9 ms·

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 "overpro

by 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%...
    - gruez 5y ago
      How is this relevant? The parent poster made a testable statement ("there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation"), and I disproved it by pointing out that even the bottom 10% of Americans are keeping up with inflation and then some.
      - justicezyx 5y ago
        The idea is that absolute improvement does not change the fact that people are seeing some are much better off than themselves. It's about why people want to be elites. As for the inflation, that's irrelevant. I should have read the comments closely. But it remains the case that such technicality is not at the right direction.
  - refenestrator 5y ago
    That's against CPI inflation. Consumer goods have gotten cheaper over the period, so even slow wage growth will outpace the CPI measure. Housing, education and financial products including health insurance are not included in CPI measures -- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4-2-percent-from-april-2020-to-april-2021.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4-...
    - gruez 5y ago
      >That's against CPI inflation. Yes, that's implied. If you get to choose your basket you can make inflation seem arbitrarily high/low. >Housing, education and financial products including health insurance are not included in CPI measures -- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4-... Why would you lie like that? https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2020.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2020.htm Housing: 42.385% of CPI-U Education: 3.033% of CPI-U "financial products" (whatever that means, the closest I could find is "Financial services"): 0.229 of CPI-U health insurance: 1.209% of CPI-U
      - refenestrator 5y ago
        Ah, my information was bad. The study you originally cited specifically mentions CPI-U as the measure they were using. I assure you I wasn't lying, and thank you for the correction. (perhaps consider not jumping straight to the lying accusation in the future). There's still a conversation about housing taking up an increasing share of the pie that doesn't exactly shine through in that top line number, but no point in belaboring it.
        gruez 5y ago
        > Ah, my information was bad. The study you originally cited specifically mentions CPI-U as the measure they were using. well the BLS publishes a bunch of CPI numbers, but "the" CPI is just CPI-U. The others are even more specific (eg. CPI-W for clerical workers or CPI for the elderly) >There's still a conversation about housing taking up an increasing share of the pie that doesn't exactly shine through in that top line number, but no point in belaboring it. The rise in housing prices has mostly been canceled out (or caused by?) low interest rates. After you adjust for interest rate and inflation, the monthly payment for a house (ie. the price you actually pay) has actually gone down from the 90s. https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screenshot-2021-03-20-101503.jpg https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/...
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    I'm not sure what report your read, but that report very clearly states the following: > Real wages fell for workers with lower levels of educational attainment and rose for highly educated workers. Wages for workers with a high school diploma or less education declined in real terms at the top, middle, and bottom of the wage distribution, whereas wages rose for workers with at least a college degree. And that is before you start looking at issues with the CPI-U and how it's price weighting compares to real expenses faced by blue collar workers.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  You should meet my carpenter and plumber and ask them about their nice houses with big yards and new cars.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    These are skilled trades, it's quite a challenge to compare them with factory work that used to employ a large blue-collar population.
  - girvo 5y ago
    Though for a lot of people those items are acquired via large amounts of debt, and at a much larger multiple of their income than in the past
    - duduuegeh 5y ago
      I don't understand this allergy towards debt. Oh no, people had the option to take out a loan to access capital they wanted to invest in themselves. If only we could be like the Europeans instead and waste public money to fund whatever stupid whimsy someone fancied rather than make them responsible for the productivity of their choice.
      - throwaways885 5y ago
        Because children were pressured by society into going to university, on what possibly was false pretences.
      - chillwaves 5y ago
        > whatever stupid whimsy someone fancied strange description for democracy.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      Part of that change is artificial. Mortgage interest rates have plummeted, which have caused prices to go up. The real median mortgage payment is about the same over the last 50 years.
- outlace 5y ago
