11 ms·

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 thei

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.
    - nradov 5y ago
      It's rather meaningless to talk about oversupply or undersupply of doctors. Demand for healthcare services is effectively infinite. The problem is that we burn up most healthcare resources on treating preventable chronic diseases, and on futile end-of-life care. Rather than on supplying more doctors we would probably get better results for society as a whole with more dieticians, personal trainers, and substance abuse counselors.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    An important consideration is that those doctors could have been something else. If you buy into the notion that intelligence follows a normal distribution, and that people below some threshold are fundamentally locked out of professions, then it becomes important how society allocates that top x% of intelligent people, because they are in short supply. A society that underproduces physicists in favor of doctors might find their economy is unable to grow rapidly enough to pay for the hospitals those doctors need to operate in. One that overproduces amazing musicians might find that their cultural influence helps to attract smart people from other countries. We see this issue in America too. Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds. That isn't exactly the kind of behavior that will lead to the technological improvements our society will need to continue to grow.
    - caf 5y ago
      Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds. This seems overly reductionist. A case can be made that these games are overall working to optimise the allocation of resources, which itself contributes to growth.
      - mywittyname 5y ago
        Yeah, these people might be ensuring more optimal prices for corn, and maybe that's a good thing. But in doing that, they aren't doing something else which may be more important for society. My point was that very smart people are a finite resource. And misallocating them can have devastating effects on a society.
    - captainoats 5y ago
      How each person assigns value to different professions is entirely subjective. Almost every industry has its own bell curve, the market determines how tall/shifted each is.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Oversupply of lawyers seems to be a better example. Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new laws that drive need for more lawyers ... but of course up to a point, and some of the graduates will find they cannot pass the bar exam or progress towards the coveted positions. Suddenly you have some very unhappy people who know enough about the law to do some real harm to the system out of spite.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    "Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new laws that drive need for more lawyers" Totally agree. I think laws would be quite different if the majority of lawmakers weren't lawyers. A lot of law seems to be designed to only be navigated by lawyers.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  "if everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow" I see that a lot with our interns. A lot of them are trained and motivated to "lead", "facilitate" and "collaborate" but not so much about doing actual work. But it's no wonder when you look at the way things work in most companies. Managers make way more money than non-managers. And a lot of managers didn't cut it as software engineers so they got pushed into management where they suck too but make good money.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    This culture is heavily promoted by management consultancies, who seem to think nothing of sending a 24 year old "consultant" into large corporations to tell them how to run their business.
david38 5y ago
Look at most planned utopian societies. They crash and burn because everyone wants to be a leader / thinker, not a doer, at least not of non-interesting stuff. The title is bad. You can be brainy and do menial work. Really, too many people who think they are above non-fulfilling work is bad. You need people who are used to selling their minds and bodies for money- in the “I work here because I have a family to support” sense of the word.
- da_chicken 5y ago
  > You can be brainy and do menial work. Yes, it's called "programming". At least 80% of programming is menial. At least. The interesting bit where you understand the problem and find the best solution virtually always takes far less time than actually banging through the code. nevermind documenting it, testing it, etc. The hardest part is simply not screwing up. I feel blessed if 5% of my day involves actual critical thinking.
- seph-reed 5y ago
  Community is usually the thing that makes a menial job feel meaningful.
  - NoOneNew 5y ago
    That's one ingredient, sure. But speaking as a millennial, there was plenty of propaganda in American schools that made it seem like if you weren't working in an office, you failed at life. Now we have people who worked in offices throughout their 20s, running and screaming from those office jobs to discover that there is fulfillment in real work. Problem is, lots of people still believe having callouses on your hands make you a second class citizen or sub-human since your opinion no longer matters. And labourous jobs dont need community to be fulfilling. Lots of folks enjoy work working, house renovation and their own property maintenance for their own benefit. That and it's a free workout a lot of times.
- justicezyx 5y ago
  > they are above non-fulfilling work I think there are a lot of fullfilling work. Certainly more than the man power and resources our society can meaningfully assigned to them. But the problem is that the system forces upon a lot of members a rather distasteful attitude and practical matters that drive them away. Often, one would find certain things lacking monetary rewards are fullfilling, but were drove off because they are in a social circle that exerts pressure. This actually happen more often in China than US. For example, one is forced to earn money for their offsprings. But to do that one is allowed to do a lot of work that is not really fullfilling by design. Like coding for people to click ads. I am not saying all of the work done for people to click ads are not fullfilling, it's just the percentage is clearly larger than what we want, and is growing still. From the system thinking perspective, the time for rethinking, a little bit about changing the social rewarding system probably is worthwhile.
minikites 5y ago
>It advocates to have an uneducated underclass that would not have the tools to improve or protest their situation. How is this different from the current incarnation of global capitalism?
sjwalter 5y ago
Brave New World was not written initially as a dystopia. Huxley was a member of the elite and was writing what amounted to a pamphlet of where we were all going, influenced along the way by the writings of Carroll (Tragedy & Hope), who told the tale of the elite cabal of banksters and other social engineers and how their various iterations formed and dispersed, their history, in sum. Huxley's editor said it'd never sell, so he added the plotline from the perspective of one man who wanted to break free and made the entire thing dystopic. I believe the signs are all there that many of the real Team Elite really do want Brave New World-esque domination, with a tiny group of truly free elite managing the masses as though they were cattle.
- prewett 5y ago
  What are the signs, in your opinion? I keep hearing people say that a group of elites wants to be in control. Seems pretty unlikely--elites have better things to do than control people, the control people are lower down, or narcissists like the orange-haired guy--but even if they want it, it seems unlikely that they will get it. It just sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I'd be interested in seeing some actual claimed signs, because so far you're the first to offer to back up the claim.
atq2119 5y ago
Can't we take the same analysis to drive alternative conclusions instead? For example, why not remove or weaken the reasons why people want to be part of the elite in the first place, perhaps by eliminating it.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  You may be able to weaken it, but you can't eliminate it due to human nature. See, for example, C.S.Lewis's essay on "the inner ring". https://noorsiddiqui.com/papers/TheInnerRing.pdf https://noorsiddiqui.com/papers/TheInnerRing.pdf
  - atq2119 5y ago
    Sure. But setting a goal of eliminating it with the purpose of driving elite importance as low as possible seems to me the most ethical way of dealing with the problem of elite overproduction. Additional measures may be useful as well, of course.
axguscbklp 5y ago
The Economist really misrepresents Turchin's theory by framing it as an issue of there being too many "brainy" people. Turchin's theory has more to do with overproduction of university degree holders, not with overproduction of smart people. Those are two different things. As far as I know, Turchin is not advocating for maintaining some sort of exploited underclass. More than 30% of U.S. adults have at least a bachelor's degree - about double the fraction that had one 40 years ago - which means that a bachelor's degree has limited value as a badge for gaining entrance to the higher strata of society. Note that this is independent of the question of whether it is good or bad for university degrees to be badges for entrance to the higher strata of society. In any case, the relative social value of a university education has massively dropped over the years.
pram 5y ago
The underclass in BNW isn't what I would describe as uneducated though. Everyone was essentially a specialist or technician dedicated to a field of work. There was no such thing as being unemployed or underemployed, they were all engineered and educated to do exactly what they were intended to do. They probably couldn't even conceive of their situation needing improvement.
rootsudo 5y ago
"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. " This, 100%. Turns out turning fiction to reality is a profitable endeavor.

