“… the two decades after World War II in the United States, a time of economic redistribution and reversal of upward social mobility.”
Does anyone have a summary about the “reversal of upward mobility” bit? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard that anywhere else and I don’t think I have the mental model to understand it intuitively without an explanation.
The previous generation – the one that reached adulthood before and during WW 2 – had upward mobility in the 40s, 50s, and wanted its children to have too
Quite some time ago, I read the claim on HN that in the USA, elite universities rather serve the purpose that
- "rich/elite" kids, and
- highly smart and ambitious kids
get mixed together so that when they finish university, these groups become (mostly) indistinguishable. The reason why this a central purpose of elite universities is that these two groups need each other.
Sort of.
1. It’s a place where capital can make friends with capable people who will be willing to work for them later.
2. It gives the smart and ambitious “commoners” enough exposure to elite social circles such that they can learn and adapt some/most of the social standards (if they choose to do so, which most don’t). This is important, as all the brains in the world won’t do you much good if you don’t fit in, especially when it comes to the bigger money positions.
3. The social shibboleths between the two groups are very real, and it usually takes less than 5 minutes hanging around someone to know which group they are in. There can be some false signals about being higher status, but those are hard to sustain for very long.
Note that many “commoners” who go to elite schools end up hitting a glass ceiling in their 30s or so due to focusing on being smart and a skill person rather than being a socially savvy person. The social people will be able to make it rain later in life, and the skill people just get shifted around as needed.
For some reason people keep telling you that you will get a better education if you pay a ridiculous amount of money for it and even if it's not better and you can't figure out how to pay the student loan off, you should still go for it, because education is it's own goal, as if it was a consumer product.
This obviously doesn't make sense from an educational perspective. If education is good for you, why make it unaffordable and out of reach? You'd want education to be as cheap as possible so nobody gets left behind, but getting left behind seems to be the entire point behind these inflated tuition fees. Low cost colleges are supposedly inferior and not everyone gets to become "an educated well rounded individual".
Only rubes think this.
The formal education at most elite universities trends towards quite bad, with a few exceptional classes.
The access to resources (academic, social, professional, etc.) at universities is phenomenal, but this only matters if the student uses those resources (most don’t).
Elite colleges typically have a great education, but they are usually just as expensive as elite universities, but with much less prestige — they are only “worth it” (if you’re looking for value) as a stepping stone to something else.
> This obviously doesn't make sense from an educational perspective. If education is good for you, why make it unaffordable and out of reach?
If someone chooses to go to an elite school while not understanding the value prop (or lack thereof), that’s on the applicant rather than the school.
> Low cost colleges are supposedly inferior and not everyone gets to become "an educated well rounded individual".
Low cost colleges serve an important function, and imho it’s just as easy to be “an educated well rounded individual” at one of these schools. They may not be as prestigious, but the value of most average or better universities and colleges is largely based on the efforts made by any given student (which trends towards being very low effort).
You can get more upward mobility by skipping education - but only if you what you do instead enables lots of upward mobility. For example, if you skip education to work in trades, you’ll have a reliable career and upfront cash; but the career’s growth is capped, so to become really successful, you must figure out how to use the upfront cash and reliable income (which probably involves research i.e. education).
Completely separate from the substance of your point, this sort of language does not encourage constructive dialog, it frames the discussion in such a way that you are either going to get
a. People who agree with you, resulting in you not learning anything b. People who are triggered into fighting with you, once again, resulting in you not learning anything c. People ignoring you, resulting in you not learning anything.
My constructive suggestion to you is that you simply don't write that first sentence. I suspect you (and everyone else!) will have a much more fruitful time online as a result!
Edit: Spelling correction
The irony is that in limiting mobility and competition from the “non elite” out-groups to preserve status, they end up shrinking the overall size of the pie.
I've always taken the elite overproduction thing as an _analytical tool_ to help us make sense of why we have experienced the rise of an oppositional anti intellectual position in contemporary culture.
