The Origins of Elite Human Capital Institutions and Communities

The natural outcome of development, and authoritarian pushback

I’ve previously posted drafts of the Introduction and Chapter 1 of my coming book on Elite Human Capital (UPDATE: See also Chapter 3). Chapter 2 is probably going to be the most important part of the book, and because I want as much feedback as possible, I’m not going to paywall this one. Taking pride in your work and prioritizing intellectual achievement over financial gain is of course very Elite Human Capital of me.

Chapter 2 explains as a positive matter why EHC exists, and why it is normatively important. The short answer is that at a certain level of economic and technological development, smart and idealistic people form truth-seeking institutions in which virtue rather than financial gain alone is rewarded. This happens quite organically. Some ideas appeal to a certain kind of person, and such individuals form communities that create cultural norms that reflect their own values and are different from those of the rest of society. EHC individuals are not really born; they’re created by being around others with comparably high intelligence and idealism.

In the course of writing the book, I’ve slightly changed the definition of EHC. Western elites, on the one hand, and communism, woke, and religious and nationalist movements, on the other, need to be treated as conceptually distinct. EHC is the default culture that people destined to disproportionately influence society form when left to their own devices, but highly intelligent ideologues who care about ideas can create authoritarian systems or epistemologically closed movements that try to resist the more general trend. This will be explained more thoroughly in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.

This is still a work in progress, so please leave any comments you have, including on spelling mistakes, typos, empirical or logical critiques, and thinkers or ideas I should take into account.

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For most of human history, people’s lives were small. Both figuratively and literally. The average British soldier in World War I was 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and most of the other nations in the conflict sent men who were likely even shorter.[1] You were born somewhere, stayed there, and you died. You didn’t meet many new people. In the Middle Ages, peasants would rarely venture beyond their village other than to go to a local market town, and many died without ever leaving the place they were born. Even the United States was 60% rural in 1900, down from over 90% a century earlier. There were always smart people being born, and some degree of geographical and socioeconomic mobility has always existed. But before modern transportation and communications technology, and at much lower levels of economic development, life was parochial for the vast majority of humans in all places and at all times.

An unusually bright and idealistic girl born into a Medieval village was unlikely to develop a value system all that different from that of those around her. She may not even have been exposed to ideas indicating that a different way of life was possible. Even if she was, she was unlikely to meet many others like her of a similar disposition, much less form a community of like-minded individuals with them that had the potential to develop its own norms, moral outlook, and status hierarchy. The same is true for someone growing up in rural Pakistan today, although the internet can now broaden people’s horizons in even the most isolated parts of the globe.

The miracle that led to our modern living standards began with the Industrial Revolution. Humanity became wealthier, and developed the technology necessary to move around. As society can afford to take children and young people out of the labor force, education increases, as a way to develop skills, signal certain traits to other people, and class marker. Fewer than 40% of Americans completed high school in 1940; today over 90% do.[2] College graduation rates went from around 5% to about a third. Note that the US was highly educated by historical standards even in the mid-twentieth century. Until very recently, then, communities of smart, intellectually curious people did not exist to any large extent.

Between 1870 and 2009, the percentage of the American labor force that was white collar went from 13% to 41%, as the percentage of farmers and farm laborers collapsed from 46% to 1%.[3] Education mostly doesn’t make people smarter after a certain point, but what is important for our purposes here is that universities do bring intelligent and idealistic individuals together on a scale that is without precedent in human history, changing values and the nature of professional and social networks even among those who eventually move away from college towns. The same is true for the most technologically and economically vibrant metro areas of the country. Across the world, greater wealth and higher education have correlated with increasing socioeconomic segregation.[4] Today, it is common for members of the American upper middle class to have few or no personal relationships with individuals who did not graduate college.

In a broad sense, there are two things that smart and hardworking people can do with the opportunities that wealth and modern levels of technological development provide. They can try to maximize income, wealth, and control over tangible resources, or seek meaning through their careers. Think of someone who becomes a petroleum engineer and works his way up to executive level management, in contrast to an individual who spends the entirety of his twenties earning a philosophy PhD, and then perhaps another half decade looking for his first real job. Nobody is purely a wealth-maximizer or a meaning-maximizer; most of the upper class is somewhere in between, but that doesn’t mean we can’t speak in terms of different prototypes.

Note that we can be generous or harsh in describing the meaning-maximizer. Perhaps he goes into journalism, academia, or some other meaning-seeking field because he has broad interests or wants to make an important contribution to the world. Or we might say that he does so in order to feel better than other people, and deep down he is shallower and more broken than the most shameless money grubber. There are social media accounts that achieve wide reach simply by publicizing the abstracts of social science and humanity PhD dissertations that are self-evidently absurd. Ayn Rand’s novels, like many works of right-leaning fiction, vilify the intellectual elites of modern societies, presenting them as mostly parasites driven by a desire to take down their betters. We can put these judgments aside for now and simply recognize that wealth-maximizers and meaning-maximizers are two different archetypes. What makes an individual one or the other is a complicated and interesting question, but it doesn’t need to concern us here. Natural predisposition must have a role, as it does with everything, in addition to cultural background, which can be seen in the fact that many immigrants come to the United States as wealth-maximizers but have children who start to have career profiles that look more similar to the distribution among natives.

