Elite Failure?

 Ross Douthat recently had a column about "elite failure," which began by discussing Paul Ehrlich and his warnings about overpopulation.  This is a strange example, because Ehrlich had no discernible effect on American policy.  According to Wikipedia, he* recommended "a tax scheme in which additional children would add to a family's tax burden ...  as well as luxury taxes on childcare goods ...  incentives for men who agree to permanent sterilization before they have two children ...  a powerful Department of Population and Environment which 'should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment.' The department should support research into population control, such as better contraceptives, mass sterilizing agents, and prenatal sex discernment (because families often continue to have children until a male is born). ...  Legislation should be enacted guaranteeing the right to an abortion, and sex education should be expanded."  Abortion laws were loosened and sex education was expanded, but none of the other policies were adopted or even seriously considered.  Ehrlich also recommended that foreign aid should be given only to countries "with sufficient programs in place to limit population growth."  That also didn't happen.  

Douthat gives several more examples of elite failure, and they don't hold up either.  One is "left-wing politics in the Covid era, when bad ideas emanated from academia and were laundered through other credentialed institutions."  The major bad policy supported by the left was delay in returning to in-person schooling, but that wasn't particularly an "elite" idea--it was broadly popular.  And the largest policy failure was on the right:  resistance to the vaccine, which didn't come from academia.  The next is DOGE, which he acknowledges "partly reflect[s] a populist unwillingness to listen to credentialed experts about the sheer difficulty of budget cutting. But the belief that a group of high-I.Q. outsiders can come in and remake a complex system is itself a characteristic elite temptation."  However, DOGE wasn't an effort to remake the government--the idea was that there was a lot of  obvious waste, fraud, and abuse.  Finally, the war with Iran:  "the voices in Trump’s coalition who were supportive ... included members of the pre-Trump G.O.P. elite and think-tankers who had been making the case for intervention for years. The voices raised in opposition often belonged to the populist wing, including some of its most paranoid factions. "  Although some Republican elites have called for a harder line with Iran, those elites haven't had much influence on the actual policy.  A few weeks after Trump's inauguration, I wrote that there was an approach to international affairs that was popular among the general public, but not among elites: "impatient with diplomacy, international agreements, and long-term obligations:  we should intervene when the nation's interests are at stake and then get out."  That's been Trump's approach to the war, and the results show why it's not popular among elites.

Douthat's model seems to be that academic and intellectual elites come up with ideas and those ideas trickle down to political decision-makers and the educated middle classes.  Since academics and intellectuals lean to the left, that means that elites, even conservative elites, are influenced by the left.  For example, Douthat's description of the "elite temptation" to remake complex systems is similar to the Hayek/Schumpeter/von Mises account of why intellectuals are attracted to socialism.  

There are two problems with this model.  One is that the spread of ideas often isn't a process of trickling down.  Ehrlich was an elite academic (a professor at Stanford), but he wasn't an expert in human populations--his research was on insects.  But (again according to Wikipedia) his public writing and speaking on overpopulation attracted the attention of the executive director of the Sierra Club and the publisher of Ballantine Books.  Ehrlich also became a frequent guest on the Tonight Show.  I don't know how he got his initial invitation, but presumably he was invited back because he was good on TV.  That is, even in the days of media "gatekeepers," the process of getting public attention was entrepreneurial.  Although sometimes entrepreneurs create demand for something new, often they fill a demand that is already there. A second problem with the model is that policymaking elites have some distinctive views that set them apart from all parts of the general public.  Some of these are the result of the influence of experts--people who have specialized in studying an issue.  With population, the specialists had noticed that economic growth and modernization were generally followed by declines in fertility.  There's no information on elite opinions at the time, but my guess is that they were less concerned about overpopulation than the general public because they were aware of this pattern, so they continued to treat economic development as the priority.  

Of course, this doesn't mean that elite ideas always right, or even usually right--getting things right is hard.  But general claims of "elite failure," at least those that I've seen, are unconvincing.

*Apparently The Population Bomb was co-written with Anne Ehrlich, but Paul was listed as the sole author.  

The few or the many?

