Maybe what we’re seeing isn’t an oversupply of elites, but a shortage of status. At the same time that the possibility of achieving some kind of elite status has grown, the opportunities for being recognized and rewarded socially for that status have shrunk.
With the decimation of local media and the disintegration of social institutions in America, it’s become much harder to actually be rewarded with social status for achieving some elite status. Previous generations could count on occasionally seeing a nice little write up of themselves in the local paper, or maybe receiving that coveted Moose Lodge Man of the Year award. Those avenues of local recognition have all been closed off now. And what’s the point of being elite if nobody knows it?
That lack of status could definitely be a source of resentment.
And we’re also seeing status hoarding. With the proliferation of nonprofits taking over the social functions of organizations like the Junior League, that area of achievable social status has become professionalized. And those careers are increasingly filled with graduates of the same elite schools, often without direct, long-term ties to the community.
Combine this with the increasingly arbitrary way status is awarded in this country, with fame now achievable through a few seconds of viral video, and it’s easy to see how people who previously would have been pillars of the community are feeling left out. What’s the point of being an elite if nobody notices? The destabilization could be coming not from an oversupply in the elite professions, but of a shortage of non-professional ways of society to acknowledge that status.
In The Upswing, Robert Putnam notes that we have gone from civic organizations (like the Moose Lodge, Rotary, VFW) where people met face to face on a regular basis, to nationwide lobbying organizations like the Sierra Club that just collect checks from people and maybe hold a Zoom now and then.
We could also do a MUCH better job of according status to good citizenship. Voting. Raising a family. Lifelong learning. Service to community. Working hard (and hopefully being in a union that works for reasonable working conditions, fair pay according to the success of the place of employment, worker input etc …)
"Maybe what we’re seeing isn’t an oversupply of elites, but a shortage of status."
A sequestering and narrowing of status by elites is the culprit as I see it. The inability for people to take pride in their work if the work they do is physical is a wound that continues to metastasize. Capitalism is good at rewarding skill sets that it needs for this particular economic moment and even better at telling people they are superfluous.
"At the same time that the possibility of achieving some kind of elite status has grown, the opportunities for being recognized and rewarded socially for that status have shrunk."
What do you mean by "achieve some kind of elite status" in the absence of reward and recognition? It seems to me the recognition and reward are the defining characteristics of elite status.
Not necessarily. For example, I remember when "Banker, Doctor, or Lawyer" were pretty much the Holy Trinity of professions that parents would brag about their kids having. Now consider today how society tends to feel about investment bankers, big pharma researchers, and personal injury lawyers. If "public respect" is part of that "recognition" component of elite status, there are plenty of people who followed all the steps to get the right credentials to enter the ranks of the elite, but find that their career doesn't actually offer the social status they expected of being elite, indeed their careers can actually be a net negative on their social standing despite their flawless academic credentials and high incomes.
Likewise, as trust in so many professions and institutions has cratered, there are relatively fewer positions worth holding. For example, reporters used to be high status, but the news industry has shrunk drastically over the last few decades with mass layoffs and most local news going bankrupt or being assimilated into massive media corporations using them as astroturf for private agendas. Even if you can still find a job as a reporter, you can't realistically aim to be the "trusted voice in News" equivalent of a Walter Cronkite anymore. Look at MSNBC right now as their viewership fell by half after the election and prominent critics like Elon Musk joke about buying the whole network just to fire the staff of certain shows. The MSNBC staff may have felt pretty elite a few months ago, but I doubt most of them are feeling it right now.
For another example, consider politics. As civics education has declined and the federal government has continued overgrowth and overreach, local and State politics have become marginalized. I routinely encounter people now, otherwise well educated professionals, who can't name their own state representative or senator, maybe know who their governor is, don't know who the top people in Congress are, and can't name half of the Supreme Court Justices. Heck, many don't even remember who the Vice President was in recent administrations. It's shocking how many times I've heard "I didn't know who Kamala Harris was until she replaced Biden for the nomination". So many positions that would have been considered VERY IMPORTANT not so long ago barely get a collective shrug now from all but the comparatively tiny fringe of politically interested people.
Your point ("I routinely encounter people now, otherwise well educated professionals, who can't name their own state representative or senator") reminded me of a briefing by a prominent public opinion pollster in Oregon that I attended in the early 2000s. I still remember being stunned when he said that more than half of Oregonians's didn't know that Oregon has two Senators. The only explanation I could think of, other than pure stupidity, was that only one of our two senators ran for re-election at a time.
I was going to add a reply here, but then near the end of your essay, I saw that the self-described tech founder from LinkedIn had anticipated me. I haven't read Turchin, but I do think there is a version of the "surplus elite" theory that is probably correct; it leads, however, not to instability but rather to bureaucracy and ossification. Our educational system produces many people whose on-paper qualifications significantly outstrip their their actual skills and knowledge. Not unreasonably, they want jobs that correspond to what they take to be their achievements. The result is not dissatisfaction, but rather a kind of ongoing collusive creation of fairly meaningless midlevel jobs. You provided a perfect example yourself: these people, you suggested, could become an assistant dean of student life. The world does not need more assistant deans of student life. We generate these midlevel administrative and bureaucratic positions not because that are doing especially valuable work, but as a way of employing people who need decent jobs but can't do much of importance. That's my hypothesis, at least! (Colored, no doubt, by having spent two and a half decades in academia, where this phenomenon seems to me especially pronounced. Although folks in the business world also have an impressive ability to write fancy-sounding, jargon-laden stuff that means absolutely nothing.)
Thanks, flattered that you think there might be something worth considering in there. I actually sketched this out in semi-satirical form a decade ago, when I was required, for the first time, to include so-called "time-on-task" expectations in a course syllabus. I think the little essay--a bit of Max Weber, bit of Tocqueville--has held up reasonably well. (So, shameless self-promotion: http://thecresset.org/2014/Michaelmas/Meilaender_M14.html.)
Yes. Academia produces a lot of graduates - even Phds - who study something there's no demand for outside of the ivory tower institution. I even go further to want those majors to go away - like Women's Studies, etc. Often seems like the aspirants need therapy more than a degree. And other "studies" would be best handled in a book club, not a degree program. So, yes, I think we're overproducing these people and they're contributing to the destabilizing of our country by then going on to teach and indoctrinate a bunch of folks who will in turn not make a contribution of any substance to our world that isn't destructive. Yet they're Dr. So and So. So elite overproduction is personified in each graduate from these "studies".
This has always been my response to Turchin from when I first heard him speaking. Higher ed is gunked up by corruption, deans of student well-being and so-on, but more generally I think there is something like elite undersupply--if by elite we mean people equal to the tasks we want them to achieve after recruiting them from elite schools.
Thanks for the article, Yascha (and Anders). I found this largely persuasive after having accepted elite overproduction as a pretty good explanation for some of the instability we've seen. I would quibble a bit with this conclusion:
"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."
I spend a bit of time in the Millennials sub-Reddit and read about their decisions to have children, move out of their parents' houses, etc. Despite the data on a post-secondary degree's effects on median income, a pretty broad sentiment in that forum (which I'd imagine over-indexes for college-educated Americans, though I'm not sure) is that many in the cohort are not having their expectations met. Particularly with home ownership, but also medical insurance and childcare. Student loans, of course, are also an area of concern. A recurring theme is that college-educated Millennials "did everything right" and should have already arrived at a stable, comfortable landing zone with a house and family. At a minimum, there's a perception in the cohort that they deserve better and previous generations had it much easier once they got a college education. Perhaps the "social optimism" and "intraelite competition/conflict" legs of the model of political instability you cite could be partial drivers of negative polarization and instability?
I’ve nearly reached my 80th year as an American. I’ve been at times a soldier, a merchant seaman, a construction worker, and camp counselor and director, and for the last 40 years before I retired, an elementary school history teacher and administrator.
I’ve seen a good deal of political instability in that time, some first hand, and much of it course in the infamous sixties. But my earliest moment of feeling things to be unstable happened at the age of about five when I happened to hear a radio broadcast informing us that the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic device. Since at that age I could hardly have had any personal understanding of the meaning of that event, I can only assume that I’d heard some adults talking about it. But I do remember being scared - thinking that some part of whatever stability I’d felt in my young life before that moment was no longer so - that some dangerous force had entered the picture.
And having thus lived through that period we refer to as 'The Cold War’, including those terrible thirteen days in October of 1962, and all that was implied in our most prevalent but least favorite acronym MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), I can vouch for knowing just how unstable a feeling such a situation can create. Indeed, during my early teenage years, I became for a time convinced I was unlikely to reach the age of twenty before we blew ourselves up. And of course we once came pretty close to doing just that, albeit that what we could have done to ourselves in the fall of 1962 was not nearly what we could do today.
I did, of course, survive well beyond twenty, but there has never been a moment since when I felt, as all of humanity did before August 6th, 1945, that although there were not necessarily any permanently safe places in the world, we were not in any danger of destroying ourselves utterly.
I remain convinced that the watershed moment when Hiroshima disappeared under that new and terrifying cloud formation has colored all our perceptions since. For example, there were of course a number of causes behind the Berkeley Free Speech movement, which morphed into its many ‘sixties’ branches - most notable the anti- Vietnam War movement. But I have a sense that what it all really amounted to was that my generation (the plank owners of the Atomic Age) had just had enough of being scared to death that we might never get the chance to grow up.
We’d all been practiced in hiding under our desks at school (bend over and kiss your sweet --- goodbye), at watching and listening to all the talk of backyard bomb shelters and how those who had them were going to defend them against those who hadn’t when the moment came. We’d all read many of the first generation of nuclear war novels (Pat Franks’ Alas Babylon, Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Burdick and Wheeler’s Fail Safe, and the best and most terrifying one, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach). It was all there in the background noise that never really went away, continually refueled by the various alarms and excursions that continued until the Fall of the Wall.
