18 ms·

Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers

58 points by supermatou 4y ago

flappyeagle 4y ago
It’s hard to know what to do. Seems to be the nature of the upper middle class rat race; everyone is looking for a leg up, competition is fierce and there’s no end in sight. It feels depressing to toil for years and end up mid. On social media all we see are people living extraordinary lives, traveling, looking gorgeous, spending money, being successful entrepreneurs, etc. Must really suck to think that’s all possible for you but somehow it’s always out of reach.
tpoacher 4y ago
I get the point the author is trying to make (which is mostly about saturation in skilled employment) but the choice of words left me with a very strong vibe of the author having a lot of bitterness and unresolved personal complexes projected into the text. Then I spotted the url and realised I was probably right :p
supermatou 4y ago
TLDR: "The concept of “elite overproduction” has attracted a lot of attention in the past several years, and it’s not hard to see why. Most associated with Peter Turchin, a researcher who has attempted to develop models that describe and predict the flow of history, elite overproduction refers to periods during which societies generate more members of elite classes than the society can grant elite privileges. Turchin argues that these periods often produce social unrest, as the resentful elites jostle for the advantages to which they believe they’re entitled."
- derbOac 4y ago
  "Can grant privileges" should be "will grant privileges" or "do grant privileges". I think this is a critical distinction. Part of the phenomenon, I think, is that there are more qualified individuals than positions or roles, which lays bare the lack of justification for the elite status of those positions to begin with. The unrest is due to a sense that the restriction is artificial — you could turn it on its head and say the unrest is as much about the old elites having a sense of entitlement to their positions even when they're no longer elite, as it is about the new elites believing they should have the same benefits.
- ginko 4y ago
  You just quoted the first paragraph of the article. What is this adding?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- llamaLord 4y ago
  IMO I think an example of this is all the hardcore activists you see coming out of liberal universities. People who are always talking about being oppressed, despite being in the top 10% socioeconomically on effectively any metric you can find. These people are smart, hard working, qualified... But not enough to get the kind of $$ and respect in society they believe they deserve, so they begin to act like the game is rigged and try to break the game so it can be restarted from zero.
wwilim 4y ago
And so we have reached the point of discussing makers on Etsy and people with OF accounts in an article about elites.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  The article muddles together being "elite" and trying to earn a living through creating art. There's a correlation -- it's quite difficult to spend four years getting a liberal arts degree without some sort of privilege thinking that this is a good idea and footing the bill -- but it's not exactly 1:1, and many Etsy/OF types did not go down this path.
  - pydry 4y ago
    "Elite overproduction" deliberately muddles together "elite" with "people scraping together a living making trinkets on etsy" because "elite" carries quite a negative connotation and the richer and more powerful the 1% get, the more they hate being singled out.
    - jmeister 4y ago
      Have you read Turchin? He defines the term rigorously to refer to a particular social-economic class
      - pydry 4y ago
        Yes. https://archive.is/XWiGM https://archive.is/XWiGM Here he is bemoaning the glut of decidedly non elite law graduates under a title of "elite overproduction". If he rigorously defined billionaire to mean anybody earning over $100k it would hardly be more ridiculous.
AlbertCory 4y ago
... and tonight, I put out my post about (among other things): Reverse Imposter Syndrome! Regular "imposter syndrome" is people who find themselves in elite company, and "suffer" from the nagging feeling that they're not good enough. Reverse Imposter Syndrome is when you think you're good enough to be at an elite institution, but you're really not. cf. Google, Apple, Meta.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Don't forget Recursive Imposter Syndrome: Look at all those people, suffering from Imposter Syndrome. They're not like me, the real imposter.
  - JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
    In order to have imposter syndrome, you can’t know that you have imposter syndrome.
  - glogla 4y ago
    Are you even good enough to have impostor syndrome?
  - precompute 4y ago
    And the even more important: pointer to Recursive Imposter Syndrome
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- LeftHandPath 4y ago
