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What is ‘elite overproduction’?

• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > Here is my related hypothesis: we now put more weight on many smaller lower-noise status markers, instead of fewer bigger noisier markers. In particular, we put more weight on markers of connections to statusful people and institutions. At first I didn't agree with OP's claim that there is more visibility of status. I don't think that is entirely correct: I always knew my family was poor, and I knew who the rich kids were, or who the top performers were. But when I circled back to the top of the article I realized it makes sense: 40 years ago in my childhood it was rich/not-rich, smart/not-smart, hot/not-hot. Now there are dozens of metrics for ranking oneself. I agree that overload of negative data is the anxiety driver. It's like we're all being forced to become data scientists and numbers junkies. We've metricked the hell out of our well-being. At least for this generation. Aren't we infinitely adaptable? Or will future kids just have shorter life spans due to the social stress?
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    You can't win at this game. You can only lose. Especially these days, with the "dozens of metrics". No matter how well you do at one (or several) metrics, there are more at which you fail to excel. If you measure your worth by your social standing, and your social standing by status metrics, you lose. So, don't do that. Don't play a game at which you can only lose.
    • noptd 5y ago
      So the only winning move is not to play? A strange game, indeed.
• burlesona 5y ago
  Interesting article and ideas. I wonder how well we can truly know how the thoughts and motivations of “our generation” compares to “past generations” though. How would we _know_ that people today are more worried about status than people in the past? How would we _know_ that in the past merit carried more weight than “noble blood.” That doesn’t seem to me like something that can be quantified, so I don’t see how we can confidently make comparisons over time in any scientific sense, only in an anecdotal and philosophical sense.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    In the past, "noble blood" was the metric of merit.
  • krastanov 5y ago
    Edit: Regrettably, the entertaining quote I copied below seems to be completely misattributed, as seen in the comment below. This is a quote that I put in a sibling comment that might entertain you. The "kids these days" complaints have been a consistent claim made by each adult generation since antiquity https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love-luxury-they-have-bad-manners-contempt https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love...
    • osipov 5y ago
      Keep telling that yourself you loser, you hired slave.
    • stkdump 5y ago
      https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
    • watwut 5y ago
      Yet another problem with that quote is that generations are in fact different. Some of them are more violent then others. Some of them drink more then others. Some of them are more submissive then others. Sometimes, kids are raised to be assertive, other times they are raised to obey. This quote is used to devalue anyone who points out some difference between now and then. But, it does not prove that such person is wrong.
  • watwut 5y ago
    History studies do deal with that sort of thing. But, one would have to deep down into it and go on reading it in order to learn it. The big problem there is that real historians never talk about "past generations" as a whole which is nonsense concept anyway. Historians talk about "1735 English aristocracy" or "1865 lower class women in American north" and so on. Because how the society is organized constantly changes.
• runawaybottle 5y ago
  I think this goes beyond status afforded to you by wealth and education. If you look at beauty standards for both men and women, they are converging around one or two achievable looks via make-up/filters/diet/exercise. Sure, we could all end up with the same credentials, but what’s everyone’s plan when we all also look the same? I can’t help but laugh.
  • krastanov 5y ago
    This is very dependent on your personal bubble. Plenty of communities make fun of the "beauty" standards you mentioned. If anything, making fun of these standards seems to me to be at least as popular in our general culture today.
    • pempem 5y ago
      They make fun of them and yet the commercialism indicates this hasn't quite been won yet.
• krastanov 5y ago
  While the premise is interesting, I really do not buy some of the contemporary examples given at the end of the post. In particular the one about physics exams. It sounds a lot like "kids these days" fallacy which has been the standard complaint of each adult generation since the start of history https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love-luxury-they-have-bad-manners-contempt https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love... I teach university physics. Intro classes are easier and the exams in these classes are meant to test whether you have learnt physics, not uncover "gifted geniuses". Once you have shown interest in the early classes, you can decide to go into the more challenging classes, whether the classical "problem based" ones celebrated in this blog post, or the more recent "project based" ones which are just as challenging, just a different style of challenging. Which is good, we should encourage all types of genius, not only the masters of algebra. However, yes, we should avoid belittling the masters of algebra in these conversations as well, the same way we learnt to stop belittling "nerds" and "geeks". For what is worth, the bad "problem based" classes that the author bemoans, have always existed. Edit: A sibling comment explained that the Socrates quote I used is probably wrong. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
  • osipov 5y ago
    Your username betrays an Eastern European origin. Your entire comment is a self-serving argument about "kids these days". No one cares that you teach university physics. You are not the candidate elite. You are a hired slave, an educated slave, but a slave nonetheless, toiling away for your slave wages. Hence, as a slave you are not privy to the problem of "elite" overproduction. In your home country you may have considered an educator role to be a a role allocated to local elites. However in your current place of employment you are just hired help. Until you recognize your place in the society you chose you will have no opportunity to move beyond where you are.