One can always make too much of one’s own personal journey in the expectation that everyone else shares it to one degree or another. But my sense remains that one of the most basic causes of today’s instabilities is a general sense that the world we inhabit has gotten well beyond any one of our abilities to control it or make it safe. It’s a little like the first time one experiences an earthquake - that something which had once seemed so solid was actually continually in dangerous motion and beyond control.
This is certainly not all attributable to the threat of nuclear destruction, although over the last couple of years that threat has increased. But vast economic, social, and political forces stalk this increasingly interconnected world, and most of us do not really understand them. And fear of the unknown is always far more concerning than of the known.
In this country, of course, a string of Supreme Court decisions (Brown v Board, Engel v Vitale, Roe v Wade, Virgina v Loving, Obergefeld v Hodges, Heller, Citizens United, Hobbes, etc), all of which increased the feeling of instability and uncertainty in various constituencies have continuously roiled society at all levels. After all, the great grandaddy of them all, Dredd Scott helped to stimulate our most dangerous period of near destruction.
It is thus a prime environment for the kind of demagoguery practiced so well by men like Donald Trump - simple, clear solutions to problems that are actually anything but simple.
Ain't that the truth!? I remember, when we moved to Long Island in 1959, calculating that when the Big One dropped on New York, the firestorm would extend eastward as far as (the aptly-named?) Searingtown Road.
As for the vast economic, social, and political forces now stalking this increasingly interconnected world? I'm convinced that we're headed into an evolutionary bottleneck, after which homo sapiens will no longer be the Earth's apex predator. Knowing what (and who) will emerge from that (or how it will define itself) is beyond my pay grade. ;-)
Political instability seems to be a much stronger and perhaps unsupportable claim, but I haven’t seen people arguing that.
It’s much more common to describe elite overproduction as a cultural phenomenon in which highly educated but underemployed people turn their energy to destructive status-seeking pursuits like cancel culture and extreme social causes.
A frustrated post-doc is unlikely to storm the Capitol, but surprisingly likely to wave a Hamas flag.
So the cultural phenomenon of elite unemployment is probably at least partially an artifact of underemployed elites being extremely online and vocal about their predicament.
Cancel culture doesn’t come from universities, it comes from the proliferation of the internet. This ‘elite’ theory is just an attempt to pin instability and conflict on the left, who famously are more likely to be university educated.
This is nonsense. You can follow the trend line at FIRE. Cancel Culture overwhelmingly started at Universities and relies almost entirely on the conceptual framing coming out of radical grievance studies departments for its moral justifications (which mostly amount to labeling any speech the Left disagrees with as "Hate Speech", "misinformation", or any number of *isms and *phobic slurs). Attacks on Free Speech didn't start from the incredibly radically pro-Free Speech early Internet.
Would you call “punching someone for being a nazi” cancel culture? Because that’s been around since the 40s, the only difference lately has been the way the sentiments have spread.
That’s when your “attacks on free speech” started.
People deciding they don’t want to listen to shitty people say shitty things is not the same as “attacking free speech”. Suppression of academic ideas shouldn’t be conflated with people not wanting celebrities they like to rape women. If you try and conflate these two ideas, the left will continue to not take what you are saying seriously.
No, I consider punching "Nazis" political violence and will readily acknowledge that political violence has been and remains mostly bipartisan, with some minor swings over time which side does it more. Conflating "speech" with "violence" (in either direction) is mostly an issue from the Left (frankly, almost every issue with fuzzy conceptual boundaries comes from the "soft categorizer" Left rather than the "hard categorizer" Right).
Yes, people who cross the line from "I'm not listening to you" to "I'm going to actively censor/deplatform you so that even people who WANT to listen to you can't" IS by definition an attack on Free Speech. Boycotts are NOT the same as demonetizing or firing. Speech that offends no one never needs protection, it's only the speech of those with less power saying things that offend those with more power that have needed the protection of law. That's something the 60's Leftist radicals had right: Free Speech is an essential tool for the marginalized to make their complaints heard. Attacks on Free Speech are inherently a form of oppression, necessarily an example of power punching down.
Suppression of academic ideas is a related, but not necessarily the same category, as censorship of Free Speech. It's potentially a violation of Free Speech to attack academics on the basis of their personal speech that is irrelevant to their duties, but professors are still professionally obligated to deliver an education that meets the standards of the institution and, if receiving tax funds, the standards of the public providing those funds. Educational instruction is a paid service and therefore commercial speech, not personal speech, with different legal standards. Professors who lose sight of that distinction and start injecting their personal views into the approved curriculum, especially by grading on the basis of agreement with their ideology instead of student work quality, can't appeal to Free Speech to defend that illegal discrimination and failure to uphold their employment contract. As such, it's not "cancel culture" for states to ban professors from teaching CRT any more than it would be cancel culture to ban professors from teaching Flat Eartherism: CRT doesn't fall into any protected legal category. Professors can talk about it in their personal capacity as much as they like (free speech), but they can't force it into the curriculum or grade based on it (commercial speech) if the State makes that ban a condition of their institution receiving tax dollars
I seriously have no idea why you seem to be conflating in #MeToo call-out culture with academic suppression of ideas. Frankly, #MeToo more often violated Free Speech standards by drifting into illegal libel/slander, too often followed by violations of the presumption of Innocence until proven Guilty, gross violations of Due Process Rights, and occasionally dangerous incidents of doxxing and swatting. What began with a legitimate basis very rapidly morphed into a misandrist free for all of false accusations, fame seeking, corruption of the law, and coercive abuse (not to mention the blatant double standards where prominent leftists often got a pass or slap on the wrist whereas prominent people on the Right were put through hell for entirely unsubstantiated and unbelievable claims later admitted or proven false. Even many feminists have admitted that #MeToo went off the rails and ultimately damaged feminism with its excesses.
If you like, I can link you the studies showing that exposure to DEI training makes people significantly more likely to see bias where objectively none exists, to support punishment for that non-existent bias, and generally become more authoritarian. Likewise, I can link you the studies and surveys showing that people on the Left are much more likely to break off relationships over ideological differences. That cancel culture is currently very much coming from and much stronger on the Left, most particularly the universities, is literally the subject of multiple formal studies and books from prominent Liberals. I don't need to use even a single source on the right to substantiate this.
Free speech is about the government telling you what you can say, not your peers. I can understand there is a line where what it is it acceptable to say can impede full and proper conversation, but my point isn’t that “punching nazis” is political violence, my point is that it is a thing that literally used to be acceptable to do (google: Jack Kirby, of Marvel comics) and it is only in the modern day that this has become an unacceptable response to the spreading of Naziism.
My POINT is that shutting down harmful rhetoric has always been a part of our societal conversation and it is only the proliferation of the internet that has led to us calling this “cancel culture” — before the phenomenon existed, just unnamed and unchallenged.
People who are gay are more likely to stop being your friend because you’re homophobic than a straight person. This isn’t cancel culture or ‘the left’ being intolerant; it’s a very normal reaction to people holding adverse opinions of others. Like a lot of your examples, it doesn’t “prove” unfairness, it make perfect sense if you take away the hivemind label of “the left” and understand where minorities are coming from when they prefer political isolation to engagement with people who don’t support what they view as their own human rights, or when they respond to issues via their own moral axis.
For example, the alternative to “Me Too” is just not responding to sexual abuse, harassment, etc, which is the default norm we were trying to move away from. Even if it is an imperfect response, which investigations of sexual abuse are very difficult to substantiate so yes it will probably be imperfect, it is still an improvement on just ignoring it. Either you have a culture where this is condemned, or you have a culture where people are fine with sexual abuse being leveraged against underlings. People who hate MeToo think it is worth the latter to avoid persecuting potential innocents, and have a totally different perspective on what behaviour makes people innocent. For example, take Onision and James Charles, two youtubers “cancelled” for abusing their position with minors who they had sexual contact with who are trying to regain their public platform. Another more mainstream example might be Phillip Schofield. There is a grey area where the behaviour is “unacceptable” to fans but perhaps not illegal — but people still have the right to decide that their behaviour is not something they approve of. This is no different to, say, Angus Dayton losing his position as TV host 20 years ago for doing Coke. Just that twenty years ago, you were significantly more likely to get away with grooming or sexual abuse than drug taking. Now that has changed, and people dislike it and call this ‘cancel culture’ like it’s new. It’s not.
This is, bluntly, again bullshit. Liberals used to know this. Look back to 1978 when the ACLU defended a Nazi group that wanted to rally through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, where many Holocaust survivors lived. Nearly half a century ago is scarcely "in the modern day". That even literal Nazis are entitled to 1st Amendment protections is NOT a new concept, much less one born from the Internet. I give due credit: for most of this past century the Left were the primary advocates for a consistent application of Constitutional Rights even to disfavored groups. It's ironic and tragic that once they gained power they immediately threw those convictions aside and became as prone or more to ignore the rights of the groups they disfavour. (Yes, they have, I can give you the studies showing that liberals are just as intolerant as conservatives and sometimes moreso.)
Free Speech, as a Liberal principle, is NOT simply about "the government telling you what you can say". Read some John Stuart Mills 'On Liberty': "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form."
Or perhaps you'd find MLK Jr more current: Dr. King gave a speech on Human Rights Day in 1965 at Hunter College in New York City. His topic was the apartheid regime of South Africa, which he lambasted as “modern-day barbarians” and “spectacular savages and brutes.” Accusing the South African government of reviving Nazism, Dr. King said:
"Once more, we read of tortures in jails with electric devices, suicides among prisoners, forced confessions, while in the outside community ruthless persecution of editors, religious leaders, and political opponents suppress free speech—and a free press."
