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"Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without some tight context.

Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.

On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.

I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.

They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.

I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.

People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.

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cess11 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Power, like money, is mainly inherited.

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FredPret 7 hours ago | parent [-]

This sounds more like a slogan, a belief, than a fact.

It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0]

Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1]

We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything.

This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced.

What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people.

[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...

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latexr 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It’s not true for the extreme top end

Any extreme is, by definition, unusual. You don’t need to be a billionaire (which is what the articule you linked to focus on) to be considered powerful or wealthy.

Tellingly, that articles notes that:

> The proportion of those in the list who grew up poor or had little wealth remained constant at roughly 20 percent throughout the same period.

Which suggests that inheriting power and money does make a difference in your chance of success. They continue:

> Most individuals on the Forbes 400 list did not inherit the family business but rather made their own fortune.

But one does not follow from the other. Inheriting a business is not the only way to have a leg up. If you’re well off you have the opportunity to risk going into some venture on your own and fail, because you have a safety net. Furthermore, your affluent family can and probably will make a difference in your business. I’m reminded of a piece of news a while back where a couple of rich kids were bragging they made their company successful “from scratch” but upon further inspection into it was revealed their customers were rich friends of their parents.

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cess11 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There is no self-made wealth. You can't become wealthy without the labour of other people.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billion...

The article you linked was a bit fuzzy, seems they counted people like Thiel and Musk as 'entrepreneurs' rather than inheritance because they didn't keep running a family company. But them being wealthy is absolutely connected to their families being privileged and the nasty, nasty crimes they profited from.

	▲	FredPret 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You know you’ve gone off the deep end when you call Musk an “entrepreneur” in quotes instead of what he is - a regular, if excellent, entrepreneur. Having a leg up due to coming from a well-off background invalidates nothing. These top entrepreneurs and politicians typically grew up upper-middle class or as members of the minor rich; they rise to positions of prominence from there. That’s fundamentally different from inheriting power even if you’re a dunce as kings once did.