Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
Rent seeking how? As the article says, most government positions were unpaid and to be an MP required paying all your own election expenses out of pocket, which were huge. They did it for the prestige and social rewards, not financial. Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free.
I know! How could these literal landlords be rent-seeking by taking unpaid positions of political influence to increase literal rental income and protect their wealth?
Its rent seeking because they’re using the government role to bring in the dough for themselves after they get the role. It just takes a bit of money upfront similar to a landlord buying a house.
That’s also how you restrict government roles to the rich who only use it for personal gain. Similar to people who believe that Trump is generously by “donating” his salary back but not realizing that he and his family are earning far more in bribes and kickbacks using his position.
You're asserting a lot of things that aren't in the article. If you want to argue Victorian-era MPs were all motivated by corruption then go ahead but you'll need to cite strong evidence for that, because the general consensus was that MPs of that time were not particularly corrupt. As the article says, they didn't even spend much time on lawmaking at all, so there wasn't a lot of legislation to abuse.
Careful, that's some of that stuff that they teach in humanities and classics courses. You know, what is being labeled as wasteful or impractical in this thread.
I believe Victorian wealth disparity was on par with today's in America -- perhaps America has slightly more "power law" wealth at the very top of the percentage charts -- but for those in charge of new empires, maybe this article will be very useful and remind them it's better to go party in SF than it is to put in too much time in the office.
That's an unusual measure -- and I like it. I wonder what those percentages are in very wealthy communities in America, e.g. Greenwich and surroundings, Nantucket, Hamptons plus labor communities west.
> Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century.
That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?
This theory continues in modern elite American Universities -- they exist not to provide job skills but to deliver a "liberal education" -- one that teaches students to think, be moral, etc. (I read from the brochure here).
Those Ivies that have more job-oriented programs tend to have (at the least) those schools looked down upon in comparison to the more 'pure' academic pursuits, e.g. Cornell's Hospitality school.
While Ivies are not tied strictly to America's true upper class, serving more as a means of entry into the upper-middle and lower-upper, this sort of signaling is an important part of some of the soft benefits they provide students -- it would be gauche to be worried about a job, ne c'est pas?
It's a thing in other countries as well. Schools which teach the classical languages in Belgium are called humaniora (literally 'more human'). About 30% of my classes were Latin and ancient Greek but we would also have more in depth art history classes.
They would lack in other education (like math and sciences) in theory but as it's also the place the best students get their education they tend to just force you to learn both (which is against some protocols afaik).
Also also hard to fake and easy to slip in. You throw in a Latin quote in your conversation and either the other person gets it and you both know you're the proper class, or they don't and you both know you're higher up the ladder than they are.
Academia in Britain was intimately connected to membership of the church and, thus, to the ability to speak Latin to hold services. It held on beyond that tenure out of both momentum and prestige.
(Modulo d'oh because of the industrial revolution and the relatively easy wealth extraction that that enabled;) because the British public had internalized (I would venture to this day) the distinction between upstairs and downstairs and did not present a revolutionary risk to the elite. This then allowed the wise decision of the elite to permit social mobility to those who would work to further the broader cause of the Empire, in all domains including sciences. This is likely a very goldilock moment for any civilization: higher valuation of reason over dogma; a techological and economic production jump that enabled a categorical raising of one nation over many others; a mass population that did not think less of its 'betters' because they were slothful extravagents (as long as they 'acted' superior); and finally the creation of a productive and resourceful middle class that was satisfied to help in the administration and operation of an enterprise that was deemed a national cause: the empire.
Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants who did their laundry, cooked their food, poured their Port and generally did all the work.
Because it was not any different from any other aristocracy in the world at the time. The question the article is trying to answer is "why Britain?" Of all the competing european empires what made that particular one especially successful?
The legal framework was a big part of the puzzle. Britain's lawyers and legal system were head and shoulders above their peers. Colonies and companies in charge were controlled by complex legal contracts guaranteeing profits to those in charge, from the Crown down.
In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.
How's this different from modern-day "aristocracy"? Don't they get servants who do their laundry, cook their food, pour their Port, and generally do all the work?
> Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants ...
OK but we're talking about a period where the UK was the world's first superpower.
I understand you want to portray the despicable conditions of servants living in rich people's houses in Victorian britain but...
Wanna have a talk about the living conditions of people in, say, Eritrea at the same time? (Eritrea has never really been colonized btw so the whole "it's because of colonialism" angle doesn't really work).
Or even just the living conditions of poor people in Britain who happened to not have jobs as servants for the rich?
My great-uncle (a radiologist) and my great-aunt (she had a pharmacy) had a servant during a bit part of their lives, Tess: and she was basically part of the family. Sure she did the laundry and cooking and cleaning but she never struck me as some oppressed human being living in misery. What I remember from visiting them was my uncle in his office, always working (analyzing radio from patients, writing (snail) mails to other doctors, etc.) and Tess always working too: just a different kind of work.
People getting paid to work for other people doesn't imply slavery. We could of course also have a talk about actual slavery, what were the last countries to officially abolish it, who were the biggest slavers in the world, which countries still have actual slaves (and sex slaves) today, etc.
I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
And also millions of poor and suffering people from the colonized countries. Millions of them died of famine. I'm not sure how much we can learn from those elites.
It did mention the colonial empire up near the beginning.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.
The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.
Countries that were not under an empire also had famines and other disasters (China had a civil war with 50 million killed, IIRC) as well as endemic practices like slavery.
Those famines were not created by the Victorians. They were all originating in natural disasters that the locals were unable to handle for themselves. The claim that the Victorians did something immoral is an ideological one, as it's effectively a claim that even though they did try to help they could have tried even more - and not rising to that level of assistance (determined arbitrarily by moderns who were not there) was somehow evil.
This view is usually also implying without stating that it is uncharitable or morally wrong for governments to not suspend free markets and impose a communist planned economy the moment there's a natural disaster. That's a highly controversial view (and a wrong one if you want something that works), but it gets slipped into criticisms of the Victorians all the time.
This is the same logic that says shutting down USAID killed people. It's an attempt to convert the possibility of charity into a hard moral obligation - but if accepted, that would make it no longer charity.
Specifically:
• The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.
• In India they did also provide aid, organized relief camps, suspended tax collection, and spent large sums of taxes and Victorian Brits made large numbers of charitable donations. It didn't look so different to the various aid campaigns for Africa in the 20th century.
• There is no such thing as the "late Victorian Holocaust". That's a concept from a book written by a Marxist in 2000 that argues that capitalism is the same thing as genocide, and frankly seems incredibly offensive to survivors of the actual holocaust.
Elites are generally immoral, even today. I mean only in relative terms, they were no worse than others. On the positive side, they did quite a few pro-social things as well (abolition of slavery, for example).
This is addressed near the beginning as the Orthodox view:
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true.
"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."
Completely faulty premise. The British Empire was already globally dominant before the Victorian era. You cannot attribute success nor failure to something that came after the fact; I suppose the Victorian elites were not time travelers. That the Empire has since collapsed does not give an especially strong vote of confidence in their stewardship, however.
Moreover, the article presupposes the notion that STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity. Generously, STEM might be considered elite for a peasant. Let us not forget who the current US president is, or the general makeup of both the American and British political systems. Hint: it's not composed of scientists and engineers.
The decline and fall was within a lifetime. Not just a random person's lifetime, but that of a single famous individual. By any of the usual endpoints (Indian Independence, Suez Crisis, Winds of Change/South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth) the Empire ended while Winston Churchill was alive- he was born in the 1874, at the height of the Empire, graduated Sandhurst and joined the British Army in 1895, took Queen Victoria's shilling in several colonial wars, then was Secretary of State for the Colonies in the 1920s, and died after Britain had withdrawn from most of her African holdings.
Within a lifetime or so, which is certainly within a range you would expect for a global empire to collapse; that rarely happens overnight. That said, it is an unfalsifiable supposition, as much as the article's supposition is, although I framed mine in less certain terms than the article claiming it as factual that said elites were effective.