But you make the good point that it can also be a _weapon_, leveraged by those oppositional groups, to justify their oppositional position.
Perhaps this seeming tautology can be resolved with some systems thinking. Maybe there's some insight in the elite overproduction analysis, but that means that, as an argument for further polarising society it's a pretty effective tool. It's actually reinforcing the feedback loop! A fascinating example of a self fulfilling prophecy.
Historically, in the US the elite are the managerial class, the lawyers (future politicians), and the coastal dilettantes who are already wealthy enough to major in the social sciences.
When 1+ million students are getting MBAs every year in the belief they will be members of the C-suite, but there’s only a few thousand such positions, you have a case of elite overproduction.
For-profit degree-churning colleges made them not-so-elite through the law of supply and demand.
And now they can’t even get a job.
Then these kids realise these jobs don’t exist, that they should have gone to trade school instead, and that their student debt will cripple them for life.
Same thing will happen in China. For now their economy grows so fast it can absorb many intellectuals, but that won’t last forever.
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/19/china-has-too-man...
Or maybe the Economist is "trying to sabotage China"?
They also have that Let it Rot problem so who knows
The massive shift in careers, not just due to LLMs but technology and society in general, threaten the promises given to prior generations. And this is also happening in China, see “tang ping” / “lying flat”.
His claim to fame is the one where he correctly predicts Trump's win and the current war with Iran, etc.
Addressing your question - he has hours of lectures exploring western culture - the greeks, christianity, rome, germany - the paints them in a really positive way from what I've seen so, if anything, he is indoctrinating people into western culture.
investigative journalism, activism, historical game theory analysis. makes people smarter, and makes it harder for the elites to lie to their people.
your take gives me the same feelings i have about how we handle africa, asia and latin america. "We can't pay them fair wages and let them control their own resources, that would collapse our system", "sounds to me like our system is built on exploitation and oppression and deserves to collapse".
In Machiavelli's view. whoever desires to establish a kingdom or principality where liberty and equality to prevail, will equally fail, unless he withdraws from that general equality a number of the boldest and most ambitious spirits, and makes gentlemen of them not merely in name but in fact, by giving them castles and possessions, as well as money and subjects; so that surrounded by these he may be able to maintain his power, and that by his support they may satisfy their ambition, and the others may be constrained to submit to that yoke to which force alone has been able to subject them. ... But to establish a republic in a country better adapted to a monarchy, or a monarchy where a republic would be more suitable, requires a man of rare genius and power, and therefore out of the many that have attempted it but few have succeeded. (Discourses I; Machiavelli [15311 1950, chap. 55, p. 256
You don’t have to invent new technologies if you simply position yourself next to halls of power and the money printer.
- elite overproduction and limited job opportunities
- wealth pump and inequality
- declining of popular wellbeing and growing resentment
Thus, it only makes sense to consider elite overproduction within this framework.
e.g. the government made university education free, lots of people went to university, there was now excess supply of college educated professionals, this led to unhappy young professionals, in turn led to unrest etc etc.
They will want to topple the elite so they can replace them.
My experience/observation is that only few (university-)educated people really do understand the game. Only a subset of them actually make serious attempts to understand the rules of the game, and of those, most get to believe in often very dangerous falsehoods about what the rules are.
What’s sophisticated are the layers of ideology and falsehood that made people believe that aristocracy was dead.
This does not describe the current situation: even if we just consider net worth, there are at least 2-3 rather separated kinds of elites:
- the "aristocracy": what you name "noble blood"
- "old money": there is some partial overlap to "aristocracy", but not the same; for example think of family with a long pedigree, but not necessarily of aristocratic origin, think of family empires that have a standing in some industries over multiple generations.
- "new money": people who got rich in particular by building some internet company. Their values and attitudes are quite different from "old money".
These are three quite different groups of people. So, it's much more complicated than "noble blood breeds nobles; common blood breeds commoners".
--
And this is just the "already net worth rich".
For example there exist groups of intelligent people who are highly ambitious, but aren't given a chance, so they look for allies, and sometimes they succeed.
