[HN Gopher] A theory that "elite overproduction" leads to politi...
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A theory that "elite overproduction" leads to political instability
(2020)
Author : jedwhite
Score : 116 points
Date : 2021-07-06 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| abnry wrote:
| I keep refreshing the comments here and I think I know why.
| Personal experience in grad school taught me the allure of
| success in academia. I was hyper-focused on playing the game
| right to get that tenure track (and hopefully tenured) position.
| Half of your salary as an academic (unless you go into the
| teaching route, "ew..." /sarcasm) is paid in prestige. When you
| have a clique of people across the world who cite your papers and
| show respect it boosts your ego massively.
|
| When I crashed out of grad school due to debilitating health
| issues, I did a reevaluation. Knowing that I loved the prestige
| aspect of academia, but then realizing that I would much rather
| have good health and no prestige than bad health and prestige, my
| perspective changed. I used to be irritated by the people who
| loudly and proudly called grad school a scam.
|
| If you do get your PhD from a brand-name university, publish a
| thesis that nobody but your advisor reads (and not even everyone
| on your thesis committee), in a field that really isn't all that
| important, can you still really say you are worthy of elite
| status?
|
| Many grad students were miffed that the academic job market was
| so tough that they had to take low-wage postdoc jobs. Truly,
| there is an overproduction of PhDs when you are trained for the
| job your advisor has. And when your advisor has more than one PhD
| student... the math won't work out, especially when your advisor
| has tenure and won't retire until the latest point possible.
|
| I graduated college a couple months before I turned 20. That put
| the idea in me that I could be "elite". Sure, it was worth a shot
| at the time. But maybe I bought into an unhealthy worldview where
| I cared more about elevating my own status than doing something
| useful.
|
| If you have a PhD, you should be smart enough to understand
| market dynamics. You should be smart enough to understand that
| when demand outstrips supply, the price people are willing to
| sell their labor is going to drop way down. Those willing to
| participate are the ones who can tolerate higher levels of risk,
| gambling that they will get the high payout.
|
| So if you are resentful your postdoc position in Middle-of-
| nowhere pays you 50k at the age of 27... your resentment is
| completely unfounded. It may sting when the bet doesn't pay out,
| but you should have known that it is a bet. And those who
| perpetuate the lie that a PhD means you are owed the reward in
| the status game, you are leading people astray.
| cryptica wrote:
| The problem is that the monetary system is ending and it
| desperately tries to propagate itself by promoting/enriching
| people who are able to maintain the illusion of normalcy which
| keeps everything together. It becomes increasingly difficult to
| find people who are capable of such an extreme degree of
| corruption and hypocrisy. The system ends after it runs out of
| corrupt people to promote. In the meantime, this systematic
| promotion of corrupt people creates political instability.
| quacked wrote:
| I wonder if the economists have ever considered a society where
| brainy people are happy and proud to perform basic sustenance
| work- construction, manufacture of textiles, farming, driving,
| etc.
| s_dev wrote:
| That sounds like Japan. You could have lads that would have
| been destined to be astrophysicists or computer architects
| performing 'working class jobs' like making chefs knives or
| growing bonzai trees. Skills that are far more modest than
| their potential.
|
| They don't seem any worse off because of it.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Skills that are far more modest than their potential
|
| Ever tried making a decent knife? Or keeping a bonsai tree
| alive? For 100 years?
| s_dev wrote:
| I can appreciate there is a huge amount of skill and
| knowledge making a knife/bonsai but I do believe there is
| more required of both such attributes to be an
| astrophysicist.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think the "primitive" skill closest to the kind of
| mathematical thinking an astrophysicist (or
| mathematician) employs would be advanced knotwork. Mental
| geometric/topological/spatial manipulations are key to
| clever insights and critical to figuring out knots.
|
| (This can be taught to/learned by some chimpanzees, BTW.
| ...but I think there are no such examples in the wild
| without substantial human contact.)
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I am closer to a computer architect than an
| astrophysicist in qualifications, but I can confirm from
| recent experience: I have no ability to keep a Bonsai
| tree alive.
| cratermoon wrote:
| On what empirical basis do you hold this belief?
| quacked wrote:
| I have noticed the same thing. I just don't see any reason
| why, across a span of a 60 year career, you can't do both at
| the same time- part time astrophysicist, part-time knife
| maker. I'd repair potholes or monitor an industrial loom for
| 2 days per week if I could take the rest of the time off.
| missedthecue wrote:
| how many japanese do you think are in the business of making
| chef knives and bonzai trees
| s_dev wrote:
| Theres probably more Japanese making knives and growing
| bonzai trees than there are Japanese astrophysicists or
| computer architects.
| busterarm wrote:
| Also I think the parent post is ignoring generally accepted
| realities of the Japanese higher education system.
|
| The hardest part of the top tier universities is getting
| in. Being an actual university student is the time in life
| when most Japanese slack off, get part time jobs and devote
| lots of attention to their hobbies. Skipping class is
| normal in most departments and largely what you get your
| degree in is meaningless.
|
| Japanese university grads merely have to graduate and based
| on the school they went to will determine which prestigious
| companies they can successfully apply to. New grads apply
| to the company, not a specific position and companies
| allocate their new hires based on what positions they need
| filled.
| zelos wrote:
| "I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long
| entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people
| pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure." (Iain M.
| Banks, Use of Weapons)
| oh-4-fucks-sake wrote:
| [I think psychologists
| have](https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-
| magic...)
|
| Basically, those that are more "brainy" need a higher level of
| mental stimulation in order to not be bored. Being given too
| much mental stimulation relative to your intelligence/skills
| results in anxiety. The sweet spot is somewhere in between and
| we seek this sweet spot (or at least stumble upon it and remain
| sticky to it).
|
| People then sort themselves over time into these buckets s/t
| (generally), the brainy people end up doing brainy things, and
| the not-so-brainy people do less-brainy things. Reversing of
| roles would be mutually detrimental to both parties.
| quacked wrote:
| I don't think I agree with this assessment. I myself am
| "brainy", but working for actually useful endeavors is easy
| to balance with a rich, involved life. I can happily dig
| rocks out of the ground in the morning and write plays in the
| evening.
|
| The difference is that the rock-digging is primarily _for
| myself and my family_ , rather than for shareholders. Would
| "brainy" people need a higher level of mental stimulation if
| they were doing road-building work on their own street? I
| certainly wouldn't be happy as a truck driver, but I could
| easily work as a truck driver for a month straight if the
| reward was significant time off that I could spend with my
| family and friends.
|
| I'm not doing a great job at explaining this- a lot of people
| have been trained to believe in the necessary division of
| labor, but their belief that they could never do manual labor
| allows the overlords of society to keep everyone in the rat
| race. If you think you could never work in a textile factory
| because you need more mental stimulation than that, then you
| won't ever consider a vision of society where you help
| produce textiles.
|
| If people really want a ten-hour work week, we need to be
| building everything that we use in our society for ourselves,
| not relying on serfs in foreign countries to do the grunt
| work while we do "stimulating work", i.e. building elaborate
| processes for white collar companies providing services that
| we don't actually need.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| I really dig the comment about serfs.
|
| We've done a great job of hiding-away slavery in the name
| of consumerism and "uplifting" third world economies.
|
| Instead, I would love to see a world where repair and reuse
| is the norm.
|
| And chasing after the largest/outrageous/most-
| expensive/trendiest is nothing short of embarrassing.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| I watched a thing on youtube regarding luxury goods
| manufacturers as the ultimate slave makers. Not because
| of the obvious sweat shops, but because they can convince
| smart/rich people that they're still inadequate and need
| to work even more so they can buy whatever the hell is
| being pushed. I thought it was an interesting concept,
| not 100% onboard, but interesting.
| javajosh wrote:
| The real truth is that brainy people need a way to blow off
| that brainy steam, and it kinda doesn't matter if it's
| designing a novel WMD or playing a board-game.
|
| I'd argue on that basis that stimulating board-games can save
| the world.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I occasionally ponder whether this is the purpose of
| funding pure mathematics.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Another reason is this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiven
| ess...
| rjbwork wrote:
| If I could make the kind of money I make in software doing
| some kind of hands on manual labor I'd be all over it,
| honestly. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing.
| quacked wrote:
| Do you mean "make the kind of money", or "live the kind of
| lifestyle"?
|
| In order to provide you with the lifestyle you take for
| granted, several million actions must be undertaken by
| people around the globe (drill for oil, watch hospital
| patients, build N95 masks, etc). My question is- how many
| of those actions could be undertaken by people who consider
| themselves "brainy", the completion of which would
| guarantee a similar lifestyle to those same brainy people?
|
| I know this is a little utopian- I don't have a full stack
| solution made up- but when your street gets a pothole, some
| man comes out and fixes it in the hot sun. Why don't you
| fix it? Well, you don't have the tools, or the expertise,
| or the legal right to do it. Furthermore, you don't have
| the _time_ to do it, because you work 40-60 hours per week
| yourself at a white collar job (I 'm assuming, given you're
| on HN during the workday). Many people think that someone's
| full-time "job" should be fixing potholes, and so people
| think "well I'd never fix potholes, I don't want that as my
| career". But wouldn't you learn how to fix potholes if you
| only had to fix potholes when they showed up near you,
| instead of for 40-60 hours per week every week?
| nradov wrote:
| Fixing potholes properly so that they stay fixed requires
| some specialized equipment. It's not the kind of stuff
| that everyone can keep in the corner of their garage. I
| certainly don't want random neighbors doing it because
| they'll end up making the situation worse for everyone.
| quacked wrote:
| Jesus Christ, this is like trying to convince the blind
| men that the elephant exists. What, do you think it takes
| a lifetime of practice to operate specialized equipment?
| They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent
| immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the
| potholes are fixed just fine.
|
| You can walk on to a pothole crew and be considered a
| functional crew member inside a single season. Sure, I
| don't want you fixing my potholes because you don't know
| how to do it, but if I happened to live next to those
| pothole guys, I'd be happy with my neighbors fixing my
| potholes. Now, let's assess the difference between them
| and you: they have at least a few hundred hours of
| pothole repair practice, and you don't. It's too bad that
| you're incapable of learning how to do that.
|
| I bet you think that good grades are important, don't
| you? Without grades, you never know what kind of
| unqualified whack job might start Microsoft, Oracle,
| Apple, Whole Foods, Uber, Dell, Dropbox... that's why we
| need those pothole guys to only ever work on potholes-
| you never know what kind of whack job might start
| jackhammering your street and "making the situation worse
| for everyone else".
