Wow, this literally reminds me of one of my tech employers. Eventually half the company was a VP, Director, Senior Director or something else. Often you had a reporting chain with a VP --> Sr.Director --> Director --> 1or2 workers

Naturally, the high salaries above had to be supported, so the 1 or 2 workers at the bottom had to code more, code faster, and the management layer figuratively cracked the whip harder and harder to somehow produce enough billings to support the team of 5. (note the layers above were not sales, they were all program-manager types. sales was a different group.)

If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of people with credentials they cannot use. We see this in the UK as well where there is a growing cadre of graduates every year going into jobs that don't need a degree. This leads to growing numbers of people that expected to be in the elite, but aren't.

The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share, and have the organisational and communications skills to do something about it. Investors that don't work for wages don't strike me as a likely group to develop growing levels of resentment.

Drill down on that issue, and you'll see the real problem.

Non-corporate litigants are majority pro-se now. That's new. Most corporate-individual litigation takes placed in closed-door arbitration, where precedent cannot be established (e.g. to definitively decide that caste-based discrimination violates existing racial discrimination statutes).

"Indigent" criminal defendants do not receive anything resembling effective counsel.

The problem isn't "too many lawyers". The problem is "too many lawyers for oligarchs, and a population too poor to afford lawyers when harmed by oligarchs"

But it's still hard to find a lawyer that charges less than 250/hr.

My hypothesis is that law school is not preparing lawyers well enough to be useful right after school. So many can't find a job to get the experience to compete with senior attorneys who charge 250/hr.

Sometimes these artificial gates are good things. They can protect consumers from low-quality products whose quality is very hard to evaluate. The market you use to "buy" a lawyer is not efficient: lawyers are no commoditized and you don't buy them frequently enough to have a good skill at evaluating them. An artificial gate like a professional association can help ensure consumers get access to a quality product, and that shitty products are prevented from entering the market and driving down the reputation of all producers.

If you're competent you have offers left and right and can command a very good salary. If you're out of a diploma mill with just the curriculum under your belt you're basically useless.

And a law degree is probably more comparable to a masters in CS than a bootcamp like flatiron.

I feel like this is only true because there's such huge demand recently if you have a pulse and can code fizz buzz you can get hired - but I know 3 guys of the top of my head who went to school with me, finished 5 years (local uni, I dropped out but kept in touch) and then went in to IT or sales because they weren't good enough to get hired as devs - this was 10 years ago.

If someone used a law degree to sell law software, or malpractice insurance I would count that was well.

It's often stated - and worried about, but whenever a thread comes up about devs over 50, we mainly see counterexamples.

Law schools are making lots of lawyers, but the 'failed' ones just drop out. That is why there is no downward pressure on the fees from increased supply.

Lots of young lawyers have no interest in biglaw either, and only some of them are naive about their future prospects.

I've seen research that the average lawyer (which is definitely not NYC biglaw firm) successfully collects on about 1/8 of their nominally billable hours.

If that is true, and you also factor in that they are effectively running a small business with all that implies for non-billable work, your $250/hr lawyer working on their own is making about $50k/year. So even if we are off by nearly a factor of two, they are hardly raking it in.

By comparison if you are in larger firms, more of the hourly rate is captured but it is also paying for multiple people.

Don't get me wrong, there are lawyers out there making great money (e.g. partners in those same NYC biglaw firms). But thinking that is the experience of the average lawyers is a bit like looking at levels.fyi and deciding that all over the country most software engineers are making 250k+.

That's insane.

I think time estimation is pretty hard in a lot of legal work also, you may be prepped for 60 hours work over then next two weeks and then a client phone call derails it entirely. It's not always easy to replace that time.

Why is the US producing 25,000 more lawyers than it needs?

Why is this happening in a supposedly rational maximally efficient - or close offer - market economy?

The simple answer is because someone else profits hugely from the money they pay for training. Which in turn is a symptom of an extractive economy, not a productive economy.

