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In Peter Turchin's book War and Peace and War [1], the term "elite overproduction" does not refer to an overproduction of smart people, education, or college de

by lwneal 6y ago

In Peter Turchin's book War and Peace and War [1], the term "elite overproduction" does not refer to an overproduction of smart people, education, or college degrees. Instead, it refers to an overproduction of nobility, individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work. For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nobility increased from around 2% to 4% of the population, while the incomes of the richest nobles soared. Eventually, peasants could no longer produce enough to feed themselves and provide income for all the nobles: this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400. The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. (Not to say there is no overlap between those groups.) [1] Turchin, Peter. War and peace and war: The life cycles of imperial nations. Pi, 2005.

est31 6y ago
> The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. (Not to say there is no overlap between those groups.) Investors do a lot of work, because they have to constantly think where to put their money, evaluate alternatives, make sure there is no money wasted on things, etc. Even passive investors who only have S&P portfolios still contribute to the economy by providing capital to companies to invest into new things.
- question000 6y ago
  Yeah but even if we accept passive investment is a form of productive labor, there's a limited number safe/good investments for those good investors. As we saw in the 2008 recession when more and investors pile on even the safest investments (mortgages backed securities) the quality of those investments tends to be diluted (via CDO's, errant ratings companies, exploitative real estate practices) This is what's making me nervous about index funds right now, the demand seems extremely high, but what about the supply how would you determine such a thing? What is investors are smart but there simply aren't enough good investments out there? Are they going to give up and become doctors, lawyers or engineers? Or just spend more time with their kids?
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    Fundamentally, investments are a bet that the future will be richer than the present. If there aren't enough good investments now then that's an indication that the market believes there are major structural problems with the economy that will prevent the future from being richer than the present. That's a far, far, more serious issue than just a question of what the kind of people who expect to receive passive incomes will do with their time. Obviously, the pandemic is having a major current impact, but as you say, there has been a shortage of good investments since at least 2008. I believe the underlying issue is a misallocation of resources into rentier economics and not enough into productive growth. We've collectively put far too much money into monopolies that squeeze larger percentages of money out of people and not enough money into innovation that improves the human environment. We need more of the original Google (i.e. the revolutionary search engine) and a lot less of the current Alphabet (i.e. the rentier advertising monopolist).
    - imtringued 6y ago
      There is an obvious shift away from labor to capital. Central banks shift the balance way too far toward capital as it is right now. Lack of labor stimulus leads to inefficient allocation of labor.
- cthaeh 6y ago
  This is what i dont get. Isnt is only if u buy stock at an ipo that the company gets the money? Otherewise, either by buying an index or a stock normally, ur giving ur money to other investors, not the company itself.
- DobryMorozov 6y ago
  Investors in secondary markets do not inject any money into businesses whatsoever. They are simply buying shares from other secondary market investors
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
> would be investors who do not work for wages. So, everyone with retirement investments. I think they're known as 401(k) in the USA, here in Australia Super Annuation. We've built a self-collapsing economy?
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I mean, to some extent, yes, probably. In an aging society, as the fraction of the population doing productive work falls, this sort of thing is likely to become a problem.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    It's only a problem in the sense that these investors will at one point realize that their investment is not as valuable as they think.
Quarrelsome 6y ago
> this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400. I feel like you need to mention the black death in this same sentence though, as the nobility population change would arguably be a lesser factor in thrall to that massive event. It does certainly paint an interesting aftermath as the black death suddenly made life a valuable commodity leading to a small period of time where worker's rights and even in some cases women's rights were improved. Considering that against a backdrop of indignant nobles is entertaining ponder-thought. The Great Famine was 1315ish, were you thinking of that instead?
- paganel 6y ago
  I also personally think that France's demographic situation in the early 1300s was a perfect example of Malthus's law, there were too many people compared to what the land could provide at that time (given the available technology). Some areas in the Southern Alps (Alpes-Maritimes) were never to be inhabited again after that.
  - Quarrelsome 6y ago
    > Some areas in the Southern Alps (Alpes-Maritimes) were never to be inhabited again after that. But that might also be due to the end of the warm period and the start of the little ice age. For reference: Its about now that the norse have to abandon their Greenland settlement.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      Note that most historians do not believe that the end of the Medieval warm period was the trigger of the collapse of the Greenland settlement, but rather that was the abandonment of trade routes to Greenland that caused its collapse.
      - Quarrelsome 6y ago
        I still think that the changing temperature was likely a factor but perhaps just a small one. It certainly would have got harder to eek out an existence on the island. As you say though a bigger factor was Portuguese traders gaining access to African elephant ivory which was easier and cheaper to procure than walrus ivory which was the cash crop of the Greenland settlement.
dalbasal 6y ago
Good context. Thanks for that. Finding modern cognates to medieval nobility is fraught. In the republican era, it basically means "finger the bad guys." There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class... Does Peace and War go into inter-nobility issues, or does the thesis rest on just the problem of a fixed size peasantry supporting a growing nobility? I could imagine these issues resulting in famines and peasant revolts. But, I can also imagine conflict emerging among nobility. You can confer as many titles as you like, but France only has so many hides of land. Landless knights and penniless descendants of counts hanging around palaces and competing viciously for favour seems like it could be a recipe too. Somewhat more parsimonious with this modern thesis.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  >There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class... Are these supposed to be different groups of people?