Wealth-maximizers are psychologically more similar to the way most humans have been throughout history. They don’t question the value system they were born into, and are conservative in the most apolitical sense. They have relatively simple value systems and status hierarchies. In 1963, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins published the landmark paper “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia,” in which he discussed what hierarchical relations look like in less developed societies in the Pacific. Prototypically, communities are led by a Big Man, who is usually as the name suggests large in physical size. His power doesn’t derive through an official position or an established process like an election. Rather, he has personal charisma and an ability to lead and inspire followers, which gives him control over resources. Generosity is key to the Big Man’s persona, as it both builds relationships with others and demonstrates his own power.

There are obvious similarities here to how third world dictatorships work, though with the latter having much more sinister undercurrents and implications. Dictators hold huge military parades where they stand on podiums and watch goose-stepping soldiers march by. They have statues raised in their honor, and coerce the public into going through sham elections in which they may win over 99% of the vote. These are demonstrations of power, but also help solidify it. The dictator shows the public that he is beloved, or, alternatively, that he can through fear coerce the masses into saying that they love him. Either way, the effect is the same, sending the message that resistance is hopeless.

In more benign form, imagine an American small-town business owner who sponsors the local little league team. He is in a way behaving similarly to the Polynesian Big Man or the third world tyrant. I have control over resources and am generous with them, so you should respect me. Such a display poses no challenge to a society’s traditional value system. It doesn’t require anyone to struggle with deep moral questions, or even pretend to. The fact that we like mom-and-pop stores but hate brutal dictators shouldn’t distract from the similarities between them.

At a certain level of societal development, however, smart and idealistic people find one another. They concentrate in college towns and around major hubs of technological and economic dynamism. They are less subject to the pressures and influences of family. This is both because they moved away from their relatives, and they have less family in the first place as birth rates decline. Those they interact with on a daily basis more closely match them in cognitive ability and personality. Even within university communities and major urban centers, the budding Elite Human Capital class is not exposed to a representative cross-section of the population, but mostly to those who they work or go to school with and live in the immediate vicinity of. With modern communications technology, it also develops a kind of class consciousness. This used to be mostly through mass media like books and national magazines, but this tendency becomes even stronger with the rise of the internet and social media.

When Elite Human Capital concentrates, money, beauty, flashy jewelry, nice cars, and ostentatious displays of power and generosity are no longer how one impresses others. Individuals begin to signal virtue. Truth becomes a lingua franca through which smart people communicate with one another. An individual tries to show that he is honest and caring. This is particularly necessary among cosmopolitan elites who are forming communities of people from diverse backgrounds. In major American cities and within public facing institutions, children of natives and immigrants from all over the world come together to live and work side by side. No parochial value system can dominate, so individuals form a culture based on tolerance and mutual respect. The lodestar values are truth and openness, as these are traits that suit Elite Human Capital. Truth because, relative to traditional communities they come from, EHC is intelligent, understands its own enlightened self-interest, and can judge moral disputes more rationally. Openness because that is selected for when people leave their families and local communities to start new lives in the first place.

Another reason that EHC adopts a value system that stresses qualities like openness and caring is that they generate and maintain their cultures in environments where women are more likely to thrive. Traditional societies in which hierarchy is determined by leadership qualities like physical strength and the willingness to employ violence tend to be dominated by men. The same is true to a lesser extent in the business world. Men are more likely to work hard at unpleasant tasks in exchange for financial reward. This is true whether we are talking about putting in the grueling hours that it takes to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or working as a garbage collector. Yet when hierarchies are determined by adherence to certain values rather than physical strength or willingness to work with garbage in return for a decent paycheck, women can begin to equal men, if not in many cases surpass them. Feminization is both a cause and an effect of Elite Human Capital having a virtue-based system of values.

Of course, in any society or subculture there is hypocrisy, and populist critics of elites can always point to areas where they have fallen short of their ideals. Over the last decade, it has been common for American conservatives to accuse their opponents of constant “virtue signalling.” But what is unusual about Elite Human Capital subcultures and institutions is the extent to which virtue plays a role in acquiring status in the first place. No one ever accuses Trump supporters of virtue signalling, and for good reason.

A scientist seeks to impress others in his field by making an important discovery. A journalist gains influence and popularity by breaking a story, and taking on the rich and powerful. Because Elite Human Capital has a kind of class consciousness that separates itself from the masses, displays associated with status among lower classes are considered vulgar. An Ivy League professor trying to impress his students with a gold chain is as absurd to imagine as someone striking up a conversation about existentialism with the person sitting next to them at a monster truck rally.

Not all movements that are ideological are liberal and open to debate. Some examples demonstrating this point are communism, wokeness, and various kinds of religious fundamentalism. From an analytical perspective, these movements share much in common with standard EHC cultures. That said, we can treat them as distinct in the sense that they are somewhat unnatural, requiring a stifling dogmatism in order to maintain their hold on smart and idealistic people. This may be done through law or an internal culture that suppresses dissent. I am putting such movements to the side for the purposes of this chapter, however, where LHC will be used as shorthand for LHC/TV cultures. Keep in mind, however, that LHC/Reading cultures exist. This may sound like gibberish right now, but I promise that for the intelligent and careful reader it will all make sense after Chapters 4 and 5.

How Well-Functioning Institutions Form

Elite Human Capital has an interest in things that cannot be provided through regular market mechanisms, due to a lack of demand relative to the cost of providing the supply. This includes fundamental scientific discoveries, social sciences and humanities research, serious journalistic reporting on topics like foreign policy and government bureaucracy, and high-brow art. There are three main ways that EHC is able to obtain these things it wants.

