There Is No Surplus Elite in America

Peter Turchin’s thesis that “elite overproduction” explains America’s instability is conceptually confused and empirically false.

(Photo via Getty Images.)

Over the course of the last decade, a seductive idea has conquered the discourse: the notion that the sudden surge in political instability in democracies like the United States has been due to “elite overproduction” and the subsequent formation of a “surplus elite.”

In the description of Peter Turchin, the Russian-American beetle-expert-cum-political-forecaster who popularized these terms, the overproduction of elites consists in “the presence of more elites and elite aspirants than the society can provide positions for.” The rise of a class of people who aspire to elite status only to see their expectations dashed, he argues, is “inherently destabilizing.”

America does indeed seem to be going through a period of prolonged turmoil. (Think the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, the summer of 2020 and the assault on the Capitol, plus of course the election of Donald Trump.) And so Turchin’s idea is suddenly everywhere. A few years ago, Graeme Wood, an excellent reporter who usually has a sure nose for bullshit, gave Turchin a respectful hearing in the pages of The Atlantic. Since then, his books have attracted praise from eminent historians like Niall Ferguson, economists like Angus Deaton, and even military leaders like James Stavridis. (“Peter Turchin,” writes the four-star admiral, “provides a powerful synthesis of the historical forces that have brought American society to the dangerous ledge upon which it now teeters.”)

But is the idea of surplus elites actually true, useful—or even coherent?

The Paradox of Rising Expectations

The term Turchin uses is relatively new. So is its sudden surge in popularity. But the underlying idea long predates his work.

In fact, the intuition that political systems may become unstable when they prove unable to meet the rising expectations of their population is very old. Alexis de Tocqueville hinted at an early version of it when, in trying to explain the roots of the French Revolution, he noted that revolutions often take place because improved conditions lead citizens to make demands that governments prove unable to meet: “The regime that a revolution destroys is almost always better than the one that immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform.”

The most compelling modern formulation of the paradox of rising expectations, specifically focused on the way in which modernization would create a new class of aspirants to high social and material status, was given by Samuel Huntington in his seminal 1968 book Political Order in Changing Societies. As Huntington pointed out, modernization creates the preconditions for democracy; but if the process of modernization takes place too rapidly, societies end up with a large number of newly educated people whose expectations for a middle-class life cannot be met—significantly increasing the risk of political instability.¹

In the first societies to industrialize, the process of modernization was very slow. In Western Europe, for example, it took centuries of gradual progress to raise the portion of the population that knew how to read and write from a small fraction to over half of the total. This made it possible to integrate newly educated citizens into the job market in a gradual manner. (Even then, of course, the process of modernization went hand-in-hand with plenty of political instability.)

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In many countries that were rapidly developing after World War II, those same transformations took place over the course of a couple of short decades, with the share of the educated population rising at unprecedented speed. Take South Korea. Over the course of a single generation, literacy rates in the country jumped from 22 percent in 1945 to 88 percent in 1970. The number of university graduates multiplied many-fold. But since Korea’s economy was still heavily based on agriculture and manufacturing, the supply of high-skilled jobs remained small. The country’s law schools, Huntington notes, “produced about eighteen times as many graduates in 1960 as the field could absorb.” Most college graduates could not find a job that was in any way commensurate with their education or their hopes for a better life.

South Korea is an extreme case. But a similar expectations gap has reared its head in many different contexts, from India in the 1970s to Egypt in the 2000s. Again and again, this extreme mismatch really has proven politically destabilizing. As Huntington pithily put the point:

[T]he higher the level of education of the unemployed, alienated, or otherwise dissatisfied person, the more extreme the destabilizing behavior which results. Alienated university graduates prepare revolutions; alienated technical or secondary school graduates plan coups; alienated primary school leavers engage in more frequent but less significant forms of political unrest.