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    They're pretty tightly clustered, but each have their own connotations, rhetorically. Remember that the original liberals and republicans were (arguably) conducting conflicts within this overall cluster. In France it was the sans culotte vs the old nobility and clerics. You could argue that zuck or murdoch represents either side.
    - meekrohprocess 6y ago
      I don't think the sans culotte were part of the wealthy classes...doesn't it translate to something like, "without fancy pants"? I could see an argument that Zuck and Murdoch are like pied pipers leading the modern sans culotte around by the nose, though. I'm not looking forward to the upcoming Terrors, in that analogy.
      - joe_biden123 6y ago
deathhand 6y ago
To distill the thought further: Rent seeking behavior in non-scaleable.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Seems to be scaling just fine for Apple though.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be <insert group I don't like and do some hand waving to indicate why their value to society is net-negative> There's a lot of groups one could complain about. On HN it's a toss-up between whether you complain about the wall street bankers or the urban landlords. In other circles people complain about the government and the white collar yuppies. The MBA types get complained about a lot but nobody complains when they're buying a $100 window A/C unit. You can find examples of net-negative rent seeking in just about every part of the economy but to paint a whole class of economic activity as a drag is naive.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I mean, the nobility were, by and large, people who derived income from capital (generally, and in many countries exclusively, land) but didn’t generally themselves do productive work (they sometimes had minor government or judiciary roles, but these were often very minor, at least as time went on). It’s a fairly obvious comparison (though it was worse; modern investment, except in land, does at least indirectly lead to productive work). There are also more recent examples of overpopulation of non-productive landowners. Post-ww1 the UK peaked at demolishing more than one stately home per day, as the Downton Abbey class abruptly became non-viable.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Obviously (hopefully) this is a very complex topic and our analogies are both lacking in nuance and inaccurate on certain levels. However... In the middle ages the nobility were effectively the government (and the church provided checks and balances, kind of) as well as the investor class. In addition to financing productive capacity they also did all the administrative things governments do. Obviously administrative bloat ebbed and flowed over time. Today we have both government investment in capital project (e.g. a road, or a bus terminal) and private investment in capital projects (a new factory or whatever). Both groups can get very rent-seeky and non-productive if left alone with no reason to not do those things. It's really hard to make generalizations that are more accurate than not. I think comparison to the pre-industrial world is more effective for understanding that time than it is for drawing conclusions about our own time. All the details are so different you really need to squint to make things line up and when you're talking about big things like macro-economics it's the fine tuning and details that make all the difference.
simonh 6y ago
I don't think that's right, Turchin himself pointed out the "overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The problem is the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite. If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of people with credentials they cannot use. We see this in the UK as well where there is a growing cadre of graduates every year going into jobs that don't need a degree. This leads to growing numbers of people that expected to be in the elite, but aren't. The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share, and have the organisational and communications skills to do something about it. Investors that don't work for wages don't strike me as a likely group to develop growing levels of resentment.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  This. I'm lucky to have made it from a medium Eastern European city to a software engineer job in UK, but I can only imagine it would've been so much more difficult (if not impossible) if the pool of people with the same level of knowledge and interest was 10x bigger. Spending many years studying/working to end up in a job with no growth prospects would be a very bitter pill to swallow.
  - simonh 6y ago
    I studies CS back in the 80s and back then every student I knew was genuinely interested in the subject and motivated to learn. In my last job at a bank I regularly interviewed recent CS graduates and candidates able to demonstrate a genuine passion for the subject were few and far between. I know, I know, get off my lawn.
    - the_only_law 6y ago
      I mean I genuinely beleive I still have passion for this subject, I just absolutely hate the career field.
moosey 6y ago
There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid. Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is). What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  > There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid. But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? We need people to grow the food, collect it, distribute it, arrange it on shelves or serve it in restaurants. We need people to build homes (and implicitly the materials that need to be dug up or obtained from somewhere), sell them, renovate them, maintain them. And what about the huge infrastructure that goes around doing all this, the roads, the water treatment plants, the garbage collection? Who's gonna do all that? Oh, right, we have food and shelter, that's enough, I forgot. If the proportion of people who want to do science/progressive stuff is larger than what is sustainable to do all that I was listing above as well, wouldn't you say that becomes a problem?
  - jahaja 6y ago
    What's your point? The amount of people and labour needed to do those things are much much less than it once was. However we've since employed a massive amount of labour to chase profits and producing stuff that aren't necessarily needed, while still maintaining a system of scarcity for essentials.
TuringNYC 6y ago
>>> For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nobility increased from around 2% to 4% of the population, while the incomes of the richest nobles soared. Eventually, peasants could no longer produce enough to feed themselves and provide income for all the nobles: this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400. Wow, this literally reminds me of one of my tech employers. Eventually half the company was a VP, Director, Senior Director or something else. Often you had a reporting chain with a VP --> Sr.Director --> Director --> 1or2 workers Naturally, the high salaries above had to be supported, so the 1 or 2 workers at the bottom had to code more, code faster, and the management layer figuratively cracked the whip harder and harder to somehow produce enough billings to support the team of 5. (note the layers above were not sales, they were all program-manager types. sales was a different group.)
