Elite Human Capital Is Not Just IQ

Smarts are necessary but not sufficient for having a responsible elite

Below are my responses to the latest mailbag. Someone asked a question about the cultural effects of immigration. I’ll just refer them here and here. I understand people become readers at different times, so when they ask about stuff I’ve addressed before I’ll just cite earlier pieces from now on. People really like asking about immigration, and it’s hard to convince those who care about this issue that they’re wrong. I will write more about it soon.

In this mailbag, I answer questions on topics including whether belief in inherent racial differences would harm support for poverty reduction programs; whether I’m unusual in finding success as a “decoupler”; tattoos on women; if I’d prefer a Yglesias dictatorship over American democracy; whether people in politics are mentally ill; and what a single 45-year-old should do with the rest of his life.

Alec Lemas asks

The Democratic Party's nominees for President and Vice President are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Kamala Harris failed the California Bar Examination on her first try. Do you consider either of these people to be "elite human capital?" If not, how do you square it with your "elite human capital" thesis?

I’m glad I got this question because it shows how the idea of EHC is often misunderstood. It’s nobody’s fault, as I think that Anatoly Karlin and I, the two people who rely most on the concept, haven’t really spelled it out. I can’t speak for Anatoly, but for me the idea isn’t just about IQ.

In most modern countries, a certain class of people tends to have a disproportionate cultural and political influence. Yes, they are smarter than average, but plenty of smart people, and even successful ones, are not Elite Human Capital. In addition to high IQ, EHC has two other distinguishing features: an interest in ideas, and a moral code that it lives by that goes beyond tribalism or a primitive form of machismo.

So take two people with the same IQ, say 120. One ends up owning a number of car dealerships in Ohio and makes a lot of money, but he never reads a serious book in his life or thinks about much other than the well being of himself and his family. If he votes, he’s likely conservative, just from instinct, not because he understands anything about the benefits of free markets. The other moves to NYC and becomes a freelance journalist, barely scraping by as she publishes articles on the topics she’s interested in. She spends a lot of her time reading nonfiction and everyone she knows has some kind of interesting job as a writer, artist, academic, or political operative.

Despite the two of them being equally smart, only the second individual is Elite Human Capital. This is not about who is more valuable to society. A small business owner probably contributes more on average than a journalist or academic, with many of the latter categories making society worse off through spreading bad ideas. But the car dealership owner matters a lot less for cultural and political outcomes. Every society has to a certain extent looked down on merchants and technicians relative to other groups that are seen as doing more intellectual or spiritual work. This is not necessarily a good thing, since I believe American culture, and the West more generally, giving the entrepreneur higher status is one of the secrets of our success, as argued by Deidre McCloskey. But most educated people still have a sense that individuals in academia, politics, journalism, the non-profit space, etc. are doing something more meaningful than those in say oil extraction or supply-chain logistics.

Regarding Kamala Harris, I don’t think she’s very smart. She went to a not very good law school despite being half black, and flunked the bar exam. This should create the presumption that her IQ isn’t that high, and from watching her in public life there is little to indicate that presumption is wrong. She’s very attractive and quite charismatic, and I think that if she had a high level of intelligence too she would be a once in a generation political talent like Obama or Clinton (Bill, of course). Kamala is good at making crowds like her, but when she’s put on the spot or faces hostile questioning, she often gets in trouble due to an inability to think well on her feet. Nonetheless, the fact that she’s a career politician and comfortable in elite liberal circles makes her EHC.

As when talking about conservatives and liberals, when I discuss EHC versus low human capital, I’m less interested in individual differences than in the kinds of communities and norms various groups of people create. An important point to remember is that EHC cares more about status and ideas than money, so this is why they have such an outsized influence. And in many ways, they have better communal norms.

For example, in the midst of his presidential campaign, Trump has recently been selling NFTs. Kamala Harris could not get away with this. It’s not just because there are fewer liberals stupid enough to fall for such a scam, though that is probably true. Rather, liberals have stronger norms against running such scams. She would lose status and respect among people she needs to win over. Trump’s staffers and social circles aren’t demoralized by him screwing over the members of his cult, and conservative media doesn’t do any in depth investigations on the topic in the way that the liberal press will occasionally report on Democratic corruption.

A conservative might try to argue for a false equivalency by pointing to something like the Clinton Foundation and note that its donations collapsed after Hillary lost the presidential race. But the point is that when liberals are corrupt, they at least have to go through the motions of pretending to do some good in the world. And sometimes this means actually doing good in the world – the Clinton Foundation did in fact save a lot of lives. Academia is similar. It’s a scam in a sense, but one where the people involved believe that it is connected to higher ideals, and as a byproduct they do often contribute knowledge to the world.

Recently, I wrote about how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was caught red handed being corrupt, and MAGA rallied around him. Democrats, in contrast, are more likely to dump politicians when their crimes become too obvious, as did the GOP before the descent into Trumpism. The fact that EHC types are more reflective people makes them care more about truth and avoiding hypocrisy and the most blatant forms of corruption.

Low human capital cultures are the world of transparent scams: anti-vaxx, Stop the Steal, the corrupt televangelist, gold and silver bars sold at exorbitant prices, fake news content mills. Yes, conservatives disproportionately create and fall for such scams. But they proliferate because even among smart people on the right who should know better, there is no culture of shaming or stigmatizing members of the tribe for even the most egregious types of behavior.

This doesn’t mean that Low Human Capital communities are completely devoid of a moral sense. But it’s a tribal morality, which appeals to people who are stupider and less idealistic. Donald Trump in his prime was probably smarter than Kamala Harris. But through most of his public life he never showed interest in anything other than making money, getting his name in the papers, and having sex with models. When Trump did talk about politics, the message was always that foreigners are bad and hurting Americans. This was true for decades before he became a presidential candidate, when he was railing against Japan “taking our jobs” in the 1980s. EHC tends to have higher ideals, while LHC sees the world in zero-sum terms, and can only be inspired if it has an enemy to bash. Its favorite targets include minorities, free thinkers, sexual non-conformists, and of course, foreigners most of all. From this perspective, it is not surprising that conservatives are happier than liberals, because their “thinking” about politics, which they approach like a football game, is a kind of self-indulgence, based around the bonding experience of rooting for their own team and the idea that the groups they identify with are superior to others.

Because EHC are the ones who matter most for politics and culture, any movement that wants to succeed needs to win them over. They seek high status, low pay professions and their commitment to ideals means they will sometimes take the steps necessary to push for major changes in society.

Although EHC 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.

Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump. As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, EHC is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist. A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.