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-
| fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the
| potholes are fixed just fine.
|
| That's not really fixing the potholes, they're basically
| putting a band-aid on it and calling it a day. "Fixing" a
| pot-holed street in a long-term sense may require
| literally rebuilding that piece of the street from the
| ground up.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's been 100 degrees here for a month. I wouldn't want any
| kind of an outdoor job here right now, not for any amount
| of money.
| quacked wrote:
| But you still think that someone should do outdoor jobs
| where you live. Why them and not you? Their jobs are open
| to you, but your job is not open to them.
|
| How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other
| people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same
| labor yourself?
| brippalcharrid wrote:
| They probably aren't willing to do outdoor work _in the
| cicumstances_ , seeing as they have previously delayed a
| lot of gratification by spending time and money
| developing skills that now enable them to do work in an
| air-conditioned office in a field that they find
| intellectually stimulating, with good remuneration. If
| they hadn't made good use of the opportunities that life
| had presented them with, if they were dealt a bad hand in
| life, or if the developed world was plunged into a new
| dark age, then I'm sure they would be more than happy to
| till the earth, tend to livestock or perform tree surgery
| if that was what it took to avert starvation or penury.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| How am I "expecting the rewards of their labor"?
|
| And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them
| (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do
| their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they
| aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it.
| How does that make anything better?
| quacked wrote:
| Outdoor jobs: growing food, infrastructure repair, dock
| loading, police work, etc. If there's a big crash on the
| highway and it's 100 degrees out, someone's still got to
| go direct traffic, clean up the glass, etc. If you expect
| the cleanup to happen, you expect someone to do the
| cleanup, therefore you are expecting the rewards of the
| labor of people who do outdoor jobs.
|
| My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly,
| but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two
| different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year
| 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am
| talking about "the collection of tasks that end up
| providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of
| the expectations that it's full-time or year-round
| attached to it. This may seem like an asinine
| distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society
| where you leave your current profession and work full-
| time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of
| society where you are capable of rendering some
| assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required
| to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-
| brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give
| up your current amount of free time, or your medical
| care, or your access to entertainment and food, but
| neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-
| smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff
| that you enjoy.
|
| If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you
| theoretically could offset the amount of time they have
| to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks.
| It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform
| the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be.
|
| I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in
| another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution
| built out in my head that would make all of this
| magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that
| the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of
| people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god,
| I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when
| the power goes out during a heat wave and the city
| employees don't fix it fast enough.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-
| gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting
| in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work
| outside"
|
| I had a part time job planting trees in high school. I
| knew I got into a good university and part of me was
| feeling like I was privileged to be able to go to college
| when the other people I was working with might not have
| the same opportunity.
|
| But then I heard one of them say "thank God I'll be
| graduating soon and won't have to do school work
| anymore."
|
| And realized they had zero interest in pursuing the path
| I was on.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| So there's a crash on the freeway, and someone needs to
| direct traffic. Yeah, I could probably do that, if I
| needed to. I even _would_ , if I thought it needed doing,
| until actual authorities showed up.
|
| But, to use your other example, the power goes out. You
| don't really want amateur me trying to restore the power.
| You want a professional doing that, because it's much
| more likely to work, and much less likely to have
| negative consequences. So having me "render assistance"
| is not likely to be either welcome or useful.
|
| In the same way, you don't want me wandering around a
| construction site looking to be helpful. I'd be more
| likely to get killed than to do much good.
|
| So... Yes, I'm willing to pitch in, outside, if needed.
| No, for many jobs you don't actually want me doing that,
| no matter how much sympathy we have for the people having
| to work out in the heat.
|
| And none of that takes anything away from my initial
| point, which is that no, I don't wish that I did manual
| labor outside instead of my nice air-conditioned job.
| Right now I'm really grateful for my nice indoor cubical
| farm.
|
| If you want to go anywhere with this, maybe the direction
| is that we ought to pay people better who have to work
| outside, rather than paying them less than indoor people.
| quacked wrote:
| But your conception of "amateur you" is fed by your
| (again, I'm assuming) 16 years in school, when you could
| have spent 200 of those hours learning how to clean up
| freeway crashes. You don't _have_ to be an amateur,
| unless you accept that as your station in life. You 're
| correct that I don't want <you as you exist in the
| present> to repair power lines, but I have full faith
| that if you set your mind to it and had the right access
| to training you could learn how to repair power lines, or
| at least provide entry-level assistance to a power-line-
| repair master.
|
| Just as you went from unskilled in your domain to skilled
| in your domain, so could you theoretically go from
| unskilled in construction to skilled in construction. I
| know you don't want to become an expert in construction,
| but how much of that want is based in the fact that in
| the current build of society, the only way to become a
| construction expert is to accept years of low pay in
| terrible conditions with awful coworkers in 100-degree-
| heat? Don't you think that somehow, using the combined
| man- and brain-power of the billions of people alive, we
| could form some kind of society where you might be able
| to learn and perform some construction without needing to
| accept the complete sacrifice of your quality of life to
| do it?
|
| The problem with "paying people better to work outside"
| is that the entire concept of paying people to do
| anything, ie rewarding people with money, require that
| the most unpleasant jobs be done by people who must
| choose between the job and starvation/exposure or
| violence (serfs or slaves). That's why the easiest, most
| brutal jobs are always done by the lowest-IQ immigrants.
| If you were to pay them more, per your suggestion, the
| price of the reward of their labor goes up (berries go
| from $6/carton to $38/carton), the demand for the reward
| of their labor goes down, and they get laid off and are
| back to having no way to secure food, shelter, and
| medical care. (There are some exceptions to this rule;
| construction workers in the US are usually decently-
| compensated, but the US is an anomaly because we subsist
| based on the efforts of serfs and slaves in Asia, who
| mine and refine our rare earth minerals, assemble our
| tech, etc.)
| jimbokun wrote:
| Why is his/her job not open to "them"?
| quacked wrote:
| IQ, education experience, the oppression of society, take
| your pick. Take an average programmer and an average
| backhoe operator. Give them both 120 hours to train at
| each other's jobs, monitored by an expert. Who will be a
| more suitable replacement for the other?
|
| As a writer I like said- "you get upset when a toll booth
| operator takes a long time to count your change, but if
| they could count change, they'd be an engineer like you
| are."
| jimbokun wrote:
| Well, yes, software engineer takes a lot more than 120
| hours of training to do that job.
|
| But that's not to say if you gave the backhoe operator
| the same number of years experience learning programming
| as the software engineer, they wouldn't be just as good
| at software development.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other
| people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same
| labor yourself?
|
| I pay them directly for their labor, as simple as that. I
| guess I'm not sure what the confusion is. Everyone wants
| the best job they can get given their skills and luck.
| Nobody is going to be shoveling asphalt in the sun for
| fun if their part time astrophysicist gig covers their
| expenses.
| quacked wrote:
| Everyone has been tricked into believing that the best
| use of their time is to "get the best job", and the "job"
| is working at a hyper-specialized set of tasks, day-in,
| day-out. They claw at each other like crabs, dismayed
| when they lose a position, elated when they eke out a few
| more dollars or gain an extra few days of free time as
| they shuffle jobs. On HN, there's an archetypal hero's
| ascendency crawl where you finally find that $300k
| product manager job and retire at 45 with crazy stock
| options.
|
| It's a slave mentality. Do you believe that we, the
| people in society, set up the component parts of society
| and thus have the right to rebuild those component parts
| as it suits us, or do you believe that concepts like
| "jobs" and "laws" are naturally occurring phenomena that
| we are owned by?
|
| I am immune to the siren call of endless improvements in
| the amount of money I receive. I have reached a high
| enough standard of living that I don't need any more
| goods or services than I already can get, and I'm not
| particularly rich as far as Americans go (about 65th
| percentile according to a recent income distribution
| calculator).
|
| My goal is to convince as many people as I can to start
| thinking about what quality of life they would be
| satisfied with, figure out what labor and materials are
| required of them and their community to provide that
| quality of life, and then cut everything else out of the
| picture. We don't need the rat race, we don't need our
| elders worrying about how they'll afford the doctor, we
| don't need people working 80 hour weeks at minimum wage
| so they can afford a crappy apartment. We just need the
| materials and the labor.
