Abstract
The emergence of a new tech elite in Silicon Valley and beyond raises questions about the economic reach, political influence, and social importance of this group. How do these inordinately influential people think about the world and about our common future? In this paper, we test a) whether members of the tech elite share a common, meritocratic view of the world, b) whether they have a "mission" for the future, and c) how they view democracy as a political system. Our data set consists of information about the 100 richest people in the tech world, according to Forbes, and rests on their published pronouncements on Twitter, as well as on their statements on the websites of their philanthropic endeavors. Automated "bag-of-words" text and sentiment analyses reveal that the tech elite has a more meritocratic view of the world than the general US Twitter-using population. The tech elite also frequently promise to "make the world a better place," but they do not differ from other extremely wealthy people in this respect. However, their relationship to democracy is contradictory. Based on these results, we conclude that the tech elite may be thought of as a "class for itself" in Marx's sense-a social group that shares particular views of the world, which in this case means meritocratic, missionary, and inconsistent democratic ideology.
Highlights
In the United States, at least, the mid-twentieth century “Great Compression” grounded in a mass-production economy that found good-paying work for much unskilled labor [1] has been replaced by an era of vertiginous gains at the very top of the income distribution and by long-term wage stagnation and declines in wealth for the broad majority of the American population
French economist Thomas Piketty has argued that we are returning to a world similar to the one that preceded the twentieth-century heyday of the manufacturing economy—a world in which returns to capital systematically outpace those to labor [2]
We use a common “bag-of-words” model (BOW) which focuses on the frequency of the occurrence of words but ignores context and grammar
Summary
In the United States, at least, the mid-twentieth century “Great Compression” grounded in a mass-production economy that found good-paying work for much unskilled labor [1] has been replaced by an era of vertiginous gains at the very top of the income distribution and by long-term wage stagnation and declines in wealth for the broad majority of the American population. French economist Thomas Piketty has argued that we are returning to a world similar to the one that preceded the twentieth-century heyday of the manufacturing economy—a world in which returns to capital systematically outpace those to labor [2]. An important element of this broader economic change has been the much-discussed shift to a high-tech economy. The high-tech economy, at first an almost exclusively American.
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