The first is by using its influence to get government to directly subsidize them. Richer and more educated elites have a disproportionate impact on policy outcomes. Higher education is one of the clearest examples of this. Every American state has a public university system, and governments run higher education establishments in practically all countries. Even private universities are heavily subsidized by government grants and loans going to students and research money supporting the work of professors. In the last two decades, we have seen the emergence of an entirely new field that has been referred to as historical genomics. While scholars used to debate questions like whether the Indo-Aryan invasions of Europe and the Indian peninsula were accompanied by genetic replacement, we can now extract DNA from remains of people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and get conclusive answers to them. Much of what we have learned comes from one lab headed by Harvard professor David Reich, whose 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here, certainly dated by now, has chapters on Europe, India, Native Americans, East Asia, and Africa. My friend Razib Khan covers developments in the field in his excellent Unsupervised Learning Substack. As much as it might pain me to admit it, because I love to learn about ancient history, there isn’t enough market demand to cover the costs of providing such information. One of Reich’s 2014 papers in Nature lists over 100 authors. All of them need to be paid salaries in a world where as high-skilled professionals they could certainly find lucrative employment outside of academia, and it is government that directly or indirectly provides most of the necessary funding.

We see much the same in more practical scientific fields. Katalin Karikó shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for pioneering the mRNA technology that led to the original covid vaccine. Much has been written about how Karikó struggled in academia before her innovation paid off during the pandemic.[5] Yet although research institutions underestimated her potential, the University of Pennsylvania did initially provide her with a position where she was able to work and develop her interest in mRNA technology. Research institutions therefore create positive externalities in the economic sense, that is, facilitate innovations that would be undersupplied in a purely market system, along with providing knowledge on topics like ancient genomics that might not have a high market value but nonetheless can still be considered beneficial to humanity.

In addition to public subsidies, EHC also convinces wealthy people to provide their own money to certain kinds of institutions and organizations. The University of Chicago, for example, was originally financed by $600,000 from John Rockefeller, along with contributions from other wealthy businessmen. ProPublica seeks to uncover corruption committed by government officials and large corporations, being able to pay its over 150 investigative journalists through private donations. Much of the work of the non-profit space may be of questionable value; after all, on hot topic issues like abortion and gun control one will find activist organizations on opposite sides, and they can’t possibly all be correct. Nonetheless, to seek non-tangible forms of status over money – either by producing knowledge or advocating for a cause – is a trait of Elite Human Capital.

The final way EHC produces things there isn’t a sufficient market for is through organizational subsidies. The history of the mass media here is instructive. Matthew Yglesias has argued that objective journalism emerged as a product of the business model of mid-twentieth century American newspapers, which aimed to appeal to a broad audience to maximize revenue from both subscribers and advertisers.[6] These newspapers provided a bundle of practical, nonpartisan information — namely sports scores, weather forecasts, and stock updates — alongside serious news coverage, striving to avoid alienating any demographic. According to Yglesias, objectivity, while an ideal, was less about impartiality as a principle and more about aligning with a centrist public consensus to avoid controversy. However, the rise of a fragmented media landscape driven by digital platforms and niche audiences has shifted journalism's focus away from universal appeal. Now, people get their stock information, weather, and sports scores instantaneously on their phones. Media organizations therefore compete for narrower audiences, hence the decline of more objective reporting.

I believe Yglesias’ story is correct on the idea that the old business model of newspapers was built on information that we now all get practically for free. Yet I don’t think that this dynamic adequately explains the breadth and depth of what newspapers have traditionally covered. Consider, if the goal was to appeal to a broad audience, why haven’t newspapers been more sensationalist? Leading never ending public crusades against sex offenders or publishing celebrity gossip can help build a large audience without offending any substantial part of the population. Yet it was once common for medium-sized cities to have local newspapers with foreign bureaus in developing countries.[7] It is difficult to believe that The Baltimore Sun could not have done a lot better for itself financially by closing its South Africa bureau long before it finally did so in 2007 and instead hiring more columnists covering celebrities and local crime. In effect, serious newspapers have always taken a financial hit by being more truthful, less sensationalist, and broader in their interests than the market would dictate. This continues to be true today, even if economic realities dictate that newspapers in cities like Denver and Des Moines decline as The New York Times and The Washington Post become juggernauts of the industry.

Economic Incentives Are Not Enough

Businessmen who want to make money and politicians seeking power exist in every society. Yet what stops corporations and government from being corrupt tools of special interests? And what creates human knowledge that does not have a practical application benefiting only an individual or small group? Exposing government corruption is like inventing the internet. In each case, society is better off with the new information or technological development, but tangible rewards under a free-market system are unlikely to create sufficient incentives to provide as much of what we want.

Political scientists have an answer, which is “institutions.” They have done an adequate job of showing that institutions are sticky and subject to reaching different equilibriums. The best among them are more robust than people imagine, and those that are hopelessly incompetent or corrupt are difficult to fix. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in Why Nations Fail (2012), attempt to provide a historical account of how well-functioning institutions form, with an emphasis on the dynamic processes of different groups interacting as they seek their own interests. Theirs is fundamentally a story of incentives, and gives short shrift to cultural norms. Such work has been criticized from many angles, with focus on its anecdotal use of evidence and the claim being made that ancestry is doing much of the heavy lifting in the relationships that are found.[8]

Safe to say, while we know institutions are sticky, the question of what originally determines their nature remains mysterious. Yet any model that focuses on tangible material incentives alone, without thinking carefully about status, is going to be at best incomplete, given what we know about human nature and how people have always sought to distinguish themselves from others from the most primitive to the most advanced societies.

