Elite human capital has bad ideas

A criticism of EHC theory

TL;DR: Bloggers Anatoly Karlin in Richard Hanania have two quite different versions of Elite Human Capital, both very critical about current right-wing thinking. Anatoly Karlin’s EHC enthusiasm is characteristically Eastern European cargo cult thinking by a disappointed former right-winger. Richard Hanania trivially observes that smart people run things better than dumb people, but mistakes their natural style of operating (what others called a managerial state or The Cathedral) for the source of their competence. They both ignore the fact that smart people can also be – and by woke/globalist ideas, have been – fooled. It too bad that many policy ideas with good empirical support – such as anti-feminism or skepticism towards formal education – are mainly endorsed by dumb people and crass populist politicians.

Elite Human Capital (EHC) theory is essentially the idea that left-liberal, globalist people and institutions are right after all. Although its name sounds like something which may have been around for decades, it was coined by Anatoly Karlin, an interesting Russian cosmopolitan, and picked up by relatively well-known American blogger Richard Hanania. Both Karlin and Hanania used to be very right-wing so endorsing this idea is a drastic change in their views. EHC is big enough now to deserve a response (see another recent one here), especially because although both Karlin and Hanania – both very smart people - ostensibly came to change their views based on new data and careful deliberation, they are still wrong.

EHC doesn’t have a formal definition and Karlin and Hanania seem to have a slightly different idea what that is so I chose to write about the two versions separately.

Karlin’s EHC: anger and heuristics above data

Karlin’s endorsement of EHC stems from his disappointment with right-wing political circles and Russia’s performance in the early phases of the Ukrainian invasion:

“the world of the triumphant Right is the world of the local baron and his cronies, who keeps things ticking in his corner of the backwoods through intimidation and murky backroom deals”

and

“it is a “based” hyper-masculine world where loyalty is the paramount virtue, and where failure and incompetence is overlooked at best, actively promoted at worst. Treason is the only cardinal sin”

and an angry hope that somehow the polar opposite of this – the left-liberal globalist order of gay rights, climate change protests and Black Lives Matter – is better and there’s only ”perhaps a 10% penalty to effectiveness”.

You have to be from here to know this but this is a quintessentially Eastern European idea. I met lots of people here in Hungary who were not enthusiastic liberals at all but said things along the lines of “those in the West have more money and better roads, so if they say gays need to marry and we need to take more immigrants they are obviously right”. It's a type of cargo cult thinking.

Karlin seems to mainly want to hurt the right out of disappointment and leftist ideas are just a cudgel to beat them with:

(His piece is also called “Why Jail is Programmed for All Rightoids”, a turn of phrase he uses a lot).

I’m ambiguous about personal ideologies motivated by hurt – sometimes an objectively good idea also needs to be personal for you to care enough about it – but Karlin’s accusation of “Rightoids” as uniquely corrupt, nepotistic and incompetent is lazy and easily falsifiable. There are plenty of instances of “Rightoid” vices in the globalist EHC world, too. Let’s go no farther than the European Union, one of the most EHC institutions in the world. (While I was drafting this, Vice President Vance made the same point in his speech at the Munich peace conference.) The EU, infiltrated by woke pressure groups, currently not only steals Hungary’s funding for nebulous violations of the “rule of law”, but even keeps Hungarian universities out of exchange programs and EU grants as a way to intimidate its government into compliance or the population to vote against it. Because this is happening in the framework of a new, opaque “rule of law process”, a mechanism the EU invented during COVID (the vote on it was coupled to the vote on the recovery fund to force states to accept it), they don’t have an open list of demands, the goalposts are always moving and only a murky backroom deal can end it, if ever. On the other hand, loyalty is the paramount virtue, and where failure and incompetence is overlooked at best, actively promoted at worst: Hungary’s widely popular government which delivered way above EU average economic growth for over a decade got the “rule of law process” for not being ideologically loyal, but there was no penalty to EU leaders for their disastrous policies on immigration, energy and foreign policy as long as they toed the line. It was also not against the “rule of law” to send a literal antifa terrorist to the EU parliament who was sprung from prison by being elected (MPs have immunity): treason is the only cardinal sin, and beating people with a hammer who look like rightoids is EHC. Karlin talks about how Gregory Cochran, a right wing blogger, squandered the grant he got from Ron Unz, but fails to mention the SPLC, a left-wing grift operation which runs an attack site on dissident scientists and solicited donations from well-meaning Americans to “stop the Nazis”, BLM, which was immensely profitable to its leaders, or the myriad leftist NGOs, foundations and think tanks financed by George Soros or USAID which provide sinecures for many grifting “journalists” and eternal “students”. Every political system has both enforcement of loyalty and corruption, it is disingenuous to identify these as uniquely right-wing. In fact, in a way the entire past decade was a story of how the Western EHC system of government is only practically, not morally superior than others (and even that is slipping away). When they need it, the US, the EU or the UK will just as readily arrest people for online comments or criticizing politicians, lock them in their apartments for years, cancel elections or not recognize democratic elections that people they don’t like win, fire academics for noticing facts, and many other things.