In some sense the classical hacker scene can be considered as an example. Some of them actually got rich by founding some internet startup.
This is a great narrative for folks who want to be fatalistic.
From my view:
- Much of what you call “nobles” and “commoners” are more about values than blood. Yes, “noble” values are difficult to develop if you’re not born in that class. That said, these values are easier to learn and develop today for a wider group of people than has ever been true in the past.
- Some people think the “noble” side is all rainbows and unicorns. The noble class is shedding its weak non-stop. It may take a generation or two before a branch of a noble family becomes common, but it happens often, and it’s a source of great consternation to that branch when it does.
> What’s sophisticated are the layers of ideology and falsehood that made people believe that aristocracy was dead.
Did anyone actually think the aristocracy was dead?
The relative power of the aristocracy dipped a bit mid-20th century, but what they may have temporarily lost in economic power was gained in social and political power.
If you can slap a moustache on economic inequality, you avoid academic accusations of unoriginality and the popular antibodies against "he who must not be named." This is good for the author, but for the reader? It's about as useful as trying to stick a fake moustache over that magnificent beard.
Are the elite:
- billionaires?
- top 1,000 Political leadership?
- top Military leadership?
- top 10% of society by wealth?
- top 10% of society by influence?
- smart people?
- hard working people?
- people with valuable economic skills?
- people who went to university and got a degree?
We have no idea from Wikipedia. It might be possible and practical to have an entirely elite society where everyone has a job for all I know reading that. I suspect we're all elite compared to the population of the 1500s.
Just to put my oar in, there is a huge problem when people aren't allowed to better their own lives and also have nothing better to do than sit around discussing how to overthrow the power structure. How that matches up to elite overproduction theories I cannot say.
But you're also missing his Elite Aspirants category which are people who have acquired credentials and social capital necessary for elite status (like a law degree from a top-tier university or an MBA).
But when this happens to the educated professional class, all hell breaks loose. The system has to change, because it is unthinkable for some professional with a master's degree to become a warehouse sorter.
If AI really makes professional workers obsolete in the future, I fully expect the next revolution to be fronted by that class.
the keyboard warriors?
After the Civil War we compensated slave owners. After the GFC we bailed out the banks. The government giving money to poor people is somehow a moral hazard yet the wealthy not only expect government handouts, they demand them.
Many in tech don't seem to realize that after 2 centuries of automation coming for only blue-collar jobs, AI will finally come for theirs. Jobs losses, depressed wages, unpaid extra work and constant layoff churn. The heady heights of the 2010s will seem like a fairy tale.
Except this time, unlike a century ago, there is no labor movement. It's been decimated. There is no effective pushback against further wealth concentration to like 100,000 people. The Jeff Bezoes of the world will demand even more government money so they can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion and things will get really bad until eventually we have a Russian or french type revolution.
Too many people think it's a big club when it isn't. As George Carlin said, you're not in it [3]. People actively advocate for their own worsening material conditions because they're deluded into thinking they'll be Jeff Bezos one day.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
Only in the district of Columbia. Such a distortion influenced me not to read the rest of your message
Where have you observed this?
I really believe that we should increase automation in blue-collar work, e.g. self-checkouts. But I don’t believe those displaced should “start at the bottom”. I believe they should get better (from their perspective) jobs, subsidized payments for whatever “job” they desire, or something in between (subsidized payments for jobs like community service and art, which have some value but don’t pay as much as they should because of desirability).
I also believe we should do this for white-collar work, and executive-level. The only exception is jobs that benefit from human-ness, like service and figureheads, and these should be automated to be as easy (comfortable and effective) as possible while keeping the human.
NAFTA
I could see a fair argument that NAFTA should have insisted on labor protections and parity in minimum wages, but it's weird because NAFTA is already somewhat protectionist, albeit including Canada and Mexico under the umbrella. So even if I steelman that your beef is that it didn't go far enough, that doesn't really explain the vitriol.
