22 ms·

A theory that “elite overproduction” leads to political instability (2020)

203 points by jedwhite 5y ago

qntty 5y ago
https://archive.is/HrVFy https://archive.is/HrVFy
francisofascii 5y ago
Also known as Elite overproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
- busterarm 5y ago
  Yes, that is what the article is about. It even says so.
cat_plus_plus 5y ago
Only if whatever enhances their intelligence also amplifies their ambition, like in the Wraith of Khan. Which seems to be the current direction of US education system. Foreign-educated tech immigrants are not throwing any fireworks at rallies.
- ben_w 5y ago
  > Wraith of Khan I know this is just a typo/autocorrupt (and goodness knows I’ve had plenty of those in my comments here, some spotted only after the edit window closes), but this does sound like an plot for either The Lower Decks or Rick & Morty. But to your actual point: I agree, I don’t think genius is correlated with corrupted power. High-IQ watering holes like HN and Less Wrong may be filled with people whose ambitions include want to radically change the world (and HN being part of Y Combinator suggests a desire to get rich doing so), but they don’t give me the vibe of wanting to rule it like the character of Kahn.
  - willvarfar 5y ago
    Wrath of Khan Academy?
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Ring Wraith of Khan.
  - handrous 5y ago
    > > Wraith of Khan > [...] but this does sound like an plot for either The Lower Decks or Rick & Morty. Rick and Morty prefers starting with an existing title and then cramming one (or more) of the character's names in, whether it makes sense or not, and sometimes avoiding a more reasonable mutation for one that's nonsense. In this case, if they really wanted to use this title, I'd expect them to end up with something like "The Rick of Khan" purely so they could match the R sound on "wrath" and the dual consonants at the end of the word. Extreme, real example of this pattern from the current season: "Mort Dinner Rick Andre". They've turned it into grammatical nonsense so they can make some very tenuous word-sound connections (especially on "with" -> "rick"—it's there, but wow, that's a stretch)
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Sure, but I mean the plot, not the title. A ghost of changed-just-enough-to-avoid-copyright-infringement-but-still-obvious Khan seeking revenge feels very much the sort of thing they’d do.
      - handrous 5y ago
        Ah, right, that makes sense.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > Only if whatever enhances their intelligence also amplifies their ambition Or if it amplifies their entitlement. I wouldn’t be surprised if the more people spend of college, the more they expect in return.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    I think that’s a given, isn’t it? When most people (in the US at least) are financing their education via loans if they’re going to take out increasingly larger loans they’re going to have to expect more in return in order to pay those loans back. I don’t know I would call that “entitlement” though.
    - meiraleal 5y ago
      To pay your own education is one part of the equation, to be successful is still on you.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      Heh, I was thinking about the entitlement in the normal sense, but forgot it'd probably read as eNtITLEMenT in the internet meme/political meme sense.
    - cherryturnover 5y ago
      High Risk != High Reward. There are far too many college educated people in the US that assume this. I walked in getting my degree knowing full well I was paying simply for the paper and the potential for getting a job in my field. I didn't walk in like I did the first time getting my associates degree believing I'd be making $50k upon graduation.
sarosh 5y ago
This Economist article is from October of 2020. Peter Turchin is not a historian. He is instead in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Universtiy of Connecticut. He advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse. The Nature article from about decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ Some descriptive work such as: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full Sone of the work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1] and some recent (2017) related work [2]. Finally, in his own words, a comparison of Psychohistory and Cliodynamics (2012) [3] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1] https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full [3] http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliodynamics/ http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliod...
- javajosh 5y ago
  "Psychohistory" has a better ring to it than "cliodynamics", IMHO.
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    Came here to say this :). Especially with the Foundation TV series coming out now this could almost be a PR stunt. The thesis seems sound, though. When you have a large number of people who have the aptitude and have invested heavily in joining the ranks of the elite (both financially and time-wise), and there's just not enough room at the top, what do they do? We see that in India with the rise of a huge number of engineering colleges. There's a massive over-supply of engineers, so people who have invested in a masters degree at great cost and 5 to 6 years of studying wind up working in vocational jobs that could have been done with a six-month diploma / apprenticeship. They're not happy.
tamaharbor 5y ago
Well, just look at Hacker News…. :-)
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Don't discount how lucky many on HN have been. Its better to be lucky than good or educated.
quacked 5y ago
I wonder if the economists have ever considered a society where brainy people are happy and proud to perform basic sustenance work- construction, manufacture of textiles, farming, driving, etc.
- zelos 5y ago
  "I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure." (Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons)
- oh-4-fucks-sake 5y ago
  [I think psychologists have](https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magical-chart/ https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magic...) Basically, those that are more "brainy" need a higher level of mental stimulation in order to not be bored. Being given too much mental stimulation relative to your intelligence/skills results in anxiety. The sweet spot is somewhere in between and we seek this sweet spot (or at least stumble upon it and remain sticky to it). People then sort themselves over time into these buckets s/t (generally), the brainy people end up doing brainy things, and the not-so-brainy people do less-brainy things. Reversing of roles would be mutually detrimental to both parties.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    The real truth is that brainy people need a way to blow off that brainy steam, and it kinda doesn't matter if it's designing a novel WMD or playing a board-game. I'd argue on that basis that stimulating board-games can save the world.
    - kevinventullo 5y ago
      I occasionally ponder whether this is the purpose of funding pure mathematics.
      - jimbokun 5y ago
motohagiography 5y ago
Saying too many people are "brainier" than they are is probably the real issue. Turchin's prediction: > “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. ...overlooks something key: they didn't produce an a new elite, only "elitists," who never quite arrive. The resentment from people who became middle class after graduating from debt funded college is the result of how all that work didn't deliver on the promise of upper-middle security. The Gen-X cliche of baristas with masters degrees has simmered for a couple of decades, and it has metastisized into a deep loathing for the working people Gen-X grads haven't been able to differentiate themselves from, and hence the "burn it all down," attitude you see in a lot of them. The coders and general contractors who didn't go to university who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real cultural factor, and a big part of the U.S. red/blue divide. If you look up Girard and "mimetic violence," you can get a useful framework with predictive power on the dynamic they're describing. The promise of college and debt was they would be elevated into an elite, but of course, they weren't, and now these smart-enough and educated people bitterly hate what they call the "trash" and neighbors they still too-closely resemble, and who the remaining elite confuses them with. The political instability aspect of it in the article is that if you want to see who is setting fires in cities and throwing rocks at police, it's people with just enough security and social capital to get away with it, but not enough to meet their self image as legit members of the elites their educations allowed them to percieve. Brainy? No. Promised something and told it was because they were brainy? Probably.
- JPKab 5y ago
  Well said. Anecdotally, the level of resentment I've seen from masters CS grads towards more talented coders with no degree was pretty epic at my last company. I've also seen this get pretty ugly in the ML/deep learning community between the credentialed academics and the practitioners.
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    I don't have a college degree. Though I usually get jobs where I'm surrounded by people that have degrees or advanced degrees. I can recall a particular startup where I was the only person without a degree, the person that I worked for had an advanced degree. This person that I worked for always resented that I made about the same income without a degree. There is no way I could have ever reached management in that company without a degree - no matter how qualified or good, because of elitist bias.
ElViajero 5y ago
This is a very elitist and narrow way to look at society. It advocates to have an uneducated underclass that would not have the tools to improve or protest their situation. Brave New World is a good book to understand why this is a bad idea. It seems that Orwell and Huxley books are being used as manuals instead of the cautionary tale that they are.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  Not quite the way I'm reading it. It's a variation on "if everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow" line. If the entire population wants to be doctors, we already know that's not going to work. And if everyone finds out they can't be a doctor after 10 years of medical school, where the amount of time and money spent has now created a sense of entitlement to the life of a doctor, the people are going to be pretty pissed off when you ask them to be fruit pickers or sanitation workers instead. Same goes for lawyers, engineers or any other profession that has a supply-demand imbalance.
  - whoisburbansky 5y ago
    Is it better to have an undersupply of doctors leading to overworked doctors and generally worse medical outcomes or to have an oversupply, with some of the excess going on to do, e.g. research or administration? Exactly matching supply and demand is practically impossible, so which side is it safer to err on?
    - wcunning 5y ago