A productive economy would do a much better job of allocating talent to social requirements. But an extractive economy is optimised for short-term gain of a small overclass - not the medium/long-term opportunity-growth of a strategically generative economy.

Through government financed student loans, we make money available for any sort of educational pursuit; and unlike a loan for, say, opening a new restaurant, no business plan or market research is needed to convince a banker that the venture is a sound one.

So, the reason this is happening in a "supposedly rational, maximally efficient — or close offer — market economy" is contained in the first word of the description: supposedly.

In truth, government loans distort and destroy a market economy. Cheap credit undermines rational planning.

And generally, the choice of education seems to lag behind what's actually in demand, even worldwide.

If there was no free money sloshing around, people would have to do a proper cash flow analysis and look at supply and demand before being able to invest their time in degrees that don’t have ROI.

Same thing happened with pharmacy school, and now there’s tons of pharmacists making very little money for exposing themselves to lots of liability in fast food working conditions.

So getting a degree is a gamble, because you either come out ahead or you get hobbled by it for the rest of your life. Whereas if you did indeed get free money to get a degree it would eliminate the hobble and produce a class of well-educated people who could afford to work for PD wages.

It's a gamble that the government offers to you even when it knows you can't meaningfully pay the loan back.

Isn't there any regulatory body which controls the number of law degrees awarded annually, like there is for doctors?

IN LAW {bar exams + prestigious law firms} ~ IN MEDICINE {board exams + specialty board residency placements}

It also differentiates the bar vs. board exams. You can't practice medicine without certification, but there are plenty of lawyers doing law without a bar association, it only constrains you from doing certain types of work.

It’s as Churchill said of Democracy, it’s the worst form of government we’ve come up with, except for all the others. Fortunately in a Democracy we have the freedoms to discuss, identify and agree solutions to these problems. These solutions will probably lead to more problems. Rinse and repeat.

I know, I know, get off my lawn.

You are comparing college students from the 1980s to those from 20xx. I'll tell you what is on the mind of the new students: how the heck do I pay my student loans and save up for a $2M starter home

It is easy to have passion when you barely have student loans and can buy a home with a year or two of earnings.

In case you point out that salaries were also lower back then, i'll give you that, but the ratio of salary/debt and salary/homeprice was far more reasonable back then than now.

EDIT: This is a US-centric view, not necessarily a global view. Further, it is a SF/SV/NYC centric view since that is where a majority of tech+banking jobs are.

Where I live in, in Charlotte, NC a $1-2 million home budget would buy you a literal castle. Here is one on zillow not far from me for $1.2M it's a 6 bed, 7 bath, 7500+ Sq ft castle on an acre and surrounded by forest while still being only a 20 minute drive to the heart of the city.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14001-Grand-Palisades-Pkw...

For a much more reasonable $250K you can easily get a nice 2-3K sq ft 3-4 bedroom home with a quarter acre lot, nice fixtures and a 2 bay garage. This is in the 15th largest city in the US mind you. Better deals can be had elsewhere.

He also talked about how he was able to buy into amazon stocks when it was $60. If you are just starting your career you're jumping into a world where everything is at an all time high, that includes housing as well, every decent asset is currently at an all time high and we know that there's no room for us.

So we're left out of the big party, and we're scrunching to try to survive as we cope with our depression and anxiety about what an insecure future we have with climate change looming in the distance. Yes, take a job for the money. It's the only chance you have.

Lol, there are a lot of stocks now at 60 you could buy that may turn out to be big winners. What kind of argument is that?

My argument was that of course students are not passionate, they are worried about student loans, homes, rents. (Fun exercise go to the same Zillow link and try to find homes in NYC max $250k. Then, on what you find, look at the transportation options are into NYC.)

I'm glad you brought up NC because it has a decent sized banking sector but also offers great QoL. I actually left NYC and took a super-interesting job a bit north of you in Virginia. Homes are affordable, QoL is great.

There is a catch though: there arent all that many other interesting jobs in tech (as there were in NY/SF). The startup scene is tiny. There are few FAANG jobs here though Amazon is supposed to come soon. There are some awesome CS research-type jobs, in govnt labs.