  • joe_the_user 5y ago
    I always shake my head when confronted with "rationalist" positions. They often consider important questions and issues but just as often mix these considerations with remarkably immature and historically ignorant thinking. Which isn't to dismiss them but it seems there's barrier they need to overcome.
• powera 5y ago
  Brave New World hints at this phenomenon. Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ummonk 5y ago
  I get perpetually annoyed by Robin Hanson’s inability to properly grasp this concept. Peter Turchin’s books are clear about the concept and provide objective ways to quantify elite production, yet Hanson perpetually ignores them.
  • danieltrembath 5y ago
    I discovered Robin Hanson around 3-4 years ago. I read one of his books, through his blog, and his twitter musings and polls. Often he would question something fundamental about human interaction that seemed to me (and I suspect most) to have obvious and quite simple explanations. But he is intelligent and couldn't be missing the forrest for the trees I told myself. Clearly he must be operating many steps ahead. Levels above! Now I wonder if maybe he just isn't so good with trees. I do not mean to dismiss the entirety of his work. No doubt much of it has been valuable. He seems to struggle to understand people, in much the same way as one of the alien's he's obsessed might struggle.
• leoc 5y ago
  The article doesn't seem great, but I might as well dump my favourite quotation about elite overproduction, from /Nationalism/ by Elie Kedourie http://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/063118885 http://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/063118885... http://www.worldcat.org/title/nationalism/oclc/27812918 http://www.worldcat.org/title/nationalism/oclc/27812918 , about conditions in Germany around 1800: "The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
  • gradschoolfail 5y ago
    At the risk of inviting survival bias, this Sounds like the situation that befell the the Bronte family. Well, at least one can make the argument that the Brontes died young because they couldnt move out of the unhealthy curate living environment.
  • JadeNB 5y ago
    I think your Amazon link got truncated: https://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/0631188851 https://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/06311888...
    • leoc 5y ago
      Thanks: I copied and pasted from an older comment and forgot to repair the link.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  Elite overproduction is not as big of a concern as the hype would seem to suggest Despite record high college attendence, the college wage premium is fatter than ever, and unployment for grads is really low at just 2 percent, the baritista meme not withstanding. The majority of grads major in actionable fields with good career prospects, not journalism or the humanities. Liberal elites who write highly publicized articles about matters pertaining to gender studies or politics are of the minority of majors. Most grads just want the requisite credentials for a middle class lifestyle, not to change the world or rise to the highest tiers of power.
  • SantalBlush 5y ago
    Absolutely. FiveThirtyEight has an excellent article [1] from 2016 that reiterates what you say here. In short: A lot of the tropes about college elitism are bogus. (But instead of relying on conventional wisdom to support their argument, they use data, and some might find that too elitist.) [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/
    • rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Why do the tropes persist? Do the people writing these articles not know anyone with an accounting degree from a state school? It does feel like people like me are forgotten, ignored and dismissed by these cosmopolitan selective school elites.
      • imtringued 5y ago
        The only time you hear these people speak is when they tell you how much they saved on tuition. So they are pretty rare.
      • UncleMeat 5y ago
        Memes. Ideas get into the water of society and get spread without re-examination.
  • 5y ago
• ALittleLight 5y ago
  In my last job I moved from a team that had no "senior" level people on it to a team that was pretty much all "senior" and up level people. I was impressed at the high rankings of everyone on my new team and thought that first, I was about to witness powerhouse performances and a lot getting done, and second that on such an elite and senior team I would have a good chance of moving up the org chart myself. What I found was that all the senior plus level people wanted to do was work on plans and reviews and architecture decisions and so on and so forth. We had a lot of "leadership" but very few people willing to actually put shovel to dirt so to speak. Our ultra-elite team was really unproductive. I began to think of the senior people as something like salt. A meal may be best with a lot of food and a little salt. One or two high level people to plan for and guide a lot of lower ranking people who could actually do work. The second best configuration would be all food and no salt - people doing work without the high level insights and planning. The worst configuration, I discovered, was all salt and no food - just a ton of meetings, reviews, plans, and missed deadlines. I'm connecting my experience with this blog post because it seems to me like the process of "becoming elite" causes the damage. Everyone on our software team was so busy trying to have cross team impact, show their leadership, come up with consequential architecture decisions, and the like - because all that stuff is what you need to be well regarded as a senior type person, that nobody wanted to do the more mundane tasks of actually implementing our plans. From the examples of the article it's like everyone is worried about the metrics they can control, like the academics publishing more and more papers in better journals, that they forget about actually discovering or documenting things. To use the high variance language, maybe in the ur-company, when it was just starting, you could have done something big and consequential. If it was a success you'd get rewarded and become a senior or a principal or whatever. If it failed, even if it failed through no particular fault of your own, you wouldn't, or maybe you'd get fired. Nowadays, as the company has grown, there are fewer of those big risks and more people who want to be seniors and principals, so people take the low variance route - establishing that they are influential planners who wrote and reviewed a lot of stuff and so on, forgetting about the nominal goal of the company - shipping good products.
