The Civic Role of the Tech Elite
Tech elites vs. traditional elites, conservatives and libraries, and more in this week's digest.
Matt Yglesias made an insightful X post about the tech elite’s conception of their civic role in the places they live:
Buying these teams and keeping them local would be a rounding error on the net worth of multiple Silicon Valley tech figures. Yet things like this don’t even seem to be on their radar.
Contrast this with Mel and Herb Simon, founders of what’s now the largest shopping mall owner in the country. The Indiana Pacers were originally an ABA team, maybe the most successful of the ABA franchises. They were one of four ABA teams that joined the NBA when their league closed. The Pacers struggled in the NBA. In the 1970s they had to hold a telethon to sell enough tickets to save the team from closure. In 1983, the Pacers were still not financially viable, having gone 20-62 the previous season, playing to mostly empty seats. They were going to either go out of business or relocate.
Then Indianapolis mayor Bill Hudnut asked the Simon brothers to buy the team. Even though it looked like a bad investment, reputedly one of the Simons said to the mayor, “I guess I have to do this, don’t I?” They bought the team for $11 million and it’s still in the city today. The team and its arena have played a key role in Indianapolis building one of the nation’s most lucrative franchises in hosting major sporting events.
This also turned out to be an incredible investment for the Simons. The Pacers are worth an estimated $4.2 billion today, far more than the total Simon family net worth back then.
Today’s tech elite need to expand their vision of their civic role, locally and nationally. Delivering amazing new technologies will always come first. But with the rewards of that come obligations that are not always freely chosen.
Sometimes you choose your duties. Sometimes your duties choose you.
Conservative Institutional Neglect of Libraries
Apart from public schools, libraries are arguably the most important government formation institution for children, and even adults. Libraries are well known for being very culturally and politically leftist in their orientation. But this is not a case where the left had to “capture” an institution. It is one that conservatives have largely neglected.
People say “conservatives don’t read.” That’s not entirely fair. There are segments of the conservative world that are very into books. Christian homeschooling family types are big users of libraries around here. But I think it’s fair to say that liberals are more interested in books than conservatives, which we see in the very leftist skew of independent bookstores as well.
Conservatives don’t typically become librarians, even though this could be an ideal profession - similar to teacher - for a significant number of conservative or religious women. It’s not a field that is valorized or put into the imagination of conservative children.
I’m also not aware of a single scholar in the conservative think tank or policy space who is chartered with studying libraries and developing policies for them as their main job. Stephen Eide is the closest person I know of, and he has a great essay on libraries in the new issue of National Affairs. But this is mostly a personal passion project for him and is not the focus of his day job. Perhaps this lack of conservative policy interest is because there’s little federal policy action, or because there are no conservative funders willing to underwrite library policy research.
Given the importance of libraries as a formation institution, conservatives should have greater interest and engagement with them.
In light of the Yglesias post above, it’s worth noting that America’s library system was originally built out through the generosity of the Gilded Age elite Andrew Carnegie. Many Carnegie library buildings are still standing, and some are still even used as libraries.
Personal Standards in Today’s World
How to raise general standards and elevate our people without imposing crushing and cruel judgments is one of the challenges of our age.
Liana Graham and Scott Yenor have an interesting essay in First Things on repentance and forgiveness in a pornified age that illustrates this in one domain of life:
In 2012, one of us asked two dozen young conservative women in San Diego—most aged twenty-five to thirty—whether they were married. Only one was. When pressed for reasons, the answer came quickly: “The men are addicted to porn.” That moment revealed a quiet crisis. If committed, attractive, faithful young women hesitate to marry because of pornography, the pro-marriage project is in deep trouble.
…
Today, women rightly sense that many men under forty have warped expectations shaped by endless visual novelty. They are jealous, suspicious, and increasingly unwilling to risk marriage with men whose loyalties seem divided. Porn explains why women are more skeptical about and less interested in marriage and dating than men. Porn is a significant source of conflict in nearly 20 percent of married and engaged couples. For more than a third of women, frequent porn use is a marital deal-breaker.
