Interesting post by Rob K. Henderson, Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games. He begins by defining the categories:
Experts are people who know things. They’re judged by other experts—people who speak the same language, use the same methods, and know the same details. You can spot experts by their credentials, their technical precision, or just the way they argue. They care about being right. They’re evaluated on whether their work holds up—whether it can be tested, measured, replicated, or defended under scrutiny. They debate each other, go deep into the weeds, and let the details decide who’s correct.
Elites are different. They’re not judged on technical knowledge but on being impressive across a broader range: wealth, looks, taste, social fluency, connections, charisma, and cultural feel. Elite institutions tend to screen for such qualities, which is why educational pedigree is also often important. This is why you can major in anything at Harvard and still get an elite job. No need for narrow expertise in, say, engineering or mathematics.
I would add a third category though: pundits or ‘thought-influencers’, as positioned between these two groups. Pundits have expertise, similar to experts, but also considerable influence/reach or clout, unlike experts. Yet, unlike elites, they don’t have power in a formal sense, nor are they super-wealthy. They cannot make big decisions, but have enough reach to indirectly influence the trajectory of policy.
Some elites have a lot of wealth, but not much influence or reach otherwise. An example are the Walton heirs. Policy elites have considerable responsibilities, unlike punditry, in which there is much less accountability and being much more insulated overall. It’s not like any of the pundits who advocated for the Iraq War, Covid lockdowns, or increased immigration lost their jobs for endorsing wrong/bad policy, or are at risk of being replaced by non-English-speaking immigrants. Policy-elites who are wrong not uncommonly face some sort of tangible consequence, such as being fired/resigning, losing reelection, or ‘fading away’ from the public eye (pretty much the entirety of the George W. Bush cabinet) in disgrace.
Like experts, pundits have subject-matter expertise. Sure, pundits may sound misinformed when straying outside of their area of expertise, but this is true of experts too. The notion that experts have more intellectual humility doesn’t necessarily hold either, as we saw during Covid, in which experts promoted bad policy proposals, such as lockdowns, or promised things that were false or unsupported by the data, such as assurances of the Covid vaccine stopping the spread of Covid, which it had clearly failed to do.
Billionaire tech elites, such as Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Chamath, Elon Musk etc. commonly aspire to punditry, with mixed success. For example, today, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt penned a NYTs essay warning of the risk of China to America’s competitiveness. But the reverse never happens: pundits using their reputations and brands to become business elites or political elites.
This irreversibility suggests in terms of revealed preferences that punditry is possibly a more desirable position or vocation than merely being wealthy. For this reason, I have argued that being a pundit is the best category, even better than being elite or super-wealthy. In this sense, successful pundits such as Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias, who are read by millions, have the best jobs in the world, as even tech billionaires aspire to that same role, by either dabbling in punditry or turning into effectively a second career, like Elon Musk or David Sacks.
It’s not enough to just have billions of dollars or creating products used by millions of people; they also want to be seen as having insightful opinions about society, or shaping the arc of society in some way, beyond just philanthropy. Being a thought leader means getting credit for originating ideas, whereas donations are more private and static. Ideas will always outlive wealth. More people remember Ross Perot as an unsuccessful candidate whose warnings about offshoring still echo today, than as a successful businessman.
Pundits also have a lot of social status, maybe not as much as elites, but more than experts. Someone like David Brooks, who writes for the NYTs, derives status from this title. And with much greater longevity than either CEOs or politicians, the latter whose tenures often have defined limits.
Moreover, pundits make a lot of money, much more than experts, such as consulting, Substack/newsletter subscriptions, podcasting, Twitter revenue sharing, and so on. It’s not Walton-levels of wealth, but it’s solidly upper-class. When you do the math, this is is comparable to, and possibly even exceeding, top tech salaries. Thousands of subscribers paying $5-10 is a lot of money, and all recuring and passive. Plus the platform or brand, which in its own right is worth a lot. So pundits clearly have the best of both elites and experts: money, influence, and status even if they are not dictating policy.