 A few days ago, Paul Krugman wrote that there has been a vicious circle in which rich people influence government policy to favor their interests, which allows them to get richer, which gives them more influence.....  This post will mainly be about the political side of his story, but I'll start with a few points about the economics.  The figure shows a general measure of income inequality over time:

It grew from the 1970s to the early 2000s, but has leveled off.  What about wealth?*

The share of the 99.0-99.9% peaked in 2018 and is now about where it was in 2009, but the share of the top 0.1% has continued to increase and is higher than ever.  So although you could argue about whether "inequality" is increasing, the very rich have been pulling ahead of the rest of us.

Krugman presents a figure showing the decline of corporate tax rates since the 1940s, which he says is a major cause of the gains at the top.    He says that the decline of corporate taxes reflects the power of the "oligarchs," and have happened "in the teeth of very broad public opposition," and points to a Gallup question about whether corporations "are paying their fair share in federal taxes, paying too much, or paying too little?"  The last time that was asked (2025), 21% said fair share, 7% too much, and 70% said too little.  

However, although agreement that corporations are paying too little in taxes may be broad, I don't think it's very deep.  First, when you mention specific rates, there's less support for an increase.  In 2021, an ABC/Washington Post survey asked "The top tax rate on corporate profits used to be 35 percent, then was cut to 21 percent. Would you support or oppose raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent?"  58% were in favor and 36% were opposed.  That's a majority, but the question isn't even about returning to how things were, just going halfway back.  There aren't many other questions that specify rates, but back in 1986, Harris asked about raising the minimum rate to 25%:  61% were in favor and 33% opposed.  However, in 1985 a Business Week/Harris poll asked about "A gradual reduction of the maximum corporate income tax from 46 percent to 35 percent," and opinions were almost evenly divided, with 42% in favor and 47% opposed.  Second, in 2011 a CBS/New York Times survey asked "If you had to choose one, which would you prefer in order to reduce the federal budget deficit--raising taxes on corporations or cutting government spending?":  32% favored increased taxes on corporations and 64% favored cutting government spending.  As far as I know, this is the only question of its kind, but there's lots of evidence suggesting that people think that there's a lot of room to cut spending without losing services.  Third, strong majorities say that the middle class pays too much in federal taxes.  Putting these points together, the usual Republican package--cuts in corporate taxes combined with with smaller cuts for middle-income people and vague promises of savings by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse--can be fairly popular.  On the other side, when Democrats propose increasing taxes on high-income people and corporations, people may suspect that the increases will wind up applying to them too.  

Finally, here's a summary of the Gallup questions about taxes on high-income people, middle-income people, the poor, and corporations.  The numbers are percent who think the group pays too much minus the percent who think they pay too little:

Although federal taxes on corporations and upper-income people have declined over that period, public opinion hasn't moved towards saying that they pay too little:  in fact, there's been some movement in the other direction.  

So overall, I think that policy doesn't reflect the strength of oligarchs so much as the weakness of popular support for high taxes on anyone, even rich people and corporations.  This doesn't mean that Democrats shouldn't try to increase taxes on rich people and corporations--just that such attempts won't be especially popular.  Public opinion is likely to be pretty evenly divided, as it was with the Clinton and Obama tax reforms.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

*Data from the Federal Reserve

Get back

 A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott called "The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week."  A few days ago, the Times promoted it in an e-mail, saying "Here’s what six years of data says is actually driving the push to get employees back to the office."  The reason they propose is narcissism--that many CEOs are narcissists, and narcissists want people to display deference to them and find displays of deference more gratifying when they are done in person.  The op-ed is based on a paper by Shandell, Elliot and Grant published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes with the title "Worship Me at the Office Altar."  They collected statements about remote work and several qualities that they regarded as measures of narcissism for a sample of about 250 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and found that CEOs who ranked higher in narcissism were more negative in their comments about remote work.

Their argument for a connection seems unconvincing to me.  Fortune 500 companies are large organizations, so the CEO never has face-to-face contact with the average employee.  If the general claim about narcissists is correct, it would be relevant to the top management team--CEOs who rank higher in narcissism would want them to return to in-person work more quickly--but wouldn't have any implications for ordinary workers.  However, they do appear to have strong evidence of a connection (t-ratio of about 4), so how do I explain that?  