- mycall 6y ago
  Sounds like they were resume building.
jquery 6y ago
> The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. This feels wrong. Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension. The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees and net tax recipients.
- dbspin 6y ago
  This is precisely backwards - especially in the US. Anyone with 'generational wealth' effectively guaranteed by investments and trust funds is in effect an aristocrat. However their income came - whether through their parents or their own work, they no longer have to take employment, can travel the world freely and don't share the concerns of the vast swathe of the ordinary population. By contrast, the median government salary in the US is 51k. Notably many government sector employees like teachers are paid at about the same level of other industrialised countries (although with enormously worse paid vacations, and less autonomy than in most EU countries). Source: https://work.chron.com/average-salary-government-employees-7863.htm https://work.chron.com/average-salary-government-employees-7... https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-2017-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...
- frobozz 6y ago
  > Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension. That is pretty much the definition of the nobility. Someone many generations ago did something perceived as meritorious by the monarch and was awarded a title and some land. To get to the position where they could have done something to earn them a peerage, their ancestors would have worked a job for payment, and so on. The only difference is the timescale. The 16th Duke of Hamilton is 400 years from someone who had to work for a living. A highly privileged modern investor whose only job was a sinecure at Daddy's company might have parents or grandparents who worked an upper-middle class job. > The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees That is a ridiculous snark. Government employees work for a wage, just as commercial and third sector employees do. If they stop working, they end up destitute same as any other employee. You do realise that Ron Swanson is a fictional character, don't you?
elindbe2 6y ago
"The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees" I disagree here. The closest equivalent would be people in academia, specifically the portions of academia that don't perform useful work. Basically, the "X studies" crowd. And that's exactly where we see the most political instability coming from these days.
- asdff 6y ago
  I don't know why you mark people in pursuit of domain knowledge for the wider world as some evil elite, when there are people who exist to solely pursue personal profit at the cost of everyone else. These capitalists are the ones buying political adspace, spreading misinformation, and driving a wedge in the working class that directly leads to the polarized hyperpartisan political environment we have today. Not some underpaid humanities professor. The fact that you reflexively blame the academic is evidence that the propaganda from these moneyed groups is working as designed.
  - elindbe2 6y ago
    I have to disagree that many of these programs are pursuing "knowledge" at all. They're pursuing a victim mentality and simply make up rationalizations as they go along and call it knowledge. And they're the ones filing into positions in the mainstream media and other circles (like social media gatekeepers) devoted to spreading misinformation.
    - joe_biden123 6y ago
      the important part is they are all "elites", and whether their work is productive or not is not that important. they are separated from the masses at lagre by something. it could be college education or senatorial status or a noble title the details doesn't matter. they are elites doesn't mean they are "evil", and all societies need elites. there are just some positions they compete for and if there are not enough to go around sociaty can pay for it. the important part is not to overproduce elites
- 6y ago
teorema 6y ago
I think you could generalize the idea of "individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work" to "individuals whose extracted income exceeds the utility of the work they perform." Maybe to the converse as well, to an excess of "individuals whose extracted income subceeds the utility of the work they perform". It's basically talking about unjustified inequality. I think to some extent this maps onto the idea of rent-seeking monopolies in current society and undercompensation of individuals. It's hard to go to something like this https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/' and not conclude that many people are being undercompensated grossly, and a small number of others are being overcompensated grossly. For what it's worth, I agree with others that I don't think this maps onto "braininess" per se. I just think that's one of the character traits that happens to be valued the most in Western societies at the moment, so it's projected by the elites the most. In the past it might have been valor or nobility or courage or whatever it was -- the thing that is presented as justification for the excessive income, and protection of that income. In general I think individuals are misvalued, not in the sense that persons don't matter, but the economic value placed on single individuals can be (and usually are) grossly overstated or understated. I think this transcends many many fields.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  In addition to the weath-in-pixels visualization you linked, another very damning graph comes from the Fed's research arm: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK This is a plot of median household income in comparison to GDP per household, both in inflation-corrected dollars. The GDP/household line has been pulling away from the household income line since the 1980s. While a great deal of wealth is being created in America, a decreasing share of it is trickling down into the hands of the median person. The rest of it is disappearing into the pockets of the already very wealthy in general, and the billionaires in particular.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
127 6y ago
This was a pretty eye-opening interview for me. Certainly gives a lot of food for thought. About kleptocracy and how that particular (parasitic) economy survives and even thrives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlZdx9eDetw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlZdx9eDetw
centimeter 6y ago
Investors already did the work for those wages - you just don’t intuitively understand deferred consumption. The closest thing to French nobility we have today is probably people with government sinecures.
- rmah 6y ago
  If having ancestors that ran the violent gangs that terrorized, plundered and murdered their way into a protection racket over the locals is "work", then sure.