As for condescension, I'll kindly note that it was you who was instructing me how to engage people and how I should be writing. When someone is writing a statement that directly contradicts even the news of the past few days, I have to ask if they are sure. I'm not sure if I can be much more deferential than that.
I would say that being sexually abused by older boys (which what the male relationships at schools largely were) was in any way healthy of helpful to anyone.
I think its possible that humanities based education made for efficient administrators.
I think that extreme prosperity like this (another example - Baby Boomers in the US) is a lagging indicator of geopolitical/industrial power.
Britain was prosperous in the 1800s because of colonialism and the industrial revolution. The US was prosperous in the second half of the 1900's because they capitalized on not being decimated by WW2.
IMO Britain's success in this era was actually sustained prosperity driven by the working class, and the failure to maintain global leadership followed from the victorian attitude of the elite.
They got nothing on American Elites - the current regime is packed to the gills with TV personalities who are incapable of actually doing their nominal jobs, yet they've all done extremely well for themselves.
This article really should not be surprising - the elite go to school to learn to rule - to socialize and develop networks of trust. Doing stuff is for the class below (PMC in today's terms).
Those who automatically gain leverage of information network, rent seeking, and labor superiority are able to use immense leasure time to better process directional changes. This isnt' automatically true, many Victorian elites went bankrupt, but it is true for some.
What the protestant work ethic is either wrong or intentionally dishonest about, is hard work may inform you of the technicalities of labor, but it rarely gives you the time, enenrgy or education to understand its organizational effeciencies or opportunties.
This is incredibly timely as we have stories and visual evidence of our current oligarchs clearly high on drugs, drunk, or generally indifferent in a leaisure way to the serious science of running our society and business, yet seem to continually get the upper hand in doing it.
Something I've always wondered: What keeps the guards and thugs of the ""elite"" from just killing the elite and taking their money?
They don't have any actual physical strength.
No seriously, think about it: Imagine 2000 years ago: A merchant prepares a caravan of goods to trek across the wilderness to a far-off settlement. He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
Or a landlord hires some goons to go beat up a tenant for not paying rent on time. Why don't the goons beat up the landlord and take the income from ALL his properties?
Or, after a miserly old oligarch pays off his bodyguards a few times, they'll eventually learn where he keeps all his money. What keeps them from torturing him to give it all to them?
All hierarchies work like that. In order for the top to gain benefit from wielding the power of the entire hierarchy of lessers, it necessarily means that the coordinated power of each level is greater than that above them (at least on average).
Take a simplified model of a king, a bunch of nobles, beneath whom are a bunch of knights, beneath whom are a bunch of serfs. Collectively, the nobles control more power than than the king. But if an individual noble defects while the others remain loyal, then the King maintains enough power to crush the uprising. So as the King, you have to proactively maintain a status quo where the nobles can't easily collectively plot against you. Classic strategies include maintaining some kind of nebulous ranking, where nobles are constantly competing with each other to garner favor, and thus likely have more to gain outing a rival noble's conspiracy than joining it, keeping the nobles sufficiently comfortable such that the risk of losing that comfort acts as friction against plotting against you, and in times of extreme distrust, keeping the nobles close at hand such that you can take decisive action against the individual noble before the forces they control can show up.
At each level of the hierarchy, recursively apply similar strategies. Nobels need to keep control of their knights, knights need to keep control of their peasants.
The first reason it’s not more common is that wealth isn’t so static. Landlords have to collect rents, oligarchs have to skim off the top of their corrupt enterprises etc. A guard who kills the landlord, then manages to organize rent collection for the benefit of other guards, has essentially become the new landlord.
The second reason is that a guard doesn’t just have to kill the landlord, a guard potentially has to kill all the other guards who want all the landlord’s wealth for themselves.
Since rent has to be collected anyway, and an individual guard has a low chance of surviving against all other guards, remaining a guard is a lower risk option.
>What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
This does happen but yes obviously attempts are made to prevent it, the guards my not be familiar with the journey, other guards may be family members or trusted friends. Often then the guards become the Merchant then.
