A quick heuristic for evaluating elites (or anyone else)
Summary: suppose that for some reason you want to figure out how a society works or worked in a given time and place, largely you want to see if it is a meritocracy where productive people get ahead and thus conditions are roughly fair and efficient, or is it more like a parasitical elite sucking the blood out of everybody. I present a heuristic for this and also as a bonus this also predicts how intellectuals work there.
I would look at whether the elites are specialists or generalists. We learned it from Adam Smith that a division of labor is efficient, and if people get rich without being efficient, well, that is a red flag. If someone’s rich, and they tell you they are specialists like manufacturing food scented soap or are specialists in retina surgery, you could have the impression that when such people get ahead, circumstances are fair and meritocratic. But when the rich people you meet seemed to be more vague, like owning shares in various businesses and you don’t see any connection between them (and they are not Buffet type investors either, they keep owning the same shares), or when all you gather is that their skillset is something very general, like generic businesses sense or people skills, you should be suspicious that the market may be rigged or corrupted, perhaps through establishing an overbearing and corrupted state, and overally the system is neither fair nor efficient.
Objection: but generic skills can be valuable!
Counter-objection: yes, but people with generic skills should be outcompeted by people with generic AND specialist skills, so the generalists should only see a middling level of success and not be on top. Alternatively, people who want to get very succesful using only generic skills should probably find the most success in a fair and efficient market by turning that generic skill into a specialization, usually a service/consulting. Thus, someone who has excellent people skills but does not like learning technical details would not see the most success (only a middling level) as a used car salesperson, or any technical product salesperson and would rather be providing sales training, communication training services, courses, consulting, writing books.
Counter-counter-objection: we know it since Adam Smith’s Scottish Highlands blacksmith example that you can only specialize if there is a lot of competition, not only in the sense that only in this case you are forced to specialize, but also in the sense that only in that case it is good, beneficial for you and others to do so. If you are the only doctor in a days walk in a Borneo rainforest, don’t specialize. If you are the only IT guy in a poverty stricken village, don’t specialize.
Answer: this is a very good point. In general specialization is a comparative thing, if nobody is a doctor near you, then being a doctor is a specialization in itself. If there are a lot of doctors, you differentiate yourself by becoming a surgeon, if there are a lot of surgeons, you differentiate yourself by becoming eye surgeon. In a village where nobody knows computers, being generic IT guy is a specialization, in a city with many thousands of IT people, you differentate yourself by being an expert on SAP FI and CO modules.
So the heuristic works only so far as you can make a good enough guess what level of specialization or differntiation would be logical in the circumstances and then you see people who are the richest or most succesful not being so specialized. In fact if they are less specialized than their underlings, that is a clear red flag! When you see someone who is an excellent eye surgeon specialist, but he is not the highest ranking doc, the highest ranking one is someone whom people say to be a generic good leader but does not have any specialist skills—welcome to Corruption Country! Because a purely okay leader (generic skill) should mean a middling level of success, not a stellar one, the top of the top guns should be someone who has these generic skills and also a rock star in a specialist field.
Well, maybe this needs to be fleshed out more, but it is a starter of an idea.
BONUS. Suppose you figured out the elites are too generalists to assume they earned their wealth by providing value to others, they simply does not look that productive, don’t seem to have a specialized enough skillset, they may look more like parasites. From this you can also figure out what intellectuals are like. By intellectuals I mean the people who write the books people from the middle classes up consume. If elites are productive, they are not interested in signalling, they have a get-things-done mentality and thus the intellectuals will often have a very pragmatic attitude, they won’t be much into lofty, murky intellectualism, they will often see highbrowery as a way to solve practical problems. Because that is what their customers want. While if elites are unproductive, they will do a lot of signalling to try to excuse their high status. They cannot tell _exactly_ what they do, so they try to look _generally_ superior than a the plebs. They often signal being more sophisticated, having better taste and all that—all this means “I don’t have a superior specialist skill, because I am an unproductive elite parasite, so I must look generally superior than the plebs”. They will also use books, intellectual ideas to express this and that kind of intellectualism will always be very murky, lofty, abstract. Not a get-things-done type. One trick to look for is if intellectuals like to abuse terms like “higher”, “spiritual”, this suggests “you guise who read it are generally superior” and thus plays into the signalling of unproductive elites.
You can also use the heuristic in the reverse. If the most popular bestsellers books are like “The Power of Habits” (pragmatic, empirical, focusing on reality, like LW), you can also assume that the customers of these books, the elites, will be largely efficient people working in a honest market (or the other way around). If the most popular bestsellers are “The Spiritual Universe—The Ultimate Truths Behind The Meaning Of The Cosmos”—you can assume not only the intellectuals who write them are buffoons, but also the rich folks will also be unproductive, parasitical aristocrats, because they generally use stuff like this to make themselves look superior in general, without specialists skills. Because specialist, productive elites hate this stuff and do not finance it.
Why is this all useful?
You can quickly decide if you want to work with / in that kind of society. Will your efficient work be rewarded? Or more likely those who are amongst the well born will take the credit? You can also figure out if a society today or even in the historical past was politically unjust or not.