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.
  - nradov 5y ago
    It's rather meaningless to talk about oversupply or undersupply of doctors. Demand for healthcare services is effectively infinite. The problem is that we burn up most healthcare resources on treating preventable chronic diseases, and on futile end-of-life care. Rather than on supplying more doctors we would probably get better results for society as a whole with more dieticians, personal trainers, and substance abuse counselors.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  An important consideration is that those doctors could have been something else. If you buy into the notion that intelligence follows a normal distribution, and that people below some threshold are fundamentally locked out of professions, then it becomes important how society allocates that top x% of intelligent people, because they are in short supply. A society that underproduces physicists in favor of doctors might find their economy is unable to grow rapidly enough to pay for the hospitals those doctors need to operate in. One that overproduces amazing musicians might find that their cultural influence helps to attract smart people from other countries. We see this issue in America too. Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds. That isn't exactly the kind of behavior that will lead to the technological improvements our society will need to continue to grow.
  - caf 5y ago
    Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds. This seems overly reductionist. A case can be made that these games are overall working to optimise the allocation of resources, which itself contributes to growth.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      Yeah, these people might be ensuring more optimal prices for corn, and maybe that's a good thing. But in doing that, they aren't doing something else which may be more important for society. My point was that very smart people are a finite resource. And misallocating them can have devastating effects on a society.
  - captainoats 5y ago
    How each person assigns value to different professions is entirely subjective. Almost every industry has its own bell curve, the market determines how tall/shifted each is.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Oversupply of lawyers seems to be a better example. Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new laws that drive need for more lawyers ... but of course up to a point, and some of the graduates will find they cannot pass the bar exam or progress towards the coveted positions. Suddenly you have some very unhappy people who know enough about the law to do some real harm to the system out of spite.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  "Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new laws that drive need for more lawyers" Totally agree. I think laws would be quite different if the majority of lawmakers weren't lawyers. A lot of law seems to be designed to only be navigated by lawyers.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
"if everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow" I see that a lot with our interns. A lot of them are trained and motivated to "lead", "facilitate" and "collaborate" but not so much about doing actual work. But it's no wonder when you look at the way things work in most companies. Managers make way more money than non-managers. And a lot of managers didn't cut it as software engineers so they got pushed into management where they suck too but make good money.
- native_samples 5y ago
  This culture is heavily promoted by management consultancies, who seem to think nothing of sending a 24 year old "consultant" into large corporations to tell them how to run their business.

