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I'll just draw a brief comparison to my "Skin in the Game" rant from a couple days ago.
We have here a massive contrast to the problem I pointed out with most elite institutions.
In this case, the particular man responsible for the failures put his own life on the line as part of the process.
So, regardless of what else you think of the guy, he didn't slough the consequences of his decisions off on someone else. If they got stuck and had to suffer for days of slowly dwindling oxygen supply, he was down there suffering with them (unless they killed him or he killed himself first).
Compare that to this little bit from the aforementioned rant:
In this case, the CEO willingly put himself into a position where his own survival and comfort would be compromised if the comfort or survival of his customers, riding in his vehicle, depending on his decisions, was compromised. His incompetence, to the extent it impacted the outcome, would impact him as well.
The feedback loop and consequences in this case were pretty much instantaneous. We don't even have to go through a lengthy investigation and trial, nor wait for a vengeful family member to attack him. If the submersible imploded, he died. If they survived for days in agony, he suffered... then died.
And now he has filtered himself out of the system, so whatever bad decisions and processes he may have been following are shown to be defective, and the person pushing those decisions and processes has no more influence.
And, in theory, this should make future incidents of this particular type substantially less likely, so the system as a whole is stronger for his absence, although we can certainly mourn for the people he took with him.
I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early history, with brave men inventing wings, strapping them on, and jumping out of towers. Jumping to their deaths. Others were more cautious and built gadgets to help them understand wings and lift. Wind tunnels were invented late. Before wind tunnels they used the whirling arm apparatus.
A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.
The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.
The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.
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It is utterly untrue that elites have no 'skin in the game'.
Where do elites live? The downtown core of major cities. If violent crime spikes in Manhattan or San Francisco, it's rich people who suffer more than the middle class. Middle class white picket fence Americans don't live in Manhattan, they don't live in downtown SF, they don't live in the Loop in Chicago. They live in safe suburbs that are themselves largely insulated from the effects of elite decisionmaking.
During the pandemic, my rich parents' neighborhood (Greenwich Village, Manhattan) which was and is one of the most expensive zip codes in the country, measurably got worse. They're tough on crime, but by and large, wealthy people in Manhattan voted for the most 'pro justice reform' mayoral candidates. They supported Alvin Bragg for DA. When garbage piles up and homeless people accost them in Washington Square Park, that's the direct impact of deinstitutionalization and 'justice reform'. When upper-middle class whites support affirmative action, they're directly making it harder for their kids to get into top colleges (yes, even with muh legacy admits factored in). I know tons of very wealthy people who truly believe and advocate for higher taxes on themselves. I know plenty who don't, of course. But many do. Rich parts of LA like Santa Monica are full of homeless encampments that directly make the lives of the wealthy people who live there worse. Again, much more skin in the game than in the average safe suburb of a midwestern city.
Sure, the absolute pinnacle of these movements are a little more insulated; I imagine that Alexander Soros has a bodyguard (although that's probably as much because of threats from schizo Qanon types as it is because of random dangers in the city). But in the merely moderately-wealthy segment of the PMC (say the 97th to 99.95th percentiles) there's a lot of skin in the game.
I think that in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of the truly rich live in very safe areas. For example, in San Francisco itself many of them live in Pacific Heights, a neighborhood that is extremely clean and has close to zero presence of homeless people. These rich people's exposure to violent crime is very small unless they deliberately go out of their way to travel into the more crime-ridden parts of the city. Incidents like what happened with Pelosi are exceptions that prove the rule.
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The ordinary rich take the subway in Manhattan. The actual elite do not; they don't really have skin in the game as far as subway crime goes. That includes both the ultra-rich like Soros and the political elite... when's the last time Alvin Bragg took the subway when it wasn't a photo-op?
Does the Manhattan DA get a driver? Bragg’s only making $200k a year and seemingly has no family or business wealth (he’s worked for the state in various capacities for decades), so if he doesn’t I assume he’s taking the subway. I know multiple people who’ve seen de Blasio on the subway, have seen city council members on the subway, those are ‘political elite’ of the city I guess. I doubt Adams takes the subway, but that’s just because he’s a social climber who lives beyond his means.
