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[                    ]
Finance & economicsOct 24th 2020 edition

Free exchange
Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

Some academics argue that unhappy elites lead to political
instability

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Oct 22nd 2020

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TEN YEARS ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of
Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. "The next decade
is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States
and western Europe," he asserted, pointing in part to the
"overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees". The
subsequent surge in populism in Europe, the unexpected votes in 2016
for Brexit and then for President Donald Trump in America, and a wave
of protests from the gilets jaunes to Black Lives Matter, has made Mr
Turchin something of a celebrity in certain circles, and has piqued
economists' interest in the discipline of "cliodynamics", which uses
maths to model historical change. Mr Turchin's emphasis on the
"overproduction of elites" raises uncomfortable questions, but also
offers useful policy lessons.

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As far back as ancient Rome and imperial China, Mr Turchin shows,
societies have veered from periods of political stability to
instability, often at intervals of about 50 years. Consider America.
Every pundit knows that Congress has become gridlocked, with
Democrats and Republicans unwilling to compromise with each other.
Fewer know that it was also highly polarised around 1900, before
becoming more co-operative in the mid-20th century.

What causes these lurches from calm to chaos? Mr Turchin views
societies as large, complex systems that are subject to certain
patterns, if not laws. That is an entirely different approach from
much of academic history, with its preference for small-scale,
microcosmic studies, argues Niall Ferguson of Stanford University. In
a paper published this year Mr Turchin (with Andrey Korotayev of the
Higher School of Economics in Russia) examines the prediction of
instability he made in 2010. His forecast model contains many
elements, but like Karl Marx Mr Turchin seems to believe that "the
history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles." Where Marx focused on the proletariat, though, Mr Turchin
is more interested in the elite--and how its members struggle against
each other.

Who counts as the elite, and how competition manifests itself, varies
from place to place; one example could be a large number of highly
educated folk relative to the number of government offices (and
therefore jobs). But a struggle is most likely when economic
inequality is high. The rewards for being at the top are then
especially lucrative, both in terms of earning power and political
influence, and those who miss out feel their loss more keenly. The
feeling of resentment is particularly strong among people brought up
to believe that they ought to be in the elite. Worse still, societies
tend to produce ever more would-be elites, in part because access to
education tends to improve over time. Mr Turchin sees all this as a
recipe for political chaos. Articulate, educated people rebel,
producing a scramble for political and economic power. Elites stop
co-operating, counter-elites emerge, and order breaks down.

The argument undoubtedly papers over historical nuance. Yet focusing
on dissatisfied elites is not a bad way of understanding political
instability. Hugh Trevor-Roper, a historian, noted that "social
crises are caused not by the clear-cut opposition of mutually
exclusive interests but by the tug-of-war of opposite interests
within one body." The French Revolution was not primarily the product
of misery but instead of a battle between an underemployed educated
class and hereditary landowners. Historians identify "the problem of
an excess of educated men" as contributing to Europe's revolutions of
1848. Mr Turchin suggests that though slavery was the proximate cause
of the American civil war, a more fundamental one was resentment from
up-and-coming Northern capitalists towards stuck-in-their-ways
Southerners.

Elite overproduction can also help explain the malaise gripping the
rich world of late. It has become extraordinarily difficult for a
young person to achieve elite status, even if she works hard and goes
to the best university. House prices are so high that only inheritors
stand a chance of emulating the living conditions of their parents.
The power of a few "superstar" firms means that there are few
genuinely prestigious jobs around. Mr Turchin reckons that each year
America produces some 25,000 "surplus" lawyers. Over 30% of British
graduates are "overeducated" relative to their jobs.

All this goes some way to explaining an apparently puzzling trend:
why apparently well-off people are drawn to radicalism. Under Jeremy
Corbyn Britain's Labour Party attracted more upper-middle- and
middle-class folk than it used to, even as it moved further left from
the Tories; its lead among recent graduates was clear. Joe Biden's
lead over Bernie Sanders in opinion polls during the Democratic
primaries was far smaller among college-educated Americans than among
those who did not finish high school.

Predicting an earthquake

Mr Turchin's theories predict that political tremors eventually
subside. "Sooner or later most people begin to yearn for the return
of stability and an end to fighting," he argues. Already the data
show that support for both left- and right-wing populist parties in
Europe is waning. Polls suggest Mr Trump will soon be voted out of
office. Another option for those looking to avoid instability is to
reduce the number of aspiring elites. Boris Johnson, Britain's prime
minister, has pressed for better vocational education, saying that
"We need to recognise that a significant and growing minority of
young people leave university and work in a non-graduate job."

Yet enlightened elites can prevent the emergence of political
instability in more effective ways. In the early 20th century
American reformers raised inheritance taxes to prevent the emergence
of a hereditary aristocracy, and engaged in massive trust-busting.
Modernising urban-planning systems could lower housing costs, and
deregulating labour markets would help create good jobs for "excess"
elites. Mr Turchin's analysis of the structural forces governing
societies is an intriguing explanation of political unrest. But
cliodynamics need not be destiny. #

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print
edition under the headline "Graduates of the world, unite!"

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