This is the compelling intuition behind Turchin’s talk of “elite overproduction” and a “surplus elite”—one that has, depending on how you count, been known for decades or even centuries. So why the renewed interest in this idea? The terms Turchin has popularized are one part of the reason.² But the principal reason lies in his claim that the idea of a surplus elite can be applied not just to developing countries like the South Korea of the postwar period but also to some of the richest places on Earth—helping to explain why countries like the United States have been so unstable of late. Is that true though? Does the overproduction of elites stand behind the rise of Donald Trump and the general chaos in which much of the West now finds itself engulfed?

Astrology for Politics Nerds

Trying to make sense of Turchin’s writings makes you feel like you’ve been staring at an astrological chart for too long. His approach—which, in a reference to the muse of history, he dubs Cliodynamics—is full of grandiose pronouncements which are designed to look scientific but actually present the world in such broad generalities that they are simply unfalsifiable. A widely-cited 2013 paper called “Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability,” for example, compares four main logical components, each of which is depicted as having a causal relationship with all three of the others: the state, population, elites, and instability.

What at first glance feels frustratingly opaque turns out, on further inspection, to be absurdly underspecified. Turchin purports to proffer an original explanation for why countries go through cycles of instability. But his theory’s key outcome variable is so vague as to be effectively meaningless. According to the predictions of his model, America’s two great eras of instability span from the 1850s to the 1910s and from the 1970s to the present day. But these two eras are so long and variegated that their blanket classification as eras of instability feels arbitrary. Were the 1980s really more unstable than the 1960s, for example?³

The same problem plagues Turchin’s explanatory variables, the factors he adduces for key outcomes like the degree of political stability in a country. His use of concepts like legitimacy or the prevalence of social optimism is the worst form of pseudo-positivism: an attempt to dress qualitative concepts up in quantitative clothes that is based on data so thin that it verges on pure conjecture.⁴

For our purposes, the most important unanswered question is what exactly Turchin means by the overproduction of elites. What makes somebody an aspirant to elite status? And what does it take for someone to attain such elite status? These concepts should in principle be easier to quantify than other explanatory factors like the prevalence of social optimism. And yet Turchin barely answers these questions. To the extent he does, he entangles himself in hopeless contradictions.

At some points, Turchin talks as though the best measure of elite status is simply income: according to his “simulation” of the antebellum South, for example, he claims that, taking income growth as the relevant metric, the number of “elite members” roughly tripled every decade between 1840 and 1870. On this interpretation of the elite, joining its ranks requires elevated material standing. But when focusing on later time periods, Turchin adopts a completely different definition of the elite: he now restricts elite status to those who have placed themselves at the top of a status hierarchy by attaining rare positions of honor or influence like elected office. As Francis Fukuyama pointed out in an appropriately scathing review of Turchin’s latest book, he “is able to detect elite overproduction in so many historical eras because he has a flexible definition of ‘elite.’ Who qualifies as an elite today? The category sometimes includes the top 1 percent of the income distribution, the top 10 percent, or any college-educated professional.”

One way to start scrutinizing Turchin’s theory, then, is to recognize that, by changing what he means by the elite, he effectively equivocates between two rather different hypotheses:

The Broad Elite Hypothesis: Elites are defined by high income or wealth. America is currently experiencing a period of elevated instability because the number of people who aspire to elite status is much larger than the number of people who can achieve these hallmarks of material prosperity.

The Narrow Elite Hypothesis: Elites are defined by their elevated social status, as conferred by inherently rival “positional goods”⁵ such as elected office. America is currently experiencing a period of elevated instability because the number of people who aspire to elite status is much larger than the number of people who can occupy these kinds of special positions.

Is either of these hypotheses plausible?

College-Educated Americans Are Doing Fine Pretty Damn Well

Let’s start by examining the Broad Elite Hypothesis, which applies a less demanding definition of who qualifies as an aspiring member of the elite. In this mode, Turchin often focuses on all Americans who have gone to college. The population of college-educated Americans now comprises over 100 million people. Among that large number, there will of course be individual outliers, from billionaires to people who are homeless. But how affluent are typical members of this broad class? Have their expectations of material affluence been dashed, like those of so many South Korean college graduates were in the 1950s and 1960s?