  Where is cost of living in this analysis? In the Midwest you can still have a nice quality of life with any decent job. Yeah sure, you can’t have such things in SF, NY or LA like maybe you could in the 70s.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    You likely pay for it in other ways.
    - coffeecat 5y ago
      What other ways do you have in mind?
      - nebula8804 5y ago
        There is no such thing as a free lunch and so reduced real estate costs bring with it an environment of potential poor local governance, poor job market, neighbors that do not share values that are conducive with rising home prices. A most recent example is poor compliance with things that benefit the masses (ie. Vaccine, mask etc.) I suspect the next thing will be poor compliance with switching over to energy efficient power generation as the world moves to clean energy + things implemented to discourage clean transportation (ie. extra taxes on EVs/banning solar installs without major caveats). All these boneheaded things drive down the cost of the real estate to its true market value.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  Non manufacturing blue collar trades are still quite profitable.
- ampdepolymerase 5y ago
  You conveniently left out the rise of the industry known as software engineering.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Software engineering isn’t blue collar work. “A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled labor.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker Plumber or nurse sure, but staring at a screen or moving Post-it notes isn’t physical labor.
    - naravara 5y ago
      While wrenching on a car is indeed manual labor I feel like it can take similar levels of mental effort, background knowledge, and training as junior dev work. So the parallel isn’t entirely off base. I believe the OP’s argument is that there are new classes of work that didn’t exist back then. Perhaps they’re not as cleanly sorted into white and blue collar lines as before but they occupy similar places in the socio-economic status positioning.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Being a mechanic is extremely repetitive. Occasionally people are faced with something odd, but it’s mostly a checklist job because identical makes and models generally run into the same issues. Or as a childhood friend out it. It’s boring, but I can zone out and work with my hands.
zozbot234 5y ago
Increased stratification is largely driven by rewards to technical skills, and technical training/STEM degrees are not the main source of "elite overproduction" by any stretch. Quite to the contrary, this is basically all coming from an extremely traditional idea of education (some would say many centuries or even thousand years old) positing that there's some sort of inherent merit to being an "intellectual" (whatever that might mean) being "socially aware" (again, a very fuzzy idea) or musing about "the human condition", even whilst actual technical merit is broadly disparaged as "beneath" one's perceived station.
- pydry 5y ago
  Increased stratification started when incomes decoupled from productivity growth in ~1979. That was caused by a wave of union busting.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    I'm puzzled by this comment. You're seemingly trying to explain a secular trend sweeping across the Western world by pointing to a single short-term event that occurred in the U.S. and was but tangentially related to what's actually going on (returns to highly skilled labor have been going up, not down as we might expect from union busting activity!) That doesn't really make much sense, tbh.
    - PicassoCTs 5y ago
      The causal event for that was the discovery that the USSR was a hollow giant and the red scare not based in reality. After that communism lost alot of its fear-factor and a take-over was becoming ever more unlikely.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        Wow, that is not the way I remember 1979...
        5y ago
bilbo0s 5y ago
Insightful comment. How would anyone possibly change the perception that you have to be a lawyer or MBA or you're useless? When looked at the way you suggest, this problem is enormous. I'm not sure we'd ever solve it. We just have to accommodate ourselves to a society with lawyers, MBAs, and software people everywhere.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  The different between a lawyer and an engineer is that one creates new means of production which grow the pie, and the other procures pieces of pie.
  - bilbo0s 5y ago
    Grows the pie, but only for people on the right side of the inequity divide. I would say tech is winner take all more than almost any other industry I can think of. So for the people feeling the pressure of the inequality divide, there's little difference between these two. Unless they join the ranks of lawyers or engineers, there's nothing in it for them monetarily speaking.
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
      Ordinary people get more personalised advertising.
    - sershe 5y ago
      The people get services that were unimaginable (or expensive and inferior, e.g. dedicated GPS navigators) for free, money-wise. If Google/Facebook/Amazon/... weren't providing value, they wouldn't be making so much money off the people who choose to use them. Tech is actually as close as it gets to literally creating and giving everyone free stuff, as far as the pie goes.