There are lots of interesting consulting jobs to be fair, as well as FAANG SE jobs. There are lots of interesting data-type jobs in Intelligence. There are also tens of thousands of totally dead-end tech jobs where you do nothing all day at government offices. A friend told me he's been waiting two months to get approval to install a pip library on a government machine. Another friend works on ancient systems.

Good QoL - absolutely.

Good home prices - absolutely.

Jobs i'd be passionate about - some, hopefully more coming with remote.

Am I obsessively passionate about the work here? No, i'm mostly enjoying the outdoors.

Not valid for Scandinavia. In Denmark we get paid approx $1000 per month (like a wage) for studying and we pay $0 for attending university. You only have to pay for your own computer.

Some students have a part time job, some get extra money from parents.

So many students get by with zero loans.

Then university has nothing of the general courses and only specialized following your program.

You have some statistics in page 7 here, for Sweden though. It is influenced by people taking single courses and masters programs instead of the first enrollment so keep that in mind.

https://www.uhr.se/globalassets/_uhr.se/publikationer/2020/s...

I've met people with grad degrees in less remunerative fields who absolutely have exactly the worries you imagine. But a fresh grad with a CS degree and a promising career? A 250k salary isn't even a stretch for them to imagine. Add a partner with a similar income and both the student loans and that $2M starter home seem plenty achievable.

Especially if they look at home prices in Oakland or Hayward where home prices are still under $1M, rather than the more exclusive parts of San Francisco (read: all of it).

A large number of $250k+ salaries, on Wall St, for example permanently disappeared with the move to open source, shared servicing, etc. Former bosses are "retired" or "consultants" or insurance brokers.

Finally, sure, having a spouse who also earns $250k is great, but does everyone have that? Should CS grads only marry other CS grads? What if you wall in love with someone who does HR (which is my case)?

Also note, that stretching for a $2M home with two $250k tech salaries is pretty risky

0. What happens when you turn 35 or 40 and now face age discrimination?

1. Both your salaries are highly industry correlated

2. Both your salaries are regionally correlated

3. If either of you lose a job, you're screwed with a mega-loan.

4. What happens when kids come and you cant work (as easily, or at all?)

Let's ground this in more realistic numbers: you can reasonably buy a $500k residential property in the SF Bay on a single $140k salary. That's a salary that's very achievable for a senior engineer - which is to say five years of experience, which many will hit by 30. It's one that you can keep getting when you hit 35 or 40 if you don't move into management or technical leadership so long as you don't insist on working solely for startups founded recently by 20-somethings. It's a pay packet that will enable you to rid yourself of student loans in relatively short order, should you choose to do so.

The nice thing about the "the tech industry" is that one name covers a shockingly diverse swath. I've seen personal finance, business finance, high finance, business services, medicine, consumer electronics, and more all under the name of "tech". They are not nearly are industry-correlated as calling it all "tech industry" might lead someone to think. Often they have little in common with one another except using a bit of Python or Ruby.

With that in mind, and that any property appreciates in value over enough time (or at least is exceptionally unlikely to lose significant value in the SF Bay), we've got a scenario where of 0-4 concerns, only #2 is really a big one in this new world of remote work. 0 and 1 aren't big issues, as mentioned previously. 3 isn't a huge deal - you're sitting on an asset in which you have a non-trivial chunk of ownership that you can use. 4 is a universal issue that will arise in literally any scenario where you don't have 1%-grade resources, and no change of location (or income) will fix that.

Your concerns are wise, and clear-headed. I applaud your foresight and caution! I think it just might be possible that grounding numbers in reality might change the calculations slightly.

What you say is highly logical and models well with the current state of the world. However, it doesnt model unknown unknowns. The problem with modeling unknown unknowns is that you remain in a constant state of fear of what might happen, even though in the base case you would be OK -- so again your viewpoint makes sense.