|
| The more people buy into "I've got to get the best job"
| mentality, the more impossible realizing any sort of
| overall improvement in our labor-time-to-reward ratio is.
|
| (I know I sound like a communist, but I don't believe in
| the labor theory of value, and most self-described
| communists I talk to call me a right-wing extremist.)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| So I 100% agree with everything you said, but don't see
| how it connects to the points you raise above.
|
| As you say, people should think long and hard about their
| life goals, and in my opinion, would probably be happier
| with a different work life balance where they can afford
| it.
|
| However, I don't see a world in which I would work part
| time at a job less enjoyable with worse pay than my
| current one. I would rather optimize to work the minimum
| hours at the best compensated job I can find. (e.g. why
| work 50-50% at white collar job and terrible job, when I
| can just work 51% at the white collar job).
|
| Sure, there are major challenges to most people doing
| this, but removing those barriers is a lot more realistic
| that introducing job swapping that people don't even
| want. The simple place to fix the problem is uncouple
| health and other benefits from employers. The current
| system discourages part time work because employers have
| fixed costs per employee. Once you break this link, more
| people will work part time.
| quacked wrote:
| Hm, well, I appreciate you pointing out that you agree
| with me, I got snippy in another response to you on a
| different comment chain.
|
| I still don't think I've successfully explained this
| concept of changing the job-as-endless-labor to job-to-
| produce-specific-amount.
|
| Have you ever gone out and built something for yourself,
| like a shed?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Have you ever gone out and built something for yourself,
| like a shed?
|
| Yes, I love building things for myself and my friends,
| but I wouldn't want to do it as a low paying job. In
| fact, doing it as a job would give me less time and money
| to do it for myself and friends. For me, that is just
| hopping off one economic hamster wheel and onto another.
| My job is complex and hard enough as it is, doubling the
| required skills and cutting the time to learn them sounds
| horrible. I'm fully aware that sharing jobs might be more
| attractive for the guy shoveling asphalt 100% of the time
|
| > I got snippy in another response to you on a different
| comment chain.
|
| No worries, at lets to me it seems like you are engaging
| in good faith, listening to answers, and responding to
| what people are saying instead of talking past them. I
| can live with a little snippiness as long as people are
| coherent.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I've done manual labor. If I could work in software despite
| only by _not_ making any more than I would in manual labor,
| I'd still work in software.
|
| And that's even before considering the way management and
| coworker selfishness and ineptitude becomes a physical
| safety threat rather than an irritation.
| jimbokun wrote:
| In high school, I had a job driving a tractor and planting
| grass seed for a summer. I was working with a couple
| gentlemen near retirement age.
|
| I made a comment one day about how this wasn't so bad,
| getting physical activity, breathing fresh air.
|
| They told me to get a job in a nice air conditioned office.
| I wouldn't want to still be doing this when I was their
| age.
| quacked wrote:
| I've said it in a few other comments- everyone has a
| very, very standard rat-race vision of what a "job" is.
| You, other commenters that are downvoting me, and the
| gentlemen you worked with all have the conception that a
| "job" must be a 40-hour/week, 261 day/year commitment to
| a set of tasks. (I'm not sure that you agree with them or
| not, based on what you said.)
|
| I do not agree that society must be set up in this
| manner. Each job produces a good or a service. In order
| to produce that good or service, a certain amount of raw
| materials and a certain number of skilled labor hours
| must be expended to produce it. It is more efficient,
| from a scaling perspective, to hyper-specialize and make
| the same people do the same drudgery day-in-day-out,
| which is why those gentlemen were stuck in that job. The
| market makers demanded efficiency, and things fell into
| place such that those gentlemen were pigeonholed into
| being grass-planters.
|
| The point that I am making is that there isn't any
| particular reason (besides an incessant demand for
| shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and
| skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method
| that we currently use in modern society. Those guys have
| to plant grass all day every day because if they don't,
| they can't buy food, afford shelter, have a doctor look
| at them, or receive medical supplies. I am certain that
| we must find a way to look past this system to achieve
| any of the high-minded goals that people like to argue
| over, like the 4-hour workweek, or equitable education,
| or mass literacy, or an end to hunger, or...
| jimbokun wrote:
| Sorry, but finding your arguments a little silly.
|
| > The point that I am making is that there isn't any
| particular reason (besides an incessant demand for
| shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and
| skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method
| that we currently use in modern society.
|
| Maybe, but you don't have any strategy for changing the
| current system, or what kind of system should replace it,
| or how to demonstrate that system will be better than the
| one we have now.
| quacked wrote:
| That is a fair criticism; I don't have a perfect solution
| built out right now, so I can't paint you a picture of
| how a theoretical nation full of well-educated laborers
| and farmers building things and providing for themselves
| would look in comparison to our current nation, where
| everyone barely struggles to hang on financially as
| citizens of the wealthiest empire in the history of
| civilization.
|
| I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people
| that they should even look past the current system. If
| you read through other comments on other chains in this
| thread, people are trying to explain to me that I could
| never convince someone to work half-time at a white
| collar job (where they endlessly produce code and then
| clock out) and half-time at a blue-collar job (where they
| endlessly shovel asphalt and then clock out), while at
| the same time I'm trying to convince them that it's
| possible to create an equilibrium of demand with output
| by simultaneously reducing aggregate demand and moving
| around aggregate output. If there's an end goal to your
| labor- produce this much and then stop producing until
| repairs or new units are needed- you don't have to _work_
| all the time at these horrible jobs.
|
| Right now, people work in white collar jobs in order to
| justify their right to the results of the blue collar
| jobs. If you don't write code, you can't afford the
| berries that Driscoll's ships to your grocery store, so
| you write code and make $150k/year, and you buy your $6
| carton of berries, and the migrant berry pickers make
| $18k/year, and the truck driver makes $80k/year. But
| you're the end user of the berries; if you instead knew
| how to pick or knew how to drive, you might have a chance
| at getting the berries to your table without needing
| quasi-slave labor.
|
| I don't want to live in a country where I get stuff-
| materials, goods, etc.- from people who are always
| struggling. We can't just UBI our way to luxury space
| communism, because then no one will pick the berries,
| because right now the "berry-picking job" is defined as
| "12 hours per day in and out of the hot sun".
|
| This is what I'm trying to say- find some way to make
| sure that I can provide myself with shelter and see a
| doctor when I need to, and I'll go pick the damn berries
| and drive them back myself. Many seem to be responding
| with "no, that's impossible."
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Specialization and increased efficiency is exactly what
| leads to the high minded goals you mention.
|
| >4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass
| literacy, or an end to hunger.
|
| It also allows the guy shoveling asphalt in the sun to
| live in an air conditioned house with fancy electronics
| and medical care.
| quacked wrote:
| Huh, I didn't realize that we didn't have any issues in
| the US with people having AC in their house or receiving
| medical care.
|
| Come on, man. This is simple. I recently got a $10,000
| hospital bill for an ultrasound, for which insurance
| decided I owed $1800. It doesn't cost $10,000 for an
| ultrasound, that's a made up ratio calculated by
| accountants trying to maximize their firm's ROI. An
| ultrasound costs {materials, refinement, assembly,
| shipping, and operation}, none of which require anyone to
| work constantly; the market has simply set it up that way
| because everyone working constantly yields great market
| valuations in the system that the owners of the markets
| set up.
|
| A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine,
| border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and
| everyone else does not require all of the labor hours
| that are presently expended in the world.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Huh, I didn't realize that we didn't have any issues in
| the US with people having AC in their house or receiving
| medical care.
|
| It happens, but the asphalt guy probably has coverage,
| like 92% of Americans. [1] There are a long list of
| simple solutions that can increase this percent _and_
| bring costs down, but people working less isn 't on it as
| far as I'm concerned. I just don't see the connection.
|
| >A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine,
| border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and
| everyone else does not require all of the labor hours
| that are presently expended in the world
|
| If anything, bringing the costs of goods down and
| increasing access to them will _increase_ the number of
| labor hours needed. More and cheaper ultrasounds means
| more {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and
| operation}, not less.
|
| https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60
| -27...
| quacked wrote:
| I think we're agreeing here too, and that's the point of
| my main comment. If we both agree that more ultrasounds
| may be needed, then let me stop on this hedonic treadmill
| of producing slight increases in code efficiency or
| tapping new markets that don't need to be tapped, and
| just work on the ultrasounds.
|
| I don't need fast foods restaurants, television,
| professional sports, overnight shipping, cheap
| smartphones, endless software updates, new computers, new
| cars, etc. Cut the parasitic, hedonic treadmill of
| consumption and you free up billions of labor hours that
| could instead work on {materials, refine, assembly,
| shipping, and operation} and then just go home afterwards
| and talk to their families or work on their own projects.
|
| Apparently there are presently 9.82 million unemployed
| Americans. Cut the ones that can't work (either because
| of character issues or because of disability issues), add
| the rest to the pile of people theoretically freed up by
| no longer producing piles and piles of useless crap and
| entertainment, and you've got a tremendous amount of
| intellectual capital available to work on real goods and
| services.
|
| There's an indoctrination aspect to this; people would
| have to be convinced that they don't need all this crap,
| and I admit that's a hard sell.
| Scalestein wrote:
| I agree with your general outlook but would also question
| why we need to make "efficiency" a goal to be attained at
| all costs. Why not rotate who does the drudgery jobs so
| no-one gets stuck doing it day in and out? It might be
| less efficient but everyone would appreciate the work
| that needs to be done more and no-one would be pigeon
| holed. What sort of efficiency loss is that worth?