The suppression of Free Speech, by ANYONE, is no friend to minorities or the oppressed. Do you truly think that Dr. King would retract his description of them as "modern-day barbarians, spectacular savages and brutes" if he were told that it wasn't the government itself doing it, but fellow citizens? Is the violation of a Human Right any less serious when the violator is a another citizen rather than a government official?
The underlying principle of Free Speech is that people have a Right to speak their beliefs and ideas. The implicit corresponding Right is to hear the other people you want to hear. There is no alternative to this that has not historically degenerated into violence. People who do not feel heard eventually MAKE themselves heard by whatever means necessary. The (appropriately named) Bill of Rights is not a list of privileges the government must grant, but rather a list of Human Rights which government is to be barred from infringing upon. The Amendments are only legally binding on the government (and, by extension, any and every other organization receiving government funding, including schools), but that does not mean the Right doesn't exist against violations by private citizens also. As an example, schools that receive government funds CANNOT legally allow students to disrupt speakers on campus. "Students" are obviously neither government employees, nor receiving tax revenues directly, so disruptive student protesters clearly aren't "the government" silencing speech, but because the schools ARE receiving government funds they share the government's obligation to actively defend the Rights of the students, including the Right of the attending students who want to hear the invited speaker.
Does this mean that I'm arguing that speech cannot have consequences? Of course not! The Right of Association inherently includes the Right to NOT Associate. You can simply not listen to people you don't want to hear. You can argue with the people you disagree with. You're free to even try to convince others not to listen or otherwise associate with such people (boycott). Where you cross the line is when you attempt to interfere with other people's Right TO listen and associate with those people. There is no inherent Right to a platform (aside from the public square and common carriers, as these are public resources), but neither is there any Right to deplatform someone else. The law does NOT recognize a "Heckler's Veto" as a legitimate form of Speech (attempting to disrupt or drown out someone else's speech). If a platform is public, and the speech is legal, there are very few justified reasons for censoring or preventing speech ("because it offends someone" is generally NOT such a valid justification, I'm talking more like criminal activity).
Regarding "this isn't cancel culture or being intolerant", it's just a normal reaction to people who disagree with you. Please look up the definitions of "tolerant" and "intolerant". I'll wait. Actually, no I won't, I'll do it for you. "Tolerance", per the Oxford Language Dictionary: "the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with." Intolerance: "unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one's own"
We "tolerate" pain, we "tolerate" discomfort, we "tolerate" disagreement. By DEFINITION, we only use "tolerate" when describing enduring something unpleasant. We don't talk about "tolerating" joy. So YES, when you refuse to associate with someone over a disagreement or dislike, YOU ARE BEING "INTOLERANT", you ARE refusing to accept their views, beliefs, or behavior that differs from your own. That may well be mutual or it may not, but it's certainly not a good look for the Left to proclaim that "tolerance" is a virtue and then be the ones that want to break off relationships over disagreements even when the people who disagree with them want to maintain the relationships. The Left really seems to dislike that word "Intolerance", almost as much as they dislike "Discriminate", so they seem to struggle to articulate the argument that it CAN be "a good thing" (even a moral act, even a moral obligation) to be intolerant of some of things, to discriminate against some things or people. But if they don't want to be correctly labeled as hypocrites, they really do need to actually make those arguments. Because you really don't have the moral high ground by engaging in intolerance and discrimination yourselves against your disfavored groups while you lecture those same groups on their intolerance and discrimination against you. That's just plain old tribalism and outgroup bias. Take your own advice and remove the group name: if you take "gay" and "minority" out of your example, are you left with a universally applicable principle? Is it fine for straight people to break off relationships because they find out someone is gay or minority? If they attempt to silence someone for being gay or minority, is that NOT "cancel culture" and "intolerance"? Bigotry is bigotry no matter which group you're in or which group you direct it against.
Regarding #MeToo, your Fallacy is the Fallacy of False Dichotomy. It is NOT the case that the only possible (or plausible) alternatives are to either ignore all women or #BelieveAllWomen. It is entirely possible (and desirable) BOTH that legitimate claims are properly investigated and perpetrators appropriately punished within the law AND that the presumption of innocence is maintained until proven guilty, that all due process rights are maintained, and that false allegations are recognized and condemned by BOTH sides as illegal and contemptible actions that undermine the public trust in true claims and distract limited attention and resources away from catching actual perpetrators.
The term "Elite Overproduction" was never meant to refer to a surplus of people who are actually elite, but rather, a surplus of people who think they are by virtue of having been awarded credentials traditionally associated with eliteness.
The PhD working at Starbucks is not elite in any genuine sense, else he wouldn't be working at Starbucks. But he's got an elite credential and a boatload of bitterness over how little good it did him, and that's the problem.
I imagine the starbucks barista would be less bitter if they hadn’t had to pay for their own education they’ve been prevented from using.
Sounds less like a problem of an elite class and a lot more like you’re creating a class of highly trained people unable to use their training, who are also on the hook for the costs of that training that they’ve been unable to utilise.
The point was not that they are prevented from using their education, it is that they are not capable of using their education. A little like handing someone a diploma that says "internationally renowned concert pianist" when they are really only capable of running through a few scales. Once you find out that you are just not good enough to justify fame and fortune, do you blame society or your own delusions? And we continue to churn out concert pianist diplomas.
Regardless of the results, which I disagree with you about, do you not think that the fact they’re the first generation who have had to pay such insanely high prices for their own education,
which you believe to be worthless, might have something to do with it?
Completely agree about the cost of college education. I don't believe education to be worthless in and of itself, but destructive when it is being used as a means to convince people that they are more capable than they are for the very reason you give: the cost. So what do you do with all those folks who are not content to take on lives that they believe are beneath them? I generally prefer the option where we don't know what to do with them, but at least they are not in debt. The trades have mostly become so technical and complicated that you need a similar level of competence to make real money there, so that's not an option either.
I’m a socialist at heart, so I believe in some less-than-40-hours-a-week utopia where people can have a bit more time and freedom to pursue beneficial projects like arts and humanities and politics/civic duties and even science — there’s a LOT of people out there doing science for free just because they love it, important science especially things like categorising for conservation. I’m from New Zealand, so our education is MUCH cheaper with a much better system — but it’s still an investment of years and tens of thousands of dollars, and the most educated people who come out with the highest loans aren’t actually all that likely to earn any money.
Moderate IQ / moderate skill set / high time preference people can make $200K - $300K per year selling roofs, but they have to be impervious to both rejection and insults. One of the other great tragedies of modern college education IMO is that it actually tries very had to decrease the very qualities (resilience and self-reliance) that can provide a lucrative life for people whose degree does not match their actual talent or ability.
Mounk also complains that Turchin conflates credentials with income. But, there has got to be a correlation between the two.
Home price appreciation has created asset-rich Baby Boomers (Tony, the Millionaire Bartender at the Gator Club in Sarasota is a good example).
Baby Boomers, who identify as as disproportionally narcissistic and self-absorbed, have also been described (by Neil Strauss) as a major reason for the acrimonious political rhetoric in the United States.
I think there are some concepts that struggle when you attempt to tie them down and define them, but none the less capture something important in a qualitative sense and seem right, and provide a method of thinking about a problem.
Many explanations of Trumps rise fall into this, and I think that Elite overproduction does also. I accept it can be hard to pin down, but in none the less captures the feeling of a Red Queens Race where everyone is pushing harder to compete with everyone else for no actual societal gain - the ones who want more but cannot get it as there is not enough to go round.
How useful is it? Well I would argue it may make you think perhaps we should not push more people into college. Maybe we should unblock more route from non-graduate to higher earners (e.g. nursing now requiring a degree).
Is it robust? Probably not? Could be be fruitful? Maybe it could.
> I think there are some concepts that struggle when you attempt to tie them down and define them, but none the less capture something important in a qualitative sense
Yes. Turchin might not have 'proved' anything but I still think he has a point. Perhaps elite overproduction has always been with us, true, and perhaps it's next to impossible to say that it was more or less of an issue at this or that time, true. Nevertheless perhaps the inherent stress caused by elite overproduction has *always* been a destabilizing force and plays a part in political instability at all times even if it is not sufficient by itself.
For example, look at the descent of the left into the purity spiral of wokeness: not every graduate from Harvard with a degree in Grievance Studies is going to make a living selling their Victimhood are they? So there is a contest -- who is the wokest? Thus an almost hysterical contest to be THE wokest and thus the insanity of the Democratic Party, thus the rise of Trump -- instability if every there was instability.
“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.”
I always remembered Turchin’s thesis as being about the over *production* of elites. A subtle difference but one that is embodied in this paragraph.
Status & wealth elites will, barring outliers, be more naturally drawn from universities so I don’t think Turchin’s argument is necessarily broken by this lack of clarity. Where your argument is strong is on the nature of the malcontents. We do not associate university attainment with Trump’s followers. And yet … even this seems patchy. The people least likely to be unhappy with the current state would appear to be recent low-skilled immigrants. While unrest over Palestine, Black Lives Matter, me too is self-evidently driven by elites. The Jan 6th incursions were fomented by highly educated elites - Bannon, Stone et al. And their argument appears to channel male frustration at displacement from safe jobs by women and minorities. This, of course, introduces a third variation of elite: the patriarchal indigenous male. Anyway, you are of course right that Turchin’s model, like Allan Lichtman’s election model, is more schematic than empirical. It may lack scientific reliability. But in social science models can be wrong and yet useful as the phrase goes.