      It's obviously better to have a, say, 1% oversupply than a 1% undersupply, but that's not an interesting question to answer, really. The better question would be: is it better to have a 1% undersupply than a 15% oversupply? (Or some other larger and less obvious mismatch) It would be clearly bad to paperclip-optimize doctors -- everyone must go through all 10 years of post-secondary education to be a doctor and then after they have done so, we will be pick the best 3% of them to be practicing doctors while telling everyone else to find another career is incredibly wasteful, as is anything significantly in that vein.
cratermoon 5y ago
I'd just like to point out that enormous numbers of people doing basic, physical, labor today would be considered highly educated and worldly were they dropped into anywhere in the world up to about the end of the 15th century. Worse, many of the facts they just know from pre-school or watching Sesame Street would be considered heretical and dangerous and land them in trouble in short order. Brainy is completely relative.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  While this is true compared to past societies, the only frame that matters for us right now is the present. Relatively speaking, I am also fabulously wealthy and I eat better than Kings. But I still rent a one bedroom apartment and can't afford a home.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  They would be considered mad and certainly not educated; an educated person of that time would have a good command of Latin, which we do not teach anymore. Standards for "looking educated" shift all the time.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    They might not look educated to the educated of the time, but laborers who had no schooling wouldn't necessarily know. They'd probably be really superstitious and suspicious if the person didn't show proper deference to the gentry and the religious authorities, though.
- chacha2 5y ago
  “I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off.”
1MachineElf 5y ago
Luke Smith talks about the same topic from the perspective of early 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter: https://youtu.be/SYUgTzT79ww https://youtu.be/SYUgTzT79ww
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  At about 29m45s into the video
debacle 5y ago
The needlessly exclusive nature of the Ivy League underpins a gross fear of the elites in the egality of education. America, for example, is a socialist nation as soon as your income hits a certain level. They look out + take care of each other in a generational fashion, at the same time advocating for policies that preach individualism and divide.
petermcneeley 5y ago
In the Star Trek future isnt everyone basically a Phd? I always thought this is what we wanted? Perhaps the issue is elsewhere.
- NoOneNew 5y ago
  Yes, we should basis reality on a fictional story... totally makes sense. If we're going to go that route, I say we start throwing politicians in volcanos as the starting point. It worked against Sauron.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    >"I say we start throwing politicians in volcanoes as the starting point." Maybe you're on to something.... Jokes aside, whenever people point to "Star Trek" as an example of post-scarcity society I recoil at just how over-simplified and not well thought out the comparison is.
    - petermcneeley 5y ago
      So what % of the population was farmers in 1500? probably like 80%. Today its 2%. Eventually a similar thing has and will happen to all manufacturing. Today we have instead millions of programmers and teachers etc etc. This trend towards increased education is due to the technological support structure. If you run this trend forward even 50 years what jobs do you really think will exist that wont basically be scientifically or academically inclined?
      - NoOneNew 5y ago
        Except trends dont account for humanity and general shit hitting the fan. We are living in the safest times ever. Even the world wars aren't enough to topple off the last 100 years are the safest in human history, on average. We are due for a massive war or two really soon if we are relying on trends. Covid is a small, kinky lovetap on the ass when it comes to pandemics of the past. Most countries haven't seen a famine in like 2 or 3 generations. What we saw the last 1.5 years wasn't famine, just hoarding mixed with logistical failures. Intersaller is probably more on the mark. Blight striking nearly every staple food is the real horror in the night. Cavendish bananas are under massive threat of a fungal disease wiping them out, forever. The same thing can happen at anytime to other overproduced mono-crops. But then let's take humanity at it's current state. If everyone believes working with their hands is beneath them, are we really going to reach automation peak? Ignoring the scifi fantasy of skynet ai, you really think there wont be exploitation? The one thing humans are brilliant at, it's exploiting a system. You have to pacify a human to stop them from min-maxing. It's what we do. We are already seeing the adverse affects of too many systems online. Ransomware is not a problem, it's a goddamn well oiled industry. The future luddite wont just break a loom or two. They can stop fuel for tens of millions of people. Turn off cooling/heating to homes. And if wireless bots run farms... well, I dont think you need a good imagination to figure out what will happen there.
Animats 5y ago
That's been a major source of unrest in some of the Arab countries, notably Egypt. They overproduced university grads without an economy that could use them. This is not a new observation. Eric Hoffer made it in "Working and Thinking on the Waterfront" (1959).
majormajor 5y ago
The article cites the election of Trump and Brexit as evidence for too many people having degrees that they aren't able to fully utilize, supposedly confirming a prediction from Turchin in 2010, but... as far as I've read, neither of those things were driven by the advanced-degree-holding crowd. The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college education!
- sjwalter 5y ago
  > The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college education Portland's seemingly endless supply of white, elitist anarchists would like a word with you.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college education! The “angry populist masses” are (one set of) the people being driven by propaganda, not the people driving it.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  It was Michael Gove, the education minister and Vote Leave figurehead, who said in 2016: "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts"[0]. This line of thinking is beautifully conveyed in a satirical drawing by Will McPhail that appeared in the 2017-01-02 issue of The New Yorker with the caption "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?".[1] Another satirical drawing from 2016 seems to capture a similar pathology, where the character starts by saying "I want things to be different".[2] [0] https://www.london.edu/think/who-needs-experts https://www.london.edu/think/who-needs-experts [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/06/trump-cartoon-new-yorker-column/96208552/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/06/trump-cart... [2] https://webcomicname.com/post/152958755984 https://webcomicname.com/post/152958755984
  - ahejtkksnf 5y ago
    Even more smugly you have to turn to an objective example instead of the subjective insanities of economics and sociology that Elites™ force down our throat. For the record your pals are starting to hire Diverse™ pilots… [1] https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-coronavirus-pandemic-c1570fd546f11a8120e4b7507b13f584 https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-coronavirus-pa...
igorkraw 5y ago
I kind of have an issue that when faced with a steep rise in educated people who find that there is no room for them in the old structures and thus are frustrated, we blame and "overproduction" of educated people and not the old structures. Even the naming tries to force that framing. Apply this to the time when most people couldn't read and you were a dangerous radical if you taught workers, blacks and women how to read because they would "no longer be content with their place in life". I think most people on this site would agree that keeping people uneducated just so they don't start realizing how unfair their lot is would be morally wrong and that the correct option is right the unfairness...right?
- axguscbklp 5y ago
  There is a huge difference there though. Teaching people to read actually does make them enormously more educated. On the other hand, putting people through university does not necessarily make people even slightly more educated. Most people I know who are university graduates are not what I would call educated in any real sense and I doubt that they were significantly more educated when they left university than when they entered it. BTW, I did not downvote you. I do not know who did, but personally I do not downvote.
  - igorkraw 5y ago
    I don't really care about the downvotes. But this meme that university likely doesn't teach you anything...it's so baffling to me, like, university does. It imply smarts, but not everyone who went to highschool reads and I feel like at least on this website people should get intervention effectiveness and probability etc. Just because university education isn't ideal and people might disagree whether the education people receive there is useful or marketable doesn't change the fact that if you graduate from a serious university or community colleague it is likely you'll have learned self management skills as well as whatever was in your classes. I've once seen a talk by a German soldier coming back from Afghanistan and he talked about what big difference it maae that in Germany almost everyone trains their ability to focus on someone speaking for 30+ minutes, discussing how he had to learn to triple check his local co-soldiers who hadn't had that luxury actually got the mission briefing. Even if you just learn to binge learn and puke out knowledge in tests that can come in quite handy later on, and the often maligned humanities actually matter if you are interested in a nuanced and continually evolving look of humans onto themselves. So I find this meme that university is worthless quite damaging and not really trustworthy. People can be uncultured swine, idiots and dicks at any educational level, it doesn't necessarily mean they didn't benefit from their education. The fact that the US puts you heavily into debt to get that education is another question that I'll leave untouched here since dang asked me repeatedly to steer clear of predictable controversies
TechBro8615 5y ago
Maybe we need to bump the definition of "elite" so that so many self-aggrandizing academics don't self-select into it. The problem is not an overproduction of elites but one of consumers and followers. The world needs more builders.
armatav 5y ago
Yeah the problem is too many smart people, not the fucked up financial systems, terrible education systems, degenerate media cycles and huge bureaucracy, but that too many people are too smart. Yeah let’s make sure we have an underclass of uneducated people so they don’t notice any of the problems, that will make sure there is less “political instability”.
- axguscbklp 5y ago
  I think that the Economist headline misrepresents Turchin's theory. The issue is not that there are too many smart people, it is that there are too many university graduates who feel entitled to a limited set of niches in the upper strata of society. Those are two different things.
