Why were Victorian elites so effective?

> 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.

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.

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?

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote an entire journal in Greek in the middle of enemy territory. "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.". Historians criticize his Greek fluency.

The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.

Apparently Oxford only dropped the requirement to have O-Level latin in 1960 (!)

Latin and Greek were useful for coining a lot of the new vocabulary that English had to create for science, industrialisation and overseas adventures.

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.

I wonder if we could see the American elite the same way? Private schools, then greek houses (fraternities) on campuses. Fraternities seem like they are continuing the victorian elite education, focus on long lasting connections between them.

If you go through history, it's hard to find a king that is not like that. The only difference is that some kings (and nowadays: presidents) are better at keeping a clean public image, see The Prince by Machiavelli for details.

Are you really sure of what you are saying?

First paragraph: "Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors."

Why are we taking the CEOs words at face value? They are notoriously known for doing and saying whatever will most help them succeed. Do they say they do these things? Sure. Do we know if they do? If they look like they workout, they probably do, but otherwise how do we know what they do with their day? Anyone who probably actually does know probably has to sign some crazy NDA. Will lying about their routine help them succeed? Quite possibly. CEOs rarely work their way up in the same company over decades, starting on the factory floor. They are MBAs that hop from one company to the next. So they are incentivized to promote some kind of mystique about themselves to make them seem more deserving over the next hopper. Knowing the lack of ethics associated with CEOs, it is not a stretch to assume there is a lot of fluffery in their self-proclaimed routine.

been seein a lot of it lately, yarvin eat your fuckin heart out

The scientific advantage was enormous, and it seems like virtually none of these elites bothered to study the sciences. During that era, the elites of other countries were far, far more ignorant. Compare the socializing and partying of the Victorians with the opium addicted and superstitious Manchurian Emperors of China or the hereditary inbred nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they come off as absolutely industrious.

While Victorian elites were partying it took about 50 years for the Japanese to go from a fully Feudal Society to reaching parity with the Royal Navy (1868-1922).

Except perhaps in China in recent decades where it's worked rather well for them.

(>China’s leadership understands and emphasizes R&D. Eight of the nine members of China’s Standing Commit­tee of the Political Bureau, including China’s current President Hu Jintao, have engineering degrees. 2011)

There were legal system and courts well before 1000 years ago.

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.

Read Leviathan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)

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.

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.

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?

You shouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Let the merchant do the merchanting and make the profits and you hang out and get your paid vacation.

If you take all the profits, the merchant won't stay in the business and then you don't have a client.

And nobody in power is going to allow you to organize to any real extent before interseding. They force you to play with their rules to get in the game. The only away around it is to already be a well known and publically liked figure that people will rally behind.

Substantial influence. The fact that America's rich are constantly mobilizing to promote or defeat ballot measures and candidates shows the limits of their power.

For better picture of what made Britain successful during this era look to folks like Isa Brunel... son of a French Revolutionary immigrant who was poor enough for debtors prison, but skilled enough in engineering and math to build some of the largest ships in the world.

“a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence”

The Victorian elites had better education, better diet, better lifestyles, better care, etc... So yes, it makes for smarter and healthier people.

If you mean in term of human qualities like morals, kindness, ethics, etc... This is complicated. Many of the elites also tend to be better in that regard too, with a very big caveat. The reason why they are better is simple: it is easier to be generous when you are not in the need, education can play a part too but it can go both ways.

The thing that make elites worse is mostly the consequence of their actions, the "with great power comes great responsibilities" thing. What is an inconsequential for the poor can have huge implication when the rich do it. If you decide to stop buying bread from one bakery will not impact that bakery too much, they loose and gain customers all the time. If you have a restaurant chain and decide to stop working with a baker, you may have ruined him.

That's when things become more complicated, sometimes the elites really are terrible to the people under them, sometimes, they are as good as humans can reasonably be, noblesse oblige. In history, it is not uncommon, when there is a revolution and power is given back to the people to end up very badly.

I don't know how Victorian elites sit on this scale, certainly not all bad, certainly not all good (especially to the colonies), but where exactly is hard to say.

This type of education is not for everyone, though.

If you nail the interview, Goldman Sachs won't really care whether you studied Economics or History of Art at Harvard. The main concern is that you studied at Harvard, which signals that you're a high-performer.

Britain had wealth from colonies and maintained an empire with very few people and no computers. The British elites were on an entirely different level to the spanish ones, which is the point of the article. Great Britain had an extremely capable and educated bureaucracy that maintained an empire and was first to industrialize as a result.

The wealth of the merchant class also predated empire by centuries; the empire grew out of a series of alliances and partnerships of both ot these classes, via the landed gentry successfully co-opting mercantile wealth (e.g. see what happened to the East India Company).

Just look at estimated work hours for the common worker in the before vs after time. (https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...)

Yes there was huge progress and wealth created. But ignoring the plight of the every man at the time is just not a good way to look at history imo.

Otherwise every single period in history was good , because rich people were comfortable at all time throughout history.

He benefitted from his employees ideas and initiatives. But that was by design. Both design of the organisation, design of the incentive structures, and the filters used for hiring.

Companies are just a collective of people trying to accomplish something. The idea that an incompetent boss, could attract talent that would be willing to force great outcomes, without due compensation/incentives, doesn't sound like a credible explanation for the mean story of success.

Important context:

1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.

2. Lot of these colonies had representative institutions of their own. "We have 43 colonies, and not 50, 60, or 70, as has been variously stated; 27 of these have representative institutions, some in a higher degree of perfection than others, no doubt, but the whole have representative institutions, including Canada, New Brunswick, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbadoes, and all the minor West Indian colonies." [0]

[0]: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1849-04-16/debates/807...

Ruling in the 1800s when firearms were orders of magnitude more expensive than today was an entirely different game than doing so in a world of mass consumption.

Divide and conquer in a world where the pony express is the fastest channel and telegraphs were the almost exclusive to the banking system and selected government agencies was still possible. Now high school students can coordinate nationally via social media. Look at the consequences of Arab spring 2011 still reverberating.

In a way, Victorian elites were much more effective relative the the helplessness of civil society at a time when people would be counted as highly mobile if they had a bicycle and could routinely travel to a few more villages than their grand parents had ever seen in their lifetimes.