However, I myself, cant stop thinking of unknown unknowns. Two that worry me (not worry me crazy, just worry me enough not to buy an expensive home in SF) are:

- What if tech jobs go remote and SF property prices stay constant? Now you dont get the appreciation you are expecting. Also, now, wages are stagnant or reduced with the large pool of workers across the US willing to work for less.

- What if the "burn down tech industry" segment of politicians win power (or cabinet influence) and create all sorts of punitive laws?

- What if we allow a lot more highly-skilled immigrants into the country (generally, i'm in favor of this coming from an immigrant family, but it cannot be denied that there would be a 3-5yr blip downwards in wages as the industry re-calibrates to more efficiently use all resources, including eventually creating net new jobs)

I'll give you three examples of unknown unknowns:

1. A friend in NYC purchased a simple 2family home and rents out the below unit to help pay the mega-mortgage. This year, there was a law that in many cases renters can defer rent (unlikely to pay it later, since it will obviously be a huge number.) Also, there is a moratorium on evictions. Also, the homeowner has to continue paying property taxes, utilities, heating, gas, etc. The model just went out the window.

2. A friend in 2009 -- outstanding performer -- was fighting to keep his job (along with a dozen other folks.) Suddenly there was a sexual harrassment claim (no witnesses, he said vs she said.) One person desperately trying to keep their job was the accuser, one was the accused. The accused lost his job. Took him 9 months to find a new job. Burnt thru his 6mo savings buffer. Increasingly desperate for a job, lowered his salary expectations and no longer earning $250k

3. Company is doing well. You are doing awesome. Making great buck. Suddenly, a corporate acquisition. New overloads bringing in loyalists. Bonuses cut for a year or so. Market is bad, stock grants are below what you got (Happens all the time). Dont want to switch jobs and be LIFO. You just went from $250 TC to $170TC.

My point is not that people cannot make ends meet. They can. Also, we in tech have it pretty good. BUT I would agrue that there are too many unknowns and stresses to "just pursue your passion" as the GP post was saying. I mean, sure, if everything was covered i'd love to pursue my passion. But it isnt.

Finally, you cant easily sell a home.

1. 6% real estate commission (if you put 20% down, you just lost 30% of your equity)

2. Title Insurance (1.5% depending on state)

3. Lawyers, fees, transfer taxes.

4. Bid-Ask spread.

All in, selling a home, especially under duress, exacts ~7-10% cost depending on your tax jurisdiction. If you put 20% down, you just lost 33 to 50% of your equity.

You can choose to minimize your risks to maximize your resources for dealing with unexpected events. This is absolutely, completely, and in every possible way a valid life choice! Validity does not mean free of consequences, though.

I have several friends who live this way. They do their best to minimize every risk in their lives and maximize their spare resources. One thing they all have in common is that they never have enough saved to feel secure - there's always a bigger and scarier scenario that they aren't prepared for. Some of them even struggle to tap their "unknown unknown" funds in the event of genuine emergencies, because there's more that could go wrong and they need to be prepared.

Choosing to be maximally conservative is a perfectly reasonable and completely valid life choice. The catch, perhaps, is contextualizing it and accepting that you will pay a price for minimizing risk. Otherwise there's the real risk that a person winds up forever paralyzed by anxiety, sitting like the world's smallest dragon atop a horde of pennies in case you might need them.

And I think it's fair to say that that's not a portrait of your average college student or the future they envision.

I did not find the boom period as bad as I expected. Many of the students in it for the money were still very smart and motivated and interesting to talk to. But I preferred the non-boom periods nonetheless :)

It is because people are not one dimensional. Most people have talent for range of professions, they are not predisposed to like exactly one of them. Also, most good students will end up liking whatever they picked provided it is within range of things they are not completely failing at.

Learning something often makes one like it more, even if one was initially ambivalent. Plus, once you know a bit more about field, you can find sub-field you are actually good at and find fun. As in, various tech jobs require slightly different aptitudes - some require more patience, some more abstract thinking, others memory. But, you dont know until you try.