by lwneal 6y ago

est31 6y ago

> The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. (Not to say there is no overlap between those groups.) Investors do a lot of work, because they have to constantly think where to put their money, evaluate alternatives, make sure there is no money wasted on things, etc. Even passive investors who only have S&P portfolios still contribute to the economy by providing capital to companies to invest into new things.

question000 6y ago
Yeah but even if we accept passive investment is a form of productive labor, there's a limited number safe/good investments for those good investors. As we saw in the 2008 recession when more and investors pile on even the safest investments (mortgages backed securities) the quality of those investments tends to be diluted (via CDO's, errant ratings companies, exploitative real estate practices) This is what's making me nervous about index funds right now, the demand seems extremely high, but what about the supply how would you determine such a thing? What is investors are smart but there simply aren't enough good investments out there? Are they going to give up and become doctors, lawyers or engineers? Or just spend more time with their kids?
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Fundamentally, investments are a bet that the future will be richer than the present. If there aren't enough good investments now then that's an indication that the market believes there are major structural problems with the economy that will prevent the future from being richer than the present. That's a far, far, more serious issue than just a question of what the kind of people who expect to receive passive incomes will do with their time. Obviously, the pandemic is having a major current impact, but as you say, there has been a shortage of good investments since at least 2008. I believe the underlying issue is a misallocation of resources into rentier economics and not enough into productive growth. We've collectively put far too much money into monopolies that squeeze larger percentages of money out of people and not enough money into innovation that improves the human environment. We need more of the original Google (i.e. the revolutionary search engine) and a lot less of the current Alphabet (i.e. the rentier advertising monopolist).
  - imtringued 6y ago
    There is an obvious shift away from labor to capital. Central banks shift the balance way too far toward capital as it is right now. Lack of labor stimulus leads to inefficient allocation of labor.
cthaeh 6y ago
This is what i dont get. Isnt is only if u buy stock at an ipo that the company gets the money? Otherewise, either by buying an index or a stock normally, ur giving ur money to other investors, not the company itself.
DobryMorozov 6y ago
Investors in secondary markets do not inject any money into businesses whatsoever. They are simply buying shares from other secondary market investors