  - BB212 5y ago
    I'm not even sure if he would argue that this is a bad thing? I 100% think a society with a stratified lower caste could be more stable than one where everyone has equal resources - but I don't think that makes it better.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      It's a bad thing if people feel entitled to things they cannot possibly have, of course. It's not even necessarily about how resources are actually distributed, it's just pointing out that we aren't supposed to be selling people a false bill of goods. Of course people can strive to be upwardly mobile and perhaps fail in these ambitions, but it should be a very clear, voluntary choice.
    - armatav 5y ago
      My argument does not preclude stratification as a concept - every competitive system has stratification by nature. My point is that you cannot stratify people into two separate classes and then perpetually move one of those classes down into total barbarism and call it a better move than rewriting your existing inefficient system. I'm not a believer in the idiotic communist ideology, and did not even mention equal resources in my post. Communism can burn, save for all of the people forced to live crippled lives under it. But you cannot have communism for 99.999% of people and true competitiveness for the leftover if you want a stable system. Specifically if you want a stable system. Comparison without the means of acquisition will cause revolution.
ozim 5y ago
Being smart does not equal being rich. Being rich does not mean being elite. Being elite is always "extraordinarily difficult" - from getting "advanced degree" there is still long way to being "elite". Having a degree does not mean one is smart, it does not mean someone will get a job. Maybe we should put more effort into explaining life to people or actually start making them smart instead of "smart". If people would be really smart they would know how much effort is needed to become elite in any discipline. I have another article: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-22/if-you-re-so-smart-why-aren-t-you-rich https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-22/if-you...
- cherryturnover 5y ago
  I personally feel like college institutions get way too much freedom to act as predatory as they do regarding student loans and education. So many 18 year olds are told to go to college and get a degree only to come out a 22 year old with no work skills or legitimate life experience unless they were fortunate enough to get an internship. Then they have to eventually either swallow their pride and work a garbage paying job for a while or get lucky working for somewhere that actually pays decently in wage and/or experience. I'm currently a return student, and based off of the data my school collected for the 2019 year, the top majors were: Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Organizational Leadership, and Nursing. General business degrees are as worthless as english degrees. They don't teach you anything about actual business and you will not be able to just get a job. You'd have a better shot beating out external candidates applying from within at a low level position...almost every time. Psych and Bio, predominantly taken by females at my school (almost 80%). Again, another worthless field unless you go on to get a MS or Ph.D...of which none at this school do because it's a very low end state school. So there's another thing schools forget to mention about certain degrees. The next one is a general business degree for online transfer students at most schools in the area who just want to check off a "I have a Bachelors" box at application time. Then Nursing (again, predominantly women) which is actually a very hard field to pass but is basically a golden ticket to employment universally here. But that doesn't even hold a candle to those 4 ahead of it. This base set of data shows that schools are marketing toward the undecided crowd or the people without the jaded understanding that real life can be a bitch. It doesn't care what you think should be the rules. And these schools take extreme advantage of it. Not to mention these schools get tax payer funding but have virtually no oversight as to how the school runs things. The head chair of my Comp Sci department is a guy with a Ph.D in physics! I know that's fairly normal, but it's pretty ridiculous that this guy is making decisions on us having to take an AI class over advanced database administration or making InfoSec students know OOP and programming.
mikewarot 5y ago
Institutions have embedded growth obligations they can't meet, and thus are forced to lie to everyone to stay alive. Is it really surprising that all the people lied to might be upset when they don't get to live the life they were promised?
jdhn 5y ago
When there's "blue collar overproduction" due to outsourcing and automation of manufacturing jobs, it's not a big deal because they can just learn to code, but when there's "elite overproduction" we need to wring our hands and talk about how this is terrible? Sorry, but I'm not buying it.
- pydry 5y ago
  The Economist can't quite bring itself to say that educated proletarians are more of a political threat to the real elites (their target audience) than uneducated proletarians.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    That's pretty much how it is, yes. The class for elite that the article uses is meaningless, a programmer or a sysadmin is not an elite in any meaningful way.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    I don't think that is a fair characterization. Instead, dissatisfied proletarians are more of a political threat than Co. Placenta ones. The most dissatisfied and dangerous proletarians are those who thought they were bourgeois and now realize they aren't. It is the mismatch of expectations and reality that drive the dissatisfaction.
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    Those "educated" proletarians, at least in my experience, are no more educated than the "trailer trash" they mock, despite their degree. They read Marx in college and start parroting the talking points of choice of their political candidate. You can tell when someone has actually thought through their political opinions when they don't all align on one side of the political spectrum.
Lavery 5y ago
Lots of comments here on the causal side of elite production, but just to float an alternate possibility: This could just as easily be suggesting that "overproduction" of elites is due to, some two decades prior, a creeping sense among the populace of nascent but growing inequality and increased stratification? Or put differently, "Grandpa worked in the plant and made a good life for himself, and I work in the plant and make a good life for my family too, but I see the writing on the all and am going to make certain that my son or daughter becomes a [lawyer/banker/software person/etc]". And the instability today is just that initial rising inequality reaching fruition. Something like that seems much more likely to me, that creeping change exists that is palpable at the individual level, and expressed through the emphasis given to the next generation.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  70s through 90s wiped the blue collar middle class off the map, there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation. Its gigs and part-time work from there. Edit: to be clear, I'm agreeing and saying people definitely had time to see the writing on the wall
  - gruez 5y ago
    >70s through 90s wiped the blue collar middle class off the map, there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation. Is it? According to the CRS[1], real wage (ie. inflation adjusted) growth is up 6.5% even for the bottom percentile. [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf#page=9 https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf#page=9
    - justicezyx 5y ago
      LMAO Dont you know that equality is a critical aspects of social satisifaction. See everywhere, equality is mentioned as the magic word that described the sacred value of liberal society... But It's never applied to personal wealth... Your thinking is precisely the ludicrous disconnection between the elites' idea of society and the reality... (I am not saying you are elite, just that elitism thinking is so blindly superficial...) BTW, equality in personal wealth is emphasized nearly 2000 years ago by Confucious 不患寡而患不均. [1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%8D%E6%82%A3%E5%AF%A1%E8%80%8C%E6%82%A3%E4%B8%8D%E5%9D%87 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%8D%E6%82%A3%E5%AF%A1%E8%...
cherryturnover 5y ago
I've always read that it's not too many smart people, but too many unemployed middle class people.
cryptica 5y ago
The problem is that the monetary system is ending and it desperately tries to propagate itself by promoting/enriching people who are able to maintain the illusion of normalcy which keeps everything together. It becomes increasingly difficult to find people who are capable of such an extreme degree of corruption and hypocrisy. The system ends after it runs out of corrupt people to promote. In the meantime, this systematic promotion of corrupt people creates political instability.
InternetPerson 5y ago
Are we overproducing elite? If so, I would like to know, because this really impacts the decisions I make every day. What are you guys gonna do? Keep producing elite, or no?
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base698 5y ago
Sounds a bit like Christopher Lasch https://newcriterion.com/issues/1995/4/christopher-lasch-vs-the-elites https://newcriterion.com/issues/1995/4/christopher-lasch-vs-...
alliao 5y ago
Obscurantism isn't anything new, over to the East Chinese ancient philosopher LaoZi famously quipped in 65th chapter interpretation may vary, but looking it naively and translating directly comes to those who are good at ruling, kept people stupid. for knowledge make them harder to rule. for those oppose this translation, argues on the word "ignorant" and it's definition by Laozi which meant earnest rather than ignorant. So it's really advocating an honest, earnest society with high trust model where ruler and it's populace cooperate. But the fact remains both interpretation exists, and I'd wager the current Chinese government is the supporter of the former naive translation. Anyway just some knee jerk thoughts reading this article, it's always fascinating to see different culture collide on the same pain points.
pyuser583 5y ago
The article is specifically talking about grad school. This isn’t an issue of blue collar tradespeople seeking college degrees. It’s an issue of people who are already college graduates seeking further education beyond their degrees. In a healthy society, most people will have a secondary education and a significant minority will have a college level degree. But if a graduate degree is necessary to find a job, or be an informed citizen, then there are serious problems. I think part of the issue is the “professionalization” of HR.
imtringued 5y ago