I embrace the critical point made here that the truly disgruntled who have shifted to the “anti-elitist” (sic) Trump are generally working class people who saw their wages decline (and perhaps blame themselves or others for their “Stolen Pride” and shame — see Hochschild’s study). Perhaps there’s a small group leading this march rightwards but they don’t seem to fit Turchin’s description of an overproduced elite either. Many of their grievances are cultural, not economic, in any case.
I think the assumption that Trump and his supporters are the source of instability, rather than a response to it, is a rather poor one. Restricting immigration and imposing trade barriers are not extreme ideas. They are very normal and reasonable political positions, and broadly popular among the public.
Trump only appears extreme because government bureaucracies and permanent unelected power factions absolutely refused to obey legitimate orders by the Trump admin and/or tried to undermine him at every step, including Republican politicians that were clearly out of step with their constituents. In many cases courts blocked Trump's policies, on the basis that even though he had the legal authority to take certain actions, they didn't like his reasoning and therefore abracadabra it's unconstitutional (like the so called "Muslim ban"). Democrats openly believe that government can only be used for progressive ends. The same power wielded regularly by progressives becomes unconstitutional the moment it gets used for conservative ends.
THAT is the source of our political instability. It is the fact that we call ourselves a democracy and then the government takes blatantly authoritarian actions to counteract the will of the people. And that dynamic is a direct result of elite overproduction, as the educated class comes to see the will of the American people as a threat to democracy rather than democracy itself.
Some clarifications would help. Turchin's interviews on the topic are muddled. Elite proliferation was developed in the context of pre-industrial agrarian societies. In these pre-capitalist societies is simply follows from demography. Elites tended to outbreed commoners. But also from the effect of rising economic inequality. It is this latter mechanism that is what concerns us.
The issue is not really surplus history majors, at least not for the US. It is influence, think lobbyist and campaign donors. A reasonable assumption would be the demand for influence would be directly related to the fraction of the cake a group receives. Since the top 1% income share is about twice as big as it was in the 1970's one might assume there is twice the per capital elite interest in influencing policy today as then. And since there are 50% more of us there is 3 times the elite interest directed to government today compared to then. Three times more on each side and so the intensity of the clash of interests on both sides would be nine times higher (this follows from the kinetics of two-body interactions).
Elite overproduction is a demographic concept. It played a bigger role in pre-capitalist economies. Capitalist economies grow and in doing so, create new positions for rising elite numbers to fill. Hence it is not the inability of graduates of elite schools being able to find good jobs that is a driver. However, the number of top political positions does not rise as the economy grows. There are no more congresspersons, governors, presidents today than there were 50 years ago and no more hours in a day. Hence elite political attention is fixed while there is three times more interest trying to influence that attention. It is more important than ever that policy makers who will listen to you are in office, meaning you will push harder to get such policymakers in place--and so will your political opponents.
Craig, I agree with you. It is about elite status and recognition beyond pure wealth and power.
We have to remember that Turchin does not come out of social science but out of biology, so he’s basically a Darwinian. And any good Darwinian knows that humans and primates compete not just for material resources, but also for status (because status increases access to resources and the odds of reproductive success). So human nature and the desire for “recognition” is at play here.
Darwin was influenced by the bleak, competitive vision of Thomas Malthus, who in turn comes out of that whole tradition of British empirical naturalism that ultimately goes back to Hobbes. So Hobbes is the ultimate touchstone here, in a sense, both for Darwin and thus ultimately for Turchin.
Let’s consider Hobbes for a moment. Everyone knows that Hobbes argued, without government, insecurity causes the state of nature to become a violent war of all against all. Thus, to avoid conflict a strong state must be established to maintain order. What many forget is that, for Hobbes, even in the state of nature, conflict is also caused by human pride and the desire for glory. Hobbes argues that open elitism provokes social conflict, and goes so far as to suggest that in a peaceful society the illusion of equality must be propagated as a useful fiction to maintain order:
“I know that Aristotle in the first book of his Politics, for a foundation of his doctrine, maketh men by nature, some more worthy to command, meaning the wiser sort, such as he thought himself to be for his philosophy; others to serve, meaning those that had strong bodies, but were not philosophers as he; as master and servant were not introduced by consent of men, but by difference of wit: which is not only against reason, but also against experience. For there are very few so foolish that had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others: nor when the wise, in their own conceit, contend by force with them who distrust their own wisdom, do they always, or often, or almost at any time, get the victory. If nature therefore have made men equal, that equality is to be acknowledged: or if nature have made men unequal, yet because men that think themselves equal will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted. And therefore for the ninth law of nature, I put this: that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride.” (Leviathan, CHAPTER XV)
Therefore, Hobbes argued that a peaceful order could only be maintained if conflict over status was controlled. Thus, the state needs to propagate the idea of human equality to satisfy the masses of ordinary people, but must also distribute titles of honor and glory to satisfy aspiring elites. If this fails, the awesome power of the sovereign, centralized state must dominate pride with force.
What Mounk misses is this Hobbesian tension in modern liberal-democratic society. On the one hand, both liberal capitalism and democracy promote the idea of citizen equality and unleash the expression of individual self-interest and material gain. On the other hand, this generates frequent competitive struggles over wealth and status that play out in a very public way. When one person or one cause “wins” in public (abortion rights or restriction, mass immigration or immigration restriction, religion or secularism, etc.) the other side loses face and pride is aroused.
An unemployed History PhD may actually make more money in the private sector than a tenured professor, just like the store manager of a Wal-Mart may earn more than a member of Congress (Walmart Store Manager Salaries Reach $500,000 - Bloomberg). But the tenured professor and the member of Congress are administrative elites with influence and status, and these positions are inherently limited. So competition over these titles is zero-sum, and this will be the case even if the rising economic tide of liberal capitalism makes everyone better off economically. Democratic ideals of equality may actually exacerbate this, since those who lose out feel that they are just as good, just as qualified, as successful elites.
Hobbes could argue that the awesome Leviathan state must overawe the public and distribute titles and honors to the ambitious. But the decentralized, liberal/capitalist/democratic state can struggle to contain the aspirations over status that it unleashes. Simple wealth generation alone cannot fix this.
Yes. It boils down to defining an "elite". During Obama, it waa used to define people of absurd wealth. All of a sudden during Trump (not his fault but def MAGA movement) it was ANYBODY that had a college degree.
It comes from the concerted push to wind up conservatives and conspiracists. Went to a talk by Graham Linehan and I got to see how these organisations draw these webs of crazy together to create a picture of a totally unstable society in which science and universities and medicine etc can’t be trusted because it’s all a sham in which academics are just trying to create opportunities to be paid (i.e. global warming is a conspiracy to give environmental scientists jobs — but in literally every field, especially to do with race or gender).
Anyone writing anything about elites is going to accidentally be playing into this indoctrination into an anti-academic worldview.
I feel this. A decade ago. I explained to my mother. Its a war on intelligence. This is no different then a high school hallway. The popular kids are book checking the motivated kids. Because intelligent children are either motivated to achieve or they are exceptionally curious and fascinated by the world around them. Knowledge is not and end. Its a means for nourishment. They are awkwardly curious. Such that their motivations make them the targets of the other childrens cynicism. And their curiosity makes them suspects in a relm outside of a football field. After 10 years. Its hard for me to engage in any rational evidentary conversation with anybody of MAGA movement. They have ostracized anything that makes them look unpopular. And Elon has sold out because his whole life. He has been looking for acceptance of the very group that views him as a loser. He was even willing to burn $44 billion to achieve their graces. Others, wants to be viewed of a level of intelligence that they neither worked at obtaining nor experienced the negative consequences that lends to one wisdom.
I came here too late and I see that others have already said what I wanted to add: that a type of "surplus elites" does exist, but in a different sense than that assigned by Turchin (whom I haven't read, but I take your word for it)--in the sense that we have too many people with higher degrees who don't have any specific knowledge and become pointless bureaucrats who don't bring any contribution to society. There are also many people who have no particular intellectual skills, yet choose to get higher degrees, and this is how we end with an inflation of, for instance, social workers and psychological counselors, many of whom have very limited IQs, which is catastrophic when one claims to deal with other people's brains or psychology and to give them counsel. Or, take my very specific field: "French theory." For decades, American freshmen who had barely read one or two books of their contemporaries, were given complex readings by sophisticated French intellectuals, and taught to "deconstruct" ideas they had never constructed or even known. This is how the average American graduate has come to believe that "a rock is a fiction" and "the Western man has invented the categories of man and woman." To feed fragile heads with something that goes above them is worse than not to feed them at all. The fact is that not everyone is equipped for theoretical understanding and study, and we would all be better off if fewer people had degrees and more did some kind of manual work. In France, where I now live, there is a huge crisis of repairmen and manual workers who can do odd jobs. We need fewer college degrees and more repairmen.
Maybe what we’re seeing isn’t an oversupply of elites, but a shortage of status. At the same time that the possibility of achieving some kind of elite status has grown, the opportunities for being recognized and rewarded socially for that status have shrunk.
With the decimation of local media and the disintegration of social institutions in America, it’s become much harder to actually be rewarded with social status for achieving some elite status. Previous generations could count on occasionally seeing a nice little write up of themselves in the local paper, or maybe receiving that coveted Moose Lodge Man of the Year award. Those avenues of local recognition have all been closed off now. And what’s the point of being elite if nobody knows it?
That lack of status could definitely be a source of resentment.
And we’re also seeing status hoarding. With the proliferation of nonprofits taking over the social functions of organizations like the Junior League, that area of achievable social status has become professionalized. And those careers are increasingly filled with graduates of the same elite schools, often without direct, long-term ties to the community.
