Completely separate from the substance of your point, this sort of language does not encourage constructive dialog, it frames the discussion in such a way that you are either going to get
a. People who agree with you, resulting in you not learning anything b. People who are triggered into fighting with you, once again, resulting in you not learning anything c. People ignoring you, resulting in you not learning anything.
My constructive suggestion to you is that you simply don't write that first sentence. I suspect you (and everyone else!) will have a much more fruitful time online as a result!
Edit: Spelling correction
The irony is that in limiting mobility and competition from the “non elite” out-groups to preserve status, they end up shrinking the overall size of the pie.
I've always taken the elite overproduction thing as an _analytical tool_ to help us make sense of why we have experienced the rise of an oppositional anti intellectual position in contemporary culture.
But you make the good point that it can also be a _weapon_, leveraged by those oppositional groups, to justify their oppositional position.
Perhaps this seeming tautology can be resolved with some systems thinking. Maybe there's some insight in the elite overproduction analysis, but that means that, as an argument for further polarising society it's a pretty effective tool. It's actually reinforcing the feedback loop! A fascinating example of a self fulfilling prophecy.
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/19/china-has-too-man...
Or maybe the Economist is "trying to sabotage China"?
They also have that Let it Rot problem so who knows
Historically, in the US the elite are the managerial class, the lawyers (future politicians), and the coastal dilettantes who are already wealthy enough to major in the social sciences.
When 1+ million students are getting MBAs every year in the belief they will be members of the C-suite, but there’s only a few thousand such positions, you have a case of elite overproduction.
For-profit degree-churning colleges made them not-so-elite through the law of supply and demand.
And now they can’t even get a job.
Then these kids realise these jobs don’t exist, that they should have gone to trade school instead, and that their student debt will cripple them for life.
Same thing will happen in China. For now their economy grows so fast it can absorb many intellectuals, but that won’t last forever.
The massive shift in careers, not just due to LLMs but technology and society in general, threaten the promises given to prior generations. And this is also happening in China, see “tang ping” / “lying flat”.