To start, let’s remind ourselves that the United States is one of the richest societies in the history of the world, and one that grants unusually large economic privileges to those who have completed a college degree. Median household income in the United States is $80,610. This makes the average American much richer than the average person in Japan, France or even Germany; indeed, residents of the poorest state, West Virginia, now out-earn those of the United Kingdom. Median household income for college-educated Americans is even higher: $117,600 for Americans with a BA (or equivalent), and $172,100 for Americans with a professional degree.

Unlike some other countries that have been able to achieve unprecedented wealth over the course of the last century, the American economy also continues to be extremely dynamic. At present, the unemployment rate in the country stands at 4.1 percent. Among college-educated Americans, it is even lower.

Since nothing irks journalists and social scientists as much as good news, any wrinkles in this story receive outsized attention. Writing in The New York Times, for example, Peter Coy recently told members of the Class of 2024 that “there aren’t enough college-level jobs out there for all of you.” A year after graduation, he warned them, “fifty-two percent of college grads are underemployed,” working in jobs that don’t require the college degree they earned.

Since around half of working-age Americans now have a college degree of some sort, it is unsurprising that graduating from university is no longer a sure entry ticket into unusual wealth or status. And it is also true that some sectors of the economy that for the past decade created especially cushy jobs for recent graduates from top colleges, like tech and consulting, over-hired during the pandemic and are now being much more selective. But Coy’s pessimism is nevertheless so misleading as to amount to fear-mongering.

Around the world, a depressing number of young people are unemployed. In North African countries like Morocco, the youth unemployment rate for some demographics can reach 50 percent. Even in China, youth unemployment hovers around 20 percent. In the United States, by contrast, around 5 percent of recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 are unemployed.

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Both now and in the past, some young people take a while to find their professional path. As a result, a significant portion of very recent college grads is underemployed. But this too is neither new nor permanent. According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans are no more likely to be underemployed now than they were three decades ago—and Americans who have graduated from college continue to have better chances of finding a job that is commensurate with their qualifications than those who did not go to college.

Life isn’t easy. Even among affluent college graduates, many feel squeezed by inflation and student debt, by skyrocketing costs for health and childcare. This is not supposed to be some naive paean to the American Dream. But Turchin is claiming that America is more unstable than it was in previous periods because of the overproduction of elites. And if we define the elite, in broad terms, as anyone who has completed an undergraduate education, there is simply vanishingly little evidence that American college graduates are less likely to have their expectations met now than in the past.

The Broad Elite Hypothesis is flat out wrong.

There Have Always Been Too Many Aspiring Actors and Poets

That leaves the Narrow Elite Hypothesis.

Let’s say that the real source of political instability is not the broad category of Americans who hope for a comfortable life but rather the much narrower category of Americans who aspire to some kind of exceptional social status. These are people who dream of writing the Great American Novel or becoming A-list actors, who aspire to be sports stars or perhaps college professors. Do we have a problem of “elite overproduction” in that sense—and, if so, is that the root of our political instability?

A lot of the reason why some writers and academics have found the idea of a “surplus elite” intuitively appealing is that they are disproportionately likely to know people who fit this description. In Brooklyn alone, thousands of people aspire to make their name as the voice of their generation; but almost by definition, there can only be a few of those (and the declining importance of literary fiction isn’t helping their prospects). Similarly, there are many more young people who aspire to be professors than there are job openings for entry-level academics.

Indeed, the tale of an extremely online history postdoc who was upset that he could not get a tenure-track job inspired one recent defense of the idea of elite overproduction. As fellow Substacker Noah Smith has argued, the historian is the perfect illustration for the thesis that “lots of careers for educated elites—humanities and social science academia, law, journalism, and so on—started becoming a lot scarcer. … This inevitably led to a bunch of frustrated strivers with big expectations and no way to fulfill them. And that mismatch between expectation and opportunity, I hypothesize, fueled some of the unrest of the 2010s.”

