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I've observed that when big waves of (labor) change washes over the working classes, it is met with "tough luck!" and some advice to seek a new profession, often starting again at the very bottom.
But when this happens to the educated professional class, all hell breaks loose. The system has to change, because it is unthinkable for some professional with a master's degree to become a warehouse sorter.
If AI really makes professional workers obsolete in the future, I fully expect the next revolution to be fronted by that class.
> But when this happens to the educated professional class, all hell breaks loose.
If the programmers fall into the "educated professional class", then no, not in Canada. I personally know people with engineering/science degrees who became "warehouse sorters", baristas, metal workers, parcel deliverers, cooks in cafeteria. Some of them eventually found programming jobs again, others are still employed in blue collar/service jobs after 3+ years.
> I've observed that when big waves of (labor) change washes over the working classes, it is met with "tough luck!" and some advice to seek a new profession, often starting again at the very bottom.
Where have you observed this?
I really believe that we should increase automation in blue-collar work, e.g. self-checkouts. But I don’t believe those displaced should “start at the bottom”. I believe they should get better (from their perspective) jobs, subsidized payments for whatever “job” they desire, or something in between (subsidized payments for jobs like community service and art, which have some value but don’t pay as much as they should because of desirability).
I also believe we should do this for white-collar work, and executive-level. The only exception is jobs that benefit from human-ness, like service and figureheads, and these should be automated to be as easy (comfortable and effective) as possible while keeping the human.
Even people like me are getting masters degrees (working on it). I don’t understand how to square this with the inflation that these degrees have got.
>it is unthinkable for some professional with a master's degree to become a warehouse sorter.
I mean I think you do actually have a salient point, but I also think there's a material difference between telling someone that's maybe been paid not a lot for half a of labor that they need to change industries and someone who's tens of thousands of dollars into debt that the implied social contract encouraging that debt was a house of cards and they need to start from scratch with 0 experience even ever being employed.
> I fully expect the next revolution to be fronted by that class.
the keyboard warriors?
What you're saying is also similar to what Marx says about ideology that ruling sensibilities align with the interest of the bourgeoisie rather than proletariat. Same is true for geo-politics a man killed in a developed nation is somewhat exceptional to man killed in the "other" countries.
There's a double-whammy here of the Myth of Meritocracy [1] under capitalism and Prosperity Gospel [2] under Protestantism.
After the Civil War we compensated slave owners. After the GFC we bailed out the banks. The government giving money to poor people is somehow a moral hazard yet the wealthy not only expect government handouts, they demand them.
Many in tech don't seem to realize that after 2 centuries of automation coming for only blue-collar jobs, AI will finally come for theirs. Jobs losses, depressed wages, unpaid extra work and constant layoff churn. The heady heights of the 2010s will seem like a fairy tale.
Except this time, unlike a century ago, there is no labor movement. It's been decimated. There is no effective pushback against further wealth concentration to like 100,000 people. The Jeff Bezoes of the world will demand even more government money so they can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion and things will get really bad until eventually we have a Russian or french type revolution.
Too many people think it's a big club when it isn't. As George Carlin said, you're not in it [3]. People actively advocate for their own worsening material conditions because they're deluded into thinking they'll be Jeff Bezos one day.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
In the Turchin model of societal collapse, discussing elite overproduction alone is not helpful at all. The model calls for 3 pillars:
- elite overproduction and limited job opportunities
- wealth pump and inequality
- declining of popular wellbeing and growing resentment
Thus, it only makes sense to consider elite overproduction within this framework.
Isn't this partly what explained the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt?
e.g. the government made university education free, lots of people went to university, there was now excess supply of college educated professionals, this led to unhappy young professionals, in turn led to unrest etc etc.
Political theorists like that word resentment. Maybe they took it from Nietzsche.
...which is where the "Marx in a Moustache" critique comes from, because it's all just immediately downstream from inequality.
If you can slap a moustache on economic inequality, you avoid academic accusations of unoriginality and the popular antibodies against "he who must not be named." This is good for the author, but for the reader? It's about as useful as trying to stick a fake moustache over that magnificent beard.
Yeah society needs to be able to allow for this
In Machiavelli's view. whoever desires to establish a kingdom or principality where liberty and equality to prevail, will equally fail, unless he withdraws from that general equality a number of the boldest and most ambitious spirits, and makes gentlemen of them not merely in name but in fact, by giving them castles and possessions, as well as money and subjects; so that surrounded by these he may be able to maintain his power, and that by his support they may satisfy their ambition, and the others may be constrained to submit to that yoke to which force alone has been able to subject them. ... But to establish a republic in a country better adapted to a monarchy, or a monarchy where a republic would be more suitable, requires a man of rare genius and power, and therefore out of the many that have attempted it but few have succeeded. (Discourses I; Machiavelli [15311 1950, chap. 55, p. 256
So essentially, this is why the suburbs of Washington DC are among the highest income regions in the world.