roenxi 5y ago
We should consider another alternative - elite overproduction correlated with very wealthy societies, and very wealthy societies revert to the mean. So overproduction of elites correlates to decline, and correlation is not causation. And attaching my pet theory - China has transformed their society, radically for the better, in 1 generation. As far as I can tell the American press has taken no interest whatsoever in seriously figuring out what happened beyond very surface level analysis. Are the policies that worked in Asia even serious contenders for implementation in America?
- lumost 5y ago
  It's only the last 10 years of China's economy that sparks interest/fear/competition in western minds and often the press is slow to pick up that something is different. The Soviet Union, and Japan both threatened U.S. economic hegemony, but ultimately saw growth stagnate when the economy ran out of people to throw at the growth engine. China is starting to look like they can keep the growth engine running even in the industrialized city centers, creating new products and services which rival their western counterparts. If this continues then China could reasonably rival the US and EU on both standard of living as well as total economic power.
  - novok 5y ago
    China has a lot of challenges coming up in the future that is slowing that growth now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTbILK0fxDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTbILK0fxDY It's making the CCP jittery, which is a theory behind the increasing authoritarianism in the country now.
    - neaanopri 5y ago
      Which is ironic because letting the leash out is what has caused the rise of China. A Maoist China would not be an economic powerhouse
      - akimball 5y ago
lumost 5y ago
This aligns with the experience I and my parents had growing up in the US. My grandparents worked in factories and did relatively well for themselves, living in the same town in Connecticut that their grandparents worked in as farmers 2 generations prior. They had the notion that factory life wasn't wear the future was and pushed my parents to go to college in the 70s. By the time I was growing up in the 90s and 00s just 2 towns over the very notion of factory work as a viable career had vanished. Everyone was prepped to live in a 2-tier system of college goers and those who weren't heading to college. Flash forward to now and it turns out that it was only certain types of college that paid off and everyone else went into unstable service jobs or unstable non-technical disciplines. If we're building a meritocracy that feels like a lottery people are going to be angry. If it works like a lottery, then the people with the most tickets are going to win every time.
- taurath 5y ago
  It turns out that all they have to do is split the angry people in two to confuse who to be angry at and that works for decades.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  >people are going to be angry. sure. I reckon they are.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  I think it was pretty apparent back in 2012 when I was picking college majors that it was essentially engineering, economics, medical, or you're going to have a rough time.
  - lumost 5y ago
    I suspect the mentality started to shift after the '08 crises. But I know quite a few undergraduate "business" majors who weren't able to find remunerative work from that era.
    - nradov 5y ago
flybrand 5y ago
Good point. Elite overproduction could come from changing the definition of an elite; we may have lowered the bar w the Internet, self-publishing, etc.
wisty 5y ago
The theory is based on historical data, and I doubt that an end to middle class blue-collar work would apply to all that many historical cases. But you might be onto something - elite overproduction could be a concession made by an elite that's facing a potential uprising - whether it's youth unemployment or a weak king or new technology arming the peasants then allowing the most ambitious potential revolutionaries a chance to advance into the elite is probably a good stalling tactic (but will eventually fail). It's like if a company starts making everyone a "manager". Maybe the leadership is incompetent, and they are more focused on management than work. Maybe they are trying to raise morale by handing out pseudo-promotions. Maybe they can't attract new workers without giving them attractive job descriptions. Whatever the case, it's unlikely to be sustainable (either the management will collapse under its own weight, or the workers will realise their new titles aren't worth what they thought they were).
mmarq 5y ago
And yet it doesn’t look like highly educated but low paid people are the main source of instability. Kids wanting to take down statues do not cause more instability than football hooligans, and as such can be easily handled by the police. Trump, Brexit or other forms of populism (say Le Pen, AfD, ecc…), which are the main source of political instability in the West, identify their enemies in the “intellectual urban elites” and look for support in the mythological “disenfranchised white working class”.