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

> would be investors who do not work for wages. So, everyone with retirement investments. I think they're known as 401(k) in the USA, here in Australia Super Annuation. We've built a self-collapsing economy?

rsynnott 6y ago
I mean, to some extent, yes, probably. In an aging society, as the fraction of the population doing productive work falls, this sort of thing is likely to become a problem.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's only a problem in the sense that these investors will at one point realize that their investment is not as valuable as they think.

Quarrelsome 6y ago

> this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400. I feel like you need to mention the black death in this same sentence though, as the nobility population change would arguably be a lesser factor in thrall to that massive event. It does certainly paint an interesting aftermath as the black death suddenly made life a valuable commodity leading to a small period of time where worker's rights and even in some cases women's rights were improved. Considering that against a backdrop of indignant nobles is entertaining ponder-thought. The Great Famine was 1315ish, were you thinking of that instead?

paganel 6y ago
I also personally think that France's demographic situation in the early 1300s was a perfect example of Malthus's law, there were too many people compared to what the land could provide at that time (given the available technology). Some areas in the Southern Alps (Alpes-Maritimes) were never to be inhabited again after that.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago
  > Some areas in the Southern Alps (Alpes-Maritimes) were never to be inhabited again after that. But that might also be due to the end of the warm period and the start of the little ice age. For reference: Its about now that the norse have to abandon their Greenland settlement.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    Note that most historians do not believe that the end of the Medieval warm period was the trigger of the collapse of the Greenland settlement, but rather that was the abandonment of trade routes to Greenland that caused its collapse.
    - Quarrelsome 6y ago
      I still think that the changing temperature was likely a factor but perhaps just a small one. It certainly would have got harder to eek out an existence on the island. As you say though a bigger factor was Portuguese traders gaining access to African elephant ivory which was easier and cheaper to procure than walrus ivory which was the cash crop of the Greenland settlement.

dalbasal 6y ago

Good context. Thanks for that. Finding modern cognates to medieval nobility is fraught. In the republican era, it basically means "finger the bad guys." There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class... Does Peace and War go into inter-nobility issues, or does the thesis rest on just the problem of a fixed size peasantry supporting a growing nobility? I could imagine these issues resulting in famines and peasant revolts. But, I can also imagine conflict emerging among nobility. You can confer as many titles as you like, but France only has so many hides of land. Landless knights and penniless descendants of counts hanging around palaces and competing viciously for favour seems like it could be a recipe too. Somewhat more parsimonious with this modern thesis.

learnstats2 6y ago
>There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class... Are these supposed to be different groups of people?
- dalbasal 6y ago
  They're pretty tightly clustered, but each have their own connotations, rhetorically. Remember that the original liberals and republicans were (arguably) conducting conflicts within this overall cluster. In France it was the sans culotte vs the old nobility and clerics. You could argue that zuck or murdoch represents either side.
  - meekrohprocess 6y ago
    I don't think the sans culotte were part of the wealthy classes...doesn't it translate to something like, "without fancy pants"? I could see an argument that Zuck and Murdoch are like pied pipers leading the modern sans culotte around by the nose, though. I'm not looking forward to the upcoming Terrors, in that analogy.
    - joe_biden123 6y ago

deathhand 6y ago

To distill the thought further: Rent seeking behavior in non-scaleable.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Seems to be scaling just fine for Apple though.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be <insert group I don't like and do some hand waving to indicate why their value to society is net-negative> There's a lot of groups one could complain about. On HN it's a toss-up between whether you complain about the wall street bankers or the urban landlords. In other circles people complain about the government and the white collar yuppies. The MBA types get complained about a lot but nobody complains when they're buying a $100 window A/C unit. You can find examples of net-negative rent seeking in just about every part of the economy but to paint a whole class of economic activity as a drag is naive.

