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Elite overproduction

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More aspirants of high status than society can sustain
A university graduation ceremony in Ottawa, Canada (2016)

Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.

However, Turchin's model cannot foretell precisely how a crisis will unfold; it can only yield probabilities. Turchin likened this to the accumulation of deadwood in a forest over many years, paving the way for a cataclysmic forest fire later on. It is possible to predict a massive conflagration, Turchin argues, but not what causes it. Nor does it offer definitive solutions, though it can clarify the trade-offs of various options. For Turchin, history suggests that non-violent end of elite overproduction is possible, citing the two decades after World War II in the United States, a time of economic redistribution and reversal of upward social mobility.

Overview

According to Turchin and Jack Goldstone, periods of political instability have throughout human history been due to the purely self-interested behavior of the elite. When the economy faced an expansion in the workforce, which exerted a downward pressure on wages, the elite generally kept much of the wealth generated to themselves, resisting taxation and income redistribution. In the face of intensifying competition, they also sought to restrict the window of opportunity in order to preserve their power and status for their descendants. These actions exacerbated inequality, a key driver of sociopolitical turbulence due to the proneness of the relatively well-off to radicalism. In the modern Western world, the popularity of progressive political beliefs among university graduates, for instance, may be due to widespread underemployment rather than from exposure to progressive ideas or experiences during their studies. Turchin has said that elite overproduction explains social disturbances during later years of various Chinese dynasties, the late Roman empire, the French Wars of Religion, and France before the Revolution. Turchin predicted in 2010 that this situation would cause social unrest in the United States during the 2020s.

Turchin's model also explains why polygamous societies tend to be more unstable than monogamous ones. Men of high status in a polygamous society tend to have more children and consequently produce more elites.

In an essay, philosopher Francis Bacon warned of the threat of sedition if "more are bred scholars, than preferment can take off." Political economist Joseph Schumpeter asserted that a liberal capitalist society contains the seeds of its own downfall as it breeds a class of intellectuals hostile to both capitalism and liberalism, though without which these intellectuals cannot exist. Before Turchin, political scientist Samuel Huntington had warned about a disconnect between upward social mobility and the ability of the institutions to absorb these new individuals leading to sociopolitical decay. Historian John Lewis Gaddis observed that while young people had always wanted to challenge the norms of society, by investing so much in education, major countries on both sides of the Cold War practically gave the young the tools needed to inflict upon their homelands the tumultuous period that was the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Australia

In Australia, higher education continues to be promoted to young people in the 2020s. However, only around half of the wages and salaries of the Group of Eight (Go8), the oldest and most prestigious universities in the nation, went to academics (teaching and research) while many students find themselves indebted after graduation.

Canada

Canada has the highest percentage of workers with higher education in the G7. However, Canada's productivity ranks lower than every other nation's in this group except Japan. One reason, according to the Bank of Canada, is the mismatch between skills learned at school and those demanded by the work place. As a result, many new entrants to the job market find themselves either unemployed, despite being highly trained, or stuck in low-wage positions. By August 2024, Canada's youth unemployment rate was 14.5%, the highest seen since 2012. The Bank of Canada refers to this as an economic emergency.

China

One of the factors that led to the decline and collapse of the Qing dynasty, the last of Imperial China, was the Taiping Rebellion, one of the deadliest civil wars in human history. The Rebellion was triggered by disgruntled well-educated young men, who had studied long and hard for the punishing civil-service examinations only to find themselves unable to seek lucrative government posts. The Taiping Rebellion exacerbated the other problems facing Imperial China at the time, including floods, droughts, famines, and foreign incursions.

In modern China, the expansion of higher education, which started in the late 1990s, was done for political rather than economic reasons. By the early 2020s, Chinese youths find themselves struggling with job hunting. University education offers little help. Due to the mismatch between education and the job market, those with university qualifications are more likely to be unemployed. About a quarter of young Chinese prefer to work for the government rather than the private sector, and, in accordance with traditional Confucian belief, do not have a high opinion of manual labor. By June 2023, China's unemployment rate for people aged 16 to 24 was about one fifth.

Egypt

In 2011, as part of the Arab Spring, young Egyptians took to the streets to demand "bread, freedom, and social justice." Youth unemployment was a serious problem facing the country at the time, especially among those with at least a bachelor's degree. Young women's unemployment rate was even worse than young men's. This problem has been driven in part by Egypt's population growth.

United Kingdom

In Victorian Britain, elite overproduction was overcome by outward migration, industrialization, and political reforms that gave power to a larger segment of the general public.

