In Peter Turchin's book War and Peace and War [1], the term "elite overproduction" does not refer to an overproduction of smart people, education, or college degrees. Instead, it refers to an overproduction of nobility, individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work.
For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nobility increased from around 2% to 4% of the population, while the incomes of the richest nobles soared. Eventually, peasants could no longer produce enough to feed themselves and provide income for all the nobles: this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400.
The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. (Not to say there is no overlap between those groups.)
[1] Turchin, Peter. War and peace and war: The life cycles of imperial nations. Pi, 2005.
>>> For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nobility increased from around 2% to 4% of the population, while the incomes of the richest nobles soared. Eventually, peasants could no longer produce enough to feed themselves and provide income for all the nobles: this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400.
Wow, this literally reminds me of one of my tech employers. Eventually half the company was a VP, Director, Senior Director or something else. Often you had a reporting chain with a VP --> Sr.Director --> Director --> 1or2 workers
Naturally, the high salaries above had to be supported, so the 1 or 2 workers at the bottom had to code more, code faster, and the management layer figuratively cracked the whip harder and harder to somehow produce enough billings to support the team of 5. (note the layers above were not sales, they were all program-manager types. sales was a different group.)
I don't think that's right, Turchin himself pointed out the "overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The problem is the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite.
If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of people with credentials they cannot use. We see this in the UK as well where there is a growing cadre of graduates every year going into jobs that don't need a degree. This leads to growing numbers of people that expected to be in the elite, but aren't.
The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share, and have the organisational and communications skills to do something about it. Investors that don't work for wages don't strike me as a likely group to develop growing levels of resentment.
There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid.
Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is).
What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.
I think you could generalize the idea of "individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work" to "individuals whose extracted income exceeds the utility of the work they perform." Maybe to the converse as well, to an excess of "individuals whose extracted income subceeds the utility of the work they perform". It's basically talking about unjustified inequality.
I think to some extent this maps onto the idea of rent-seeking monopolies in current society and undercompensation of individuals. It's hard to go to something like this
and not conclude that many people are being undercompensated grossly, and a small number of others are being overcompensated grossly.
For what it's worth, I agree with others that I don't think this maps onto "braininess" per se. I just think that's one of the character traits that happens to be valued the most in Western societies at the moment, so it's projected by the elites the most. In the past it might have been valor or nobility or courage or whatever it was -- the thing that is presented as justification for the excessive income, and protection of that income.
In general I think individuals are misvalued, not in the sense that persons don't matter, but the economic value placed on single individuals can be (and usually are) grossly overstated or understated. I think this transcends many many fields.
> this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400.
I feel like you need to mention the black death in this same sentence though, as the nobility population change would arguably be a lesser factor in thrall to that massive event.
It does certainly paint an interesting aftermath as the black death suddenly made life a valuable commodity leading to a small period of time where worker's rights and even in some cases women's rights were improved. Considering that against a backdrop of indignant nobles is entertaining ponder-thought.
The Great Famine was 1315ish, were you thinking of that instead?
>The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be <insert group I don't like and do some hand waving to indicate why their value to society is net-negative>
There's a lot of groups one could complain about. On HN it's a toss-up between whether you complain about the wall street bankers or the urban landlords. In other circles people complain about the government and the white collar yuppies. The MBA types get complained about a lot but nobody complains when they're buying a $100 window A/C unit.
You can find examples of net-negative rent seeking in just about every part of the economy but to paint a whole class of economic activity as a drag is naive.
> The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. (Not to say there is no overlap between those groups.)
Investors do a lot of work, because they have to constantly think where to put their money, evaluate alternatives, make sure there is no money wasted on things, etc. Even passive investors who only have S&P portfolios still contribute to the economy by providing capital to companies to invest into new things.
Finding modern cognates to medieval nobility is fraught. In the republican era, it basically means "finger the bad guys." There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class...
Does Peace and War go into inter-nobility issues, or does the thesis rest on just the problem of a fixed size peasantry supporting a growing nobility? I could imagine these issues resulting in famines and peasant revolts. But, I can also imagine conflict emerging among nobility.
