The peasants, the Guardian class, and trust in institutions and the elites

Notes from a nameless conference. Martin Gurri. July 23, 2019. https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/2019/07/23/notes-from-a-nameless-conference/

Sometime this year, I found myself at a conference centered around the theme of “regaining trust.”  For obvious reasons, I won’t name names, but it was a professional gathering of the old regime:  the industrial elites.  In their hundreds if not thousands, I was swarmed by people of good will who were also smart, articulate, and hyper-educated.  They craved, sincerely, to help the disadvantaged and save the earth.  The words “science” and “reason” were perpetually on their lips, as if they held the copyright for these terms – which, in a sense, they did.  And if they were a bit defensive, a tad obtuse, their intentions were the purest I could imagine.

So why, by their own admission, do they no longer inspire trust?

I have met their kindred before, in other glittering places.  They run the institutions that hold center stage in our society, but look on the world as if from a walled mountain fortress, where every loud noise from beyond is interpreted as risk and threat.  They disagree about minutia, but mostly move in lockstep, like synchronized swimmers, with word and thought.  They are earnest but extraordinarily narrow.  In a typical complaint, one speaker blamed the public for hiding in an “information bubble” – [...]

The same unmodulated whine about present conditions circled around and around, without even the ambition to achieve wit, depth, or originality:

*  The internet is the enemy:  of rationality, of democracy, of truth.  It must be regulated by enlightened minds.
*  The public resembles an eight-year-old who is always fooled by tricks and lies.  For its own protection, it must be constrained by a Guardian class.
*  Populism is the spawn of lies.  Even if it wins elections, it is never legitimate, and must be swept away by a higher authority.
[...]

None of this was up for discussion.  None of it was uttered with the least semblance of self-awareness.  In the same breath, a speaker called for the regulation of the web and the education of children in “tolerance.”  If I had pointed out the contradiction, the speaker, I’m certain, would have denied it.  Tolerance, for her, meant the obliteration of opinions she disliked.

In fact, each narrative loop I listed above ends with the elites happily in charge, and the obliteration of the wretched present.  If we wish to understand why trust evaporated in the first place, consider the moral and political assumptions behind this rhetorical posture

***
The industrial elites have lost their way.  In every major profession and institution, they once commanded vast, widely-admired projects that filled their lives with meaning and endowed the entire class with an unconquerable confidence.  But the twentieth century couldn’t be preserved forever, like a bug in amber.  The elites now face a radically transformed environment – and they are maladapted and demoralized.  An inability to listen, an impulse to spew jargon in broadcast mode, a demand for social distance as the reward for professional success:  such habits, which in the past placed them above and beyond the mob’s reach, now drag them down to contempt and mockery in the information sphere.  Among the public, trust has curdled into loathing.  The elites are horribly aware of their fall from grace – hence the conference – but being deaf to the public’s voice, they are clueless about how to respond.

To some extent, this is a family drama:  [...]

The senior people, largely white and male, seemed to believe that, in punishment for the sins of their fathers, trust had fractured along identity lines.  Women today were thought to trust only women, for example.  [...]

For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts.  They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like.  Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either.  Eventually, the young cosplayers must put away their costumes, take one last sip of Kombucha, and set off, seething with repressed virtue, to make money in the world as it really is.

I was intrigued by the pathology of mutual dependence between these generational postures.  It’s the way abusive relationships are supposed to work – although, in all honesty, I was at a loss to say who was the abuser and who the abused.

***
We are living through the early stages of a colossal transformation:  from the industrial age to something that doesn’t yet have a name.  Many periods of history have been constrained by structural necessity.  This isn’t one of them.  Rather than a forking path, we face possibilities that radiate in every direction, like spokes from a hub.  Even the immediate future seems up for grabs.  We could see the formation of a hyper-connected liberal democracy, or plunge into nihilism and chaos – or we could contemplate arrangements and relations that are, at present, unimaginable.