david38 5y ago

Look at most planned utopian societies. They crash and burn because everyone wants to be a leader / thinker, not a doer, at least not of non-interesting stuff. The title is bad. You can be brainy and do menial work. Really, too many people who think they are above non-fulfilling work is bad. You need people who are used to selling their minds and bodies for money- in the “I work here because I have a family to support” sense of the word.

da_chicken 5y ago
> You can be brainy and do menial work. Yes, it's called "programming". At least 80% of programming is menial. At least. The interesting bit where you understand the problem and find the best solution virtually always takes far less time than actually banging through the code. nevermind documenting it, testing it, etc. The hardest part is simply not screwing up. I feel blessed if 5% of my day involves actual critical thinking.
seph-reed 5y ago
Community is usually the thing that makes a menial job feel meaningful.
- NoOneNew 5y ago
  That's one ingredient, sure. But speaking as a millennial, there was plenty of propaganda in American schools that made it seem like if you weren't working in an office, you failed at life. Now we have people who worked in offices throughout their 20s, running and screaming from those office jobs to discover that there is fulfillment in real work. Problem is, lots of people still believe having callouses on your hands make you a second class citizen or sub-human since your opinion no longer matters. And labourous jobs dont need community to be fulfilling. Lots of folks enjoy work working, house renovation and their own property maintenance for their own benefit. That and it's a free workout a lot of times.
justicezyx 5y ago
> they are above non-fulfilling work I think there are a lot of fullfilling work. Certainly more than the man power and resources our society can meaningfully assigned to them. But the problem is that the system forces upon a lot of members a rather distasteful attitude and practical matters that drive them away. Often, one would find certain things lacking monetary rewards are fullfilling, but were drove off because they are in a social circle that exerts pressure. This actually happen more often in China than US. For example, one is forced to earn money for their offsprings. But to do that one is allowed to do a lot of work that is not really fullfilling by design. Like coding for people to click ads. I am not saying all of the work done for people to click ads are not fullfilling, it's just the percentage is clearly larger than what we want, and is growing still. From the system thinking perspective, the time for rethinking, a little bit about changing the social rewarding system probably is worthwhile.

minikites 5y ago

>It advocates to have an uneducated underclass that would not have the tools to improve or protest their situation. How is this different from the current incarnation of global capitalism?

sjwalter 5y ago

Brave New World was not written initially as a dystopia. Huxley was a member of the elite and was writing what amounted to a pamphlet of where we were all going, influenced along the way by the writings of Carroll (Tragedy & Hope), who told the tale of the elite cabal of banksters and other social engineers and how their various iterations formed and dispersed, their history, in sum. Huxley's editor said it'd never sell, so he added the plotline from the perspective of one man who wanted to break free and made the entire thing dystopic. I believe the signs are all there that many of the real Team Elite really do want Brave New World-esque domination, with a tiny group of truly free elite managing the masses as though they were cattle.

prewett 5y ago
What are the signs, in your opinion? I keep hearing people say that a group of elites wants to be in control. Seems pretty unlikely--elites have better things to do than control people, the control people are lower down, or narcissists like the orange-haired guy--but even if they want it, it seems unlikely that they will get it. It just sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I'd be interested in seeing some actual claimed signs, because so far you're the first to offer to back up the claim.

atq2119 5y ago

Can't we take the same analysis to drive alternative conclusions instead? For example, why not remove or weaken the reasons why people want to be part of the elite in the first place, perhaps by eliminating it.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
You may be able to weaken it, but you can't eliminate it due to human nature. See, for example, C.S.Lewis's essay on "the inner ring". https://noorsiddiqui.com/papers/TheInnerRing.pdf https://noorsiddiqui.com/papers/TheInnerRing.pdf
- atq2119 5y ago
  Sure. But setting a goal of eliminating it with the purpose of driving elite importance as low as possible seems to me the most ethical way of dealing with the problem of elite overproduction. Additional measures may be useful as well, of course.

axguscbklp 5y ago

The Economist really misrepresents Turchin's theory by framing it as an issue of there being too many "brainy" people. Turchin's theory has more to do with overproduction of university degree holders, not with overproduction of smart people. Those are two different things. As far as I know, Turchin is not advocating for maintaining some sort of exploited underclass. More than 30% of U.S. adults have at least a bachelor's degree - about double the fraction that had one 40 years ago - which means that a bachelor's degree has limited value as a badge for gaining entrance to the higher strata of society. Note that this is independent of the question of whether it is good or bad for university degrees to be badges for entrance to the higher strata of society. In any case, the relative social value of a university education has massively dropped over the years.

pram 5y ago

The underclass in BNW isn't what I would describe as uneducated though. Everyone was essentially a specialist or technician dedicated to a field of work. There was no such thing as being unemployed or underemployed, they were all engineered and educated to do exactly what they were intended to do. They probably couldn't even conceive of their situation needing improvement.

rootsudo 5y ago

"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. " This, 100%. Turns out turning fiction to reality is a profitable endeavor.