Whether their tastes are sophisticated or not, all communities contain hierarchies based on what its individuals collectively value. Low Human Capital – which, we must continually remind ourselves, is the default of man – typically seeks status through physical beauty, material possessions, large houses, money, jewelry, and demonstrations of power, wealth, and generosity. Elite Human Capital is far from indifferent to financial incentives, but is more likely to want others in their community to believe that they are smart, talented, and fair-minded. Because it is constantly engaging in higher-level discourse, it can also self-correct based on preexisting principles, and even change its values over time. In academia, the replication crisis refers to the growing recognition that many scientific studies, particularly in psychology and other social sciences, fail to produce consistent results when repeated. Researchers have found that replication efforts often yield weaker effects or entirely different outcomes, raising questions about the reliability of published findings. There has therefore been a reorientation towards practices like the pre-registration of studies, open data sharing, and increased emphasis on replication in the scientific community.

Critics of academia take the existence of the replication crisis as evidence that what universities are doing is fake. This is the wrong lesson to draw. A community engaging in honest self-reflection is rare. Businesses, religious organizations, or governments tend not to do so, except perhaps when forced to by an external crisis. Concerns that findings were not replicating came from within academia. There were situations where, among other forms of corruption, scholars looked the other way in order not to challenge established names in the field, but what is notable is the fact that the natural reticence to challenge power was in some cases overcome.

I graduated with a PhD in political science in 2018, and have sometimes wondered why there wasn’t more cheating in my academic program. For example, even though I taught hundreds of students and graded their papers, none ever came and offered me a bribe to give them a passing grade without doing the work. I never heard of a professor or fellow graduate student put in such a position. Why not? Cheating seems like it would be better for all involved. The student doesn’t have to do the work, and there is less for me to grade. Just about any price should have been sufficient to make a deal, as I would have benefited myself from the arrangement. Yet students put in a basic effort, and I graded them according to merit.

I don’t believe that it was rules or regulations that got in the way. One might say that a student would not offer me a bribe because there was a chance I might turn him in. I wouldn’t request one for the same reason. But people naturally overcome coordination problems like this in different contexts all the time.[9] One could imagine a student saying something that is an invitation to solicit a bribe, while maintaining plausible deniability if I wanted to turn them in. I could solicit a payment for a better grade in the same way. “Graduate students make so little. It would be nice to have a little more money to spend and not have to grade so many papers.” Neither party gets too far ahead of the other, and by the time the trade becomes explicit both sides are complicit in the fraud so neither will tell on the other.

Coordination for corrupt purposes is easy, and the fact that in certain times and places such things rarely happen should not be taken for granted. In 2014, Russia’s Education and Science Minister admitted that so many prominent individuals had been revealed to have plagiarized their college and doctoral dissertations that it was hurting the reputation of the nation.[10] The year before, the Russian State Library had admitted that about 10% of doctoral dissertations in history were plagiarized, likely a low-ball estimate. Among the offenders is Vladimir Putin himself. Today, when so much of the world is digitized and there exists plagiarism detection software, getting away with academic fraud of this kind has become much more difficult. But it’s an interesting question why everywhere wasn’t more like Russia in previous decades, when the probability of getting caught was so low. For example, the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized his dissertation from another work was not discovered until over three decades after it was filed. If someone as prominent as the civil rights icon of his time could get away with it for that long, surely lesser-known figures have faced even longer odds of getting caught. The fact that there are so many American elites who have filed PhDs and so few plagiarism scandals, despite the existence of software developed to detect such fraud, indicates that things in the United States aren’t nearly as bad as Russia.

Western academia is relatively uncorrupt because it is governed by the norms of Elite Human Capital. Individuals who are primarily motivated by a desire for money and convenience go into the private sector. The reason individuals enter academia is that they are more driven by other factors, which, depending on the individual, might include virtue-based status in a community of like-minded individuals or the advance of truth. In some situations, the virtues of EHC might not matter. Undergrads tend to forget most of what they learn and are unlikely to ever use much of what they do retain anyway, so everyone might have been better off if all students paid me, turned in chicken scratch, and then received high marks. But it is difficult to treat academia as completely fake in one scenario and real in another. Having undergrads actually do their homework might be necessary to maintain the value system that allows us to have confidence that there isn’t widespread fraud in all areas of academic science. Even more broadly, if elites in our society are cheating as undergrads, it might make less sense to trust the fairness of the courts, which is much more essential. The fact that societies with well-functioning institutions in one area of life tend to have others that work well indicates that the existence or absence of a general Elite Human Capital culture matters.

What can be said about academics being relatively uncorrupt applies to governance too. In many third world countries, more than half of individuals report paying a bribe to access government services in the last year, compared to nobody or a percentage in the low single digits in the most advanced democracies.[11] The lack of corruption in richer states can be tied to them having more Elite Human Capital individuals and institutions. Lower IQs in the developing world means that there are fewer interlocking communities of smarter individuals and the ones that do exist may not be numerous enough to have the critical mass necessary to form subcultures with norms independent of those of the rest of society.