You don’t have to invent new technologies if you simply position yourself next to halls of power and the money printer.
I've discussed Elite Overproduction with some economists and the best way for me to conceptualize this in modern day is with software, UI/design specifically.
UI and design is weird. There's a saying in fashion "there's no new fashion, just cycled old ideas" and things have a trend cycle. UI have a similar trend, as we can see with IOS pattern update and icon update for Google: they're just new, but we can't really tell if it's "better". But UI designer still require busywork to justify their existence and salary, so we get new UIs now and then. Part of it just falls under the bullshit job category [1]
When we ponder upon this, it boggles down to the fact that it's notoriously hard to distinguish "value creation" vs "value extraction". If I invent a fridge and it become commercially available or cheap enough so that people previously not able to purchase it can buy it, it's fairly easy to see it as value being created. A duopoly diluting milk with water to increase the profit margin, a search engine monopoly intentionally worsening it's search engine so we have to search twice (=twice the use!), a white ware company implementing planned obsolescence but better UI, looks good on the profit and balance sheet but was value now created, or extracted?
Elite overproduction, though this scope, is not about some 1% but most "middle class and up" that doesn't really do anything meaningful (bullshit job, value extraction) in society but expects titles and yearly salary increase.
This is not an issue when a society genuinely have room to grow (value creation is ample) but when the growth is harder to come by, but new generation expectations haven't changed. Then more jobs are created to extract value, and the burden start to bubble up
> When we ponder upon this, it boggles down to the fact that it's notoriously hard to distinguish "value creation" vs "value extraction".
This is an excellent frame to think about this. When we look at the increasing financialization of consumer spending (subscriptions, buy now pay later, rebates, club discounts, etc.), we can think of it as disguising value extraction as value creation.
> If I invent a fridge and it become commercially available or cheap enough so that people previously not able to purchase it can buy it, it's fairly easy to see it as value being created.
When you think about it, it actually isn't even as obvious as you might think - which is the whole problem you are talking about. Another way to recast it is there is some theoretical optimum use of resources and it is unclear whether the action you took is in line with that optimum or not. In fact, since reality is rather complicated, it probably isn't!
I might liken the idea to a chess grand-master watching a club player and a total rookie play. From the grand-master's perspective, both sides are just blundering even though one player is much more likely to win.
In the same way some supreme hyper-intelligence might see the fridge creation as a horrific failure to allocate resources to create value and hence value-destructive in relation to the original resources, even though we mere mortals think it is a pretty good idea. All we can really do is compare things and talk about which one is more efficient.
So it isn't just notoriously difficult to distinguish, but objectively almost everything we do is probably value destructive (and hence uselessly extractive) compared to a potential optimum allocation. Up until the 1950s or so even the best people managed was still pretty pathetic at creating value by modern standards. They weren't putting enough resources towards correctly creating fertiliser, which is far worse than the milk-dilution example.
I found this interesting:
“… the two decades after World War II in the United States, a time of economic redistribution and reversal of upward social mobility.”
Does anyone have a summary about the “reversal of upward mobility” bit? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard that anywhere else and I don’t think I have the mental model to understand it intuitively without an explanation.
I think it’s just poorly worded; it’s about the upward mobility of the _generation born after the Second World War_. This generation lacked opportunities and this created unrest in the 60s and 70s.
The previous generation – the one that reached adulthood before and during WW 2 – had upward mobility in the 40s, 50s, and wanted its children to have too
I'm sure the actual theory goes in to a lot of detail in academic papers and whatnot, but the Wiki summary is to vague to be interesting. There is a key question left unanswered. Who are the elite?
Are the elite:
- billionaires?
- top 1,000 Political leadership?
- top Military leadership?
- top 10% of society by wealth?
- top 10% of society by influence?
- smart people?
- hard working people?
- people with valuable economic skills?
- people who went to university and got a degree?
We have no idea from Wikipedia. It might be possible and practical to have an entirely elite society where everyone has a job for all I know reading that. I suspect we're all elite compared to the population of the 1500s.
Just to put my oar in, there is a huge problem when people aren't allowed to better their own lives and also have nothing better to do than sit around discussing how to overthrow the power structure. How that matches up to elite overproduction theories I cannot say.