by Lavery 5y ago

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%...
  - gruez 5y ago
    How is this relevant? The parent poster made a testable statement ("there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation"), and I disproved it by pointing out that even the bottom 10% of Americans are keeping up with inflation and then some.
    - justicezyx 5y ago
      The idea is that absolute improvement does not change the fact that people are seeing some are much better off than themselves. It's about why people want to be elites. As for the inflation, that's irrelevant. I should have read the comments closely. But it remains the case that such technicality is not at the right direction.
- refenestrator 5y ago
  That's against CPI inflation. Consumer goods have gotten cheaper over the period, so even slow wage growth will outpace the CPI measure. Housing, education and financial products including health insurance are not included in CPI measures -- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4-2-percent-from-april-2020-to-april-2021.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4-...
  - gruez 5y ago
    >That's against CPI inflation. Yes, that's implied. If you get to choose your basket you can make inflation seem arbitrarily high/low. >Housing, education and financial products including health insurance are not included in CPI measures -- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4-... Why would you lie like that? https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2020.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2020.htm Housing: 42.385% of CPI-U Education: 3.033% of CPI-U "financial products" (whatever that means, the closest I could find is "Financial services"): 0.229 of CPI-U health insurance: 1.209% of CPI-U
    - refenestrator 5y ago
      Ah, my information was bad. The study you originally cited specifically mentions CPI-U as the measure they were using. I assure you I wasn't lying, and thank you for the correction. (perhaps consider not jumping straight to the lying accusation in the future). There's still a conversation about housing taking up an increasing share of the pie that doesn't exactly shine through in that top line number, but no point in belaboring it.
      - gruez 5y ago
        > Ah, my information was bad. The study you originally cited specifically mentions CPI-U as the measure they were using. well the BLS publishes a bunch of CPI numbers, but "the" CPI is just CPI-U. The others are even more specific (eg. CPI-W for clerical workers or CPI for the elderly) >There's still a conversation about housing taking up an increasing share of the pie that doesn't exactly shine through in that top line number, but no point in belaboring it. The rise in housing prices has mostly been canceled out (or caused by?) low interest rates. After you adjust for interest rate and inflation, the monthly payment for a house (ie. the price you actually pay) has actually gone down from the 90s. https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screenshot-2021-03-20-101503.jpg https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/...
- shkkmo 5y ago
  I'm not sure what report your read, but that report very clearly states the following: > Real wages fell for workers with lower levels of educational attainment and rose for highly educated workers. Wages for workers with a high school diploma or less education declined in real terms at the top, middle, and bottom of the wage distribution, whereas wages rose for workers with at least a college degree. And that is before you start looking at issues with the CPI-U and how it's price weighting compares to real expenses faced by blue collar workers.
merpnderp 5y ago
You should meet my carpenter and plumber and ask them about their nice houses with big yards and new cars.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  These are skilled trades, it's quite a challenge to compare them with factory work that used to employ a large blue-collar population.
- girvo 5y ago
  Though for a lot of people those items are acquired via large amounts of debt, and at a much larger multiple of their income than in the past
  - duduuegeh 5y ago
    I don't understand this allergy towards debt. Oh no, people had the option to take out a loan to access capital they wanted to invest in themselves. If only we could be like the Europeans instead and waste public money to fund whatever stupid whimsy someone fancied rather than make them responsible for the productivity of their choice.
    - throwaways885 5y ago
      Because children were pressured by society into going to university, on what possibly was false pretences.
    - chillwaves 5y ago
      > whatever stupid whimsy someone fancied strange description for democracy.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Part of that change is artificial. Mortgage interest rates have plummeted, which have caused prices to go up. The real median mortgage payment is about the same over the last 50 years.
outlace 5y ago
Where is cost of living in this analysis? In the Midwest you can still have a nice quality of life with any decent job. Yeah sure, you can’t have such things in SF, NY or LA like maybe you could in the 70s.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  You likely pay for it in other ways.
  - coffeecat 5y ago
    What other ways do you have in mind?
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      There is no such thing as a free lunch and so reduced real estate costs bring with it an environment of potential poor local governance, poor job market, neighbors that do not share values that are conducive with rising home prices. A most recent example is poor compliance with things that benefit the masses (ie. Vaccine, mask etc.) I suspect the next thing will be poor compliance with switching over to energy efficient power generation as the world moves to clean energy + things implemented to discourage clean transportation (ie. extra taxes on EVs/banning solar installs without major caveats). All these boneheaded things drive down the cost of the real estate to its true market value.
pyuser583 5y ago
Non manufacturing blue collar trades are still quite profitable.
ampdepolymerase 5y ago
You conveniently left out the rise of the industry known as software engineering.
- Retric 5y ago
  Software engineering isn’t blue collar work. “A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled labor.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker Plumber or nurse sure, but staring at a screen or moving Post-it notes isn’t physical labor.
  - naravara 5y ago
    While wrenching on a car is indeed manual labor I feel like it can take similar levels of mental effort, background knowledge, and training as junior dev work. So the parallel isn’t entirely off base. I believe the OP’s argument is that there are new classes of work that didn’t exist back then. Perhaps they’re not as cleanly sorted into white and blue collar lines as before but they occupy similar places in the socio-economic status positioning.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Being a mechanic is extremely repetitive. Occasionally people are faced with something odd, but it’s mostly a checklist job because identical makes and models generally run into the same issues. Or as a childhood friend out it. It’s boring, but I can zone out and work with my hands.