One factor is that the usual t-ratios assume that the errors are normally distributed.  In fact, the residuals from the regression aren't normally distributed:  

With an error distribution like this, the standard errors will tend to be underestimated so the t-ratios will be overestimated.  There is no perfect way to address this, but I tried a few reasonable alternatives and they produced t-ratios of about 2.5.  That's less impressive, but still reasonably strong evidence by conventional standards.  

The more important factor involves their measure of narcissism.   They propose four indicators:  size of signature on the annual reports, size of the CEO photo, cash compensation relative to the second-highest paid executive, and non-cash compensation relative to the second-highest paid executive.  If you have multiple measures of the same underlying concept, all of the measures should be positively correlated with each other.  In fact, the correlations among these variables range from -.113 to .160, with an average of .044.*  There are two possible interpretations:  either there is no underlying quality to measure, or that at least three of the four "indicators" are not good measures of that quality.  I'll go with the poor measures interpretation:  in particular, even CEOs don't have complete control over their own compensation or the compensation of other managers.   

 If you include the individual variables as predictors in the regression, relative cash compensation consistently is statistically significant, relative non-cash compensation sometimes is, photo size sometimes scrapes in as "significant at the 10% level," and signature size is never close.  So there's pretty good evidence that CEOs who are highly compensated (relative to the next highest paid employee) expressed more opposition to remote work.  How would I explain this?  My proposal is that managements generally wanted to get employees back to in-person work--maybe not all the way back, but faster and farther than the typical employee would want--and that more prominent CEOs took the lead in delivering the bad news.  "Prominence" could be understood as status within the profession--high compensation is a sign that someone is regarded as an outstanding leader.  Or it could be within the organization:  high compensation could indicate a hierarchical organization in which nothing was final until you heard it from the big guy.  In less hierarchical organizations, the CEO could stand back and let subordinates deliver the bad news.   

Although I disagree with their interpretation, Shandell, Elliott, and Grant deserve credit for collecting and compiling the data (the link is on p. 5 of their paper, which I think is open access).  Unfortunately, they don't include the names of the companies, which would let other researchers add to the data set.  Confidentiality isn't an issue, since all of the data are from public records.  

*If you're interested in Cronbach's alpha, it's about .125.  

Done them proud?

 In 1999, Gallup asked "Overall, do you think the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased or disappointed by the way the United States has turned out?"  The question was repeated in June 2001, 2003, June 2008, 2013, and June 2026.  In 2007 and 2010, CBS asked a similar question:  whether the "founding fathers" would be pleased or disappointed.  Finally, in 2010 (January and June), 2011, 2016 and 2017 Fox News asked if the founding fathers would be "proud of the country if they could see it today."  Here is the percent positive (pleased or proud) answers:

The breakdown by party identification (June 2010 and June 2016 are unavailable):*

Partisan differences were small and Democratic and Republican opinions moved in the same direction for the first decade or so, but then diverged in 2010.  The next figure shows the gap between supporters of the President's party and supporters of the opposition:

    For some evaluations, like economic conditions, partisan differences have increased steadily in the 21st century:  growing from Bush to Obama, Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden, Biden to Trump II.  This is different:  the partisan gap was bigger under Obama than in either Trump term (unfortunately the question wasn't asked in the Biden years).  Why is this question different?  My guess is that people focus on the political situation when answering, and evaluation of the political situation involves views of the opposition as well as the party in power.  That is, someone might think that the president was doing a good job but that the founders would be distressed to see the amount or kind of opposition that he was encountering.  Of course, Democrats were upset about Republican opposition during the Obama years, but I think they were still somewhat hopeful about winning a clear majority or achieving some bipartisan successes.  As a result, they were more optimistic in assessing the general political situation than Republicans are now.  