The future will be determined not by vast, impersonal forces but by an accumulation of individual choices.  Ultimately, the elites must lead the way.  Whether selected by the public or self-anointed and self-perpetuating, they hold in hand the institutional levers of change:  that’s just how the world works in a complex civilization.  We will not transcend our petty and immobile present with protests or referendums.

The dilemma is that this present is defined by a radical distrust of the institutions of industrial society, and of the elites that control them, and of their statements and descriptions of reality.  The conference organizers got our predicament right.  At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority.  The mass audience of the twentieth century has fractured like a fallen mirror.  An angry and alienated public inhabits the broken shards – and nobody speaks for the whole.  The elites who should take the first step into the unknown are paralyzed by doubt and fear.  They utter the words science and reason like incantations, claim ownership to Platonic truth, and believe, with astonishing unanimity, that they have been overthrown by a tsunami of lies.  One need only restore truth to its former throne of glory, with themselves as mediating lords, they imagine, and the masses, as in the golden past, will bend the knee of trust.

But the solid masses are now a fractured public.  Truth, for mediated information, is a question of perspective.  Today the political and media elites must deal with a huge number of competing perspectives:  theirs is but one reedy voice in the uproar.  It never occurs to them, as it never did to my conference-goers, that they would profit from understanding the splintered perspectives of the public:  why, for example, a devout Christian with eyes wide open might vote for a man like Donald Trump.  A canonical explanation for Trump already existed, involving the usual tropes – fake news, Facebook, Putin.  Racism took care of the remainder.

The decisive endeavor of our moment – far surmounting, I believe, any specific policy call – is the re-establishment of trust in the institutions of representative democracy.  Only after the system has been reformed and the public has been reconciled to it can we again talk about truth as a self-evident proposition.  Until then, all we will have is perspectives – fragments of truth circling, randomly, the gravitational power of some opinion.  Appealing to tribal identity only compounds the fragmentation.  Fighting imaginary fascists and Nazis can be no more rewarding than hugging an imaginary friend.  [...]

I left the conference uncertain about the prospects of the good people I had encountered there.  They belonged to the class that should take all the forward places in the great migration away from this frozen hour, toward the new.  Instead, they were transfixed with longing for a dead past.  And the clock, for them, is ticking.  [...]

The public is more accepting of psychologists’ involvement in national security settings, including involvement in many of the activities highlighted as problematic, than are psychologists

Thornewill, A., DeMatteo, D., & Heilbrun, K. (2019). In the immediate wake of Hoffman’s independent review: Psychologist and general public perceptions. American Psychologist, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000497 

Abstract: In 2015, the American Psychological Association (APA) commissioned an independent review (IR) to examine APA’s potential involvement with “enhanced interrogation” procedures following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The IR concluded that certain APA officials acted together with the Department of Defense to “align APA and curry favor with” the Department of Defense to allow the involvement of psychologists in such enhanced interrogations (Hoffman et al., 2015, p. 9). Discussion following the IR’s release underscored differences in the views of psychologists regarding the IR’s conclusions. Despite extensive discussion, there is only anecdotal evidence regarding the views of psychologists on many of the questions investigated in the IR. This study examined the opinions of psychologists and the public shortly after the IR’s release regarding the roles of psychologists in national security interrogations and other non-treatment-focused contexts. This survey of psychologists (N = 1,146) engaged in treatment-focused and non-treatment-focused activities, and of the general public (N = 522), sheds light on the broader perceptions of the IR’s conclusions, and is relevant in considering future directions for the profession. Results suggest that the public is more accepting of psychologists’ involvement in national security settings, including involvement in many of the activities highlighted as problematic in the IR, than are psychologists. The perceptions of treatment-focused and non-treatment-focused psychologists regarding the appropriate roles of psychologists in national security settings did not differ significantly. These empirical data should help inform the ongoing discussion in this area. None of the authors is associated with an unequivocal position on the IR or the issues addressed as part of it.