zozbot234 5y ago

Increased stratification is largely driven by rewards to technical skills, and technical training/STEM degrees are not the main source of "elite overproduction" by any stretch. Quite to the contrary, this is basically all coming from an extremely traditional idea of education (some would say many centuries or even thousand years old) positing that there's some sort of inherent merit to being an "intellectual" (whatever that might mean) being "socially aware" (again, a very fuzzy idea) or musing about "the human condition", even whilst actual technical merit is broadly disparaged as "beneath" one's perceived station.

pydry 5y ago
Increased stratification started when incomes decoupled from productivity growth in ~1979. That was caused by a wave of union busting.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  I'm puzzled by this comment. You're seemingly trying to explain a secular trend sweeping across the Western world by pointing to a single short-term event that occurred in the U.S. and was but tangentially related to what's actually going on (returns to highly skilled labor have been going up, not down as we might expect from union busting activity!) That doesn't really make much sense, tbh.
  - PicassoCTs 5y ago
    The causal event for that was the discovery that the USSR was a hollow giant and the red scare not based in reality. After that communism lost alot of its fear-factor and a take-over was becoming ever more unlikely.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      Wow, that is not the way I remember 1979...
      - 5y ago

bilbo0s 5y ago

Insightful comment. How would anyone possibly change the perception that you have to be a lawyer or MBA or you're useless? When looked at the way you suggest, this problem is enormous. I'm not sure we'd ever solve it. We just have to accommodate ourselves to a society with lawyers, MBAs, and software people everywhere.

wombatmobile 5y ago
The different between a lawyer and an engineer is that one creates new means of production which grow the pie, and the other procures pieces of pie.
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  Grows the pie, but only for people on the right side of the inequity divide. I would say tech is winner take all more than almost any other industry I can think of. So for the people feeling the pressure of the inequality divide, there's little difference between these two. Unless they join the ranks of lawyers or engineers, there's nothing in it for them monetarily speaking.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    Ordinary people get more personalised advertising.
  - sershe 5y ago
    The people get services that were unimaginable (or expensive and inferior, e.g. dedicated GPS navigators) for free, money-wise. If Google/Facebook/Amazon/... weren't providing value, they wouldn't be making so much money off the people who choose to use them. Tech is actually as close as it gets to literally creating and giving everyone free stuff, as far as the pie goes.

