there’s an obvious synthesis of great man theory and broader structural forces theories of history.
there are great people, but these people are still bound by many constraints due to structural forces. political leaders can’t just do whatever they want; they have to appease the keys of power within the country. in a democracy, the most obvious key of power is the citizens, who won’t reelect a politician that tries to act against their interests. but even in dictatorships, keeping the economy at least kind of functional is important, because when the citizens are starving, they’re more likely to revolt and overthrow the government. there are also powerful interest groups like the military and critical industries, which have substantial sway over government policy in both democracies and dictatorships. many powerful people are mostly custodians for the power of other people, in the same way that a bank is mostly a custodian for the money of its customers.
also, just because someone is involved in something important, it doesn’t mean that they were maximally counterfactually responsible. structural forces often create possibilities to become extremely influential, but only in the direction consistent with said structural force. a population that strongly believes in foobarism will probably elect a foobarist candidate, and if the winning candidate never existed, another foobarist candidate would have won. winning an election always requires a lot of competence, but no matter how competent you are, you aren’t going to win on an anti-foobar platform. the sentiment of the population has created the role of foobarist president for someone foobarist to fill.
this doesn’t mean that influential people have no latitude whatsoever to influence the world. when we’re looking at the highest tiers of human ability, the efficient market hypothesis breaks down. there are so few extremely competent people that nobody is a perfect replacement for anyone else. if someone didn’t exist, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone else would have stepped up to do the same. for example, if napoleon had never existed, there might have been some other leader who took advantage of the weakness of the Directory to seize power, but they likely would have been very different from napoleon. great people still have some latitude to change the world orthogonal to the broader structural forces.
it’s not a contradiction for the world to be mostly driven by structural forces, and simultaneously for great people to have hugely more influence than the average person. in the same way that bill gates or elon musk are vastly vastly wealthier than the median person, great people have many orders of magnitude more influence on the trajectory of history than the average person. and yet, the richest person is still only responsible for 0.1%* of the economic output of the united states.
*\ fermi estimate, taking musk’s net worth and dividing by 20 to convert stocks to flows, and comparing to gdp. caveats apply based on interest rates and gdp being a bad metric. many assumptions involved here.
I think there’s a spectrum between great man theory and structural forces theory and I would classify your view as much closer to the structural forces view, rather than a combination of the two.
The strongest counter-example might be Mao. It seems like one man’s idiosyncratic whims really did set the trajectory for hundreds of millions of people. Although of course as soon as he died most of the power vanished, but surely China and the world would be extremely different today without him.
A synthesis between the structural forces theory and “pulling the rope sideways”.
The economical and other forces determine the main direction, a leader who already wanted to go in that direction gets elected and starts going in that direction, his idiosyncratic whims get implemented as a side effect.
Like, instead of Hitler, there would be another German leader determined to change the post-WW1 world order, but he would probably be less obsessed about the Jews. Also, he might make different alliances.
and yet, the richest person is still only responsible for 0.1%* of the economic output of the united states.
Musk only owns 0.1% of the economic output of the US but he is responsible for more than this, including large contributions to
Politics
Space
SpaceX is nearly 90% of global upmass
Dragon is the sole American spacecraft that can launch humans to ISS
Starlink probably enables far more economic activity than its revenue
Quality and quantity of US spy satellites (Starshield has ~tripled NRO satellite mass)
Startup culture through the many startups from ex-SpaceX employees
Twitter as a medium of discourse, though this didn’t change much
Electric cars probably sped up by ~1 year by Tesla, which still owns over half the nation’s charging infrastructure
AI, including medium-sized effects on OpenAI and potential future effects through xAI
Depending on your reckoning I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon’s influence added up to >1% of Americans combined. This is not really surprising because a Zipfian relationship would give the top person in a nation of 300 million 5% of the total influence.
i’m happy to grant that the 0.1% is just a fermi estimate and there’s a +/- one OOM error bar around it. my point still basically stands even if it’s 1%.
i think there are also many factors in the other direction that just make it really hard to say whether 0.1% is an under or overestimate.
for example, market capitalization is generally an overestimate of value when there are very large holders. tesla is also a bit of a meme stock so it’s most likely trading above fundamental value.
my guess is most things sold to the public sector probably produce less economic value per $ than something sold to the private sector, so profit overestimates value produced
the sign on net economic value of his political advocacy seems very unclear to me. the answer depends strongly on some political beliefs that i don’t feel like arguing out right now.
it slightly complicates my analogy for elon to be both the richest person in the us and also possibly the most influential (or one of). in my comment i am mostly referring to economic-elon. you are possibly making some arguments about influentialness in general. the problem is that influentialness is harder to estimate. also, if we’re talking about influentialness in general, we don’t get to use the 0.1% ownership of economic output as a lower bound of influentialness. owning x% of economic output doesn’t automatically give you x% of influentialness. (i think the majority of other extremely rich people are not nearly as influential as elon per $)
there’s an obvious synthesis of great man theory and broader structural forces theories of history.