In the modern United Kingdom, there were simply not enough working-class Britons disenchanted with the status quo to support the Brexit movement, which was also buoyed by many highly educated voters, many of whom were indebted and under- or unemployed, as there were not enough jobs to match their degrees. Worse, many pursued university courses that offered them little in the way of marketable skills. A 2019 analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that a fifth of university alumni would have been better off had they not gone to university. In addition, having a master's degree in certain subjects such as languages, English, sociology, history, and health actually incurs a financial loss compared to having only a bachelor's degree, and this trend is worse for men than it is for women. Another reason behind the radicalization of British university graduates is the rising cost of living, including the cost of housing. As the educated class moves further to the left, left-wing ideals grow in popularity. The United Kingdom now finds itself amid a cultural conflict revolving around issues of race, sex, and climate change.

United States

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In the United States, while most historians and social researchers consider the New Deal of the 1930s to be a turning point in American history, Turchin argues that from the point of view of the structural-demographic theory, it was merely a continuation of the Progressive Era (1890s to 1910s), though some trends were accelerated. During this time, policies of economic redistribution were common place. Taxes on high income-earners were high. Many regulations were imposed on businesses. Labor unions became more powerful. Upward social mobility was reversed, as can be seen from admissions quotas (against Jews and blacks) at Ivy League institutions and the fall of the number of medical and dental schools. Concerns over social trust prompted restrictions on immigration and less tolerance for those deemed socially deviant. As political scientist Robert Putnam explains, ethnic and cultural diversity has its downsides in the form of declining cultural capital, falling civic participation, lower general social trust, and greater social fragmentation. For Turchin, the golden years of the 1950s mirrored the Era of Good Feelings.

Turchin observed that between the 1970s and the 2020s, while the overall economy has grown, real wages for low-skilled workers have stagnated, while the costs of housing and higher education continue to climb. Popular discontent has led to urban riots, something that also happened during the years right before the Civil War. During the 1850s, the level of antagonism between the Northern industrialists and the Southern plantation owners also escalated, resulting in incidents of violence in the halls of Congress.

Turchin argued that elite overproduction due to the expansion of higher education was also a factor behind the turmoil of late 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2010s. By the 2010s, it became clear that the cost of higher education has ballooned over the previous three to four decades—faster than inflation, in fact—thanks to growing demand. About a quarter of American university students failed to graduate within six years in the late 2010s and those who did faced diminishing wage premiums. At the same time, students at elite colleges and universities increasingly hold highly left-wing views, putting them at odds with not just their peers at other institutions of higher learning but also the public at large. Progressive activism has become par for the course at the nation's top schools during this period.

In his prediction that the 2020s would be politically turbulent, Turchin used current data and the structural-demographic theory, a mathematical model of how population changes affect the behavior of the state, the elite, and the commons, created by Jack Goldstone. Goldstone himself predicted using his model that in the twenty-first century, the United States would elect a national populist leader. Elite overproduction has been cited as a root cause of political tension in the U.S., as so many well-educated Millennials are either unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise not achieving the high status they expect. The Occupy Wall Street protest of 2011 was an example of a movement dominated by Millennials, who felt aggrieved by their relative rather than absolute economic deprivation. Richard V. Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in his book Dream Hoarders (2017) that, "...more than a third of the demonstrators on the May Day 'Occupy' march in 2011 had annual earnings of more than $100,000. But, rather than looking up in envy and resentment, the upper middle class would do well to look at their own position compared to those falling further and further behind." Political commentator David Brooks identified this "cognitive dissonance" as "the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it."

Alumni of elite schools who take up positions in finance, consulting, or technology continue to be lucratively employed. Meanwhile, the nation continued to produce excess lawyers and PhD holders, especially in the humanities and social sciences, for which employment prospects were dim, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time of such intense intra-elite competition, evidence of corruption, such as the college admissions scandal revealed by Operation Varsity Blues, further fuels public anger and resentment, destabilizing society.

According to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of people in their 20s continued to grow till the end of the 2010s, meaning the youth bulge would likely not fade away before the 2020s. As such the gap between the supply and demand in the labor market would likely not fall before then, and falling or stagnant wages generate sociopolitical stress. In fact, the American population was aging, making revolutions less likely. And while the polarizing nature of social media can perpetuate a sense of crisis and despair, these platforms are too disjointed for a unifying figure to emerge and seize power. Turchin predicted that the resolution to this crisis will occur in the 2030s and will substantially change the character of the United States.

The early 2020s saw many faculty members leaving academia for good, especially those from the humanities. Turchin noted, however, that the U.S. was also overproducing STEM graduates. Already, number of public universities have cut their STEM departments.

See also

References

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