Jeff Jacoby elitist extraordinaire

Jeff Jacoby writes this type of column every once in a while:

When your car needs fixing, you want someone knowledgeable about auto mechanics to diagnose the problem; when a weighty medical decision has to be made, you probably wouldn’t turn to inexperienced laymen to make it. The crafting of government policy — of tax law and defense budgets and judicial nominations and trade regulations — is at least as serious an endeavor as surgery and car repair. Many people, for wholly legitimate and understandable reasons, give no thought to governmental affairs. Fine, but why hector them to vote? If anything, they should be reassured that it’s OK if they don’t vote.

Here’s Jeff back awhile on Democrats:

At a Democratic fundraiser in Newton this month, offering what he called “a little bit of perspective from the Oval Office,’’ President Obama gave this diagnosis of the American political scene:

“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.’’

The smug condescension in this — we’re losing because voters are panicky and confused — is matched only by its apparent cluelessness. Does Obama really believe that demeaning ordinary Americans is the way to improve his party’s fortunes? Or that his dwindling job approval is due to the public’s weak grip on “facts and science’’ and not, say, to his own divisive and doctrinaire performance as president?

Hmm , it’s smug condescension when President Obama notes that voters don’t always have the best information when they vote, but when Jeff says the same thing and then says those people probably shouldn’t vote?

Jeff has made a career out of talking about ‘liberal elites’, such as here, but this is the true elitism–only some people should vote.

And, because I haven’t uploaded pictures for a while, here’s a non-elitist picture of a sunset:

The elite

The basic definition of the elite is easy, it’s people who have wealth and power. As people elaborate, then it gets less obvious. Still, I would hope that most of us would agree that someone in the elite: can take vacations pretty much when they want (although some of them might work a large amount of the time); have subordinates to do much of the grunt work; usually do not suffer much when they make a bad decision (think of the bank CEOs that crashed the economy and kept all the millions they made and are again making millions). Of course, some of the elite can still empathize with the rest of us. In any case, Senators are all obviously of the elite in the US and some of them are what brought me to write about this:

“It is impossible to do all of the things that the majority leader laid out,” Kyl said today, “frankly, without disrespecting the institution and without disrespecting one of the two holiest of holidays for Christians and the families of all of the Senate, not just the senators themselves but all of the staff.”

and:

“We shouldn’t be jamming a major arms control treaty up against Christmas; it’s sacrilegious and disrespectful,” DeMint told Politico. “What’s going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians. They did the same thing last year — they kept everybody here until (Christmas Eve) to force something down everybody’s throat. I think Americans are sick of this.”

Of course part of this is the usual partisan play and part of this is the usual Christian assumption of being special, but this is also a good example of elitists that can’t empathize. It isn’t that they don’t realize that most of us do have to work during these times, it’s that they don’t realize that we don’t think they have a right to take a vacation when they want. It’s not that they don’t know that it’s their fault (with all their delay tactics and filibusters) that it’s taking so long for legislation to pass, it’s that they don’t understand that that might mean they have to pay for it. An elite with empathy wouldn’t have this trouble, but these Senate Republicans obviously don’t have that empathy.

Charles Murray and elitism

Charles Murray has an article about the New Elitism. The complete vacuousness of his defining how you can tell if you’re in the new elite has lead to a new meme (which I first found here). I love the cognitive dissonance between this statement:

All this has made the New Elite distinctly touchy (see Maureen Dowd’s “Making Ignorance Chic”), dismissive (see Jacob Weisberg’s “Elitist Nonsense”) and defensive (see Anne Applebaum’s “The Rise of the ‘Ordinary’ Elite”).

“Elite?” they seem to be saying. “Who? Us?”

and this:

Q. The bigger question, Dr. Murray, is what do you know about blue collar life and the mainstream? With your quiz, the picture you painted of “ordinary” America is part nostalgia and part a vicious vision of violence and ignorance. Tongue in cheeck indeed. You see mainstream America as undereducated rural/small town veterans who enjoy watching fast cars, brawls, country music and game shows, who are hooked on apocalyptic religion and who join civic clubs. That your idea of humor? You are a Harvard BA and MIT PhD — according to your article, you are the new elitist.

 

A. Charles Murray writes:

Well, I did grow up in Newton, Iowa, with a father who had only a high school education, and have lived for the last 20 years in a little blue-collar/farming town in Maryland (we’re not talking horse country here), sending my kids to local public schools. I’m not COMPLETELY out of touch.