Less wealth also means that individuals are less likely to have the luxury of foregoing attempts to improve their economic situation for the sake of more meaningful work. It might be tempting to become a journalist in a country where you can earn $60,000 a year doing so, even if the same person could earn twice as much with a different job. But if one is in a country where living standards aren’t high enough to support many individuals becoming journalists even at that relatively low salary, then more people choose their professions according to what provides the best practical means to make a decent living. In a nation where residents have less disposable income, there might not be the money to contribute to organizations like ProPublica. A free press and non-profits can be checks on corruption, yet at lower levels of societal development the institutions that draw Elite Human Capital and reflect its values are less common and weaker.

As mentioned above, journalism is like academia in that it provides more truthful and objective content than market incentives would dictate it should. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, we saw the rise of clickbait journalism, as editors and website owners could start to get real time feedback on what kinds of stories drew the most eyeballs.[12] There’s a reason that such content doesn’t swallow the internet, however, and it is in part because there is a large group of people with serious intellectual interests who would like to do in-depth reporting on topics like the replication crisis, breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, and conflicts in distant lands that are not as interesting to an American audience as those involving Israel and its neighbors. They believe it is their duty to speak in measured tones and try to present all sides of the issues that they are covering. This is for the sake of maintaining their own sense of self-respect, but also the interrelated concern of how they want to be seen by others.

Outlets like the New York Times provide more objective coverage of important issues than the market demands. Yet one thing that increases the organic demand for such content is educated people’s desire to be the kind of person who reads the New York Times. Many readers may not ever bother diving into their coverage of the civil war in Burma or UN activities in Haiti. Nonetheless, the idea of stories like this appeals to them because they relish the thought of subscribing to a serious newspaper that informs the world about serious topics.

As a writer for an Elite Human Capital audience, I face reputational damage for saying things that are untrue, or making leaps in logic that strike rational people as absurd. Just as importantly, I feel bad when I make an error, even if no one notices it, as I was born with or have internalized the idea that truth is important. Compare this to an influencer who provides clickbait content for an audience that enjoys politics like it does a football game. All that matters is defending one’s own tribe while scoring points on the other side. Just as how some people gorge on junk food while others have more refined tastes, and some like monster truck rallies while others read classic literature, the way individuals interact with politics and the world of ideas varies according to class and individual differences.

Authoritarian Survival as a War on Elite Human Capital

Up to this point, I have been implying that Elite Human Capital subcultures and institutions are things that almost inevitably pop up once societies reach a certain level of socioeconomic development. This is not entirely the case. There is a natural tendency for them to develop, but dictatorships have increasingly realized that educated urban elites are the greatest potential threat to their power and acted accordingly.

Political scientists talk about the process of “authoritarian learning.”[13] While the percentage of countries in the world that are democracies skyrocketed over the course of the twentieth century, that process has stalled over the last two decades. As of 2023, 51% of countries were classified as democracies by the Regimes of the World (RoW) database, slightly down from 53% twenty years earlier.[14] There is a great deal of evidence that this is because dictatorships have learned the lessons of previous governments that failed.[15]

Samuel Huntington famously discussed the three waves of democratization since the first half of the nineteenth century.[16] In the second wave, between the early 1940s and the early 1960s, the main causes were decolonization and foreign imposition. The third wave occurred between the early 1970s and the 1990s. Here, democratization was primarily an internal process. Civil society in the form of institutions like universities and non-governmental political organizations played a major role in resisting authoritarian leaders and eventually forcing transitions to democracy.

Budding or established authoritarian governments have therefore figured out that going after EHC institutions and stopping them from forming or becoming powerful in the first place is the way to maintain power. If a dictator waits for a moment when such institutions pose a direct threat, it might be too late. One common way they do this is by going after NGOs, on the grounds that they are foreign funded. Since Vladimir Putin's ascent to power in 2000, Russia has systematically tightened control over these groups, particularly those receiving foreign funding or engaging in activities perceived as political. This clampdown has intensified over the years through a series of legislative measures and enforcement actions aimed at curbing dissent and limiting the influence of civil society. In 2012, a new law mandated that NGOs receiving foreign funding and engaging in loosely defined "political activities" register as foreign agents. A few years later, the government gave itself the power to ban NGOs deemed a threat to national security or the constitutional order. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought even more restrictions. All of this has been part of a rational survival strategy, as the Putin regime could observe how in Georgia and Ukraine, sitting governments had difficulty manipulating elections under conditions where civil society had been left alone.[17]

A free press is another common target of authoritarian regimes. Over the past two decades, Venezuela has experienced a significant decline in press freedom under the administrations of Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and Nicolás Maduro (2013–present). Chávez's government implemented laws such as the Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, which imposed restrictions on content perceived as inciting hatred or violence, leading to the closure of independent media outlets. Under Maduro, the crackdown only got worse, with the government enacting the 2017 Law against Hate, further restricting speech and leading to the shutdown of numerous media outlets. Between 2003 and 2022, at least 285 radio broadcasters were closed, more than 60 newspapers went out of circulation, and ten foreign television broadcasters were forced out.[18]

Universities are perhaps the most natural gathering point for EHC. In 2011, Egyptians overthrew the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak. University students were at the forefront of massive protests, particularly in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the revolution. They mobilized through the use of campuses as organizing hubs and leveraging their networks to draw large crowds. After coming to power, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in June 2014 issued a decree that granted him the authority to appoint presidents and deans of public universities. As a consequence, universities were soon experiencing a level of repression that academics and journalists reported went beyond anything seen in Mubarak’s time.[19] In the 2014-2015 academic year alone, hundreds of students were arrested or expelled for political activities, and a professor was even sentenced to death for writing articles critical of the government. Having seen what happened to Mubarak, the new regime was not taking any chances and made sure to be even more repressive, particularly towards EHC institutions.