|
| As long as we prioritize economic efficiency there will
| be an never ending treadmill of improving efficiency.
| Until we start bringing human factors into the equation
| we will stay on this path.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| That's basically a society without mass immigration - manual
| labour becomes more expensive, so educated people spend their
| time automating tasks and inventing and operating robots.
| quacked wrote:
| That is one of the many reasons I oppose mass immigration; a
| constant influx of new people makes it far, far more
| difficult for a single locality to figure out how best to
| reduce its own demand and come to a reasonably stable local
| identity, with an attached reasonable level of demand for
| goods and services.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Do you also oppose people having more than 2 children? At
| what point does "immigration" become "mass immigration"?
| quacked wrote:
| > Do you also oppose people having more than 2 children?
|
| Yeah, if you want to keep the aggregate demand of your
| society consistent, it makes sense to have fewer than 2
| children. (I don't necessarily support government
| prevention people having more than two children, but a
| really self-aware group of humans wouldn't spawn
| uncontrollably.)
|
| > At what point does "immigration" become "mass
| immigration"
|
| The fact that you're asking me that question implies that
| my definition is drastically different than your
| definition. So- I think we can agree that if the entire
| population of Omaha, Nebraska (475,000) moved over the
| span of one month to Tahiti (280,000), that could be
| called "mass immigration", with disastrous consequences
| for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc. So, if
| you'd call that "mass immigration", which I think you'd
| be foolish not to, what about that makes it "mass
| immigration"? Whatever your definition is, it'll be
| different from mine.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I don't think the issue is brainy people doing those jobs per
| se, it's brainy people spending years and a small fortune for a
| degree, and then end up performing that kind of work anyways.
|
| I would guess working class white people in the 1950s US were
| overall more content than today, even though many fewer of them
| had college degrees. They were happy performing "sustenance
| work", because they were able to start those jobs out of high
| school, support a family, buy a house, etc.
|
| (Massive caveat for the people who were excluded from this
| system back then.)
| bjourne wrote:
| Sure, but what you are listing are a far cry from what actually
| _menial_ jobs are. Fruit picking, burger flipping,
| telemarketing.. Those jobs are menial on a whole other level
| than, say, construction work.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| In the Star Trek future isnt everyone basically a Phd? I always
| thought this is what we wanted? Perhaps the issue is elsewhere.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Yes, we should basis reality on a fictional story... totally
| makes sense. If we're going to go that route, I say we start
| throwing politicians in volcanos as the starting point. It
| worked against Sauron.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"I say we start throwing politicians in volcanoes as the
| starting point."
|
| Maybe you're on to something....
|
| Jokes aside, whenever people point to "Star Trek" as an
| example of post-scarcity society I recoil at just how over-
| simplified and not well thought out the comparison is.
| bitwize wrote:
| Anytime anyone posits post-scarcity society I cringe a
| little. Human wants are infinite; atoms on Earth are finite
| (and take considerable time and energy to move around).
| petermcneeley wrote:
| So what % of the population was farmers in 1500? probably
| like 80%. Today its 2%. Eventually a similar thing has and
| will happen to all manufacturing. Today we have instead
| millions of programmers and teachers etc etc. This trend
| towards increased education is due to the technological
| support structure.
|
| If you run this trend forward even 50 years what jobs do
| you really think will exist that wont basically be
| scientifically or academically inclined?
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Except trends dont account for humanity and general shit
| hitting the fan. We are living in the safest times ever.
| Even the world wars aren't enough to topple off the last
| 100 years are the safest in human history, on average. We
| are due for a massive war or two really soon if we are
| relying on trends. Covid is a small, kinky lovetap on the
| ass when it comes to pandemics of the past. Most
| countries haven't seen a famine in like 2 or 3
| generations. What we saw the last 1.5 years wasn't
| famine, just hoarding mixed with logistical failures.
|
| Intersaller is probably more on the mark. Blight striking
| nearly every staple food is the real horror in the night.
| Cavendish bananas are under massive threat of a fungal
| disease wiping them out, forever. The same thing can
| happen at anytime to other overproduced mono-crops.
|
| But then let's take humanity at it's current state. If
| everyone believes working with their hands is beneath
| them, are we really going to reach automation peak?
| Ignoring the scifi fantasy of skynet ai, you really think
| there wont be exploitation? The one thing humans are
| brilliant at, it's exploiting a system. You have to
| pacify a human to stop them from min-maxing. It's what we
| do. We are already seeing the adverse affects of too many
| systems online. Ransomware is not a problem, it's a
| goddamn well oiled industry. The future luddite wont just
| break a loom or two. They can stop fuel for tens of
| millions of people. Turn off cooling/heating to homes.
| And if wireless bots run farms... well, I dont think you
| need a good imagination to figure out what will happen
| there.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| I mean, it's not like it's bad to daydream the "what if",
| then work backwards to see if it's even possible in the
| real world... but what irks me is how anyone imagines any
| form of gov, society, or industry just needs a Thanos snap
| to fix them. Like Jesus Christ, watch an overview video
| that explains the difficulty of grocery store logistics.
| That's a sliver of the difficulty to run a city, state,
| province, country or the goddamn planet. To imagine a
| writer or two, with zero political, business or logistics
| background "figured it out"... I won't use the r word only
| because that insults the mentally handicapped with how
| stupid this line of thinking is. We're talking about the
| same people who get basic physics and electronics wrong on
| their show all the time. "Its okay, we figured out how to
| create the perfect society in our fictional tv show." And
| people take it seriously... these same folks should watch
| Vikings and vote for that society to be implemented. I'd
| enjoy that.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Totally agree.
|
| I do find this illuminating, though, because if someone
| fundamentally believes problems are caused by a lack of
| resources - or more specifically a _lack of access_ to
| resources - then it makes perfect sense to them to think
| post-scarcity will be a paradise. They 're looking at the
| problems in a fundamentally different way than you or I
| are.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| A long time ago, when the whole reality tv thing was
| taking off, there were a lot of those rich wife of
| wherever shows. You want post-scarcity examples, check
| out them bitches. A coworker back then told me he thinks
| it has something to do with no real problems, thus
| they're bored. That boredom from real, actual problems,
| causes people to be... well, batshit crazy. 10+ years
| later, I see it repeatedly in real life. If you have no
| strenuous issues, you turn either crazy or a depressive
| lump. Humans need difficult goals. Making sure you have
| good livable conditions is an easy one, but obviously
| this shouldn't be insanely difficult either. I also
| believe that's why men at a certain age are perpetually
| doing home improvements. It fulfills that instinctual
| need to strive for better living conditions. I think
| other lofty goals are important too. But this is a
| massively huge topic beyond HN posts.
| ozim wrote:
| I would say if you have space faring society and you put them
| on star ships like the Enterprise, you put those Phds on the
| super expensive ships.
|
| In the "Star Trek" you don't see broad society, sometimes you
| see normal people, but series is mostly officers.
|
| You don't want Phds only society because that is a lot of
| waste. From my point of view bachelors or engineering degree is
| mostly what will be needed in the future.
|
| Because for me Phds are mostly on thought level of someone who
| has done bachelor. Staying in academia is a career choice and
| not that you are chosen to become Phd because you were super
| smarter than others. It also turns out that to be successful
| Phd it is more about politics at the university that "beeing
| ultra smart". True that you still have to be smart to play
| politics but don't have to point fingers at stupid politicians
| that handle that as well without having even masters degree.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| If you mean literally the future depicted by _Star Trek_ ,
| then, certainly not. It's not stated for sure, but I'd bet
| money on the activity directors on Risa [0] not having PhDs or
| equivalent.
|
| But, if, by " _Star Trek_ future, " you just mean a post-
| scarcity future, then, maybe? There would be no reason everyone
| should _need_ to be a PhD, but also no reason why everyone
| _couldn 't_ be [1].
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Risa
|
| [1]: Everyone with the intellectual capacity, that is. One
| certainly wouldn't expect severely developmentally delayed
| individuals to possess graduate-level knowledge of any subject.
| Gradeflation only goes so far. :-P
| bitwize wrote:
| In the _actual space program of the time_ pretty much everyone
| was a Ph.D. as well as a peak physical specimen.
|
| In _Star Trek_ 's future, space travel is commonplace and there
| are almost certainly non-experts in starship crew roles; Ensign
| Redshirt, who gets killed by the planetside monster, probably
| doesn't have an advanced degree.
| Animats wrote:
| That's been a major source of unrest in some of the Arab
| countries, notably Egypt. They overproduced university grads
| without an economy that could use them.
|
| This is not a new observation. Eric Hoffer made it in "Working
| and Thinking on the Waterfront" (1959).
| ElViajero wrote:
| This is a very elitist and narrow way to look at society. It
| advocates to have an uneducated underclass that would not have
| the tools to improve or protest their situation.
|
| Brave New World is a good book to understand why this is a bad
| idea. It seems that Orwell and Huxley books are being used as
| manuals instead of the cautionary tale that they are.
| david38 wrote:
| Look at most planned utopian societies. They crash and burn
| because everyone wants to be a leader / thinker, not a doer, at
| least not of non-interesting stuff.
|
| The title is bad. You can be brainy and do menial work. Really,
| too many people who think they are above non-fulfilling work is
| bad. You need people who are used to selling their minds and
| bodies for money- in the "I work here because I have a family
| to support" sense of the word.
