Why do campaign managers believe that ad buys work? You might think their jobs depend on it, but not really: grass-roots work provides plenty of reason for campaign managers to exist.

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And I emphasize that I am not talking about “tokens of merit.” I am talking about actual merit. I realize that educational achievement is not necessarily identical with merit, but I am using it as a rather standard metric of certain kinds of relevant merit. But please note that when I say educational achievement I _don’t_ mean things like college _degrees_ — which are indeed “tokens” — instead I mean things like “reading level,” IQ, numeracy, literacy, vocabulary, and so on.

In the history of real-life barbaric practices, there was once something called “hobbling.” That verb can mean to limp, or to walk in a way indicating an injury — but it also referred, at one time, to the practice of intentionally inflicting a permanently debilitating injury on someone that would cause them to “hobble,” in the first sense, for the rest of their life. This was intended as a punishment to discourage slaves from running away; but it also served to physically prevent run-away slaves from even being capable of running away again.

This is horrible, and yet the general USA society is organized around a less-barbaric version of the same practice: people are kept uninformed, intellectually passive, half-educated, in order to be kept out of power. Or rather: in order to keep the people who are in power where they are. As part of the effort to compete, effort is made to hamper the competition. There are two explicit models of education in this society: one is designed to enable autonomous people to rule; the other is designed (explicitly) to train servants to take their place obeying the autonomous rulers. Undeniably, it makes self-interested sense for the class of elites to do this. And yet also it is rather unspeakable, for obvious reasons: it is too selfish to admit to, and so it is never admitted to, and (as it is the powerful doing it) we are expected not to speak of it to force the powerful to admit it — indeed to be complicit in the “coverup.”

That is what I make of your post: you are aiding in the cover-up of the hobbling of the masses by the elite, by denying that it even exists. By speaking instead about “tokens.”

Unfortunately I cannot, in this space, provide a full story. But here’s a good link, which can be followed to find other links: http://www.demos.org/blog/7/28/13/poverty-poison

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And I emphasize that I am not talking about “tokens of merit.” I am talking about actual merit. I realize that educational achievement is not necessarily identical with merit, but I am using it as a rather standard metric of certain kinds of relevant merit. But please note that when I say educational achievement I _don’t_ mean things like college _degrees_ — which are indeed “tokens” — instead I mean things like “reading level,” IQ, numeracy, literacy, vocabulary, and so on.

In the history of real-life barbaric practices, there was once something called “hobbling.” That verb can mean to limp, or to walk in a way indicating an injury — but it also referred, at one time, to the practice of intentionally inflicting a permanently debilitating injury on someone that would cause them to “hobble,” in the first sense, for the rest of their life. This was intended as a punishment to discourage slaves from running away; but it also served to physically prevent run-away slaves from even being capable of running away again.

This is horrible, and yet the general USA society is organized around a less-barbaric version of the same practice: people are kept uninformed, intellectually passive, half-educated, in order to be kept out of power. Or rather: in order to keep the people who are in power where they are. As part of the effort to compete, effort is made to hamper the competition. There are two explicit models of education in this society: one is designed to enable autonomous people to rule; the other is designed (explicitly) to train servants to take their place obeying the autonomous rulers. Undeniably, it makes self-interested sense for the class of elites to do this. And yet also it is rather unspeakable, for obvious reasons: it is too selfish to admit to, and so it is never admitted to, and (as it is the powerful doing it) we are expected not to speak of it to force the powerful to admit it — indeed to be complicit in the “coverup.”

That is what I make of your post: you are aiding in the cover-up of the hobbling of the masses by the elite, by denying that it even exists. By speaking instead about “tokens.”