there are great people, but these people are still bound by many constraints due to structural forces. political leaders can’t just do whatever they want; they have to appease the keys of power within the country. in a democracy, the most obvious key of power is the citizens, who won’t reelect a politician that tries to act against their interests. but even in dictatorships, keeping the economy at least kind of functional is important, because when the citizens are starving, they’re more likely to revolt and overthrow the government. there are also powerful interest groups like the military and critical industries, which have substantial sway over government policy in both democracies and dictatorships. many powerful people are mostly custodians for the power of other people, in the same way that a bank is mostly a custodian for the money of its customers.
also, just because someone is involved in something important, it doesn’t mean that they were maximally counterfactually responsible. structural forces often create possibilities to become extremely influential, but only in the direction consistent with said structural force. a population that strongly believes in foobarism will probably elect a foobarist candidate, and if the winning candidate never existed, another foobarist candidate would have won. winning an election always requires a lot of competence, but no matter how competent you are, you aren’t going to win on an anti-foobar platform. the sentiment of the population has created the role of foobarist president for someone foobarist to fill.
this doesn’t mean that influential people have no latitude whatsoever to influence the world. when we’re looking at the highest tiers of human ability, the efficient market hypothesis breaks down. there are so few extremely competent people that nobody is a perfect replacement for anyone else. if someone didn’t exist, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone else would have stepped up to do the same. for example, if napoleon had never existed, there might have been some other leader who took advantage of the weakness of the Directory to seize power, but they likely would have been very different from napoleon. great people still have some latitude to change the world orthogonal to the broader structural forces.
it’s not a contradiction for the world to be mostly driven by structural forces, and simultaneously for great people to have hugely more influence than the average person. in the same way that bill gates or elon musk are vastly vastly wealthier than the median person, great people have many orders of magnitude more influence on the trajectory of history than the average person. and yet, the richest person is still only responsible for 0.1%* of the economic output of the united states.
*\ fermi estimate, taking musk’s net worth and dividing by 20 to convert stocks to flows, and comparing to gdp. caveats apply based on interest rates and gdp being a bad metric. many assumptions involved here.
I think there’s a spectrum between great man theory and structural forces theory and I would classify your view as much closer to the structural forces view, rather than a combination of the two.
The strongest counter-example might be Mao. It seems like one man’s idiosyncratic whims really did set the trajectory for hundreds of millions of people. Although of course as soon as he died most of the power vanished, but surely China and the world would be extremely different today without him.
A synthesis between the structural forces theory and “pulling the rope sideways”.
The economical and other forces determine the main direction, a leader who already wanted to go in that direction gets elected and starts going in that direction, his idiosyncratic whims get implemented as a side effect.
Like, instead of Hitler, there would be another German leader determined to change the post-WW1 world order, but he would probably be less obsessed about the Jews. Also, he might make different alliances.
Musk only owns 0.1% of the economic output of the US but he is responsible for more than this, including large contributions to
Politics
Space
SpaceX is nearly 90% of global upmass
Dragon is the sole American spacecraft that can launch humans to ISS
Starlink probably enables far more economic activity than its revenue
Quality and quantity of US spy satellites (Starshield has ~tripled NRO satellite mass)
Startup culture through the many startups from ex-SpaceX employees
Twitter as a medium of discourse, though this didn’t change much
Electric cars probably sped up by ~1 year by Tesla, which still owns over half the nation’s charging infrastructure
AI, including medium-sized effects on OpenAI and potential future effects through xAI
Depending on your reckoning I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon’s influence added up to >1% of Americans combined. This is not really surprising because a Zipfian relationship would give the top person in a nation of 300 million 5% of the total influence.
The Duke of Wellington said that Napoleon’s presence on a battlefield “was worth forty thousand men”.
This would be about 4% of France’s military size in 1812.
i’m happy to grant that the 0.1% is just a fermi estimate and there’s a +/- one OOM error bar around it. my point still basically stands even if it’s 1%.
i think there are also many factors in the other direction that just make it really hard to say whether 0.1% is an under or overestimate.
for example, market capitalization is generally an overestimate of value when there are very large holders. tesla is also a bit of a meme stock so it’s most likely trading above fundamental value.
my guess is most things sold to the public sector probably produce less economic value per $ than something sold to the private sector, so profit overestimates value produced
the sign on net economic value of his political advocacy seems very unclear to me. the answer depends strongly on some political beliefs that i don’t feel like arguing out right now.
it slightly complicates my analogy for elon to be both the richest person in the us and also possibly the most influential (or one of). in my comment i am mostly referring to economic-elon. you are possibly making some arguments about influentialness in general. the problem is that influentialness is harder to estimate. also, if we’re talking about influentialness in general, we don’t get to use the 0.1% ownership of economic output as a lower bound of influentialness. owning x% of economic output doesn’t automatically give you x% of influentialness. (i think the majority of other extremely rich people are not nearly as influential as elon per $)