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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   35812 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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as i wrote in an earlier blog post (https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/09/01/elite-overproduction-not-that-big-of-a-deal-yet/) , the case for elite overproduction, assuming such a thing is real, being societally destabilizing seems weak, imho. I agree society is much more competitive at the top-end compared to generations ago, such as math and coding competitions, Silicon Valley tech jobs, NYC finance jobs, high-stakes admissions, etc., but I fail to see how this is a threat per say even if it creates more anxiety among the striver-class or disillusionment. If anything, it's beneficial to have smarter people at the top, running companies, which is a tailwind for innovation and economic growth. Brain drain and capital outflows are way bigger problems than having too many elites. I would go so far as to say that elite overproduction is at the bottom of the ladder of possible things that are a problem. This is why emerging markets and most other foreign markets have done so poorly relative to the US economy and the S&P 500 since 2009 or so.,.,fewer brains, exiting capital, lack of innovation.

I find this interesting because my introduction to the idea of elite overproduction came back in 2018, and had much less to do with economics in the sense that you've analysed. To quote the author in question:

Part of that blowback came from within the working classes that took the brunt of the policies just named, and part of it came from other sectors of society that were shut out of the benefits of the bipartisan policy consensus and forced to carry a disproportionate share of the costs. Another element of it, though, unfolded from a policy that elites always embrace sooner or later: the habit of making sure that the educational system produces more people trained for managerial tasks than existing institutions can absorb.

Why should elites do this? For them, at least in the short term, the advantages are obvious. If you’re going to entrust the running of society to a hierarchy of flunkeys who are allowed to rise up from the underprivileged masses but are never quite allowed to join the overprivileged elite—and this, of course, is the normal condition of a complex society—you need to enforce rigid loyalty to the system and the ideas it considers acceptable. The most effective way to this is to set candidates for flunkeyhood against each other in a savage competition that most will lose.

As your prospective flunkeys climb over one another, kicking and clawing their way toward a sharply limited number of positions of wealth and influence, any weakness becomes a weapon in the hands of rivals. You thus can count on getting the best, the brightest, and—above all—those who have sedulously erased from their minds any tendency to think any thought not preapproved by the conventional wisdom. Your candidates will be earnest, idealistic, committed, ambitious, if that’s what you want them to be; ask them to be something else and you’ll get that, too, because under the smiling and well-groomed facade you’ve got a bunch of panicked conformists whose one stark terror is that they will somehow fail to please their masters.

It’s the losers in that competition who matter here, though. There are always some of them, and in modern America there are a lot of them: young men and women who got shoved aside in the stampede for those positions of wealth and influence, and didn’t even get the various consolation prizes our society offers the more successful end of the also-rans. They’re the ones who for one reason or another—lack of money, lack of talent, lack of desire—didn’t take all the right classes, do all the right extracurricular activities, pass all the right tests, think all the right thoughts, and so fell by the wayside.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-two-in-the-shadow-of-the-cathedral/

The problem isn't that you have a lowered GDP, the problem is that you create a cohort of people who have nothing tying them to the existing system and a huge swathe of incentives to tear it down. These are the cohorts that produce people like Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre, and when your society is producing large numbers of Jacobins (or their equivalents) it usually portends serious problems coming down the line, even if doing so is responsible for a modest increase in GDP.

I think the problem comes from those who don’t make it, as they have time and money, and are upset or disillusioned from doing “everything right” but now living a different lifestyle than the one promised.

I would assume they become the activist class, agitating for tearing down the system and instituting Marxism.

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