You're only going to get a good TA when that professor is teaching a class that's their focus and has a grad student that has that fucus AND that student isn't on other research funding. The system is far from optional for either undergrads or grads. Believe me, I'm not happy either

Each class would 1-2 people in it that were genuinely interested in computers.

Early web startup cultures were heavy on college drop outs who had passed the professors in “useful” skills.

Sounds like folks who love the field but hate the job, should teach!

The trouble is that the students will see the instructor as the barrier between them abd a paying career.

I loved solving problems with computers in high school. Didn’t give a crap about theory unless it helped me solve harder problems.

So more engineer then scientist.

Choice for college path. Computer Management or Computer Science.

Once of those was about buying software and managing people.

Other was learning fundamentals so I could build cool stuff.

That's correct, but is not what is implied by "The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share". Those investors are analogous to the knights & nobles of the 1200s, who most likely will gladly support the existing system because they benefit greatly from it.

What is implied is that people _who train to be investors but cannot find work investing_ will be more likely to develop growing levels of resentment. They are in the same boat as the extra 25000 lawyers per year.

  >  the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite.

Perhaps this is somewhat an issue of self identification though.

Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is).

What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.

But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? We need people to grow the food, collect it, distribute it, arrange it on shelves or serve it in restaurants. We need people to build homes (and implicitly the materials that need to be dug up or obtained from somewhere), sell them, renovate them, maintain them. And what about the huge infrastructure that goes around doing all this, the roads, the water treatment plants, the garbage collection? Who's gonna do all that? Oh, right, we have food and shelter, that's enough, I forgot.

If the proportion of people who want to do science/progressive stuff is larger than what is sustainable to do all that I was listing above as well, wouldn't you say that becomes a problem?

In 1400, ~80% of the population tilled fields with horses and oxen, planted by hand, sorted the wheat from the chaff themselves before grinding the wheat into flour and baking it in an oven heated by an actual fire running from wood (and other flammables) that they collected themselves.

Now we have robots (in the broadest sense of the word) available to assist us with ploughing, sowing, harvesting, transporting, sorting, milking, shelf stacking, ordering, home deliveries, and cooking — the first half of that list is why agriculture is no longer employing 80% of the population.

Similar developments are ongoing in all areas, and that progress is the output of the scientists’ labour.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricul...

One place where technology is struggling to make an impact is in housing. Even ignoring the farcical inflation of land prices in some municipalities, the price of a building itself has not decreased in cost similar to other durable goods.

This is in part due to consumer choice

1 bigger buildings

2 better buildings (impoved sealing, more equipment, etc)

But also due to other factors

1 inability to replace skilled labor

2 ecological costs

3 increased code requirements

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a20622/watch-the...

...It doesn't look anywhere close to market-ready, but goddamn what a gamechanger once it is.

https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Archive/Story-Article-...

But regardless of that, even if you buy cheap land in a low regulation county/state and use all non-union labor, the building cost is still more expensive than it would be if buildings had the reduction of costs that other durable goods have had over time.

Some of this is clearly regulatory, i.e. codes. Some is clearly consumer choice, note the failure of prefab and tilt up to catch on. Some is clearly ecology, note the disappearance of native large timber from most residential construction.

Many architects and builders have tried their hand at designing homes and construction processes that reduce the costs of buildings but if they have to build to modern codes, expectations and ecological standards they mostly see marginal improvements. There are just a lot of fundamental costs involved with site constructed buildings that meet modern standards.

I would love an example of housing for everyone in locations that meets their needs, achieved in a timely manner, in a way that removes profit and investment motives.

What part are you referring to?

> I would love an example of housing for everyone in locations that meets their needs, achieved in a timely manner, in a way that removes profit and investment motives.

Well, on the other hand, is there something inherent in housing that requires those motives?

A lot of the program seems to have rested on subsidies and incentives, which are nice ways of saying you're relying on a profit or investment motive.

> Well, on the other hand, is there something inherent in housing that requires those motives?