  • streetcat1 5y ago
    As an Ex-elite person, what you are missing is their performance goals as were given to them by their manager. As a senior person in a big org, you are judge by your leadership efforts / cross team efforts, so this is what they tried to do. I bet that if their goals were to write code, you would see them write code.
• jjoonathan 5y ago
  I have been seeing more and more press hits for "elite overproduction" recently. It stinks of an ulterior motive: the middle class has been under withering financial attack for decades and I fear is now weak enough that the overlords smell the opportunity for a frontal assault on the concept itself.
  • SantalBlush 5y ago
    This is my feeling as well. I might be concerned with "elite overproduction" if the middle class hadn't been shrinking for decades.
    • refenestrator 5y ago
      Not mutually exclusive, 'elite' never meant middle class, and you used to be able to attain a middle class lifestyle without having to be 'elite'.
      • SantalBlush 5y ago
        I agree, and I think non-elites should also have more access to middle class earnings and status. They don't, and many of them are also frustrated at the lack of opportunities they face. But if I were to say that we have a non-elite overproduction as a result, that would sound stupid, because it is.
      • jjoonathan 5y ago
        Right. That never stopped being the case and should never stop being the case. The concept of "elite overproduction" wants to trick you into thinking it did. The "elite overproduction" framework begs you to not view the middle class as a group of people who have achieved a balance where they do valuable work and are rewarded with nice things, but as a group of scheming do-nothings who pose a burden to society as they foolishly aspire to elite-hood and repeatedly fail. It's a laser-guided propaganda missile aimed directly at a fault line in populist movements that have been gaining steam recently.
        • 5y ago
• alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  I know nothing about Social Science, so maybe someone can chime in. Whenever I read about something from the social sciences, it always seems to read as an opinion rather than something rigorously tested. Is Social Science considered a rigorous science, or will we look back in 100 years and group it in as we do with phrenology?
  • JadeNB 5y ago
    > Is Social Science considered a rigorous science, or will we look back in 100 years and group it in as we do with phrenology? I think there's a middle ground between being a rigorous science and being an anti-science like phrenology. I think there's no problem with having soft sciences, as long as the difference between them and hard sciences is understood, and one does not confuse the levels of rigor and certainty between the two.
    • noptd 5y ago
      Agreed. Unfortunately, a concerning percentage of the population seems driven to treat it as the former when defining their core beliefs, like castles built on sand.
    • alfiedotwtf 5y ago
      I think the bluring of lines is what I'm worried about. There's a lot of soft science when it comes to policital economy, and countries have gone all-in with policies from different branches, even though there's really no hard evidence and rigor of some of these ideas. It's mind blowing when you think that millions of people's lives are affected because politicians have had gut instincts of a soft science sounding scientific.
      • SantalBlush 5y ago
        These are fundamental misunderstandings that I often see on HN. First, world leaders must make decisions about the economy, even if those decisions are to, say, permit a more free-market economy. They have no choice in the matter but to decide. The choices they make are based largely on what they consider the best evidence available to them at the time. Second, everyone who participates in the economy has a mental model of how that economy works, using their own evidence. Anyone who says they don't is lying. So if your model of how the economy works is better than the ones they are using, then show us your evidence. Pointing out the flaws in their model is easy and insufficient; you need something better to replace it with, and you must be able to sell it.
• mrjangles 5y ago
  Thomas Sowell talks about this phenomena a lot, however he describes it as an abundance of wealthy individuals who are highly educated in philosphical ideas but who have no practical or useful skills for society. It often happens in societies where hard work is looked down upon as something only poor people do. The result is that these 'elites' have nothing else to do but agitate politically. I feel like people have a great need to succeed and further themselves in life. When they don't have an avenue to satisfy these needs through hard and useful work, they find other outlets. Often these other outlets that can be very detrimental to society as a whole.
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    > educated in philosphical ideas but who have no practical or useful skills for society Like Lisp programmers.
    • tprice7 5y ago
      In this survey, Clojure was associated with the highest salaries globally, and second place in the United States: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=announcement-banner&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019#top-paying-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so...
  • throwawayg56 5y ago
    > Thomas Sowell talks about this phenomena a lot, however he describes it as an abundance of wealthy individuals who are highly educated in philosphical ideas but who have no practical or useful skills for society. I wish this was the only problem. I have been exposed to so many 'elites' (investors, diplomats, C-level executives) that are just plain stupid. For some reason people assume they are very smart, perpetuating this myth.
