We’re not smart. We don’t work hard. We’re just posh.
President of a Viennese private bank catering to the aristocracy
I dislike of the concept of aristocracy, but is it possible that having an aristocracy is beneficial to a society? If we assume that it’s a good idea to put a small, extraordinary talented elite into leadership positions, is hereditary aristocracy a sensible way of doing that?
Here’s a thought experiment: Assume there’s a 1% chance that someone has the qualities required to belong to a country’s aristocracy, and the heritability of those qualities is 80%. That’s generously based on the upper end of the estimates for the heritability for IQ. Having aristocratic qualities is likely also related to other traits like people skills or ruthlessness, which are less heritable, but let’s ignore that for a moment. For simplicity, let’s also assume random mating.
A superficial glance at those assumptions would suggest that it makes sense to have a heritable aristocracy, since highly talented aristocratic parents will have highly talented children.
This is wrong. Under the scenario above, 83% of those in the top percentile will be born from parents that aren’t in the top percentile. Only 0.4% will have both parents from the top percentile. The other 16.6% will have one parent from the top percentile. This means that even if we assume that the qualities that are required for aristocracy are highly heritable, most of those that have those qualities will come from families that don’t belong to the aristocracy. This is a special case of reversion to the mean, and it’s not limited to the aristocracy. For example, most Olympic athletes don’t have parents that were Olympic athletes.
My encounters with members of the nobility in Vienna and Cambridge support my notion that entrusting a country’s fortunes to a heritable aristocracy is a bad idea. I found them more pleasant than I had assumed, but they didn’t show any signs of outstanding ability.
Here’s another data point: Around the year 1900, something like half a percent of the population of countries like Austria, Germany and England belonged to nobility. How did that work out?
All of this doesn’t answer the question of how much a country’s fortunes are linked to the upper middle class, especially when belonging to that class isn’t hereditary. Maybe that’s a topic for another blog post.
Nehaveigur 