Aside from that it requires scarce resources to produce and maintain and is rival in nature? I suppose not. Though that does put it in the company of quite a few other goods and services.

I mean that's just an implementation issue. To scale fast at that time, the government paid already existing corporations to build but kept ownership of the completed buildings. The point is that it's still a state venture and the profit motive/investment, "free market", was essentially suspended. So without this kind of government program the market, because of profit/risk/investment motives, won't build this.

Personally, I blame the system of incentives created by late-stage capitalism. It's more beneficial to litigate your job to a safe place than to learn a new or more efficient method of accomplishing the same job.

It's a systemic issue - the incentives that we have lead to a governmental inability to function at all levels. Pick any random piece and you can find a reason that it's hard to do meaningful work.

I was using the pipes as an accessible example of what is a single piece of a very, very large mosaic.

The assertion I intended to make was precisely this: That it is impossible to point to a single bad actor (although, you are likely correct in pointing out the most egregious of them). The core issue (IMO, the thing to fix) is that the system of incentives that surrounds the developers, contractors, politicians, homeowners, and everyone else involved rewards slicing the pie over making more pie. Adding value, when it's easier to litigate your way into aquiring a larger share of existing value, is pointless from any individual's standpoint.

Take a look at the debacle that surrounded the Stuyvesant Town housing projects - this is a case where this sort of pie-slicing quite nearly made it through, but was struck down by the courts. I use this example because due to it's failure the techniques involved are clearly visible:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/01/america...

...my central assertion is that the pipes and deals like this are motivated by the same underlying socioeconomic factors. And too many lawyers.

Wait, are you saying America uses lead pipes, not PVC or copper?

Yeah, essentially. We need so few people dedicated to this line of work because of the wonderful scientific, technological and logistic discoveries of the past century. The fact that we have people that starve today is a failure of culture and politics and nothing more. With such a rich soil in which to build an advanced society, the fact that we haven't produced the creativity to produce a more advanced society is not exactly alarming. It says more about the human mind and condition than anything else.

Uhm, we already do all of that stuff that you mentioned with a tiny subset of the population working on all of it, hence the concept of a 'service' economy. We could replace 'service' with any number of alternative concepts that could advance humanity far more significantly.

A related longer article expanding on such ideas: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

I just read Andrew Yang's "The War on Normal People" from 2018 that covers a lot of the same ground as in that article and in a clearer and more persuasive way (but does not outline quite as many possible solutions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Normal_People "Focusing on domestic issues, the book discusses technological change, automation, job displacement, the U.S. economy, and what Yang describes as the need for a universal basic income (UBI). Yang argues that "as technology continues to make many jobs obsolete, the government must take concrete steps to ensure economic stability for residents of the United States," including the provision of a UBI, which is one of three central policies of Yang's 2020 presidential campaign."

I think to some extent this maps onto the idea of rent-seeking monopolies in current society and undercompensation of individuals. It's hard to go to something like this

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/'

and not conclude that many people are being undercompensated grossly, and a small number of others are being overcompensated grossly.

For what it's worth, I agree with others that I don't think this maps onto "braininess" per se. I just think that's one of the character traits that happens to be valued the most in Western societies at the moment, so it's projected by the elites the most. In the past it might have been valor or nobility or courage or whatever it was -- the thing that is presented as justification for the excessive income, and protection of that income.

In general I think individuals are misvalued, not in the sense that persons don't matter, but the economic value placed on single individuals can be (and usually are) grossly overstated or understated. I think this transcends many many fields.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK

This is a plot of median household income in comparison to GDP per household, both in inflation-corrected dollars.

The GDP/household line has been pulling away from the household income line since the 1980s. While a great deal of wealth is being created in America, a decreasing share of it is trickling down into the hands of the median person. The rest of it is disappearing into the pockets of the already very wealthy in general, and the billionaires in particular.

I feel like you need to mention the black death in this same sentence though, as the nobility population change would arguably be a lesser factor in thrall to that massive event.