(And now I am officially horrible at writing essays, it is to writing what “er, umm, er, like” is to speaking. But I hope you can glean the meaning out of it. I am not a very verbal thinker, I am just trying to translate the shapes in my mind to words.)
As a proxy for elite quality can I suggest this list of Real World Development Indicators, hot off the presses:
Number of tall buildings not occupied by the government or United Nations
Probability that the President/Prime Minister seeks medical treatment in own country
Proportion of political leaders younger than the average life expectancy
Proportion of resort vacationers from that or neighboring countries
Percent of young people that prefer to start a business rather than world for an NGO
Percent of undergraduate students taking a real major, rather than development studies
Number of wrecked airplanes near the runway of the main airport
Proportion of NGO websites not written in English or French
Number of people who take pictures of you
Percent of people too busy to answer your survey
Number of government officials who give foreign experts the “who the hell are you?” look
Central to your argument is the following claim:
but I don’t think you’ve given it enough support to justify an accusation of corruption against any society in which people with “generic skills” are very successful. Isn’t it plausible (1) that the best person to run an organization (or some department of one) might be someone who has some understanding of all the things their underlings are doing, and (2) that this will often come at the cost of not getting so expert in any single area (or, having formerly been an expert specialist, neglecting those skills in favour of learning everyone else’s a bit), and (3) that the people who run organizations may be quite handsomely paid for doing it?
(To put it differently: in some contexts being a really good generalist may be a valuable specialist skill.)
We could identify highly successful societies and then look at the characteristics of their elites.
Why do you not see “people skills” as, say, being a specialist in dealing with people?
Is Malcolm Gladwell an intellectual?
This is my objection too. This is an interesting idea but when I try to use it, I find that it’s harder to distinguish “generic” from “specific” than I expected.
Because it is a facilitator skill, people usually want something specific. I.e. if I go buying a used car I want the salesman to be personally nice, but ultimately I am there for the car. Even if your job would to get paid to talk to and entertain people, it would work better when specializing in what a special group of people likes to talk about.
Googled him now, looks like one.
Capitalists (not the only elites, but a good fraction of them) serve the economy as speculators and coordinators, not as direct providers of a service. It’s a facilitator class of being, and as such things like ‘people skills’ are central to the practice.
In the same way, they benefit from a very wide-angle view of the business landscape- Tim Cook is notorious for managing supply chains for Apple products through the most elaborate contortions. An engineer who is an expert in the design of iPhone speaker systems is unlikely to have a really informed view of how much his speakers’ wiring will cost in three years.
A good car salesman is one who convinces as many people as possible to buy a car, but a banker who gave out as many loans as possible would be a terrible banker. The banker’s job is to carefully consider which businesses and people are most likely to provide a return on an investment, given both the characteristics of the individual asking for money and the likely trends of the economy as a whole. That looks a whole lot like being a generalist with good people skills.
“Countries with a lot of specialization are richer, therefore, within a country, the richest people should be people who specialize.”
::sigh::
No. Specialization, as such, increases efficiency, both on the individual level and it also adds up collectively.
On the contrary, it is a good sign. Skilled leaders handle the administrative details and let their underlings focus on doing the actual work. You get to be a top specialist by spending your time and energy mastering your specialty. It just can’t be done if you spend a significant portion of your day on administrative tasks. Management requires different skills and is basically a completely different career path from that of the specialist.
This phenomenon was one of the inspirations behind the Peter Principle.
Buffet famously doesn’t sell shares—this is one feature that makes him very unusual among investors.
Military generals aren’t called generals because they are specialists. People at the top need to be generalists to delegate individual issues to whatever specialist is best able to handle them.
Teaching and negotiating are both people skills but they aren’t the same skill. There are people who aren’t good at teaching but who are good at selling.
This is true only in the sense that they aren’t called generals because they are pianos.
I hate argument-by-folk-etymology. From Wikipedia:
This overlaps the idea that believing that there’s such a thing as management in general is highly destructive—businesses end up being run by specialists in law and finance rather than by people who know the particular business.
Management is a real thing, particularly at scale.
Set up incentives and responsibilities wrong, and your company is good and humped.
I believe that management is a real thing, and when done correctly it can produce a lot of value, but most managers are doing it horribly wrong.
Why are incompetent managers more successful in companies than e.g. incompetent programmers? The answer is probably in the existing feedback mechanisms. Who precisely can make the decision “this is an incompetent manager and we should tell him to improve or fire him”? Most likely a higher-level manager, who most likely is also incompetent in doing his job. Or the owner of the company; but most owners probably also don’t have good management skills.
Measuring manager’s output is difficult. Each company is different, each department is different, there is too much noise in the data. Managers can make decisions that save some money in short term, and cost much more in long term. Or decisions that save some money in short term, but there is a small probability of a huge loss later. If you start mesuring their outputs using crude methods, you have just provided them another incentive to make this kind of decisions.
In my life I have only met one manager whom I would call highly competent: Mr. Anton Zajac from ESET anti-virus company. (Today I learned: He has a doctorate in quantum physics.) The other managers at best did not interfere with the development process and let the team do their work; at worst actively disrupted the work of everyone else.
