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Elitism, elites

Wednesday 25th of March 2026

Elites America's elites have stored  more wealth than they can consume. Edward Luce, Financial Times, February 8, 2018 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Elites If Rome’s oligarchs could have travelled to the future, they might have learned a trick or two from the US Ivy League. It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practiced by America's top universities. … Of the 31mn Americans aged between 18 and 24, just 68,000 are Ivy League schools  undergraduates — about a fifth of a per cent. Of these, a varying ratio are non-white beneficiaries of affirmative action. Many of those are from privileged black or His[anic backgrounds, as opposed to Chicago's South Side or the wastelands of Detroit. This is the basis on which the Ivy League lays claim to being a deliverer of social change. Edward Luce, Financial Times, July 5, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Elites It is hard for even an engaged citizen to visualise the crisis that wasn't, the agonies that might have been. The result is that otherwise smart people fall for the populist fork: elites are held to be omnipotent when things go wrong and irrelevant in normal times. The Crash?  Their fault. The preceding boom? It fell from  a tree. The Iraq war? Elite hubris. Decades  on end of peace? Would have happened any-  way. A pandemic? Dereliction in high office. No pandemic? The natural order of things. This is what happens when your best and most important work is largely invisible. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 29, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Elites The most important social tensions are within the elite — not, as a decade of populism has pretended, between the elite and the people.  The person likeliest to tear down a nation's establishment is a half-member of it. He or she is close enough to have felt its condescension (which must be largely theoretical for a total outsider) and to know its weak points. Donald Trump, disdained as a bridge-and-  tunnel vulgarian for all his material privilege, is the most famous example. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 16, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Elites Of the elite corporate professions — law, finance, consultancy — the first two are vilified as ruthless. But only the third is seen as outright bullshit. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 24, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Elites Social inclusion may be a growing public mantra of the far upper class. But economic extraction remains among its core operating principles. David Callahan © 2017 Kwiple.com
Elites That Elon Musk has been able to dominate the world’s space-based satellite systems — and global communications infrastructure — with little pushback from nation-states speaks to extraordinary capture of our political possibilities by microscopically small elites. Danielle Allen, The New Republic, July/August 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Elites Those searching for one-line lessons from history should take note: apparently, it is not the people who decide to be done with democracy; it is elites. Jan-Werner Müller, Democracy Rules © 2021 Kwiple.com
Elites We got more money, we got more brains, we got better houses and apartments, we got nicer boats, we're smarter than they are and they say they're the elite. You're the elite, we're the elite. Donald Trump, comparing his supporters to his critics © 2018 Kwiple.com
Elites When elites leave their homelands, they typically go to stable countries with long-term horizons. In good times, the rich want a weak state with low tax and little regulation, but in bad times they prefer strong states. That's why the countries with the highest influx of foreign brains per capita are Aus- tralia, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Canada, according to the Fund for Peace. The safe haven of the American super- -rich in case the US collapses is social democratic New Zealand. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, July 29, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Elites say Export factories, import workers © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Elites say Why'd they ever vote for Trump? © 2018 Kwiple.com