It is certainly true that it is much harder to become a history professor now than it was in the past. Until the Great Recession, the number of job ads for tenure-track positions in history used to match reasonably closely the number of newly awarded PhD degrees in history. Since then, the number of jobs has fallen off a cliff; meanwhile, the number of newly awarded degrees continues to be relatively high by historical standards.

Source: Karen Kelsky

Even so, there are three fundamental reasons why I’m not buying the thesis, either as stated by Turchin or as summarized (rather more lucidly) by Smith.

First, virtually all of the people who fail to attain their dream jobs can secure perfectly decent employment in some other line of work. I don’t want to understate how devastating it can be to see your dreams dashed. And I am acutely aware that American universities prey on the unwillingness of many people to give up on their dreams, keeping them around as severely underpaid adjuncts without prospects for a real career. But this just doesn’t make their situation analogous to those law graduates in the South Korea of the 1960s who faced unemployment or had to go work in a factory as unskilled laborers. In today’s America, virtually every aspiring writer or professor could, within five years, earn well above median wage as a nonprofit worker, an ad executive, or an assistant dean for student life. If they “sold out” and went to business school, they might even be in a position to endow a named professorship a few decades hence!⁶

Second, it is simply not clear that there is something new about any of this. There has always been a surplus of people who wanted to succeed in high-status professions such as the arts or academia. Have you watched La bohème? Or read one of the dozens of counterfactual histories imagining what would have happened if only Adolf Hitler had gotten into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts? In fact, even that seemingly compelling chart about aspiring academics makes the same point: At its beginning, in the 1970s, the disproportion between job ads and newly minted PhDs was about as bad as it is now.⁷

Finally, there is an odd mismatch between the class of people whose dreams of artistic or academic success has been dashed and the class of people who are at the root of our current political instability. If you look purely at the leaders of Occupy Wall Street or the activists who animated protests in the summer of 2020, the Narrow Elite Hypothesis may look plausible. But for all of the importance of those movements, they have ultimately turned out to be the sideshow. The real political realignment of this moment has been animated by a very different set of people. The people who compose what Turchin would call the new “counter-elite,” from Steve Bannon to Kash Patel, have precious little in common with that history postdoc who is upset that he hasn’t landed a tenure-track job. The same is true most of the Americans who have newly embraced Trump: for the most part, they are working-class voters who are fed up with the smugness of the elite, not aspiring members of the elite who are frustrated that they couldn’t find jobs as lawyers or academics.

A Final Meaning of Surplus Elite

Once Turchin’s theory is clearly spelled out, it becomes clear that its plausibility has, all along, rested on an equivocation between two different hypotheses.

The Broad Elite Hypothesis is right to posit a causal connection between an overproduction of people who aspire to material wealth and political instability (a connection that has long ago been pointed out by the likes of Tocqueville and Huntington). But while this theory may remain relevant for understanding the politics of contemporary India or (perhaps) China, it is highly implausible that this helps to explain why the United States is going through a period of instability right now.

The Narrow Elite Hypothesis, meanwhile, seizes on a real phenomenon that is very salient if (like me) you know a lot of aspiring actors, writers and academics. But there is simply nothing new about the fact that more people aspire to the most glamorous and prestigious positions in society than can possibly attain them.

Ultimately, all that is left of Turchin’s theory is a couple of catchy neologisms. But that, oddly, may be enough to ensure its survival. In fact, in the wake of the imprudent hiring spree that Silicon Valley companies like Google and professional firms like McKinsey went on during the pandemic, the idea of a “surplus elite” has increasingly come to connote a completely different phenomenon. As The Times of London recently wrote, it now “seems to refer to any white-collar worker who probably wouldn’t be missed were they fired. Or worse, things would actually improve once they, and their useless meetings and memos, were removed.”

