Chapter 1 Elites, Elite Overproduction, and the Road to Crisis Who Are the Elites? Sources of Social Power Who are the elites? You, reader, are you "elite"? If I were a betting man, I''d predict that 99 percent of my readers would answer "no!" So let''s define what I mean by "elites." In sociology, elites are not those who are somehow better than the rest. They are not necessarily those who are more hardworking, or more intelligent, or more talented. They are simply those who have more social power-the ability to influence other people. A more descriptive term for elites is "power holders." Because power is such an important part of the story to come, we will return to it in later chapters, where I discuss how sociologists define power and power holders in different societies, past and present. But for now, let''s take a shortcut. In America, power is closely correlated with wealth.

As a result, it is relatively straightforward to figure out who belongs to different ranks of power holders. (A more sophisticated answer to the question of who rules will have to wait until chapter 5.) If you are an American and your net worth is in the $1-$2 million range, for example, then you are roughly in the top 10 percent, which puts you in the lower ranks of American elites. Most people in this category are not particularly powerful in the sense of having a lot of other people to order around. But a few million dollars in wealth (and higher incomes that are typically associated with it) gives ten-percenters a lot of control-power-over their own lives. They can turn down jobs that are unpleasant, or don''t pay enough, or are located in regions they don''t care to move to. Or they can choose to retire from the rat race. They typically own houses and send their children to good colleges, and sudden medical emergencies will not wipe them out.

They have certainly escaped "precarity." The correlation between wealth and real power starts to become tighter for those whose net worth is counted in tens or, better, hundreds of millions. People in this class include owners of businesses and CEOs of large corporations, who wield their power over hundreds or thousands of employees. Many powerful politicians are also in this range. (There are about fifty members of Congress whose net worth is greater than $10 million.) The correlation between wealth and political power is not perfect. Nine American presidents didn''t even make it into the $1 million or above territory (in today''s dollars), including Harry Truman, Woodrow Wilson, and Abraham Lincoln. But more than half of them had enough wealth to put them into what today would be the top 1 percent.

And before 1850, all American presidents were one-percenters (at the least). Another point to keep in mind is that poor people who become power holders in America don''t stay poor for long. Bill Clinton grew up in a poor Arkansas family with an alcoholic and abusive stepfather, but now his wealth is estimated to be at least $120 million. The close correlation between wealth and political power in America arises partly because many a politician, poor at the start of their career, joins the ranks of the wealthy after leaving public office. But an equally important reason is that people who are already very wealthy are much more likely to seek and gain public office than the rest of us. Think of the Roosevelt and Kennedy clans, Ross Perot, Michael Bloomberg, and-yes-Trump. Still, the correlation between wealth and power, even in America, is not perfect. So let''s talk about other sources of power.

The hardest-and crudest-form of social power is coercion: force, or a threat of force. Americans specializing in coercion, such as army generals and police officers, are generally thoroughly subordinated to other forms of power. Exceptions, such as J. Edgar Hoover, who was the first and most powerful FBI director, are rare. The second kind of power is wealth (or accumulated material resources, more generally). Wealthy people can hire people to do what they want (within limits). The third and more subtle kind of power is bureaucratic or administrative. Modern human beings belong to a variety of organizations.

We have a variety of "bosses" whose orders we generally follow. There is an element of coercion to these relationships, of course, because not following orders may get you fired, fined, or arrested. But most of the time we follow orders simply because of the power of social norms. The bosses at various levels of organizations all wield different amounts of power, which tends to increase the larger their organizations and the higher their positions within them. The fourth and "softest" kind of power is ideological-the power of persuasion. Soft power, or persuasion, is an extremely potent force that can sway multitudes. It includes the realm of thought influencers, such as famous "public intellectuals," columnists at major newspapers, and, more recently, social media figures with millions of followers. As we can see, this simple question-who are the elites?-doesn''t have a simple answer.

Human societies are complex systems, and trying to characterize the flows of social power within them by way of an overly simplistic scheme would be counterproductive. My job is to make my theory as simple as possible, but not simpler. The Game of Aspirant Chairs Once we start thinking about so-called elite behavior, we encounter several layers of complexity. First, in terms of wealth, there is no hard boundary between the elites and non-elites. Ten-percenters (roughly, millionaires in today''s dollars) have a lot of power over their own lives. One-percenters (roughly, decamillionaires) have a lot of power over other people''s lives. Centimillionaires and billionaires wield even more power. But there are no sharp boundaries between one-percenters and ten-percenters-the distribution of incomes is a smooth curve.

And there is no huge difference in social attitudes between the one-percenters and ten-percenters, or between the ten-percenters, the top income decile, and the next decile. In chapter 3, we will see that another way of distinguishing social classes, in terms of the more educated (those with a four-year college degree) and the less educated (those without one), is much more salient if we want to understand the diversity of life trajectories and social attitudes. Second, different elites tend to specialize in different kinds of social power: generals, admirals, and police chiefs mete out coercion; CEOs and wealth holders wield economic power; senators and secretaries of federal departments manage administrative power; and TV anchors and influential podcasters deal in persuasion. Each kind of influence has its own power hierarchy. This is most clearly seen in military chains of command, but softer kinds of power also have their pecking orders. The third layer of complexity arises when we ask, how are elites made? In order to understand elite overproduction, we need to understand social reproduction of the elites-what happens with them over time. Let''s distinguish between people already in elite positions-established elites-and those who want to get into such positions-elite aspirants. Elite aspirants come in a variety of shapes and forms, depending on the kind of power they want and what level they aspire to.

For example, most lieutenants want to become majors, and most majors want to become one-star generals, and one-star generals aim for additional stars to their insignia. Similarly, decamillionaires want to become centimillionaires, and those who have already made their first $100 million aim to get into the billionaire class. Although not everybody has ambition to acquire more power, there are always more aspirants than power positions. Inevitably, there are those who try but fail to obtain a power position-frustrated elite aspirants. Elite overproduction develops when the demand for power positions by elite aspirants massively exceeds their supply. Let''s focus for now on the nexus between wealth and politics and see how elite overproduction can develop in this sphere. Starting in the 1980s, the number of superrich in America-those worth at least $10 million, or decamillionaires-started to grow rapidly. In 1983, there were only 66,000 such households, and by 2019 (the last year for which data are available), their number increased more than tenfold to 693,000.

This was not a result of dollar inflation; we adjusted the threshold to determine who is in this class (using constant 1995 dollars). During this period, the overall number of households grew by 53 percent, so in proportionate terms, decamillionaires swelled from 0.08 to 0.54 percent of the total population. A similar upsurge in the fortunes of the wealthy also happened lower on the food chain. If the numbers of decamillionaires grew tenfold, the number of households worth $5 million or more increased sevenfold, and the number of mere millionaires expanded fourfold. Overall, the larger the level of the fortunes we look at, the more growth they have seen over the past forty years. On the surface of it, an increase in the number of wealthy people doesn''t sound like such a bad thing.

Isn''t it part of the American dream to get rich? But there are two downsides to this good news. First, the ballooning of the superwealthy class did not happen in isolation from the fortunes of the rest of the population. While the numbers of superrich have multiplied, the income and wealth of the typical American family have actually declined. (The more precise term for "typical" wealth is "the median," which divides the wealth distribution into equal halv.