You can confer as many titles as you like, but France only has so many hides of land. Landless knights and penniless descendants of counts hanging around palaces and competing viciously for favour seems like it could be a recipe too. Somewhat more parsimonious with this modern thesis.
"The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees"
I disagree here. The closest equivalent would be people in academia, specifically the portions of academia that don't perform useful work. Basically, the "X studies" crowd. And that's exactly where we see the most political instability coming from these days.
This was a pretty eye-opening interview for me. Certainly gives a lot of food for thought. About kleptocracy and how that particular (parasitic) economy survives and even thrives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlZdx9eDetw
> The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages.
This feels wrong. Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension.
The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees and net tax recipients.
Turchin uses the term “elites”, which is not the same as “brainy”.
Genuinely “brainy” people can find new ways to contribute to society, there can never be too any of them.
“Elites” on the other hand - highly credentialed and entitled - play zero-sum games.
There’s a lot of interesting critique written by heterodox leftists today, in the spirit of Chris Lasch, on how the current progressive movement is just intra-elite competition. Take BLM for example: how are Floyd/Blake policing incidents related to removing entrance tests from the super-elite schools and colleges, or shaking down super-elite art galleries until they show more POC artists? Or having a nominally black VP who’s made a career out of prosecuting black criminals?
Or the populist conservative movement appealing to the “non-elite” working class, who the progressives used to represent. This is happening all over the western world.
TLDR: Elite vs. non-elite seems exactly right, but let’s not confuse it with “brainy” please
> Genuinely “brainy” people can find new ways to contribute to society, there can never be too any of them.
"brainy" people can only contribute more than their non-brainy counterparts when they can leverage meaningful amounts of resources. a really clever person working a register in mcdonalds is not a whole lot more productive than a barely competent employee. even if they have some brilliant idea to streamline things in the store, no one will care.
it's entirely possible to have more "brainy" people than there are opportunities available for them to leverage their intelligence. if resources are diverted to develop "brainy" people, then this would be a case where there are too many of them.
I'm not sure how brainy I am. Perhaps the main reason I came across that way in school is because my mom taught me to read early.
In any case, no one in the lower-end workplace has been particularly interested in what brains I do have, or (apparently) anyone else's around me. It's all about how you can fit into the local pattern, which is often suboptimal yet resistant to change. Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have-- so the chances seem low of me making a useful contribution. To say nothing of barriers to entry constantly & furiously being erected.
The main danger to me with regard to the question in the title seems to be the realization that despite what I was told as a child, I am pretty obviously redundant and unnecessary. Not needed. The world has enough brainy people already. There is little for me to do but try to care for those in my immediate vicinity as best I can and wait out my time.
> Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have
You may be surprised to learn how false and limiting this belief is. Turns out most of those people are also just winging it, so if you wing it too, hey, you may actually reach a better outcome.
The following is a link to the Mathematics Subject Classification [1]. There are thousands of lines, with each line being a different area of specialization in the disciplines of math. Every time you think we are close to "running out" of ideas, things to do, or things to learn, I ask that you pull this up. Even if we limit to mathematics and don't talk about things like agriculture, psychology, and so forth, you have so many possible things to do with your life that even if everyone picks one thing and specializes in it, there will still be something unique for you to explore. Consider that something like machine learning is largely applied statistics, optimization, linear algebra, and a few other things and then look at this list with those things omitted! There is still a lot left. We are nowhere close to having worked on all the interesting problems or running out of things to discover.
> Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have
I noticed that reading "recommended content" (like from google news) always gets me to thinking like this, but remember 90% of startups fail[1].
The company TransMeta was mostly PhDs. They fooled around so long, arguing and redesigning, not releasing, that Intel ate their lunch steadily improving scalar performance. My colleague who was worth $100M in TransMeta options at one point, is back to work with nothing.
So, increased numbers of educated people relate to a rise of expectations on equality, wealth distribution, etc. Status quo fights back and instability grows.
A good example is the fight on climate change. The status quo wants to avoid responsibility for past, current and future damage. A growing educated population wants accountability. That creates tension.