| bjourne wrote:
| If society "need" people to do non-fullfilling work it should
| compensate them well for it. Amazon need people to do menial
| work at starvation wages so that Jeff Bezos can grow his
| fortune, but that is not a societal need.
| ozim wrote:
| Well I would like to point your attention to one little
| fact.
|
| Jeff Bezos is not buying crap on Amazon and he is not
| demanding lowest prices or free delivery.
|
| Amazon needs people to do menial work at starvation wages
| so that bunch of other people with money to spend on crap
| from overseas could do it for cheap.
|
| Seems that having cheap crap from Asia is a societal need.
|
| Not defending anyone, just taking a different point of view
| into consideration.
| bjourne wrote:
| But that is not true. Skimming a few billions of Bezos'
| fortune would be enough to give all Amazon employee's a
| hefty raise for years to come.
| da_chicken wrote:
| > You can be brainy and do menial work.
|
| Yes, it's called "programming".
|
| At least 80% of programming is menial. _At least_. The
| interesting bit where you understand the problem and find the
| best solution virtually always takes far less time than
| actually banging through the code. nevermind documenting it,
| testing it, etc. The hardest part is simply _not screwing
| up_.
|
| I feel blessed if 5% of my day involves actual critical
| thinking.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Community is usually the thing that makes a menial job feel
| meaningful.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| That's one ingredient, sure. But speaking as a millennial,
| there was plenty of propaganda in American schools that
| made it seem like if you weren't working in an office, you
| failed at life. Now we have people who worked in offices
| throughout their 20s, running and screaming from those
| office jobs to discover that there is fulfillment in real
| work.
|
| Problem is, lots of people still believe having callouses
| on your hands make you a second class citizen or sub-human
| since your opinion no longer matters.
|
| And labourous jobs dont need community to be fulfilling.
| Lots of folks enjoy work working, house renovation and
| their own property maintenance for their own benefit. That
| and it's a free workout a lot of times.
| justicezyx wrote:
| > they are above non-fulfilling work
|
| I think there are a lot of fullfilling work. Certainly more
| than the man power and resources our society can meaningfully
| assigned to them.
|
| But the problem is that the system forces upon a lot of
| members a rather distasteful attitude and practical matters
| that drive them away. Often, one would find certain things
| lacking monetary rewards are fullfilling, but were drove off
| because they are in a social circle that exerts pressure.
| This actually happen more often in China than US.
|
| For example, one is forced to earn money for their
| offsprings. But to do that one is allowed to do a lot of work
| that is not really fullfilling by design. Like coding for
| people to click ads. I am not saying all of the work done for
| people to click ads are not fullfilling, it's just the
| percentage is clearly larger than what we want, and is
| growing still.
|
| From the system thinking perspective, the time for
| rethinking, _a little bit_ about changing the social
| rewarding system probably is worthwhile.
| sjwalter wrote:
| Brave New World was not written initially as a dystopia. Huxley
| was a member of the elite and was writing what amounted to a
| pamphlet of where we were all going, influenced along the way
| by the writings of Carroll (Tragedy & Hope), who told the tale
| of the elite cabal of banksters and other social engineers and
| how their various iterations formed and dispersed, their
| history, in sum.
|
| Huxley's editor said it'd never sell, so he added the plotline
| from the perspective of one man who wanted to break free and
| made the entire thing dystopic.
|
| I believe the signs are all there that many of the real Team
| Elite really do want Brave New World-esque domination, with a
| tiny group of truly free elite managing the masses as though
| they were cattle.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Can't we take the same analysis to drive alternative
| conclusions instead?
|
| For example, why not remove or weaken the reasons why people
| want to be part of the elite in the first place, perhaps by
| eliminating it.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| The Economist really misrepresents Turchin's theory by framing
| it as an issue of there being too many "brainy" people.
| Turchin's theory has more to do with overproduction of
| university degree holders, not with overproduction of smart
| people. Those are two different things. As far as I know,
| Turchin is not advocating for maintaining some sort of
| exploited underclass. More than 30% of U.S. adults have at
| least a bachelor's degree - about double the fraction that had
| one 40 years ago - which means that a bachelor's degree has
| limited value as a badge for gaining entrance to the higher
| strata of society. Note that this is independent of the
| question of whether it is good or bad for university degrees to
| be badges for entrance to the higher strata of society. In any
| case, the relative social value of a university education has
| massively dropped over the years.
| minikites wrote:
| >It advocates to have an uneducated underclass that would not
| have the tools to improve or protest their situation.
|
| How is this different from the current incarnation of global
| capitalism?
| sudhirj wrote:
| Not quite the way I'm reading it. It's a variation on "if
| everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow" line. If
| the entire population wants to be doctors, we already know
| that's not going to work. And if everyone finds out they can't
| be a doctor after 10 years of medical school, where the amount
| of time and money spent has now created a sense of entitlement
| to the life of a doctor, the people are going to be pretty
| pissed off when you ask them to be fruit pickers or sanitation
| workers instead. Same goes for lawyers, engineers or any other
| profession that has a supply-demand imbalance.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| Is it better to have an undersupply of doctors leading to
| overworked doctors and generally worse medical outcomes or to
| have an oversupply, with some of the excess going on to do,
| e.g. research or administration? Exactly matching supply and
| demand is practically impossible, so which side is it safer
| to err on?
| wcunning wrote:
| It's obviously better to have a, say, 1% oversupply than a
| 1% undersupply, but that's not an interesting question to
| answer, really. The better question would be: is it better
| to have a 1% undersupply than a 15% oversupply? (Or some
| other larger and less obvious mismatch) It would be clearly
| bad to paperclip-optimize doctors -- everyone must go
| through all 10 years of post-secondary education to be a
| doctor and then after they have done so, we will be pick
| the best 3% of them to be practicing doctors while telling
| everyone else to find another career is incredibly
| wasteful, as is anything significantly in that vein.
| nradov wrote:
| It's rather meaningless to talk about oversupply or
| undersupply of doctors. Demand for healthcare services is
| effectively infinite. The problem is that we burn up most
| healthcare resources on treating preventable chronic
| diseases, and on futile end-of-life care.
|
| Rather than on supplying more doctors we would probably
| get better results for society as a whole with more
| dieticians, personal trainers, and substance abuse
| counselors.
| mywittyname wrote:
| An important consideration is that those doctors could have
| been something else.
|
| If you buy into the notion that intelligence follows a
| normal distribution, and that people below some threshold
| are fundamentally locked out of professions, then it
| becomes important how society allocates that top x% of
| intelligent people, because they are in short supply.
|
| A society that underproduces physicists in favor of doctors
| might find their economy is unable to grow rapidly enough
| to pay for the hospitals those doctors need to operate in.
| One that overproduces amazing musicians might find that
| their cultural influence helps to attract smart people from
| other countries.
|
| We see this issue in America too. Where hedge funds are
| paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of
| dollars annually to program computers that essentially play
| games in the stock market with the programs written by
| other hedge funds. That isn't exactly the kind of behavior
| that will lead to the technological improvements our
| society will need to continue to grow.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Oversupply of lawyers seems to be a better example.
|
| Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new
| laws that drive need for more lawyers ... but of course up to
| a point, and some of the graduates will find they cannot pass
| the bar exam or progress towards the coveted positions.
|
| Suddenly you have some very unhappy people who know enough
| about the law to do some real harm to the system out of
| spite.
| igorkraw wrote:
| I kind of have an issue that when faced with a steep rise in
| educated people who find that there is no room for them in the
| old structures and thus are frustrated, we blame and
| "overproduction" of educated people and not the old structures.
| Even the naming tries to force that framing.
|
| Apply this to the time when most people couldn't read and you
| were a dangerous radical if you taught workers, blacks and women
| how to read because they would "no longer be content with their
| place in life". I think _most_ people on this site would agree
| that keeping people uneducated just so they don 't start
| realizing how unfair their lot is would be morally wrong and that
| the correct option is right the unfairness...right?
| axguscbklp wrote:
| There is a huge difference there though. Teaching people to
| read actually does make them enormously more educated. On the
| other hand, putting people through university does not
| necessarily make people even slightly more educated. Most
| people I know who are university graduates are not what I would
| call educated in any real sense and I doubt that they were
| significantly more educated when they left university than when
| they entered it.
|
| BTW, I did not downvote you. I do not know who did, but
| personally I do not downvote.
| igorkraw wrote:
| I don't really care about the downvotes.
|
| But this meme that university likely doesn't teach you
| anything...it's so baffling to me, like, university does. It
| imply smarts, but not everyone who went to highschool reads
| and I feel like at least on this website people should get
| intervention effectiveness and probability etc. Just because
| university education isn't ideal and people might disagree
| whether the education people receive there is useful or
| marketable doesn't change the fact that if you graduate from
| a serious university or community colleague it is _likely_
| you 'll have learned self management skills as well as
| whatever was in your classes.
|
| I've once seen a talk by a German soldier coming back from
| Afghanistan and he talked about what big difference it maae
| that in Germany almost _everyone_ trains their ability to
| focus on someone speaking for 30+ minutes, discussing how he
| had to learn to triple check his local co-soldiers who hadn
| 't had that luxury actually got the mission briefing. Even if
| you just learn to binge learn and puke out knowledge in tests
| that can come in quite handy later on, and the often maligned
| humanities actually _matter_ if you are interested in a
| nuanced and continually evolving look of humans onto
| themselves. So I find this meme that university is worthless
| quite damaging and not really trustworthy. People can be
| uncultured swine, idiots and dicks at any educational level,
| it doesn 't necessarily mean they didn't benefit from their
| education.
