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In our society, Elite Overproduction can be explained as a form of Malthusian social competition where only so many resources and only so much status is availab
by andreilys 5y ago
In our society, Elite Overproduction can be explained as a form of Malthusian social competition where only so many resources and only so much status is available, and the only way to access a satisfactory slice is to compete within the power structures that control them. In turn, our institutions evolve mainly to facilitate this competition rather than performing their ostensible material functions. In turn this causes resentment to grow among those who never had access to those institutions in the first place.
This situation is a consequence of Elite Underproduction. Our society is chronically bad at producing and nurturing true elites, the individuals who are capable of creating and sustaining frontiers. That makes malthusian competition inveitable, and the only thing going - the kinds of 'elites' we end up producing are good at that kind of competition and not much else.
Yes it’s important to have elites that go out and create new frontiers, but at the same time status in a hierarchical society is inherently zero-sum. We can’t all be high status, because there needs to be some reference point.
As an example in the world of law there are only so many spots available at Harvard Law School, even fewer spots for clerking with Supreme Court justices, and of course a very very small amount of actual Supreme Court justices.
What happens when someone loses the high-status tournament to become a Supreme Court justice? Ideally they find another tournament/status game to play, somewhere they can succeed. But even so, if we saturate our society with too many lawyers, there are simply not enough tournaments they can play in (that will also pay them enough to pay off their student loans).
- xyzelement 5y ago>What happens when someone loses the high-status tournament to become a Supreme Court justice? Ideally they find another tournament/status game to play, somewhere they can succeed. If someone reasonably bright orients their entire endeavor around the goal of becoming a Supreme Court Justice, they will be totally fine in life even if they fall well short of their goal. "Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the stars." The problem we have is actually the opposite - too many people believe that no opportunity is available to them, thus they don't pursue anything, and end up stagnant or declining ("Aim for the ground... can't miss!")
- rtpg 5y agoLaw is an interesting example, cuz it has so many points of the non-static nature of all of this. The number of people on the SC changes. The relative status of being a fancy defense lawyer changes. We could in the future set term limits to court judges. there are appelate courts (which are pretty close to the top)!. We could pack the court! We could also make it so that being a lawyer isn't actually prestigious, as a society. We could also stop just choosing people from Harvard & Yale. There are so many choices as a society about what is done, and how many people are or are not needed in certain roles, that the implicit premise in all of this (that the current state of things involve some static limits, _and_ that we have reached those limits right now, instead of 100 years ago or 100 years from now) doesn't stand. Even if I agree that everybody in US elite political circles going through law school is extremely bizarre and bad, I don't think either argument presented in the article holds up.