roenxi 5y ago

We should consider another alternative - elite overproduction correlated with very wealthy societies, and very wealthy societies revert to the mean. So overproduction of elites correlates to decline, and correlation is not causation. And attaching my pet theory - China has transformed their society, radically for the better, in 1 generation. As far as I can tell the American press has taken no interest whatsoever in seriously figuring out what happened beyond very surface level analysis. Are the policies that worked in Asia even serious contenders for implementation in America?

lumost 5y ago
It's only the last 10 years of China's economy that sparks interest/fear/competition in western minds and often the press is slow to pick up that something is different. The Soviet Union, and Japan both threatened U.S. economic hegemony, but ultimately saw growth stagnate when the economy ran out of people to throw at the growth engine. China is starting to look like they can keep the growth engine running even in the industrialized city centers, creating new products and services which rival their western counterparts. If this continues then China could reasonably rival the US and EU on both standard of living as well as total economic power.
- novok 5y ago
  China has a lot of challenges coming up in the future that is slowing that growth now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTbILK0fxDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTbILK0fxDY It's making the CCP jittery, which is a theory behind the increasing authoritarianism in the country now.
  - neaanopri 5y ago
    Which is ironic because letting the leash out is what has caused the rise of China. A Maoist China would not be an economic powerhouse
    - akimball 5y ago

lumost 5y ago

This aligns with the experience I and my parents had growing up in the US. My grandparents worked in factories and did relatively well for themselves, living in the same town in Connecticut that their grandparents worked in as farmers 2 generations prior. They had the notion that factory life wasn't wear the future was and pushed my parents to go to college in the 70s. By the time I was growing up in the 90s and 00s just 2 towns over the very notion of factory work as a viable career had vanished. Everyone was prepped to live in a 2-tier system of college goers and those who weren't heading to college. Flash forward to now and it turns out that it was only certain types of college that paid off and everyone else went into unstable service jobs or unstable non-technical disciplines. If we're building a meritocracy that feels like a lottery people are going to be angry. If it works like a lottery, then the people with the most tickets are going to win every time.

taurath 5y ago
It turns out that all they have to do is split the angry people in two to confuse who to be angry at and that works for decades.
Pokepokalypse 5y ago
>people are going to be angry. sure. I reckon they are.
reducesuffering 5y ago
I think it was pretty apparent back in 2012 when I was picking college majors that it was essentially engineering, economics, medical, or you're going to have a rough time.
- lumost 5y ago
  I suspect the mentality started to shift after the '08 crises. But I know quite a few undergraduate "business" majors who weren't able to find remunerative work from that era.
  - nradov 5y ago

flybrand 5y ago

Good point. Elite overproduction could come from changing the definition of an elite; we may have lowered the bar w the Internet, self-publishing, etc.

wisty 5y ago

The theory is based on historical data, and I doubt that an end to middle class blue-collar work would apply to all that many historical cases. But you might be onto something - elite overproduction could be a concession made by an elite that's facing a potential uprising - whether it's youth unemployment or a weak king or new technology arming the peasants then allowing the most ambitious potential revolutionaries a chance to advance into the elite is probably a good stalling tactic (but will eventually fail). It's like if a company starts making everyone a "manager". Maybe the leadership is incompetent, and they are more focused on management than work. Maybe they are trying to raise morale by handing out pseudo-promotions. Maybe they can't attract new workers without giving them attractive job descriptions. Whatever the case, it's unlikely to be sustainable (either the management will collapse under its own weight, or the workers will realise their new titles aren't worth what they thought they were).

mmarq 5y ago

And yet it doesn’t look like highly educated but low paid people are the main source of instability. Kids wanting to take down statues do not cause more instability than football hooligans, and as such can be easily handled by the police. Trump, Brexit or other forms of populism (say Le Pen, AfD, ecc…), which are the main source of political instability in the West, identify their enemies in the “intellectual urban elites” and look for support in the mythological “disenfranchised white working class”.