*I don't show independents in order to keep things simpler.  As you'd expect, they are generally in between supporters of the president's party and the opposition, and I don't see any clear changes in their relative position.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

That's great

 In May, the Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels "as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide."  They just gave ranks, but I was interested in total scores--how much difference is there between first and 10th place, or 10th and 100th?  I also wondered if there were novelists whose votes were scattered among a number of different works, so they would do better in a ranking by authors.  This article by Jarrett Kobek  has a link to a spreadsheet with the choices of individual voters.  I calculated scores as 10 points for a first choice, 9 for second, .... 1 for 10th.*  

There were 172 voters, who selected 670 different novels.  The distribution was highly skewed--the leader was Middlemarch, with 446 points, and at the other end there were 67 novels that got a single point (ie, one voter placed them tenth).  To make the top 100 required only 18 points--twelve novels had exactly that total.  Turning to authors, 474 received votes.  The top 25:

                                        N    points Guardian

George Eliot                 60    469 83.45
Virginia Woolf                64    407 84.35
Jane Austen                    63 390 82.50
Leo Tolstoy                    47     379 65.95
Toni Morrison                 57    361 75.05

James Joyce                 39 295 53
Charles Dickens         44 269 57.45
Marcel Proust                 27 201 37.05
Gustave Flaubert         22 159 29.95
Vladimir Nabokov         27 157 34.85

Henry James                 29 151 36.55
Gabriel García Márquez 23 126 29.30
Charlotte Brontë         21 121 27.05
F Scott Fitzgerald         21 120 27.00
Herman Melville         18 116 23.80

Emily Brontë                 15 114 20.70
Fyodor Dostoevsky         17 110 22.50
Laurence Sterne         18 109 23.45
Franz Kafka                 18 107 23.35
George Orwell          20 104 25.20

Kazuo Ishiguro         19 97 23.85
Chinua Achebe         15 94 19.70
Salman Rushdie         15 86 19.30
Miguel de Cervantes 11 84 15.20
Muriel Spark                 16 83 20.15

On the other side, here are some well-known novelists who didn't get much support:

                                points
Balzac                        7
Stephen Crane            9
Richard Wright          10
Zola                            13

In 1998,  the Modern Library offered a list of the top 100 novels published in English in the 20th century.  Novels from that list that got no support in the Guardian survey include Brave New World (#5), Darkness at Noon (8),  An American Tragedy (16), Native Son (20--Wright's points in the Guardian poll were for Black Boy), Henderson the Rain King (21), Sister Carrie (33), All the King's Men (36), The Heart of the Matter (40), and Lord of the Flies (41).  

One pattern that seems clear is that realist novels of the 19th and early 20th century don't get much support from the Guardian voters.  Why not?  The basic realist plot is that an outsider tries to get somewhere but is defeated, partly by social injustice but partly by his/her flaws and bad decisions.  I think that accounts for their poor showing in the Guardian survey:  educated middle class people are increasingly uncomfortable with anything that seems to express a critical view of disadvantaged people.  Another pattern is that novels by Americans and Europeans which are set in the rest of the world don't do well in the Guardian survey.  In addition to the examples of Henderson the Rain King and The Heart of the Matter, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano ranked 11th in the Modern Library list and got only 9 points from the Guardian, which puts it about 250th.  There's one big exception:  Heart of Darkness gets 42 points, for a rank of 40.  I think there's a reason for that:  it's about the damage done by colonialism.  Conrad gets only 9 points for all of his other novels (Modern Library had The Secret Agent ranked 46th, Nostromo 47th, and Heart of Darkness at 67th).  Finally, two novels with political themes do well in the Guardian ranking:  1984 at 16th and The Handmaid's Tale at 36th. But that's about it--several of the Modern Library picks that got no support in the Guardian survey seem at least equally relevant to contemporary politics.  Overall, the Guardian list seems to reflect the view that writers should "stay in their lanes."  

*The Guardian used a different formula:  1 point for being chosen and then a bonus of 0.5 for first, 0.45 for second, .... 0.05 for tenth.  That doesn't make sense to me--it makes the difference between 11th and 10th more important than the difference between 10th and first.   