Honestly, the political instability is just plain old incomplete capitalism. The idea behind capitalism is that economic power is in the individual. The ideal is that there is an owner for everything, including the "means of production" and sometimes even public goods like land. Because each decision maker has a small impact on the rest of the economy misbehaving (behaving = perfectly optimizing for current market factors) actors will quickly be weeded out. The difference in agility between a startup vs a slow moving large company vs the government is pretty obvious. When that start up fails nobody is going to remember it and that is a good thing. The bigger the organization the less likely it is going to obey market forces. It does have its positives and negatives but I am not here to talk about the small fry problems like monopolies. I'm here to talk about the fact that the free market is built around the idea that local decision making by individuals is superior to global decision making by a large organization. The truth is that we need both. To be more exact, we need to use the government to transfer information and put a share of the burden of global decision making onto individuals so that the local optimum for individuals is the same thing as the global optimum for the economy as a whole. We need to break the prisoner's dilemma and the paradox of competition that arises from it. Here are the three factors: 1. Get rid of all trade imbalances It is very easy to intentionally run export surpluses at the expense of other nations. The importing nation has to take on debt and in the case of a perpetual surplus the debt cannot be repair, ever. The only ways export deficit countries can defend against this is either via protectionism which ends in trade wars (and decision making errors by politicians) or they must increase their own competitiveness through devaluation of their currency. Both are a race to the bottom. When every country is trying to achieve an export surplus then global absolute trade will trend to 0. I'm not talking about export surpluses going down, I'm talking about ceasing trading entirely. Keynes suggested an ICU that sanctions export surplus countries and distributes money to workers via a UBI (or tax cuts) to raise their purchasing power and thus eliminate the import deficit which involves handing out more and more loans. If you never buy anything from the borrower then a default/bailout is inevitable. 2. Sanction large savings accounts There is no mechanism in capitalism that forces investments, other than the dreaded "inflation". Inflation creates risk and erodes the value of idle money that is doing nothing. Thus it becomes obvious that you must run a business or keep working to get ahead of inflation by obtaining a future income stream. This is necessary for money to fulfill its purpose as a medium of exchange. It must pass from hand to hand all the time. It is not allowed to get stuck anywhere. When inflation is very low there is barely any incentive to invest. People start hoarding money, which fuels a deflationary spiral. Central banks all around the world are trying new party tricks to get the private sector to invest again. They drive yields on safe assets to nothing to create more risk. They make borrowing cheaper so that investments are profitable and old unprofitable investments can be refinanced under better terms. All that QE isn't ending up anywhere except maybe real estate. The cheap financing costs are also letting large companies hoard money and do stock buy backs, which further reduces their incentive to invest their money. Young people take on mortgages which drives up prices high but buying an old house for double its original price isn't investing. Old people pay their mortgages off before they retire and don't take new ones during their retirement. Instead of hoping that investments happen on their own because the economy just happens to encourage them via inflation we could just skip the middle man and maybe even get rid on the dependence of inflation and reintroduce the mechanism in an official fashion. We introduce wealth taxes on money in bank accounts of private individuals and large companies. 2% per year and they get to deduct debt to reduce the wealth tax. The money can then be handed back via a UBI or tax cuts. The point isn't funding welfare, it's to punish behavior that is globally suboptimal. 3. Land value tax It's actually the same mechanic as with money. People hoard land instead of money. However, we can't create more land to catch up with demand if people move to cities for jobs. Real estate tends to go up in value much faster than money because of the fixed supply. The owners of the land didn't work to earn this money, they simply waited for the population to grow. Buying land as an investment should be a terrible idea. People taking on bigger and bigger mortgages for a low productivity investment like buying a house shouldn't happen. If anything, land values should be shrinking over time. The only way someone should be able to make money off of real estate is by building a house and renting it out or by saving money through owner occupation. The fundamental problem is that living in suburbia only works if some people do it. If everyone does it, then the system collapses as early homebuyers get their land and house for dirt cheap at the expense of future generations who no longer can afford them. You're going to see a lot of pitchforks. The land value tax is just a flat (% or fixed amount) tax on land that reduces the benefit of holding onto land. Again, we can use the proceeds of punishing suboptimal behavior to fund a UBI but I personally would just do wholesale tax cuts on income and replace capital gains and corporate income taxes with the lowered income tax. (a simpler tax code is fairer for those who cannot exploit it). 1. and 2. bring back jobs and create financial stability, 3. reduces living costs by punishing rent seeking. All these proposals are built around the same idea: local decision making may lead to a benefit for the decision maker at the expense of everyone else, thus decision making should be based on what the global optimum is, so that all decision makers make decisions that benefit everyone in the long run instead of focusing only on themselves. This is actually strongly in favor of capitalism as it shows that local decision making can reach a global optimum. The idea that local decision making inevitably leads to infighting and thus mass exploitation is something the communists always criticized about capitalism. The hope was that fixing core problems like housing by avoiding the prisoners dilemma would lead to a better society even if it is at the expense of individual freedom and thus efficiency. To be honest, they got housing right (although they neglected maintenance). They built a lot of housing in east Germany. Even west Germany built a lot of social (=affordable and government owned) housing that made renting extremely affordable in Germany. The problems started as soon as the government sold its social housing. They made a quick buck but then housing prices started rising. Private ownership of land just doesn't work.
vncecartersknee 5y ago
The lengths that hackernews commenters will go to to defend capitalism are insane
joe_the_user 5y ago
TEN YEARS ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” On the contrary, I'd claim relative instability was predicted by a fairly large group. The decline of the US has been described and predicted across the political spectrum. Gridlock was a pretty visible thing ten or thirty years ago. pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees” This is an ...uh, bizarre definition of "elites". The elites are broadly rulers, the owners specialized, etc - those consuming and managing a significant portion of a society's resources. As far back as ancient Rome and imperial China, Mr Turchin shows, societies have veered from periods of political stability to instability, often at intervals of about 50 years. Things go up and things go down. A remarkably prescient view /s. This article reads like "collapse of complex societies"[1] for idiots. Where lots of young people with PhDs figure in these speculations is hard to say (I mean, this is small of any elite overreach). It's sad how many poor quality articles like this one have been popping up here lately. I suggest the original Tainter as well as Jared Diamond's Collapse, at the least. Edit: I should also note The Economist may well be misstating Mr Turchin's on elites but this is the linked article. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
abriosi 5y ago
The book "The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation" offers a well researched scenario with historical footing
rossdavidh 5y ago
This has got to be the absolute worst summary of Peter Turchin's work that I have ever seen. Please don't judge Turchin, or the field of Cliodynamics, from this article.
29athrowaway 5y ago
Hard times create strong people = 1910-1940s Strong people create good times = 1950s Good times create weak people = 1970s Weak people create hard times <- you are here /s
Cybotron5000 5y ago
“We mustn’t over-educate the plebs - next thing you know, those uncouth oiks will be getting uppity ideas beyond their station and before one can utter a forlorn ‘gadzooks!’ the bally country’s gorn all wrong!”
627467 5y ago
My pet idea is that our current world order (on average) has been great at lifting people out of poverty BUT ALSO great at keeping those at the top, at the top. And this looks great on paper: let the pie grow instead of taking from some to give to others. But the result is: some people stop being able to climb the ladder, and some seem happily stuck at the top.
rhyn00 5y ago
This article does a horrible job of explaining Turchin's ideas. It's not too many "brainy" people that are the problem. It's that if upward mobility becomes limited to those that have advanced degrees, and if there are an oversupply of people with advanced degrees, you will now have (at least) 3 groups of people: non-advanced-educated-but-not-good-enough, educated-but-not-good-enough, and elites. The non-advanced-educated feel marginalized because it will be ridiculously hard for them to get the education, and as things get more expensive their livelihood will go down relative to the elites. The advanced-educated-but-not-good-enough will feel marginalized because they spent their time and money and got nothing in return, and now have debt and degraded livelihood compared to the elites. When enough people feel marginalized AND something happens that weakens the state's power/influence, political instability will occur. It compounds in US/Europe with regards to education, given that these two groups are politically opposite of each other, and advanced education is becoming a barrier of entry to upward mobility. Turchin's 2016 book Ages of discord explains these ideas in detail.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  It's what happens when you have "advanced" degrees that are not actually useful in large numbers to society. We only need so many sociologists and critical race studies professors and political scientists. These jobs also happen to generally be supported off of societal productivity (i.e. taxes and charities) instead of growing the pie which means their supply is naturally limited. Notice that even for STEM jobs which are strongly constrained by available capital, like structural engineering or petroleum engineering, the pay is substantially higher than the useless jobs and the competition is less. You don't have to go to an Ivy League to get paid $$$ in engineering.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    They get jobs outside their field. In 1950s and 60s the US seriously overestimated the number of physicists they would need. Lots of physicists ended up working in business.
    - lixtra 5y ago