Unfortunately I cannot, in this space, provide a full story. But here’s a good link, which can be followed to find other links: http://www.demos.org/blog/7/28/13/poverty-poison

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You said: “Those who have been denied the ballot box tend to turn to the bomb”… I don’t believe in a huge connection between the two things. My country (Italy) professed democratic ideals ever since its unification in the mid-19th century and instituted universal male suffrage before WW1, but this didn’t prevent the widespread political violence which put the fascists in power, and even in the cold war era we’ve had communist bombs and political killings everywhere. Breivik had the right to vote, Gandhi didn’t.

You say “It may not be absurd to deny education to a section of the population, but it is pretty inefficient.” If denial of education follow from disenfranchisement, then why is it that historically there has been universal education long before universal suffrage? Doesn’t that suggest that the elite actually do care about the poor?
In my country university education is largely state-managed and free. I’m pretty sure it’s the elite who want it that way, not the poor, who are a lot less concerned with how the university works.

That aside, selective education, contrary to being “pretty inefficient”, is extremely efficient. Not everybody has what it takes to become a scientists and our societies would spare enormous resources if they acknowledged this. Not just because we’d need less teachers and use better the ones we have, but also thanks to the productive work of young people who no longer would waste years learning nothing.

It is true that the more selective education is, the more the lower classes will be cut out of it, and to a superficial observer this might look bad and not truly meritocratic. But such an observer would ignore that intelligence is largely heritable and that there simply might be less of it in the lower classes (and to those who would ask me to prove with scientific evidence the last statement, let me ask: where is your scientific evidence that genes for intelligence are equally distributed among the social classes?)

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Congress has so succeeded through campaign finance deformation in protecting their incumbency that they are free to vote in a way that will win them plaudits from the cool kids.

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A subset of this hypothesis is: Policies supported by elites are good ideas. Legislators vote for good ideas. The masses have bad ideas.

It’s nice to see that even opponents of democracy support welfare, immigration and controls on free speech.

(Yeah, I’m aware that most libertarians are pro-immigration and some near-reactionaries are ok with welfare, but I’m talking more about the overall beigeist consensus.)

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A subset of this hypothesis is: Policies supported by elites are good ideas. Legislators vote for good ideas. The masses have bad ideas.

While I am aware that plenty of bad ideas become law, I have in mind Caplan’s “Myth of the Rational Voter” regarding the masses and their bad ideas.

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Not having read the papers in question, I may be barking up the wrong tree. But just from the information given in the post itself, it appears that there is a very simple way of reconciling the Economic Elite Domination theory (Gilens and Page) and the “money doesn’t matter” research. Namely, while the former is looking at differences between the elite and popular opinion, the latter is examining the effects of differences within the elite opinion. Granted that there may well be “declining marginal efficiency” of money in elections, so that the difference in spending between two elite candidates makes little difference to election outcomes. However, the point is that due to the money constraint, most non-elite candidates will not even make it as far as the candidacy itself; and even if some do, they will simply never amass the sort of money that would turn them into ‘serious’ contenders. So you basically get the Pepsi vs Coke elections; even if the No-Name Soft Drink formally takes part, it is basically irrelevant to the outcome. In a blind test, it might turn out to be the most popular flavour. But it will never be given a chance to compete on a level playing field. Hence: the elite opinion does need to be determined in the intra-elite competition, and there, the impact of the respective amounts of money may be quite small. But whatever the elite opinion turns out to be, it will (very nearly always) trump popular opinion when the two are different – just as Gilens and Page are trying to demonstrate.

P. S. I see that in the last sentence, Eli above makes a similar point.

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You have said that the US is a meritocracy and also that it isn’t.

You have pointed out that there is market in tokens of merit, qualifications, etc, supporting the claim that the US is a meritocracy.

You have also pointed out that the market is rigged, and it is possible to buy tokens of merit, so that they do not objectively represent real merit, supporting the claim that the US is not a meritocracy.

May I suggest the synthesis that the US is not a fair or effective meritocracy.

Edit: but this is still fairly orthogonal to the original point. For every jackass of an elected pol, there are dozens of smart advisors, civil servants and lobbyists. So meritocracy. But imperfect.

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