From Suthen Siva's Substack, November 2020:
Elite Overproduction
This is an interview from the Atlantic featuring Peter Turchin, someone who "has as been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an age of discord, civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed."
The center of his premise is around the idea of elite overproduction and supported by declining living standards among the general population and a government that can't cover its financial positions.
He defines “elite overproduction as the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated?
The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do."
This creates a growing number of counter-elites for every elite position.
Take a look at protests around the world.
Revolts have happened in poor countries like Somalia and affluent countries like France, Chile, and the US – and the public in revolt, when looked at closely, consists mostly of the middle class and college-educated people. That’s true everywhere.
The cycle looks like this "Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency."
This trend has been accentuated by social media - as explained in by Martin Gurri, the author of The Prophet of the Revolt.
"The elites had abandoned the idea of serving the public before the arrival of the digital tsunami. What that catastrophe did was to reverse the polarities of power: it was the public that was now technologically adept, politically restless, and in revolt against the perplexed elites. The vast gap remained, and the elites have no wish to cross it – to do so would mean breaking that wall that protects the pure soul of the Brahmin.
We have no way of knowing whether a more talented elite class could have avoided the current anger mobilizing the public or the hair-trigger impulse to revolt. There are no laboratories that run parallel versions of history. I will say this: the struggle today is structural, not personality-dependent. Even an FDR or a Reagan would have difficulty preserving institutions whose authority has collapsed because of a radical reversal in the information environment."
A couple of interesting takes by Martin and Peter:
The Case Against Credential-Oriented EducationHe opposes credential-oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise. I largely agree - we are increasingly seeing a world where credential does not equal an elite job as one may have hoped. At an aggregate level, you're fostering an entire generation that resents the status quo.Democracy is Aided by ConflictThe effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex societies because they kill off simpler ones. Democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present.Writing History“If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,” Walter Scheidel, an actual historian at Stanford, told me. (Scheidel, whose books span millennia, takes Turchin’s work seriously and has even co-written a paper with him.) Instead, they come from scientific fields where these taboos do not dominate....
Previously on Turchin:
The Model That Forecast 2020's Political Turmoil In 2010, Says The U.S. Is Heading Toward Civil War.
I've said a few times that I don't think the United States will have a civil war, it is just so rare in established democracies. The only major exception I can think of is 1861 - 1865 when somewhere between 650,000 and 850,000 people died.
In the in the American Civil War...
"Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?"
I don't have enough information to determine if Professor Turchin is correct in his analysis.
I do know that human beings are so good at pattern recognition that we can see patterns that aren't even there.
Here's a twofer, the prediction and the follow-up....
C.S. Lewis On Different Types Of Readers
Although these days we use pseudo-psycho-mumbo-jumbo like "Confirming my priors" and "Validating the reader", this old boy was writing about such things in his SciFi novel 76 years ago:
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945
As we saw in yesterday's "Planet of the Grifters"
with it's quick look at Turchin's idea that there are too many elites
and wannabe elites, there is money to be made from feeding the fantasy
of the wannabe. (as the degenerate state of academia shows)
And
that probably accounts for some of the crabbiness we see from folks
who, compared with our billions and billions of forebearers, back into
the mists of time, are among the most privileged and advantaged ever to
walk the earth.
They also get grumpy when reminded of that fact....
