The term elite is discussed all the time in public, in the media, in bars. People use this term, and it’s often just a buzzword for powerful people that one does not personally agree with. That’s both on the Left and the Right. We wanted to try to wrestle some conceptual clarity around the term, particularly to try to give an appropriate order of magnitude. Often people talk about elites, and then they go on to talk about 20 percent of the population.

In our case, the elite is defined by a book called Who’s Who that has been cataloging people who have reached the highest positions of influence and power in British society for the last 120 years. Essentially, the book characterizes positional elites in the sense that it tries to capture the people who lead in different spheres or fields. So all MPs, all judges, all fellows of the British Academy are included automatically. Together they represent about 0.05 percent of the population, so about 33,000 people.

But we also wanted a second measure, because even that 33,000 people still feels like too many in terms of who really wields power. So we looked at people who, besides having positional power, also had economic power. We defined that as people in Who’s Who who are also in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution. We call them the wealth elite. There are six thousand of them, and they make up 0.01 percent of the British population.

Both Aaron and I were interested in this project because, as sociologists who have worked on inequality for maybe fifteen years in various different ways, we kept coming back to the various ways in which the inequalities that we were studying were shaped by those in positions of power.

Since these people shape our world, understanding them helps us understand, essentially, how our societies function. But more specifically, there’s a question here about why we get the politics we get. What we tried to do in this project is interrogate a thesis that’s often been prevalent in academic literature, which is that, when elites are drawn from a very narrow social pool, that tends to lead to ideological homogeneity — a groupthink. Our results show that, actually, the way in which elites are recruited matters for the politics we get. It has tangible implications for the politics that those people bring with them into elite positions.

What we’re showing is that elite reproduction is still very much alive, but that the mechanisms through which it takes place have changed. What we can see in the interviews with people born and people working in the early part of the twentieth century was that fairly egregious forms of nepotism were the norm, and that people were not apologetic about those trajectories — they thought that was the natural order of things.

That has changed. I think that the interesting thing is that people today see that that’s changed, and they often misread that change as a sign that elite reproduction is now not taking place — because you can’t buy your way into Oxford or Cambridge, or because your father can’t get you a job at Bloomberg.

Although the mechanisms through which people reach elite positions are still hugely important, they are now essentially hidden under the veil of meritocracy. I think that, because the more blatant forms of nepotism have been eliminated, people have the illusion that elite reproduction has diminished significantly. What we show is that that isn’t the case.

When it comes to personal narratives, what was really interesting was the disconnect we could see between the way people perceive their origins and what we could see when we measured their origins in the ways that social scientists normally do. Something like 30 percent of people we surveyed in Who’s Who had said they came from a more disadvantaged background than they would be characterized as belonging to in a standard social science way.

What that reflects, I think, is a desire to be ordinary through an ability to tell an upward story about your destination in life — that you weren’t given that privilege through your birth, and that, instead, your trajectory reflects a meritocratic legitimacy.  The best way to do that, in a way, is to downplay your privilege. Now, I don’t necessarily say that that’s intentional. I don’t think we necessarily know the degree of intentionality, and that’s an interesting question to pose and, I think, for others to study. But we definitely could see that regardless of intentionality, there was this downplaying of privilege.

The other key way that elite identity is expressed is in taste and lifestyle. There what’s interesting in a way is that the public persona that these elites project is one that is very carefully curated to give the impression of being open to tastes and art forms and lifestyle practices that both signal ordinary-ness and signal a high-brow acculturation. But what was really interesting was that when we compared the private personas that we got in anonymized interviews with the public profiles that are actually published online, searchable by journalists, you saw quite a strong disconnect.

These people were generally much more high-brow in the way they articulated who they were in this anonymized interview than they were in their public profile. I think that, while we can’t judge people’s intentions entirely, there’s a signal there that people are conscious of what their lifestyle says about them, and that actually being able to present yourselves as being somebody who does the same things as the general public — that likes to hang out with their pets and their friends, likes to go to football matches — is a way of forging a sense of connection to the wider public.

There is one way to read it, which is encouraging: there is often a criticality to those portrayals. However, I think the criticality is very often a little bit skin deep or superficial. There’s also a sense in which the aesthetic of these programs delights still in the glamour of that elite status. There’s an ambiguous representation going on that’s saying: “Look, we want to say these people are flawed, even though they are powerful and wealthy. But we’re also still going to get you to watch these programs because you’re fascinated by them in a spectacular way.”

What often is missing is a structural critique. It tends to be more of a “these people are individually flawed, rather than the processes that have brought them to those positions.” We also need to be aware about the fact that inequalities are reproduced in much more mundane ways. The spectacular nature of these representations allows almost everyone to say: “Oh, that’s not me. It’s over there.” I think that characterizes the difference between our focus on elites and those more televisual or filmic representations of wealthy elites in the last ten years.

We are trying, I think, to particularly go after, or to try to inhibit, the distortionary propulsive power of certain types of institutions, particularly private schools in the UK. The main way we’ve tried to do that is to think about undermining the incentives that wealthy parents have for sending them there in the first place, which is almost entirely at present about the ability of those schools to deliver their alumni into elite universities.

Our proposal is essentially that you cap the number of students that come from those schools at Russell Group Universities, which is the top tier of universities in the UK, to 10 percent, which is the amount of students in the whole country who at some point receive private education. This is quite provocative, I think. But the basic point of this would be to undermine the demand for private schools, which we think would then force parents into putting their kids into a more comprehensive and therefore mixed schooling environment, which we think is useful.

More general, though, in terms of elites, we think that there’s a question here about absolute advantage, which in our view is distortionary, and we think could be attacked by a wealth tax. We also think it’s important to think about how you distribute power: a classic one being more workers on boards of big companies and also changing the House of Lords to something that is more of an elected body, or something that has a more bottom-up representation of the country as a whole.

That’s a really big question, which is a topic for an entirely different and new book in itself. I think there’s a difficult question about how to organize societies in a way where there will always have to be some types of individuals that have authority, responsibility, and that are willing to take on those responsibilities in order to make societies function. And wherever you have that, I think you have to think about how you assign those positions.

Having said that, I think the degree of inequality between the people in those positions and general populations, which is a question of inequality of outcome as well as of how power is distributed, could be much flatter than it is now in a society like the UK. That would be helpful. But I think it’s a much bigger question to say: Can you eliminate people in society with any position of power or authority over others? I think that’s a much trickier thing.