Combine this with the increasingly arbitrary way status is awarded in this country, with fame now achievable through a few seconds of viral video, and it’s easy to see how people who previously would have been pillars of the community are feeling left out. What’s the point of being an elite if nobody notices? The destabilization could be coming not from an oversupply in the elite professions, but of a shortage of non-professional ways of society to acknowledge that status.
In The Upswing, Robert Putnam notes that we have gone from civic organizations (like the Moose Lodge, Rotary, VFW) where people met face to face on a regular basis, to nationwide lobbying organizations like the Sierra Club that just collect checks from people and maybe hold a Zoom now and then.
We could also do a MUCH better job of according status to good citizenship. Voting. Raising a family. Lifelong learning. Service to community. Working hard (and hopefully being in a union that works for reasonable working conditions, fair pay according to the success of the place of employment, worker input etc …)
That’s what a lot of these local service organizations used to recognize. Moose Lodges were really holding the country together.
"Maybe what we’re seeing isn’t an oversupply of elites, but a shortage of status."
A sequestering and narrowing of status by elites is the culprit as I see it. The inability for people to take pride in their work if the work they do is physical is a wound that continues to metastasize. Capitalism is good at rewarding skill sets that it needs for this particular economic moment and even better at telling people they are superfluous.
That's what the market does. While socialism rewards having no family, no skills, no work ethic, the market doesn't. That's a feature, not a bug.
"At the same time that the possibility of achieving some kind of elite status has grown, the opportunities for being recognized and rewarded socially for that status have shrunk."
What do you mean by "achieve some kind of elite status" in the absence of reward and recognition? It seems to me the recognition and reward are the defining characteristics of elite status.
Not necessarily. For example, I remember when "Banker, Doctor, or Lawyer" were pretty much the Holy Trinity of professions that parents would brag about their kids having. Now consider today how society tends to feel about investment bankers, big pharma researchers, and personal injury lawyers. If "public respect" is part of that "recognition" component of elite status, there are plenty of people who followed all the steps to get the right credentials to enter the ranks of the elite, but find that their career doesn't actually offer the social status they expected of being elite, indeed their careers can actually be a net negative on their social standing despite their flawless academic credentials and high incomes.
Likewise, as trust in so many professions and institutions has cratered, there are relatively fewer positions worth holding. For example, reporters used to be high status, but the news industry has shrunk drastically over the last few decades with mass layoffs and most local news going bankrupt or being assimilated into massive media corporations using them as astroturf for private agendas. Even if you can still find a job as a reporter, you can't realistically aim to be the "trusted voice in News" equivalent of a Walter Cronkite anymore. Look at MSNBC right now as their viewership fell by half after the election and prominent critics like Elon Musk joke about buying the whole network just to fire the staff of certain shows. The MSNBC staff may have felt pretty elite a few months ago, but I doubt most of them are feeling it right now.
For another example, consider politics. As civics education has declined and the federal government has continued overgrowth and overreach, local and State politics have become marginalized. I routinely encounter people now, otherwise well educated professionals, who can't name their own state representative or senator, maybe know who their governor is, don't know who the top people in Congress are, and can't name half of the Supreme Court Justices. Heck, many don't even remember who the Vice President was in recent administrations. It's shocking how many times I've heard "I didn't know who Kamala Harris was until she replaced Biden for the nomination". So many positions that would have been considered VERY IMPORTANT not so long ago barely get a collective shrug now from all but the comparatively tiny fringe of politically interested people.
Your point ("I routinely encounter people now, otherwise well educated professionals, who can't name their own state representative or senator") reminded me of a briefing by a prominent public opinion pollster in Oregon that I attended in the early 2000s. I still remember being stunned when he said that more than half of Oregonians's didn't know that Oregon has two Senators. The only explanation I could think of, other than pure stupidity, was that only one of our two senators ran for re-election at a time.
I was going to add a reply here, but then near the end of your essay, I saw that the self-described tech founder from LinkedIn had anticipated me. I haven't read Turchin, but I do think there is a version of the "surplus elite" theory that is probably correct; it leads, however, not to instability but rather to bureaucracy and ossification. Our educational system produces many people whose on-paper qualifications significantly outstrip their their actual skills and knowledge. Not unreasonably, they want jobs that correspond to what they take to be their achievements. The result is not dissatisfaction, but rather a kind of ongoing collusive creation of fairly meaningless midlevel jobs. You provided a perfect example yourself: these people, you suggested, could become an assistant dean of student life. The world does not need more assistant deans of student life. We generate these midlevel administrative and bureaucratic positions not because that are doing especially valuable work, but as a way of employing people who need decent jobs but can't do much of importance. That's my hypothesis, at least! (Colored, no doubt, by having spent two and a half decades in academia, where this phenomenon seems to me especially pronounced. Although folks in the business world also have an impressive ability to write fancy-sounding, jargon-laden stuff that means absolutely nothing.)
Yes, this I think is the kernel of an interesting and compelling theory - it’s not at all Turchin’s theory!
Thanks, flattered that you think there might be something worth considering in there. I actually sketched this out in semi-satirical form a decade ago, when I was required, for the first time, to include so-called "time-on-task" expectations in a course syllabus. I think the little essay--a bit of Max Weber, bit of Tocqueville--has held up reasonably well. (So, shameless self-promotion: http://thecresset.org/2014/Michaelmas/Meilaender_M14.html.)
Yes. Academia produces a lot of graduates - even Phds - who study something there's no demand for outside of the ivory tower institution. I even go further to want those majors to go away - like Women's Studies, etc. Often seems like the aspirants need therapy more than a degree. And other "studies" would be best handled in a book club, not a degree program. So, yes, I think we're overproducing these people and they're contributing to the destabilizing of our country by then going on to teach and indoctrinate a bunch of folks who will in turn not make a contribution of any substance to our world that isn't destructive. Yet they're Dr. So and So. So elite overproduction is personified in each graduate from these "studies".
The solution is for universities to create a new Doctorate in Critical Studies of Critical Studies program. Think of the employment bump!
Indeed.
Totally.
I read your comment after I wrote mine. We think alike.
This has always been my response to Turchin from when I first heard him speaking. Higher ed is gunked up by corruption, deans of student well-being and so-on, but more generally I think there is something like elite undersupply--if by elite we mean people equal to the tasks we want them to achieve after recruiting them from elite schools.
Thanks for the article, Yascha (and Anders). I found this largely persuasive after having accepted elite overproduction as a pretty good explanation for some of the instability we've seen. I would quibble a bit with this conclusion:
"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."
I spend a bit of time in the Millennials sub-Reddit and read about their decisions to have children, move out of their parents' houses, etc. Despite the data on a post-secondary degree's effects on median income, a pretty broad sentiment in that forum (which I'd imagine over-indexes for college-educated Americans, though I'm not sure) is that many in the cohort are not having their expectations met. Particularly with home ownership, but also medical insurance and childcare. Student loans, of course, are also an area of concern. A recurring theme is that college-educated Millennials "did everything right" and should have already arrived at a stable, comfortable landing zone with a house and family. At a minimum, there's a perception in the cohort that they deserve better and previous generations had it much easier once they got a college education. Perhaps the "social optimism" and "intraelite competition/conflict" legs of the model of political instability you cite could be partial drivers of negative polarization and instability?
I’ve nearly reached my 80th year as an American. I’ve been at times a soldier, a merchant seaman, a construction worker, and camp counselor and director, and for the last 40 years before I retired, an elementary school history teacher and administrator.
I’ve seen a good deal of political instability in that time, some first hand, and much of it course in the infamous sixties. But my earliest moment of feeling things to be unstable happened at the age of about five when I happened to hear a radio broadcast informing us that the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic device. Since at that age I could hardly have had any personal understanding of the meaning of that event, I can only assume that I’d heard some adults talking about it. But I do remember being scared - thinking that some part of whatever stability I’d felt in my young life before that moment was no longer so - that some dangerous force had entered the picture.
And having thus lived through that period we refer to as 'The Cold War’, including those terrible thirteen days in October of 1962, and all that was implied in our most prevalent but least favorite acronym MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), I can vouch for knowing just how unstable a feeling such a situation can create. Indeed, during my early teenage years, I became for a time convinced I was unlikely to reach the age of twenty before we blew ourselves up. And of course we once came pretty close to doing just that, albeit that what we could have done to ourselves in the fall of 1962 was not nearly what we could do today.
I did, of course, survive well beyond twenty, but there has never been a moment since when I felt, as all of humanity did before August 6th, 1945, that although there were not necessarily any permanently safe places in the world, we were not in any danger of destroying ourselves utterly.
I remain convinced that the watershed moment when Hiroshima disappeared under that new and terrifying cloud formation has colored all our perceptions since. For example, there were of course a number of causes behind the Berkeley Free Speech movement, which morphed into its many ‘sixties’ branches - most notable the anti- Vietnam War movement. But I have a sense that what it all really amounted to was that my generation (the plank owners of the Atomic Age) had just had enough of being scared to death that we might never get the chance to grow up.
We’d all been practiced in hiding under our desks at school (bend over and kiss your sweet --- goodbye), at watching and listening to all the talk of backyard bomb shelters and how those who had them were going to defend them against those who hadn’t when the moment came. We’d all read many of the first generation of nuclear war novels (Pat Franks’ Alas Babylon, Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Burdick and Wheeler’s Fail Safe, and the best and most terrifying one, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach). It was all there in the background noise that never really went away, continually refueled by the various alarms and excursions that continued until the Fall of the Wall.