I agree, as much as I think that to keep leaders accountable is one of the greatest society advances ever. The only way forward is for the status quo to accept change and advance with society and reduce the tension.
Fearmongering at it's greatest. Instead of looking for possible solutions. It downplays the worst case scenarios by having "Too Many" educated people. Both the article and the study. Instead of asking why we should fear having too many educated people. Shouldn't we instead be asking the question why should we fear them in the first place? Rather, the government policies at place and the systemic issues which affect the people we should "fear". What am I to say. The study itself is from 2010.The effects of it are about to come anyways for the good and bad. It's just about how you deal with the issue. The call for higher education is a bipartisan belief in America. In which both sides already agree that student grants should be in place rather than student loans. While the candidates running may not agree with that in the coming presidential election both republic and democratic leaders agree that grants should replace loans. The main problems which they address really aren't likely to be problems in the near future.
Stupid people who think they're smart because they have a fancy education and are rewarded with high salary, that's probably a dangerous "brainy elite".
Along with stupid people who just so happened to get a ton of money by no merit of their own, but don't realize this.
Taleb writes about this with the phrase IYI intellectual yet idiot.
His primary concern is that these people don't take risk and become bureaucrats. Not that they are smart, brainy, or any other ad hominem attack masked as a compliment.
Taleb taught me how to protect myself in the face of uncertain situtations, the idea is not to take risks for the sake of taking risks. The problem with bureaucrats is that they are exposing others to huge risks and they don't feel it on their own skin. They are pushing the consequences of the risk on other people.
For further context: this Economist article [1] references a letter to the editor by Peter Turchin [2], which is itself a response to the Nature 2010 opinion article "2020 visions" [3].
> In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt
Quite interesting that this article only focuses on the 3rd entry of those
I often participated in team quizzes, and it was a good thing to have 1 engineer in the team, and it was a _very bad_ thing to have 2 engineers in the team.
The idea that there is some sort of magic cycle that links 1870s to 2020 is patent nonsense. No cycle could survive the technological and political disruptions of the last hundred years. The current problem is the same old one where available real resources are growing more slowly than the population. If real stuff is becoming available faster than the population, we have golden ages. When population grows faster than stuff, the walls fall in and people start fighting each other.
It would really be in the best interests of everyone if some of the infighting would stop and people start looking for ways to increase general prosperity by creating more instead of coming up with clever justifications about why we have to take stuff away from people who have it.
And fire all the bankers. They aren't fulfilling their part of the social contract and investing in improving the future. We found that out in 2007 and the situation will keep getting worse until incompetent financiers start losing money.
>>And fire all the bankers. They aren't fulfilling their part of the social contract and investing in improving the future. We found that out in 2007 and the situation will keep getting worse until incompetent financiers start losing money.
The state administers the largest corporate welfare program in the economy via government-guaranteed mortgages. It guarantees nearly $2 trillion worth every year, which the banks naturally buy as they are risk-free income.
So there's no need to fire the bankers. Just stop meddling in the economy with these sophomoric interventions, whether it's GSE mortgage guarantees, or the FDIC: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22223
Malthusian arguments are outdated by atleast a 100 years. Where is the proof that “real stuff” is growing slower than the population? Seems like there is too much stuff TBH.
And banker-scapegoating is also outdated by ~10 years. The regulations passed after ‘08 have made banks boring and powerless.
People with college degrees get more arrogant and indoctrinated than educated (I graduated from a top university). Almost everything useful I know was attained outside school.
"Cliodynamics" sounds a lot like psychohistory. I always appreciated azimov as a sci-fi writer for psychohistory. Sci fi and fantasy have a common form where it's the world and regular people, but a technology (or magic) exists. The world + the fictional technology make the setting for the story. Usually the device is a time machine or magic hat. In Asimov's story, the device is a theory. I always thought making the device abstract was a genius novelty.
The whole idea came from what if one of these broad economic disciplines actually worked? Especially marxism, objectivism, and such. As the article mentions, these use economics broadly to explain history... and predict it.
