The crunch at the bottom causes people to try to get their children into the elite. This causes high competition among the elites (you can see that with college

The crunch at the bottom causes people to try to get their children into the elite. This causes high competition among the elites (you can see that with college tuition going up and people with degrees working as baristas) which causes a crunch at the top which is starting to cause political instability. I think a lot of this is cyclical although I'd argue that (in the US anyway) the crunch at the bottom came before it really needed to due to some poor policy decisions.