Lots of comments here on the causal side of elite production, but just to float an alternate possibility:
This could just as easily be suggesting that "overproduction" of elites is due to, some two decades prior, a creeping sense among the populace of nascent but growing inequality and increased stratification? Or put differently, "Grandpa worked in the plant and made a good life for himself, and I work in the plant and make a good life for my family too, but I see the writing on the all and am going to make certain that my son or daughter becomes a [lawyer/banker/software person/etc]". And the instability today is just that initial rising inequality reaching fruition.
Something like that seems much more likely to me, that creeping change exists that is palpable at the individual level, and expressed through the emphasis given to the next generation.
This aligns with the experience I and my parents had growing up in the US. My grandparents worked in factories and did relatively well for themselves, living in the same town in Connecticut that their grandparents worked in as farmers 2 generations prior. They had the notion that factory life wasn't wear the future was and pushed my parents to go to college in the 70s.
By the time I was growing up in the 90s and 00s just 2 towns over the very notion of factory work as a viable career had vanished. Everyone was prepped to live in a 2-tier system of college goers and those who weren't heading to college.
Flash forward to now and it turns out that it was only certain types of college that paid off and everyone else went into unstable service jobs or unstable non-technical disciplines.
If we're building a meritocracy that feels like a lottery people are going to be angry. If it works like a lottery, then the people with the most tickets are going to win every time.
I think it was pretty apparent back in 2012 when I was picking college majors that it was essentially engineering, economics, medical, or you're going to have a rough time.
I suspect the mentality started to shift after the '08 crises. But I know quite a few undergraduate "business" majors who weren't able to find remunerative work from that era.
There’s a lot of hidden correlations in that stat.
It’s almost certain that it includes individuals who went on to get MBAs which open big doors in terms of compensation. Would love to see how this stat breaks down by cohort.
70s through 90s wiped the blue collar middle class off the map, there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation. Its gigs and part-time work from there.
Edit: to be clear, I'm agreeing and saying people definitely had time to see the writing on the wall
I saw a lot of people in the trades barely scraping by 5-7 years ago when housing was bottoming out. Housing stock is growing at something like 3x population growth in the US right now. A few more years of that and they may be back in the same situation. Being employed in a heavily cyclical industry definitely has rich years, but it's also got lean ones.
However the housing stock grows, the remaining stock needs maintenance anyway.
So, well, indeed, a good plumber should not see extremely lean years.
(Anecdotally, my son works as a building systems maintenance engineer, without a college diploma. Of course the market for such jobs ebbs and flows, but seems to never dry up: city buildings still need their elevators, HVAC, fire alarm, access control, etc systems working, no matter what.)
Housing starts are at ~1.7MM units/year right now, that's enough for about 4.5MM people at current household sizes. US population growth was 1.6M in 2019 and <1MM in 2020. Even with generous estimates on losses of existing housing, I don't think 3x is appreciably off.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that more than half of the younger generation are currently living with parents [1]. Not because they necessarily enjoy it, but because they can't afford their own home.
Building more housing should lower the effective price of it, and allow many new home buyers or renters to enter the market.
A lot of the construction boom is probably attributable to the new found geographic freedom COVID gave, coupled with the low interest rates from the Fed's monetary policy. There was a sudden mismatch of locale supply and demand. Housing starts were also quite low over much of the last decade, definitely below the equilibration point for 2019-2013.
It'll be interesting to see how things play out. I think the shift of older millennials out of cities combined with the relatively smaller generation replacing them will likely cause a reversal of a lot of the urban price growth in the past decade in places like New York. Rents are already reflecting that, but sales prices have more hysteresis.
I've read since 2008 LA has added 5 jobs for every new unit of housing. I'm sure other places in CA must be just as bad with how they've been building for the past decade. It feels like we are so far in the hole in many cities, I'm not sure how much overbuilding it would take to right the ship and make housing affordable to the median wage earner again.
When GP said business owners I assume they included independent plumbers. I can call the local plumbing franchise and I will pay $150/hr, but the person who shows up at my door is not making anywhere near that.
My friend works for a home security company. They bill $150/hr for labor and he makes $26/hr.
Compared to other countries, Australia is an outlier for tradesmen income, by far. The closest comparison I can think of is software engineer income in the US vs everywhere else.
Working in a trade in Australia is lucrative AF, if you're looking for a way to be relatively wealthy only a couple of years out of high school, apprentice as a shipwright, elevator technician or HVAC technician.
That may not be a lot of money wherever you live, but a married couple both making close to that are borderline rich where I live. A single person making that is above middle class. Of course a nice house can also be had for $150k.
And yeah, my carpenter got his HVAC, electrician, and plumbing licenses in prison and now runs his own business with family members and makes a lot more than I do, but it wasn't by luck or fortune. Anyone could have done what he did (skipping the prison part), if they didn't mind working hard.
That's not a lot of money, period, considering the hours and the inflation due to overtime. Consider too that that is the median - many are making far below that.
Most people making money in trades make most of it working more than 40 hours a week, or, like you said, runs his own business (which is completely different. That is no longer a "carpenter" plying his trade.)
> Anyone could have done what he did (skipping the prison part), if they didn't mind working hard.
This is just not true and stated as fact. There is no evidence of this. We have no idea how capable this man really is. I know lots of dumb tradesmen and lots of brilliant ones. He should be proud of what he's done because it isn't as easy as you say.
Overall that doesn't make much difference. The bottom decile of business owners makes much less and the top decile makes much more. The majority in the middle makes about the same as they would if they were an employee.
Part of that change is artificial. Mortgage interest rates have plummeted, which have caused prices to go up. The real median mortgage payment is about the same over the last 50 years.
This, unfortunately, also implies an explosion of interest rate risk. Given a fixed monthly payment, I'd much rather be paying it at high rates that have a good chance of dropping, than at low rates that have a good chance at rising.
Edit: Thank you, Americans, for your perspective! I understand now that you have fixed rate mortgages there. That's, for better or worse, not the case in Canada!
Ah, my perspective is coming from Canada where every mortgage is variable rate. ("Fixed rate" mortgages are only locked in for five years).
One would think that would cause US real estate to appreciate much faster than Canada when rates are low, but the opposite is the case. Strange days indeed.
* In Canada you technically can get a 25 year fixed mortgage, but the interest rate is 8.75%. That's a massive premium and I've never heard of anyone doing that.
If you want your monthly payments to be low initially, and you intend to pay off the mortgage debt fully within 5 or 7 years, then a 5/1 or 7/1 ARM can be a good option.
I don't understand this allergy towards debt. Oh no, people had the option to take out a loan to access capital they wanted to invest in themselves. If only we could be like the Europeans instead and waste public money to fund whatever stupid whimsy someone fancied rather than make them responsible for the productivity of their choice.
>70s through 90s wiped the blue collar middle class off the map, there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation.
Is it? According to the CRS[1], real wage (ie. inflation adjusted) growth is up 6.5% even for the bottom percentile.
Ah, my information was bad. The study you originally cited specifically mentions CPI-U as the measure they were using.
I assure you I wasn't lying, and thank you for the correction. (perhaps consider not jumping straight to the lying accusation in the future).
There's still a conversation about housing taking up an increasing share of the pie that doesn't exactly shine through in that top line number, but no point in belaboring it.
> Ah, my information was bad. The study you originally cited specifically mentions CPI-U as the measure they were using.
well the BLS publishes a bunch of CPI numbers, but "the" CPI is just CPI-U. The others are even more specific (eg. CPI-W for clerical workers or CPI for the elderly)
>There's still a conversation about housing taking up an increasing share of the pie that doesn't exactly shine through in that top line number, but no point in belaboring it.
The rise in housing prices has mostly been canceled out (or caused by?) low interest rates. After you adjust for interest rate and inflation, the monthly payment for a house (ie. the price you actually pay) has actually gone down from the 90s.
> The rise in housing prices has mostly been canceled out (or caused by?) low interest rates. After you adjust for interest rate and inflation, the monthly payment for a house (ie. the price you actually pay) has actually gone down from the 90s.
Only if you ignore the tax side of things, housing interest payments are deductible where principal payments aren’t. That ends up having a huge impact when inflation and interest rates drop. It’s not uncommon for mortgages to be less affordable over time. A bump in interest rates without could really mess things up.
> That ends up having a huge impact when inflation and interest rates drop.
How so? The chart in question is for 30 year fixed rate mortgages. You're going to be making the same payment every month regardless of what direction interest rates move.
The mortgage income tax deduction means paying interest comes at a discount, paying principal doesn’t so the effective nominal payment increases over time. However, when inflation is high after 10 years the mortgage becomes trivial to pay. That dramatically increases housing affordability over a lifetime. Making a stretch purchase becomes reasonable, but if inflation is very low making the same nominal payment becomes less affordable every month.
Worse insurance and property taxes are indexed to value and don’t care about inflation. Further people can’t make the same down payment when property values increase. Identical down payments at different interest rates don’t lower monthly payments equally, and at ultra low interest rates their not even a good investment.
Housing is not included in the CPI. The housing figure is Owner's Equivalent Rent. They survey owners and ask them what they think that they could rent their home for.
They do include actual rent costs, but the weighting for rent costs has 1/3 of the weighting of Owner's Equivalent Rent. The CPI-U provides an tiny weighting of rent compared to the real rent costs for anyone who is actually renting.
I'm not sure what report your read, but that report very clearly states the following:
> Real wages fell for workers with lower levels of educational attainment and rose for highly educated workers. Wages for workers with a high school
diploma or less education declined in real terms at the top, middle, and bottom of the wage distribution, whereas wages rose for workers with at least a college degree.
And that is before you start looking at issues with the CPI-U and how it's price weighting compares to real expenses faced by blue collar workers.
Dont you know that equality is a critical aspects of social satisifaction. See everywhere, equality is mentioned as the magic word that described the sacred value of liberal society...
But
It's never applied to personal wealth...
Your thinking is precisely the ludicrous disconnection between the elites' idea of society and the reality... (I am not saying you are elite, just that elitism thinking is so blindly superficial...)
BTW, equality in personal wealth is emphasized nearly 2000 years ago by Confucious 不患寡而患不均.
How is this relevant? The parent poster made a testable statement ("there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation"), and I disproved it by pointing out that even the bottom 10% of Americans are keeping up with inflation and then some.
Software engineering isn’t blue collar work. “A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled labor.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker
Plumber or nurse sure, but staring at a screen or moving Post-it notes isn’t physical labor.
While wrenching on a car is indeed manual labor I feel like it can take similar levels of mental effort, background knowledge, and training as junior dev work. So the parallel isn’t entirely off base. I believe the OP’s argument is that there are new classes of work that didn’t exist back then. Perhaps they’re not as cleanly sorted into white and blue collar lines as before but they occupy similar places in the socio-economic status positioning.
Being a mechanic is extremely repetitive. Occasionally people are faced with something odd, but it’s mostly a checklist job because identical makes and models generally run into the same issues.
Or as a childhood friend out it. It’s boring, but I can zone out and work with my hands.
Where is cost of living in this analysis? In the Midwest you can still have a nice quality of life with any decent job. Yeah sure, you can’t have such things in SF, NY or LA like maybe you could in the 70s.
There is no such thing as a free lunch and so reduced real estate costs bring with it an environment of potential poor local governance, poor job market, neighbors that do not share values that are conducive with rising home prices.
A most recent example is poor compliance with things that benefit the masses (ie. Vaccine, mask etc.)
I suspect the next thing will be poor compliance with switching over to energy efficient power generation as the world moves to clean energy + things implemented to discourage clean transportation (ie. extra taxes on EVs/banning solar installs without major caveats). All these boneheaded things drive down the cost of the real estate to its true market value.
We should consider another alternative - elite overproduction correlated with very wealthy societies, and very wealthy societies revert to the mean. So overproduction of elites correlates to decline, and correlation is not causation.
And attaching my pet theory - China has transformed their society, radically for the better, in 1 generation. As far as I can tell the American press has taken no interest whatsoever in seriously figuring out what happened beyond very surface level analysis. Are the policies that worked in Asia even serious contenders for implementation in America?
>Are the policies that worked in Asia even serious contenders for implementation in America?
No. The US prioritises corporate profit over everything else - even to the point of sacrificing its hegemony.
China just wants to be powerful.
China realized a long time ago that that is the American achilles heel and exploited it by creating long term economic dependency on them in exhange for short term profit.
It's only the last 10 years of China's economy that sparks interest/fear/competition in western minds and often the press is slow to pick up that something is different.
The Soviet Union, and Japan both threatened U.S. economic hegemony, but ultimately saw growth stagnate when the economy ran out of people to throw at the growth engine.
China is starting to look like they can keep the growth engine running even in the industrialized city centers, creating new products and services which rival their western counterparts. If this continues then China could reasonably rival the US and EU on both standard of living as well as total economic power.
There are many wealthy societies that keep growing instead of declining, and many poorer societies that get stuck in a trap and decline. That's the billion-dollar question wrt. China that nobody knows the answer to: will they keep growing and reach a Western-like standard or will they fail to pursue the reforms they would need and get stuck with a middling average income, like so many countries in South America today?