Highly respected, part 2

 In a recent post, I found that people who believed that they were treated with "less courtesy or respect than other people" were more likely to vote for Trump in 2016 (and probably 2020).  This post will look at it from another direction:  who is more likely to think that they are treated with less respect?*  I considered race, sex, age, and education.  My expectations were that black people, younger people, men, and less educated people would be more likely to perceive disrespect.  Age turned out to be the most important factor, followed by race, with no clear differences by education and sex.  But although the overall average is about the same for men and women, there is an interaction with age:

Young men perceive more disrespect than young women, but middle-aged women perceive more disrespect than middle-aged men.  Or looking at it in terms of the relation with age, perceived disrespect declines steadily with age for men, but stays about the same or even increases until about age 40 or 50 for women and then declines.  There's also an interaction between education and sex:  education makes a difference among men (less educated men perceive more disrespect), but not as much (maybe not at all) among women.  There are also interactions involving race:  black men perceive more disrespect than black women.  In fact, the means for white men, white women, and black women are very close, and are consistent with the hypothesis that race doesn't make any difference among women.  Finally, there's an interaction between race and education:  among whites, people with college degrees perceive less disrespect; among blacks, there's no clear difference.  I looked at possible interactions between race and age, and education and age, but found no evidence of them.  I also looked at the possibility of a three-way interaction between race, sex, and education, but the numbers are too small to say anything definite.  

A belief that you are treated with less respect than other people could reflect experience--you really are treated with less respect--or greater sensitivity--you are more likely to interpret the same treatment as disrespect.  The group differences probably reflect a mix of both, but there's no way to distinguish them in these data.

*In my previous post, I asked "whether the association involves support for conservatism in general, or a specific kind of populist conservatism... I'll try to shed light on that by looking at the association with various political views."  I did that analysis, and found that among people with college degrees, feeling that you are treated with less respect is generally associated with more conservative views, but it's not possible to be more specific, partly because the number of cases isn't that large and partly because the GSS questions on politics aren't very well suited to identifying populist conservatism.

A distinction without (much) difference

Last year I had a post about the claim that men don't have as many friends as they used to.   I noted that the 2021 survey cited as evidence of a large decline in friendship among men showed a similarly large decline among women.   That survey used different procedures from previous ones, so it's not clear that we should accept it as evidence of a real decline in friendship, but if we do, it shows a decline among people generally rather than men specifically.  

A few days ago, I read an interview of Laurie Santos, a professor of Psychology at Yale, by Derek Thompson.  Santos said there was a decline in friendship, and "that decrease is much worse for men. One study found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship -- do you have six close friends you could talk to? -- men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. And if you ask how many men say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15% of American guys in midlife saying exactly that. That’s a fivefold decrease since folks have been running this survey."  Then there was this figure, summarizing the same 2021 survey I wrote about:

The share of men who reported six or more close friends indeed declined by more than half, from 55% to 27%.  The share of women who reported six or more friends declined from 41% to 24%.  That's a decline of 51% among men and only 41% among women, but it's just one possible comparison:  the share who report 10 or more declined by 62% among men and 61% among women, and the share who report five or more declined by 40% among men and 38% among women.  And the share of women reporting no close friends rose from 2% to 10%:  the same ratio of 5 as among men.  That is, the table doesn't support the general claim that any decline has been much worse among men.*  

That raises the question of why this misinterpretation is so prevalent (Santos followed this report, which is the source of the table).  The obvious factor is that people just like to talk about differences between men and women.  A second possibility is the influence of political ideology:  the idea of an especially large decline among men appeals to both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons.  Liberals are inclined to think that the traditional model of masculinity is unsuited to modern society, and we're seeing a symptom of that; conservatives are inclined to think that we've paid so much attention to the problems of women that we're neglecting the problems of men.  And moderates think that if both liberals and conservatives agree that there's a problem, we have a welcome opportunity for cooperation across ideological lines.  

*Even if you think that the comparison between six or more vs. five or fewer is especially important, you need to consider sampling error.  The 2021 survey had about 2000 people, and the 1990 survey had about 1200, so the figures for men and women are based on samples of 1000 and 600.  Then you have ratios, and differences between ratios, increasing the margin of error.  I estimate that the standard error of the difference between the ratios is about 5.5% assuming simple random sampling, but even without doing calculations it's clearly substantial.