Zack Beauchamp argues that the lessons of authoritarian learning have reached beyond authoritarian regimes, with many politicians in established democracies coming to understand how they can consolidate their own power through anti-democratic means.[20] I think Beauchamp unjustifiably ignores the ways in which left-wing policies such as public sector unions subvert democratic norms and institutions. But there is little question in my mind that many right-wing leaders he criticizes would entrench themselves permanently in power if they could. There’s also an interesting question for democratic theory that one may ask. If Elite Human Capital – that is, the artists, bureaucrats, activists, journalists, and intellectuals that tend to assume power when democratic governments don’t take a heavy handed approach to controlling society – naturally leans left, how can rightists accomplish their policy goals, even those supported by the majority of the public, while sticking to democratic norms, as people like Beauchamp understand them? One answer is that they should give up on such goals or at least take a more long-term approach to achieving them. Yet one cannot be surprised if conservatives take issue with the way their political opponents define the term democracy. The point here is that successful democratization in authoritarian regimes and the left-wing lean of elites in democracies are both products of the same underlying forces.

Is EHC Necessary for Progress?

Authoritarian regimes, like most governments everywhere, would like to see their countries experience economic and technological growth. The question is whether a society can have these things to any large degree at the same time it suppresses Elite Human Capital institutions.

China is probably the most interesting case of a nation trying to do so. In many ways, it is a technological powerhouse, among the top countries in the world in terms of innovation as measured by criteria like number of patents and scientific publications. It has also seen remarkable economic growth since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s. At the same time, perhaps no country has done a better job of learning from the fall of other governments. Xi Jinping has encouraged members of the Chinese Communist Party to think carefully about the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed so as not to repeat the same mistakes.[21]

Yet there are signs that pathologies inherent to a government having as its primary goal the maintenance of its own long-term power are hurting its other aims. In the Xi era, China has been making information less freely available, lest it embarrass the state. This covers everything from economic data to the contents of academic journals to the registration of corporate documents.[22] The nation’s tech industry has been sent reeling in the last several years as government clamps down on entrepreneurs who appear to be too powerful or create products that have the potential to undermine stability. The Chinese government would ideally like to have both control and the most rapid economic progress possible, but when forced to choose it is going to select the former.

Thus, even if one does not believe democracy is a good in and of itself, undermining it tends to hinder other goals most people share. Moreover, authoritarian regimes often end up with the problem that has been called “kakistocracy,” or rule by the worst. Individuals who will prioritize staying in the good graces of a leader over serving the public or directing their energies towards pro-social outcomes as measured by market success make terrible elites, for obvious reasons.

The killing of the Russian dissident Alexey Navalny demonstrates the darkest side of how Low Human Capital functions. In August 2020, he survived a poisoning attempt with a nerve agent, which was widely attributed to Russian authorities. After returning to his home country in January 2021, Navalny was arrested and subsequently sentenced to over 19 years in prison on politically trumped-up charges. He died in February 2024 while incarcerated in a remote Arctic penal colony, under circumstances that have raised significant concerns and calls for a thorough investigation.

Navalny was a hero according to any reasonable value system. He lived and died for his ideals. After being poisoned and nearly killed, he did not seek asylum in a Western country but went back to Russia in order to face what everyone knew was a corrupt criminal justice system. He was eventually put in a prison cell and predictably ended up dead. Throughout the entire process, Navalny maintained his dignity, joking and laughing during the court proceedings he was subjected to. The fact that the Russian government, including the national legislature, prosecutors, the judiciary, and prison administrators, all participated in the elaborate farce that brought him to his death is a sign of cultural and moral rot. In a community with strong moral norms, Putin and those around him would have been embarrassed to have participated in such a charade all for the purpose of locking up and eventually perhaps killing a critic of the government, and the fact that there was little outrage expressed within Russian society shows the degree to which that nation is still to develop Elite Human Capital norms and institutions.

Russian elites having a culture of amorality explains much of the odd behavior surrounding the invasion of Ukraine. The US announced months in advance what the Russians were planning, yet soldiers went to their deaths in the early days of the conflict not knowing what their mission was. In January 2022, the Pentagon warned of a coming “false flag” operation that would justify the start of the war. This did not embarrass the Putin regime, and it proceeded to behave close to the ways in which officials in Washington predicted, stirring up provocations in Donetsk and Luhansk and then launching a major invasion that it refused to call a war but laughably referred to as a “Special Military Operation.” This pattern of deception regarding Russian activities in Ukraine went back to 2014, when “little green men” who were obviously sent by Moscow took control of Crimea as Putin and his officials presented the events that were unfolding as part of a spontaneous local uprising.

What is notable here is not that Russian officials lie in order to justify preferred policies abroad. There is no shortage of democratic leaders who do the same thing. What is different here is the initial plausibility of the deceptions involved. The Bush administration might have twisted the evidence to argue that there was a WMD threat from Iraq. What it did not do was ship soldiers to the Middle East thinking that they were going to a base in Qatar and then surprise them en route by informing them that they were going to try and take Baghdad. It did not stage a false flag attack justifying the invasion. American leaders can’t get away with such things due to checks and balances and a free press, and a general societal expectation that leaders behave with a certain level of honesty. Putin’s lies are distinguished by their brazen nature, and how little there is in the way of domestic political consequences when they are exposed.