From 2015... Envy would be most strongly experienced in response to others who had highly divisible resources that participants did not believe would be shared

Effects of resource divisibility and expectations of sharing on envy. Yumi Inoue et al. Motivation and Emotion, December 2015, Volume 39, Issue 6, pp 961–972. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-015-9498-6

Abstract: In three experiments, we provide evidence that resource divisibility and expectations of sharing influence the degree to which envy arises in response to another’s superior resources. We manipulated the resource divisibility (e.g., 2 coins worth approximately $5.50 each vs. a single note worth approximately $11) and expectations of sharing were measured (Experiments 1 and 2) and manipulated (Experiment 3). Findings in these three experiments supported our hypothesis that envy would be most strongly experienced in response to others who had highly divisible resources that participants did not believe would be shared. These findings offer novel insights into the adaptive function of envy, which may promote sharing of divisible resources.

Keywords: Envy Sharing Divisibility Expectations

In recent years, equity-based compensation represents almost 45% of total compensation to high-skilled labor; ignoring such income results in incorrect measurement of the returns to such labor

Human Capitalists. Andrea L. Eisfeldt, Antonio Falato, and Mindy Z. Xiaolan. Stanford Univ, Jul 2019. https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/abstract_5.pdf

Abstract: The widespread and growing practice of equity-based compensation has transformed high-skilled labor from a pure labor input into a class of “human capitalists”. We show that high-skilled labor income in the form of equity claims to firms’ future dividends and capital gains has dramatically increased since the 1980s. Indeed, in recent years, equity-based compensation represents almost 45% of total compensation to high-skilled labor. Ignoring such income results in incorrect measurement of the returns to high-skilled labor, with important implications for macroeconomics. Including equity-based compensation to high-skilled labor cuts the total decline in the labor share since the 1980’s by over 60%, and completely reverses the decline in the high skilled labor share to an increase of almost 1%. Correctly measuring the return to high-skilled labor can thus resolve the puzzling lack of a skill premium in recent data, as well as the corresponding lack of evidence of complementarity between high-skilled labor and new-economy physical capital. Moreover, tackling the capital structure question of who owns firms’ profits is necessary to provide a link between changing factor shares and changing income and wealth shares. We use an estimated model to understand the rise of human capitalists in an economy with declining capital goods prices. Finally, we present corroborating cross section and time series evidence for complementarity between high-skilled labor and physical capital using our corrected measure of the total return to human capitalists.

Declines in vocabulary of American adults, 1974–2016: As educational attainment has increased, those at each educational level are less verbally skilled

Declines in vocabulary among American adults within levels of educational attainment, 1974–2016. Jean M. Twenge et al. Intelligence, Volume 76, September–October 2019, 101377, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101377

Highlights
• When controlled for educational attainment, adults' vocabulary skills have declined.
• The vocabulary of U.S. college graduates was lower in the 2010s vs. the late 1970s.
• Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment.
• The decline in vocabulary is primarily a time period effect.

Abstract: We examined trends over time in vocabulary, a key component of verbal intelligence, in the nationally representative General Social Survey of U.S. adults (n = 29,912). Participants answered multiple-choice questions about the definitions of 10 specific words. When controlled for educational attainment, the vocabulary of the average U.S. adult declined between the mid-1970s and the 2010s. Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment (less than high school, high school or 2-year college graduate, bachelor's or graduate degree), with the largest declines among those with a bachelor's or graduate degree. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, time period, and cohort suggest that the decline is primarily a time period effect. Increasing educational attainment has apparently not improved verbal ability among Americans. Instead, as educational attainment has increased, those at each educational level are less verbally skilled even though the vocabulary skills of the whole population are unchanged.

Despite the popularity of the Ancient Greek maxim ‘know thyself’, the importance of self-insight for adjustment, or effective psychological functioning, is not there: There is no better adjustment

Self-insight into emotional and cognitive abilities is not related to higher adjustment. Joyce C. He & Stéphane Côté. Nature Human Behaviour, July 22 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0644-0

Abstract: Despite the popularity of the Ancient Greek maxim ‘know thyself’, the importance of self-insight for adjustment, or effective psychological functioning, remains unclear. Here we examined four perspectives about how cognitive and emotional abilities and self-views about these abilities relate to adjustment. We administered tests of cognitive and emotional abilities and assessed self-views about these abilities. Participants then completed daily diaries for a week to report multiple self-reported indicators of adjustment. We analysed data using polynomial regression and response surface analysis. We found no support for benefits of self-insight. The conditions to infer support for linear or curvilinear associations between abilities or self-views about these abilities and adjustment were also not met. The findings suggest that giving employees and students feedback about their cognitive and emotional abilities in organizations and in schools may not enhance their adjustment. We discuss the limitations of our study and offer suggestions for future research.