  Reminds me of the (all too often cited nowadays) Dunning Kruger effect [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Three thoughts: First, elites feel like losers because they define themselves as elite. "Elite" is a comparative description - better than almost everyone else. But that's a game where you can't win; you can only lose. If you're in the top 10%, you know someone who's in the top 1%. If you're in the top 1%, you know someone who's in the top 0.1%. If you're in the top 0.1%, you know someone who's in the top 1000 worldwide. And even if you're in the top 1000, you still lose as you compare yourself to others: "He's better at law. She's better at mathematics. He's got better connections." If you define your worth by comparison to others, all you can do is lose, because there's always someone to whom you lose. Second, it's both a rigged game and a stupid one. The elites have created a game of competing to see who's elite. And they wrote the rules, and they wrote the rules so that they win. That means that you get to lose. But it's a stupid game anyway. Take social status, for instance. If you crack into the 400 who rule New York society, then you get to attend a bunch of social events so you can feel like an insider. That's great, I guess, but... if you don't accept the premise of the game, then it becomes very difficult to explain why you should care about playing. It's like Santa Claus. Once you don't believe, people have a really hard time convincing you that you should believe. And third, part of this may be because many people think they're elite when they're not. They've been given participation trophies, and told that they're special, but in terms of elite competition, they're not. Then they get out of college and run into real elites with 30 years of experience.
- vakadrayio 4y ago
  Your third point is quite solid. People support capitalism for only one reason—they actually really do believe they are temporarily embarrassed capitalists, just one job away from some Prince Charming mentor figure discovering their talent being “wasted” at the bottom and lifting them into the C-suite. In truth, of course, the system sees them as being right where they belong. This “overproduction” crisis is a war between the outer capitalist party and the inner one, the former being a powerless but once comfortable buffer class the real elite has decided it wants to try living without. Technological changes and globalization have led the actual economic elite to decide they no longer need a large middle class (outer party). This is not about overproduction. Supply isn’t changing. It’s demand going to zero that is creating the problem.
orzig 4y ago
When I pay for one artist’s output, there likely were nine others who tried and failed in a similar style. It’s like how drug companies have to try nine different drugs (actually many more) before the stars align around one which is safe and effective. For the business model to work, someone has to pay for those other nine. In pharma, it is the patients (through high prices on successful drugs). In creative industries, it is the failed artists who put in a huge amount of work with essentially no compensation. It was totally their choice, but I can understand the frustration. I do wonder about the moral culpability of art schools, though…
- vakadrayio 4y ago
  You bring up art schools, and you’re right. The influence economy is the same way. You don’t win by trying to become elite. The actual winning strat is to sell other people a fantasy of becoming elite. Hence overproduction of markers that were once elite but have been debased and diluted to oblivion.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Probably a variation on selling shovels and pick axes to miners rather than going to prospect for gold yourself. And there's probably actually a variant of that with the influencer economy. The ad-supported sites, microphone and camera manufacturers, etc. have almost certainly made more money than the "influencers" themselves.
- derbOac 4y ago
  Part of what complicates all of this is rent seeking problems, excessive licensing, monopoly abuses, protectionist overregulation, and so forth. I think There's slightly different issues going on in different areas.
polio 4y ago
I think that it's wonderful that we live in a world where people can actually aspire to being an "elite", rather than the feudal world mentioned briefly in the article in which there is no glut. It's unfortunate that supply in the "elite" labor market takes many years to respond to actual market conditions, since the pipelines here are inherently longer, but I see this as a side effect of living in a world where those pipelines exist. Demand control is a hard subject, and the graduates of law school who don't get into Sullivan and Cromwell will probably find some other relatively decent job.
recursivedoubts 4y ago
A few comments: Another reason that elites often feel like losers is that they are at the very tail end of the bell curve when it comes to whatever skill or talent they are elite at. At the end of the bell curve you have a huge variance between people, in a way that you do not in the middle of the bell curve. So the chances are very good that you are in close proximity/competition to someone who is not just better than you at something you are supposed to be good at, but much, much better/smarter/faster/etc. I experienced this phenomena in college and grad school. As for what is to be done, the best thing I can think to do is to produce more elite slots by devolving our increasingly consolidated world to more local control. This will produce more elite slots at the cost of some efficiency, but that's probably the right trade off for "loser" elites, as well as for non-elites for whom the elites would become more accessible/more closely aligned.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  It’s hard to localize when the Internet exists. That’s the root of the problem IMO. All of a sudden you’re competing on the global stage for everything and Internet scale and distribution creates winner take all effects for everything that can be expressed in text, audio, and video