• derbOac 5y ago
  Seems like the obvious is being overlooked? If elites are being overproduced, it suggests that whatever is being used to justify that status isn't warranted, and therefore, any inequities are unfair or unjustified. You can move the goalposts but if it's in the wrong direction you just make the problem worse. This might be why the "class grades don't mean anything anymore" rings hollow to me -- it's trying to close the barn door when the horses are already gone. Or to use a different analogy, it's like some variant of the fox and grapes fable (maybe there is a fable for it on its own?), where if the elites' markers are shown to be empty, they start saying "well those weren't good anyway." That might work for awhile but if there's enough of it people start thinking the system is rigged.
  • lmm 5y ago
    > Seems like the obvious is being overlooked? If elites are being overproduced, it suggests that whatever is being used to justify that status isn't warranted, and therefore, any inequities are unfair or unjustified. You can move the goalposts but if it's in the wrong direction you just make the problem worse. The problem is there's no consensus on what's fair. A lot of people think they deserve to be part of the elite, and they have reasonable-to-them grounds for that. The people saying "grades don't mean anything" are probably sincere - they really do think something else is now more important than grades and that's why they focused on that something else. But it all adds up to something far too top-heavy.
  • pclmulqdq 5y ago
    This is actually the point of the elite overproduction hypothesis, although the article doesn't get that across. People who pose the theory don't believe that actual elites are being overproduced, but people who believe they should be elite and act as though they are. Many people with a degree believe that they should be elites (because they would be in the 1960s) and are disappointed that they are not. The elites have circled the wagons and use friendships to determine eliteness (see WeWork and Theranos - where elites started companies that are total frauds and still were billionaires for a while). At the same time, it is good for society to have a meritocratic component to the measure of "eliteness." This is why generals who won battles was a good example, and college degrees used to be: people who became generals or got into college were generally not there purely on merit, but the cream of the crop became apparent through challenges relevant to the society of the day. The meritocratic component also allows for social mobility for people who are really damn good at whatever the merit is: great soldiers could find their way into the roman aristocracy from nothing, and colleges always admitted a few exceptionally talented lower-class people who became great scholars. The "elite overproduction" theory suggests that there is too much social mobility for the wrong people, and not enough for the right people.
• woopwoop 5y ago
  What could falsify this hypothesis? I feel like I can tell just-so stories about the all-consuming importance of elite status in the post-war United States that are just as shocking and compelling as what is written here. Did you know people used to smoke cigarettes to look cool and keep their weight down? That men working in white-collar jobs wore suits to work to distinguish themselves from the lower-classes (hence the name "white-collar")?
• dotcommand 5y ago
  I agree that societal instability stem from problems within the elites, but not sure it's due to 'elite overproduction' necessarily. I think it has more to do with divergence of interests within the elites. Even without elite overproduction, if the interests of a significant segment of the elites diverged from the interests of the rest of the elites, then you will have societal breakdown, civil war, etc. One example is the american revolution where the one group of elites in the british empire wanted good relations with the indians to protect their fur trade while another group of elites wanted to invade native areas and steal their land. Don't think there was an issue of elite overproduction in the british empire in the mid 1700s. But there was an issue of divergent interests and there was no room for compromise as these competing interests directly conflicted with each other. Another one is the civil war, where the interests of the industrial north ( the desire to protect industry via tariffs ) directly conflicted withe the interests of the agrarian south ( who wanted to remove tariffs ) so they could sell cotton/agricultural goods to foreign markets. Once again, I don't think there was an overproduction of elites in the north or the south in the 1850s. But I guess if the elite overproduction was severe enough, it could structural conflict of interests. But my guess is that conflicts would naturally arise amongs the elites long before elite overproduction.
  • FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    I like this analysis but am missing the next step. What material interests are in play today? David Graeber argued that the people who controlled the two major parties in the United States, until recently, were into Finance, which benefits from deindustrialization and a weak middle class, and that Trump was different because his interests were in Real Estate, which actually requires domestic consumers -- hence trade war and antiglobalism. (For someone as "far left" as Graeber, it sounded more apologetic for Trump than I expected.) Now, I find this theory interesting, but I'm not sure I buy it. Do you have another one?
    • jackcosgrove 5y ago
      I see a more meaningful split within the elites between industrial and post-industrial magnates. This maps better onto the positions and preferences of the two political parties.
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Bees some of the most organized forms of life on this planet. Bees have different roles, among them, the queen bee. Bees have the ability to create queens by feeding them with royal jelly. When for any reason there's more than one queen, queens fight to death.
• jhanschoo 5y ago
  > For example, early in ancient empires, many rose in status via winning military battles, or perhaps by building new trading regimes. But later in such empires, status was counted more in terms of your connections to other statusful people. Which led to neglect of military success, and thus empire collapse. Is this really a good example? Building an empire and holding it are different things. Many empires collapse from succession disputes and rebellion rather than a lack of military success over rivals.
• mk81 5y ago
  Too many people who think they're smarter than they are who want to be able to tell others how they should think and live.
