Following on the post immediately below, "....The Trouble With Depending on Experts" with its look at the urge to power/control/domination in the recent half-decade, we zoom out for a more panoramic view of the interplay between two types of people who have shown themselves to not really be all that they have purported to be over the last century or so.
From Rob Henderson's Newsletter, May the fourth:
Understanding the expert-elite divide
Experts and elites play fundamentally different games. Misunderstanding this distinction warps how we judge institutions—and who we choose to trust.
A few days ago, The Free Press published my Letter to the Editor discussing the difference between experts and elites—an insightful distinction I first encountered on Robin Hanson’s Substack.
Here I elaborate on this framework. I’ll be speaking with a certain amount of looseness and generalization. Any time you speak about social patterns there will be exceptions. Boundaries can be fuzzy. Still, this is a useful framework.
Defining Experts and Elites
In most societies, people fall into one of three roles: the masses, the experts, and the elites.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.
It’s common to see someone from an elite college with a degree in English or political science go on to work at a top consulting firm even though their degree had nothing to do with their job. Many elite organizations don’t filter for narrow technical expertise but rather roundedness and the qualities that make for an elite rather than an expert.
They talk to other elites—not necessarily in the same field, but from the same orbit. Their speech is less about precision and more about mood, values, and gestures. Social grooming and chimp politics. Instead of drilling down, they smooth over. Instead of proving their point, they bring people along to crystallize a consensus. They win arguments through allegiance rather than getting closer to the actual objective truth.
Recall season 6 of the television series Mad Men. Dr. Arnold Rosen, a relatively plain man, tells the tall and handsome protagonist, Don Draper, “If I looked like you and talked like that, I wouldn’t have had to go to medical school.” Don, who didn’t graduate from college, responds with a restrained smile.
The Expert–Elite Spectrum
You can think of experts and elites as ends of a spectrum.At one end: the pure expert—say, a mathematician—does proofs all day and needs zero social skills. At the other: the pure elite—a politician, a CEO—who might not have much technical knowledge, but knows how to talk, how to read a room, how to get people on board.
Elites like to say they’re just following the experts. “We believe the science,” they’ll insist. But elites can overrule expert opinion—especially on issues charged with moral or emotional weight. They pretend their views came from neutral experts, when they often don’t.
A lot of elites, though, were experts first. Managers climb the ladder from technical roles. Thought leaders often start out as academics or journalists. Eventually they shift focus. From depth to breadth. From precision to persuasion. Many still call themselves “experts.” Elites understand audiences, coalitions, and cultural sensitivities. They know how to frame things. That’s what qualifies them, supposedly, to lead the conversation rather than merely contribute to it.
Academics tend to stay in their lane. “Here’s what I know about my field.” But they’ll stop short of broader recommendations. They’re cautious, disciplined, trained to qualify their claims. Their audience is other experts. The job is to be precise, not persuasive.
Public intellectuals play a different game. They range wider, speak more freely, and they’re more comfortable telling people what should be done. They aren’t just sharing knowledge. They’re trying to build coalitions, shape opinion, steer the ship. Which means their language shifts. Less jargon, less hedging.
And they’re judged differently, too. Academics get evaluated by other specialists: Does this person know what they’re talking about? Are they following the rules of the field? Public intellectuals, by contrast, have to impress a broader audience. They’re expected to have taste, poise, connections—celebrity-adjacent traits. It’s not enough to be right; you also have to be compelling.
Experts talk in a particular way. It’s precise, analytical, often skeptical. They’re comfortable pointing out flaws, raising objections, disagreeing in public. That’s part of the job—scrutinize the details, say what’s wrong, argue your case. Elite talk is different. It’s smoother. More flattery. More vagueness. More emphasis on values and shared goals.
Here I can’t help but recall a quote from Thomas Sowell: "For university presidents, as for politicians at all levels, one of the most valuable talents for the success of their careers is the ability to say things that make no sense, with a straight face and a lofty tone."
Elite talk is less about getting things exactly right and more about keeping people on board. Building consensus, projecting optimism, saying the kind of thing that motivates rather than scrutinizes. It’s not that one is better than the other—they serve different functions. Expert talk is for getting to the truth. Elite talk is for getting things to move. And in most real-world settings—institutions, media, politics—it’s elite talk that sets the tone.
At a conference, the person giving a talk is often more of an expert. The panel discussion afterward is more elite territory, where people will opine on topics they have no special expertise in. Academics tend to cluster toward the expert side. Public intellectuals drift elite. A frontline worker might know every detail of how a system works; their manager probably couldn’t do the job, but knows how to talk about it in a meeting. As people move up a hierarchy, they frequently try to move from expert to elite.
There are plenty of other examples of this expert–elite divide.
Take journalism. A beat reporter is closer to an expert—they’re supposed to gather facts, stick to the evidence, and get the details right. An opinion columnist, on the other hand, plays the elite role. They make broader claims, shape narratives, signal values. Their job isn’t just to report what’s true—it’s to tell you what it means and why it matters.
Same thing with boards. Advisors are the experts. They know a specific thing, and they’re brought in for that knowledge. Directors are elites. They’re there for judgment, influence, connections, and status.
Even Nobel Prize winners—arguably the peak of expert success—often try to make the leap. Once they win, many of them start writing op-eds, weighing in on topics far outside their field. The underlying assumption is: now that I’ve proven myself as an expert, I’ve earned the right to speak like an elite. Robin Hanson points out that even for Nobel Prize winners, it's really hard after a lifetime of the expert strategy to suddenly switch to trying to be the elite. Most of these Nobel Prize winners do not become accepted as elites.
And it goes both ways. High-status people often try to drape themselves in expertise. They want the authority of the expert label without the years of narrow focus. So there’s mutual envy: experts want reach, elites want credibility. You don’t need to become an expert first to become an elite. But that’s the usual direction within these two categories. Elites seldom strive to become experts; plenty of experts attempt to become elites.
Experts can be broke—or at least live in a zone of genteel poverty. Elites are usually better off financially as it’s easier for them to exchange status for money....
....MUCH MORE
