Elite Overproduction

timmg

I'm one of those people that goes by the "all models are wrong, but some models are useful" saying. I'm sure the "elite overproduction" model is mostly wrong. But I also think it is an interesting/useful way to look at some things happening in society recently. Certainly, you can think of the recent "cancel culture" phenomena as a great way to remove elites to make room for new ones. ( Maybe you could argue that some of the effects of MeToo were similar.) DEI -- along with hiring quotas -- tended to bring new "officials" at companies and government orgs ("head of diversity") which is another great way of "creating" more elites. Kinda neat, I think. But probably not super-explanatory.

Yizahi

Article mixes "elites" and real elites. The mere usage of the term employment is a dead giveaway, among other issues. Real elites are not employed by someone as a general rule, with some exceptions of course. Article would be more aptly named "Overproduction of qualified or overqualified workers".

jagged-chisel

I found this interesting: “… the two decades after World War II in the United States, a time of economic redistribution and reversal of upward social mobility.” Does anyone have a summary about the “reversal of upward mobility” bit? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard that anywhere else and I don’t think I have the mental model to understand it intuitively without an explanation.

pwozgcw

Probably couples with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism

Ekaros

I have largely gotten to idea that education never made elites. It was just signal most of time for someone who already belonged to elite class. From this people started to think that getting education would mean to become elite. But this was reality only for a few. And even with many of those it was questionable were they elites or only more skilled and more professional groups like say doctors and lawyers.

pfisherman

I associate this phrase with losers and people trying to sabotage the US. You know who is not wringing their hands about “elite overproduction”? China, who are pumping out tons of smart and capable STEM PhDs, and have in a relatively short time caught up to and in some cases surpassed the US in production of scientific output and technology.

liveoneggs

hello fans of professor jiang

whattheheckheck

Yeah society needs to be able to allow for this In Machiavelli's view. whoever desires to establish a kingdom or principality where liberty and equality to prevail, will equally fail, unless he withdraws from that general equality a number of the boldest and most ambitious spirits, and makes gentlemen of them not merely in name but in fact, by giving them castles and possessions, as well as money and subjects; so that surrounded by these he may be able to maintain his power, and that by his support they may satisfy their ambition, and the others may be constrained to submit to that yoke to which force alone has been able to subject them. ... But to establish a republic in a country better adapted to a monarchy, or a monarchy where a republic would be more suitable, requires a man of rare genius and power, and therefore out of the many that have attempted it but few have succeeded. (Discourses I; Machiavelli [15311 1950, chap. 55, p. 256

AreShoesFeet000

The last time the world had an intelligentsia of this magnitude, the Tsarist State fell.

sinuhe69

In the Turchin model of societal collapse, discussing elite overproduction alone is not helpful at all. The model calls for 3 pillars: - elite overproduction and limited job opportunities - wealth pump and inequality - declining of popular wellbeing and growing resentment Thus, it only makes sense to consider elite overproduction within this framework.

roenxi

I'm sure the actual theory goes in to a lot of detail in academic papers and whatnot, but the Wiki summary is to vague to be interesting. There is a key question left unanswered. Who are the elite? Are the elite: - billionaires? - top 1,000 Political leadership? - top Military leadership? - top 10% of society by wealth? - top 10% of society by influence? - smart people? - hard working people? - people with valuable economic skills? - people who went to university and got a degree? We have no idea from Wikipedia. It might be possible and practical to have an entirely elite society where everyone has a job for all I know reading that. I suspect we're all elite compared to the population of the 1500s. Just to put my oar in, there is a huge problem when people aren't allowed to better their own lives and also have nothing better to do than sit around discussing how to overthrow the power structure. How that matches up to elite overproduction theories I cannot say.

TrackerFF

I've observed that when big waves of (labor) change washes over the working classes, it is met with "tough luck!" and some advice to seek a new profession, often starting again at the very bottom. But when this happens to the educated professional class, all hell breaks loose. The system has to change , because it is unthinkable for some professional with a master's degree to become a warehouse sorter. If AI really makes professional workers obsolete in the future, I fully expect the next revolution to be fronted by that class.

