Tyler Cowen summarizing... Elites are arguing from their class and demographic biases (a bias can be positive, to be clear), not from their expertise; that lowers the marginal value of expertise, at least given how our world operates

Re-Assessing Elite-Public Gaps in Political Behavior. Joshua D. Kertzer. August 3, 2020, Forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science. Author's take: https://twitter.com/jkertzer/status/1298970729292222464

Full paper: https://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jkertzer/Research_files/Elite-Public-Gaps-Web.pdf

Tyler Cowen's take: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/the-elites-really-are-worse-than-you-think.html

Abstract: Political scientists often criticize psychological approaches to the study of politics on the grounds that many psychological theories were developed on convenience samples of college students or members of the mass public, whereas many of the most important decisions in politics are made by elites, who are presumed to differ systematically from ordinary citizens. This paper proposes an overarching framework for thinking about differences between elites and masses, presenting the results of a meta-analysis of 162 paired treatments from paired experiments on political elites and mass publics, as well as an analysis of 12 waves of historical elite and mass public opinion data on foreign policy issues over a 43 year period. It finds political scientists both overstate the magnitude of elite-public gaps in decision-making, and misunderstand the determinants of elite-public gaps in political attitudes, many of which are due to basic compositional differences rather than to elites’ domain-specific expertise.

Verification materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LHOTOK