The first 5 are all considered elite. He says the elite are about 2% so that's about 7 million people on the US.
But you're also missing his Elite Aspirants category which are people who have acquired credentials and social capital necessary for elite status (like a law degree from a top-tier university or an MBA).
The poster child for all of this is the entertainment industry, both music and especially Hollywood. There's a reason that "nepo babies" is such a pervasive meme now.
More than a decade ago, HBO released Girls and many were surprised to learn that every single cast member in that was a nepo baby of some sort. All these people who've made it in Hollywood end up having children. So someone will try and get a show greenlit and a studio head or an agent or somebody will come along and say "if you put my son/daughter in it, you'll get this financing or simply more chance that the studio will greenlight it". So the entire project may end up being sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, etc.
There are still non-nepo babies in this industry but it becomes harder and harder to make it on pure merit. Even if you're not a nepo baby, you need to be an "influencer". It matters how many follows you have on IG, Tiktok or Twitter. This part isn't new either. Before social media, influece was measured in magazine tears.
Eventually that sort of thing leads to the collapse of an industry.
I have largely gotten to idea that education never made elites. It was just signal most of time for someone who already belonged to elite class. From this people started to think that getting education would mean to become elite. But this was reality only for a few. And even with many of those it was questionable were they elites or only more skilled and more professional groups like say doctors and lawyers.
Education does increase upward mobility. But 1) you have to pay attention and use the education to find opportunities, and 2) it doesn’t guarantee it, you need opportunities in the first place.
You can get more upward mobility by skipping education - but only if you what you do instead enables lots of upward mobility. For example, if you skip education to work in trades, you’ll have a reliable career and upfront cash; but the career’s growth is capped, so to become really successful, you must figure out how to use the upfront cash and reliable income (which probably involves research i.e. education).
Universities were just elite finishing schools. It's a status signal to be able to afford to spend 4 years of your youth not working, partying, and paying tuition to "study" subjects that have no economic value (studying practical things like medicine and law was not elite because it shows that you need to work for a living). This stopped being a status signal with the advent student loans because it removed the exclusivity, but it takes generations for the non elite to figure that out.
Maybe not in specific countries, but where education is free and exclusively merit based (tests every few years, test to enter college, etc. ) it does lead to ability to reaching elite status.
Exactly. Elites are elite because they’re the children of the elite.
Their degrees never mattered. “Elite education” was always a cover-up.
"Even though Canada has the highest percentage of workers with higher education in the G7, the nation's productivity ranks lower than every other nation's in this group except Japan. ... By August 2024, Canada's youth unemployment rate was 14.5%, the highest seen since 2012."
A lot of does-not-follow suppositions are embedded in this. Nor does the article really seem to be talking about "elites", as career training is not some elite status.
During the period in question Canada saw outrageous levels of immigration. The highest population growth, in absolute numbers, in the developed world. It was incredibly destructive.
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/features/10000_brainiacs/
It was kind of the apogee of a problem that had grown for years, where Canada had leaned on low-cost, exploitable imported labour to avoid salary pressures, with that avoiding modernizing, automation, etc. With that massive immigration bulge we also moved to a housing-based economy where people no longer cared about normal avenues of entrepreneurial effort, but instead everyone became real estate speculators. Why start a business when you can just stand in line for some pre-con condos on the notion that you'll flip it at a big gain when complete. Or buy some dilapidated house and become a slumlord for a dozen international students.
It was perverse incentive, and has been a lost decade for the country.
Wait a little, but I was told without a university degree I am unemployable, unmarryiable, and unrespectable human trash. Ho-Humm.
hello fans of professor jiang
My take: "Professor" Jiang is a CCP asset meant to destabilise the west. Change my mind.
The OG amongst us know this comes from Peter Turchin
Chinese Joe Rogan
Probably couples with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism
I have to wonder, too, if this partially describes why "Make America Great Again" has been such an effective slogan. The greatness that most Americans long to return to is a time where a larger middle class was able to more easily pay for health care, housing, and other needs.
I'm one of those people that goes by the "all models are wrong, but some models are useful" saying.
I'm sure the "elite overproduction" model is mostly wrong. But I also think it is an interesting/useful way to look at some things happening in society recently.
Certainly, you can think of the recent "cancel culture" phenomena as a great way to remove elites to make room for new ones. (Maybe you could argue that some of the effects of MeToo were similar.)
DEI -- along with hiring quotas -- tended to bring new "officials" at companies and government orgs ("head of diversity") which is another great way of "creating" more elites.