203 points by jedwhite 5y ago

https://archive.is/HrVFy https://archive.is/HrVFy

Also known as Elite overproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

busterarm 5y ago
Yes, that is what the article is about. It even says so.

cat_plus_plus 5y ago

Only if whatever enhances their intelligence also amplifies their ambition, like in the Wraith of Khan. Which seems to be the current direction of US education system. Foreign-educated tech immigrants are not throwing any fireworks at rallies.

ben_w 5y ago
> Wraith of Khan I know this is just a typo/autocorrupt (and goodness knows I’ve had plenty of those in my comments here, some spotted only after the edit window closes), but this does sound like an plot for either The Lower Decks or Rick & Morty. But to your actual point: I agree, I don’t think genius is correlated with corrupted power. High-IQ watering holes like HN and Less Wrong may be filled with people whose ambitions include want to radically change the world (and HN being part of Y Combinator suggests a desire to get rich doing so), but they don’t give me the vibe of wanting to rule it like the character of Kahn.
- willvarfar 5y ago
  Wrath of Khan Academy?
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Ring Wraith of Khan.
- handrous 5y ago
  > > Wraith of Khan > [...] but this does sound like an plot for either The Lower Decks or Rick & Morty. Rick and Morty prefers starting with an existing title and then cramming one (or more) of the character's names in, whether it makes sense or not, and sometimes avoiding a more reasonable mutation for one that's nonsense. In this case, if they really wanted to use this title, I'd expect them to end up with something like "The Rick of Khan" purely so they could match the R sound on "wrath" and the dual consonants at the end of the word. Extreme, real example of this pattern from the current season: "Mort Dinner Rick Andre". They've turned it into grammatical nonsense so they can make some very tenuous word-sound connections (especially on "with" -> "rick"—it's there, but wow, that's a stretch)
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Sure, but I mean the plot, not the title. A ghost of changed-just-enough-to-avoid-copyright-infringement-but-still-obvious Khan seeking revenge feels very much the sort of thing they’d do.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Ah, right, that makes sense.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> Only if whatever enhances their intelligence also amplifies their ambition Or if it amplifies their entitlement. I wouldn’t be surprised if the more people spend of college, the more they expect in return.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I think that’s a given, isn’t it? When most people (in the US at least) are financing their education via loans if they’re going to take out increasingly larger loans they’re going to have to expect more in return in order to pay those loans back. I don’t know I would call that “entitlement” though.
  - meiraleal 5y ago
    To pay your own education is one part of the equation, to be successful is still on you.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    Heh, I was thinking about the entitlement in the normal sense, but forgot it'd probably read as eNtITLEMenT in the internet meme/political meme sense.
  - cherryturnover 5y ago
    High Risk != High Reward. There are far too many college educated people in the US that assume this. I walked in getting my degree knowing full well I was paying simply for the paper and the potential for getting a job in my field. I didn't walk in like I did the first time getting my associates degree believing I'd be making $50k upon graduation.

sarosh 5y ago

This Economist article is from October of 2020. Peter Turchin is not a historian. He is instead in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Universtiy of Connecticut. He advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse. The Nature article from about decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ Some descriptive work such as: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full Sone of the work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1] and some recent (2017) related work [2]. Finally, in his own words, a comparison of Psychohistory and Cliodynamics (2012) [3] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1] https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full [3] http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliodynamics/ http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliod...

javajosh 5y ago
"Psychohistory" has a better ring to it than "cliodynamics", IMHO.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  Came here to say this :). Especially with the Foundation TV series coming out now this could almost be a PR stunt. The thesis seems sound, though. When you have a large number of people who have the aptitude and have invested heavily in joining the ranks of the elite (both financially and time-wise), and there's just not enough room at the top, what do they do? We see that in India with the rise of a huge number of engineering colleges. There's a massive over-supply of engineers, so people who have invested in a masters degree at great cost and 5 to 6 years of studying wind up working in vocational jobs that could have been done with a six-month diploma / apprenticeship. They're not happy.

tamaharbor 5y ago

Well, just look at Hacker News…. :-)

annoyingnoob 5y ago
Don't discount how lucky many on HN have been. Its better to be lucky than good or educated.

quacked 5y ago

I wonder if the economists have ever considered a society where brainy people are happy and proud to perform basic sustenance work- construction, manufacture of textiles, farming, driving, etc.

zelos 5y ago
"I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure." (Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons)
oh-4-fucks-sake 5y ago
[I think psychologists have](https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magical-chart/ https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magic...) Basically, those that are more "brainy" need a higher level of mental stimulation in order to not be bored. Being given too much mental stimulation relative to your intelligence/skills results in anxiety. The sweet spot is somewhere in between and we seek this sweet spot (or at least stumble upon it and remain sticky to it). People then sort themselves over time into these buckets s/t (generally), the brainy people end up doing brainy things, and the not-so-brainy people do less-brainy things. Reversing of roles would be mutually detrimental to both parties.
- javajosh 5y ago
  The real truth is that brainy people need a way to blow off that brainy steam, and it kinda doesn't matter if it's designing a novel WMD or playing a board-game. I'd argue on that basis that stimulating board-games can save the world.
  - kevinventullo 5y ago
    I occasionally ponder whether this is the purpose of funding pure mathematics.
    - jimbokun 5y ago

motohagiography 5y ago

Saying too many people are "brainier" than they are is probably the real issue. Turchin's prediction: > “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. ...overlooks something key: they didn't produce an a new elite, only "elitists," who never quite arrive. The resentment from people who became middle class after graduating from debt funded college is the result of how all that work didn't deliver on the promise of upper-middle security. The Gen-X cliche of baristas with masters degrees has simmered for a couple of decades, and it has metastisized into a deep loathing for the working people Gen-X grads haven't been able to differentiate themselves from, and hence the "burn it all down," attitude you see in a lot of them. The coders and general contractors who didn't go to university who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real cultural factor, and a big part of the U.S. red/blue divide. If you look up Girard and "mimetic violence," you can get a useful framework with predictive power on the dynamic they're describing. The promise of college and debt was they would be elevated into an elite, but of course, they weren't, and now these smart-enough and educated people bitterly hate what they call the "trash" and neighbors they still too-closely resemble, and who the remaining elite confuses them with. The political instability aspect of it in the article is that if you want to see who is setting fires in cities and throwing rocks at police, it's people with just enough security and social capital to get away with it, but not enough to meet their self image as legit members of the elites their educations allowed them to percieve. Brainy? No. Promised something and told it was because they were brainy? Probably.

JPKab 5y ago
Well said. Anecdotally, the level of resentment I've seen from masters CS grads towards more talented coders with no degree was pretty epic at my last company. I've also seen this get pretty ugly in the ML/deep learning community between the credentialed academics and the practitioners.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  I don't have a college degree. Though I usually get jobs where I'm surrounded by people that have degrees or advanced degrees. I can recall a particular startup where I was the only person without a degree, the person that I worked for had an advanced degree. This person that I worked for always resented that I made about the same income without a degree. There is no way I could have ever reached management in that company without a degree - no matter how qualified or good, because of elitist bias.

ElViajero 5y ago

This is a very elitist and narrow way to look at society. It advocates to have an uneducated underclass that would not have the tools to improve or protest their situation. Brave New World is a good book to understand why this is a bad idea. It seems that Orwell and Huxley books are being used as manuals instead of the cautionary tale that they are.

sudhirj 5y ago
Not quite the way I'm reading it. It's a variation on "if everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow" line. If the entire population wants to be doctors, we already know that's not going to work. And if everyone finds out they can't be a doctor after 10 years of medical school, where the amount of time and money spent has now created a sense of entitlement to the life of a doctor, the people are going to be pretty pissed off when you ask them to be fruit pickers or sanitation workers instead. Same goes for lawyers, engineers or any other profession that has a supply-demand imbalance.
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  Is it better to have an undersupply of doctors leading to overworked doctors and generally worse medical outcomes or to have an oversupply, with some of the excess going on to do, e.g. research or administration? Exactly matching supply and demand is practically impossible, so which side is it safer to err on?
  - wcunning 5y ago
    It's obviously better to have a, say, 1% oversupply than a 1% undersupply, but that's not an interesting question to answer, really. The better question would be: is it better to have a 1% undersupply than a 15% oversupply? (Or some other larger and less obvious mismatch) It would be clearly bad to paperclip-optimize doctors -- everyone must go through all 10 years of post-secondary education to be a doctor and then after they have done so, we will be pick the best 3% of them to be practicing doctors while telling everyone else to find another career is incredibly wasteful, as is anything significantly in that vein.

cratermoon 5y ago

I'd just like to point out that enormous numbers of people doing basic, physical, labor today would be considered highly educated and worldly were they dropped into anywhere in the world up to about the end of the 15th century. Worse, many of the facts they just know from pre-school or watching Sesame Street would be considered heretical and dangerous and land them in trouble in short order. Brainy is completely relative.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
While this is true compared to past societies, the only frame that matters for us right now is the present. Relatively speaking, I am also fabulously wealthy and I eat better than Kings. But I still rent a one bedroom apartment and can't afford a home.
inglor_cz 5y ago
They would be considered mad and certainly not educated; an educated person of that time would have a good command of Latin, which we do not teach anymore. Standards for "looking educated" shift all the time.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  They might not look educated to the educated of the time, but laborers who had no schooling wouldn't necessarily know. They'd probably be really superstitious and suspicious if the person didn't show proper deference to the gentry and the religious authorities, though.
chacha2 5y ago
“I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off.”