As for the policies that worked there - Deng Xiaoping said "black cat, white cat, if it catches mice it's good cat". But today the popular thing in America is to talk a lot about the ideology of being black or white, and just forget about that catching mice thing.
implying that this is the pinnacle? May be it is possible that they blaze a new way. May be it is possible that they remain as they are, for extended periods of time, or become the next super power.
Increased stratification is largely driven by rewards to technical skills, and technical training/STEM degrees are not the main source of "elite overproduction" by any stretch. Quite to the contrary, this is basically all coming from an extremely traditional idea of education (some would say many centuries or even thousand years old) positing that there's some sort of inherent merit to being an "intellectual" (whatever that might mean) being "socially aware" (again, a very fuzzy idea) or musing about "the human condition", even whilst actual technical merit is broadly disparaged as "beneath" one's perceived station.
It also corresponded with massive illegal and legal immigration entering the labor force of over 50 million individuals (unions were always against immigration for the labor supply competition reason). In addition, there was not a commensurate increase in housing stock in many urban centers and areas leading to more of your income swallowed by rich landlords.
To be fair the immigrants have a much better life in the US, and if you're worried about the US population dropping, boy would it have dropped more without that immigration wave.
My theory has always been that the decoupling was due to the effects of exponential population growth becoming more linear in the 50s (and taking ~20yrs to kick in). When population growth is exponential everyone has opportunity to "move up the ladder". As the growth rate flattens, demand drops and things get more competitive. This combined with an economic/fiscal focus on GDP and "the stock market" meant workers wages had to bear the brunt, thus leading to a number of things like union busting.
This question surprised me. In that any one could read a random comment on the internet as anything other than opinion? There most certainly arguments to be in support or against (Reagan busting up the air traffic controllers is an easy example from that era) but the entire notion is clearly one sided and clearly not fact.
>In that any one could read a random comment on the internet as anything other than opinion?
Maybe? eg. something like "subprime mortgages caused the 2008 recession" would qualify as a fact. Maybe what the parent poster said was the academic consensus among labor economists, or is at least a serious competing theory among mainstream academics (ie. not something that only a few marxist economists believe).
I'm puzzled by this comment. You're seemingly trying to explain a secular trend sweeping across the Western world by pointing to a single short-term event that occurred in the U.S. and was but tangentially related to what's actually going on (returns to highly skilled labor have been going up, not down as we might expect from union busting activity!) That doesn't really make much sense, tbh.
The causal event for that was the discovery that the USSR was a hollow giant and the red scare not based in reality. After that communism lost alot of its fear-factor and a take-over was becoming ever more unlikely.
Time to hit the history books. 1980s the fear propaganda was still strong, but the three letter agencies had enough material to pass judgment on the USSR.
The three letter agencies may have known better, but they weren't setting wages for the country. And, as you said, "the fear propaganda was still strong". So I don't think your position can logically work if 1979 is the year things started to change for wages.
How would anyone possibly change the perception that you have to be a lawyer or MBA or you're useless? When looked at the way you suggest, this problem is enormous. I'm not sure we'd ever solve it. We just have to accommodate ourselves to a society with lawyers, MBAs, and software people everywhere.
Grows the pie, but only for people on the right side of the inequity divide. I would say tech is winner take all more than almost any other industry I can think of.
So for the people feeling the pressure of the inequality divide, there's little difference between these two. Unless they join the ranks of lawyers or engineers, there's nothing in it for them monetarily speaking.
The people get services that were unimaginable (or expensive and inferior, e.g. dedicated GPS navigators) for free, money-wise. If Google/Facebook/Amazon/... weren't providing value, they wouldn't be making so much money off the people who choose to use them. Tech is actually as close as it gets to literally creating and giving everyone free stuff, as far as the pie goes.
The theory is based on historical data, and I doubt that an end to middle class blue-collar work would apply to all that many historical cases.
But you might be onto something - elite overproduction could be a concession made by an elite that's facing a potential uprising - whether it's youth unemployment or a weak king or new technology arming the peasants then allowing the most ambitious potential revolutionaries a chance to advance into the elite is probably a good stalling tactic (but will eventually fail).
It's like if a company starts making everyone a "manager". Maybe the leadership is incompetent, and they are more focused on management than work. Maybe they are trying to raise morale by handing out pseudo-promotions. Maybe they can't attract new workers without giving them attractive job descriptions. Whatever the case, it's unlikely to be sustainable (either the management will collapse under its own weight, or the workers will realise their new titles aren't worth what they thought they were).
And yet it doesn’t look like highly educated but low paid people are the main source of instability. Kids wanting to take down statues do not cause more instability than football hooligans, and as such can be easily handled by the police.
Trump, Brexit or other forms of populism (say Le Pen, AfD, ecc…), which are the main source of political instability in the West, identify their enemies in the “intellectual urban elites” and look for support in the mythological “disenfranchised white working class”.
This article does a horrible job of explaining Turchin's ideas. It's not too many "brainy" people that are the problem. It's that if upward mobility becomes limited to those that have advanced degrees, and if there are an oversupply of people with advanced degrees, you will now have (at least) 3 groups of people: non-advanced-educated-but-not-good-enough, educated-but-not-good-enough, and elites.
The non-advanced-educated feel marginalized because it will be ridiculously hard for them to get the education, and as things get more expensive their livelihood will go down relative to the elites.
The advanced-educated-but-not-good-enough will feel marginalized because they spent their time and money and got nothing in return, and now have debt and degraded livelihood compared to the elites.
When enough people feel marginalized AND something happens that weakens the state's power/influence, political instability will occur.
It compounds in US/Europe with regards to education, given that these two groups are politically opposite of each other, and advanced education is becoming a barrier of entry to upward mobility.
Turchin's 2016 book Ages of discord explains these ideas in detail.
It's what happens when you have "advanced" degrees that are not actually useful in large numbers to society. We only need so many sociologists and critical race studies professors and political scientists. These jobs also happen to generally be supported off of societal productivity (i.e. taxes and charities) instead of growing the pie which means their supply is naturally limited.
Notice that even for STEM jobs which are strongly constrained by available capital, like structural engineering or petroleum engineering, the pay is substantially higher than the useless jobs and the competition is less. You don't have to go to an Ivy League to get paid $$$ in engineering.
If you want to lead a technical team or technical organization you should be technical. Developing people skills doesn't take a degree in gender studies. It merely takes giving a shit about improving and talking to people.
Non-technical leadership leading a technical company is why Intel is in the dire straits it is today. When you put a marketing person in charge of Xeon and they parrot about diversity instead of executing on the business it's obvious where the problem is. Notice all the competition is led by technical leadership: AMD is led by a PhD in EE, Nvidia a Masters in EE. Intel's former leadership was technical until they were pushed out by non-technical bean counters.
Technically, parts of the degree were wasted (everything to do with actual physics) and the maths education was just a side effect that could have been given more efficiently with a maths degree (or even some other kind of education).
Really? I got nothing with my top notch STEM PhD. Got hungry, homeless an sick.
But as mentioned by a friend. A STEM PhD must never be unemployed. There are always opportunities in the world. Be it in China or with Narcos in South America. There are opportunities. Never forget that! Nearly killed me that I forgot. There will always be one to pay you if you can deliver.
These forms of knowledge do grow the pie, they just haven't formed a monetization/product loop. The scarcity of jobs to fund their work (which we need vastly more of) is a market failure.
David Graeber (and others) make an adjacent criticism:
Lots of people would like to choose "caring" work. Teaching, healthcare, policy stuff, knowledge stuff, etc. Something meaningful and rewarding.
With rising inequity, only people who can afford higher education, who don't have to work to eat, can choose these "caring" career paths.
Some fraction of the resentment towards the "liberal elite" is from being denied access to these "caring" roles. Made worse by the obliviousness of people like me not even realizing there's a problem.
--
I regard both Turchin and Graeber's theories as complimentary. I also hope that leftists like me will dig into these social phenomenon.
Until we understand better, I'm content with very cheap higher ed, with some professions being subsidized. For example, I'm happy to pay people to become doctors (specialists). Society needs more. Students shouldn't be penalized, having to wait +12 years before starting families (or whatever).
> Lots of people would like to choose "caring" work. Teaching, healthcare, policy stuff, knowledge stuff, etc. Something meaningful and rewarding.
> With rising inequity, only people who can afford higher education, who don't have to work to eat, can choose these "caring" career paths.
> Some fraction of the resentment towards the "liberal elite" is from being denied access to these "caring" roles. Made worse by the obliviousness of people like me not even realizing there's a problem.
Is there really a phenomenon of people angry to the point of causing social instability because they have to work in a bank rather than teaching calculus in high school?
You have another group, the advanced-educated-and-good-enough-but-not-connected-enough-so-they’re-stuck-behind -someone-who-is-less-qualified. I could imagine they’re the group that feels worst.
Turchin is, of course, free to think whatever he wants (I haven't studied his ideas). However, I can't see how my statement applies in any way to either Bannon or Trump.
Trump is unsuspicious of having advanced education and qualifications, but instead was born into a millionaire family which allowed him to pursue whatever he wanted. If anything, he would be the person blocking a position from someone qualified but not well connected. He even ended up being president, in case someone forgot.
Bannon apparently served in the Navy, got a Harvard MBA, worked at Goldman Sachs. His wiki page starts "Stephen Kevin Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive, political strategist, and former investment banker, who served as the White House's chief strategist in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump". I'd say by most standards one would say he reached quite a number of things he set his mind to that most people don't. Again, hardly an example of someone who failed in his career because he was blocked by someone less qualified.
I am not interested in Turchin, I am not interested in a scholarly evaluation of Turchin's catalogue, I am not interested in studying 'Turchin's ideas' (all of which may be super interesting, but I have more pressing matters to attend to). I am instead interested in the ideas mentioned in another comment; I replied and added another one.
I never claimed to be perfectly aligned with your opinion. I just agreed that the person you were responding to was off, in that the issue isn't whether or not people are "good enough."
Trump circumvented the traditional process for becoming president by aligning with the underclass...
The elites made fun of him relentlessly. Bannon ran Breitbart out of a random townhouse basement and was denied press credentials by those empowered in the national association.
The elite tried to block both of them, and they were circumvented by interclass alliance. That's the entire idea of elite overproduction, which is what we are talking about.
Elite overproduction is basically when more people have the resources to grab power than the power structure allows to hold power.
Not arguing that trump is a victim, just saying he has been considered gauche and passé for a long while. Gauche and passé ends up just meaning "not elite."
If you make a million dollars a year running a plumbing business, you are rich, but you aren't elite. If you make 400k at Skadden, you are closer to being elite.
Again, completely different scenario than what I meant and discussed.
You can leave it to me to know what I meant when I threw "advanced-educated-and-good-enough-but-not-connected-enough-so-they’re-stuck-behind -someone-who-is-less-qualified" into the discussion, I don't really need an explanation of what I meant from someone else.
Any time I see a headline is from the Economist I go straight to the comments for the inevitable rebuttal of their oversimplifications or outright bias. Appreciate the book recommendation; just ordered it.
It's not like those "advanced-educated" that are left out are hating on the top elite of the advanced ("the great") that are "good". For starters, because those are too few, and they don't compete directly, plus they can see their merits.
So, usually it's "advanced-educated-and-perfectly-good" vs "advanced-educated-but-lucky-or-with-connections-and/or-family-wealth" where the discontent lies.
Thanks, good to hear there's more substance behind this than the article implies. The article lost any remaining credibility with me when the best example of radicalism they could find was Corbyn. As other comments here have said, that shows a strong lack of willingness to think critically about the current system - and a willingness to clutch at straws such as a theory about "too many educated people" to avoid that critical thinking.
Saying too many people are "brainier" than they are is probably the real issue.
Turchin's prediction:
> “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”.
...overlooks something key: they didn't produce an a new elite, only "elitists," who never quite arrive. The resentment from people who became middle class after graduating from debt funded college is the result of how all that work didn't deliver on the promise of upper-middle security. The Gen-X cliche of baristas with masters degrees has simmered for a couple of decades, and it has metastisized into a deep loathing for the working people Gen-X grads haven't been able to differentiate themselves from, and hence the "burn it all down," attitude you see in a lot of them. The coders and general contractors who didn't go to university who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real cultural factor, and a big part of the U.S. red/blue divide.
If you look up Girard and "mimetic violence," you can get a useful framework with predictive power on the dynamic they're describing. The promise of college and debt was they would be elevated into an elite, but of course, they weren't, and now these smart-enough and educated people bitterly hate what they call the "trash" and neighbors they still too-closely resemble, and who the remaining elite confuses them with.
The political instability aspect of it in the article is that if you want to see who is setting fires in cities and throwing rocks at police, it's people with just enough security and social capital to get away with it, but not enough to meet their self image as legit members of the elites their educations allowed them to percieve.
Brainy? No. Promised something and told it was because they were brainy? Probably.