|
| The fact that the US puts you heavily into debt to get that
| education is another question that I'll leave untouched here
| since dang asked me repeatedly to steer clear of predictable
| controversies
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Maybe we need to bump the definition of "elite" so that so many
| self-aggrandizing academics don't self-select into it. The
| problem is not an overproduction of elites but one of consumers
| and followers. The world needs more builders.
| Lavery wrote:
| Lots of comments here on the causal side of elite production, but
| just to float an alternate possibility:
|
| This could just as easily be suggesting that "overproduction" of
| elites is due to, some two decades prior, a creeping sense among
| the populace of nascent but growing inequality and increased
| stratification? Or put differently, "Grandpa worked in the plant
| and made a good life for himself, and I work in the plant and
| make a good life for my family too, but I see the writing on the
| all and am going to make certain that my son or daughter becomes
| a [lawyer/banker/software person/etc]". And the instability today
| is just that initial rising inequality reaching fruition.
|
| Something like that seems much more likely to me, that creeping
| change exists that is palpable at the individual level, and
| expressed through the emphasis given to the next generation.
| roenxi wrote:
| We should consider another alternative - elite overproduction
| correlated with very wealthy societies, and very wealthy
| societies revert to the mean. So overproduction of elites
| correlates to decline, and correlation is not causation.
|
| And attaching my pet theory - China has transformed their
| society, radically for the better, in 1 generation. As far as I
| can tell the American press has taken no interest whatsoever in
| seriously figuring out what happened beyond very surface level
| analysis. Are the policies that worked in Asia even serious
| contenders for implementation in America?
| imbnwa wrote:
| 70s through 90s wiped the blue collar middle class off the map,
| there are no other options outside of non-MD healthcare work if
| you want income that even begins to keep up with inflation. Its
| gigs and part-time work from there.
|
| Edit: to be clear, I'm agreeing and saying people definitely
| had time to see the writing on the wall
| lumost wrote:
| This aligns with the experience I and my parents had growing up
| in the US. My grandparents worked in factories and did
| relatively well for themselves, living in the same town in
| Connecticut that their grandparents worked in as farmers 2
| generations prior. They had the notion that factory life wasn't
| wear the future was and pushed my parents to go to college in
| the 70s.
|
| By the time I was growing up in the 90s and 00s just 2 towns
| over the very notion of factory work as a viable career had
| vanished. Everyone was prepped to live in a 2-tier system of
| college goers and those who weren't heading to college.
|
| Flash forward to now and it turns out that it was only certain
| types of college that paid off and everyone else went into
| unstable service jobs or unstable non-technical disciplines.
|
| If we're building a meritocracy that feels like a lottery
| people are going to be angry. If it works like a lottery, then
| the people with the most tickets are going to win every time.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Increased stratification is largely driven by rewards to
| _technical_ skills, and technical training /STEM degrees are
| not the main source of "elite overproduction" by any stretch.
| Quite to the contrary, this is basically all coming from an
| extremely traditional idea of education (some would say many
| centuries or even thousand years old) positing that there's
| some sort of inherent merit to being an "intellectual"
| (whatever that might mean) being "socially aware" (again, a
| very fuzzy idea) or musing about "the human condition", even
| whilst actual technical merit is broadly disparaged as
| "beneath" one's perceived station.
| pydry wrote:
| Increased stratification started when incomes decoupled from
| productivity growth in ~1979. That was caused by a wave of
| union busting.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I'm puzzled by this comment. You're seemingly trying to
| explain a secular trend sweeping across the Western world
| by pointing to a single short-term event that occurred in
| the U.S. and was but tangentially related to what's
| actually going on (returns to highly skilled labor have
| been going up, not down as we might expect from union
| busting activity!) That doesn't really make much sense,
| tbh.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| The causal event for that was the discovery that the USSR
| was a hollow giant and the red scare not based in
| reality. After that communism lost alot of its fear-
| factor and a take-over was becoming ever more unlikely.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| It also corresponded with massive illegal and legal
| immigration entering the labor force of over 50 million
| individuals (unions were always against immigration for the
| labor supply competition reason). In addition, there was
| not a commensurate increase in housing stock in many urban
| centers and areas leading to more of your income swallowed
| by rich landlords.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| >STEM degrees are not the main source of "elite
| overproduction" by any stretch.
|
| How many of today's billionaires have a tech background?
| astrange wrote:
| That's not what "elite overproduction" theory refers to.
| "Elites" means people with PhDs who can't get academic
| jobs.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Insightful comment.
|
| How would anyone possibly change the perception that you have
| to be a lawyer or MBA or you're useless? When looked at the way
| you suggest, this problem is enormous. I'm not sure we'd ever
| solve it. We just have to accommodate ourselves to a society
| with lawyers, MBAs, and software people everywhere.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| The different between a lawyer and an engineer is that one
| creates new means of production which grow the pie, and the
| other procures pieces of pie.
| qntty wrote:
| https://archive.is/HrVFy
| cratermoon wrote:
| I'd just like to point out that enormous numbers of people doing
| basic, physical, labor today would be considered highly educated
| and worldly were they dropped into anywhere in the world up to
| about the end of the 15th century. Worse, many of the facts they
| just know from pre-school or watching Sesame Street would be
| considered heretical and dangerous and land them in trouble in
| short order.
|
| Brainy is completely relative.
| chacha2 wrote:
| "I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've
| ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God
| damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables,
| slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and
| clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
| We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or
| place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war
| is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've
| been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all
| be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and
| we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed
| off."
| inglor_cz wrote:
| They would be considered mad and certainly not educated; an
| educated person of that time would have a good command of
| Latin, which we do not teach anymore.
|
| Standards for "looking educated" shift all the time.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| While this is true compared to past societies, the only frame
| that matters for us right now is the present. Relatively
| speaking, I am also fabulously wealthy and I eat better than
| Kings. But I still rent a one bedroom apartment and can't
| afford a home.
| ozim wrote:
| Being smart does not equal being rich. Being rich does not mean
| being elite. Being elite is always "extraordinarily difficult" -
| from getting "advanced degree" there is still long way to being
| "elite".
|
| Having a degree does not mean one is smart, it does not mean
| someone will get a job. Maybe we should put more effort into
| explaining life to people or actually start making them smart
| instead of "smart". If people would be really smart they would
| know how much effort is needed to become elite in any discipline.
|
| I have another article:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-22/if-you...
| cherryturnover wrote:
| I personally feel like college institutions get way too much
| freedom to act as predatory as they do regarding student loans
| and education. So many 18 year olds are told to go to college
| and get a degree only to come out a 22 year old with no work
| skills or legitimate life experience unless they were fortunate
| enough to get an internship. Then they have to eventually
| either swallow their pride and work a garbage paying job for a
| while or get lucky working for somewhere that actually pays
| decently in wage and/or experience.
|
| I'm currently a return student, and based off of the data my
| school collected for the 2019 year, the top majors were:
| Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Organizational
| Leadership, and Nursing.
|
| General business degrees are as worthless as english degrees.
| They don't teach you anything about actual business and you
| will not be able to just get a job. You'd have a better shot
| beating out external candidates applying from within at a low
| level position...almost every time. Psych and Bio,
| predominantly taken by females at my school (almost 80%).
| Again, another worthless field unless you go on to get a MS or
| Ph.D...of which none at this school do because it's a very low
| end state school. So there's another thing schools forget to
| mention about certain degrees. The next one is a general
| business degree for online transfer students at most schools in
| the area who just want to check off a "I have a Bachelors" box
| at application time. Then Nursing (again, predominantly women)
| which is actually a very hard field to pass but is basically a
| golden ticket to employment universally here. But that doesn't
| even hold a candle to those 4 ahead of it.
|
| This base set of data shows that schools are marketing toward
| the undecided crowd or the people without the jaded
| understanding that real life can be a bitch. It doesn't care
| what you think should be the rules. And these schools take
| extreme advantage of it. Not to mention these schools get tax
| payer funding but have virtually no oversight as to how the
| school runs things. The head chair of my Comp Sci department is
| a guy with a Ph.D in physics! I know that's fairly normal, but
| it's pretty ridiculous that this guy is making decisions on us
| having to take an AI class over advanced database
| administration or making InfoSec students know OOP and
| programming.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Institutions have embedded growth obligations they can't meet,
| and thus are forced to lie to everyone to stay alive. Is it
| really surprising that all the people lied to might be upset when
| they don't get to live the life they were promised?
| majormajor wrote:
| The article cites the election of Trump and Brexit as evidence
| for too many people having degrees that they aren't able to fully
| utilize, supposedly confirming a prediction from Turchin in 2010,
| but... as far as I've read, neither of those things were driven
| by the advanced-degree-holding crowd. The "angry populist masses"
| are the ones without college education!
| sjwalter wrote:
| > The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college
| education
|
| Portland's seemingly endless supply of white, elitist
| anarchists would like a word with you.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The "angry populist masses" are the ones without college
| education!
|
| The "angry populist masses" are (one set of) the people being
| driven by propaganda, not the people driving it.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| It was Michael Gove, the education minister and Vote Leave
| figurehead, who said in 2016: "I think the people of this
| country have had enough of experts"[0].