There is something sad about a profession where “not doing actively harm” already puts one above the average, and “actually improving things” is a rare exception. Or maybe there are actually many professions like this, only the managers are more visible.
I didn’t mean that there’s no such thing as management—just that there’s no such thing as management in general. Competent management takes deep knowledge of a business, or at least a type of business.
Well, in my experience, the most competent IT manager was not a programmer (as far as I know). But it most likely helped that he had a natural-science background, as opposed to whatever it is that most managers study (Master of Bullshit and Absurdity, probably). Thus he wasn’t the annoying kind of manager who believes that 1) all problems are imaginary and 2) all problems can be solved by insisting that you think positively.
On the other hand, a frequent failure mode is to take a skilled programmer and say “from now on, you are the manager”. This is how a few companies tried to revert stupidity. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, because managing people is a different skill from writing code.
I have seen coders who became good “laissez-faire” managers. But I have also seen coders who became terrible managers, because being introverted they avoided communication with the rest of their team, the junior team members sometimes didn’t even know what to do, and they received no help. I have also seen coders who started micromanaging their teams, insisting that everyone use the most complicated technology and most complicated design patterns regardless of the junior team members’ real skills; who probably felt an unconscious need to compete with their subordinates, which could be rather depressing for the subordinate.
In worst case, the existing top management was not able to tell a difference between competent and incompetent coder, so they promoted the most loyal one who stayed with the company the longest time (which was actually the most incompetent one, and many of his former colleagues left the company precisely to avoid having to work with him). Imagine Dunning–Kruger effect turned up to eleven; the team leader insisting that his colleagues avoid all design patterns and best practices because he didn’t understand why it was useful, and if he didn’t understand something then obviously it had to be useless. He was removed from the function a few months later when literally every coder complained. This is an illustration of a meta-problem: if you do not have the deep knowledge of business, how do you find a person who does?
Yet another problem is a person who did programming 10 or 20 years ago, and now is only a manager. Sometimes they actively resist every innovation in the field, because hey, we didn’t have all that fancy stuff in the stone age, and we still managed to develop a fully working application. (Except it wasn’t online, didn’t support multiple platforms, didn’t run on multiple servers at the same time, didn’t communicate with multiple databases and other systems, didn’t allow multiple users to operate on the same data in the same time, had 10 dialogs instead of 1000, didn’t support mouse or flexible screen size, etc. But those are just trivial details, right? By the way, why does it take you guys so much time?) Of course, there is also a reverse-stupid pattern, where the manager insists on using the latest fashion, so you have to work with halfway-finished tools full of errors, and in a few months you will switch to yet newer fashion.
So, my conclusion is that there is such a thing as management in general, but a part of it is the awareness that you must learn the business processes at your company on a level necessary for managing them. For example, when managing programmers, you don’t have to write code, and you don’t even have to read it. But you should be aware of what your programmers need to do their work (e.g. specification, various tools), and make sure they get it. Don’t treat technical problems as mere psychological problems that will miraculously fix themselves when you do a half-assed attempt to motivate your people. Communicate with all stakeholders regularly, but be brief so you don’t waste their time. Sometimes inconspicuously cross-check the information you get, to prevent people from pulling your leg. Understand planning fallacy, etc. -- Seems easy, but in my experience most managers don’t do that.
Analogically, if tomorrow somehow I would get a task of managing a team of experts in something I don’t have a clue about (e.g. a group of surgeons or rocket scientists), I would: ask them to give me a high-level outline of how they imagine things should be done, the time estimates for individual steps (I would try to add a reserve when communicating this to my superiors), and I would ask them what inputs do they need to do each step successfully. Then I would try to make sure they get the inputs, which would mean communicating with people responsible for these inputs and their managers. Every day or two, I would show them the high-level outline and ask if this is still realistic, or if it needs to be updated; and I would accept the bad news without punishing the messenger. (But I would keep a log of “which things cause repeated changes in our plans”.) This would be a quick start, and then I would try to learn more about how their jobs look like in near mode. -- Seems like an obvious stuff, but it isn’t. Many managers are instead like “oh, this is my big chance; I have heard a youtube speech about the power of positive thinking, so now I am going to teach them how to do their jobs properly”.
I think it’s very easy and potentially problematic to focus on too-narrow a category for your specialties.
To flagrantly steal an example from SlateStarCodex, examine basketball players. Professional basketball players tend to be tall. Several standard deviations taller than the general population. There is a definite, verifiable link between increased height and increased basketball success.
However, the most successful pro basketball players are not necessarily the tallest. Michael Jordan was not the tallest player in his environment, but was absolutely in the running for being the best. Success in basketball is related to a number of factors, height being only one. General athleticism, spatial awareness, strategic thinking, willingness to train diligently, and so forth are also important. A person who is above average in multiple relevant factors may be a stronger overall player than another person who surpasses him in one factor but falls behind in the rest.
The same is plausibly true in other fields. A person who is two deviations above average in medical skill and two deviations above average in social skills might easily be more successful than a person who is three deviations above average in medical skill and completely average in social skills. The may be more utility in having multiple synergistic skillsets than one exceedingly strong skillset.