Grey Enlightment doesn't understand elite overproduction, so I'll show where his analysis is flawed:
1. The word ‘overproduction’ suggests an imbalance or surplus of college grads, but the ever-widening college wage premium suggests otherwise. Proponents of elite overproduction theory have to reconcile the data showing college grads have much higher earnings, with the notion of oversupply, which is inherently contradictory.
This isn't at all surprising, nor is it contradictory. We live in a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy allocates funds to it's own ends. We do not have a free market in which a price signal could be normal. Think about how they hand out incentives for 'green' technology, which in turn make it appear these technologies are fully functional. But we don't have the sort of electrical grid that can handle everyone getting electric cars- we will end up with a broken grid, and a lot of people unable to drive anywhere.
The overproduction of elites is similar, with regard to his point. There would be a gap in earnings anyway, though not as large as it is now.
2. Most college grads do not aspire to highly-visible elite roles. Some of most popular majors are psychology, nursing, business, medicine/pre-med, accounting, engineering, and ‘sports psychology’. These are actionable, good-paying careers, but not necessarily elite-track professions. If you want to be elite, you probably want to get a humanities, law, economics, or Classics degree. As I said before, elites generally deal with abstractions or words, not people or things (the only possible exceptions being business elites or political elites), which is why law school tends to be the favored path for aspiring elites. They don’t want to be doing rectal exams or having to read expense reports.
The bureaucracy coalesces around people who actually do work. This is perhaps most obvious in the medical industry where most of the money we've been spending since the Clinton years has been going into huge bureaucracies. Most people are going to look for honest work. They are not going to call a bureaucrat an elite, because they are technically not elites- they are usurpers. But since the modern bureaucratic state was so successful in destroying the nobility, they do exist now as the elite under the current system. Few people are going to see this until it directly hurts them- like when doctors tried to get good information out about COVID that contradicted the bureaucratic plan. We usually just grumble about paperwork and go along with the program with the thought that it's just the way it is.
3. Elite overproduction, if it exists, is not societally destabilizing. It just means an angier, more cynical educated class, but it will not lead to unrest or the breakdown or society. Even with increased credentialization over the past 40 years, strong GDP growth, falling crime rates since the early 90s (although there was a spike in 2020-2021), record corporate profits, and record high US dollar, suggests that having a large educated class hasn’t yet had deleterious effects from a macro economic or social stability perspective.
Here it would be advantageous to actually read Peter Turchin, because he's not talking about some mere hypothesis about the current year. He points out elite overproduction has happened before. It has not happened at this scale though. Just think about the comparison of creating elites through a royal family versus elites via a bureaucracy. Families grow at a much slower rate. Even the bureaucratic state was growing much slower in previous iterations when there was some sanity.
But now that it has gone off the rails, what we see are our institutions failing us, making excuses for not doing what they should be doing, and claiming ever more authority despite losing credibility for not doing the things we gave them authority for in the first place.
This is where the social destabilization comes in. Your city can't provide water because they wasted your money on other things, rather than keeping the infrastructure up. Ideally you could fire them all and find folks who know what they are doing, but no- the reason the infrastructure is screwed up is racism or climate change. They proceed to demand more of you because they need to fight racism or climate change. The infrastructure still needs to be fixed- the whole city needs to be put on a sustainable path, but they will then take the money and create more bureaucracy meant to combat racism and climate change. The infrastructure will continue to degrade, and the bureaucracy will make sure to create the impression that racism and climate change exist and are pressing problems.
This is an emergent property of complex systems- the bureaucracy defends itself, appearing intelligent in a perverse way, because you'd think the average bureaucrat (being human) would see this could end badly, perhaps even see that it could end for him personally in a very bad way, yet they continue to pursue these activities. In large part, it's due to comfort and the fact that their pensions are tied up with the existing system.
Under these conditions, violence breaks out, and society destabilizes. Instead of letting Unite the Right speak in Charlottsville- which would result in us laughing at them if they were just a bunch of racists- they let Antifa take over the streets and then pushed the Unite the Right people into them. Then they proceeded to spend hours letting craziness take over their streets- a sign they were obviously hoping for/fomenting violence. I believe there was one (very leftist) journalist who still wants to know why the first responders were stopped from providing care to the one victim, who got hit by a car, but died of a heart attack.
As you may be able to tell, I think they were hoping for blood shed. They were probably sad that they only one got one death, considering what the ensuing media/marketing circus was afterward.
Most of what has appeared on TV since then have similar suspicious qualities. Whatever the feelings of the people involved, there's a scripted quality. One demographic comes away with the idea they are being hunted by the police. Another demographic comes away with the message that we need to militarize the police more, apparently never worrying that the military gear might be used against them.
4. The ability of political elites to impart drastic change is possibly overstated. Democratic elites seem to have have mixed success at policy. ‘Defund the police’ was DOA, same for the ‘George Floyd Justice in Policing Act,’ which got zero Republican votes. AOC is regarded as one of the least effective congresspeople. It was Manchin who stole the show. A case can be made that elites were more effective generations ago, such as during the Civil Rights era, compared to today, before they became overproduced. More elites means more competition within elites, like conservative vs. liberal elites.
They are all a part of the same bureaucracy. The competition is invalid because the bureaucracy filters good people out. You can't move up in the hierarchy with out accepting lies as 'training'. You are going to get people dumb enough to believe it, or sociopaths who don't believe it but impose it anyway. The conservatives don't even have an ideology- they are just nostalgic. All they do is occasionally improve the economic situation, which makes things a little better for us, but also allows the bureaucracy to continue. They entire left/right charade in the mainstream can be consider a type of internal stabilization for the bureaucracy.
Grey Enlightenment continued on with more examples, but frankly, it feels like elite overproduction is just something he saw on a blog somewhere, and he never really bothered to figure out what it was. Additionally, the blind spot most people have, where they don't think about bureaucracy much at all, seems present here. I suppose this is why the bureaucrats have been so successful with the term 'systematic racism'. It shuts down real discussion about the system because it blames every failure on racism.
Violence and social destabilization under these conditions can occur anywhere. There does not need to be a bureaucracy involved. The conditions are already here- the electrical grid, the water supply, roads, food, brainwashed people who think you are doing or thinking something wrong- it doesn't take much to put us into a flashpoint situation. But if you aren't aware of how the bureaucracy caused these conditions, they'll just keep happening over and over. They prefer us to be out here, squabbling with each other, rather than correctly identifying who is responsible and figuring out some way of removing them from power.
No comments:
Post a Comment