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Exactly. It’s like prof Lambeau character from Good Will Hunting - he’s at the top of his field (Fields medalist) and then he sees someone like Will and it just destroys his self worth. Most “regular” people who interact with Will probably dont even realize what he’s capable of
  - CyberDildonics 4y ago
    That is a fictional movie and not based in reality.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      Next you gonna tell me he also didn’t get stranded on Mars?
pydry 4y ago
"Elite overproduction" is a neat semantic trick. When the word "elite" expands from "toxic billionaire" to "everybody with a liberal arts degree working at Starbucks", a target is taken off the backs of those toxic billionaires. In this case, it's not the Starbucks baristas calling themselves elite. It's actual toxic elites (via media they control - national review, bloomberg, etc.) calling Starbucks baristas "elites". Implying that they are perhaps a little too entitled - wanting typical elite stuff like affordable healthcare, housing, education, etc. It parallels the way that people earning $600,000 / year call themselves "middle class". Or the wonderfully named "baumol's cost disease", which is what some consider to be a frankly disgusting tendency of wages to go up in more productive societies.
- KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
  I am not sure where you are from but 600k a year is not that much. That's a staff engineer at a well capitalized unicorn. You can reach there within or under a decade. In places like Cali, half of your money goes to taxes. Unless that 600k is in dividends/capital gains, you get diminishing returns the more you make. It's solidly upper middle class, but the elite class ceiling is very high when you have founders making 9 figure exits in low interest rate environments. (Downvoters can go suck on their sour grapes, if you aren't negotiating a total compensation in line with the value you are creating, that's not my problem. You are in an industry that generates disproportionately large returns per individual contributor and the fact that you don't know how to capture the value of your own labor is entirely on you. Spend less time practicing leetcode and more time on learning business).
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    Everyone wants to call themselves middle class. $60,000 a year? Middle class. $600,000 a year? Upper middle class. Where is the lower class? Where is the upper class? I swear people on this site making >$500,000 a year act poorer than my family members making $90,000.
    - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
pimlottc 4y ago
What is this site? The domain name makes it sound like a pickup-artist forum.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  the about page explains it it's a proudly neoliberal online magazine completely focused on the cancel culture moral panic. > Our community includes Thomas Chatterton-Williams and Garry Kasparov, David French and Emily Yoffe, Elif Shafak and Francis Fukuyama should tell you all you need to know one way or another if you recognize any of those names from the last few years.
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
    Even if you disagree, attack the content, not the source.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      I thought I was neutral enough to avoid a scolding but you can never be careful enough for that I guess! Anyway to a meaningful extent the source is the content when discussing an organization formed around a certain ideology for a certain goal and so I will attack both if I feel like it thanks.
  - pimlottc 4y ago
    Ah, I never found the about page since their email collection nag took up the whole page, I didn't realize there was anything behind it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
baerrie 4y ago
[flagged]
mattwilsonn888 4y ago
Top two comments here either didn't read the article, or may as well not have.
- precompute 4y ago
  The article is pretty trash, honestly. It is one paragraph stretched to fifteen.
karmakaze 4y ago
Does this all just come down to comparative self-worth? What if you judged yourself not against others, but rather against your own (perceived) potential? I may not reach the same levels as some others, but I may be reaching a higher percentage of what's realistically achievable with my means. Add to add to that that the axis I'm applying myself has some meaningful value to society, and there's not much room to recognize oneself as a loser.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  You’re more well adjusted than most, but I think you’re rare. In the past at least people had religion to backstop them.