…
Women are encouraged to be tolerant of male sexual impurity today because some girls have gone wild. For nearly every porn video there is a female “porn star.” Call Her Daddy, a podcast where the girls brag about getting around, is wildly popular. Women are reading erotica, watching more porn than in the past, and posting highly suggestive and borderline pornographic photos of themselves on social media. At best, women today are torn between the desire to settle down and have a family and the career pressures of feminism, extraordinary sex positivity, and a dating culture built on premarital sex.
Today’s world, where many of the standards of the past are pervasively violated and thus long gone, puts people, and institutions, in a bind who want to set a higher bar than what society has on offer.
Porn is an obvious example. A woman who demands a man who doesn’t watch porn, at least on occasion, is going to narrow her pool of prospects considerably. Similarly, you see many men on the internet proclaiming women damaged goods because of their “body count,” but if they insist on only marrying a “debt-free virgin without tattoos,” they are setting a standard that excludes a majority of younger single women.
Men and women can make those choices, but they come with greater tradeoffs than would have been the case in the past. As Graham and Yenor put it:
Before the sexual revolution, men and women could more easily hold one another to high standards of premarital conduct, but these novels instruct us not to glorify the good old days. As sixty years of sexual revolution have compromised both men and women, both must balance standards with realistic expectations.
I’ve also noted similar effects in other domains. It’s hard for anyone to be too judgmental these days when it comes to things like substance abuse problems, divorce, a suicide, etc. because everybody’s family now has somebody in it - maybe more than one somebody - with big life problems.
Best of the Web
WSJ: How Defending Prostitution Became a Progressive Cause (gift link) - ‘Sex-worker’ rights have become a rallying cry on the cultural left. But not everyone agrees that the sex trade should be getting a pass.
More Births: A shocking new study finds that the desire for children has collapsed among young people in China
Scott Greer: The Irrelevance Of Pro-Lifers - America has largely moved on from abortion, to the chagrin of people who make their living off the issue. Note: Greer is a dissident right figure who likely doesn’t care about abortion personally.
New Content and Media Mentions
I got a mention this week from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
New this week:
The End of the Moral Majority - The pro-life movement is one of the first casualties of a political architecture built for a country that no longer exists
My podcast this week was with Seth Barron on the left’s institutional capture of institutions.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
Cover image: New York Public Library by Vallue/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
While I think it is generally true that the tech elite haven't used their wealth and power for civic virtue, I think the As/Raiders examples from Yglesias fail on the facts. Mark Davis has no interest in selling his controlling share of the Raiders. It is a family business and it is one of the only sports franchises where owning that team is the primary familial business (Al Davis was a football man who got into team ownership back in the AFL days as opposed to a businessman who bought a team). John Fisher seems to have no interest in selling the As, even though he could make a killing selling them to the highest bidder (because at this point, it would be easier to relocate them than pretty much any other major sports franchise).
But the question of why haven't more tech moguls started inner city STEM charter schools is more salient and interesting to me.
Re: Civic Role
Three examples from Columbus:
1. The late John McConnell of Worthington Industries, along with Nationwide Insurance, saving a fledging bid for an NHL team. As a result, a desperately needed downtown arena was built by Nationwide. Events that used to bypass Columbus now come to the city.
2. Jack Nicklaus wanting to bring something like the Masters Tournament to his hometown of Columbus. The result was a world class golf course with the Memorial Tournament, one of the top on the PGA Tour. With that has been big money for Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
3. Finally, Arnold Schwarzenegger won a major bodybuilding event in Columbus in the 1970’s. Through that he met people from Columbus. That brought The Arnold, an annual event spanning various sports and health, which packs downtown Columbus each March.
The Arnold might fit a unique example for the tech elite today. A guy from Austria starts an event in a random American midwest town due to winning an event in the town. What could the tech elite do in Toledo, Duluth, or Albuquerque?