A problem more specific than my angry rant above is that Karlin’s EHC theory commits a fundamental epistemic error: it puts heuristics above data. Normally, if smart and motivated people with a strong moral code care about something you can assume it is a good idea. But this is just a heuristic, a rule of thumb, until you know more about those ideas. There is no guarantee that smart and moral people are always right, and we need to look at real-world data to check if EHC policies work. As it turns out, many EHC ideas are already known to be disastrous:

- feminism (which drives down birth rates and makes women unhappy),

- the support for mass immigration (which adds people to Western countries who are a net drain on the state through lower education/income, higher use of social transfers and increased criminality),

- support for the Ukrainian war (which destroys both Ukraine and the EU economy to avert a Russian threat which never really existed anyway),

- racial egalitarianism (which only works if handouts are given on a racial basis because there is a likely biological discrepancy in the abilities and motivations of ancestry groups)

- drastic measures to stop climate change (which never include things like nuclear energy which actually work, have poor cost-benefit ratio, won’t work unless implemented globally which is not happening, and even then only stops an event which is predicted to be the second-to-least likely world-ending scenario, with most predicting humanity will be fine)

- transgender ideology (which causes iatrogenic harm to a significant percentage of impressionable teenagers)

For the record, I’m ambiguous about a core EHC issue, gay rights. I think a non-trivial percentage of at least men is genuinely homosexual, not much can be done to increase or decrease it, and this doesn’t directly do more harm to society than any other fetish. I might be convinced to even support gay marriage if it was less politicized and remained something few people even hear about.

Karlin likes to beat “rightoids” over the head with how EHC supports these ideas so they must be correct. But this is thinking backwards. The fact that Western elites support ideas known to be wrong doesn’t mean that these ideas are somehow less wrong now: it means that there is an intellectual crisis in the West because even the elites operate on religious fervor, not rational thought.

Hanania’s EHC: re-branding the managerial elite

Although he sometimes resorts to Karlineque trolling, Hanania’s interpretation of EHC is much more serious. Hanania’s minimum EHC theory is so intuitive and dispassionate that it is hard to disagree with it:

“Elites are people who:

1. Participate in and have contact with long-standing, established institutions that have traditionally had cultural, political, and social power, even when the power of those institutions is waning.

2. Have status that is connected to their affiliations with such institutions or those involved with them, rather than a direct relationship with a mass audience, in terms of voters or consumers.

3. Have norms and professional incentives centered around raising one’s status via impressing other members of the elite, rather than a mass audience.

Once we have a definition of elites, we can define populism, which is a derivative concept. A good working definition of populism is that it is a worldview that:

1. Blames elites for societal problems and stands in opposition to them.

2. Champions values and aesthetics that have more currency among the general public than elites, namely xenophobia, traditional cultural values and forms of art, an openness towards mysticism and the supernatural, and a leveling informality in social relations.

3. Assigns status to individuals based on a direct connection to a mass audience or voters, rather than success within established institutions.”

However, this description of EHC is a little tautological: Hanania simply describes the way people with above-average intelligence and Western middle class manners tend to run things as EHC. Obviously, both smart/elite people and dumb/non-elite people both prefer society to be run in a way that they can be or at least like its leaders. If you have the manners and intelligence to become a member of high society, you prefer high society to run the world in its own way. If you don’t, you prefer the loud and rowdy pro wrestling style Donald Trump embodies, because this is how your kind exercises power.

It is an open question which style is better and under which circumstances. Preferring the EHC style Hanania basically reads N. S. Lyons’ piece “The China Convergence” and likes it. In that piece, and similar works like Auron McIntyre’s recent book “The Total State” the core argument is that even if a modern country has no king or emperor with total power, it is also not really democratic (as in run by its citizens who compete in a marketplace of ideas and an open political arena). This is because even in such a country eventually a managerial elite develops which seeks to expand its own power by uniformizing society, replacing the organic structures of society (families, churches, and ultimately even states) by its own ideology and institutions, and then harnessing the work of the resulting human paste for its goals. It does this not by force, but by saturating the public discourse by propaganda, by lobbying state power via NGOs, and ultimately overtaking organizations by sending loyalists to work there. Basically, because voters rely on mass media for information, and because government institutions can interpret law flexibly, you can do state capture by buying media space and training loyalists for the government. This managerial elite, which Curtis Yarvin called the Cathedral, does not have formal leadership. Its cohesion comes from ideological conformity: Cathedral officials are selected to be true believers, so they predictably act according to their ideology and training when a decision is to be made. This is a lot like how a tight religious community operates.

Hanania practically equates EHC with people who would make ideal members of the managerial elite:

“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.”

That is, EHC are people who are not only smart, but in a way religious: they have ideas about improving the world and they are willing to compromise on their comfort to live up to them and to proselytize.