And in any case, even rich people who don’t take the subway are still affected. My mother doesn’t, but my parents like taking a walk after dinner, like going to the park for long walks on weekends (last time I was there in [edit] December a couple of schizo homeless were ranting incoherently and scaring off tourists by the carousel). They deal with it, I know because they and all their rich friends discuss it all the time.
Yeah I mean when he was public advocate or the borough park councilor, I know the mayor gets a motorcade.
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So why do they continue to pursue measurably harmful policies, and indeed policies that fail on their own terms with very little to show for it? Like, when is the last time any big-name politician admitted their policy didn't work as intended and then stepped down or was punished in some way as to make amends for the failure?
The example I provided of Chesa Boudin, whose policies failed, abjectly, at reducing criminality in his district. But now he gets to teach a new generation of lawyers to carry his policies forward, probably to other towns around the country.
Why does anyone still take the man seriously?
I'm really not sure I count the majority of "upper-middle class whites" as "elites" for our purposes. They don't have the sort of influence on policy outcomes, nor do they have the sort of wealth that can actually swing large-scale outcomes that marks someone as 'elite,' although perhaps they may be the elites of their local environment.
And I would bet you can't find any situation where a particular Congressperson's children were unable to gain admission to the school of their choice, even if they were rich and white.
And let us make the point clearer: by making it harder for your KIDS to get into school, you are in fact MAKING SOMEBODY ELSE SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES of your actions.
Show me people who are in favor of actively making their own chances of getting a particular job or promotion or admission to [institution] worse!
That upper-class whites are being made substantially worse off by a particular policy prescription while the persons in charge of setting and administering the policy endure no consequences is in fact the problem. Because upper-class whites who DON'T support the policy are still eating the consequences, and cannot do anything meaningful to fix it.
Get back to me when they actually start signing checks to the government of their own free will. Literally nobody is stopping them.
"Supporting higher taxes" is really not putting more skin in the game. You would want the people who are in charge of spending the tax money they collect to be heavily motivated to spend it well, however.
Usually, the person most incentivized to spend money efficiently and effectively is the person who earned and properly owned it.
So why are the homeless encampments allowed to persist? Whose policy decisions lead to this outcome, and why aren't they being removed from power and run out of town on a rail (literally or figuratively) so their influence is completely eradicated?
If the persons whose job it is to resolve the homelessness issue is directly suffering from said problem, why aren't they extremely motivated to make progress on it?
The average safe suburb is safe BECAUSE the people in charge of handling such matters as vagrancy probably have a lot more to lose if they can't keep the homeless population down and the streets safe. The ones who failed will be selected out and won't keep influencing the outcome.
You're missing that the real key factor is that skin in the game means you get filtered out if you make bad decisions.
It doesn't have to be literal death, but you should be in a position to lose all your money, prestige, and/or influence in the event that you make decisions which demonstrably worsen the lives of thousands of people.
If you're a banker and you lose your depositors' money, you shouldn't get a golden parachute into another high-paying job. You should lose all your money along with them and never be given a job in the financial sector again.
If you're a politician and you implement a policy to eliminate homelessness, if the data shows no impact on homelessness after millions upon millions of dollars spent, you should probably be removed from office and possibly tarred and feathered. Or at least, maybe you should be required to live in the same conditions as the homeless folks you were trying to help.
The point is less that "elites aren't ever going to confront the results of their policy choices when the entire world is made worse off," and more "elites are never going to suffer consequences that are fully proportional to the harms their policy choices cause."
The issue is the asymmetry. An elite causes 100,000,000 units of dis-utility across a large population, but only suffers about 10 of those units themselves, so their incentive to fix things in minimal compared to the suffering as a whole. And perhaps worse, often the elite is able to extract 10 units of utility by causing 100,000,000 units of dis-utility, and is thus rewarded for it.
What I want is symmetry. If you're asking people to risk their lives on a submarine you designed and built yourself, the least you can do is risk your life alongside them!
If you lose all their money because you committed fraud, sure. If you lose all their money because no decision has a 100% chance of working and there's some tiny but unavoidable chance of losing all their money, no, you shouldn't.
You could demand that people not be permitted to buy fire insurance so that if they do something bad that burns down their house, they have to suffer the consequences of their bad judgment. This is not normal practice, because insurance has a purpose. If they lost the money of their depositors for reasons that are not fraud or recklessness, the golden parachute is essentially insurance, even if they got it as part of industry practice rather than by paying a monthly premium.