This may be attributed to authoritarian learning. Putin did not simply wait until NGOs or a free press threatened his hold on power. Rather, he neutered these institutions, and stopped EHC cultures from forming in the first place. Ideally, he would have been able to do this and not harm his war-making capabilities. Yet the secrecy surrounding the Ukraine invasion ensured that there was no public debate to be had regarding whether the Russians were sending enough troops to complete its mission, or whether it could do so at an acceptable price. One reason some experts in warfare predicted that there would not be a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was that conventional military doctrine suggested that Russia did not have enough troops mobilized on the border, yet it does not appear that Putin took such concerns seriously enough, if they were brought to his attention at all.

None of this is to say that there are not intelligent, brave, and idealistic Russians. They simply do not have plausible pathways to organize and form communities in which they find strength in uniting behind a common purpose as they collectively influence the rest of society. Navalny got his start through making popular YouTube videos exposing official corruption back when Russia was free enough for a regular citizen hostile to entrenched power to develop an organic following. Top officials in the Putin regime understand that independent and truth-seeking institutions make it difficult to do things like rig elections and launch wars under false pretenses. Members of what would make up a natural Elite Human Capital class are therefore isolated from one another and rendered powerless.

We can compare modern Russia to the events surrounding the Dreyfus Affair around the turn of the twentieth century, when French artists, politicians, and intellectuals stood up against government officials and a military bureaucracy that sought to continue imprisoning an army officer for treason despite it gradually becoming clear that he was likely innocent. J'accuse…!, Émile Zola’s famous January 1898 open letter, became a rallying cry for liberal elites who wished to demonstrate their commitments to justice and equality. Three hundred thousand copies of the newspaper publishing the letter were sold, and it provoked other scholars to take a public stand. Of course, conservatives, Catholics, nationalists, and those who supported the armed forces stood against Dreyfus, and they were no less engaging in what today would be called virtue signalling. The Polish-Russian aristocrat Princess Catherine Radziwiłł spoke for the Elite Human Capital of the time when she wrote that “French papers ask why foreign countries take such an interest in the Affair, as if a question of justice did not interest the whole world.”[23]

One may draw a direct comparison to contemporary issues like trans rights and Black Lives Matter. Jews in France at the end of the nineteenth century were perceived as a minority that was discriminated against, just like how individuals who are black or LGBT are seen in America today. Elite Human Capital is not always correct, but the underlying pattern is the same. Cultural elites express support for the downtrodden in order to gain status relative to other elites, and as members of a class superior to the prejudiced and narrow-minded masses.

The durability of Russian and Chinese autocracy and these regimes hindering the formation of Elite Human Capital institutions are intimately related. Going to war with EHC has harmed these states with regards to goals beyond the maintenance of their current systems. We may ask whether there are countries that show that dictatorship with less of an EHC class can form stable, prosperous societies. A few polities indicate that such a thing is possible, namely Singapore, the UAE, and Qatar. Yet these are all small, densely populated nations, and it is an open question whether their systems are scalable, particularly those of the Gulf Arab monarchies that rely on a unique and deeply rooted underlying culture that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

EHC as Class Conflict

Elites looking down on the masses is almost always considered a bad thing. Practically every major theory that seeks to explain the rise of populism aims to flatter the masses at the expense of elites, even though “elites” might be defined differently depending on one’s ideological predisposition. To conservatives, they are cultural tastemakers, including professors and journalists. The left tries to redirect anger towards economic elites, arguing that it is the wealthy who deserve to be the targets of popular anger. Conservatives are uncomfortable explicitly defending the rich, while liberals usually won’t exult culture elites as better than the masses, though each side might be less guarded about its prejudices when talking within the tribe. Regardless, the common understanding here is that elites can never be compared favorably to nonelites. And even if they are in some sense superior, certainly nothing good can come of them acknowledging and being proud of the fact.

When we discuss modern politics as based in class antagonism then, the undercurrent is nearly always that it is elites who are wrong. They need to humble themselves, listen to the people, and reflect on why they have squandered the trust of the public. But having a premise that we can know who is correct in a disagreement based on the identities of the parties involved in a dispute reflects a pernicious way of viewing the world, no less than if we determined who was at fault in an interethnic conflict in the same way.

If elites are distinguished from the masses by things like a higher intellect, concern for truth, and a broad circle of empathy, then we are justified in saying that they are in some ways superior. And there may in fact be benefits to acknowledging such facts. Social psychologists have long known that when people are divided into different groups, individuals will start to live up to the stereotypes of their ingroup while distinguishing themselves from outgroups. It is therefore possible that an elite class that sees itself as in some ways better than most others begins to live up to its higher ideals.

Recall that Low Human Capital value systems are the norm. This is why monarchies and dictatorships tend to be highly corrupt. Despite the importance of heredity for determining cognitive and personality traits, aristocracies or classes made up of individuals who were born into elite status tend to be filled with those who are more average than people who rise to the top in an open social and political system. A ruling class composed of individuals who are more average will likely have a more typical value system.

In the modern world, class conflict looks to be all but embedded in the DNA of advanced democracies. This must be because, to a large extent, elites are different from the masses that they rule over. It’s not that they were simply born into better positions. That would be more tolerable, as we can see in the popularity of the British Royal Family. Democratic leaders, in contrast, have an entirely different value system, language, and way of interacting with the world. They were born different, and diverge from the masses even more when they find one another. This engenders bitterness. Perhaps this is in part due to a nagging sense of inferiority. But there’s also the view that of course elites can’t be all that they claim, that under the façade they are just as corrupt as the rest of us. Donald Trump made this subtext of populism explicit, and this has helped his followers overlook his unusually high degree of flagrant corruption.