Kinda neat, I think. But probably not super-explanatory.
You just wanted to jam in this conversation your dislike of DEI (which can be criticised but it’s not the subject).
Elite overproduction is about everybody wanting to be basically managers and nobody wanting to be production workers.
Except that without enough production workers it’s impossible to justify “elite” positions.
College graduates took on huge debt only to realise they’re not needed. That’s how you get a class of young, angry and unemployed intellectuals which is every government’s worst nightmare.
> DEI -- along with hiring quotas -- tended to bring new "officials" at companies and government orgs ("head of diversity") which is another great way of "creating" more elites.
If anything, it's a way of placating existing elites.
The elite overproduction idea is that there is a surplus of people who feel that they should have an elite status compared to reasonably available elite positions.
Creating additional managerial positions is a way to attempt to absorb this situation.
Elite overproduction = Elected overproduction = Elected mass-production.
There are those that value equality (=). There are those that value non-equality (>).
As elites of the history until now (>=6000 years-ago until now). We are the "chosen ones" who received "=" and ">" at an early age. These symbols are not "math" nor "school"; they are simply life to us.
But now consider why there must be ">" in the world. On a relaxing beach, why must one wave be higher than another? How does the water "feel"? Warm? Is that ">" than cold?
In my head, I see Master Epstein as 100, and other people as 17. 100 > 17. Master has died, so perhaps death > life. But I am only one person out of billions in the world. But I have not seen a billion people, am I over-trusting the books?
So my point is that the Elite Overproduction model is more wrong than Master Epstein. In particular...
1. If "elite overproduction model", then "Master Epstein model"
2. "Elite Overproduction" = "Master Epstein"
3. "Elite Overproduction" -> "Master Epstein"
4. 100 > 17, so "Master Epstein" model > "Elite Overproduction" model
You may not understand my point, but I hope you at least understand Master Epstein.
Article mixes "elites" and real elites. The mere usage of the term employment is a dead giveaway, among other issues. Real elites are not employed by someone as a general rule, with some exceptions of course. Article would be more aptly named "Overproduction of qualified or overqualified workers".
Whether or not Turchin uses your preferred definition of "elite" is irrelevant to the correctness of his model.
It's been awhile since I've read Turchin but I'm pretty sure in his own examples elites are indeed employed in prestigious positions. Which is really his whole point, there are only so many prestigious positions. His example using musical chairs has always stuck with me.
Honestly? No. In fact, what's actually unsustainable are societies stuck in past models, where stereotypical Fordist worker in production lines organised according to Taylor/Weber/Fayol principles are needed; yes, in these societies, there's no room for such a large proportion of educated people as we theoretically have today, theoretically because practice is different, I discuss that after.
The thing is, these societies are as obsolete as their ruling classes, who view young people seeking culture with concern. What we need is to evolve our societies to ensure there's a place for culture, letting automation do its job to generate a new economy where we work less and live better, the exact opposite of the classic https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg
If only computerisation were done properly, for the benefit of the many rather than just a select few, we would roughly have a tenth of the consumption and time currently required to do almost anything, simply thanks to greater efficiency. This isn't the case because both the ruling classes and the masses are mentally incapable of understanding a society organised differently through TLC and IT. The few who do understand have, on average, found ways to profit handsomely from the ignorance of the majority, and the remaining handful who understand but aren't among the giants profiting from it are the "rebels" that the WEF "feared" back in 2016 http://web.archive.org/web/20161206153258/https://www.forbes... and they don't have much room to get anywhere.
In the first paragraph, I said "in theory" we have trained people, because training is largely obsolete, stuck in another era, with the bulk of universities, courses, and lecturers being even more reactionary than the average person. The reality is that people who actually know what they're doing are incredibly scarce compared to the past, precisely because of this general lack of evolution. This is a massive disaster because knowledge and intelligence are the only natural resources that grow with use and recede otherwise.
Today we truly need a great reset, as foreseen by the current élites, only of a different nature, because we need a different civilisation from the current one.
I associate this phrase with losers and people trying to sabotage the US. You know who is not wringing their hands about “elite overproduction”? China, who are pumping out tons of smart and capable STEM PhDs, and have in a relatively short time caught up to and in some cases surpassed the US in production of scientific output and technology.
> I associate this phrase with losers
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
China itself has a PhD and academics glut:
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/19/china-has-too-man...
Or maybe the Economist is "trying to sabotage China"?
In my view, STEM PhDs are not members of the “elite.”
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.
The last time the world had an intelligentsia of this magnitude, the Tsarist State fell.