As determined by whom?
I think the actual relevant question is whether you were making some kind of guarantee that the money would be safe or you were giving them an informed risk such that it was clear that if [extremely low probability event] happened, the money could be lost.
And again, the point here is to disincentivize taking bad risks, and incentivize good behavior, else they might decide to take certain risks that were not originally agreed to because why not?
If the risk is indeed that tiny, then holy cow they should have no problem putting their own money at risk as well!
If they're not willing to, I read that as a strong signal that they think the risk is actually larger than that!
This is in fact why most insurance policies have exclusions for fires caused intentionally or by gross negligence.
It's also why people pay higher premiums if they're considered higher risk... or why deductibles exist.
That doesn't follow. Again, by this reasoning, we shouldn't have fire insurance, because if you want to do something with a non-zero risk of starting a fire, you need to assume the risk yourself. You point out that insurance has exclusions and deductibles, but by this reasoning people shouldn't have insurance at all, not just have exclusions and deductibles.
The entire point of insurance is so that you do not have to take on a risk with a tiny chance of happening but a large value if it happens.
I'm also pretty sure that a golden parachute is not as good for the banker as not losing his job and not needing to use the golden parachute, so considered as insurance, there's already a deductible built in, in the amount of (value of job - value of golden parachute).
Insurance companies are agreeing to 'assume' the risk of the fire occurring.
But they won't pay out of if set the building on fire intentionally (if they can prove that) and they calculate premiums based on various factors that increase or decrease fire risks.
There's a whole area of research behind moral hazard that examines how the knowledge that one is insured can change behavior.
Take this to the extreme, if a policymaker has reason to believe that a given policy is likely to result in more housefires occurring (say something stupid like mandating all houses have to be constructed of wood), but also that they, themselves, will pay no consequences as a result of this policy, then what actual incentives are there against implementing it?
We want our policymakers and decisionmakers' interests to align with the interests of the people they affect.
With housefires, they generally are aligned. Nobody wants their house to burn down, and they buy insurance to mitigate a relatively small risk that can have outsize influence on them but nobody else.
The problem arises when the person or persons who pays the cost is not the one who is making the decisions or policy.
Would you pay for fire insurance for a house you didn't own?
I agree that if you lose people's money because you committed fraud or negligence, sure, you shouldn't get a golden parachute, That's the equivalent to setting the building on fire intentionally.
The "premium" is "we're hiring you to run the bank, and part of your compensation is the possibility of getting a golden parachute if something bad happens". The premium isn't a separate line item, but the banker is still paying it--the bank wouldn't have been able to hire the banker without either providing it, or providing other compensation that makes up for its absence. And when they hired the banker, they certainly would have tried to assess how risky a banker he was when deciding how much and what kind of compensation to offer.
It's insurance, just with extra steps.
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It’s possible that many elites just believe in ideologies that are both harmful to them and the wider population. In fact I think this is often true. I’m not sure why this is seemingly not included in your example.
Plenty of people believe in entirely stupid things and always have. The rich person who suffers because the ‘justice reform’ candidate they voted for wins by a hair and lets their environment deteriorate might just believe in a bunch of really dumb memes. “Everyone acts in their absolute self-interest all the time” is the logical flaw in your reasoning. People often do things that aren’t in their best interests.
Then these ideologies should hopefully die out when the adherents keep getting filtered out every time their policies fail and they lose any and all influence they might have accrued to that point.
Not enable them to make endless excuses and to continue on unabated.
If not, then it all just builds up to a much larger, catastrophic failure further down the line.
The issue, again, is that their ideologies ALSO often enable them to duck or shift consequences, possibly indefinitely... until the whole system blows up at once.
We want to filter out these problems early enough that they don't pose larger risks later.
And people should be positioned so their own screwups blow back on them in proportion to the damage they cause, so that the system as a whole can improve when they're removed from it.
It's not about being 'absolutely' self-interested all the time, but making sure that your self interest is at least aligned with those whose interests you represent so that there's an incentive for you to AVOID screwing them.
Most elites, seemingly, have gotten to a position where they can enrich themselves without regard as to whether they're causing damage or no.
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