1MachineElf 5y ago

Luke Smith talks about the same topic from the perspective of early 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter: https://youtu.be/SYUgTzT79ww https://youtu.be/SYUgTzT79ww

1MachineElf 5y ago
At about 29m45s into the video

debacle 5y ago

The needlessly exclusive nature of the Ivy League underpins a gross fear of the elites in the egality of education. America, for example, is a socialist nation as soon as your income hits a certain level. They look out + take care of each other in a generational fashion, at the same time advocating for policies that preach individualism and divide.

petermcneeley 5y ago

In the Star Trek future isnt everyone basically a Phd? I always thought this is what we wanted? Perhaps the issue is elsewhere.

NoOneNew 5y ago
Yes, we should basis reality on a fictional story... totally makes sense. If we're going to go that route, I say we start throwing politicians in volcanos as the starting point. It worked against Sauron.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"I say we start throwing politicians in volcanoes as the starting point." Maybe you're on to something.... Jokes aside, whenever people point to "Star Trek" as an example of post-scarcity society I recoil at just how over-simplified and not well thought out the comparison is.
  - petermcneeley 5y ago
    So what % of the population was farmers in 1500? probably like 80%. Today its 2%. Eventually a similar thing has and will happen to all manufacturing. Today we have instead millions of programmers and teachers etc etc. This trend towards increased education is due to the technological support structure. If you run this trend forward even 50 years what jobs do you really think will exist that wont basically be scientifically or academically inclined?
    - NoOneNew 5y ago
      Except trends dont account for humanity and general shit hitting the fan. We are living in the safest times ever. Even the world wars aren't enough to topple off the last 100 years are the safest in human history, on average. We are due for a massive war or two really soon if we are relying on trends. Covid is a small, kinky lovetap on the ass when it comes to pandemics of the past. Most countries haven't seen a famine in like 2 or 3 generations. What we saw the last 1.5 years wasn't famine, just hoarding mixed with logistical failures. Intersaller is probably more on the mark. Blight striking nearly every staple food is the real horror in the night. Cavendish bananas are under massive threat of a fungal disease wiping them out, forever. The same thing can happen at anytime to other overproduced mono-crops. But then let's take humanity at it's current state. If everyone believes working with their hands is beneath them, are we really going to reach automation peak? Ignoring the scifi fantasy of skynet ai, you really think there wont be exploitation? The one thing humans are brilliant at, it's exploiting a system. You have to pacify a human to stop them from min-maxing. It's what we do. We are already seeing the adverse affects of too many systems online. Ransomware is not a problem, it's a goddamn well oiled industry. The future luddite wont just break a loom or two. They can stop fuel for tens of millions of people. Turn off cooling/heating to homes. And if wireless bots run farms... well, I dont think you need a good imagination to figure out what will happen there.

Animats 5y ago

That's been a major source of unrest in some of the Arab countries, notably Egypt. They overproduced university grads without an economy that could use them. This is not a new observation. Eric Hoffer made it in "Working and Thinking on the Waterfront" (1959).

majormajor 5y ago

The article cites the election of Trump and Brexit as evidence for too many people having degrees that they aren't able to fully utilize, supposedly confirming a prediction from Turchin in 2010, but... as far as I've read, neither of those things were driven by the advanced-degree-holding crowd. The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college education!

sjwalter 5y ago
> The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college education Portland's seemingly endless supply of white, elitist anarchists would like a word with you.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college education! The “angry populist masses” are (one set of) the people being driven by propaganda, not the people driving it.
dane-pgp 5y ago
It was Michael Gove, the education minister and Vote Leave figurehead, who said in 2016: "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts"[0]. This line of thinking is beautifully conveyed in a satirical drawing by Will McPhail that appeared in the 2017-01-02 issue of The New Yorker with the caption "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?".[1] Another satirical drawing from 2016 seems to capture a similar pathology, where the character starts by saying "I want things to be different".[2] [0] https://www.london.edu/think/who-needs-experts https://www.london.edu/think/who-needs-experts [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/06/trump-cartoon-new-yorker-column/96208552/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/06/trump-cart... [2] https://webcomicname.com/post/152958755984 https://webcomicname.com/post/152958755984
- ahejtkksnf 5y ago
  Even more smugly you have to turn to an objective example instead of the subjective insanities of economics and sociology that Elites™ force down our throat. For the record your pals are starting to hire Diverse™ pilots… [1] https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-coronavirus-pandemic-c1570fd546f11a8120e4b7507b13f584 https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-coronavirus-pa...

igorkraw 5y ago

I kind of have an issue that when faced with a steep rise in educated people who find that there is no room for them in the old structures and thus are frustrated, we blame and "overproduction" of educated people and not the old structures. Even the naming tries to force that framing. Apply this to the time when most people couldn't read and you were a dangerous radical if you taught workers, blacks and women how to read because they would "no longer be content with their place in life". I think most people on this site would agree that keeping people uneducated just so they don't start realizing how unfair their lot is would be morally wrong and that the correct option is right the unfairness...right?

axguscbklp 5y ago
There is a huge difference there though. Teaching people to read actually does make them enormously more educated. On the other hand, putting people through university does not necessarily make people even slightly more educated. Most people I know who are university graduates are not what I would call educated in any real sense and I doubt that they were significantly more educated when they left university than when they entered it. BTW, I did not downvote you. I do not know who did, but personally I do not downvote.
- igorkraw 5y ago
  I don't really care about the downvotes. But this meme that university likely doesn't teach you anything...it's so baffling to me, like, university does. It imply smarts, but not everyone who went to highschool reads and I feel like at least on this website people should get intervention effectiveness and probability etc. Just because university education isn't ideal and people might disagree whether the education people receive there is useful or marketable doesn't change the fact that if you graduate from a serious university or community colleague it is likely you'll have learned self management skills as well as whatever was in your classes. I've once seen a talk by a German soldier coming back from Afghanistan and he talked about what big difference it maae that in Germany almost everyone trains their ability to focus on someone speaking for 30+ minutes, discussing how he had to learn to triple check his local co-soldiers who hadn't had that luxury actually got the mission briefing. Even if you just learn to binge learn and puke out knowledge in tests that can come in quite handy later on, and the often maligned humanities actually matter if you are interested in a nuanced and continually evolving look of humans onto themselves. So I find this meme that university is worthless quite damaging and not really trustworthy. People can be uncultured swine, idiots and dicks at any educational level, it doesn't necessarily mean they didn't benefit from their education. The fact that the US puts you heavily into debt to get that education is another question that I'll leave untouched here since dang asked me repeatedly to steer clear of predictable controversies

TechBro8615 5y ago

Maybe we need to bump the definition of "elite" so that so many self-aggrandizing academics don't self-select into it. The problem is not an overproduction of elites but one of consumers and followers. The world needs more builders.

armatav 5y ago

Yeah the problem is too many smart people, not the fucked up financial systems, terrible education systems, degenerate media cycles and huge bureaucracy, but that too many people are too smart. Yeah let’s make sure we have an underclass of uneducated people so they don’t notice any of the problems, that will make sure there is less “political instability”.

