Nadia Asparouhova: prediction

Transcript context

…Interesting. Do you think the kids of today's tech billionaires will be future aristocrats? That they'll be tomorrow's Rockefellers? That effective altruism will be an elite aristocratic philosophy. Yeah, I kind of worry about that actually. Within the US, we were kind of lucky in that we have these two different types of elites. We have the aristocratic elites and we have meritocratic elites. Most other countries basically just have aristocratic elites, especially comparing the US to Britain in this way. In the aristocratic model, your wealth and your power is conferred to you by previous generations. You just kind of inherit it from your parents or your family or whomever. The upside of that, if there is an upside, is that you get really socialized into this idea of — What does it mean to be a public steward? What does it mean to think of yourself and your responsibility to the rest of society as a privileged elite person? In the US, we have this really great thing where we have the American dream, right? Lots of people that didn't grow up with money can break into the elite ranks by doing something that makes them really successful. And that's a really special thing about the US. So we have this whole class of meritocratic elites who may not have aristocratic backgrounds, but ended up doing something within their lifetimes that made them successful. I think it's a really cool thing. The downside of that being that you don't really get socialized into — What does it mean to have this fortune and do something interesting with your money? You don't have this generational benefit that the aristocratic elites have of presiding over your land or whatever you want to call it, where you're learning how to think about yourself in relation to the rest of society. So it's much easier to just kind of hoard your wealth or whatever. When you think about what are the next generations, the children of the meritocratic elites going to look or what are they going to do, it's very easy to imagine them just becoming aristocratic elites in the sense of, they're just going to inherit the money from their families. And they haven't also really been socialized into how to think about their role in society. All the meritocratic elites eventually turn into aristocratic elites, which is where I think you start seeing this trend now towards people wanting to spend down their fortunes within their lifetime or within a set number of decades after they die because they see what happened in previous generations and are like, “Oh, I don't want to do that. ” Well, it's interesting. You mentioned that the aristocratic elites feel that they have the responsibility to give back more so than the meritocratic elites. But I believe that in the U.S. the amount of people who give to philanthropy and the total amount they give is higher than in Europe where they probably have a higher ratio of aristocratic elites. Wouldn't you expect the opposite if the aristocratic elites are the ones that are inculcated to give back?…

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