rsynnott 6y ago
I mean, the nobility were, by and large, people who derived income from capital (generally, and in many countries exclusively, land) but didn’t generally themselves do productive work (they sometimes had minor government or judiciary roles, but these were often very minor, at least as time went on). It’s a fairly obvious comparison (though it was worse; modern investment, except in land, does at least indirectly lead to productive work). There are also more recent examples of overpopulation of non-productive landowners. Post-ww1 the UK peaked at demolishing more than one stately home per day, as the Downton Abbey class abruptly became non-viable.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Obviously (hopefully) this is a very complex topic and our analogies are both lacking in nuance and inaccurate on certain levels. However... In the middle ages the nobility were effectively the government (and the church provided checks and balances, kind of) as well as the investor class. In addition to financing productive capacity they also did all the administrative things governments do. Obviously administrative bloat ebbed and flowed over time. Today we have both government investment in capital project (e.g. a road, or a bus terminal) and private investment in capital projects (a new factory or whatever). Both groups can get very rent-seeky and non-productive if left alone with no reason to not do those things. It's really hard to make generalizations that are more accurate than not. I think comparison to the pre-industrial world is more effective for understanding that time than it is for drawing conclusions about our own time. All the details are so different you really need to squint to make things line up and when you're talking about big things like macro-economics it's the fine tuning and details that make all the difference.

simonh 6y ago

I don't think that's right, Turchin himself pointed out the "overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The problem is the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite. If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of people with credentials they cannot use. We see this in the UK as well where there is a growing cadre of graduates every year going into jobs that don't need a degree. This leads to growing numbers of people that expected to be in the elite, but aren't. The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share, and have the organisational and communications skills to do something about it. Investors that don't work for wages don't strike me as a likely group to develop growing levels of resentment.

xenocratus 6y ago
This. I'm lucky to have made it from a medium Eastern European city to a software engineer job in UK, but I can only imagine it would've been so much more difficult (if not impossible) if the pool of people with the same level of knowledge and interest was 10x bigger. Spending many years studying/working to end up in a job with no growth prospects would be a very bitter pill to swallow.
- simonh 6y ago
  I studies CS back in the 80s and back then every student I knew was genuinely interested in the subject and motivated to learn. In my last job at a bank I regularly interviewed recent CS graduates and candidates able to demonstrate a genuine passion for the subject were few and far between. I know, I know, get off my lawn.
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    I mean I genuinely beleive I still have passion for this subject, I just absolutely hate the career field.

moosey 6y ago

There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid. Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is). What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.

xenocratus 6y ago
> There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid. But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? We need people to grow the food, collect it, distribute it, arrange it on shelves or serve it in restaurants. We need people to build homes (and implicitly the materials that need to be dug up or obtained from somewhere), sell them, renovate them, maintain them. And what about the huge infrastructure that goes around doing all this, the roads, the water treatment plants, the garbage collection? Who's gonna do all that? Oh, right, we have food and shelter, that's enough, I forgot. If the proportion of people who want to do science/progressive stuff is larger than what is sustainable to do all that I was listing above as well, wouldn't you say that becomes a problem?
- jahaja 6y ago
  What's your point? The amount of people and labour needed to do those things are much much less than it once was. However we've since employed a massive amount of labour to chase profits and producing stuff that aren't necessarily needed, while still maintaining a system of scarcity for essentials.

TuringNYC 6y ago

>>> For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nobility increased from around 2% to 4% of the population, while the incomes of the richest nobles soared. Eventually, peasants could no longer produce enough to feed themselves and provide income for all the nobles: this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400. Wow, this literally reminds me of one of my tech employers. Eventually half the company was a VP, Director, Senior Director or something else. Often you had a reporting chain with a VP --> Sr.Director --> Director --> 1or2 workers Naturally, the high salaries above had to be supported, so the 1 or 2 workers at the bottom had to code more, code faster, and the management layer figuratively cracked the whip harder and harder to somehow produce enough billings to support the team of 5. (note the layers above were not sales, they were all program-manager types. sales was a different group.)

mycall 6y ago
Sounds like they were resume building.

jquery 6y ago

> The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. This feels wrong. Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension. The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees and net tax recipients.