• jcranmer 5y ago
  > For example, early in ancient empires, many rose in status via winning military battles, or perhaps by building new trading regimes. But later in such empires, status was counted more in terms of your connections to other statusful people. Which led to neglect of military success, and thus empire collapse. The more I think about this statement, the harder it is for me to actually come up with any examples of this happening. While military success of a general might well be useful for status, it is hard to find any examples where that's the primary source of status. The closest I can think up are steppe confederations, whose great size (when they attained such a size) was driven in large part by the personal charisma of the leader, and the loot they could bring to the table, and almost invariably fell apart the moment said leader died, even if their successor were tremendously militarily successful (such as Kublai Khan's conquest of China). I can come up with some more examples where the military caste ultimately robbed the polity of military success, but these came about because the military caste was unwilling to adapt to modern military technologies and opposed military reforms that might lessen their status. And even then, military nonsuccess didn't lead to empire collapse very quickly (cf., the Ottomans). > So early on, ambitious soldiers tried to figure out how to win battles, and to get involved in promising battles. But it was hard to guess just how to do this, and outcomes were noisy functions of efforts. ... do you know anything of military history? Because the key to success is invariably training. Whether we're talking about the citizen soldiers of Greek city states (where soldiering was a part-time job) or the professional army of Rome (where it was a lifelong career), soldiers trained. Hell, the sports of elites (e.g., polo, fencing) are basically military training in disguise. And if you're not talking about common soldiers but elite generals, that military training will absolutely include studying the great generals of yesteryear to be able to apply their tactics and strategums when the time comes due. > So no one could be very sure of their future status, or with whom to associate to gain status. But later on, ambitious soldiers would need to come from the right family, and make good new social connections. Is the implication meant to be that common soldiers uncommonly good at soldiering could leverage that into high society? Because... again, I'm hard-pressed to any time that was true. Even in cases such as the Aztecs, where military prowess was a prized status symbol and was theoretically open to anybody (and everybody received military training!), in practice, actually getting yourself in a position to demonstrate military prowess required elite connections. If we instead restrict ourselves to elites whose power derives from their demonstrated military abilities, well, most such people you can point to could only do what they did because of their connections. Alexander the Great was the son of the guy who conquered all of Greece. Julius Caesar was the scion of one of the most powerful families in Rome, and even after he found himself on the losing side in a civil war, he was able to get plum military and political appointments by attaching himself to the richest man in Rome. So I again ask, what is this society of which the author speaks? It doesn't match with any empire, ancient, medieval, or modern, of which I am aware.
• newbamboo 5y ago
  Companies get lower cost, higher output labor, for free. The money flows upward, enslaving the middle class with obscene debts trying to compete for prized jobs that used to require far less schooling. Meanwhile trust in authorities and institutions falls to new lows. I heard yesterday that 50% of populace now supports censorship, not of hate speech or anything like that, censorship of whatever popular opinion currently deems “misinformation.” Darwin, Newton, Galileo, all “misinformation” that benefitted from having far fewer gatekeepers than we do today. If this is what the democratizing force of higher education gives us, I’ll pass. We have more educated people and greater economic divide than ever before. The group with the greatest amount of “vaccine hesitancy” are those with phds! If that doesn’t scream elite overproduction you may be deaf.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >Galileo Galileo was ordered to abandon heliocentrism by the Pope. Ultimately he was sentenced to prison for his views (commuted to house arrest). He had plenty of gatekeepers.
    • newbamboo 5y ago
      There were fewer “elites” then. You are agreeing with me without realizing it. We now have what amounts to millions of little popes — nothing more than school children with high credentials in mostly nonsensical fields calling for widespread excommunication of heretics from their privileged positions in government and social media. If Galileo lived today we would never know of his positions- he would be immediately deplatformed, entirely erased from the historical record. This is elite overproduction.
      • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        >You are agreeing with me without realizing it. No, I totally disagree with you and just pointed out the most obvious weakness in your argument.
• analyst74 5y ago
  From historical perspective, another side effect of "elite overproduction" is that as "elites" grow in number, they take an increasingly larger slice of the pie, eventually leading to peasants rebellions when enough people cannot even feed their families. Not sure how it applies to modern society, as we seem to manage food scarcity much better than previous millennia. And disgruntled elites alone is not enough to start rebellions if they lack popular support.
• DanielVZ 5y ago
  > For example, early in ancient empires, many rose in status via winning military battles, or perhaps by building new trading regimes. But later in such empires, status was counted more in terms of your connections to other statusful people. Which led to neglect of military success, and thus empire collapse. Is this being said seriously? As someone that once aspired to be a historian this sounds like a massive oversimplification. But maybe this is a hyperbolic rethorical resource. It does sound Toynbeesque though, so maybe the author is taking this from Toynbee's work? I feel like these examples/arguments/proofs need to be developed a lot more to be consistent, specially for an article hosted in a domain called "overcomingbias.com".
  • watwut 5y ago
    On the philosophical level, gotta love the unashamed "starting wars is a good thing, never mind the pain, destabilization and suffering you caused" in that sentence.