|
| This line of thinking is beautifully conveyed in a satirical
| drawing by Will McPhail that appeared in the 2017-01-02 issue
| of _The New Yorker_ with the caption "These smug pilots have
| lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should
| fly the plane?".[1]
|
| Another satirical drawing from 2016 seems to capture a similar
| pathology, where the character starts by saying "I want things
| to be different".[2]
|
| [0] https://www.london.edu/think/who-needs-experts
|
| [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/06/trump-
| cart...
|
| [2] https://webcomicname.com/post/152958755984
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Luke Smith talks about the same topic from the perspective of
| early 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter:
| https://youtu.be/SYUgTzT79ww
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| At about 29m45s into the video
| cherryturnover wrote:
| I've always read that it's not too many smart people, but too
| many unemployed middle class people.
| jdhn wrote:
| When there's "blue collar overproduction" due to outsourcing and
| automation of manufacturing jobs, it's not a big deal because
| they can just learn to code, but when there's "elite
| overproduction" we need to wring our hands and talk about how
| this is terrible? Sorry, but I'm not buying it.
| pydry wrote:
| The Economist can't quite bring itself to say that educated
| proletarians are more of a political threat to the real elites
| (their target audience) than uneducated proletarians.
| debacle wrote:
| The needlessly exclusive nature of the Ivy League underpins a
| gross fear of the elites in the egality of education.
|
| America, for example, is a socialist nation as soon as your
| income hits a certain level. They look out + take care of each
| other in a generational fashion, at the same time advocating for
| policies that preach individualism and divide.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Saying too many people are "brainier" than they are is probably
| the real issue.
|
| Turchin's prediction:
|
| > "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".
|
| ...overlooks something key: they didn't produce an a new elite,
| only "elitists," who never quite arrive. The resentment from
| people who became middle class after graduating from debt funded
| college is the result of how all that work didn't deliver on the
| promise of upper-middle security. The Gen-X cliche of baristas
| with masters degrees has simmered for a couple of decades, and it
| has metastisized into a deep loathing for the working people
| Gen-X grads haven't been able to differentiate themselves from,
| and hence the "burn it all down," attitude you see in a lot of
| them. The coders and general contractors who didn't go to
| university who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real cultural
| factor, and a big part of the U.S. red/blue divide.
|
| If you look up Girard and "mimetic violence," you can get a
| useful framework with predictive power on the dynamic they're
| describing. The promise of college and debt was they would be
| elevated into an elite, but of course, they weren't, and now
| these smart-enough and educated people bitterly hate what they
| call the "trash" and neighbors they still too-closely resemble,
| and who the remaining elite confuses them with.
|
| The political instability aspect of it in the article is that if
| you want to see who is setting fires in cities and throwing rocks
| at police, it's people with just enough security and social
| capital to get away with it, but not enough to meet their self
| image as legit members of the elites their educations allowed
| them to percieve.
|
| Brainy? No. Promised something and told it was because they were
| brainy? Probably.
| runnerup wrote:
| > now these smart-enough and educated people bitterly hate what
| they call the "trash" (which I guess are the middle class,
| "general contractors", etc)
|
| This isn't resonating with me. Generally I see those "baristas
| with masters degrees" (which I viewed here as an alias for the
| 60-70% of all degreed people who lean somewhat left) are
| typically advocating for policies to help the working class. It
| doesn't seem fueled by hatred for the working class.
|
| Sincerely, a middle-class oilfield worker.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > they didn't produce an a new elite, only "elitists," who
| never quite arrive. The resentment from people who became
| middle class after graduating from debt funded college is the
| result of how all that work didn't deliver on the promise of
| upper-middle security. The Gen-X cliche of baristas with
| masters degrees has simmered for a couple of decades, and it
| has metastisized into a deep loathing for the working people
| Gen-X grads haven't been able to differentiate themselves from
|
| What were they expecting going into fields with no growth or
| market?
|
| > The coders and general contractors who didn't go to
| university who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real
| cultural factor
|
| Our industry was built by drop-outs, so there's a certain
| legend and expectation that the next Gates or Jobs will be one
| of them, but they are rare to encounter in real life.
| jmull wrote:
| I don't think you're talking about Generation X. We were the
| last generation where more higher education made sense/paid
| off, on average. Also, the classism you describe seems
| antithetical to general Gen X attitudes.
| wombatpm wrote:
| I was ready to burn it all down in the 80's when were living
| with the spectre of nuclear war. Long before college and grad
| school.
| JPKab wrote:
| Well said.
|
| Anecdotally, the level of resentment I've seen from masters CS
| grads towards more talented coders with no degree was pretty
| epic at my last company. I've also seen this get pretty ugly in
| the ML/deep learning community between the credentialed
| academics and the practitioners.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > from masters CS grads towards more talented coders with no
| degree
|
| A CS masters isn't necessarily signaling the right things [0]
| [1]. Especially if it's a "terminal" master (and not someone
| dropping out of a PhD).
|
| > I've also seen this get pretty ugly in the ML/deep learning
| community between the credentialed academics and the
| practitioners.
|
| Lots of institutions embarked on the ML bandwagon, but unless
| the credentialed academics have connections/worked at a
| serious lab, I much prefer practitioners.
|
| [0] https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-
| compu...
|
| [1] https://ozwrites.com/masters/
| api wrote:
| I'm a self-taught coder, and I'll never forget years ago
| someone with an MIT degree turning to me with a look of mild
| indignation and saying "how do you know this stuff?"
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I don't have a college degree. Though I usually get jobs
| where I'm surrounded by people that have degrees or advanced
| degrees. I can recall a particular startup where I was the
| only person without a degree, the person that I worked for
| had an advanced degree. This person that I worked for always
| resented that I made about the same income without a degree.
| There is no way I could have ever reached management in that
| company without a degree - no matter how qualified or good,
| because of elitist bias.
| beaner wrote:
| > This person that I worked for always resented that I made
| about the same income without a degree.
|
| How do you know this was the reason, or even that they
| resented you at all?
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| The HR person let it slip to me one day that I was making
| $5k less than my boss. My boss had made comments about my
| salary given my position. We wanted to hire an
| Engineering Manager from outside the company, this person
| would not hire someone very qualified because he lacked a
| degree. I mentioned something in passing one day, joking,
| saying I wanted to be the CTO - this person told me
| 'fine, go get a PhD'. No one was going to advance to be
| equal to or beyond this person without an advanced
| degree.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You also see a lot of the opposite, tbh. Resentment in
| general tends to be largely driven by personal attitudes,
| regardless of one's actual circumstances.
| toxik wrote:
| Very true, and both sides are justified in their attitudes.
| You're not necessarily better because you went to grad
| school, but you might have learned some things that you
| wouldn't know if you just programmed cool stuff.
|
| I find two expressions of this: over reverent attitude
| bordering on complete deference, and stubborn rejection of
| anything that sounds vaguely complicated.
| paulpauper wrote:
| >The coders and general contractors who didn't go to university
| who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real cultural factor,
| and a big part .of the U.S. red/blue divide.
|
| Hardly. Those are just outliers. Even in spite of the college-
| educated barista trope, which is a favorite of the media and
| pundits when making a sweeping generalization about an entire
| generation, the data has consistently shown that college grads
| make more than high school grads and this gap has only widened
| since 2008.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| quite a personal set of projections you have gathered there,
| maybe you should become a barista?
| InternetPerson wrote:
| Are we overproducing elite? If so, I would like to know, because
| this really impacts the decisions I make every day.
|
| What are you guys gonna do? Keep producing elite, or no?
| francisofascii wrote:
| Also known as Elite overproduction
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
| busterarm wrote:
| Yes, that is what the article is about. It even says so.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| Only if whatever enhances their intelligence also amplifies their
| ambition, like in the Wraith of Khan. Which seems to be the
| current direction of US education system. Foreign-educated tech
| immigrants are not throwing any fireworks at rallies.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Only if whatever enhances their intelligence also amplifies
| their ambition
|
| Or if it amplifies their entitlement. I wouldn't be surprised
| if the more people spend of college, the more they expect in
| return.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I think that's a given, isn't it? When most people (in the US
| at least) are financing their education via loans if they're
| going to take out increasingly larger loans they're going to
| have to expect more in return in order to pay those loans
| back. I don't know I would call that "entitlement" though.
| cherryturnover wrote:
| High Risk != High Reward. There are far too many college
| educated people in the US that assume this. I walked in
| getting my degree knowing full well I was paying simply for
| the paper and the potential for getting a job in my field.
| I didn't walk in like I did the first time getting my
| associates degree believing I'd be making $50k upon
| graduation.
| meiraleal wrote:
| To pay your own education is one part of the equation, to
| be successful is still on you.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Heh, I was thinking about the entitlement in the normal
| sense, but forgot it'd probably read as eNtITLEMenT in the
| internet meme/political meme sense.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Wraith of Khan
|
| I know this is just a typo/autocorrupt (and goodness knows I've
| had plenty of those in my comments here, some spotted only
| after the edit window closes), but this does sound like an plot
| for either The Lower Decks or Rick & Morty.
|
| But to your actual point: I agree, I don't think genius is
| correlated with corrupted power. High-IQ watering holes like HN
| and Less Wrong may be filled with people whose ambitions
| include want to radically _change_ the world (and HN being part
| of Y Combinator suggests a desire to get rich doing so), but
| they don't give me the vibe of wanting to _rule_ it like the
| character of Kahn.