"Psychohistories" are compelling, interesting and intellectually engaging. We have a tendency of adopting them though. That's the problem. They aren't scientific. They aren't even theories in a popperian sense. Ultimately, it's punditry. A perspective. I enjoy it. I enjoyed this article. It's neither true or false though, in any kind of global sense.
All that said, this take augments the (also economist friendly) "anywheres vs everywheres" take on Brexit. That take also had to do with an increase in uni graduates.
A narrower version of Turchin's concept might also be true. Rather than a surplus of (all) graduates crowding the top... this might be an issue of very specific surpluses. EG Journalism, specific government agencies, professorships, political positions... Those are a tiny portion of people overall, but highly influential to the political mood. If most journalists, academics, political aids are competing for a limited pool of jobs... These professions really are tense. Most people who want to can't get a job in these fields. Many want to. There's often no fallback. If you're a journalist/activist/campaigner type... you're either in that insider group or you have nothing. Academics is similar. A phd historian can either be a professor or very little else. No consolation prizes.
the theory works for many kind of surpluses. if there are too many engineers and scientists and not enough jobs for them it's a problem. this also applies to any kind of elites: someone who considers himself above the general population: medieval nobles, roman senators, programmers. too many of them and it's a problem. you can read turchin's scientific articles, he uses data from different societies (widely different) and his equations seem to work to predict instability
Will definitely check this out. I find books that take a 50,000ft view of human development deeply insightful even if I don't entire agree with their theses.
Yeah right. Keep numbers of educated people to a bare minimum so that generic person would have shitty job paying unlivable wage and be happy about it.
Educated people (at least ones having good general University type education) at least have better chance finding something useful to do and creating new opportunities.
My advice for those "academics" would be to undergo voluntary lobotomy and improve the world in accordance to their views.
[+] [-] lwneal|5 years ago|reply
For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nobility increased from around 2% to 4% of the population, while the incomes of the richest nobles soared. Eventually, peasants could no longer produce enough to feed themselves and provide income for all the nobles: this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400.
The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. (Not to say there is no overlap between those groups.)
[1] Turchin, Peter. War and peace and war: The life cycles of imperial nations. Pi, 2005.
[+] [-] TuringNYC|5 years ago|reply
Wow, this literally reminds me of one of my tech employers. Eventually half the company was a VP, Director, Senior Director or something else. Often you had a reporting chain with a VP --> Sr.Director --> Director --> 1or2 workers
Naturally, the high salaries above had to be supported, so the 1 or 2 workers at the bottom had to code more, code faster, and the management layer figuratively cracked the whip harder and harder to somehow produce enough billings to support the team of 5. (note the layers above were not sales, they were all program-manager types. sales was a different group.)
[+] [-] simonh|5 years ago|reply
If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of people with credentials they cannot use. We see this in the UK as well where there is a growing cadre of graduates every year going into jobs that don't need a degree. This leads to growing numbers of people that expected to be in the elite, but aren't.
The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share, and have the organisational and communications skills to do something about it. Investors that don't work for wages don't strike me as a likely group to develop growing levels of resentment.
[+] [-] moosey|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is).
What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.
[+] [-] teorema|5 years ago|reply
I think to some extent this maps onto the idea of rent-seeking monopolies in current society and undercompensation of individuals. It's hard to go to something like this
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/'
and not conclude that many people are being undercompensated grossly, and a small number of others are being overcompensated grossly.
For what it's worth, I agree with others that I don't think this maps onto "braininess" per se. I just think that's one of the character traits that happens to be valued the most in Western societies at the moment, so it's projected by the elites the most. In the past it might have been valor or nobility or courage or whatever it was -- the thing that is presented as justification for the excessive income, and protection of that income.
In general I think individuals are misvalued, not in the sense that persons don't matter, but the economic value placed on single individuals can be (and usually are) grossly overstated or understated. I think this transcends many many fields.
[+] [-] Quarrelsome|5 years ago|reply
I feel like you need to mention the black death in this same sentence though, as the nobility population change would arguably be a lesser factor in thrall to that massive event.
It does certainly paint an interesting aftermath as the black death suddenly made life a valuable commodity leading to a small period of time where worker's rights and even in some cases women's rights were improved. Considering that against a backdrop of indignant nobles is entertaining ponder-thought.