> now these smart-enough and educated people bitterly hate what they call the "trash" (which I guess are the middle class, "general contractors", etc)
This isn't resonating with me. Generally I see those "baristas with masters degrees" (which I viewed here as an alias for the 60-70% of all degreed people who lean somewhat left) are typically advocating for policies to help the working class. It doesn't seem fueled by hatred for the working class.
I grew up with these people. They hate the working class. The “policies to help the working class” is legacy Democratic politics. Today, that’s rapidly changing, and they only care about the working class people if those people aren’t white. (See the reaction to JD Vance’s book.)
So did I. I grew up in the “most educated” city in America. I’ve really not seen this. Those I grew up with have strong opinions about my choice to work on oil rigs in Saudi Arabia but have been quite consistent in wanting job-, employment-, training- and relocation assistance for West Virginia coal workers. Who are quite white, statistically.
I have no idea who JD Vance is and I asked two-handfuls of my degrees friends, they haven’t heard either. Your impression of the situation doesn’t seem to resonate with my reality at all.
Hmm, are you sure "baristas with masters degrees" isn't meant literally?? I'm sure many lean left but only because university education seems to cause people to lean left in the absence of other factors like growing older, starting a family etc. When I see this phrase, at least to me it's not an alias for anything. It is meant quasi-literally, as "people with advanced training in a subject they cannot use".
I can think of many people I've known who ended up in this bucket over time. Most of them don't seem to be simmering with rage over it, but other than one, I wouldn't know them well enough to be sure. Of the people I know, barista is not the most common working class job they end up in. Many of them ended up as IT recruiters, for example.
>The coders and general contractors who didn't go to university who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real cultural factor, and a big part .of the U.S. red/blue divide.
Hardly. Those are just outliers. Even in spite of the college-educated barista trope, which is a favorite of the media and pundits when making a sweeping generalization about an entire generation, the data has consistently shown that college grads make more than high school grads and this gap has only widened since 2008.
OK, but what's the distribution of college graduate distribution? Is it bimodal? That is, is there a significant fraction of college grads who don't make more than high school grads? If so, those are the ones who are angry.
> college grads make more than high school grads and this gap has only widened since 2008
Problem is that it's not that college grads have made more and become more successful, but that good sustainable jobs for high school grads have completely vanished and a college degree is now the minimum requirement a high school degree once was.
Many people with business/social studies degrees are taking the jobs that were once filled with high school grads, and the high school grads are now just homeless. If I was 80k in debt and working at Star Bucks I'd be pissed too!
However, given the topic is "elite" production, at least some of those people would have got the high earning jobs anyway because university is used as little more than a finishing school by the parents before they parachuted their offspring into a cushy job somewhere inside the government or a large corporation via their contacts network. The actual degree is irrelevant to their earnings.
I don't think you're talking about Generation X. We were the last generation where more higher education made sense/paid off, on average. Also, the classism you describe seems antithetical to general Gen X attitudes.
> they didn't produce an a new elite, only "elitists," who never quite arrive. The resentment from people who became middle class after graduating from debt funded college is the result of how all that work didn't deliver on the promise of upper-middle security. The Gen-X cliche of baristas with masters degrees has simmered for a couple of decades, and it has metastisized into a deep loathing for the working people Gen-X grads haven't been able to differentiate themselves from
What were they expecting going into fields with no growth or market?
> The coders and general contractors who didn't go to university who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real cultural factor
Our industry was built by drop-outs, so there's a certain legend and expectation that the next Gates or Jobs will be one of them, but they are rare to encounter in real life.
Anecdotally, the level of resentment I've seen from masters CS grads towards more talented coders with no degree was pretty epic at my last company. I've also seen this get pretty ugly in the ML/deep learning community between the credentialed academics and the practitioners.
I don't have a college degree. Though I usually get jobs where I'm surrounded by people that have degrees or advanced degrees. I can recall a particular startup where I was the only person without a degree, the person that I worked for had an advanced degree. This person that I worked for always resented that I made about the same income without a degree. There is no way I could have ever reached management in that company without a degree - no matter how qualified or good, because of elitist bias.
The HR person let it slip to me one day that I was making $5k less than my boss. My boss had made comments about my salary given my position. We wanted to hire an Engineering Manager from outside the company, this person would not hire someone very qualified because he lacked a degree. I mentioned something in passing one day, joking, saying I wanted to be the CTO - this person told me 'fine, go get a PhD'. No one was going to advance to be equal to or beyond this person without an advanced degree.
> from masters CS grads towards more talented coders with no degree
A CS masters isn't necessarily signaling the right things [0] [1]. Especially if it's a "terminal" master (and not someone dropping out of a PhD).
> I've also seen this get pretty ugly in the ML/deep learning community between the credentialed academics and the practitioners.
Lots of institutions embarked on the ML bandwagon, but unless the credentialed academics have connections/worked at a serious lab, I much prefer practitioners.
You also see a lot of the opposite, tbh. Resentment in general tends to be largely driven by personal attitudes, regardless of one's actual circumstances.
Very true, and both sides are justified in their attitudes. You’re not necessarily better because you went to grad school, but you might have learned some things that you wouldn’t know if you just programmed cool stuff.
I find two expressions of this: over reverent attitude bordering on complete deference, and stubborn rejection of anything that sounds vaguely complicated.
I'm a self-taught coder, and I'll never forget years ago someone with an MIT degree turning to me with a look of mild indignation and saying "how do you know this stuff?"
This Economist article is from October of 2020. Peter Turchin is not a historian. He is instead in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Universtiy of Connecticut. He advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse. The Nature article from about decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a
A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/
Sone of the work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1] and some recent (2017) related work [2]. Finally, in his own words, a comparison of Psychohistory and Cliodynamics (2012) [3]
Came here to say this :). Especially with the Foundation TV series coming out now this could almost be a PR stunt.
The thesis seems sound, though. When you have a large number of people who have the aptitude and have invested heavily in joining the ranks of the elite (both financially and time-wise), and there's just not enough room at the top, what do they do?
We see that in India with the rise of a huge number of engineering colleges. There's a massive over-supply of engineers, so people who have invested in a masters degree at great cost and 5 to 6 years of studying wind up working in vocational jobs that could have been done with a six-month diploma / apprenticeship. They're not happy.
The thesis is also nothing new, it was developed in quite some depth by early 20th-century sociologists. It has since become unpopular however, largely because the very notion of identifiable "elites" inherently problematizes popular and widespread notions such as democratic representation, or social mobility.
the problem is that there is an elite to begin with. being highly educated should not make people feel entitled to benefits, but rather it should make them feel obligated to use their education to contribute to society.
if education is free or even comes with financial support then there is no need for higher salaries to compensate the expense. a computer science master and a master baker should have the same incentive.
This has not been and never will be the case because of leverage. A master baker can serve maybe a 100 people with an oven, a developer can serve 100 million with a RaspberryPi. Short of violence-enforced "equality" this simply can't happen.
that's an interesting argument, but i it doesn't add up. i only need one baker to cover all my daily need for bread, but the software that i use requires thousands of developers to maintain. so, yes, while a single developer can reach millions of people, that single developer only contributes a tiny fraction to the life of each of them.
you have to really look at the recipient side of things. how much of a factor is IT in the life of an individual, compared to other professions?
of course they are not all equal. a hairdresser is needed once a month, the baker daily, the doctor once a quarter, IT, well, depends on what kind of work i do. of course it's not all equal. but we also have many more programmers than bakers.
the value of each of those varies for each individual, but in the end it all balances out. i am not advocating that everyone should get exactly the same pay, but there is no reason that one particular profession must be strictly more valuable than another.
Yeah, this gets messed up when money is the expression of value. Any profession with leverage will make more money, without necessarily being more valuable. Same way a HFT/quant fund manager makes more than my kid’s schoolteacher, or even my kid’s doctor, but the teacher and doctor are far more valuable than the fund manager.
I understand why "psychohistory" would appeal to Asimov fans, but it means something like "history of the mind". Whereas "cliodynamics" means "the study of history as a dynamical system". If you want to say that the way people thought has changed over time -- the kind of thesis Adam Curtis would make -- then "psychohistory" is better. If you want to talk about an ODE model of society -- say, you want to show how rising grain prices caused the Arab Spring -- then "cliodynamics" is better.
The reason why it is called "cliodynamics" is because Turchin isn't the first person to have considered this topic.
The term "cliodynamics" comes from "cliometrics" (after the Greek god of history, Clio), which was a term invented in the 60s to describe the quantitative study of history (typically, economic history). Cliodynamics, the term invented by Turchin, seems to refer only to the background of those doing the studying (and using tools from the sciences) i.e. they are "scientists", not "historians".
Yup, I am reading Peter's historical dynamism, still light years away from the psychohistory definition, but it's on the direction and is a vast leap of the conventional history study. Note that well before Peter's work, there were many quantitative study of macro history trends. But I am an outsider, and not an expert, so do your research if interested. Starting from Peter and his works would be fruitful route (I find Peter's book give much better introduction to prior arts).
Yeah the problem is too many smart people, not the fucked up financial systems, terrible education systems, degenerate media cycles and huge bureaucracy, but that too many people are too smart.
Yeah let’s make sure we have an underclass of uneducated people so they don’t notice any of the problems, that will make sure there is less “political instability”.
I read Turchin's site extensively... and I can say this is NOT what this is about.
Turchin is talking about when you have too much elite in general, not necessarily smart or educated elite, compared to spots where the elite can fit, and then what happens because of that.
This applies to any leadership role.
For example, what happens when there is only one Emperor spot, but a handful of candidates?
They murder each other.
Now, what happens when you have THOUSANDS of candidates, as China once did in the past?
Well... then you end with civil war, in China's case more than once centuries-long civil war.
Now larger scale, what about non-king nobility? Like Dukes, Counts, and so on? Again, same thing, if you have too many nobles compared to physical places for them to rule, you end with more and more wars, as the nobles without a fief start to recruit people to attempt to take a fief by force or cunning.
Turchin mention advanced university degrees as a symptom of this, in a world where nobility doesn't exist anymore properly... what would be the USA equivalent of aristocrats or king candidates?
----
a non political example:
Suppose you have a military. What happens if you start to promote a ton of people to be general? If you have 10 high command spots, but 200 generals, how the 200 generals will sort out what 10 of them will rule?
Well the US Navy has 232 Admirals for only 254 commissioned warships.
Job title inflation is also common in many businesses. You have huge numbers of "Directors" and "Vice Presidents" with no direct reports and little real responsibility.
There is also the problem, that "hacking" the system is rewarded higher then adding to the system.
If you get a job at wallstreet, gambling the system, you will be higher rewarded in money and status, then if you joined a lab that researched fusion or asteroid mining.
Worser still, society will communicate to you, that you are a "sucker" for working so hard for so little.
This has nothing to do with "hacking" the system and wall street is not gambling the system - they provide value otherwise they would not exist.
I think it's more about utility. While the value of fusion research or asteroid mining is potentially very high, there is a large probability of failure. The risk adjusted return is actually quite low. Providing liquidity and services to markets has a higher risk adjusted return because it affects people now and with high probability.
> value of fusion research or asteroid mining is potentially very high, there is a large probability of failure
it's not that the probability of failure is high - more that the value creation is not capture-able by private interests.
Fusion research, or anything that is fundamental research leading to new tech, will unlikely to bring private wealth to those who fund it. Applied research, on the other hand, would. So you do see well paid researchers in fields, such as pharmaceuticals.
Wall-street investment bankers get paid a lot because all of the value that is created there get captured - very little of it flows out into society.
I think that the Economist headline misrepresents Turchin's theory. The issue is not that there are too many smart people, it is that there are too many university graduates who feel entitled to a limited set of niches in the upper strata of society. Those are two different things.
And reading between the lines, the issue is specifically that there are too many university graduates with degrees of "elite" image and prestige but very dubious usefulness otherwise, that essentially set them up to fail in modern society. An attitude of entitlement can be especially unattractive to many employers, and many universities do not exactly try to warn their students that they should avoid this.
I agree with that assertion: that universities are making up marketing BS and hurting people.
As a gateway to a high-paying job, a University degree is (in many cases: NOT ALL), more of a signal that the candidate is white, upper-middle or higher class, likely to not have a criminal record, likely to not have problems with mental illness (never mind substance abuse), and that's mainly what they're looking for, and why that gateway became such a high-demand commodity that it commanded a price that is often as much as buying a house. (easy access to student loans also probably played a role).
I say this as a person who thinks that every American should have an opportunity to go to college and get appropriate training for the career of their choice (as long as they otherwise meet qualifications). I think it should be "free" (and I think that business should pay into a tax-pool to fund the training of their workforce).
But I think that universities should ABSOLUTELY be tied down in how much they can charge for degrees, based on the actual economic value of that degree. If they train 100,000 underwater basketweavers, who make on average $15000/yr, then they sure as hell should not charge $100,000 for that degree, and they shouldn't be allowed to.