axguscbklp 5y ago
I think that the Economist headline misrepresents Turchin's theory. The issue is not that there are too many smart people, it is that there are too many university graduates who feel entitled to a limited set of niches in the upper strata of society. Those are two different things.
- BB212 5y ago
  I'm not even sure if he would argue that this is a bad thing? I 100% think a society with a stratified lower caste could be more stable than one where everyone has equal resources - but I don't think that makes it better.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    It's a bad thing if people feel entitled to things they cannot possibly have, of course. It's not even necessarily about how resources are actually distributed, it's just pointing out that we aren't supposed to be selling people a false bill of goods. Of course people can strive to be upwardly mobile and perhaps fail in these ambitions, but it should be a very clear, voluntary choice.
  - armatav 5y ago
    My argument does not preclude stratification as a concept - every competitive system has stratification by nature. My point is that you cannot stratify people into two separate classes and then perpetually move one of those classes down into total barbarism and call it a better move than rewriting your existing inefficient system. I'm not a believer in the idiotic communist ideology, and did not even mention equal resources in my post. Communism can burn, save for all of the people forced to live crippled lives under it. But you cannot have communism for 99.999% of people and true competitiveness for the leftover if you want a stable system. Specifically if you want a stable system. Comparison without the means of acquisition will cause revolution.

ozim 5y ago

Being smart does not equal being rich. Being rich does not mean being elite. Being elite is always "extraordinarily difficult" - from getting "advanced degree" there is still long way to being "elite". Having a degree does not mean one is smart, it does not mean someone will get a job. Maybe we should put more effort into explaining life to people or actually start making them smart instead of "smart". If people would be really smart they would know how much effort is needed to become elite in any discipline. I have another article: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-22/if-you-re-so-smart-why-aren-t-you-rich https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-22/if-you...

cherryturnover 5y ago
I personally feel like college institutions get way too much freedom to act as predatory as they do regarding student loans and education. So many 18 year olds are told to go to college and get a degree only to come out a 22 year old with no work skills or legitimate life experience unless they were fortunate enough to get an internship. Then they have to eventually either swallow their pride and work a garbage paying job for a while or get lucky working for somewhere that actually pays decently in wage and/or experience. I'm currently a return student, and based off of the data my school collected for the 2019 year, the top majors were: Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Organizational Leadership, and Nursing. General business degrees are as worthless as english degrees. They don't teach you anything about actual business and you will not be able to just get a job. You'd have a better shot beating out external candidates applying from within at a low level position...almost every time. Psych and Bio, predominantly taken by females at my school (almost 80%). Again, another worthless field unless you go on to get a MS or Ph.D...of which none at this school do because it's a very low end state school. So there's another thing schools forget to mention about certain degrees. The next one is a general business degree for online transfer students at most schools in the area who just want to check off a "I have a Bachelors" box at application time. Then Nursing (again, predominantly women) which is actually a very hard field to pass but is basically a golden ticket to employment universally here. But that doesn't even hold a candle to those 4 ahead of it. This base set of data shows that schools are marketing toward the undecided crowd or the people without the jaded understanding that real life can be a bitch. It doesn't care what you think should be the rules. And these schools take extreme advantage of it. Not to mention these schools get tax payer funding but have virtually no oversight as to how the school runs things. The head chair of my Comp Sci department is a guy with a Ph.D in physics! I know that's fairly normal, but it's pretty ridiculous that this guy is making decisions on us having to take an AI class over advanced database administration or making InfoSec students know OOP and programming.

mikewarot 5y ago

Institutions have embedded growth obligations they can't meet, and thus are forced to lie to everyone to stay alive. Is it really surprising that all the people lied to might be upset when they don't get to live the life they were promised?

jdhn 5y ago

When there's "blue collar overproduction" due to outsourcing and automation of manufacturing jobs, it's not a big deal because they can just learn to code, but when there's "elite overproduction" we need to wring our hands and talk about how this is terrible? Sorry, but I'm not buying it.

pydry 5y ago
The Economist can't quite bring itself to say that educated proletarians are more of a political threat to the real elites (their target audience) than uneducated proletarians.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  That's pretty much how it is, yes. The class for elite that the article uses is meaningless, a programmer or a sysadmin is not an elite in any meaningful way.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I don't think that is a fair characterization. Instead, dissatisfied proletarians are more of a political threat than Co. Placenta ones. The most dissatisfied and dangerous proletarians are those who thought they were bourgeois and now realize they aren't. It is the mismatch of expectations and reality that drive the dissatisfaction.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Those "educated" proletarians, at least in my experience, are no more educated than the "trailer trash" they mock, despite their degree. They read Marx in college and start parroting the talking points of choice of their political candidate. You can tell when someone has actually thought through their political opinions when they don't all align on one side of the political spectrum.

Lavery 5y ago

Lots of comments here on the causal side of elite production, but just to float an alternate possibility: This could just as easily be suggesting that "overproduction" of elites is due to, some two decades prior, a creeping sense among the populace of nascent but growing inequality and increased stratification? Or put differently, "Grandpa worked in the plant and made a good life for himself, and I work in the plant and make a good life for my family too, but I see the writing on the all and am going to make certain that my son or daughter becomes a [lawyer/banker/software person/etc]". And the instability today is just that initial rising inequality reaching fruition. Something like that seems much more likely to me, that creeping change exists that is palpable at the individual level, and expressed through the emphasis given to the next generation.

imbnwa 5y ago
70s through 90s wiped the blue collar middle class off the map, there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation. Its gigs and part-time work from there. Edit: to be clear, I'm agreeing and saying people definitely had time to see the writing on the wall
- gruez 5y ago
  >70s through 90s wiped the blue collar middle class off the map, there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation. Is it? According to the CRS[1], real wage (ie. inflation adjusted) growth is up 6.5% even for the bottom percentile. [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf#page=9 https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf#page=9
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    LMAO Dont you know that equality is a critical aspects of social satisifaction. See everywhere, equality is mentioned as the magic word that described the sacred value of liberal society... But It's never applied to personal wealth... Your thinking is precisely the ludicrous disconnection between the elites' idea of society and the reality... (I am not saying you are elite, just that elitism thinking is so blindly superficial...) BTW, equality in personal wealth is emphasized nearly 2000 years ago by Confucious 不患寡而患不均. [1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%8D%E6%82%A3%E5%AF%A1%E8%80%8C%E6%82%A3%E4%B8%8D%E5%9D%87 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%8D%E6%82%A3%E5%AF%A1%E8%...

cherryturnover 5y ago

I've always read that it's not too many smart people, but too many unemployed middle class people.

cryptica 5y ago

The problem is that the monetary system is ending and it desperately tries to propagate itself by promoting/enriching people who are able to maintain the illusion of normalcy which keeps everything together. It becomes increasingly difficult to find people who are capable of such an extreme degree of corruption and hypocrisy. The system ends after it runs out of corrupt people to promote. In the meantime, this systematic promotion of corrupt people creates political instability.

InternetPerson 5y ago

Are we overproducing elite? If so, I would like to know, because this really impacts the decisions I make every day. What are you guys gonna do? Keep producing elite, or no?

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base698 5y ago

Sounds a bit like Christopher Lasch https://newcriterion.com/issues/1995/4/christopher-lasch-vs-the-elites https://newcriterion.com/issues/1995/4/christopher-lasch-vs-...

alliao 5y ago

Obscurantism isn't anything new, over to the East Chinese ancient philosopher LaoZi famously quipped in 65th chapter interpretation may vary, but looking it naively and translating directly comes to those who are good at ruling, kept people stupid. for knowledge make them harder to rule. for those oppose this translation, argues on the word "ignorant" and it's definition by Laozi which meant earnest rather than ignorant. So it's really advocating an honest, earnest society with high trust model where ruler and it's populace cooperate. But the fact remains both interpretation exists, and I'd wager the current Chinese government is the supporter of the former naive translation. Anyway just some knee jerk thoughts reading this article, it's always fascinating to see different culture collide on the same pain points.

pyuser583 5y ago

The article is specifically talking about grad school. This isn’t an issue of blue collar tradespeople seeking college degrees. It’s an issue of people who are already college graduates seeking further education beyond their degrees. In a healthy society, most people will have a secondary education and a significant minority will have a college level degree. But if a graduate degree is necessary to find a job, or be an informed citizen, then there are serious problems. I think part of the issue is the “professionalization” of HR.