The Great Famine was 1315ish, were you thinking of that instead?
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|5 years ago|reply
There's a lot of groups one could complain about. On HN it's a toss-up between whether you complain about the wall street bankers or the urban landlords. In other circles people complain about the government and the white collar yuppies. The MBA types get complained about a lot but nobody complains when they're buying a $100 window A/C unit.
You can find examples of net-negative rent seeking in just about every part of the economy but to paint a whole class of economic activity as a drag is naive.
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|5 years ago|reply
So, everyone with retirement investments. I think they're known as 401(k) in the USA, here in Australia Super Annuation.
We've built a self-collapsing economy?
[+] [-] est31|5 years ago|reply
Investors do a lot of work, because they have to constantly think where to put their money, evaluate alternatives, make sure there is no money wasted on things, etc. Even passive investors who only have S&P portfolios still contribute to the economy by providing capital to companies to invest into new things.
[+] [-] deathhand|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
Finding modern cognates to medieval nobility is fraught. In the republican era, it basically means "finger the bad guys." There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class...
Does Peace and War go into inter-nobility issues, or does the thesis rest on just the problem of a fixed size peasantry supporting a growing nobility? I could imagine these issues resulting in famines and peasant revolts. But, I can also imagine conflict emerging among nobility.
You can confer as many titles as you like, but France only has so many hides of land. Landless knights and penniless descendants of counts hanging around palaces and competing viciously for favour seems like it could be a recipe too. Somewhat more parsimonious with this modern thesis.
[+] [-] elindbe2|5 years ago|reply
I disagree here. The closest equivalent would be people in academia, specifically the portions of academia that don't perform useful work. Basically, the "X studies" crowd. And that's exactly where we see the most political instability coming from these days.
[+] [-] 127|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] centimeter|5 years ago|reply
The closest thing to French nobility we have today is probably people with government sinecures.
[+] [-] jquery|5 years ago|reply
This feels wrong. Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension.
The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees and net tax recipients.
[+] [-] jmeister|5 years ago|reply
Genuinely “brainy” people can find new ways to contribute to society, there can never be too any of them.
“Elites” on the other hand - highly credentialed and entitled - play zero-sum games.
There’s a lot of interesting critique written by heterodox leftists today, in the spirit of Chris Lasch, on how the current progressive movement is just intra-elite competition. Take BLM for example: how are Floyd/Blake policing incidents related to removing entrance tests from the super-elite schools and colleges, or shaking down super-elite art galleries until they show more POC artists? Or having a nominally black VP who’s made a career out of prosecuting black criminals?
Or the populist conservative movement appealing to the “non-elite” working class, who the progressives used to represent. This is happening all over the western world.
TLDR: Elite vs. non-elite seems exactly right, but let’s not confuse it with “brainy” please
[+] [-] leetcrew|5 years ago|reply
"brainy" people can only contribute more than their non-brainy counterparts when they can leverage meaningful amounts of resources. a really clever person working a register in mcdonalds is not a whole lot more productive than a barely competent employee. even if they have some brilliant idea to streamline things in the store, no one will care.
it's entirely possible to have more "brainy" people than there are opportunities available for them to leverage their intelligence. if resources are diverted to develop "brainy" people, then this would be a case where there are too many of them.
[+] [-] slfnflctd|5 years ago|reply
In any case, no one in the lower-end workplace has been particularly interested in what brains I do have, or (apparently) anyone else's around me. It's all about how you can fit into the local pattern, which is often suboptimal yet resistant to change. Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have-- so the chances seem low of me making a useful contribution. To say nothing of barriers to entry constantly & furiously being erected.
The main danger to me with regard to the question in the title seems to be the realization that despite what I was told as a child, I am pretty obviously redundant and unnecessary. Not needed. The world has enough brainy people already. There is little for me to do but try to care for those in my immediate vicinity as best I can and wait out my time.
[+] [-] Haul4ss|5 years ago|reply
You may be surprised to learn how false and limiting this belief is. Turns out most of those people are also just winging it, so if you wing it too, hey, you may actually reach a better outcome.