One can always make too much of one’s own personal journey in the expectation that everyone else shares it to one degree or another. But my sense remains that one of the most basic causes of today’s instabilities is a general sense that the world we inhabit has gotten well beyond any one of our abilities to control it or make it safe. It’s a little like the first time one experiences an earthquake - that something which had once seemed so solid was actually continually in dangerous motion and beyond control.
This is certainly not all attributable to the threat of nuclear destruction, although over the last couple of years that threat has increased. But vast economic, social, and political forces stalk this increasingly interconnected world, and most of us do not really understand them. And fear of the unknown is always far more concerning than of the known.
In this country, of course, a string of Supreme Court decisions (Brown v Board, Engel v Vitale, Roe v Wade, Virgina v Loving, Obergefeld v Hodges, Heller, Citizens United, Hobbes, etc), all of which increased the feeling of instability and uncertainty in various constituencies have continuously roiled society at all levels. After all, the great grandaddy of them all, Dredd Scott helped to stimulate our most dangerous period of near destruction.
It is thus a prime environment for the kind of demagoguery practiced so well by men like Donald Trump - simple, clear solutions to problems that are actually anything but simple.
Anyway, my two cents.
This is a beautiful essay. I’d gladly read more
Ain't that the truth!? I remember, when we moved to Long Island in 1959, calculating that when the Big One dropped on New York, the firestorm would extend eastward as far as (the aptly-named?) Searingtown Road.
As for the vast economic, social, and political forces now stalking this increasingly interconnected world? I'm convinced that we're headed into an evolutionary bottleneck, after which homo sapiens will no longer be the Earth's apex predator. Knowing what (and who) will emerge from that (or how it will define itself) is beyond my pay grade. ;-)
At least according to the best science fiction writers, predatory insects. There’s a comforting thought!
LOL (morbidly)! ;-)
Political instability seems to be a much stronger and perhaps unsupportable claim, but I haven’t seen people arguing that.
It’s much more common to describe elite overproduction as a cultural phenomenon in which highly educated but underemployed people turn their energy to destructive status-seeking pursuits like cancel culture and extreme social causes.
A frustrated post-doc is unlikely to storm the Capitol, but surprisingly likely to wave a Hamas flag.
I was surprised to learn just now that the growth in PhDs conferred annually since the 1970s is almost all driven by STEM fields.
Humanities and other fields have remained pretty flat: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/12/03/survey-shows-annual-decline-number-phds-awarded
So the cultural phenomenon of elite unemployment is probably at least partially an artifact of underemployed elites being extremely online and vocal about their predicament.
Cancel culture doesn’t come from universities, it comes from the proliferation of the internet. This ‘elite’ theory is just an attempt to pin instability and conflict on the left, who famously are more likely to be university educated.
This is nonsense. You can follow the trend line at FIRE. Cancel Culture overwhelmingly started at Universities and relies almost entirely on the conceptual framing coming out of radical grievance studies departments for its moral justifications (which mostly amount to labeling any speech the Left disagrees with as "Hate Speech", "misinformation", or any number of *isms and *phobic slurs). Attacks on Free Speech didn't start from the incredibly radically pro-Free Speech early Internet.
Would you call “punching someone for being a nazi” cancel culture? Because that’s been around since the 40s, the only difference lately has been the way the sentiments have spread.
That’s when your “attacks on free speech” started.
People deciding they don’t want to listen to shitty people say shitty things is not the same as “attacking free speech”. Suppression of academic ideas shouldn’t be conflated with people not wanting celebrities they like to rape women. If you try and conflate these two ideas, the left will continue to not take what you are saying seriously.
No, I consider punching "Nazis" political violence and will readily acknowledge that political violence has been and remains mostly bipartisan, with some minor swings over time which side does it more. Conflating "speech" with "violence" (in either direction) is mostly an issue from the Left (frankly, almost every issue with fuzzy conceptual boundaries comes from the "soft categorizer" Left rather than the "hard categorizer" Right).
Yes, people who cross the line from "I'm not listening to you" to "I'm going to actively censor/deplatform you so that even people who WANT to listen to you can't" IS by definition an attack on Free Speech. Boycotts are NOT the same as demonetizing or firing. Speech that offends no one never needs protection, it's only the speech of those with less power saying things that offend those with more power that have needed the protection of law. That's something the 60's Leftist radicals had right: Free Speech is an essential tool for the marginalized to make their complaints heard. Attacks on Free Speech are inherently a form of oppression, necessarily an example of power punching down.
Suppression of academic ideas is a related, but not necessarily the same category, as censorship of Free Speech. It's potentially a violation of Free Speech to attack academics on the basis of their personal speech that is irrelevant to their duties, but professors are still professionally obligated to deliver an education that meets the standards of the institution and, if receiving tax funds, the standards of the public providing those funds. Educational instruction is a paid service and therefore commercial speech, not personal speech, with different legal standards. Professors who lose sight of that distinction and start injecting their personal views into the approved curriculum, especially by grading on the basis of agreement with their ideology instead of student work quality, can't appeal to Free Speech to defend that illegal discrimination and failure to uphold their employment contract. As such, it's not "cancel culture" for states to ban professors from teaching CRT any more than it would be cancel culture to ban professors from teaching Flat Eartherism: CRT doesn't fall into any protected legal category. Professors can talk about it in their personal capacity as much as they like (free speech), but they can't force it into the curriculum or grade based on it (commercial speech) if the State makes that ban a condition of their institution receiving tax dollars
I seriously have no idea why you seem to be conflating in #MeToo call-out culture with academic suppression of ideas. Frankly, #MeToo more often violated Free Speech standards by drifting into illegal libel/slander, too often followed by violations of the presumption of Innocence until proven Guilty, gross violations of Due Process Rights, and occasionally dangerous incidents of doxxing and swatting. What began with a legitimate basis very rapidly morphed into a misandrist free for all of false accusations, fame seeking, corruption of the law, and coercive abuse (not to mention the blatant double standards where prominent leftists often got a pass or slap on the wrist whereas prominent people on the Right were put through hell for entirely unsubstantiated and unbelievable claims later admitted or proven false. Even many feminists have admitted that #MeToo went off the rails and ultimately damaged feminism with its excesses.
If you like, I can link you the studies showing that exposure to DEI training makes people significantly more likely to see bias where objectively none exists, to support punishment for that non-existent bias, and generally become more authoritarian. Likewise, I can link you the studies and surveys showing that people on the Left are much more likely to break off relationships over ideological differences. That cancel culture is currently very much coming from and much stronger on the Left, most particularly the universities, is literally the subject of multiple formal studies and books from prominent Liberals. I don't need to use even a single source on the right to substantiate this.
Free speech is about the government telling you what you can say, not your peers. I can understand there is a line where what it is it acceptable to say can impede full and proper conversation, but my point isn’t that “punching nazis” is political violence, my point is that it is a thing that literally used to be acceptable to do (google: Jack Kirby, of Marvel comics) and it is only in the modern day that this has become an unacceptable response to the spreading of Naziism.
My POINT is that shutting down harmful rhetoric has always been a part of our societal conversation and it is only the proliferation of the internet that has led to us calling this “cancel culture” — before the phenomenon existed, just unnamed and unchallenged.
People who are gay are more likely to stop being your friend because you’re homophobic than a straight person. This isn’t cancel culture or ‘the left’ being intolerant; it’s a very normal reaction to people holding adverse opinions of others. Like a lot of your examples, it doesn’t “prove” unfairness, it make perfect sense if you take away the hivemind label of “the left” and understand where minorities are coming from when they prefer political isolation to engagement with people who don’t support what they view as their own human rights, or when they respond to issues via their own moral axis.
For example, the alternative to “Me Too” is just not responding to sexual abuse, harassment, etc, which is the default norm we were trying to move away from. Even if it is an imperfect response, which investigations of sexual abuse are very difficult to substantiate so yes it will probably be imperfect, it is still an improvement on just ignoring it. Either you have a culture where this is condemned, or you have a culture where people are fine with sexual abuse being leveraged against underlings. People who hate MeToo think it is worth the latter to avoid persecuting potential innocents, and have a totally different perspective on what behaviour makes people innocent. For example, take Onision and James Charles, two youtubers “cancelled” for abusing their position with minors who they had sexual contact with who are trying to regain their public platform. Another more mainstream example might be Phillip Schofield. There is a grey area where the behaviour is “unacceptable” to fans but perhaps not illegal — but people still have the right to decide that their behaviour is not something they approve of. This is no different to, say, Angus Dayton losing his position as TV host 20 years ago for doing Coke. Just that twenty years ago, you were significantly more likely to get away with grooming or sexual abuse than drug taking. Now that has changed, and people dislike it and call this ‘cancel culture’ like it’s new. It’s not.
This is, bluntly, again bullshit. Liberals used to know this. Look back to 1978 when the ACLU defended a Nazi group that wanted to rally through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, where many Holocaust survivors lived. Nearly half a century ago is scarcely "in the modern day". That even literal Nazis are entitled to 1st Amendment protections is NOT a new concept, much less one born from the Internet. I give due credit: for most of this past century the Left were the primary advocates for a consistent application of Constitutional Rights even to disfavored groups. It's ironic and tragic that once they gained power they immediately threw those convictions aside and became as prone or more to ignore the rights of the groups they disfavour. (Yes, they have, I can give you the studies showing that liberals are just as intolerant as conservatives and sometimes moreso.)
Free Speech, as a Liberal principle, is NOT simply about "the government telling you what you can say". Read some John Stuart Mills 'On Liberty': "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form."
Or perhaps you'd find MLK Jr more current: Dr. King gave a speech on Human Rights Day in 1965 at Hunter College in New York City. His topic was the apartheid regime of South Africa, which he lambasted as “modern-day barbarians” and “spectacular savages and brutes.” Accusing the South African government of reviving Nazism, Dr. King said:
"Once more, we read of tortures in jails with electric devices, suicides among prisoners, forced confessions, while in the outside community ruthless persecution of editors, religious leaders, and political opponents suppress free speech—and a free press."