This market is horribly broken, and I don't think that it is presently workable without some much stronger government intervention. Otherwise, no player in this game has any incentive to change what it's doing. Since the government has a stake in having a viable and productive national labor-force, it's literally a matter of national security that this resource receive appropriate investment.
The alternative is to continue our downward spiral.
The best way to align supply with demand would be to eliminate the government intervention. It's government subsidies dished out in defiance of actual market demand that allows so people students to study underwater basket weaving simply because they find it interesting. If students had to rely on (normal) bank loans or corporate sponsorship that problem would dry up really fast.
Too many people believe those things are entitlements when in fact they are tradeoffs. Like half my high school graduating class dropped out of college or didn't even start and many make decent wages or have dual income with a significant other. Many of which own homes or live decently. None of which demanded free rent and a college education.
Sure, but why should someone who goes to university and studies, say, literature for 4 years feel more entitled to owning a house than someone who, say, did not go to university and instead read and studied literature on his own for 4 years?
I would imagine both groups would consider themselves equally worthy.
Where would you draw the line? Which classes of society do you deem unworthy of home ownership other than the aforementioned groups and (presumably) every group below them?
I don't think anyone should feel entitled to home ownership, but certainly the classes who voted for today's zoning/planning laws (pulling the ladder up behind them) are unworthy of it.
That's exactly the point of the comment above - own a house you need to be an 'elite'. So people trying to become 'elite' is really just people trying to own a house and get a tiny bit of stability.
Home ownership is within a couple percent of where it was in the 70's and 80's [1] and much higher than earlier in the centry [2]. People have selective memories and remember everyone buying into the housing bubble in the 90's but have forgotten about the crash after where they lost those houses.
The reality is that home ownership is the same or better than any time before the Clinton administration, but those who grew up in the boom have a mismatch between expectations and reality.
I don't see how that maps into the argument. First of all, you need to look into youth home ownership, not total home ownership, second of all you need to look into the rate of change and not the overall amount.
Beyond that, it's not arguable that you need to be into a so called 'elite' job to be able to afford homeownership in most of the country.
I think it maps onto the argument as an explanation for both 1) why youth feel entitled to homes and 2) why they are experiencing such disappointment.
Growing up through a bubble explains 1) and the rapid decline from the bubble popping explains the intensity of 2)*.
I agree that the youth ownership numbers are dismal and indicate housing is harder to get into for that age group[1]. On the other hand, ownership is going up for the elderly as fewer old folks fall into poverty and lose their homes, leading to a bit of a wash for the overall population.
It is hard to call home ownership an 'elite' while the majority of Americans are homeowners.
*There are a ton of other factors that play into the affordability crisis
-Increasing migration to more expensive urban areas.
-Housing stock not keeping up (NIMBY, regulation)
-Loss of blue collar jobs, and immigration depressing wages
I'm not even sure if he would argue that this is a bad thing?
I 100% think a society with a stratified lower caste could be more stable than one where everyone has equal resources - but I don't think that makes it better.
It's a bad thing if people feel entitled to things they cannot possibly have, of course. It's not even necessarily about how resources are actually distributed, it's just pointing out that we aren't supposed to be selling people a false bill of goods. Of course people can strive to be upwardly mobile and perhaps fail in these ambitions, but it should be a very clear, voluntary choice.
My argument does not preclude stratification as a concept - every competitive system has stratification by nature.
My point is that you cannot stratify people into two separate classes and then perpetually move one of those classes down into total barbarism and call it a better move than rewriting your existing inefficient system.
I'm not a believer in the idiotic communist ideology, and did not even mention equal resources in my post. Communism can burn, save for all of the people forced to live crippled lives under it. But you cannot have communism for 99.999% of people and true competitiveness for the leftover if you want a stable system. Specifically if you want a stable system.
Comparison without the means of acquisition will cause revolution.
Exactly, educated doesn’t mean schooled/credentialed. The word for this is “discrimination”— the more educated people we produce the less discriminating our institutions must be. If academia doesn’t discriminate the few from the many, it’s non-functional. Colleges are not to educate the public, they’re supposed to advance human knowledge. These are incongruent goals.
And those edits don't propagate to pages that are already open.
> You posted 20 minutes after I posted it.
GP could easily have taken 20 minutes to read the article and comments before wading in. I know I've posted replies after leaving a tab open for hours before.
Sure, but as a casual passer-by it seems like you're rationalizing the somewhat petulant comment from tpmx which did include those words: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27755083
You could have said that to the person complaining about 'weak sauce' in the first place. Or you could have applied it to my previous comment* instead of quibbling. It's a two-way street.
maybe some smart people are at the root of those problems. The huge bureaucracy is composed of mostly educated people. That was his point even though I don't agree with him.
Exactly - in the modern world if we chose to say tackle climate crisis like the moon shot or wwII production was tackled, we would likely cause a massive step up in labor consumption of educated elite. Maybe the core problem is one not of overproduction of one of poor allocation choices for how to use human capital in failing societies.
This is a very elitist and narrow way to look at society. It advocates to have an uneducated underclass that would not have the tools to improve or protest their situation.
Brave New World is a good book to understand why this is a bad idea. It seems that Orwell and Huxley books are being used as manuals instead of the cautionary tale that they are.
Not quite the way I'm reading it. It's a variation on "if everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow" line. If the entire population wants to be doctors, we already know that's not going to work. And if everyone finds out they can't be a doctor after 10 years of medical school, where the amount of time and money spent has now created a sense of entitlement to the life of a doctor, the people are going to be pretty pissed off when you ask them to be fruit pickers or sanitation workers instead. Same goes for lawyers, engineers or any other profession that has a supply-demand imbalance.
Oversupply of lawyers seems to be a better example.
Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new laws that drive need for more lawyers ... but of course up to a point, and some of the graduates will find they cannot pass the bar exam or progress towards the coveted positions.
Suddenly you have some very unhappy people who know enough about the law to do some real harm to the system out of spite.
"Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new laws that drive need for more lawyers"
Totally agree. I think laws would be quite different if the majority of lawmakers weren't lawyers. A lot of law seems to be designed to only be navigated by lawyers.
Is it better to have an undersupply of doctors leading to overworked doctors and generally worse medical outcomes or to have an oversupply, with some of the excess going on to do, e.g. research or administration? Exactly matching supply and demand is practically impossible, so which side is it safer to err on?
It's obviously better to have a, say, 1% oversupply than a 1% undersupply, but that's not an interesting question to answer, really. The better question would be: is it better to have a 1% undersupply than a 15% oversupply? (Or some other larger and less obvious mismatch) It would be clearly bad to paperclip-optimize doctors -- everyone must go through all 10 years of post-secondary education to be a doctor and then after they have done so, we will be pick the best 3% of them to be practicing doctors while telling everyone else to find another career is incredibly wasteful, as is anything significantly in that vein.
It's rather meaningless to talk about oversupply or undersupply of doctors. Demand for healthcare services is effectively infinite. The problem is that we burn up most healthcare resources on treating preventable chronic diseases, and on futile end-of-life care.
Rather than on supplying more doctors we would probably get better results for society as a whole with more dieticians, personal trainers, and substance abuse counselors.
An important consideration is that those doctors could have been something else.
If you buy into the notion that intelligence follows a normal distribution, and that people below some threshold are fundamentally locked out of professions, then it becomes important how society allocates that top x% of intelligent people, because they are in short supply.
A society that underproduces physicists in favor of doctors might find their economy is unable to grow rapidly enough to pay for the hospitals those doctors need to operate in. One that overproduces amazing musicians might find that their cultural influence helps to attract smart people from other countries.
We see this issue in America too. Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds. That isn't exactly the kind of behavior that will lead to the technological improvements our society will need to continue to grow.
Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds.
This seems overly reductionist. A case can be made that these games are overall working to optimise the allocation of resources, which itself contributes to growth.
Yeah, these people might be ensuring more optimal prices for corn, and maybe that's a good thing. But in doing that, they aren't doing something else which may be more important for society.
My point was that very smart people are a finite resource. And misallocating them can have devastating effects on a society.
How each person assigns value to different professions is entirely subjective. Almost every industry has its own bell curve, the market determines how tall/shifted each is.
"if everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow"
I see that a lot with our interns. A lot of them are trained and motivated to "lead", "facilitate" and "collaborate" but not so much about doing actual work.
But it's no wonder when you look at the way things work in most companies. Managers make way more money than non-managers. And a lot of managers didn't cut it as software engineers so they got pushed into management where they suck too but make good money.
This culture is heavily promoted by management consultancies, who seem to think nothing of sending a 24 year old "consultant" into large corporations to tell them how to run their business.
Look at most planned utopian societies. They crash and burn because everyone wants to be a leader / thinker, not a doer, at least not of non-interesting stuff.
The title is bad. You can be brainy and do menial work. Really, too many people who think they are above non-fulfilling work is bad. You need people who are used to selling their minds and bodies for money- in the “I work here because I have a family to support” sense of the word.
At least 80% of programming is menial. At least. The interesting bit where you understand the problem and find the best solution virtually always takes far less time than actually banging through the code. nevermind documenting it, testing it, etc. The hardest part is simply not screwing up.
I feel blessed if 5% of my day involves actual critical thinking.
If society "need" people to do non-fullfilling work it should compensate them well for it. Amazon need people to do menial work at starvation wages so that Jeff Bezos can grow his fortune, but that is not a societal need.
Well I would like to point your attention to one little fact.
Jeff Bezos is not buying crap on Amazon and he is not demanding lowest prices or free delivery.
Amazon needs people to do menial work at starvation wages so that bunch of other people with money to spend on crap from overseas could do it for cheap.
Seems that having cheap crap from Asia is a societal need.
Not defending anyone, just taking a different point of view into consideration.
Yes, add to it that when Bezos start selling shares - because he does not have it in cash burried underground or mansions like Escobar - it will turn out it is not billions people think about it will be a lot lot less.
I think there are a lot of fullfilling work. Certainly more than the man power and resources our society can meaningfully assigned to them.
But the problem is that the system forces upon a lot of members a rather distasteful attitude and practical matters that drive them away. Often, one would find certain things lacking monetary rewards are fullfilling, but were drove off because they are in a social circle that exerts pressure. This actually happen more often in China than US.
For example, one is forced to earn money for their offsprings. But to do that one is allowed to do a lot of work that is not really fullfilling by design. Like coding for people to click ads. I am not saying all of the work done for people to click ads are not fullfilling, it's just the percentage is clearly larger than what we want, and is growing still.
From the system thinking perspective, the time for rethinking, a little bit about changing the social rewarding system probably is worthwhile.
That's one ingredient, sure. But speaking as a millennial, there was plenty of propaganda in American schools that made it seem like if you weren't working in an office, you failed at life. Now we have people who worked in offices throughout their 20s, running and screaming from those office jobs to discover that there is fulfillment in real work.
Problem is, lots of people still believe having callouses on your hands make you a second class citizen or sub-human since your opinion no longer matters.
And labourous jobs dont need community to be fulfilling. Lots of folks enjoy work working, house renovation and their own property maintenance for their own benefit. That and it's a free workout a lot of times.
Brave New World was not written initially as a dystopia. Huxley was a member of the elite and was writing what amounted to a pamphlet of where we were all going, influenced along the way by the writings of Carroll (Tragedy & Hope), who told the tale of the elite cabal of banksters and other social engineers and how their various iterations formed and dispersed, their history, in sum.
Huxley's editor said it'd never sell, so he added the plotline from the perspective of one man who wanted to break free and made the entire thing dystopic.
I believe the signs are all there that many of the real Team Elite really do want Brave New World-esque domination, with a tiny group of truly free elite managing the masses as though they were cattle.
What are the signs, in your opinion? I keep hearing people say that a group of elites wants to be in control. Seems pretty unlikely--elites have better things to do than control people, the control people are lower down, or narcissists like the orange-haired guy--but even if they want it, it seems unlikely that they will get it. It just sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I'd be interested in seeing some actual claimed signs, because so far you're the first to offer to back up the claim.
The Economist really misrepresents Turchin's theory by framing it as an issue of there being too many "brainy" people. Turchin's theory has more to do with overproduction of university degree holders, not with overproduction of smart people. Those are two different things. As far as I know, Turchin is not advocating for maintaining some sort of exploited underclass. More than 30% of U.S. adults have at least a bachelor's degree - about double the fraction that had one 40 years ago - which means that a bachelor's degree has limited value as a badge for gaining entrance to the higher strata of society. Note that this is independent of the question of whether it is good or bad for university degrees to be badges for entrance to the higher strata of society. In any case, the relative social value of a university education has massively dropped over the years.
The underclass in BNW isn't what I would describe as uneducated though. Everyone was essentially a specialist or technician dedicated to a field of work. There was no such thing as being unemployed or underemployed, they were all engineered and educated to do exactly what they were intended to do. They probably couldn't even conceive of their situation needing improvement.
"Brave New World is a good book to understand why this is a bad idea. It seems that Orwell and Huxley books are being used as manuals instead of the cautionary tale that they are. "
This, 100%. Turns out turning fiction to reality is a profitable endeavor.