If the programmers fall into the "educated professional class", then no, not in Canada. I personally know people with engineering/science degrees who became "warehouse sorters", baristas, metal workers, parcel deliverers, cooks in cafeteria. Some of them eventually found programming jobs again, others are still employed in blue collar/service jobs after 3+ years.
I mean I think you do actually have a salient point, but I also think there's a material difference between telling someone that's maybe been paid not a lot for half a of labor that they need to change industries and someone who's tens of thousands of dollars into debt that the implied social contract encouraging that debt was a house of cards and they need to start from scratch with 0 experience even ever being employed.
UI and design is weird. There's a saying in fashion "there's no new fashion, just cycled old ideas" and things have a trend cycle. UI have a similar trend, as we can see with IOS pattern update and icon update for Google: they're just new, but we can't really tell if it's "better". But UI designer still require busywork to justify their existence and salary, so we get new UIs now and then. Part of it just falls under the bullshit job category [1]
When we ponder upon this, it boggles down to the fact that it's notoriously hard to distinguish "value creation" vs "value extraction". If I invent a fridge and it become commercially available or cheap enough so that people previously not able to purchase it can buy it, it's fairly easy to see it as value being created. A duopoly diluting milk with water to increase the profit margin, a search engine monopoly intentionally worsening it's search engine so we have to search twice (=twice the use!), a white ware company implementing planned obsolescence but better UI, looks good on the profit and balance sheet but was value now created, or extracted?
Elite overproduction, though this scope, is not about some 1% but most "middle class and up" that doesn't really do anything meaningful (bullshit job, value extraction) in society but expects titles and yearly salary increase.
This is not an issue when a society genuinely have room to grow (value creation is ample) but when the growth is harder to come by, but new generation expectations haven't changed. Then more jobs are created to extract value, and the burden start to bubble up
When you think about it, it actually isn't even as obvious as you might think - which is the whole problem you are talking about. Another way to recast it is there is some theoretical optimum use of resources and it is unclear whether the action you took is in line with that optimum or not. In fact, since reality is rather complicated, it probably isn't!
I might liken the idea to a chess grand-master watching a club player and a total rookie play. From the grand-master's perspective, both sides are just blundering even though one player is much more likely to win.
In the same way some supreme hyper-intelligence might see the fridge creation as a horrific failure to allocate resources to create value and hence value-destructive in relation to the original resources, even though we mere mortals think it is a pretty good idea. All we can really do is compare things and talk about which one is more efficient.
So it isn't just notoriously difficult to distinguish, but objectively almost everything we do is probably value destructive (and hence uselessly extractive) compared to a potential optimum allocation. Up until the 1950s or so even the best people managed was still pretty pathetic at creating value by modern standards. They weren't putting enough resources towards correctly creating fertiliser, which is far worse than the milk-dilution example.
This is an excellent frame to think about this. When we look at the increasing financialization of consumer spending (subscriptions, buy now pay later, rebates, club discounts, etc.), we can think of it as disguising value extraction as value creation.
A lot of does-not-follow suppositions are embedded in this. Nor does the article really seem to be talking about "elites", as career training is not some elite status.
During the period in question Canada saw outrageous levels of immigration. The highest population growth, in absolute numbers, in the developed world. It was incredibly destructive.
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/features/10000_brainiacs/
It was kind of the apogee of a problem that had grown for years, where Canada had leaned on low-cost, exploitable imported labour to avoid salary pressures, with that avoiding modernizing, automation, etc. With that massive immigration bulge we also moved to a housing-based economy where people no longer cared about normal avenues of entrepreneurial effort, but instead everyone became real estate speculators. Why start a business when you can just stand in line for some pre-con condos on the notion that you'll flip it at a big gain when complete. Or buy some dilapidated house and become a slumlord for a dozen international students.
It was perverse incentive, and has been a lost decade for the country.
More than a decade ago, HBO released Girls and many were surprised to learn that every single cast member in that was a nepo baby of some sort. All these people who've made it in Hollywood end up having children. So someone will try and get a show greenlit and a studio head or an agent or somebody will come along and say "if you put my son/daughter in it, you'll get this financing or simply more chance that the studio will greenlight it". So the entire project may end up being sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, etc.