Of course managerial elites/EHC can have various ideologies and goals, some better than others. Hanania likes EHC because he likes the idea of society being led by smart and motivated people, as long as they have a good mission: maximizing economic growth, American world dominance, and peace (or at least the fewest possible causalities). Conversely, his worry is that the EHC or managerial elite adopts policies which don’t work, which includes both wokeness and right-wing idiocy like anti-vaxxerism.

Hanania’s EHC idea makes a lot more sense than Karlin’s and it is worth engaging with. There are two reasons I don’t like it: one ideological and weaker, another practical and stronger.

The ideological argument is that Hanania’s EHC, like all managerial elites according to Lyons, is utopian and meliorist, which you might not like. It is right wing progressive, as in right wing (not egalitarian) but still progressive (sees the world as fallen and wants to improve it). Hanania has little respect for traditions and the status quo: forcing people to take vaccines as long as this reduces infection rates, expelling millions of Palestinians as long as this minimizes deaths, or letting in millions of Indians as long as they make the GDP grow is a no-brainer because abstract individual rights and nation states are just obstacles in the way to progress. Hanania is enthusiastic about the world becoming a uniform economic zone dominated by corporations (“the nomos of the airport”) where everything, the people absolutely included, is designed to be maximally efficient and minimally disruptive. I’m making this sound bad, but I see the argument that of all the worlds we have tried so far this Wall-E universe has the lowest amount of suffering. Maybe we have access to too much information not to be tired of all the ideological bullshit that drove history and the best thing is to just get the biggest McMansion and the most streamlined product delivery experiences possible. Brave New World is the conclusion of utilitarianism.

The practical argument is that Hanania ignores the possibility that when it comes to human affairs, exposure to EHC-style expertise may have a net negative effect on your ability to make good decisions. I get the appeal of Hanania’s idea that you need to base policy on numbers and logic, not heuristics and feelings. In practice, however, this is not how EHC operates at all. When I wrote about Karlin’s EHC, I listed some bad ideas that EHC holds, but I’m actually struggling to think of any good ones it has. Respectable opinions about human affairs are virtually all wrong, even if you zoom out from woke insanity: education reforms don’t work, democracy doesn’t help countries grow, declining fertility is basically because we did away with the gender wage gap, prisoners cannot be rehabilitated, etc. Elite schools on human affairs such as psychology, sociology, economics or foreign affairs train what Nassim Taleb called “empty suits”, not real experts. Just using her natural instincts about human affairs a typical Eastern European commieblock babushka – definitely not EHC – may have a better idea about what to do with mental illness [1], sex roles, or criminals than a typical Harvard-trained sociologist. Smart people, while still working in the smart EHC ways Hanania describes, are just as susceptible to stupid ideas as dumb ones, they are just better at papering it over with nice prose and good manners and their competence keeps catastrophic failure at bay better. Outside of STEM I’m not sure EHC ideas are any better than populist ideas. Hanania could move the goalposts and say that “I want an EHC, just not the current woke, anti-capitalist, feminism-education-climate change-obsessed EHC” but this would be just saying “I want smart people running society in traditional smart people ways, only with actually correct ideas this time”. Hanania tries not to sound this naïve but this is what I’m reading when I try to understand his point.

The most egregious example for Hanania’s naiveté about the dumbness of smart people is his piece “Why the media is honest and good”. Hanania defends the mainstream media like the NYT by saying that 1) they do good-quality reporting on neutral events, which is what most content is, 2) they report even facts against their biases such as racial crime disparities, it’s just that they put an ideological spin on them, 3) they don’t make up fully fake news. Conversely, right-wing alternatives don’t have neutral stories at all, it’s all rage-bait about the liberals, reporting is selective, and they make up or re-publish fake news.

I agree with this completely, it’s just that this means the opposite of what Hanania says. When you read “rightoid” publications like VDare or the Daily Stormer, you immediately understand that this is a publication with an extreme political agenda, so you take everything with a grain of salt. Conversely, the NYT packages its lies and biases in great travel reports, movie reviews and accurate coverage of geopolitical events which make it more, not less, dangerous. A smart person reading on the Daily Stormer something like that “Sanna Marin was better than Annalena Baerbock because out of all the worthless sluts promoted as politicians people at least wanted to have sex with her” will immediately understand it as satire, something South Park did 20 years on prime-time television. On the other hand, after reading the NYT for real facts he will fall for their propaganda stories about things like police violence about Blacks, Zach Goldberg famous example, with liberals overestimating the rate of fatal Black police shootings by orders of magnitude.

Never explicitly writing false facts and packaging it in good reporting makes EHC press worse, not better. EHC propaganda has a hyperreal element to it: it never explicitly says something like “Donald Trump is a paid agent of Vladimir Putin who is basically Hitler” but by publishing endless word salad articles insinuating this this is how the truth assembles in reader’s heads.

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[1] If you think I’m bluffing on this, read the chapter „Understanding Why Some Clinicians Use Pseudoscientific Methods” in this book about the accuracy of clinicians and laypeople evaluating mental illness.