• asplake 5y ago
  “Here is my related hypothesis: we now put more weight on many smaller lower-noise status markers, instead of fewer bigger noisier markers. In particular, we put more weight on markers of connections to statusful people and institutions.” I wonder if the writer is familiar with the class system? Or noticed the democratisation of connection through technology? From a historical perspective, this part at least seems backwards to me. At best, the “now” is irrelevant and there is either no such trend or it has changed more form than quantity. Made me suspect that the rest is over-thought.
• slaymaker1907 5y ago
  I think the problem has more to do with continued application of filters based entirely on one's ranking according to some metric. The problem with this is that we never have a measureable metric for the goals we actually care about. For example, universities want the students who will succeed the most at university and thus use some combination of grades, test scores, extracurricular participation, etc. as a proxy for future success. However, future success is a vague goal and the measures chosen would often fail as predictors even if the objective were formalized due to a combination of chance and various biases of the predictor metrics. This gets disastrous in the long term because all these filter processes reinforce each other's biases and due to people being filtered trying to game the system. I think to fix some of these issues, we should stop trying to rank everything precisely and introduce some degree of actual randomness in who passes a given filter. For example, instead of passing the top 10% of applicants in the old system, still keep the top 5%, but do a weighted choice for sufficiently qualified people to fill the other slots. I think this would also help improve diversity as well without the use of true affirmative action.
  • rax0m 5y ago
    I think we would keep the top 5% scores, and the remaining 5% would be filled with the people able to "affect the randomness" (read bribe) the best. There is already a degree of randomness inherent, since for example students don't all study all the material with exactly the same level of attention to each individual part of material. And some will be tired the day of the exams. Some will have something else on their mind while studying due to their relative being in the hospital. Some will by chance happen to guess right on some difficult task. etc. So you already have randomness.
    • Deestan 5y ago
      That randomness doesn't correct for score bias.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    The fundamental problem is work piling. The unit of work isn't 1 hour, it's a "job". If there is 60 hours of work then one person will get a whole job while the other one struggles part time. Both could have gotten a 30 hour work week. Now they start competing for the 40 hour job.
• Animats 5y ago
  "Elite overproduction" is real, in that only about half of college graduates now work at jobs that really require a college degree. The article seems to have gone off on some other subject entirely. This isn't a new phenomenon. Eric Hoffer mentions it in "Working and Thinking on the Waterfront", written in the 1950s. He is unimpressed with intellectuals who don't do real work.
• TechBro8615 5y ago
  I wonder if we would hear so much pearl clutching about “the elites” if every journalist didn’t believe they were one.
• LukeEF 5y ago
  Really interesting concept which has a lot of explanation power. I work with some of the people behind this idea on a global historical databank called Seshat: http://seshatdatabank.info/ http://seshatdatabank.info/. Idea is to record all of the political and social datasets from human history (big parameters!) and provide in a machine readable format. Basically trying to understand the past (where elite overproduction occurred etc.) and make data driven predictions about the future. Uncertainty, complex schemata, complex data, and difficult to digest formats abound. The project was the starting point for TerminusDB: https://github.com/terminusdb/terminusdb https://github.com/terminusdb/terminusdb
• straffs 5y ago
  Elite overproduction is already real in developed countries with high pressure on education, as South Korea. But there is a difference between highly capable people and elites in the sense of dominance structures.
• ceilingcorner 5y ago
  I strongly object to the terminology here. These people are not elite, they are good at gaming the current socioeconomic system and/or have some advantage gained by family relationships or proximity. They are not the smartest, or strongest, or any X adjective. If they are smart or strong, this is only somewhat correlated with their societal position.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• DoctorNick 5y ago
  This is complete and utter nonsense. In a time of incredible, increasing inequality, the problem is that there's TOO MUCH social mobility? Give me a fucking break.
  • throw3849 5y ago
    Producing graduates with irrelevant education and a huge debt is the opposite of social mobility.
    • Peritract 5y ago
      It's the debt that's the problem, not the education.
      • luckylion 5y ago
        It's the debt for irrelevant education. You don't need a million Pokemon scholars, and society would do much better if they had gone into engineering instead.
      • pclmulqdq 5y ago
        Colleges used to be finishing schools for the rich attached to educational institutions for geniuses (the geniuses keep the prestige level up, and the rich provide funding). Companies started demanding degrees to get people who are geniuses or well-connected, so new schools popped up to produce more graduates, and so on in a feedback loop. Eventually the degree became a requirement and not a signal of "eliteness" any more. The people getting the degrees still feel elite, even though many go on to become baristas and store clerks. The problem is that college was never about the education (except for a small minority of students who were usually in the sciences), it was always about the signaling. The part that we think is good (the education) is just a side effect.
  • DoctorNick 5y ago
    BTW, the author is an utter creep: https://slate.com/business/2018/04/economist-robin-hanson-might-be-americas-creepiest-professor.html https://slate.com/business/2018/04/economist-robin-hanson-mi...