| handrous wrote:
| > > Wraith of Khan
|
| > [...] but this does sound like an plot for either The Lower
| Decks or Rick & Morty.
|
| Rick and Morty prefers starting with an existing title and
| then cramming one (or more) of the character's names in,
| whether it makes sense or not, and sometimes _avoiding_ a
| more reasonable mutation for one that 's nonsense. In this
| case, if they really wanted to use this title, I'd expect
| them to end up with something like "The Rick of Khan" purely
| so they could match the R sound on "wrath" and the dual
| consonants at the end of the word.
|
| Extreme, real example of this pattern from the current
| season: "Mort Dinner Rick Andre". They've turned it into
| grammatical nonsense so they can make some _very_ tenuous
| word-sound connections (especially on "with" -> "rick"--it's
| there, but wow, that's a stretch)
| ben_w wrote:
| Sure, but I mean _the plot_ , not the title. A ghost of
| changed-just-enough-to-avoid-copyright-infringement-but-
| still-obvious Khan seeking revenge feels very much the sort
| of thing they'd do.
| handrous wrote:
| Ah, right, that makes sense.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Wrath of Khan Academy?
| ben_w wrote:
| Ring Wraith of Khan.
| sarosh wrote:
| This Economist article is from October of 2020. Peter Turchin is
| not a historian. He is instead in the Department of Ecology and
| Evolutionary Biology at the Universtiy of Connecticut. He
| advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math
| to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially
| large ones such as collapse. The Nature article from about decade
| ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he
| directs and uses to study this:
| http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/
|
| Some descriptive work such as:
| https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full
|
| Sone of the work [0] has been criticized on methodological
| grounds [1] and some recent (2017) related work [2]. Finally, in
| his own words, a comparison of Psychohistory and Cliodynamics
| (2012) [3]
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1]
| https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis [2]
| https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full [3]
| http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliod...
| javajosh wrote:
| "Psychohistory" has a better ring to it than "cliodynamics",
| IMHO.
| justicezyx wrote:
| Yup, I am reading Peter's historical dynamism, still light
| years away from the psychohistory definition, but it's on the
| direction and is a vast leap of the conventional history
| study. Note that well before Peter's work, there were many
| quantitative study of macro history trends. But I am an
| outsider, and not an expert, so do your research if
| interested. Starting from Peter and his works would be
| fruitful route (I find Peter's book give much better
| introduction to prior arts).
| RobRivera wrote:
| time to bulk record macro predictive analytics and schedule
| them for release every century or so
| cratermoon wrote:
| Unfortunately, nobody has yet figured out a sure fire way
| to get people to listen to predictions when they are made.
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/05/sixty-
| years-...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"nobody has yet figured out a sure fire way to get
| people to listen"
|
| Have they tried force? /s
| sudhirj wrote:
| Came here to say this :). Especially with the Foundation TV
| series coming out now this could almost be a PR stunt.
|
| The thesis seems sound, though. When you have a large number
| of people who have the aptitude and have invested heavily in
| joining the ranks of the elite (both financially and time-
| wise), and there's just not enough room at the top, what do
| they do?
|
| We see that in India with the rise of a huge number of
| engineering colleges. There's a massive over-supply of
| engineers, so people who have invested in a masters degree at
| great cost and 5 to 6 years of studying wind up working in
| vocational jobs that could have been done with a six-month
| diploma / apprenticeship. They're not happy.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The thesis is also nothing new, it was developed in quite
| some depth by early 20th-century sociologists. It has since
| become unpopular however, largely because the very notion
| of identifiable "elites" inherently problematizes popular
| and widespread notions such as democratic representation,
| or social mobility.
| FredPret wrote:
| Sounds like an undersupply of entrepreneurs!
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Well, just look at Hacker News.... :-)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Don't discount how lucky many on HN have been. Its better to be
| lucky than good or educated.
| armatav wrote:
| Yeah the problem is too many smart people, not the fucked up
| financial systems, terrible education systems, degenerate media
| cycles and huge bureaucracy, but that too many people are too
| smart.
|
| Yeah let's make sure we have an underclass of uneducated people
| so they don't notice any of the problems, that will make sure
| there is less "political instability".
| axguscbklp wrote:
| I think that the Economist headline misrepresents Turchin's
| theory. The issue is not that there are too many smart people,
| it is that there are too many university graduates who feel
| entitled to a limited set of niches in the upper strata of
| society. Those are two different things.
| BB212 wrote:
| I'm not even sure if he would argue that this is a bad thing?
|
| I 100% think a society with a stratified lower caste could be
| _more stable_ than one where everyone has equal resources -
| but I don 't think that makes it better.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's a bad thing if people feel entitled to things they
| cannot possibly have, of course. It's not even necessarily
| about how resources are actually distributed, it's just
| pointing out that we aren't supposed to be selling people a
| false bill of goods. Of course people can strive to be
| upwardly mobile and perhaps fail in these ambitions, but it
| should be a very clear, voluntary choice.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| And reading between the lines, the issue is specifically that
| there are too many university graduates with degrees of
| "elite" image and prestige but very dubious usefulness
| otherwise, that essentially set them up to fail in modern
| society. An attitude of entitlement can be especially
| unattractive to many employers, and many universities do not
| exactly try to warn their students that they should avoid
| this.
| ozim wrote:
| I agree it reads that universities making up marketing BS
| are hurting people.
|
| I think it is the same way of hurting people with YT
| influencers, where they BS how their lifes are great but
| never show real behind scenes.
| pydry wrote:
| >a limited set of niches in the upper strata of society
|
| Otherwise known as "owning a house" and not being buried in
| student debt.
| cherryturnover wrote:
| Too many people believe those things are entitlements when
| in fact they are tradeoffs. Like half my high school
| graduating class dropped out of college or didn't even
| start and many make decent wages or have dual income with a
| significant other. Many of which own homes or live
| decently. None of which demanded free rent and a college
| education.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| Sure, but why should someone who goes to university and
| studies, say, literature for 4 years feel more entitled to
| owning a house than someone who, say, did not go to
| university and instead read and studied literature on his
| own for 4 years?
| pydry wrote:
| I would imagine both groups would consider themselves
| equally worthy.
|
| Where would you draw the line? Which classes of society
| do you deem unworthy of home ownership other than the
| aforementioned groups and (presumably) every group below
| them?
| axguscbklp wrote:
| >Which classes of society do you deem unworthy of home
| ownership other than the aforementioned groups and
| (presumably) every group below them?
|
| I do not know where you are getting this from. I have no
| interest in drawing a line and I do not deem anyone to be
| unworthy of home ownership.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's exactly the point of the comment above - own a
| house you need to be an 'elite'. So people trying to
| become 'elite' is really just people trying to own a
| house and get a tiny bit of stability.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| There is also the problem, that "hacking" the system is
| rewarded higher then adding to the system.
|
| If you get a job at wallstreet, gambling the system, you will
| be higher rewarded in money and status, then if you joined a
| lab that researched fusion or asteroid mining.
|
| Worser still, society will communicate to you, that you are a
| "sucker" for working so hard for so little.
| tpmx wrote:
| Elite does not necessarily equal smart, in this context.
|
| (This comment doesn't make any sense after you edited your
| comment. Weak sauce.)
| iNane9000 wrote:
| Exactly, educated doesn't mean schooled/credentialed. The
| word for this is "discrimination"-- the more educated people
| we produce the less discriminating our institutions must be.
| If academia doesn't discriminate the few from the many, it's
| non-functional. Colleges are not to educate the public,
| they're supposed to advance human knowledge. These are
| incongruent goals.
| armatav wrote:
| I edited it 5 seconds after posting it. You posted 20 minutes
| after I posted it.
| paulpauper wrote:
| maybe some smart people are at the root of those problems. The
| huge bureaucracy is composed of mostly educated people. That
| was his point even though I don't agree with him.
| speeder wrote:
| I read Turchin's site extensively... and I can say this is NOT
| what this is about.
|
| Turchin is talking about when you have too much elite in
| general, not necessarily smart or educated elite, compared to
| spots where the elite can fit, and then what happens because of
| that.
|
| This applies to any leadership role.
|
| For example, what happens when there is only one Emperor spot,
| but a handful of candidates?
|
| They murder each other.
|
| Now, what happens when you have THOUSANDS of candidates, as
| China once did in the past?
|
| Well... then you end with civil war, in China's case more than
| once centuries-long civil war.
|
| Now larger scale, what about non-king nobility? Like Dukes,
| Counts, and so on? Again, same thing, if you have too many
| nobles compared to physical places for them to rule, you end
| with more and more wars, as the nobles without a fief start to
| recruit people to attempt to take a fief by force or cunning.
|
| Turchin mention advanced university degrees as a symptom of
| this, in a world where nobility doesn't exist anymore
| properly... what would be the USA equivalent of aristocrats or
| king candidates?
|
| ----
|
| a non political example:
|
| Suppose you have a military. What happens if you start to
| promote a ton of people to be general? If you have 10 high
| command spots, but 200 generals, how the 200 generals will sort
| out what 10 of them will rule?
| treeman79 wrote:
| In college many years ago. I worked at a small pet store.
| Managers wore red shirts rest of us blue.
|
| Customer walked in, looked at 4 of us. Other 3 wore red I had
| blue. Customer went to me as I was clearly the manager.
|
| That was the day I realized 75% of the staff was managers.
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