See, it’s weird when other people deny they’re elite but completely normal when he does.

But the part that shows exactly what Murray is really thinking occurs here:

Q. Isn’t there an argument to be made for the fact that most people don’t know a lot about cultures outside their own? The elites don’t understand middle America, middle America doesn’t understand inner city minorities, inner city minorities don’t understand the elites and so on indefinitely.

 

A. Charles Murray writes:

Yes. But it doesn’t make much difference to public policy when a factory worker doesn’t know much about life in Potomac, MD. It makes a big difference when the people in senior positions don’t know about life a working-class neighborhood.

Notice the two very big assumptions:

1. elites only work in the government. Somehow those multimillionaire CEOs never seem to be ‘elite’ to conservatives.

2. it’s only problematic when liberals don’t know something about conservatives. Does Murray really believe that when this Tea Party group he’s lauding makes such a big noise about immigration or slashing the ‘bad’ government spending (they don’t want to cut military spending for example) or complaining about unions or so many other things that this doesn’t have huge public policy implications? And the reason the Tea Party has a lot of these stances is because they don’t know about many of the groups most affected. But Murray probably doesn’t care about these groups so it’s ok.

The problem with schools and elitism

The Boston Globe has an article about the consolidation of schools. The idea of the governor is that larger schools will save money and give a better education, while the article tries to argue that neither is true. Besides the fact that I went to a consolidated school (ConVal in Peterborough, NH), I don’t know enough about this to say which side is true (the fact that one of the experts that the article relies on is from the Cato Institute does give me pause). The bit I’m going to look at is more specific, this statement:

“When we talk about thinking and acting like a school system instead of system of schools, I think of places like Maryland, where [the state superintendent of schools] can get 24 superintendents around a table a couple of times a month if she needs to talk about educational policy . . . to get everyone on the same page, to connect it with a system of higher education,” Reville says. “There are operational advantages.”

The charge of elitism is thrown around all the time, but this is the real thing. It’s the Ayn Rand-John Galt-libertarian idea of elitism, that the people at the top are better than the rest of us and deserve all the money they get. You can see that attitude in the CEOs of today(although the last year has put a real dent in this idea) and the whole John Galt movement that’s spreading in some circles (here’s Michelle Malkin if you have the stomach or go to TPM).

Even in sports like tennis where it’s easy to measure who’s the best this can lead to interesting results:

Let’s suppose that player A wins a point against B 51% of the time (to make it simple, in real life this would change depending on the serve and length of the match, …), then player A will win 52.5% of games; 57.34% of sets; 63.565% of best of 5 matches.

If player A wins 55% of the points then A will win 62.31% of games; 82.16% of sets; 95.74% of matches.

Thus a player who in some sense is only slightly better than another will win most of the time and this is the difference between being a millionaire and a journeyman. This is just an example of the Law of Large Numbers–in the long run, the proportion of times something happens will approach its probability.

If we go from tennis to a team sport, it becomes much harder to judge and the ‘best’ player will not always help the team the most. You can see this in the New England Patriot’s philosophy–a good player that fits into the Bill Belichick philosophy helps the team more than a great player that doesn’t.

When we then move to school systems it becomes even more difficult. The first thing Reville’s statement assumes is that the administrators of schools make the difference, because the teachers would be the same (if the new system keeps the same student-teacher ratio, then the same number of teachers will be needed). The second thing it assumes is that it’s better to have fewer, ‘better’ administrators. I think both assumptions are wrong, but let me talk about the second one.

Let’s suppose that administrator A is better overall than B, then if we had to choose one A is the one to go with. The problem is that it’s very unlikely that A will be better than B in all things and here’s where the problem with using fewer people shows up–as the saying goes ‘two heads are better than one’. You see, administrators do talk and by having more units, more things can be tried. Since nobody knows what works best, some differences of opinion and practice are good to see what works better. CEOs might try to tell you that a top-down structure works best, but look at things like Wikipedia to see an alternative. In a collaborative effort with lots of people, a little difference between people will have a much smaller difference than in something like tennis and it’s much more important to get a wide set of people–like with the Patriots, the best person might not be the best addition.

Libertarians argue that a business is like tennis, but I would argue that any large company is much more of a collaborative effort. This means that any one person will usually make only a small difference (there are, of course, exceptions)–a person who is replaced by someone who is slightly worse, even a CEO, will not mean a big change and sometimes (if the new person is a better fit) it can actually make things better. If this is true, then CEOs are not worth nearly as much as they get.