dbspin 6y ago
This is precisely backwards - especially in the US. Anyone with 'generational wealth' effectively guaranteed by investments and trust funds is in effect an aristocrat. However their income came - whether through their parents or their own work, they no longer have to take employment, can travel the world freely and don't share the concerns of the vast swathe of the ordinary population. By contrast, the median government salary in the US is 51k. Notably many government sector employees like teachers are paid at about the same level of other industrialised countries (although with enormously worse paid vacations, and less autonomy than in most EU countries). Source: https://work.chron.com/average-salary-government-employees-7863.htm https://work.chron.com/average-salary-government-employees-7... https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-2017-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...
frobozz 6y ago
> Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension. That is pretty much the definition of the nobility. Someone many generations ago did something perceived as meritorious by the monarch and was awarded a title and some land. To get to the position where they could have done something to earn them a peerage, their ancestors would have worked a job for payment, and so on. The only difference is the timescale. The 16th Duke of Hamilton is 400 years from someone who had to work for a living. A highly privileged modern investor whose only job was a sinecure at Daddy's company might have parents or grandparents who worked an upper-middle class job. > The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees That is a ridiculous snark. Government employees work for a wage, just as commercial and third sector employees do. If they stop working, they end up destitute same as any other employee. You do realise that Ron Swanson is a fictional character, don't you?

elindbe2 6y ago

"The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees" I disagree here. The closest equivalent would be people in academia, specifically the portions of academia that don't perform useful work. Basically, the "X studies" crowd. And that's exactly where we see the most political instability coming from these days.

asdff 6y ago
I don't know why you mark people in pursuit of domain knowledge for the wider world as some evil elite, when there are people who exist to solely pursue personal profit at the cost of everyone else. These capitalists are the ones buying political adspace, spreading misinformation, and driving a wedge in the working class that directly leads to the polarized hyperpartisan political environment we have today. Not some underpaid humanities professor. The fact that you reflexively blame the academic is evidence that the propaganda from these moneyed groups is working as designed.
- elindbe2 6y ago
  I have to disagree that many of these programs are pursuing "knowledge" at all. They're pursuing a victim mentality and simply make up rationalizations as they go along and call it knowledge. And they're the ones filing into positions in the mainstream media and other circles (like social media gatekeepers) devoted to spreading misinformation.
  - joe_biden123 6y ago
    the important part is they are all "elites", and whether their work is productive or not is not that important. they are separated from the masses at lagre by something. it could be college education or senatorial status or a noble title the details doesn't matter. they are elites doesn't mean they are "evil", and all societies need elites. there are just some positions they compete for and if there are not enough to go around sociaty can pay for it. the important part is not to overproduce elites
6y ago

teorema 6y ago

I think you could generalize the idea of "individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work" to "individuals whose extracted income exceeds the utility of the work they perform." Maybe to the converse as well, to an excess of "individuals whose extracted income subceeds the utility of the work they perform". It's basically talking about unjustified inequality. I think to some extent this maps onto the idea of rent-seeking monopolies in current society and undercompensation of individuals. It's hard to go to something like this https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/' and not conclude that many people are being undercompensated grossly, and a small number of others are being overcompensated grossly. For what it's worth, I agree with others that I don't think this maps onto "braininess" per se. I just think that's one of the character traits that happens to be valued the most in Western societies at the moment, so it's projected by the elites the most. In the past it might have been valor or nobility or courage or whatever it was -- the thing that is presented as justification for the excessive income, and protection of that income. In general I think individuals are misvalued, not in the sense that persons don't matter, but the economic value placed on single individuals can be (and usually are) grossly overstated or understated. I think this transcends many many fields.

bleepblorp 6y ago
In addition to the weath-in-pixels visualization you linked, another very damning graph comes from the Fed's research arm: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK This is a plot of median household income in comparison to GDP per household, both in inflation-corrected dollars. The GDP/household line has been pulling away from the household income line since the 1980s. While a great deal of wealth is being created in America, a decreasing share of it is trickling down into the hands of the median person. The rest of it is disappearing into the pockets of the already very wealthy in general, and the billionaires in particular.

deleted 6y ago

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127 6y ago

This was a pretty eye-opening interview for me. Certainly gives a lot of food for thought. About kleptocracy and how that particular (parasitic) economy survives and even thrives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlZdx9eDetw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlZdx9eDetw

centimeter 6y ago

Investors already did the work for those wages - you just don’t intuitively understand deferred consumption. The closest thing to French nobility we have today is probably people with government sinecures.

rmah 6y ago
If having ancestors that ran the violent gangs that terrorized, plundered and murdered their way into a protection racket over the locals is "work", then sure.