NalNezumi

I've discussed Elite Overproduction with some economists and the best way for me to conceptualize this in modern day is with software, UI/design specifically. UI and design is weird. There's a saying in fashion "there's no new fashion, just cycled old ideas" and things have a trend cycle. UI have a similar trend, as we can see with IOS pattern update and icon update for Google: they're just new, but we can't really tell if it's "better". But UI designer still require busywork to justify their existence and salary, so we get new UIs now and then. Part of it just falls under the bullshit job category [1] When we ponder upon this, it boggles down to the fact that it's notoriously hard to distinguish "value creation" vs "value extraction". If I invent a fridge and it become commercially available or cheap enough so that people previously not able to purchase it can buy it, it's fairly easy to see it as value being created. A duopoly diluting milk with water to increase the profit margin, a search engine monopoly intentionally worsening it's search engine so we have to search twice (=twice the use!), a white ware company implementing planned obsolescence but better UI, looks good on the profit and balance sheet but was value now created, or extracted? Elite overproduction, though this scope, is not about some 1% but most "middle class and up" that doesn't really do anything meaningful (bullshit job, value extraction) in society but expects titles and yearly salary increase. This is not an issue when a society genuinely have room to grow (value creation is ample) but when the growth is harder to come by, but new generation expectations haven't changed. Then more jobs are created to extract value, and the burden start to bubble up [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

llm_nerd

"Even though Canada has the highest percentage of workers with higher education in the G7, the nation's productivity ranks lower than every other nation's in this group except Japan. ... By August 2024, Canada's youth unemployment rate was 14.5%, the highest seen since 2012." A lot of does-not-follow suppositions are embedded in this. Nor does the article really seem to be talking about "elites", as career training is not some elite status. During the period in question Canada saw outrageous levels of immigration. The highest population growth, in absolute numbers, in the developed world. It was incredibly destructive. https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/features/10000_brainiacs/ It was kind of the apogee of a problem that had grown for years, where Canada had leaned on low-cost, exploitable imported labour to avoid salary pressures, with that avoiding modernizing, automation, etc. With that massive immigration bulge we also moved to a housing-based economy where people no longer cared about normal avenues of entrepreneurial effort, but instead everyone became real estate speculators. Why start a business when you can just stand in line for some pre-con condos on the notion that you'll flip it at a big gain when complete. Or buy some dilapidated house and become a slumlord for a dozen international students. It was perverse incentive, and has been a lost decade for the country.

jmyeet

The poster child for all of this is the entertainment industry, both music and especially Hollywood. There's a reason that "nepo babies" is such a pervasive meme now. More than a decade ago, HBO released Girls and many were surprised to learn that every single cast member in that was a nepo baby of some sort. All these people who've made it in Hollywood end up having children. So someone will try and get a show greenlit and a studio head or an agent or somebody will come along and say "if you put my son/daughter in it, you'll get this financing or simply more chance that the studio will greenlight it". So the entire project may end up being sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, etc. There are still non-nepo babies in this industry but it becomes harder and harder to make it on pure merit. Even if you're not a nepo baby, you need to be an "influencer". It matters how many follows you have on IG, Tiktok or Twitter. This part isn't new either. Before social media, influece was measured in magazine tears. Eventually that sort of thing leads to the collapse of an industry.

woodpanel

Wait a little, but I was told without a university degree I am unemployable, unmarryiable, and unrespectable human trash. Ho-Humm.

kkfx

Honestly? No. In fact, what's actually unsustainable are societies stuck in past models, where stereotypical Fordist worker in production lines organised according to Taylor/Weber/Fayol principles are needed; yes, in these societies, there's no room for such a large proportion of educated people as we theoretically have today, theoretically because practice is different, I discuss that after. The thing is, these societies are as obsolete as their ruling classes, who view young people seeking culture with concern. What we need is to evolve our societies to ensure there's a place for culture, letting automation do its job to generate a new economy where we work less and live better, the exact opposite of the classic https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg If only computerisation were done properly, for the benefit of the many rather than just a select few, we would roughly have a tenth of the consumption and time currently required to do almost anything, simply thanks to greater efficiency. This isn't the case because both the ruling classes and the masses are mentally incapable of understanding a society organised differently through TLC and IT. The few who do understand have, on average, found ways to profit handsomely from the ignorance of the majority, and the remaining handful who understand but aren't among the giants profiting from it are the "rebels" that the WEF "feared" back in 2016 http://web.archive.org/web/20161206153258/https://www.forbes... and they don't have much room to get anywhere. In the first paragraph, I said "in theory" we have trained people, because training is largely obsolete, stuck in another era, with the bulk of universities, courses, and lecturers being even more reactionary than the average person. The reality is that people who actually know what they're doing are incredibly scarce compared to the past, precisely because of this general lack of evolution. This is a massive disaster because knowledge and intelligence are the only natural resources that grow with use and recede otherwise. Today we truly need a great reset, as foreseen by the current élites, only of a different nature, because we need a different civilisation from the current one.