[Lavery]

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.

[lumost]

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.

[taurath]

It turns out that all they have to do is split the angry people in two to confuse who to be angry at and that works for decades.

[reducesuffering]

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.

[Pokepokalypse]

>people are going to be angry.

sure. I reckon they are.

[imbnwa]

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

[merpnderp]

You should meet my carpenter and plumber and ask them about their nice houses with big yards and new cars.

[gruez]

>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.

[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf#page=9

[ampdepolymerase]

You conveniently left out the rise of the industry known as software engineering.

[pyuser583]

Non manufacturing blue collar trades are still quite profitable.

[outlace]

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.

[roenxi]

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?

[pydry]

>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.

[lumost]

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.

[zozbot234]

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.

[naravara]

China’s economic development (and East Asia’s more broadly) has been one of the most thoroughly studied topics in development economics.

[zozbot234]

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.

[pydry]

Increased stratification started when incomes decoupled from productivity growth in ~1979. That was caused by a wave of union busting.

[beaconstudios]

>STEM degrees are not the main source of "elite overproduction" by any stretch.

How many of today's billionaires have a tech background?

[bilbo0s]

Insightful comment.

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.

[wombatmobile]

The different between a lawyer and an engineer is that one creates new means of production which grow the pie, and the other procures pieces of pie.

[wisty]

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).

[flybrand]

Good point.

Elite overproduction could come from changing the definition of an elite; we may have lowered the bar w the Internet, self-publishing, etc.

[mmarq]

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”.