58 points by supermatou 4y ago

It’s hard to know what to do. Seems to be the nature of the upper middle class rat race; everyone is looking for a leg up, competition is fierce and there’s no end in sight. It feels depressing to toil for years and end up mid. On social media all we see are people living extraordinary lives, traveling, looking gorgeous, spending money, being successful entrepreneurs, etc. Must really suck to think that’s all possible for you but somehow it’s always out of reach.

tpoacher 4y ago

I get the point the author is trying to make (which is mostly about saturation in skilled employment) but the choice of words left me with a very strong vibe of the author having a lot of bitterness and unresolved personal complexes projected into the text. Then I spotted the url and realised I was probably right :p

supermatou 4y ago

TLDR: "The concept of “elite overproduction” has attracted a lot of attention in the past several years, and it’s not hard to see why. Most associated with Peter Turchin, a researcher who has attempted to develop models that describe and predict the flow of history, elite overproduction refers to periods during which societies generate more members of elite classes than the society can grant elite privileges. Turchin argues that these periods often produce social unrest, as the resentful elites jostle for the advantages to which they believe they’re entitled."

derbOac 4y ago
"Can grant privileges" should be "will grant privileges" or "do grant privileges". I think this is a critical distinction. Part of the phenomenon, I think, is that there are more qualified individuals than positions or roles, which lays bare the lack of justification for the elite status of those positions to begin with. The unrest is due to a sense that the restriction is artificial — you could turn it on its head and say the unrest is as much about the old elites having a sense of entitlement to their positions even when they're no longer elite, as it is about the new elites believing they should have the same benefits.
ginko 4y ago
You just quoted the first paragraph of the article. What is this adding?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
llamaLord 4y ago
IMO I think an example of this is all the hardcore activists you see coming out of liberal universities. People who are always talking about being oppressed, despite being in the top 10% socioeconomically on effectively any metric you can find. These people are smart, hard working, qualified... But not enough to get the kind of $$ and respect in society they believe they deserve, so they begin to act like the game is rigged and try to break the game so it can be restarted from zero.

wwilim 4y ago

And so we have reached the point of discussing makers on Etsy and people with OF accounts in an article about elites.

rippercushions 4y ago
The article muddles together being "elite" and trying to earn a living through creating art. There's a correlation -- it's quite difficult to spend four years getting a liberal arts degree without some sort of privilege thinking that this is a good idea and footing the bill -- but it's not exactly 1:1, and many Etsy/OF types did not go down this path.
- pydry 4y ago
  "Elite overproduction" deliberately muddles together "elite" with "people scraping together a living making trinkets on etsy" because "elite" carries quite a negative connotation and the richer and more powerful the 1% get, the more they hate being singled out.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    Have you read Turchin? He defines the term rigorously to refer to a particular social-economic class
    - pydry 4y ago
      Yes. https://archive.is/XWiGM https://archive.is/XWiGM Here he is bemoaning the glut of decidedly non elite law graduates under a title of "elite overproduction". If he rigorously defined billionaire to mean anybody earning over $100k it would hardly be more ridiculous.

AlbertCory 4y ago

... and tonight, I put out my post about (among other things): Reverse Imposter Syndrome! Regular "imposter syndrome" is people who find themselves in elite company, and "suffer" from the nagging feeling that they're not good enough. Reverse Imposter Syndrome is when you think you're good enough to be at an elite institution, but you're really not. cf. Google, Apple, Meta.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Don't forget Recursive Imposter Syndrome: Look at all those people, suffering from Imposter Syndrome. They're not like me, the real imposter.
- JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
  In order to have imposter syndrome, you can’t know that you have imposter syndrome.
- glogla 4y ago
  Are you even good enough to have impostor syndrome?
- precompute 4y ago
  And the even more important: pointer to Recursive Imposter Syndrome
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
LeftHandPath 4y ago
Reminds me of the (all too often cited nowadays) Dunning Kruger effect [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- AlbertCory 4y ago