It does certainly paint an interesting aftermath as the black death suddenly made life a valuable commodity leading to a small period of time where worker's rights and even in some cases women's rights were improved. Considering that against a backdrop of indignant nobles is entertaining ponder-thought.

The Great Famine was 1315ish, were you thinking of that instead?

That doesn't seem to line up well with Turchin's secular cycle theory, though: 1300 is supposed to be the peak of the "integrative phase" and 1400 is supposed to be the trough of the "disintegrative phase". In fact, many of the "disintegrative phase" events happen well before 1350 (the Great Famine of 1315-1317, the Shepherds' Crusade of 1320, the Flemish peasant revolts of 1323) and many of the events that happened after 1350 could be explained more simply as effects of the Black Death.

To be fair to Turchin, I think his thesis is that overpopulation and elite overproduction happens first, which then leads to famine/scarcity decreasing the non-elite population, which finally leads to a later period of warfare that kills off the excess elites as they fight for shares of the smaller pie. But I think the claim that this process happens for all societies on a 200-year sine wave warrants some skepticism.

But that might also be due to the end of the warm period and the start of the little ice age. For reference: Its about now that the norse have to abandon their Greenland settlement.

As you say though a bigger factor was Portuguese traders gaining access to African elephant ivory which was easier and cheaper to procure than walrus ivory which was the cash crop of the Greenland settlement.

There's a lot of groups one could complain about. On HN it's a toss-up between whether you complain about the wall street bankers or the urban landlords. In other circles people complain about the government and the white collar yuppies. The MBA types get complained about a lot but nobody complains when they're buying a $100 window A/C unit.

You can find examples of net-negative rent seeking in just about every part of the economy but to paint a whole class of economic activity as a drag is naive.

There are also more recent examples of overpopulation of non-productive landowners. Post-ww1 the UK peaked at demolishing more than one stately home per day, as the Downton Abbey class abruptly became non-viable.

All I find online is references online to some TV show. Is there another term for these people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landed_gentry

In the middle ages the nobility were effectively the government (and the church provided checks and balances, kind of) as well as the investor class. In addition to financing productive capacity they also did all the administrative things governments do. Obviously administrative bloat ebbed and flowed over time. Today we have both government investment in capital project (e.g. a road, or a bus terminal) and private investment in capital projects (a new factory or whatever). Both groups can get very rent-seeky and non-productive if left alone with no reason to not do those things. It's really hard to make generalizations that are more accurate than not.

I think comparison to the pre-industrial world is more effective for understanding that time than it is for drawing conclusions about our own time. All the details are so different you really need to squint to make things line up and when you're talking about big things like macro-economics it's the fine tuning and details that make all the difference.

This was kind of true early on, and got less true both as the size of the nobility grew (especially in countries like France and Russia, which had serious nobility surpluses) and as a professional class of government emerged (by the time you get to Samuel Pepys, you're talking about largely a professional government). Even before that in practice many or most government functions were carried out by appointed or elected commoners.

To take a ridiculously over the top example, take the samurai class in the Tokugawa Shogunate. They were about 10% of the population, and by and large weren't really allowed do anything much at all (beyond wars, but there were no significant wars during that period). 99% of them were pure drain on the economy.

> as well as the investor class

This is way more dubious. Obviously it depends on the time and place, but in most times and most places it was anything from socially unacceptable (England) to effectively illegal (Roman Republic/Empire) for aristocratic landowners to invest in non-land things. What little investment in productive projects there was was largely by merchants, money lenders, and later banks, all generally commoners.

can you expand on this? It's harder to think about "investment" opportunities back then because the economy was basically agriculture, the slave trade, urban real estate, and trading the fruits of agriculture and slavery. I think landowners in the Roman Empire did in fact partake in other business, say starting gladiator companies.