You see this with the billionaires building luxury apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand and other exotic locales that are like mini theme parks. It slowly dawns on them that when society breaks down that's exactly what it means. You can't depend on normal social norms or laws anymore, how do you stop your security team from kicking you out of your own bunker, how you do you charter a flight to your bunker? It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.
Prepping is different as it doesn't involve depending on others. Just yourself and your preparations.
It has happened a few times in history, e.g. the French revolution and the Bolshevik revolution.
However once they killed the "elite" or "oppressor" they couldn't stop the killing, and kept redefining who the "oppressor" was, until it was anyone who had one more cow than the rest.
Why beat someone where some negative consequences are likely to follow, if the same person can give you immunity to infinitely beat and extort large group of people only for your pleasure and at your whim? This is called society.
The aristocracy, certainly.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?
Those Ivies that have more job-oriented programs tend to have (at the least) those schools looked down upon in comparison to the more 'pure' academic pursuits, e.g. Cornell's Hospitality school.
While Ivies are not tied strictly to America's true upper class, serving more as a means of entry into the upper-middle and lower-upper, this sort of signaling is an important part of some of the soft benefits they provide students -- it would be gauche to be worried about a job, ne c'est pas?
They would lack in other education (like math and sciences) in theory but as it's also the place the best students get their education they tend to just force you to learn both (which is against some protocols afaik).
The prestige also accrued because it was the language of the educated in Europe for a long time.
Why do you think all animal species have a latin name? You think the ancient romans classified them?
The industries in Britain had access to such huge monopolistic markets, so not really a surprise.
In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.
OK but we're talking about a period where the UK was the world's first superpower.
I understand you want to portray the despicable conditions of servants living in rich people's houses in Victorian britain but...
Wanna have a talk about the living conditions of people in, say, Eritrea at the same time? (Eritrea has never really been colonized btw so the whole "it's because of colonialism" angle doesn't really work).
Or even just the living conditions of poor people in Britain who happened to not have jobs as servants for the rich?
My great-uncle (a radiologist) and my great-aunt (she had a pharmacy) had a servant during a bit part of their lives, Tess: and she was basically part of the family. Sure she did the laundry and cooking and cleaning but she never struck me as some oppressed human being living in misery. What I remember from visiting them was my uncle in his office, always working (analyzing radio from patients, writing (snail) mails to other doctors, etc.) and Tess always working too: just a different kind of work.
People getting paid to work for other people doesn't imply slavery. We could of course also have a talk about actual slavery, what were the last countries to officially abolish it, who were the biggest slavers in the world, which countries still have actual slaves (and sex slaves) today, etc.
I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.
The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.
The great famine of Ireland, The great famine of India, and even The late Victorian Holocaust is a thing.
It is also well documented where other empire wanted to help the starving people, but denied because it would make them looked bad.
I really can not see that they are not lack of morality.
Those famines were not created by the Victorians. They were all originating in natural disasters that the locals were unable to handle for themselves. The claim that the Victorians did something immoral is an ideological one, as it's effectively a claim that even though they did try to help they could have tried even more - and not rising to that level of assistance (determined arbitrarily by moderns who were not there) was somehow evil.
This view is usually also implying without stating that it is uncharitable or morally wrong for governments to not suspend free markets and impose a communist planned economy the moment there's a natural disaster. That's a highly controversial view (and a wrong one if you want something that works), but it gets slipped into criticisms of the Victorians all the time.
This is the same logic that says shutting down USAID killed people. It's an attempt to convert the possibility of charity into a hard moral obligation - but if accepted, that would make it no longer charity.
Specifically:
• The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.
• In India they did also provide aid, organized relief camps, suspended tax collection, and spent large sums of taxes and Victorian Brits made large numbers of charitable donations. It didn't look so different to the various aid campaigns for Africa in the 20th century.
• There is no such thing as the "late Victorian Holocaust". That's a concept from a book written by a Marxist in 2000 that argues that capitalism is the same thing as genocide, and frankly seems incredibly offensive to survivors of the actual holocaust.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true.
"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."
