{"id":4002,"date":"2015-03-26T14:19:34","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T14:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=4002"},"modified":"2015-03-26T14:20:31","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T14:20:31","slug":"aristocracy-of-privilege-and-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2015\/03\/aristocracy-of-privilege-and-power\/","title":{"rendered":"America’s Aristocracy of Privilege and Power – Article by Daniel J. Bier"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Daniel J. Bier
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
March 26, 2015<\/span>
\n<\/big><\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n

Bush, Kennedy, Romney, Clinton, and, yes, even Paul \u2014 is it just a coincidence that the same names keep appearing on the ballots each election cycle? Are these families just innately talented legislators, naturally \u201cborn to rule\u201d?<\/p>\n

No, says economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz<\/a>. America’s lame political dynasties are the result of a political system rife with nepotism.<\/p>\n

\n

There is a very real chance that the presidential election in 2016 will pit Jeb Bush against Hillary Clinton.\u2026 Whether or not you like one of the candidates, it just doesn\u2019t feel right, in part because a second Bush-Clinton election makes a mockery of our self-identification as a democratic meritocracy.\u2026<\/p>\n

In our era a son of a president was roughly 1.4 million times more likely to become president than his supposed peers.\u2026 The presidency is obviously a small sample. But the same calculations can be done for other political positions. Take governors.<\/p>\n

Because it is difficult to be sure that you have counted all the sons of governors, let\u2019s assume that governors reproduce at average rates. This would mean there were about 250 baby boomer males born to governors. Five of them became governors themselves, about one in 50. This is 6,000 times the rate of the average American. The same methodology suggests that sons of senators had an 8,500 times higher chance of becoming a senator than an average American male boomer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But there\u2019s nepotism everywhere, and most parents want their children to follow in their footsteps. Is politics remarkable?<\/p>\n

\n

Is this electoral edge unusual? Successful parents, whatever their occupation, pass on their genes and plenty of other stuff to their kids. Do different fields have similar familial patterns?<\/p>\n

In just about every field I looked at, having a successful parent makes you way more likely to be a big success, but the advantage is much smaller than it is at the top of politics\u2026.<\/p>\n

Think about the N.B.A. further. The skills necessary to be a basketball player, especially height, are highly hereditary. But the N.B.A. is a meritocracy, with your performance easy to evaluate. If you do not play well, you will be cut, even if the team is the New York Knicks and your name is Patrick Ewing Jr. Father-son correlation in the N.B.A. is only one-eleventh as high as it is in the Senate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Presidents, superstar athletes, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and other leaders in their field are outliers in the distribution. \u201cRegression to the mean\u201d is a statistical principle that describes the tendency of variables to return to the average over time. In the case of hereditary athletic talents, we should expect that Michael Jordan\u2019s sons will be pretty average basketball players and will probably not end up dominating the NBA.<\/p>\n

But in politics, we don\u2019t see this: “The Bush family\u2019s dominance would be the basketball equivalent of Michael Jordan being the father of LeBron James and Kevin Durant \u2014 and of Michael Jordan\u2019s father being Walt Frazier.”<\/p>\n

In other words, the odds that the best person to run your government (assuming\u00a0such a thing exists) just so happened to live in the same house as the previous senator, governor, or president are stupendously bad.<\/p>\n

He notes that politics isn\u2019t the only sphere where irrational favoritism for close relations shows up in the data: CEOs tend to give birth to CEOs at an improbable rate, too, and\u00a0we know that heredity isn\u2019t a foolproof guide to succession in business, either. Economists have shown that family businesses<\/a> that favor succession to blood relatives tend to perform worse after the transition.<\/p>\n

The difference is that in business, the cost of the decision falls on those who make it. In politics, we all pay.<\/p>\n

Stephens-Davidowitz concludes, \u201cThe data shows conclusively that we have a nepotism problem. So now the question is: Why does the modern United States tolerate this level of privilege for political name brands?\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed. How could this be? It can’t be nepotism in the same way that family businesses tap\u00a0relations\u00a0to run the company\u00a0\u2014 it’s the voters who decide\u00a0who wins the next\u00a0election.\u00a0So how could equalitarian democracy, the great leveller, the system that tells elementary students \u201cyou too could grow up to be senator or president,\u201d recreate dynastic political succession?<\/p>\n

Well,\u00a0the answer is\u00a0that the promise is partially true: technically, any citizen can<\/em> become a senator \u2014 Sen. Elizabeth Warren, he points out, is the daughter of a janitor \u2014 but you\u2019re just 8,500 times<\/em>\u00a0more likely to get there if your mom or dad was too. And, in part, it could be that intelligence (or low cunning) is heritable and\u00a0makes politicians\u2019 kids better at the game. But that doesn\u2019t explain the continued popularity\u00a0of a figure\u00a0like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,\u00a0the dull luminary of the anti-vaccine and \u201cjail climate deniers<\/a>\u201d movements, who has clearly regressed to mean with a vengeance.<\/p>\n

A better answer is that America’s\u00a0dynasties reveal something fundamental about politics: we do not have\u00a0a meritocracy because democracy is not a good\u00a0way to select rulers<\/a> (even if it is, as is so often said, the least worst way).\u00a0Surveys show conclusively\u00a0that the electorate is wildly ill-informed about both the candidates and the issues, as well as aggressively irrational about a host of important economic, political, scientific, legal, and simply factual issues. Controlled studies show that voters select candidates<\/a> for patently absurd reasons, like their height, weight, attractiveness, and timbre\u00a0of voice. And, in answer to Stephens-Davidowitz\u2019\u00a0last\u00a0question, more than anything else, name recognition<\/a> matters.<\/p>\n

What makes politics so futile is not that the national electorate improbably keeps landing on the same few families, decade after decade. Rather, it\u2019s that the voters keep supporting the same dumb policies.<\/p>\n

We don’t need a rule to prevent political power from passed down through families. The rules that govern what people can do with\u00a0elected office matter far more than who sits there.\u00a0We need, as comedian Penn Jillette once said,\u00a0to give politicians so little<\/em> power\u00a0that it doesn’t matter who they are\u00a0\u2014 rather than so much<\/em> power\u00a0that it doesn’t matter who they are.<\/p>\n

Daniel Bier is the executive editor of\u00a0The Skeptical Libertarian<\/a>. He writes on issues relating to science, skepticism, and economic freedom, focusing on the role of evolution in social and economic development.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel J. Bier March 26, 2015 ****************************** Bush, Kennedy, Romney, Clinton, and, yes, even Paul \u2014 is it just a coincidence that the same names keep appearing on the ballots each election cycle? Are these families just innately talented legislators, naturally \u201cborn to rule\u201d? No, says economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. America’s lame political dynasties are the result of a political system rife with nepotism. There is a very real chance that the presidential election in 2016 will pit Jeb Bush against…<\/p>\n

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