Sure. But setting a goal of eliminating it with the purpose of driving elite importance as low as possible seems to me the most ethical way of dealing with the problem of elite overproduction.
Additional measures may be useful as well, of course.
When there's "blue collar overproduction" due to outsourcing and automation of manufacturing jobs, it's not a big deal because they can just learn to code, but when there's "elite overproduction" we need to wring our hands and talk about how this is terrible? Sorry, but I'm not buying it.
The Economist can't quite bring itself to say that educated proletarians are more of a political threat to the real elites (their target audience) than uneducated proletarians.
Those "educated" proletarians, at least in my experience, are no more educated than the "trailer trash" they mock, despite their degree. They read Marx in college and start parroting the talking points of choice of their political candidate.
You can tell when someone has actually thought through their political opinions when they don't all align on one side of the political spectrum.
That's pretty much how it is, yes. The class for elite that the article uses is meaningless, a programmer or a sysadmin is not an elite in any meaningful way.
That's been a major source of unrest in some of the Arab countries, notably Egypt. They overproduced university grads without an economy that could use them.
This is not a new observation. Eric Hoffer made it in "Working and Thinking on the Waterfront" (1959).
Being smart does not equal being rich. Being rich does not mean being elite. Being elite is always "extraordinarily difficult" - from getting "advanced degree" there is still long way to being "elite".
Having a degree does not mean one is smart, it does not mean someone will get a job. Maybe we should put more effort into explaining life to people or actually start making them smart instead of "smart". If people would be really smart they would know how much effort is needed to become elite in any discipline.
I personally feel like college institutions get way too much freedom to act as predatory as they do regarding student loans and education. So many 18 year olds are told to go to college and get a degree only to come out a 22 year old with no work skills or legitimate life experience unless they were fortunate enough to get an internship. Then they have to eventually either swallow their pride and work a garbage paying job for a while or get lucky working for somewhere that actually pays decently in wage and/or experience.
I'm currently a return student, and based off of the data my school collected for the 2019 year, the top majors were: Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Organizational Leadership, and Nursing.
General business degrees are as worthless as english degrees. They don't teach you anything about actual business and you will not be able to just get a job. You'd have a better shot beating out external candidates applying from within at a low level position...almost every time. Psych and Bio, predominantly taken by females at my school (almost 80%). Again, another worthless field unless you go on to get a MS or Ph.D...of which none at this school do because it's a very low end state school. So there's another thing schools forget to mention about certain degrees. The next one is a general business degree for online transfer students at most schools in the area who just want to check off a "I have a Bachelors" box at application time. Then Nursing (again, predominantly women) which is actually a very hard field to pass but is basically a golden ticket to employment universally here. But that doesn't even hold a candle to those 4 ahead of it.
This base set of data shows that schools are marketing toward the undecided crowd or the people without the jaded understanding that real life can be a bitch. It doesn't care what you think should be the rules. And these schools take extreme advantage of it. Not to mention these schools get tax payer funding but have virtually no oversight as to how the school runs things. The head chair of my Comp Sci department is a guy with a Ph.D in physics! I know that's fairly normal, but it's pretty ridiculous that this guy is making decisions on us having to take an AI class over advanced database administration or making InfoSec students know OOP and programming.
I kind of have an issue that when faced with a steep rise in educated people who find that there is no room for them in the old structures and thus are frustrated, we blame and "overproduction" of educated people and not the old structures. Even the naming tries to force that framing.
Apply this to the time when most people couldn't read and you were a dangerous radical if you taught workers, blacks and women how to read because they would "no longer be content with their place in life". I think most people on this site would agree that keeping people uneducated just so they don't start realizing how unfair their lot is would be morally wrong and that the correct option is right the unfairness...right?
There is a huge difference there though. Teaching people to read actually does make them enormously more educated. On the other hand, putting people through university does not necessarily make people even slightly more educated. Most people I know who are university graduates are not what I would call educated in any real sense and I doubt that they were significantly more educated when they left university than when they entered it.
BTW, I did not downvote you. I do not know who did, but personally I do not downvote.
But this meme that university likely doesn't teach you anything...it's so baffling to me, like, university does. It imply smarts, but not everyone who went to highschool reads and I feel like at least on this website people should get intervention effectiveness and probability etc. Just because university education isn't ideal and people might disagree whether the education people receive there is useful or marketable doesn't change the fact that if you graduate from a serious university or community colleague it is likely you'll have learned self management skills as well as whatever was in your classes.
I've once seen a talk by a German soldier coming back from Afghanistan and he talked about what big difference it maae that in Germany almost everyone trains their ability to focus on someone speaking for 30+ minutes, discussing how he had to learn to triple check his local co-soldiers who hadn't had that luxury actually got the mission briefing. Even if you just learn to binge learn and puke out knowledge in tests that can come in quite handy later on, and the often maligned humanities actually matter if you are interested in a nuanced and continually evolving look of humans onto themselves. So I find this meme that university is worthless quite damaging and not really trustworthy. People can be uncultured swine, idiots and dicks at any educational level, it doesn't necessarily mean they didn't benefit from their education.
The fact that the US puts you heavily into debt to get that education is another question that I'll leave untouched here since dang asked me repeatedly to steer clear of predictable controversies
I think people too often conflate education with productive (building human capital).
On the other hand, putting people through university does not necessarily make people more productive (in the economic sense). To make people more productive, you need to match the skills and knowledge imparted with a unfilled demand.
The problem rises when education is co marketed as an opportunity for personal development and career development people don't realize until after which ones they got.
Many professors imbue their students with the idea that, after graduation, they will automagically, immediately and irrevocably be part of the elite.
This claim is utterly false, however it adds value to the professor's job and doesn't cost him anything. Some even use it in a "positive" way, to express "work hard, learn thoroughly, you will be an important part of society".
Many graduates think they are entitled by being so, and as it is not the case they judge that others unjustly mistreat or even betray them.
Only if whatever enhances their intelligence also amplifies their ambition, like in the Wraith of Khan. Which seems to be the current direction of US education system. Foreign-educated tech immigrants are not throwing any fireworks at rallies.
I think that’s a given, isn’t it? When most people (in the US at least) are financing their education via loans if they’re going to take out increasingly larger loans they’re going to have to expect more in return in order to pay those loans back. I don’t know I would call that “entitlement” though.
High Risk != High Reward. There are far too many college educated people in the US that assume this. I walked in getting my degree knowing full well I was paying simply for the paper and the potential for getting a job in my field. I didn't walk in like I did the first time getting my associates degree believing I'd be making $50k upon graduation.
I know this is just a typo/autocorrupt (and goodness knows I’ve had plenty of those in my comments here, some spotted only after the edit window closes), but this does sound like an plot for either The Lower Decks or Rick & Morty.
But to your actual point: I agree, I don’t think genius is correlated with corrupted power. High-IQ watering holes like HN and Less Wrong may be filled with people whose ambitions include want to radically change the world (and HN being part of Y Combinator suggests a desire to get rich doing so), but they don’t give me the vibe of wanting to rule it like the character of Kahn.
> [...] but this does sound like an plot for either The Lower Decks or Rick & Morty.
Rick and Morty prefers starting with an existing title and then cramming one (or more) of the character's names in, whether it makes sense or not, and sometimes avoiding a more reasonable mutation for one that's nonsense. In this case, if they really wanted to use this title, I'd expect them to end up with something like "The Rick of Khan" purely so they could match the R sound on "wrath" and the dual consonants at the end of the word.
Extreme, real example of this pattern from the current season: "Mort Dinner Rick Andre". They've turned it into grammatical nonsense so they can make some very tenuous word-sound connections (especially on "with" -> "rick"—it's there, but wow, that's a stretch)
Sure, but I mean the plot, not the title. A ghost of changed-just-enough-to-avoid-copyright-infringement-but-still-obvious Khan seeking revenge feels very much the sort of thing they’d do.
I'd just like to point out that enormous numbers of people doing basic, physical, labor today would be considered highly educated and worldly were they dropped into anywhere in the world up to about the end of the 15th century. Worse, many of the facts they just know from pre-school or watching Sesame Street would be considered heretical and dangerous and land them in trouble in short order.
“I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off.”
They would be considered mad and certainly not educated; an educated person of that time would have a good command of Latin, which we do not teach anymore.
Standards for "looking educated" shift all the time.
They might not look educated to the educated of the time, but laborers who had no schooling wouldn't necessarily know. They'd probably be really superstitious and suspicious if the person didn't show proper deference to the gentry and the religious authorities, though.
While this is true compared to past societies, the only frame that matters for us right now is the present. Relatively speaking, I am also fabulously wealthy and I eat better than Kings. But I still rent a one bedroom apartment and can't afford a home.
Obscurantism isn't anything new, over to the East Chinese ancient philosopher LaoZi famously quipped in 65th chapter
interpretation may vary, but looking it naively and translating directly comes to
those who are good at ruling, kept people stupid. for knowledge make them harder to rule.
for those oppose this translation, argues on the word "ignorant" and it's definition by Laozi which meant earnest rather than ignorant.
So it's really advocating an honest, earnest society with high trust model where ruler and it's populace cooperate.
But the fact remains both interpretation exists, and I'd wager the current Chinese government is the supporter of the former naive translation.
Anyway just some knee jerk thoughts reading this article, it's always fascinating to see different culture collide on the same pain points.
If you mean literally the future depicted by Star Trek, then, certainly not. It's not stated for sure, but I'd bet money on the activity directors on Risa [0] not having PhDs or equivalent.
But, if, by "Star Trek future," you just mean a post-scarcity future, then, maybe? There would be no reason everyone should need to be a PhD, but also no reason why everyone couldn't be [1].
[1]: Everyone with the intellectual capacity, that is. One certainly wouldn't expect severely developmentally delayed individuals to possess graduate-level knowledge of any subject. Gradeflation only goes so far. :-P
I would say if you have space faring society and you put them on star ships like the Enterprise, you put those Phds on the super expensive ships.
In the "Star Trek" you don't see broad society, sometimes you see normal people, but series is mostly officers.
You don't want Phds only society because that is a lot of waste. From my point of view bachelors or engineering degree is mostly what will be needed in the future.
Because for me Phds are mostly on thought level of someone who has done bachelor. Staying in academia is a career choice and not that you are chosen to become Phd because you were super smarter than others. It also turns out that to be successful Phd it is more about politics at the university that "beeing ultra smart". True that you still have to be smart to play politics but don't have to point fingers at stupid politicians that handle that as well without having even masters degree.
Ph.D.'s are not just bachelor-level. A Ph.D. teaches you the ability to learn to become an expert. A bachelor's teaches you how the field thinks, which is not the same thing. I tried doing research for my Master's, it was (in retrospect) total amateur hour. My professor suggested I write a summary paper of the literature the next semester, and I learned how I didn't know a thing. Recently I've noticed that my dad (Ph.D.) goes about learning things completely differently than me; I just bumble around and read stuff, he figures out who the important people are and reads that (among other things).
How it is different from what I described as a career choice?
I chose career in building web applications, this is what I am proficient at and I learned it on the job/on my own.
If I would choose to follow Ph.D. I would optimize different things just like your father. Well I believe your father is not proficient at building web applications and I don't think he could be as proficient as me in 6 months. The same for other things I could not become professional football player in 6 months or conduct research in proficient way.
In the actual space program of the time pretty much everyone was a Ph.D. as well as a peak physical specimen.
In Star Trek's future, space travel is commonplace and there are almost certainly non-experts in starship crew roles; Ensign Redshirt, who gets killed by the planetside monster, probably doesn't have an advanced degree.
Yes, we should basis reality on a fictional story... totally makes sense. If we're going to go that route, I say we start throwing politicians in volcanos as the starting point. It worked against Sauron.
>"I say we start throwing politicians in volcanoes as the starting point."
Maybe you're on to something....
Jokes aside, whenever people point to "Star Trek" as an example of post-scarcity society I recoil at just how over-simplified and not well thought out the comparison is.
I mean, it's not like it's bad to daydream the "what if", then work backwards to see if it's even possible in the real world... but what irks me is how anyone imagines any form of gov, society, or industry just needs a Thanos snap to fix them. Like Jesus Christ, watch an overview video that explains the difficulty of grocery store logistics. That's a sliver of the difficulty to run a city, state, province, country or the goddamn planet. To imagine a writer or two, with zero political, business or logistics background "figured it out"... I won't use the r word only because that insults the mentally handicapped with how stupid this line of thinking is. We're talking about the same people who get basic physics and electronics wrong on their show all the time. "Its okay, we figured out how to create the perfect society in our fictional tv show." And people take it seriously... these same folks should watch Vikings and vote for that society to be implemented. I'd enjoy that.
I do find this illuminating, though, because if someone fundamentally believes problems are caused by a lack of resources - or more specifically a lack of access to resources - then it makes perfect sense to them to think post-scarcity will be a paradise. They're looking at the problems in a fundamentally different way than you or I are.