The suppression of Free Speech, by ANYONE, is no friend to minorities or the oppressed. Do you truly think that Dr. King would retract his description of them as "modern-day barbarians, spectacular savages and brutes" if he were told that it wasn't the government itself doing it, but fellow citizens? Is the violation of a Human Right any less serious when the violator is a another citizen rather than a government official?
The underlying principle of Free Speech is that people have a Right to speak their beliefs and ideas. The implicit corresponding Right is to hear the other people you want to hear. There is no alternative to this that has not historically degenerated into violence. People who do not feel heard eventually MAKE themselves heard by whatever means necessary. The (appropriately named) Bill of Rights is not a list of privileges the government must grant, but rather a list of Human Rights which government is to be barred from infringing upon. The Amendments are only legally binding on the government (and, by extension, any and every other organization receiving government funding, including schools), but that does not mean the Right doesn't exist against violations by private citizens also. As an example, schools that receive government funds CANNOT legally allow students to disrupt speakers on campus. "Students" are obviously neither government employees, nor receiving tax revenues directly, so disruptive student protesters clearly aren't "the government" silencing speech, but because the schools ARE receiving government funds they share the government's obligation to actively defend the Rights of the students, including the Right of the attending students who want to hear the invited speaker.
Does this mean that I'm arguing that speech cannot have consequences? Of course not! The Right of Association inherently includes the Right to NOT Associate. You can simply not listen to people you don't want to hear. You can argue with the people you disagree with. You're free to even try to convince others not to listen or otherwise associate with such people (boycott). Where you cross the line is when you attempt to interfere with other people's Right TO listen and associate with those people. There is no inherent Right to a platform (aside from the public square and common carriers, as these are public resources), but neither is there any Right to deplatform someone else. The law does NOT recognize a "Heckler's Veto" as a legitimate form of Speech (attempting to disrupt or drown out someone else's speech). If a platform is public, and the speech is legal, there are very few justified reasons for censoring or preventing speech ("because it offends someone" is generally NOT such a valid justification, I'm talking more like criminal activity).
Regarding "this isn't cancel culture or being intolerant", it's just a normal reaction to people who disagree with you. Please look up the definitions of "tolerant" and "intolerant". I'll wait. Actually, no I won't, I'll do it for you. "Tolerance", per the Oxford Language Dictionary: "the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with." Intolerance: "unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one's own"
We "tolerate" pain, we "tolerate" discomfort, we "tolerate" disagreement. By DEFINITION, we only use "tolerate" when describing enduring something unpleasant. We don't talk about "tolerating" joy. So YES, when you refuse to associate with someone over a disagreement or dislike, YOU ARE BEING "INTOLERANT", you ARE refusing to accept their views, beliefs, or behavior that differs from your own. That may well be mutual or it may not, but it's certainly not a good look for the Left to proclaim that "tolerance" is a virtue and then be the ones that want to break off relationships over disagreements even when the people who disagree with them want to maintain the relationships. The Left really seems to dislike that word "Intolerance", almost as much as they dislike "Discriminate", so they seem to struggle to articulate the argument that it CAN be "a good thing" (even a moral act, even a moral obligation) to be intolerant of some of things, to discriminate against some things or people. But if they don't want to be correctly labeled as hypocrites, they really do need to actually make those arguments. Because you really don't have the moral high ground by engaging in intolerance and discrimination yourselves against your disfavored groups while you lecture those same groups on their intolerance and discrimination against you. That's just plain old tribalism and outgroup bias. Take your own advice and remove the group name: if you take "gay" and "minority" out of your example, are you left with a universally applicable principle? Is it fine for straight people to break off relationships because they find out someone is gay or minority? If they attempt to silence someone for being gay or minority, is that NOT "cancel culture" and "intolerance"? Bigotry is bigotry no matter which group you're in or which group you direct it against.
Regarding #MeToo, your Fallacy is the Fallacy of False Dichotomy. It is NOT the case that the only possible (or plausible) alternatives are to either ignore all women or #BelieveAllWomen. It is entirely possible (and desirable) BOTH that legitimate claims are properly investigated and perpetrators appropriately punished within the law AND that the presumption of innocence is maintained until proven guilty, that all due process rights are maintained, and that false allegations are recognized and condemned by BOTH sides as illegal and contemptible actions that undermine the public trust in true claims and distract limited attention and resources away from catching actual perpetrators.
The term "Elite Overproduction" was never meant to refer to a surplus of people who are actually elite, but rather, a surplus of people who think they are by virtue of having been awarded credentials traditionally associated with eliteness.
The PhD working at Starbucks is not elite in any genuine sense, else he wouldn't be working at Starbucks. But he's got an elite credential and a boatload of bitterness over how little good it did him, and that's the problem.
I imagine the starbucks barista would be less bitter if they hadn’t had to pay for their own education they’ve been prevented from using.
Sounds less like a problem of an elite class and a lot more like you’re creating a class of highly trained people unable to use their training, who are also on the hook for the costs of that training that they’ve been unable to utilise.
The point was not that they are prevented from using their education, it is that they are not capable of using their education. A little like handing someone a diploma that says "internationally renowned concert pianist" when they are really only capable of running through a few scales. Once you find out that you are just not good enough to justify fame and fortune, do you blame society or your own delusions? And we continue to churn out concert pianist diplomas.
Regardless of the results, which I disagree with you about, do you not think that the fact they’re the first generation who have had to pay such insanely high prices for their own education,
which you believe to be worthless, might have something to do with it?
Completely agree about the cost of college education. I don't believe education to be worthless in and of itself, but destructive when it is being used as a means to convince people that they are more capable than they are for the very reason you give: the cost. So what do you do with all those folks who are not content to take on lives that they believe are beneath them? I generally prefer the option where we don't know what to do with them, but at least they are not in debt. The trades have mostly become so technical and complicated that you need a similar level of competence to make real money there, so that's not an option either.
I’m a socialist at heart, so I believe in some less-than-40-hours-a-week utopia where people can have a bit more time and freedom to pursue beneficial projects like arts and humanities and politics/civic duties and even science — there’s a LOT of people out there doing science for free just because they love it, important science especially things like categorising for conservation. I’m from New Zealand, so our education is MUCH cheaper with a much better system — but it’s still an investment of years and tens of thousands of dollars, and the most educated people who come out with the highest loans aren’t actually all that likely to earn any money.
Moderate IQ / moderate skill set / high time preference people can make $200K - $300K per year selling roofs, but they have to be impervious to both rejection and insults. One of the other great tragedies of modern college education IMO is that it actually tries very had to decrease the very qualities (resilience and self-reliance) that can provide a lucrative life for people whose degree does not match their actual talent or ability.
Mounk also complains that Turchin conflates credentials with income. But, there has got to be a correlation between the two.
Home price appreciation has created asset-rich Baby Boomers (Tony, the Millionaire Bartender at the Gator Club in Sarasota is a good example).
Baby Boomers, who identify as as disproportionally narcissistic and self-absorbed, have also been described (by Neil Strauss) as a major reason for the acrimonious political rhetoric in the United States.
I think there are some concepts that struggle when you attempt to tie them down and define them, but none the less capture something important in a qualitative sense and seem right, and provide a method of thinking about a problem.
Many explanations of Trumps rise fall into this, and I think that Elite overproduction does also. I accept it can be hard to pin down, but in none the less captures the feeling of a Red Queens Race where everyone is pushing harder to compete with everyone else for no actual societal gain - the ones who want more but cannot get it as there is not enough to go round.
How useful is it? Well I would argue it may make you think perhaps we should not push more people into college. Maybe we should unblock more route from non-graduate to higher earners (e.g. nursing now requiring a degree).
Is it robust? Probably not? Could be be fruitful? Maybe it could.
> I think there are some concepts that struggle when you attempt to tie them down and define them, but none the less capture something important in a qualitative sense
Yes. Turchin might not have 'proved' anything but I still think he has a point. Perhaps elite overproduction has always been with us, true, and perhaps it's next to impossible to say that it was more or less of an issue at this or that time, true. Nevertheless perhaps the inherent stress caused by elite overproduction has *always* been a destabilizing force and plays a part in political instability at all times even if it is not sufficient by itself.
For example, look at the descent of the left into the purity spiral of wokeness: not every graduate from Harvard with a degree in Grievance Studies is going to make a living selling their Victimhood are they? So there is a contest -- who is the wokest? Thus an almost hysterical contest to be THE wokest and thus the insanity of the Democratic Party, thus the rise of Trump -- instability if every there was instability.
Doesn’t this sentence undermine your argument:
“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.”
I always remembered Turchin’s thesis as being about the over *production* of elites. A subtle difference but one that is embodied in this paragraph.
Status & wealth elites will, barring outliers, be more naturally drawn from universities so I don’t think Turchin’s argument is necessarily broken by this lack of clarity. Where your argument is strong is on the nature of the malcontents. We do not associate university attainment with Trump’s followers. And yet … even this seems patchy. The people least likely to be unhappy with the current state would appear to be recent low-skilled immigrants. While unrest over Palestine, Black Lives Matter, me too is self-evidently driven by elites. The Jan 6th incursions were fomented by highly educated elites - Bannon, Stone et al. And their argument appears to channel male frustration at displacement from safe jobs by women and minorities. This, of course, introduces a third variation of elite: the patriarchal indigenous male. Anyway, you are of course right that Turchin’s model, like Allan Lichtman’s election model, is more schematic than empirical. It may lack scientific reliability. But in social science models can be wrong and yet useful as the phrase goes.
