WHAT IS ELITE CAPTURE?
What is elite capture?
Originally, economists used “elite capture” was used by economists to describe how people with power in developing countries funnel foreign aid meant for public projects into their private bank accounts.
Now, elite capture is is used more widely in other fields, like political science, to describe how people with certain social, political, and economic advantages take resources meant for everyone.
Who is an elite?
Political scientist Jo Freeman defines an elite as:
“a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent.”
Here, elite is not a fixed identity. It’s a relationship between a smaller group of people and a larger group of people within a particular context.
How one becomes an elite
According to Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, we can become an elite due to:
How people relate to some aspect of our social identity, such as gender or ethnicity.
Contingent advantages like our level of education, wealth, or social standing.
Or, simply because we happen to be the only one of our group who’s in a particular room.
(So yes, even if someone is in a marginalized group, if they speak on behalf of their whole group as the only representative, they could be an elite!)
How elite capture happens
Elite capture is a system behavior. It emerges out of the constant dynamic of the interactions between individuals, groups, and subgroups, which forms the basis of a social system.
Táíwò compares how elite capture emerges to how rust forms when metal and water meet. Similarly, elite capture occurs across contexts where social systems encounter certain conditions.
For example…
Let’s say we get on Twitter to understand and discuss an issue, or to find community. Twitter is designed to drive our constant engagement for a metric called monetizable daily active users (mDAU). Controversial and pithy “hot takes” get more reactions out of us, driving quote tweets, and even though we might want nuanced or deep discussions, we might modify our behaviors to go viral or get sucked into the controversy of the day.
The owner of Twitter makes more money when there’s more traffic, and a small group of Twitter users with hot takes get lots of attention or follows. A “Twitter elite” emerges.
Another bigger example
If we want to talk about really big time elite capture, one example would be by large global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who gives loans to formerly colonized countries conditional on them reducing government spendings on public services and devaluing their currency.
Out of 190 countries in the IMF, the U.S. has veto power over most decisions, with almost 17.5% of the voting power. Via the current global financial system, the lives of people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa are determined by “the functional partnership between capitalism and liberal democracy,” decidedly undemocratically.
Are elites evil or opportunistic?
Elites can be vile or virtuous, malevolent or benevolent. It’s not because of appropriation or opportunism, elite capture takes place regardless of the moral successes or failures of any individual or group.
According to Jo Freeman, “any group of people interacting with each other will structure itself in some way or other, whether consciously or unconsciously, leaving only the question of how that resulting structure distributes resources, responsibilities, attention, and power.”
In other words, almost everything can fall prey to elite capture.
What is the point of fighting elite capture, then?
In essence, elite capture is “the presence of unequal access to power… and consequently the ability to influence the transfer of funds/resources disproportionately,” as economist Diya Dutta explains.
This disproportionate distribution of resources is the reason the top 10% of the world owns 76% of the wealth and accounts for 48% of global emission. It’s the reason Americans constitute 5% of the world's population but consume 24% of the world's energy. It’s the reason Americans throw out 200,000 tons of edible food daily, that there is more than enough food produced in the world to feed everyone on the planet, but about 800 million still go hungry. Source, source, source.
The point of fighting elite capture, is the quest to achieve radical equality in the distribution of resources and power in our world.