Why Elites Still Matter

Among the most important voices in tech, Dwarkesh Patel, just made a strong statement in support of animal rights.

Among the more surprising — and robust — findings of social scientific research is that elites matter much less for social change than most people might suspect. The reason is twofold.

First, elites and other highly-connected people tend to be susceptible to what social network scientists call “countervailing influence.” Elites have a large number of social connections, and each of these connections is a form of social drag preventing change. This explains audience capture — when a content-creator is shaped by their audience more than they are able to shape it.

Second, the people influenced by elites tend to lack the social redundancy necessary for change to stick. This is because elites tend to, by their very elite status, be at the center of hub-and-spoke social networks. It turns out that networks of this sort are inefficient at spreading complex contagion through social networks because, even if the elite changes people who are one degree of separation from them, the change stops there rather than bouncing through a redundant social network.

Peer-to-peer networks are much more efficient mechanisms when social redundancy is required for change to stick.

I’ve argued based on this research that the average prison inmate might be more important than Oprah Winfrey in efforts at social change. The reason is that the average prison inmate has: (a) fewer social connections; and (b) more redundancy in those connections (e.g., close family ties that all know one another) than someone like Oprah. The implication is that social movements probably spend far too much time and money chasing celebrities and elites. (For a different view on this, check out my conversation with economist Noah Smith.)

But today, I am going to make the argument that elites still matter. The point is made salient by an important podcast with Dwarkesh Patel and Lewis Bollard about the fight against factory farming. Watch the full show below. Here’s my very quick review.

Dwarkesh is not well known outside of tech. But within tech spaces he is arguably the most important podcaster in the world. He has recently held conversations with luminaries such as Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Meta/Facebook) and Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) and George Church (arguably the most important figure in modern biology). This week, Dwarkesh invited Lewis on the show. And I was stoked.

You might now be wondering: didn’t you just say elites don’t matter? Why the Dwarkesh exception? The answer to these questions is an important qualification to the general thesis that elites don’t matter. They do matter, just not in the way that most people think.

Dwarkesh is not likely to directly change the people in his audience. This is the point about Oprah Winfrey, countervailing influence, and social redundancy. But elites like Dwarkesh can serve two other important functions.

First, they can help to reverse one of the roadblocks in social change: preference falsification. Human beings are social animals who often hide what we truly believe when we think there may be some social penalty. When this is the case, transparency is often more important than persuasion in driving change. This was almost surely the case in gay rights, where a cascade of people “coming out” triggered a revolution in public sentiment.

And, importantly, elites who publicly signal their support for a cause can assist others in coming out. They change the permission structure around what people are allowed to publicly say. In short, people like Dwarkesh matter to the extent that they empower you to make statements in support of animal rights.

Second, elites can destabilize the pillars of support for the status quo. Even if their direct efforts are ineffective, by turning against a system, they make it less likely that others will be able to defend it. The classic example of this is LBJ and civil rights. LBJ, who was a racist politician from the South, probably did not directly do much to assist the cause of civil rights. But by turning against Jim Crow, he destabilized the effort to prop it up by showing that even a Southern politician saw something wrong with racism in America.

Here, too, Dwarkesh’s support is important. The tech bro culture has been one of the most influential forces in human civilization in the last two decades and, for many years, it has condemned the soy boys of the left. The fact that one of the most prominent voices in that space — Dwarkesh is a libertarian with a passionate male audience — is showing support for animals can be used to destabilize efforts to condemn concern for animals as wokeism or sentimentality.

So there you have it: elites still matter because they can reverse preference falsification, and because they can signal instability in support for the status quo. But, crucially, both of these impacts only work if people (including people who don’t care much about the elite in question otherwise) know that the elites are expressing public support for a cause. This is why it’s so important to amplify the signal when someone like Dwarkesh makes a statement in support of animal rights.

He might not do much to influence his audience. But, by changing the permission structure and destabilizing opposition, he can help you influence yours.

Give the show a listen, and share it with a friend.