A long time ago, when the whole reality tv thing was taking off, there were a lot of those rich wife of wherever shows. You want post-scarcity examples, check out them bitches. A coworker back then told me he thinks it has something to do with no real problems, thus they're bored. That boredom from real, actual problems, causes people to be... well, batshit crazy. 10+ years later, I see it repeatedly in real life. If you have no strenuous issues, you turn either crazy or a depressive lump. Humans need difficult goals. Making sure you have good livable conditions is an easy one, but obviously this shouldn't be insanely difficult either. I also believe that's why men at a certain age are perpetually doing home improvements. It fulfills that instinctual need to strive for better living conditions. I think other lofty goals are important too. But this is a massively huge topic beyond HN posts.
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the <people> would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
Anytime anyone posits post-scarcity society I cringe a little. Human wants are infinite; atoms on Earth are finite (and take considerable time and energy to move around).
So what % of the population was farmers in 1500? probably like 80%. Today its 2%. Eventually a similar thing has and will happen to all manufacturing.
Today we have instead millions of programmers and teachers etc etc. This trend towards increased education is due to the technological support structure.
If you run this trend forward even 50 years what jobs do you really think will exist that wont basically be scientifically or academically inclined?
Except trends dont account for humanity and general shit hitting the fan. We are living in the safest times ever. Even the world wars aren't enough to topple off the last 100 years are the safest in human history, on average. We are due for a massive war or two really soon if we are relying on trends. Covid is a small, kinky lovetap on the ass when it comes to pandemics of the past. Most countries haven't seen a famine in like 2 or 3 generations. What we saw the last 1.5 years wasn't famine, just hoarding mixed with logistical failures.
Intersaller is probably more on the mark. Blight striking nearly every staple food is the real horror in the night. Cavendish bananas are under massive threat of a fungal disease wiping them out, forever. The same thing can happen at anytime to other overproduced mono-crops.
But then let's take humanity at it's current state. If everyone believes working with their hands is beneath them, are we really going to reach automation peak? Ignoring the scifi fantasy of skynet ai, you really think there wont be exploitation? The one thing humans are brilliant at, it's exploiting a system. You have to pacify a human to stop them from min-maxing. It's what we do. We are already seeing the adverse affects of too many systems online. Ransomware is not a problem, it's a goddamn well oiled industry. The future luddite wont just break a loom or two. They can stop fuel for tens of millions of people. Turn off cooling/heating to homes. And if wireless bots run farms... well, I dont think you need a good imagination to figure out what will happen there.
Institutions have embedded growth obligations they can't meet, and thus are forced to lie to everyone to stay alive. Is it really surprising that all the people lied to might be upset when they don't get to live the life they were promised?
My pet idea is that our current world order (on average) has been great at lifting people out of poverty BUT ALSO great at keeping those at the top, at the top. And this looks great on paper: let the pie grow instead of taking from some to give to others.
But the result is: some people stop being able to climb the ladder, and some seem happily stuck at the top.
Maybe we need to bump the definition of "elite" so that so many self-aggrandizing academics don't self-select into it. The problem is not an overproduction of elites but one of consumers and followers. The world needs more builders.
Hard times create strong people = 1910-1940s
Strong people create good times = 1950s
Good times create weak people = 1970s
Weak people create hard times <- you are here
The problem is that the monetary system is ending and it desperately tries to propagate itself by promoting/enriching people who are able to maintain the illusion of normalcy which keeps everything together. It becomes increasingly difficult to find people who are capable of such an extreme degree of corruption and hypocrisy. The system ends after it runs out of corrupt people to promote. In the meantime, this systematic promotion of corrupt people creates political instability.
I wonder if the economists have ever considered a society where brainy people are happy and proud to perform basic sustenance work- construction, manufacture of textiles, farming, driving, etc.
I don't think the issue is brainy people doing those jobs per se, it's brainy people spending years and a small fortune for a degree, and then end up performing that kind of work anyways.
I would guess working class white people in the 1950s US were overall more content than today, even though many fewer of them had college degrees. They were happy performing "sustenance work", because they were able to start those jobs out of high school, support a family, buy a house, etc.
(Massive caveat for the people who were excluded from this system back then.)
That sounds like Japan. You could have lads that would have been destined to be astrophysicists or computer architects performing 'working class jobs' like making chefs knives or growing bonzai trees. Skills that are far more modest than their potential.
I have noticed the same thing. I just don't see any reason why, across a span of a 60 year career, you can't do both at the same time- part time astrophysicist, part-time knife maker. I'd repair potholes or monitor an industrial loom for 2 days per week if I could take the rest of the time off.
I can appreciate there is a huge amount of skill and knowledge making a knife/bonsai but I do believe there is more required of both such attributes to be an astrophysicist.
I am closer to a computer architect than an astrophysicist in qualifications, but I can confirm from recent experience: I have no ability to keep a Bonsai tree alive.
I think the “primitive” skill closest to the kind of mathematical thinking an astrophysicist (or mathematician) employs would be advanced knotwork. Mental geometric/topological/spatial manipulations are key to clever insights and critical to figuring out knots.
(This can be taught to/learned by some chimpanzees, BTW. …but I think there are no such examples in the wild without substantial human contact.)
Music. There was a time when arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music were all considered essential, and most importantly, interrelated, mathematical arts, taught as the Quadrivium.
Today we teach arithmetic to first graders, or earlier, start learning basic geometry in grade school and get the full course on geometry around 7th or 8th grade.
Music, of course, is not part of "STEM" and is no longer considered a valuable thing to learn, and astronomy, if it's taught at all, tends to be "here is the sun, the moon, and planets. Memorize this mnemonic for the names for the planets: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. Whoops, I mean Just Served Us Noodles", and most people who go into astronomy don't really get courses on it until they enter college.
Also I think the parent post is ignoring generally accepted realities of the Japanese higher education system.
The hardest part of the top tier universities is getting in. Being an actual university student is the time in life when most Japanese slack off, get part time jobs and devote lots of attention to their hobbies. Skipping class is normal in most departments and largely what you get your degree in is meaningless.
Japanese university grads merely have to graduate and based on the school they went to will determine which prestigious companies they can successfully apply to. New grads apply to the company, not a specific position and companies allocate their new hires based on what positions they need filled.
Basically, those that are more "brainy" need a higher level of mental stimulation in order to not be bored. Being given too much mental stimulation relative to your intelligence/skills results in anxiety. The sweet spot is somewhere in between and we seek this sweet spot (or at least stumble upon it and remain sticky to it).
People then sort themselves over time into these buckets s/t (generally), the brainy people end up doing brainy things, and the not-so-brainy people do less-brainy things. Reversing of roles would be mutually detrimental to both parties.
I don't think I agree with this assessment. I myself am "brainy", but working for actually useful endeavors is easy to balance with a rich, involved life. I can happily dig rocks out of the ground in the morning and write plays in the evening.
The difference is that the rock-digging is primarily for myself and my family, rather than for shareholders. Would "brainy" people need a higher level of mental stimulation if they were doing road-building work on their own street? I certainly wouldn't be happy as a truck driver, but I could easily work as a truck driver for a month straight if the reward was significant time off that I could spend with my family and friends.
I'm not doing a great job at explaining this- a lot of people have been trained to believe in the necessary division of labor, but their belief that they could never do manual labor allows the overlords of society to keep everyone in the rat race. If you think you could never work in a textile factory because you need more mental stimulation than that, then you won't ever consider a vision of society where you help produce textiles.
If people really want a ten-hour work week, we need to be building everything that we use in our society for ourselves, not relying on serfs in foreign countries to do the grunt work while we do "stimulating work", i.e. building elaborate processes for white collar companies providing services that we don't actually need.
I watched a thing on youtube regarding luxury goods manufacturers as the ultimate slave makers. Not because of the obvious sweat shops, but because they can convince smart/rich people that they're still inadequate and need to work even more so they can buy whatever the hell is being pushed. I thought it was an interesting concept, not 100% onboard, but interesting.
The real truth is that brainy people need a way to blow off that brainy steam, and it kinda doesn't matter if it's designing a novel WMD or playing a board-game.
I'd argue on that basis that stimulating board-games can save the world.
If I could make the kind of money I make in software doing some kind of hands on manual labor I'd be all over it, honestly. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing.
I've said it in a few other comments- everyone has a very, very standard rat-race vision of what a "job" is. You, other commenters that are downvoting me, and the gentlemen you worked with all have the conception that a "job" must be a 40-hour/week, 261 day/year commitment to a set of tasks. (I'm not sure that you agree with them or not, based on what you said.)
I do not agree that society must be set up in this manner. Each job produces a good or a service. In order to produce that good or service, a certain amount of raw materials and a certain number of skilled labor hours must be expended to produce it. It is more efficient, from a scaling perspective, to hyper-specialize and make the same people do the same drudgery day-in-day-out, which is why those gentlemen were stuck in that job. The market makers demanded efficiency, and things fell into place such that those gentlemen were pigeonholed into being grass-planters.
The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society. Those guys have to plant grass all day every day because if they don't, they can't buy food, afford shelter, have a doctor look at them, or receive medical supplies. I am certain that we must find a way to look past this system to achieve any of the high-minded goals that people like to argue over, like the 4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger, or...
Huh, I didn't realize that we didn't have any issues in the US with people having AC in their house or receiving medical care.
Come on, man. This is simple. I recently got a $10,000 hospital bill for an ultrasound, for which insurance decided I owed $1800. It doesn't cost $10,000 for an ultrasound, that's a made up ratio calculated by accountants trying to maximize their firm's ROI. An ultrasound costs {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and operation}, none of which require anyone to work constantly; the market has simply set it up that way because everyone working constantly yields great market valuations in the system that the owners of the markets set up.
A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine, border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and everyone else does not require all of the labor hours that are presently expended in the world.
>Huh, I didn't realize that we didn't have any issues in the US with people having AC in their house or receiving medical care.
It happens, but the asphalt guy probably has coverage, like 92% of Americans. [1] There are a long list of simple solutions that can increase this percent and bring costs down, but people working less isn't on it as far as I'm concerned. I just don't see the connection.
>A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine, border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and everyone else does not require all of the labor hours that are presently expended in the world
If anything, bringing the costs of goods down and increasing access to them will increase the number of labor hours needed. More and cheaper ultrasounds means more {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and operation}, not less.
I think we're agreeing here too, and that's the point of my main comment. If we both agree that more ultrasounds may be needed, then let me stop on this hedonic treadmill of producing slight increases in code efficiency or tapping new markets that don't need to be tapped, and just work on the ultrasounds.
I don't need fast foods restaurants, television, professional sports, overnight shipping, cheap smartphones, endless software updates, new computers, new cars, etc. Cut the parasitic, hedonic treadmill of consumption and you free up billions of labor hours that could instead work on {materials, refine, assembly, shipping, and operation} and then just go home afterwards and talk to their families or work on their own projects.
Apparently there are presently 9.82 million unemployed Americans. Cut the ones that can't work (either because of character issues or because of disability issues), add the rest to the pile of people theoretically freed up by no longer producing piles and piles of useless crap and entertainment, and you've got a tremendous amount of intellectual capital available to work on real goods and services.
There's an indoctrination aspect to this; people would have to be convinced that they don't need all this crap, and I admit that's a hard sell.
>If we both agree that more ultrasounds may be needed, then let me stop on this hedonic treadmill of producing slight increases in code efficiency or tapping new markets that don't need to be tapped, and just work on the ultrasounds.
Their in lies the "Hard Problem". The unemployed and uninsured guy can't pay for an ultrasound, but there are millions of people willing to line up for the next candy crush clone or similar garbage product. Cash is the incentive to make more ultrasounds, but that guy doesn't have it.
You can tell someone that they would feel better after volunteering or working at a homeless shelter than playing candy crush, but like you said, it is a hard sell.
It is temping to say that the government should get into the ultrasound business, but IMHO, you will just get government brand ultrasounds at twice the price. Somehow we need to make a cultural change about how individuals spend their wealth and limited time.
I agree with your general outlook but would also question why we need to make "efficiency" a goal to be attained at all costs. Why not rotate who does the drudgery jobs so no-one gets stuck doing it day in and out? It might be less efficient but everyone would appreciate the work that needs to be done more and no-one would be pigeon holed. What sort of efficiency loss is that worth?
As long as we prioritize economic efficiency there will be an never ending treadmill of improving efficiency. Until we start bringing human factors into the equation we will stay on this path.
> The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society.
Maybe, but you don't have any strategy for changing the current system, or what kind of system should replace it, or how to demonstrate that system will be better than the one we have now.
That is a fair criticism; I don't have a perfect solution built out right now, so I can't paint you a picture of how a theoretical nation full of well-educated laborers and farmers building things and providing for themselves would look in comparison to our current nation, where everyone barely struggles to hang on financially as citizens of the wealthiest empire in the history of civilization.