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

Three thoughts: First, elites feel like losers because they define themselves as elite. "Elite" is a comparative description - better than almost everyone else. But that's a game where you can't win; you can only lose. If you're in the top 10%, you know someone who's in the top 1%. If you're in the top 1%, you know someone who's in the top 0.1%. If you're in the top 0.1%, you know someone who's in the top 1000 worldwide. And even if you're in the top 1000, you still lose as you compare yourself to others: "He's better at law. She's better at mathematics. He's got better connections." If you define your worth by comparison to others, all you can do is lose, because there's always someone to whom you lose. Second, it's both a rigged game and a stupid one. The elites have created a game of competing to see who's elite. And they wrote the rules, and they wrote the rules so that they win. That means that you get to lose. But it's a stupid game anyway. Take social status, for instance. If you crack into the 400 who rule New York society, then you get to attend a bunch of social events so you can feel like an insider. That's great, I guess, but... if you don't accept the premise of the game, then it becomes very difficult to explain why you should care about playing. It's like Santa Claus. Once you don't believe, people have a really hard time convincing you that you should believe. And third, part of this may be because many people think they're elite when they're not. They've been given participation trophies, and told that they're special, but in terms of elite competition, they're not. Then they get out of college and run into real elites with 30 years of experience.

vakadrayio 4y ago
Your third point is quite solid. People support capitalism for only one reason—they actually really do believe they are temporarily embarrassed capitalists, just one job away from some Prince Charming mentor figure discovering their talent being “wasted” at the bottom and lifting them into the C-suite. In truth, of course, the system sees them as being right where they belong. This “overproduction” crisis is a war between the outer capitalist party and the inner one, the former being a powerless but once comfortable buffer class the real elite has decided it wants to try living without. Technological changes and globalization have led the actual economic elite to decide they no longer need a large middle class (outer party). This is not about overproduction. Supply isn’t changing. It’s demand going to zero that is creating the problem.

orzig 4y ago

When I pay for one artist’s output, there likely were nine others who tried and failed in a similar style. It’s like how drug companies have to try nine different drugs (actually many more) before the stars align around one which is safe and effective. For the business model to work, someone has to pay for those other nine. In pharma, it is the patients (through high prices on successful drugs). In creative industries, it is the failed artists who put in a huge amount of work with essentially no compensation. It was totally their choice, but I can understand the frustration. I do wonder about the moral culpability of art schools, though…

vakadrayio 4y ago
You bring up art schools, and you’re right. The influence economy is the same way. You don’t win by trying to become elite. The actual winning strat is to sell other people a fantasy of becoming elite. Hence overproduction of markers that were once elite but have been debased and diluted to oblivion.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Probably a variation on selling shovels and pick axes to miners rather than going to prospect for gold yourself. And there's probably actually a variant of that with the influencer economy. The ad-supported sites, microphone and camera manufacturers, etc. have almost certainly made more money than the "influencers" themselves.
derbOac 4y ago
Part of what complicates all of this is rent seeking problems, excessive licensing, monopoly abuses, protectionist overregulation, and so forth. I think There's slightly different issues going on in different areas.

polio 4y ago

I think that it's wonderful that we live in a world where people can actually aspire to being an "elite", rather than the feudal world mentioned briefly in the article in which there is no glut. It's unfortunate that supply in the "elite" labor market takes many years to respond to actual market conditions, since the pipelines here are inherently longer, but I see this as a side effect of living in a world where those pipelines exist. Demand control is a hard subject, and the graduates of law school who don't get into Sullivan and Cromwell will probably find some other relatively decent job.

recursivedoubts 4y ago

A few comments: Another reason that elites often feel like losers is that they are at the very tail end of the bell curve when it comes to whatever skill or talent they are elite at. At the end of the bell curve you have a huge variance between people, in a way that you do not in the middle of the bell curve. So the chances are very good that you are in close proximity/competition to someone who is not just better than you at something you are supposed to be good at, but much, much better/smarter/faster/etc. I experienced this phenomena in college and grad school. As for what is to be done, the best thing I can think to do is to produce more elite slots by devolving our increasingly consolidated world to more local control. This will produce more elite slots at the cost of some efficiency, but that's probably the right trade off for "loser" elites, as well as for non-elites for whom the elites would become more accessible/more closely aligned.