Women strongly prefer a highly educated potential partner in dating app Tinder; men have not aversion to a highly educated partner; & there is no preference for a partner with a similar education level

Are Men Intimidated by Highly Educated Women? Undercover on Tinder. Brecht Neyt et al. Economics of Education Review, July 22 2019, 101914. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2019.101914

Highlights
• Women on Tinder are more selective than men on Tinder.
• Women on Tinder have a preference for highly educated men.
• Men on Tinder are not intimidated by highly educated women.
• On Tinder, preferences for educational assortative mating are absent.

Abstract: In this study, we examine the impact of an individual's education level on her/his mating success on the mobile dating app Tinder. To do so, we conducted a field experiment on Tinder in which we collected data on 3,600 profile evaluations. In line with previous research on mating preferences from multiple fields, our results indicate a heterogeneous effect of education level by gender: while women strongly prefer a highly educated potential partner, this hypothesis is rejected for men. In contrast with recent influential studies from the field of economics, we do not find any evidence that men would have an aversion to a highly educated potential partner. Additionally, in contrast with most previous research – again from multiple fields – we do not find any evidence for preferences for educational assortative mating, i.e. preferring a partner with a similar education level.

Keywords: Returns to educationMating successAssortative matingDating appsTinder

The presence of laughter enhances how funny people find jokes, even recorded laughter; this effect is increased for spontaneous laughter; effect was present for both neurotypical & autistic participants

Modulation of humor ratings of bad jokes by other people’s laughter. Qing Cai, Sinead Chen, Sarah J. White, Sophie K. Scott. Current Biology, Volume 29, Issue 14, July 22 2019, Pages R677-R678. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.073

Summary: Laughter is a positive vocal emotional expression: most laughter is found in social interactions [1]. We are overwhelmingly more likely to laugh when we are with other people [1], and laughter can play a very important communicative role [2]. We do of course also laugh at humor — but can laughter influence how funny we actually perceive the humorous material to be? In this study, we show that the presence of laughter enhances how funny people find jokes and that this effect is increased for spontaneous laughter. This effect was present for both neurotypical and autistic participants, indicating similarities in their implicit processing of laughter.

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This may be due to our autistic participants being high functioning, or perhaps similar performance patterns can rest on distinctly different neural systems 6, 7, or laughter is implicitly processed by autistic individuals in the same way as their neurotypical peers.

The potential role of testosterone as a relationship protection mechanism, activated by threats to one's pair-bond (e.g., devaluation of attractive alternatives)

The potential role of testosterone as a relationship protection mechanism. Stefan Mattias-Maria Goetz, Justin M. Carré. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. Boston 2019. http://tiny.cc/aa1w6y

Abstract: Testosterone has oft been described as a mating effort hormonal mechanism, and is generally conceived of as promoting promiscuity. However, the environment can at times favor monogamy. The field of social psychology has long recognized a host of relationship protection mechanisms that are activated by threats to one's pair-bond (e.g., devaluation of attractive alternatives). To the degree that testosterone functions to promote mating effort writ large, we hypothesize that it should sharpen these relationship protection mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we employed a placebocontrol double blind between subject design in which men either received testosterone (Natesto® ) or placebo (N = ~300) before interacting with an attractive female confederate. About half of the men were already in a committed relationship allowing us to test both the effects of testosterone on mate seeking and its effects on fidelity. Behavioral coding of the videos will be undertaken to ascertain men’s mate seeking behaviors, operationalized as self-presentation, behavioral mimicry, attention fixation, and self-reported interest.

The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation: Women's interest in other women, as seen by Francis T McAndrew