I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people that they should even look past the current system. If you read through other comments on other chains in this thread, people are trying to explain to me that I could never convince someone to work half-time at a white collar job (where they endlessly produce code and then clock out) and half-time at a blue-collar job (where they endlessly shovel asphalt and then clock out), while at the same time I'm trying to convince them that it's possible to create an equilibrium of demand with output by simultaneously reducing aggregate demand and moving around aggregate output. If there's an end goal to your labor- produce this much and then stop producing until repairs or new units are needed- you don't have to work all the time at these horrible jobs.
Right now, people work in white collar jobs in order to justify their right to the results of the blue collar jobs. If you don't write code, you can't afford the berries that Driscoll's ships to your grocery store, so you write code and make $150k/year, and you buy your $6 carton of berries, and the migrant berry pickers make $18k/year, and the truck driver makes $80k/year. But you're the end user of the berries; if you instead knew how to pick or knew how to drive, you might have a chance at getting the berries to your table without needing quasi-slave labor.
I don't want to live in a country where I get stuff- materials, goods, etc.- from people who are always struggling. We can't just UBI our way to luxury space communism, because then no one will pick the berries, because right now the "berry-picking job" is defined as "12 hours per day in and out of the hot sun".
This is what I'm trying to say- find some way to make sure that I can provide myself with shelter and see a doctor when I need to, and I'll go pick the damn berries and drive them back myself. Many seem to be responding with "no, that's impossible."
I am very skeptical of any utopian-sounding scheme.
"I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people that they should even look past the current system."
Look past it all you want. But once you start using the power of the state to make it come about, the potential for devastating unintended consequences are very high.
If you want to be a well rounded human who picks berries and also writes code, knock yourself out. If you want to write Medium articles advocating for this lifestyle, knock yourself out.
But if the vast majority of people just want to specialize and pay people to perform other tasks, that's their prerogative, too.
As for the berry pickers, the UBI-like effect of the Covid stimulus programs in the US showed that giving people an income floor is very effective at raising wages rapidly, as people can turn down jobs that they don't think adequately compensates them for their labor.
> If the vast majority of people just want to specialize and pay people to perform other tasks, that's their prerogative, too.
Your sort of radical individualism, which is mostly accepted by the tech gentry, has proven absolutely disastrous for the less intelligent and other historically disadvantaged people. From birth, the modern American is subjected to the most refined consumer propaganda that has ever existed. The towns and cultures that our ancestors grew up with have been chewed up and spit out by mass tech and capital. People are constantly manipulated by cable news, advertising algorithms, television, computer programs- fast food restaurants are literally designed by "psychologists" and "product researchers" to induce hunger. The average American- not the average American you know, I mean the actual average American- is incapable of choosing culture or principles over the momentary rewards of money or satiation of various appetites because of the conditions imposed upon them by people like us, who have the ability to create controlling mechanisms.
One of the tools used to manipulate the other people in the U.S. is a model of society created in the 1900s, where you go to school for 16 years and then you work at the same career for the rest of your life, drawing a consistent paycheck and performing the same actions over and over again. In the 1970s, the IRA and the 401(k) were invented and pushed in order to free companies from the financial burden of providing pensions, and to siphon more cash into the investment market. Someone who has been convinced of this model of society is unable to argue about anything other than financial compensation. They are kept in a simultaneous state of envy for the rich and contempt for the poor. UBI makes sense to them because it would not require any change to their life, which is why everyone clamors for a higher salary, rather than for a life that they can be proud to live.
If you are content to live your own, satisfied, educated life and let the rest of our society fall victim to predatory markets and invasive habit control, because "that's their prerogative", then you are a coward.
And you think centralizing power even more will solve this problem?
People need to be empowered to individually make the choice to opt out of this system on their own. Persuasion to take that course is fine and noble.
But do you honestly think putting some group of people in charge of "protecting" people from all these bad influences, will truly lead to that small number of people acting completely altruistically in the best interests of society? Or they will be sorely tempted to use that power to manipulate society to the ends they personally deem most important?
One of the biggest problems I see with current discourse, is all memory of 20th century history seems to have been completely forgotten. There were large parts of the world that did away with all the consumerism and capitalism. They ended up killing 10s of millions of their own people, through starvation and enforcing their control by killing dissenters.
I don't know if you're still checking this comment chain, but I don't think from my other comments that I mentioned bringing a central authority into the equation. I realize that the concept of a central moral authority "protecting" the populace has gone poorly in the past, but that is not what I am advocating for. I am advocating for a heavily armed, heavily informed populace that knows where everything it uses comes from and is capable of building each component part of its society.
You and I are the authority; we can do the educating and the protection. People are being taken advantage of every day by various agents that wish to exploit them for various purposes. Those need clear, consistent messaging from people they respect that explains and illuminates the many pitfalls of modern society and offers a path through which to learn society-building skills and self-reliance. Leaving them to their own devices does not create a healthy, unified community; it merely leaves them ripe for the harvest by the banks, the insurance companies, advertisers, fast food corporations, car companies, etc.
It is uninteresting to me to be compared to the communists and the Nazis. It will turn out better for us all if you allow yourself to think more creatively than that. Contemporary society does not need to choose between absolute individualistic chaos or absolute control, although the fact that society is populated by many people who think exactly as you do makes that duality seem like the only outcome possible.
Do you mean "make the kind of money", or "live the kind of lifestyle"?
In order to provide you with the lifestyle you take for granted, several million actions must be undertaken by people around the globe (drill for oil, watch hospital patients, build N95 masks, etc). My question is- how many of those actions could be undertaken by people who consider themselves "brainy", the completion of which would guarantee a similar lifestyle to those same brainy people?
I know this is a little utopian- I don't have a full stack solution made up- but when your street gets a pothole, some man comes out and fixes it in the hot sun. Why don't you fix it? Well, you don't have the tools, or the expertise, or the legal right to do it. Furthermore, you don't have the time to do it, because you work 40-60 hours per week yourself at a white collar job (I'm assuming, given you're on HN during the workday). Many people think that someone's full-time "job" should be fixing potholes, and so people think "well I'd never fix potholes, I don't want that as my career". But wouldn't you learn how to fix potholes if you only had to fix potholes when they showed up near you, instead of for 40-60 hours per week every week?
Fixing potholes properly so that they stay fixed requires some specialized equipment. It's not the kind of stuff that everyone can keep in the corner of their garage. I certainly don't want random neighbors doing it because they'll end up making the situation worse for everyone.
Jesus Christ, this is like trying to convince the blind men that the elephant exists. What, do you think it takes a lifetime of practice to operate specialized equipment? They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the potholes are fixed just fine.
You can walk on to a pothole crew and be considered a functional crew member inside a single season. Sure, I don't want you fixing my potholes because you don't know how to do it, but if I happened to live next to those pothole guys, I'd be happy with my neighbors fixing my potholes. Now, let's assess the difference between them and you: they have at least a few hundred hours of pothole repair practice, and you don't. It's too bad that you're incapable of learning how to do that.
I bet you think that good grades are important, don't you? Without grades, you never know what kind of unqualified whack job might start Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Whole Foods, Uber, Dell, Dropbox... that's why we need those pothole guys to only ever work on potholes- you never know what kind of whack job might start jackhammering your street and "making the situation worse for everyone else".
> They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the potholes are fixed just fine.
That's not really fixing the potholes, they're basically putting a band-aid on it and calling it a day. "Fixing" a pot-holed street in a long-term sense may require literally rebuilding that piece of the street from the ground up.
I've done manual labor. If I could work in software despite only by not making any more than I would in manual labor, I’d still work in software.
And that's even before considering the way management and coworker selfishness and ineptitude becomes a physical safety threat rather than an irritation.
But you still think that someone should do outdoor jobs where you live. Why them and not you? Their jobs are open to you, but your job is not open to them.
How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?
They probably aren't willing to do outdoor work in the cicumstances, seeing as they have previously delayed a lot of gratification by spending time and money developing skills that now enable them to do work in an air-conditioned office in a field that they find intellectually stimulating, with good remuneration. If they hadn't made good use of the opportunities that life had presented them with, if they were dealt a bad hand in life, or if the developed world was plunged into a new dark age, then I'm sure they would be more than happy to till the earth, tend to livestock or perform tree surgery if that was what it took to avert starvation or penury.
>How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?
I pay them directly for their labor, as simple as that. I guess I'm not sure what the confusion is. Everyone wants the best job they can get given their skills and luck. Nobody is going to be shoveling asphalt in the sun for fun if their part time astrophysicist gig covers their expenses.
Everyone has been tricked into believing that the best use of their time is to "get the best job", and the "job" is working at a hyper-specialized set of tasks, day-in, day-out. They claw at each other like crabs, dismayed when they lose a position, elated when they eke out a few more dollars or gain an extra few days of free time as they shuffle jobs. On HN, there's an archetypal hero's ascendency crawl where you finally find that $300k product manager job and retire at 45 with crazy stock options.
It's a slave mentality. Do you believe that we, the people in society, set up the component parts of society and thus have the right to rebuild those component parts as it suits us, or do you believe that concepts like "jobs" and "laws" are naturally occurring phenomena that we are owned by?
I am immune to the siren call of endless improvements in the amount of money I receive. I have reached a high enough standard of living that I don't need any more goods or services than I already can get, and I'm not particularly rich as far as Americans go (about 65th percentile according to a recent income distribution calculator).
My goal is to convince as many people as I can to start thinking about what quality of life they would be satisfied with, figure out what labor and materials are required of them and their community to provide that quality of life, and then cut everything else out of the picture. We don't need the rat race, we don't need our elders worrying about how they'll afford the doctor, we don't need people working 80 hour weeks at minimum wage so they can afford a crappy apartment. We just need the materials and the labor.
The more people buy into "I've got to get the best job" mentality, the more impossible realizing any sort of overall improvement in our labor-time-to-reward ratio is.
(I know I sound like a communist, but I don't believe in the labor theory of value, and most self-described communists I talk to call me a right-wing extremist.)
So I 100% agree with everything you said, but don't see how it connects to the points you raise above.
As you say, people should think long and hard about their life goals, and in my opinion, would probably be happier with a different work life balance where they can afford it.
However, I don't see a world in which I would work part time at a job less enjoyable with worse pay than my current one. I would rather optimize to work the minimum hours at the best compensated job I can find. (e.g. why work 50-50% at white collar job and terrible job, when I can just work 51% at the white collar job).
Sure, there are major challenges to most people doing this, but removing those barriers is a lot more realistic that introducing job swapping that people don't even want. The simple place to fix the problem is uncouple health and other benefits from employers. The current system discourages part time work because employers have fixed costs per employee. Once you break this link, more people will work part time.
>Have you ever gone out and built something for yourself, like a shed?
Yes, I love building things for myself and my friends, but I wouldn't want to do it as a low paying job. In fact, doing it as a job would give me less time and money to do it for myself and friends. For me, that is just hopping off one economic hamster wheel and onto another. My job is complex and hard enough as it is, doubling the required skills and cutting the time to learn them sounds horrible. I'm fully aware that sharing jobs might be more attractive for the guy shoveling asphalt 100% of the time
> I got snippy in another response to you on a different comment chain.
No worries, at least to me it seems like you are engaging in good faith, listening to answers, and responding to what people are saying instead of talking past them. I can live with a little snippiness as long as people are coherent.
And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it. How does that make anything better?
Outdoor jobs: growing food, infrastructure repair, dock loading, police work, etc. If there's a big crash on the highway and it's 100 degrees out, someone's still got to go direct traffic, clean up the glass, etc. If you expect the cleanup to happen, you expect someone to do the cleanup, therefore you are expecting the rewards of the labor of people who do outdoor jobs.
My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly, but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am talking about "the collection of tasks that end up providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of the expectations that it's full-time or year-round attached to it. This may seem like an asinine distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society where you leave your current profession and work full-time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of society where you are capable of rendering some assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give up your current amount of free time, or your medical care, or your access to entertainment and food, but neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff that you enjoy.
If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you theoretically could offset the amount of time they have to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks. It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be.
I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution built out in my head that would make all of this magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when the power goes out during a heat wave and the city employees don't fix it fast enough.
> but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside"
I had a part time job planting trees in high school. I knew I got into a good university and part of me was feeling like I was privileged to be able to go to college when the other people I was working with might not have the same opportunity.
But then I heard one of them say "thank God I'll be graduating soon and won't have to do school work anymore."
And realized they had zero interest in pursuing the path I was on.
So there's a crash on the freeway, and someone needs to direct traffic. Yeah, I could probably do that, if I needed to. I even would, if I thought it needed doing, until actual authorities showed up.
But, to use your other example, the power goes out. You don't really want amateur me trying to restore the power. You want a professional doing that, because it's much more likely to work, and much less likely to have negative consequences. So having me "render assistance" is not likely to be either welcome or useful.
In the same way, you don't want me wandering around a construction site looking to be helpful. I'd be more likely to get killed than to do much good.
So... Yes, I'm willing to pitch in, outside, if needed. No, for many jobs you don't actually want me doing that, no matter how much sympathy we have for the people having to work out in the heat.
And none of that takes anything away from my initial point, which is that no, I don't wish that I did manual labor outside instead of my nice air-conditioned job. Right now I'm really grateful for my nice indoor cubical farm.
