 10% of people can solve the "Helen the cyclist" problem. (It takes Helen 9 minutes to move 4 km and then 6 minutes to move 3 km. What's her average speed in km/h? Using miles instead of kilometers gives the same answer)
- In a typical western country, roughly 50% of people can solve the "revolving door" problem. (How many people can go through a tripartite, four-rotation-per-minute revolving door, large enough that two people can enter side-by-side in the space between wings, in the span of 30 minutes?)
If you can solve both problems easily, you probably found the first one easier than the second one. Fewer people can solve it because taking an average is a more abstract mental operation than multiplying numbers together. This is counter-intuitive, but what makes a problem out of reach of people below a certain threshold is not its complexity, but how abstract it is. In the previous part, I mentioned how the initial stages of the Covid pandemic were characterized by exponential growth: the problem was not complicated, but it was a little too abstract. Conversely, regular people can solve surprisingly complex problems when those can be broken down and no single step is too abstract - like managing a store.
While the "revolving door" problem does not tell us much about elites, the "Helen the cyclist" problem does. Because of their IQ (110-115), we know that political elites in a given country largely come from that fraction of the population - the 10%. This gives us an idea of the minimum level of competency of this group - by and large, they can solve the "Helen the cyclist" test. The smarter people in that fraction will probably go on to work in the private sector, but even the remaining ones are likely to be able to take averages and do simple multiplications without a calculator on hand.
However, it appears that they cannot do much more than that. As noted earlier, exponential growth is too abstract for almost all of them. A simple probability question, which is more abstract than an average but less abstract than exponential growth, tripped up roughly 60% of British MPs. Other surveys of officials in different countries provide similar results, although they are less clear-cut.
So, to sum up, a decent ballpark estimate is that our political elites tend to fall into a category of people who can solve the "Helen the cyclist" problem, but not problems involving abstract modeling, feedback or distributions. Simple probabilities are, fittingly, a coin toss. Conditional probabilities are likely just beyond reach of such a group.
Confirmation bias
While we should be aware of it, confirmation bias is not a bad thing: it's just what we do when we evaluate data in light of an existing theory. The only way to evaluate conflicting theories is to spend some time with each of them, allowing the bias to settle in, and then see if the picture fits. "Smart elites theory" and "Stupid elites theory" are competing theories. We can put them on and take them off like glasses. Once our eyes have habituated, we can keep them on for a little while and see if anything appears blurry or distorted in day-to-day life.
In my experience, wearing the "Stupid elites theory" glasses makes the picture much crisper. The mysterious machinations of governments around the world are a lot less puzzling when taking into account the very limited agency of those who run them. For the most part, they are neither macchiavellian geniuses optimizing their profits nor tools being puppeteered by decisive private interest groups. They are short-term thinkers who believe they are doing the right thing and try to impress others like themselves with their wealth and status. People in governments and legislative bodies default to price control and subsidies because they believe it solves problems. They do not see a problem with legal immigration because they do not think about it quantitatively and supporting immigration is high-status in their social circle. They grandstand and saber-rattle because it sounds cool, or tough. Trump is not playing 5D chess, nor does Putin know what he is doing. They and their counselors mostly know how to put on their very-serious-people face. Their worldviews are murky, incoherent, and based on false premises.
If you do not subscribe to it, spend some time with Stupid elites theory. Allow yourself to see the world through that lens for a little while.
What to make of this?
Political elites are a varied bunch. They are not all idiots. They are a group, and every group has outliers. They are smarter than regular citizens, but by less than a standard deviation. They also differ from normal people in other ways, such as character. Political elites must be somewhat more competitive, social and status-conscious than normal people.
Elected officials might be a special case to some extent, because winning a constituency involves persuading regular people to vote for you. In some cases, being relatable and not too high-achieving is an advantage. However, I doubt that this makes elected officials profoundly different from other political elites, because at the upper echelons those two groups exchange seats very often.
Elites are selected from a substrate. Their composition depends both on the substrate and the selection mechanism. A critique of our elites begins with a critique of the people: stupid people have stupid elites. So, in the long run, the best way to have better elites is eugenic population control and avoiding the mass import of third-world immigrants into the west.
Regarding the selection mechanism, putting into place requirements to access key positions would be easy enough, as well as reducing the general overproduction of elites by placing a cap on how many BA/BS, MS, PhDs, etc. can be awarded in a given year. Money incentives would probably be counter-productive, considering that they already tend to be paid fairly well in western countries.
We should keep in mind that every smart and diligent individual who branches into politics has to come from somewhere, and that involves tradeoffs.
There is no miracle cure, but there is no harm in seeing through the smoke.