Comment by rhyn00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhyn00 | Hacker News Reader

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.

They get jobs outside their field.

In 1950s and 60s the US seriously overestimated the number of physicists they would need.

Lots of physicists ended up working in business.

> Lots of physicists ended up working in business.

But usually still in roles that benefited from their studies.

Studying complex financial instruments?

https://youtu.be/Elyfo1DIlzs

Most of a physics degree is applied maths. If they use their math skills the degree wasn't a waste.

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).

Possibly … I know quite a few of these (now retired) ex-physicists. Most got jobs that only expected a Bachelors, not an advanced degree at all.

But I’m sure there’s selection bias here.

And arguably lots of non-technical roles benefit from social science / humanities studies.

If you want to lead a team, or eventually a large organisation, there are worse things you could do than spend 3 years learning about people.

>And arguably lots of non-technical roles benefit from social science / humanities studies.

If by "benefit" you mean "are filled with busywork and the latest cultural biases and performative ceremonies", then yes :-)

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.

Ivy League to get paid $$$ in engineering.?

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.

Walter, is that you ?

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.

-An unemployed STEM

>We only need so many sociologists and critical race studies professors and political scientists.

Yeah, and the number is 0.

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?

Pol Pot did want to teach history, after all.

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.

Yeah I dislike this framing.

Elite overproduction isn't about "good enough," it's about alignment.

Trump was never accepted into the NYC elite social circle. They had money, elite education, and influence. But they weren't in-group.

Bannon also is a good study.

And there's always a couple of weirdos at prep school who don't quite fit in.

That’s - not at all what I meant.

Turchin, the guy who came up with this, applies it specifically to trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/17/were-on-the-...

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 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.

Also it might be helpful for you to engage with the source text re:Turchin if you want to have conversations about his ideas.

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.

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.

>The advanced-educated-but-not-good-enough

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.

Maybe the journalist was precisely part of the overproduction...

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