I would suggest that the proliferation of NGOs, and entrepreneurial activism may be symptoms of an oversupply of elite wannabes.
I embrace the critical point made here that the truly disgruntled who have shifted to the “anti-elitist” (sic) Trump are generally working class people who saw their wages decline (and perhaps blame themselves or others for their “Stolen Pride” and shame — see Hochschild’s study). Perhaps there’s a small group leading this march rightwards but they don’t seem to fit Turchin’s description of an overproduced elite either. Many of their grievances are cultural, not economic, in any case.
The grievances are ALL cultural, except for the economic ones which are grossly misdirected. This is deliberate.
… although I’d avoid the “economic determinism” framework, the economy is what some people ONLY concern themselves with. Interesting piece on the gender divide in Tara’s post here: https://open.substack.com/pub/tarahenley/p/transcript-daniel-cox?
I think the assumption that Trump and his supporters are the source of instability, rather than a response to it, is a rather poor one. Restricting immigration and imposing trade barriers are not extreme ideas. They are very normal and reasonable political positions, and broadly popular among the public.
Trump only appears extreme because government bureaucracies and permanent unelected power factions absolutely refused to obey legitimate orders by the Trump admin and/or tried to undermine him at every step, including Republican politicians that were clearly out of step with their constituents. In many cases courts blocked Trump's policies, on the basis that even though he had the legal authority to take certain actions, they didn't like his reasoning and therefore abracadabra it's unconstitutional (like the so called "Muslim ban"). Democrats openly believe that government can only be used for progressive ends. The same power wielded regularly by progressives becomes unconstitutional the moment it gets used for conservative ends.
THAT is the source of our political instability. It is the fact that we call ourselves a democracy and then the government takes blatantly authoritarian actions to counteract the will of the people. And that dynamic is a direct result of elite overproduction, as the educated class comes to see the will of the American people as a threat to democracy rather than democracy itself.
Some clarifications would help. Turchin's interviews on the topic are muddled. Elite proliferation was developed in the context of pre-industrial agrarian societies. In these pre-capitalist societies is simply follows from demography. Elites tended to outbreed commoners. But also from the effect of rising economic inequality. It is this latter mechanism that is what concerns us.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-current-crisis-era#:~:text=periods%20of%20rising,of%20elite%20proliferation.
As for the effect on stability here is a brief take on it.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-current-crisis-era#:~:text=Another%20is%20competition,that%20way%20anymore.
The issue is not really surplus history majors, at least not for the US. It is influence, think lobbyist and campaign donors. A reasonable assumption would be the demand for influence would be directly related to the fraction of the cake a group receives. Since the top 1% income share is about twice as big as it was in the 1970's one might assume there is twice the per capital elite interest in influencing policy today as then. And since there are 50% more of us there is 3 times the elite interest directed to government today compared to then. Three times more on each side and so the intensity of the clash of interests on both sides would be nine times higher (this follows from the kinetics of two-body interactions).
Elite overproduction is a demographic concept. It played a bigger role in pre-capitalist economies. Capitalist economies grow and in doing so, create new positions for rising elite numbers to fill. Hence it is not the inability of graduates of elite schools being able to find good jobs that is a driver. However, the number of top political positions does not rise as the economy grows. There are no more congresspersons, governors, presidents today than there were 50 years ago and no more hours in a day. Hence elite political attention is fixed while there is three times more interest trying to influence that attention. It is more important than ever that policy makers who will listen to you are in office, meaning you will push harder to get such policymakers in place--and so will your political opponents.
Craig, I agree with you. It is about elite status and recognition beyond pure wealth and power.
We have to remember that Turchin does not come out of social science but out of biology, so he’s basically a Darwinian. And any good Darwinian knows that humans and primates compete not just for material resources, but also for status (because status increases access to resources and the odds of reproductive success). So human nature and the desire for “recognition” is at play here.
Darwin was influenced by the bleak, competitive vision of Thomas Malthus, who in turn comes out of that whole tradition of British empirical naturalism that ultimately goes back to Hobbes. So Hobbes is the ultimate touchstone here, in a sense, both for Darwin and thus ultimately for Turchin.
Let’s consider Hobbes for a moment. Everyone knows that Hobbes argued, without government, insecurity causes the state of nature to become a violent war of all against all. Thus, to avoid conflict a strong state must be established to maintain order. What many forget is that, for Hobbes, even in the state of nature, conflict is also caused by human pride and the desire for glory. Hobbes argues that open elitism provokes social conflict, and goes so far as to suggest that in a peaceful society the illusion of equality must be propagated as a useful fiction to maintain order:
“I know that Aristotle in the first book of his Politics, for a foundation of his doctrine, maketh men by nature, some more worthy to command, meaning the wiser sort, such as he thought himself to be for his philosophy; others to serve, meaning those that had strong bodies, but were not philosophers as he; as master and servant were not introduced by consent of men, but by difference of wit: which is not only against reason, but also against experience. For there are very few so foolish that had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others: nor when the wise, in their own conceit, contend by force with them who distrust their own wisdom, do they always, or often, or almost at any time, get the victory. If nature therefore have made men equal, that equality is to be acknowledged: or if nature have made men unequal, yet because men that think themselves equal will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted. And therefore for the ninth law of nature, I put this: that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride.” (Leviathan, CHAPTER XV)
Therefore, Hobbes argued that a peaceful order could only be maintained if conflict over status was controlled. Thus, the state needs to propagate the idea of human equality to satisfy the masses of ordinary people, but must also distribute titles of honor and glory to satisfy aspiring elites. If this fails, the awesome power of the sovereign, centralized state must dominate pride with force.
What Mounk misses is this Hobbesian tension in modern liberal-democratic society. On the one hand, both liberal capitalism and democracy promote the idea of citizen equality and unleash the expression of individual self-interest and material gain. On the other hand, this generates frequent competitive struggles over wealth and status that play out in a very public way. When one person or one cause “wins” in public (abortion rights or restriction, mass immigration or immigration restriction, religion or secularism, etc.) the other side loses face and pride is aroused.
An unemployed History PhD may actually make more money in the private sector than a tenured professor, just like the store manager of a Wal-Mart may earn more than a member of Congress (Walmart Store Manager Salaries Reach $500,000 - Bloomberg). But the tenured professor and the member of Congress are administrative elites with influence and status, and these positions are inherently limited. So competition over these titles is zero-sum, and this will be the case even if the rising economic tide of liberal capitalism makes everyone better off economically. Democratic ideals of equality may actually exacerbate this, since those who lose out feel that they are just as good, just as qualified, as successful elites.
Hobbes could argue that the awesome Leviathan state must overawe the public and distribute titles and honors to the ambitious. But the decentralized, liberal/capitalist/democratic state can struggle to contain the aspirations over status that it unleashes. Simple wealth generation alone cannot fix this.
Yes. It boils down to defining an "elite". During Obama, it waa used to define people of absurd wealth. All of a sudden during Trump (not his fault but def MAGA movement) it was ANYBODY that had a college degree.
It comes from the concerted push to wind up conservatives and conspiracists. Went to a talk by Graham Linehan and I got to see how these organisations draw these webs of crazy together to create a picture of a totally unstable society in which science and universities and medicine etc can’t be trusted because it’s all a sham in which academics are just trying to create opportunities to be paid (i.e. global warming is a conspiracy to give environmental scientists jobs — but in literally every field, especially to do with race or gender).
Anyone writing anything about elites is going to accidentally be playing into this indoctrination into an anti-academic worldview.
I feel this. A decade ago. I explained to my mother. Its a war on intelligence. This is no different then a high school hallway. The popular kids are book checking the motivated kids. Because intelligent children are either motivated to achieve or they are exceptionally curious and fascinated by the world around them. Knowledge is not and end. Its a means for nourishment. They are awkwardly curious. Such that their motivations make them the targets of the other childrens cynicism. And their curiosity makes them suspects in a relm outside of a football field. After 10 years. Its hard for me to engage in any rational evidentary conversation with anybody of MAGA movement. They have ostracized anything that makes them look unpopular. And Elon has sold out because his whole life. He has been looking for acceptance of the very group that views him as a loser. He was even willing to burn $44 billion to achieve their graces. Others, wants to be viewed of a level of intelligence that they neither worked at obtaining nor experienced the negative consequences that lends to one wisdom.
I came here too late and I see that others have already said what I wanted to add: that a type of "surplus elites" does exist, but in a different sense than that assigned by Turchin (whom I haven't read, but I take your word for it)--in the sense that we have too many people with higher degrees who don't have any specific knowledge and become pointless bureaucrats who don't bring any contribution to society. There are also many people who have no particular intellectual skills, yet choose to get higher degrees, and this is how we end with an inflation of, for instance, social workers and psychological counselors, many of whom have very limited IQs, which is catastrophic when one claims to deal with other people's brains or psychology and to give them counsel. Or, take my very specific field: "French theory." For decades, American freshmen who had barely read one or two books of their contemporaries, were given complex readings by sophisticated French intellectuals, and taught to "deconstruct" ideas they had never constructed or even known. This is how the average American graduate has come to believe that "a rock is a fiction" and "the Western man has invented the categories of man and woman." To feed fragile heads with something that goes above them is worse than not to feed them at all. The fact is that not everyone is equipped for theoretical understanding and study, and we would all be better off if fewer people had degrees and more did some kind of manual work. In France, where I now live, there is a huge crisis of repairmen and manual workers who can do odd jobs. We need fewer college degrees and more repairmen.
Even before you get to the substance of your critique, the "beetle expert" dig seems an unnecessary ad hominem.