On LinkedIn, a self-described tech founder expands on this idea:

Surplus elites are workers who’ve taken advantage of the knowledge economy to climb into positions that pay them far too much for their actual skillsets. They’ve wormed their way into middle management at massive companies that grew so fast they didn’t have time to measure whether these people were producing anything valuable.

There may be something to that notion. But what’s striking about it is that it is basically the opposite of what the concept of a surplus elites was originally supposed to mean. Turchin worried that people whose skills or qualifications would at different times have allowed them to climb into the elite were being left out in the cold, potentially turning them into disgruntled revolutionaries. Today, tech founders in Silicon Valley worry that we have accorded too high a status to people who don’t have any real reason to belong to the elite, stifling innovation and enforcing political conformity.

It in many ways remains puzzling why America, and many other Western countries, are going through a period of acute political instability at a time of relative affluence and prosperity. This makes it tempting to give credence to sweeping pseudo-scientific theories like the one on which Turchin has built his renown. But sadly, his arguments don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. For a real explanation, we’ll have to look elsewhere.

With many thanks to Anders Knospe for the invaluable research assistance he provided for this piece.

1. After writing these paragraphs, I noticed that Francis Fukuyama made much the same point when he reviewed Peter Turchin’s book in The New York Times: “Six decades ago, without recourse to modern Big Data tools, the political scientist Samuel Huntington could already observe, as Turchin does, that political decay occurred when there was a disjunction between the rate of social mobilization and the ability of existing institutions to incorporate these new players.”

2. Nothing wrong with that. It’s often a genuine addition to “the discourse” to coin a term which makes an idea intuitive, helping to bring it to wider attention.

3. Worse, when Turchin does quantify his outcome variable, he does so in a highly inconsistent manner. In his original paper proposing cliodynamics, for example, he measures instability over time by looking at a database of news reports of events including riots, lynchings, and so on. While this is of course one important dimension of political instability, it is highly doubtful that the frequency of such events is, in and of itself, an adequate metric for political instability in general. But even if we accept the validity of this metric, the data actually contradicts his main conclusion.

In his paper, Turchin is claiming that instability in four northern states increased over the second half of the 19th century. But when you just look at his data on events like riots in those northern states, political instability actually peaks around 1825 to 1835, and then declines rapidly. While his model would predict an increase in these kinds of events in the relevant states in the 1850s and 1860s, that is not what his own data shows.

4. This is something on which qualitative and quantitative social scientists should be able to agree. Qualitative social scientists understandably have an allergic reaction to simplistic attempts to quantify complex social phenomena. But in their defense, so do methodologically rigorous quantitative scholars: while they might insist that, with great care and enormous work, it is in principle possible to quantify such concepts, they would likely agree that Turchin has failed to do so.

5. Positional goods are defined as “either scarce in an absolute or socially imposed sense, or subject to crowding or congestion through more extensive use. Examples would include everything from top jobs, pleasant tourist locations or desirable residential areas, to front seats at the opera.”

6. This is related to an important distinction between the overproduction of elite aspirants in particular fields and particular times and the overproduction of such elites across the board. Because of the dynamics of economic growth, even the fastest growing economies are likely to produce a surplus of highly qualified people in particular fields for which there is declining workforce demand; the question is whether the supply of highly qualified people in general outstrips the demand for them in the labor market.

In the United States, the demand for programmers and management consultants has recently ebbed. In many other fields, from aviation to medicine, the demand for highly-qualified workers currently outstrips their supply, a problem (if you will) of “elite underproduction.” This is very different from contexts in which the problem of rising expectations actually applies; there, the problem of elite overproduction tends to apply to a great majority of fields.

7. This once again shows how arbitrary Turchin’s demarcation of different historical periods is. The chart in question would suggest that the period beginning in the 1970s should be one of relative social calm; after all, the three decades from the 1980s offered remarkable job opportunities for aspiring professors; but according to Turchin, it is precisely in the 1970s that our current period of political instability started.