flappyeagle 4y ago
It’s hard to localize when the Internet exists. That’s the root of the problem IMO. All of a sudden you’re competing on the global stage for everything and Internet scale and distribution creates winner take all effects for everything that can be expressed in text, audio, and video
dilyevsky 4y ago
Exactly. It’s like prof Lambeau character from Good Will Hunting - he’s at the top of his field (Fields medalist) and then he sees someone like Will and it just destroys his self worth. Most “regular” people who interact with Will probably dont even realize what he’s capable of
- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  That is a fictional movie and not based in reality.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    Next you gonna tell me he also didn’t get stranded on Mars?

pydry 4y ago

"Elite overproduction" is a neat semantic trick. When the word "elite" expands from "toxic billionaire" to "everybody with a liberal arts degree working at Starbucks", a target is taken off the backs of those toxic billionaires. In this case, it's not the Starbucks baristas calling themselves elite. It's actual toxic elites (via media they control - national review, bloomberg, etc.) calling Starbucks baristas "elites". Implying that they are perhaps a little too entitled - wanting typical elite stuff like affordable healthcare, housing, education, etc. It parallels the way that people earning $600,000 / year call themselves "middle class". Or the wonderfully named "baumol's cost disease", which is what some consider to be a frankly disgusting tendency of wages to go up in more productive societies.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
I am not sure where you are from but 600k a year is not that much. That's a staff engineer at a well capitalized unicorn. You can reach there within or under a decade. In places like Cali, half of your money goes to taxes. Unless that 600k is in dividends/capital gains, you get diminishing returns the more you make. It's solidly upper middle class, but the elite class ceiling is very high when you have founders making 9 figure exits in low interest rate environments. (Downvoters can go suck on their sour grapes, if you aren't negotiating a total compensation in line with the value you are creating, that's not my problem. You are in an industry that generates disproportionately large returns per individual contributor and the fact that you don't know how to capture the value of your own labor is entirely on you. Spend less time practicing leetcode and more time on learning business).
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  Everyone wants to call themselves middle class. $60,000 a year? Middle class. $600,000 a year? Upper middle class. Where is the lower class? Where is the upper class? I swear people on this site making >$500,000 a year act poorer than my family members making $90,000.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago

pimlottc 4y ago

What is this site? The domain name makes it sound like a pickup-artist forum.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
the about page explains it it's a proudly neoliberal online magazine completely focused on the cancel culture moral panic. > Our community includes Thomas Chatterton-Williams and Garry Kasparov, David French and Emily Yoffe, Elif Shafak and Francis Fukuyama should tell you all you need to know one way or another if you recognize any of those names from the last few years.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Even if you disagree, attack the content, not the source.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    I thought I was neutral enough to avoid a scolding but you can never be careful enough for that I guess! Anyway to a meaningful extent the source is the content when discussing an organization formed around a certain ideology for a certain goal and so I will attack both if I feel like it thanks.
- pimlottc 4y ago
  Ah, I never found the about page since their email collection nag took up the whole page, I didn't realize there was anything behind it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

baerrie 4y ago

[flagged]

mattwilsonn888 4y ago

Top two comments here either didn't read the article, or may as well not have.

precompute 4y ago
The article is pretty trash, honestly. It is one paragraph stretched to fifteen.

karmakaze 4y ago

Does this all just come down to comparative self-worth? What if you judged yourself not against others, but rather against your own (perceived) potential? I may not reach the same levels as some others, but I may be reaching a higher percentage of what's realistically achievable with my means. Add to add to that that the axis I'm applying myself has some meaningful value to society, and there's not much room to recognize oneself as a loser.

flappyeagle 4y ago
You’re more well adjusted than most, but I think you’re rare. In the past at least people had religion to backstop them.