• agbell 5y ago
  When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!' Then I think about it for years - Bryan Caplan
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• throrrr3322 5y ago
  This sounds eerily like India: the Brown British collaborators who inherited the British colony basically ran it as their personal inheritance. There are clauses in the constitution to systematically deny any human rights to Hindus. The state restricts education and opportunities to English speakers. Basically the classical civilisation is denied any sense of agency. The situation isn’t much different from the treatment of native Americans back in the barbaric days. Little wonder the Anglo-Indian class and their brainless supporters in the West are up in arms anytime a more rooted Indian leadership emerges. There is much to criticise the current idiots in power but the old colonial crooks are so stupid and insipid that in their toxic discourse of ‘Hindu fascists’ ‘Hindu Nazis’ (in a country which has oppressed Hindus for a millennia) they’re only digging their own graves.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    This is not at all specific to India, FWIW. Many post-colonial countries has been in the same boat for a long time, which can only be a huge source of instability and conflict.
  • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    > There are clauses in the constitution to systematically deny any human rights to Hindus Which laws are those?
• bovermyer 5y ago
  When I was living in New Zealand twenty years ago, I often took the bus to get places. One day I struck up a conversation with the bus driver. Turns out he had a doctorate and was a published researcher in his native country. However, when he moved to New Zealand, he found no work in his field. Part of this could be attributed to academia's perpetual lack of job openings, but I always wondered how much the locals' perception of this individual - as a non-white foreigner - and his attendant social status played into it. Society seems to still have a severe problem with using talent effectively - whether that's elite experience or unskilled labor.
  • koheripbal 5y ago
    That's why it's called overproduction - because there simply isn't demand for research in certain fields. The issue is society producing an elite with a skill set that isn't needed.
    • philipov 5y ago
      Suppose that the skill of the elites you produce is a normal distribution. There are only jobs for the best 0.001% of people in the field, but to get enough candidates that reach that 0.001% bar, you have to produce the other 99.999%. You're sifting through sand to try to get the flakes of gold. There might not be a need for the grains of sand that are produced by the system, but without filling the system with them, you wouldn't have been able to extract the gold that's mixed in. This is why elite overproduction occurs. Many of them may be perfectly competent individuals, but as long as employers are competing to hire only the best of the best, the system will have to massively overproduce to satisfy that demand.
      • stdbrouw 5y ago
        Except that's not what is going on. Usually, when the time comes to look for a new postdoc or a new professor, there are plenty of candidates of very high talent and future potential and committees end up deciding based on low-information signals such as publication count because otherwise they'd have no clue who to prefer. Of course you want there to be more PhDs than professors to allow for an additional selection for the very top talent at that point, but the current situation is that we're producing too much sand as well as too much gold.
• stereolambda 5y ago
  I think the term "elite" here may be the root of the problem. There are implications that educated people are meant to "rule" society which may not be true (in militarism, true democracy etc.), or that they have skills with no useful applications. Maybe we could try "intellectual workers"? Even traditional humanities can be used to please people, stimulate them intellectually, organize knowledge and persuade (rhetoric). These may not be trivial to monetize in a market but are still stuff that a developed society needs. Also note that nowadays we don't need boatloads of people to cultivate land with ploughs and sickles and hand produce everything. Maybe the society isn't well organized but it doesn't mean we don't need educated people (indeed, perhaps better educated than modern university system can offer). I think this blog post has some interesting points on history of humanities education for outside professionals: https://scholars-tage.org/for-god-and-progress-notes-on-training-the-medical-mind/ https://scholars-tage.org/for-god-and-progress-notes-on-trai... Besides I really don't like attempts to solve history by armchair reasoning, instead of empirical evidence. Like the first "theory" of empires failing. When it comes to Rome, there are some examples showing that indeed there were less "great people" war/statecraft accomplishment, but the more apparent (even to the contemporary people) and specific reason being moving to empire from republic. You really didn't want to be too successful because then the emperor would see you as a threat. There is this public desire to have an unified theory of how civilizations (or "empires", lol) decline. I don't believe we have enough of a sample size, even if we had sufficient historical sources. But there is always unrigorous thinking leaning towards whatever social views the thinker has.
• zhdc1 5y ago
  > For example, early in ancient empires, many rose in status via winning military battles, or perhaps by building new trading regimes. But later in such empires, status was counted more in terms of your connections to other statusful people. Which led to neglect of military success, and thus empire collapse. I've always wondered if this was true, or if it's an artifact of the survival of records/histories that over-promote governing coalition members instead of non-governing but wealthly and influential citizens. I.e., most ruling autocratic dynasties are founded through violence, so it makes sense that official records reference individuals who took part in this. Similarly, most autocratic dynasties are sustained through peaceful transitions of power to the next generation of governing members through the acquiescence of coalition members, so it makes sense that - over time - official records will reference individuals who succeeded through their connections instead of their military merits. If you assume that autocratic governments are unstable over long periods of time, and if you intentionally ignore the large number of ruling coalitions that came to power through war but failed to survive a peaceful transition of power, the author's perspective here makes sense. However, this doesn't mean that it's necessary accurate.