imtringued 5y ago

Honestly, the political instability is just plain old incomplete capitalism. The idea behind capitalism is that economic power is in the individual. The ideal is that there is an owner for everything, including the "means of production" and sometimes even public goods like land. Because each decision maker has a small impact on the rest of the economy misbehaving (behaving = perfectly optimizing for current market factors) actors will quickly be weeded out. The difference in agility between a startup vs a slow moving large company vs the government is pretty obvious. When that start up fails nobody is going to remember it and that is a good thing. The bigger the organization the less likely it is going to obey market forces. It does have its positives and negatives but I am not here to talk about the small fry problems like monopolies. I'm here to talk about the fact that the free market is built around the idea that local decision making by individuals is superior to global decision making by a large organization. The truth is that we need both. To be more exact, we need to use the government to transfer information and put a share of the burden of global decision making onto individuals so that the local optimum for individuals is the same thing as the global optimum for the economy as a whole. We need to break the prisoner's dilemma and the paradox of competition that arises from it. Here are the three factors: 1. Get rid of all trade imbalances It is very easy to intentionally run export surpluses at the expense of other nations. The importing nation has to take on debt and in the case of a perpetual surplus the debt cannot be repair, ever. The only ways export deficit countries can defend against this is either via protectionism which ends in trade wars (and decision making errors by politicians) or they must increase their own competitiveness through devaluation of their currency. Both are a race to the bottom. When every country is trying to achieve an export surplus then global absolute trade will trend to 0. I'm not talking about export surpluses going down, I'm talking about ceasing trading entirely. Keynes suggested an ICU that sanctions export surplus countries and distributes money to workers via a UBI (or tax cuts) to raise their purchasing power and thus eliminate the import deficit which involves handing out more and more loans. If you never buy anything from the borrower then a default/bailout is inevitable. 2. Sanction large savings accounts There is no mechanism in capitalism that forces investments, other than the dreaded "inflation". Inflation creates risk and erodes the value of idle money that is doing nothing. Thus it becomes obvious that you must run a business or keep working to get ahead of inflation by obtaining a future income stream. This is necessary for money to fulfill its purpose as a medium of exchange. It must pass from hand to hand all the time. It is not allowed to get stuck anywhere. When inflation is very low there is barely any incentive to invest. People start hoarding money, which fuels a deflationary spiral. Central banks all around the world are trying new party tricks to get the private sector to invest again. They drive yields on safe assets to nothing to create more risk. They make borrowing cheaper so that investments are profitable and old unprofitable investments can be refinanced under better terms. All that QE isn't ending up anywhere except maybe real estate. The cheap financing costs are also letting large companies hoard money and do stock buy backs, which further reduces their incentive to invest their money. Young people take on mortgages which drives up prices high but buying an old house for double its original price isn't investing. Old people pay their mortgages off before they retire and don't take new ones during their retirement. Instead of hoping that investments happen on their own because the economy just happens to encourage them via inflation we could just skip the middle man and maybe even get rid on the dependence of inflation and reintroduce the mechanism in an official fashion. We introduce wealth taxes on money in bank accounts of private individuals and large companies. 2% per year and they get to deduct debt to reduce the wealth tax. The money can then be handed back via a UBI or tax cuts. The point isn't funding welfare, it's to punish behavior that is globally suboptimal. 3. Land value tax It's actually the same mechanic as with money. People hoard land instead of money. However, we can't create more land to catch up with demand if people move to cities for jobs. Real estate tends to go up in value much faster than money because of the fixed supply. The owners of the land didn't work to earn this money, they simply waited for the population to grow. Buying land as an investment should be a terrible idea. People taking on bigger and bigger mortgages for a low productivity investment like buying a house shouldn't happen. If anything, land values should be shrinking over time. The only way someone should be able to make money off of real estate is by building a house and renting it out or by saving money through owner occupation. The fundamental problem is that living in suburbia only works if some people do it. If everyone does it, then the system collapses as early homebuyers get their land and house for dirt cheap at the expense of future generations who no longer can afford them. You're going to see a lot of pitchforks. The land value tax is just a flat (% or fixed amount) tax on land that reduces the benefit of holding onto land. Again, we can use the proceeds of punishing suboptimal behavior to fund a UBI but I personally would just do wholesale tax cuts on income and replace capital gains and corporate income taxes with the lowered income tax. (a simpler tax code is fairer for those who cannot exploit it). 1. and 2. bring back jobs and create financial stability, 3. reduces living costs by punishing rent seeking. All these proposals are built around the same idea: local decision making may lead to a benefit for the decision maker at the expense of everyone else, thus decision making should be based on what the global optimum is, so that all decision makers make decisions that benefit everyone in the long run instead of focusing only on themselves. This is actually strongly in favor of capitalism as it shows that local decision making can reach a global optimum. The idea that local decision making inevitably leads to infighting and thus mass exploitation is something the communists always criticized about capitalism. The hope was that fixing core problems like housing by avoiding the prisoners dilemma would lead to a better society even if it is at the expense of individual freedom and thus efficiency. To be honest, they got housing right (although they neglected maintenance). They built a lot of housing in east Germany. Even west Germany built a lot of social (=affordable and government owned) housing that made renting extremely affordable in Germany. The problems started as soon as the government sold its social housing. They made a quick buck but then housing prices started rising. Private ownership of land just doesn't work.

vncecartersknee 5y ago

The lengths that hackernews commenters will go to to defend capitalism are insane

joe_the_user 5y ago

TEN YEARS ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” On the contrary, I'd claim relative instability was predicted by a fairly large group. The decline of the US has been described and predicted across the political spectrum. Gridlock was a pretty visible thing ten or thirty years ago. pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees” This is an ...uh, bizarre definition of "elites". The elites are broadly rulers, the owners specialized, etc - those consuming and managing a significant portion of a society's resources. As far back as ancient Rome and imperial China, Mr Turchin shows, societies have veered from periods of political stability to instability, often at intervals of about 50 years. Things go up and things go down. A remarkably prescient view /s. This article reads like "collapse of complex societies"[1] for idiots. Where lots of young people with PhDs figure in these speculations is hard to say (I mean, this is small of any elite overreach). It's sad how many poor quality articles like this one have been popping up here lately. I suggest the original Tainter as well as Jared Diamond's Collapse, at the least. Edit: I should also note The Economist may well be misstating Mr Turchin's on elites but this is the linked article. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

abriosi 5y ago

The book "The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation" offers a well researched scenario with historical footing

rossdavidh 5y ago

This has got to be the absolute worst summary of Peter Turchin's work that I have ever seen. Please don't judge Turchin, or the field of Cliodynamics, from this article.

29athrowaway 5y ago

Hard times create strong people = 1910-1940s Strong people create good times = 1950s Good times create weak people = 1970s Weak people create hard times <- you are here /s

Cybotron5000 5y ago

“We mustn’t over-educate the plebs - next thing you know, those uncouth oiks will be getting uppity ideas beyond their station and before one can utter a forlorn ‘gadzooks!’ the bally country’s gorn all wrong!”

627467 5y ago

My pet idea is that our current world order (on average) has been great at lifting people out of poverty BUT ALSO great at keeping those at the top, at the top. And this looks great on paper: let the pie grow instead of taking from some to give to others. But the result is: some people stop being able to climb the ladder, and some seem happily stuck at the top.

rhyn00 5y ago

This article does a horrible job of explaining Turchin's ideas. It's not too many "brainy" people that are the problem. It's that if upward mobility becomes limited to those that have advanced degrees, and if there are an oversupply of people with advanced degrees, you will now have (at least) 3 groups of people: non-advanced-educated-but-not-good-enough, educated-but-not-good-enough, and elites. The non-advanced-educated feel marginalized because it will be ridiculously hard for them to get the education, and as things get more expensive their livelihood will go down relative to the elites. The advanced-educated-but-not-good-enough will feel marginalized because they spent their time and money and got nothing in return, and now have debt and degraded livelihood compared to the elites. When enough people feel marginalized AND something happens that weakens the state's power/influence, political instability will occur. It compounds in US/Europe with regards to education, given that these two groups are politically opposite of each other, and advanced education is becoming a barrier of entry to upward mobility. Turchin's 2016 book Ages of discord explains these ideas in detail.

b9a2cab5 5y ago
It's what happens when you have "advanced" degrees that are not actually useful in large numbers to society. We only need so many sociologists and critical race studies professors and political scientists. These jobs also happen to generally be supported off of societal productivity (i.e. taxes and charities) instead of growing the pie which means their supply is naturally limited. Notice that even for STEM jobs which are strongly constrained by available capital, like structural engineering or petroleum engineering, the pay is substantially higher than the useless jobs and the competition is less. You don't have to go to an Ivy League to get paid $$$ in engineering.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  They get jobs outside their field. In 1950s and 60s the US seriously overestimated the number of physicists they would need. Lots of physicists ended up working in business.
  - lixtra 5y ago