[+] [-] MathematicalArt|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/classifications/MSC-2010.html
[+] [-] __john|5 years ago|reply
I noticed that reading "recommended content" (like from google news) always gets me to thinking like this, but remember 90% of startups fail[1].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-star...
[+] [-] 127|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|5 years ago|reply
So yeah, too many brains are a dangerous thing.
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
A good example is the fight on climate change. The status quo wants to avoid responsibility for past, current and future damage. A growing educated population wants accountability. That creates tension.
I agree, as much as I think that to keep leaders accountable is one of the greatest society advances ever. The only way forward is for the status quo to accept change and advance with society and reduce the tension.
[+] [-] noetokyo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dusted|5 years ago|reply
Along with stupid people who just so happened to get a ton of money by no merit of their own, but don't realize this.
[+] [-] emailrhoads|5 years ago|reply
His primary concern is that these people don't take risk and become bureaucrats. Not that they are smart, brainy, or any other ad hominem attack masked as a compliment.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
[+] [-] johnnycerberus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenocratus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwneal|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/10/24/c...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a.pdf
[3] https://www.demogr.mpg.de/publications/files/3706_1264687048...
[+] [-] Tokelin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtech|5 years ago|reply
> In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt
Quite interesting that this article only focuses on the 3rd entry of those
[+] [-] toolslive|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] friendlybus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roenxi|5 years ago|reply
It would really be in the best interests of everyone if some of the infighting would stop and people start looking for ways to increase general prosperity by creating more instead of coming up with clever justifications about why we have to take stuff away from people who have it.
And fire all the bankers. They aren't fulfilling their part of the social contract and investing in improving the future. We found that out in 2007 and the situation will keep getting worse until incompetent financiers start losing money.
[+] [-] CryptoPunk|5 years ago|reply
The state administers the largest corporate welfare program in the economy via government-guaranteed mortgages. It guarantees nearly $2 trillion worth every year, which the banks naturally buy as they are risk-free income.
So there's no need to fire the bankers. Just stop meddling in the economy with these sophomoric interventions, whether it's GSE mortgage guarantees, or the FDIC: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22223
[+] [-] jmeister|5 years ago|reply
And banker-scapegoating is also outdated by ~10 years. The regulations passed after ‘08 have made banks boring and powerless.
The focus should be on the tech industry.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jungletime|5 years ago|reply
"The Simpsons" S10 Ep. 22 - "They Saved Lisa's Brain" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avgMk_w38g0
[+] [-] spacemanmatt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trident1000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
The whole idea came from what if one of these broad economic disciplines actually worked? Especially marxism, objectivism, and such. As the article mentions, these use economics broadly to explain history... and predict it.
"Psychohistories" are compelling, interesting and intellectually engaging. We have a tendency of adopting them though. That's the problem. They aren't scientific. They aren't even theories in a popperian sense. Ultimately, it's punditry. A perspective. I enjoy it. I enjoyed this article. It's neither true or false though, in any kind of global sense.
All that said, this take augments the (also economist friendly) "anywheres vs everywheres" take on Brexit. That take also had to do with an increase in uni graduates.
A narrower version of Turchin's concept might also be true. Rather than a surplus of (all) graduates crowding the top... this might be an issue of very specific surpluses. EG Journalism, specific government agencies, professorships, political positions... Those are a tiny portion of people overall, but highly influential to the political mood. If most journalists, academics, political aids are competing for a limited pool of jobs... These professions really are tense. Most people who want to can't get a job in these fields. Many want to. There's often no fallback. If you're a journalist/activist/campaigner type... you're either in that insider group or you have nothing. Academics is similar. A phd historian can either be a professor or very little else. No consolation prizes.
[+] [-] joe_biden123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldiracdelta|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boudewijnrempt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikig|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FpUser|5 years ago|reply
Educated people (at least ones having good general University type education) at least have better chance finding something useful to do and creating new opportunities.
My advice for those "academics" would be to undergo voluntary lobotomy and improve the world in accordance to their views.
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m000|5 years ago|reply