Moreover, the article presupposes the notion that STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity. Generously, STEM might be considered elite for a peasant. Let us not forget who the current US president is, or the general makeup of both the American and British political systems. Hint: it's not composed of scientists and engineers.
Are you really sure of what you are saying?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
As for condescension, I'll kindly note that it was you who was instructing me how to engage people and how I should be writing. When someone is writing a statement that directly contradicts even the news of the past few days, I have to ask if they are sure. I'm not sure if I can be much more deferential than that.
I think its possible that humanities based education made for efficient administrators.
Britain was prosperous in the 1800s because of colonialism and the industrial revolution. The US was prosperous in the second half of the 1900's because they capitalized on not being decimated by WW2.
IMO Britain's success in this era was actually sustained prosperity driven by the working class, and the failure to maintain global leadership followed from the victorian attitude of the elite.
This article really should not be surprising - the elite go to school to learn to rule - to socialize and develop networks of trust. Doing stuff is for the class below (PMC in today's terms).
What the protestant work ethic is either wrong or intentionally dishonest about, is hard work may inform you of the technicalities of labor, but it rarely gives you the time, enenrgy or education to understand its organizational effeciencies or opportunties.
This is incredibly timely as we have stories and visual evidence of our current oligarchs clearly high on drugs, drunk, or generally indifferent in a leaisure way to the serious science of running our society and business, yet seem to continually get the upper hand in doing it.
Ask yourself ... why?
They don't have any actual physical strength.
No seriously, think about it: Imagine 2000 years ago: A merchant prepares a caravan of goods to trek across the wilderness to a far-off settlement. He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
Or a landlord hires some goons to go beat up a tenant for not paying rent on time. Why don't the goons beat up the landlord and take the income from ALL his properties?
Or, after a miserly old oligarch pays off his bodyguards a few times, they'll eventually learn where he keeps all his money. What keeps them from torturing him to give it all to them?
Take a simplified model of a king, a bunch of nobles, beneath whom are a bunch of knights, beneath whom are a bunch of serfs. Collectively, the nobles control more power than than the king. But if an individual noble defects while the others remain loyal, then the King maintains enough power to crush the uprising. So as the King, you have to proactively maintain a status quo where the nobles can't easily collectively plot against you. Classic strategies include maintaining some kind of nebulous ranking, where nobles are constantly competing with each other to garner favor, and thus likely have more to gain outing a rival noble's conspiracy than joining it, keeping the nobles sufficiently comfortable such that the risk of losing that comfort acts as friction against plotting against you, and in times of extreme distrust, keeping the nobles close at hand such that you can take decisive action against the individual noble before the forces they control can show up.
At each level of the hierarchy, recursively apply similar strategies. Nobels need to keep control of their knights, knights need to keep control of their peasants.
There were legal system and courts well before 1000 years ago.
The first reason it’s not more common is that wealth isn’t so static. Landlords have to collect rents, oligarchs have to skim off the top of their corrupt enterprises etc. A guard who kills the landlord, then manages to organize rent collection for the benefit of other guards, has essentially become the new landlord.
The second reason is that a guard doesn’t just have to kill the landlord, a guard potentially has to kill all the other guards who want all the landlord’s wealth for themselves.
Since rent has to be collected anyway, and an individual guard has a low chance of surviving against all other guards, remaining a guard is a lower risk option.
This does happen but yes obviously attempts are made to prevent it, the guards my not be familiar with the journey, other guards may be family members or trusted friends. Often then the guards become the Merchant then.
You see this with the billionaires building luxury apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand and other exotic locales that are like mini theme parks. It slowly dawns on them that when society breaks down that's exactly what it means. You can't depend on normal social norms or laws anymore, how do you stop your security team from kicking you out of your own bunker, how you do you charter a flight to your bunker? It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.
Prepping is different as it doesn't involve depending on others. Just yourself and your preparations.
However once they killed the "elite" or "oppressor" they couldn't stop the killing, and kept redefining who the "oppressor" was, until it was anyone who had one more cow than the rest.
Read Leviathan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)