There is probably good reason to believe that Elite Human Capital would be less moral if it did not have the rubes to look down upon. American governance is remarkably non-corrupt. The federal government spends $2.5 billion to investigate “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and finds surprisingly little of each.[24] In the critiques of the sharpest observers of American governance, there is the implicit message that we if anything go too far in trying to root out corruption. This has led to procurement rules and ethics standards that are so stringent that they make it difficult for leaders to be innovative or fulfill their basic missions.[25] EHC is also remarkably tolerant. Again, this is something that can go too far, as we can see in the excesses of identity politics and wokeness.

Regardless, we should keep in mind how rare truth-seeking institutions are in the grand scope of history. All societies have had elites, but few until the Industrial Revolution had much in the way of Elite Human Capital. The societies that do have such individuals and sub-cultures have been the most successful in the history of humanity. One cannot draw from this fact alone the conclusion that Elite Human Capital is necessary for social stability, moral progress and economic growth. But given that there is a plausible connection to be made between the most admirable traits of our most prestigious institutions and how well democratic capitalism has functioned, we should maintain some skepticism towards attempts to tear them down or even significantly reduce their influence.

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[1] Hatton, Tim. 2014. “Short poppies: The height of World War I servicemen.” Available at https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/short-poppies-height-world-war-i-servicemen.

[2] See Ryan, Camille L. and Kurt Bauman. 2015.” Educational attainment in the United States: 2015.” US Census Bureau. Available at https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf.

[3] Gordon, Robert. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. ch. 8.

[4] Mijs, Jonathan J.B., and Elizabeth L. Roe. 2021. “Is America coming apart? Socioeconomic segregation in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and social networks, 1970–2020.” Sociology Compass 15(6); Fry, Richard, and Paul Taylor. 2012. “The rise of residential segregation by income.” Pew Research Center. Available at https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2012/08/01/the-rise-of-residential-segregation-by-income/

[5] Teslo, Ruxandra. 2024. “The Weird nerd comes with trade-offs.” Available at https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-weird-nerd-comes-with-trade-offs.

[6] Yglesias, Matthew. 2023. “‘Objective journalism was a business model.” Slow Boring. Available at https://www.slowboring.com/p/objective-journalism-was-a-business.

[7] See Gentile, Bill. 2019. “With foreign bureaus slashed, freelancers are filling the void.” Available at https://www.american.edu/soc/news/with-foreign-bureaus-slashed-freelancers-are-filling-the-void-at-their-own-risk.cfm.

[8] Spolaore, Enrico, and Romain Wacziarg. 2013. “How deep are the roots of economic development?” Journal of economic literature 51(2): 325-369; Easterly, William. 2012. “The Roots of Hardship.” Wall Street Journal. Available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304724404577293714016708378.

[9] See Pinker, Steven. 2012. The Stuff of Thought. Penguin: ch. 8.

[10] Strauss, Valerie. 2014. “Russia’s plagiarism problem: Even Putin has done it!” Washington Post. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/18/russias-plagiarism-problem-even-putin-has-done-it/.

[11] See page on corruption at Our World in Data, available at https://ourworldindata.org/corruption.

[12] Smith, Ben. 2023. Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Penguin Press.

[13] Hall, Stephen GF, and Thomas Ambrosio. 2017. “Authoritarian learning: A conceptual overview.” East European Politics 33(2): 143-161.

[14] “Democracy.” Our World in Data. Available at https://ourworldindata.org/democracy.

[15] Korosteleva, Elena. 2014. “Questioning democracy promotion: Belarus' response to the ‘colour revolutions’.” In Coloured Revolutions and Authoritarian Reactions. Routledge: 37-59

[16] Huntington, Samuel P. 2009. “How countries democratize.” Political Science Quarterly 124(1): 31-69; Huntington, Samuel P. 2009. Political order in changing societies. Yale University Press.

[17] Hall and Ambrosio, 2017: p. 149.

[18] Kahn , Gretel. 2023. “Forced out from print and airwaves, news media in Venezuela shift to digital to survive.” Reuters Institute. Available at

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/forced-out-print-and-airwaves-news-media-venezuela-shift-digital-survive.

[19] Lane, Emily Crane. 2015. “Egypt’s besieged universities.” Foreign Policy. Available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/31/egypts-besieged-universities-sisi-academic-freedom/.

[20] Beauchamp, Zack. 2024. The reactionary spirit: How America’s most insidious political tradition swept the world. PublicAffairs.

[21] Dimitrov, Martin et al. 2023. “Chinese Assessments of the Soviet Union’s Collapse.” CSIS. Available at https://interpret.csis.org/chinese-assessments-of-the-soviet-unions-collapse/.

[22] See Wei, Lingling, Yoko Kubota, and Dan Strumpf. 2023. “China locks information on the country in a black box.” Wall Street Journal. Available at https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-locks-information-on-the-country-inside-a-black-box-9c039928.

[23] See Tuchman, Barbara W. 1966. The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. Macmillan, ch. 4.

[24] Buck, Stewart. 2024. “Government efficiency: What can it possibly mean?” Available at https://goodscience.substack.com/p/governmental-efficiency-what-can.

[25] For an interesting conversation along these lines, see “Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War,” in October 2024 on the Conversations with Tyler podcast, available at https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/christopher-kirchhoff/.