There are still non-nepo babies in this industry but it becomes harder and harder to make it on pure merit. Even if you're not a nepo baby, you need to be an "influencer". It matters how many follows you have on IG, Tiktok or Twitter. This part isn't new either. Before social media, influece was measured in magazine tears.
Eventually that sort of thing leads to the collapse of an industry.
The thing is, these societies are as obsolete as their ruling classes, who view young people seeking culture with concern. What we need is to evolve our societies to ensure there's a place for culture, letting automation do its job to generate a new economy where we work less and live better, the exact opposite of the classic https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg
If only computerisation were done properly, for the benefit of the many rather than just a select few, we would roughly have a tenth of the consumption and time currently required to do almost anything, simply thanks to greater efficiency. This isn't the case because both the ruling classes and the masses are mentally incapable of understanding a society organised differently through TLC and IT. The few who do understand have, on average, found ways to profit handsomely from the ignorance of the majority, and the remaining handful who understand but aren't among the giants profiting from it are the "rebels" that the WEF "feared" back in 2016 http://web.archive.org/web/20161206153258/https://www.forbes... and they don't have much room to get anywhere.
In the first paragraph, I said "in theory" we have trained people, because training is largely obsolete, stuck in another era, with the bulk of universities, courses, and lecturers being even more reactionary than the average person. The reality is that people who actually know what they're doing are incredibly scarce compared to the past, precisely because of this general lack of evolution. This is a massive disaster because knowledge and intelligence are the only natural resources that grow with use and recede otherwise.
Today we truly need a great reset, as foreseen by the current élites, only of a different nature, because we need a different civilisation from the current one.
timmg•8h ago
I'm sure the "elite overproduction" model is mostly wrong. But I also think it is an interesting/useful way to look at some things happening in society recently.
Certainly, you can think of the recent "cancel culture" phenomena as a great way to remove elites to make room for new ones. (Maybe you could argue that some of the effects of MeToo were similar.)
DEI -- along with hiring quotas -- tended to bring new "officials" at companies and government orgs ("head of diversity") which is another great way of "creating" more elites.
Kinda neat, I think. But probably not super-explanatory.
atomic_reed•8h ago
There are those that value equality (=). There are those that value non-equality (>).
As elites of the history until now (>=6000 years-ago until now). We are the "chosen ones" who received "=" and ">" at an early age. These symbols are not "math" nor "school"; they are simply life to us.
But now consider why there must be ">" in the world. On a relaxing beach, why must one wave be higher than another? How does the water "feel"? Warm? Is that ">" than cold?
In my head, I see Master Epstein as 100, and other people as 17. 100 > 17. Master has died, so perhaps death > life. But I am only one person out of billions in the world. But I have not seen a billion people, am I over-trusting the books?
So my point is that the Elite Overproduction model is more wrong than Master Epstein. In particular...
1. If "elite overproduction model", then "Master Epstein model"
2. "Elite Overproduction" = "Master Epstein"
3. "Elite Overproduction" -> "Master Epstein"
4. 100 > 17, so "Master Epstein" model > "Elite Overproduction" model
You may not understand my point, but I hope you at least understand Master Epstein.
zingababba•8h ago
ftmootnomoat•8h ago
Elite overproduction is about everybody wanting to be basically managers and nobody wanting to be production workers.
Except that without enough production workers it’s impossible to justify “elite” positions.
College graduates took on huge debt only to realise they’re not needed. That’s how you get a class of young, angry and unemployed intellectuals which is every government’s worst nightmare.
energy123•7h ago
ftmootnomoat•7h ago
atq2119•7h ago
If anything, it's a way of placating existing elites.
The elite overproduction idea is that there is a surplus of people who feel that they should have an elite status compared to reasonably available elite positions.
Creating additional managerial positions is a way to attempt to absorb this situation.
ftmootnomoat•7h ago