Call him Kyle. He went to GW or Tufts or American. One parent is a lawyer. One is a white-collar journeyman. Both are invested in Vanguard funds, consistency, and a really nice sectional. He’s a decent hang and he doesn't skip leg day. He sometimes quotes The Good Place, which his girlfriend loved, or Margin Call, which he first saw on a plane. He works in finance or insurance or at a SaaS startup. You can't quite remember. He's got college friends and work friends and that girlfriend, whose name also starts with a "K." As an individual, Kyle is not interesting. But he’s a prime example of North America’s most fascinating species.
Homo directus, results-oriented hominids animated by general ambition rather than specific conviction, are what ecologists call a keystone indicator species. So goes Kyle, so goes America.
And Kyle already went. In the mid-2000s, he went to Booz Allen, Lehman, or Accenture. In the 2010s, he went to Deloitte, Salesforce, or Workday. In the 2020s, he went to Palantir, Amazon (and got fired), or Guidehouse. That's the stuff you gotta do if you're going to be at in growth equity by forty.
In 1974, the psychologist D.W. Winnicott observed that dread of impending catastrophe is common after an unacknowledged catastrophe has already occurred. This is, more or less, the state of the discourse about “elite circulation,” Vilfredo Pareto's term for the inevitable and shockingly frequent replacement of the powers that be with other powers that be more powerful. NPR moms are freaking out right now about Bari Weiss, the Jeffrey Epstein Social Club, and Erika Kirk Instagram memes, but the circulation implied by those shifts happened fifteen or twenty years ago when Kyle took a gig at Aon.
Pareto called history the “graveyard of aristocracies.” We know circulation already happened because LinkedIn provides a fossil record.
Low conviction people are highly instructive because elite circulation is often the result of personal passivity. Yes, some elites compete – thus the whole “canceled” discourse – but more elites allow themselves to get circulated. Consider Sam Rogers, the freshly fired company man played by the Tooch in Margin Call. A particularly self-aware example of H. Directus with a particularly on-the-nose backstory, Rogers was a structural engineer before becoming a senior risk officer at an investment bank. "I built a bridge once," he tells Paul Bettany with a voice full to overflowing with wist.
But a financializing economy creates specific incentives for those with Sam’s facility for abstraction. The 97-second bridge monologue is an elegy for the infrastructure aristocracy, the engineers and planners who built America’s now sclerotic arteries, now consigned to Pareto's graveyard.
The infrastructure aristocracy was one part of an aristocracy Barbara and John Ehrenreich dubbed the professional-managerial class: journalists, academics, public servants, doctors, lawyers, and engineers for whom credentials did double duty as class identity. This was the non-financialized elite. The Boomer Elite. The Production Elite. The meek who inherited the Earth then lost it to card counters.
In the early 1970s, roughly one in twenty Harvard graduates entered finance or consulting. By the 1990s, one in four. Today, 53% of the class of 2025 went into finance (21%), tech (18%), or consulting (14%). Meanwhile, newsroom employment is down roughly 60% since 2008; tenure-track academic positions have been declining as a share of PhD outcomes since the 1970s; the FIRE sector – finance, insurance, real estate – went from approximately 10% of U.S. corporate profits in 1980 to nearly 40% by 2007. Incentives sucked an entire class off into spreadsheetland3. Newsrooms, universities, and the federal civil service didn't lose talent and pull then become mediocre. They lost pull on mediocre talent, which turns out to be undervalued. H. Directus migrated elsewhere.
Specifically, H. Directus migrated toward derivatives, instruments whose value is determined by the shifting values of asset rather than from those asset themselves. Yes, that includes the trade in futures (and mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps), but it also includes insurance and SaaS startups founded on the old VC logic of selling picks and shovels to miners rather than chasing gold. Once a shift in that direction began and those kinds of jobs became both plentiful and socially acceptable, elite circulation was inevitable. As anthropologist David Graeber convincingly argued, the suppression of genuinely disruptive innovation under financialized capitalism is a feature rather than a bug. Because disruption threatens existing capital structures, innovations and new ideas are suppressed. New elites antagonize old elites even as they ask them for advice on what to wear to the office.
An evolutionary argument can be made, of course, that H. Directus is merely a misidentified Homo Economicus. Primatologists do get these things wrong. But consider the behavior. Kyle isn't optimizing for income. A master electrician in a high-cost metro earns a median wage roughly on par with an Accenture consulting associate. Adjust for four years of credentialing, two subpar associate years, the real probability of not making partner, and private equity roll-up dynamics, a plug and play approach to life makes more financial sense than going corporate. But H. Directus doesn't do trades. The species' instinct is to balance a need for financial capital with a need for social capital, which is to say legitimacy in the eyes of whichever members of the old production elite paid for those four and half years at GW or Tufts or American.
A bone gets dug up from Pareto's graveyard and thrown to mom and dad.
The circulation that NPR moms are currently dreading happened somewhere between 2000 and 2010. We can date it to just prior to the financial crisis, when complicated financial instruments lured new grads with a siren song. The panic has arrived about twenty years late, which is exactly what Winnicott would have predicted. The dread of the breakdown seeps in once the breakdown is in the rearview. Objects in mirror are further than they appear.
The useful implication of Winnicott is the obverse: If the discourse is currently catastrophizing the last rotation, it's ignoring the next4. Pareto's graveyard is an active dig site and if stock performance is any indication, the hole for SaaS execs is already half shoveled. H. Directus understands this. Kyle’s girlfriend made him watch The Good Place twice and what Pareto said about elite circulation isn’t so different from what Jason Mendoza said about Florida: "If you don't like this funeral, just wait a minute.")