If you want to go anywhere with this, maybe the direction is that we ought to pay people better who have to work outside, rather than paying them less than indoor people.
But your conception of "amateur you" is fed by your (again, I'm assuming) 16 years in school, when you could have spent 200 of those hours learning how to clean up freeway crashes. You don't have to be an amateur, unless you accept that as your station in life. You're correct that I don't want <you as you exist in the present> to repair power lines, but I have full faith that if you set your mind to it and had the right access to training you could learn how to repair power lines, or at least provide entry-level assistance to a power-line-repair master.
Just as you went from unskilled in your domain to skilled in your domain, so could you theoretically go from unskilled in construction to skilled in construction. I know you don't want to become an expert in construction, but how much of that want is based in the fact that in the current build of society, the only way to become a construction expert is to accept years of low pay in terrible conditions with awful coworkers in 100-degree-heat? Don't you think that somehow, using the combined man- and brain-power of the billions of people alive, we could form some kind of society where you might be able to learn and perform some construction without needing to accept the complete sacrifice of your quality of life to do it?
The problem with "paying people better to work outside" is that the entire concept of paying people to do anything, ie rewarding people with money, require that the most unpleasant jobs be done by people who must choose between the job and starvation/exposure or violence (serfs or slaves). That's why the easiest, most brutal jobs are always done by the lowest-IQ immigrants. If you were to pay them more, per your suggestion, the price of the reward of their labor goes up (berries go from $6/carton to $38/carton), the demand for the reward of their labor goes down, and they get laid off and are back to having no way to secure food, shelter, and medical care. (There are some exceptions to this rule; construction workers in the US are usually decently-compensated, but the US is an anomaly because we subsist based on the efforts of serfs and slaves in Asia, who mine and refine our rare earth minerals, assemble our tech, etc.)
IQ, education experience, the oppression of society, take your pick. Take an average programmer and an average backhoe operator. Give them both 120 hours to train at each other's jobs, monitored by an expert. Who will be a more suitable replacement for the other?
As a writer I like said- "you get upset when a toll booth operator takes a long time to count your change, but if they could count change, they'd be an engineer like you are."
Well, yes, software engineer takes a lot more than 120 hours of training to do that job.
But that's not to say if you gave the backhoe operator the same number of years experience learning programming as the software engineer, they wouldn't be just as good at software development.
Do you honestly believe that? They could be as good, but I would wager that they wouldn't on average. There is fair amount self sorting based on aptitudes.
Having known a large number of manual labor professionals my whole life, there is no difference between the good-at-heavy-equipment and the good-at-writing-a-crud-app crowd. You do get a wider variety of intellectual capacity on the blue collar side depending on the trade, but electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, etc are all just as good at problem solving on average as any group of developers I know.
"Blue collar", "the trades" are just so broad in scope it's an unfair comparison. It becomes much easier when you look at specific manual labor professions and specific developer professions.
I totally agree that most good tradesmen are great problem solvers. I'm just not convinced that the types of problems and the aptitudes required to solve them are interchangeable.
Sure, but what you are listing are a far cry from what actually menial jobs are. Fruit picking, burger flipping, telemarketing.. Those jobs are menial on a whole other level than, say, construction work.
"I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure."
(Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons)
That's basically a society without mass immigration - manual labour becomes more expensive, so educated people spend their time automating tasks and inventing and operating robots.
That is one of the many reasons I oppose mass immigration; a constant influx of new people makes it far, far more difficult for a single locality to figure out how best to reduce its own demand and come to a reasonably stable local identity, with an attached reasonable level of demand for goods and services.
> Do you also oppose people having more than 2 children?
Yeah, if you want to keep the aggregate demand of your society consistent, it makes sense to have fewer than 2 children. (I don't necessarily support government prevention people having more than two children, but a really self-aware group of humans wouldn't spawn uncontrollably.)
> At what point does "immigration" become "mass immigration"
The fact that you're asking me that question implies that my definition is drastically different than your definition. So- I think we can agree that if the entire population of Omaha, Nebraska (475,000) moved over the span of one month to Tahiti (280,000), that could be called "mass immigration", with disastrous consequences for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc. So, if you'd call that "mass immigration", which I think you'd be foolish not to, what about that makes it "mass immigration"? Whatever your definition is, it'll be different from mine.
> Whatever your definition is, it'll be different from mine.
It's not very helpful for you to say you oppose something if you are using a different definition of that thing than everyone else.
Of course I agree with you that doubling the population density of a complex society in a month would lead to negative effects, and you can use that as the threshold for classifying a situation as "mass immigration" if you want, but there's still a tautology there, as you're effectively saying you're against "too much immigration", which is true of just about everyone's position on immigration.
(I suppose some people might think that "too much immigration" cannot occur in practice, because any country that is desirable to immigrate to would have the resources to adapt quickly enough to people arriving at the rates that current transportation systems make possible).
To give a tighter upper bound, though, rather than considering the population of Omaha, let's look at the population of the whole of the US. In 2019 (so before the pandemic) the population growth rate was 0.60% per year, whereas in the past 70 years, the highest rate was 1.76% (in 1956).[0] So empirically I think we can say that the population growth rate could be almost triple what it is today without that growth rate itself being the cause of "disastrous consequences for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc.".
However, it is still possible that all of those aspects are negatively affected by the current population density, and that the "ideal" growth rate is negative. What all that means for immigration policy is a further step removed from the data available, but I hope that the above is helpful for thinking about these questions.
“We mustn’t over-educate the plebs - next thing you know, those uncouth oiks
will be getting uppity ideas beyond their station and before one can utter a forlorn ‘gadzooks!’ the bally country’s gorn all wrong!”
This has got to be the absolute worst summary of Peter Turchin's work that I have ever seen. Please don't judge Turchin, or the field of Cliodynamics, from this article.
Honestly, the political instability is just plain old incomplete capitalism.
The idea behind capitalism is that economic power is in the individual. The ideal is that there is an owner for everything, including the "means of production" and sometimes even public goods like land. Because each decision maker has a small impact on the rest of the economy misbehaving (behaving = perfectly optimizing for current market factors) actors will quickly be weeded out.
The difference in agility between a startup vs a slow moving large company vs the government is pretty obvious. When that start up fails nobody is going to remember it and that is a good thing. The bigger the organization the less likely it is going to obey market forces.
It does have its positives and negatives but I am not here to talk about the small fry problems like monopolies.
I'm here to talk about the fact that the free market is built around the idea that local decision making by individuals is superior to global decision making by a large organization. The truth is that we need both. To be more exact, we need to use the government to transfer information and put a share of the burden of global decision making onto individuals so that the local optimum for individuals is the same thing as the global optimum for the economy as a whole. We need to break the prisoner's dilemma and the paradox of competition that arises from it.
Here are the three factors:
1. Get rid of all trade imbalances
It is very easy to intentionally run export surpluses at the expense of other nations. The importing nation has to take on debt and in the case of a perpetual surplus the debt cannot be repair, ever.
The only ways export deficit countries can defend against this is either via protectionism which ends in trade wars (and decision making errors by politicians) or they must increase their own competitiveness through devaluation of their currency. Both are a race to the bottom. When every country is trying to achieve an export surplus then global absolute trade will trend to 0. I'm not talking about export surpluses going down, I'm talking about ceasing trading entirely.
Keynes suggested an ICU that sanctions export surplus countries and distributes money to workers via a UBI (or tax cuts) to raise their purchasing power and thus eliminate the import deficit which involves handing out more and more loans. If you never buy anything from the borrower then a default/bailout is inevitable.
2. Sanction large savings accounts
There is no mechanism in capitalism that forces investments, other than the dreaded "inflation". Inflation creates risk and erodes the value of idle money that is doing nothing. Thus it becomes obvious that you must run a business or keep working to get ahead of inflation by obtaining a future income stream. This is necessary for money to fulfill its purpose as a medium of exchange. It must pass from hand to hand all the time. It is not allowed to get stuck anywhere.
When inflation is very low there is barely any incentive to invest. People start hoarding money, which fuels a deflationary spiral. Central banks all around the world are trying new party tricks to get the private sector to invest again. They drive yields on safe assets to nothing to create more risk. They make borrowing cheaper so that investments are profitable and old unprofitable investments can be refinanced under better terms. All that QE isn't ending up anywhere except maybe real estate. The cheap financing costs are also letting large companies hoard money and do stock buy backs, which further reduces their incentive to invest their money. Young people take on mortgages which drives up prices high but buying an old house for double its original price isn't investing. Old people pay their mortgages off before they retire and don't take new ones during their retirement.
Instead of hoping that investments happen on their own because the economy just happens to encourage them via inflation we could just skip the middle man and maybe even get rid on the dependence of inflation and reintroduce the mechanism in an official fashion. We introduce wealth taxes on money in bank accounts of private individuals and large companies. 2% per year and they get to deduct debt to reduce the wealth tax. The money can then be handed back via a UBI or tax cuts. The point isn't funding welfare, it's to punish behavior that is globally suboptimal.
3. Land value tax
It's actually the same mechanic as with money. People hoard land instead of money. However, we can't create more land to catch up with demand if people move to cities for jobs. Real estate tends to go up in value much faster than money because of the fixed supply. The owners of the land didn't work to earn this money, they simply waited for the population to grow. Buying land as an investment should be a terrible idea. People taking on bigger and bigger mortgages for a low productivity investment like buying a house shouldn't happen. If anything, land values should be shrinking over time. The only way someone should be able to make money off of real estate is by building a house and renting it out or by saving money through owner occupation. The fundamental problem is that living in suburbia only works if some people do it. If everyone does it, then the system collapses as early homebuyers get their land and house for dirt cheap at the expense of future generations who no longer can afford them. You're going to see a lot of pitchforks.
The land value tax is just a flat (% or fixed amount) tax on land that reduces the benefit of holding onto land. Again, we can use the proceeds of punishing suboptimal behavior to fund a UBI but I personally would just do wholesale tax cuts on income and replace capital gains and corporate income taxes with the lowered income tax. (a simpler tax code is fairer for those who cannot exploit it).
1. and 2. bring back jobs and create financial stability, 3. reduces living costs by punishing rent seeking.
All these proposals are built around the same idea: local decision making may lead to a benefit for the decision maker at the expense of everyone else, thus decision making should be based on what the global optimum is, so that all decision makers make decisions that benefit everyone in the long run instead of focusing only on themselves. This is actually strongly in favor of capitalism as it shows that local decision making can reach a global optimum. The idea that local decision making inevitably leads to infighting and thus mass exploitation is something the communists always criticized about capitalism. The hope was that fixing core problems like housing by avoiding the prisoners dilemma would lead to a better society even if it is at the expense of individual freedom and thus efficiency. To be honest, they got housing right (although they neglected maintenance). They built a lot of housing in east Germany. Even west Germany built a lot of social (=affordable and government owned) housing that made renting extremely affordable in Germany. The problems started as soon as the government sold its social housing. They made a quick buck but then housing prices started rising. Private ownership of land just doesn't work.
The needlessly exclusive nature of the Ivy League underpins a gross fear of the elites in the egality of education.
America, for example, is a socialist nation as soon as your income hits a certain level. They look out + take care of each other in a generational fashion, at the same time advocating for policies that preach individualism and divide.
The article cites the election of Trump and Brexit as evidence for too many people having degrees that they aren't able to fully utilize, supposedly confirming a prediction from Turchin in 2010, but... as far as I've read, neither of those things were driven by the advanced-degree-holding crowd. The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college education!
It was Michael Gove, the education minister and Vote Leave figurehead, who said in 2016: "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts"[0].
This line of thinking is beautifully conveyed in a satirical drawing by Will McPhail that appeared in the 2017-01-02 issue of The New Yorker with the caption "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?".[1]
Another satirical drawing from 2016 seems to capture a similar pathology, where the character starts by saying "I want things to be different".[2]
Even more smugly you have to turn to an objective example instead of the subjective insanities of economics and sociology that Elites™ force down our throat. For the record your pals are starting to hire Diverse™ pilots…
TEN YEARS ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,”
On the contrary, I'd claim relative instability was predicted by a fairly large group. The decline of the US has been described and predicted across the political spectrum. Gridlock was a pretty visible thing ten or thirty years ago.
pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”
This is an ...uh, bizarre definition of "elites". The elites are broadly rulers, the owners specialized, etc - those consuming and managing a significant portion of a society's resources.
As far back as ancient Rome and imperial China, Mr Turchin shows, societies have veered from periods of political stability to instability, often at intervals of about 50 years.
Things go up and things go down. A remarkably prescient view /s.
This article reads like "collapse of complex societies"[1] for idiots. Where lots of young people with PhDs figure in these speculations is hard to say (I mean, this is small of any elite overreach). It's sad how many poor quality articles like this one have been popping up here lately. I suggest the original Tainter as well as Jared Diamond's Collapse, at the least.
Edit: I should also note The Economist may well be misstating Mr Turchin's on elites but this is the linked article.