  • enkid 5y ago
    The quoted passage seems strange to me, and is probably incorrect for the normal interpretation. If you were in a position to win a battle, say you were a general or led a large force of fighting men, you were probably already an elite of some sort. The only examples I can think of where this isn't true is either in modern times (US Grant being a possible example) or things like slave rebellions. But those are still the exception instead of the rule.
    • zhdc1 5y ago
      While it's pedantic, in sociology and related fields, status is almost always conceptualized in terms of peer-group connections anyway. So it would be incorrect to say that General John Smith had high status simply because he was a General. Instead, John Smith's 'status' depended on whether or not he was a peer of other high-status individuals. In other words, it was always a matter of 'who you know'. It's just that, as you pointed out, in the early stages of a new ruling regime or dynasty, being a General or holding a similar military position pretty much guaranteed that you had the 'right social connections'. This is true even if you gained those connections as a byproduct of your military rank. This is likely true even in many or most modern states.
• malwarebytess 5y ago
  Seems like less a problem of 'elite overproduction' and more a problem of relying on hiearchies when a society reaches a level of success that you begin to create many exceptional people. Maybe in some societies it's time to start working to break hierarchies and cease training people to operate within and climb them. It's time to redistribute the wealth, because if we don't the 'excess elites' will rationally hoard it -- leading to civil unrest and ultimately collapse.
  • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    I wouldn't phrase it that way, but I think I believe something very similar coming from a different cultural background. I'd be curious whether you would agree that the issue isn't so much any hierarchies at all, but too few of them. I still want to reward the best podcasters or authors or aerospace engineers, the issue is when too large a portion of society rewards too small a number of people for too broadly-defined a set of criteria. And elite overproduction is sort of when too many people want to be at the top of the biggest hierarchy for poorly defined reasons, rather than being the best author they personally can be.
    • malwarebytess 5y ago
      Absolutely agree that it's wise to reward and give special attention to the most skilled people. I agree with with your perception of the problem. It makes good sense, and this framing could be used to guide reforms you might compare to antitrust law. Do you have anything in mind that could be done from a policy perspective? Because I don't think that asking people to turn inward for validation is going to work. Let's say we find some policy that works and we can enact. I'm not sure that's enough to fix the problem. Just as policy encouraging a competitive market hasn't fixed the problem there, either. It will keep pooping up and finding new ways to subvert the policy. I think that just as capital creates capital, hierarchy creates hierarchy. Whether it's human nature or the structure of our societies, the outcome appears always to be consolidation. If the efficiency gains of consolidation cannot counter the social/civil instability, and I don't think they can at a certain level of development, then we should tackle the root cause. But I'm repeating myself. I appreciate your perspective, thank you for letting me see it.
• jokoon 5y ago
  Well until we can understand that social hierarchy and social status are pointless values, this will continue to generate problems. What is the point of considering that there are people that are worth more than others? Merit already doesn't work, only inheritance and social reproduction really matter. Why are there so many people who disagree that 100% of people should have access to healthcare, food and shelter? Elites shouldn't really exist. Nobody is really above anybody else. That's the point of having human rights. Of course some people are more specialized for certain things, but nobody is really "above" others. At best, leaders or people with responsibility are "accountable", but their efforts are done as an effort to help other, not to reap the benefits. Market fundamentalists are going to argue that risk must be rewarded, but investors will always work hard to lower risk to a minimum to increase ROI, so why are they really rewarded at all if they reduce risk, since they argued risk must be rewarded?
  • pclmulqdq 5y ago
    This isn't so much about basic needs, which our societies generally provide. This is about having more than a minimum standard of living: seaside mansions aren't as abundant as 300 sq ft apartments. We're apes who are wired to show off to other apes to attract mating opportunities and secure the future of our genes (by helping our children get a leg up).
    • jokoon 5y ago
      no, that's a fallacy of nature
      • pclmulqdq 5y ago
        It isn't that this behavior is good because it's natural - it's good because it keeps people motivated. The problem is that unfortunately, people are not the same. Some are better physicists than others, some are better organizers, and some are better carpenters. You need some inequality of outcome to incentivize people to do what they are good at - the Soviet Union has showed us that. Having any inequality at all produces elites. You can have human rights while having inequality, and we generally do.
• red_admiral 5y ago
  In Huxley's Brave New World, there is a scene where the savage asks the World Controller, why don't you make everyone Alpha Double Plus? The Controller explains how a society of Alphas couldn't help becoming restless and unstable, so instead they produce just the right social pyramid for a happy society.
• aklemm 5y ago
  The world needs ditch diggers too.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  Elite Overproduction is why we have woke and SJWs!