I think it somewhat depends on the era, but in general if you were a senatorial family, you wouldn't want to do this, because you'd lose your senate seat (and might face other sanctions from the Censor). There were rich non-senatorial-class people, some of whom would have been much richer than most of the senators who might own land along with other stuff, but the big landowners were generally the senators, because they weren't allowed do much else. I think even, say, building an apartment block on land they owned was dubious territory for a senator. Mercantile activities were right out.

In the English case, the landowning classes generally didn't invest in non-land things, and arguably the trigger of the industrial revolution was less the technological advances, and more the development of the capital infrastructure to invest in using them (banks, joint stock companies, etc).

So, everyone with retirement investments. I think they're known as 401(k) in the USA, here in Australia Super Annuation.

We've built a self-collapsing economy?

Investors do a lot of work, because they have to constantly think where to put their money, evaluate alternatives, make sure there is no money wasted on things, etc. Even passive investors who only have S&P portfolios still contribute to the economy by providing capital to companies to invest into new things.

As we saw in the 2008 recession when more and investors pile on even the safest investments (mortgages backed securities) the quality of those investments tends to be diluted (via CDO's, errant ratings companies, exploitative real estate practices)

This is what's making me nervous about index funds right now, the demand seems extremely high, but what about the supply how would you determine such a thing?

What is investors are smart but there simply aren't enough good investments out there? Are they going to give up and become doctors, lawyers or engineers? Or just spend more time with their kids?

If there aren't enough good investments now then that's an indication that the market believes there are major structural problems with the economy that will prevent the future from being richer than the present.

That's a far, far, more serious issue than just a question of what the kind of people who expect to receive passive incomes will do with their time.

Obviously, the pandemic is having a major current impact, but as you say, there has been a shortage of good investments since at least 2008.

I believe the underlying issue is a misallocation of resources into rentier economics and not enough into productive growth. We've collectively put far too much money into monopolies that squeeze larger percentages of money out of people and not enough money into innovation that improves the human environment. We need more of the original Google (i.e. the revolutionary search engine) and a lot less of the current Alphabet (i.e. the rentier advertising monopolist).

Otherewise, either by buying an index or a stock normally, ur giving ur money to other investors, not the company itself.

Finding modern cognates to medieval nobility is fraught. In the republican era, it basically means "finger the bad guys." There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class...

Does Peace and War go into inter-nobility issues, or does the thesis rest on just the problem of a fixed size peasantry supporting a growing nobility? I could imagine these issues resulting in famines and peasant revolts. But, I can also imagine conflict emerging among nobility.

You can confer as many titles as you like, but France only has so many hides of land. Landless knights and penniless descendants of counts hanging around palaces and competing viciously for favour seems like it could be a recipe too. Somewhat more parsimonious with this modern thesis.

Are these supposed to be different groups of people?

Remember that the original liberals and republicans were (arguably) conducting conflicts within this overall cluster. In France it was the sans culotte vs the old nobility and clerics. You could argue that zuck or murdoch represents either side.

I could see an argument that Zuck and Murdoch are like pied pipers leading the modern sans culotte around by the nose, though. I'm not looking forward to the upcoming Terrors, in that analogy.

San Domingue, now Haiti, was also a place where these nobles went off to get rich.

The new world was filled with these kinds of guys.

Arguably, the spanish tradition continues under more modern institutions with the British and Dutch trade monopolies. Nobles and wealthy commoners could go off and stake their claims in the colonies. A more diverse elite.

Instead of being a knight that can either farm (limited number of hides) or crusade, you could also be a textile merchant. You could be a ship captain, VOC clerk or mior Raj.

I disagree here. The closest equivalent would be people in academia, specifically the portions of academia that don't perform useful work. Basically, the "X studies" crowd. And that's exactly where we see the most political instability coming from these days.

If we are looking for people who earn lots of money for no real tangible work, the people who work in tax exempt churches and congregations are much higher in that list than people in academia.

All modern prophets, pastors, speakers, con artists and so on. People in academia don't buy a new SUV every year, while these talkers do.

And right now, with the Covid crisis, we need the work of the academics. Not the whatever they do in the talkers group.

The closest thing to French nobility we have today is probably people with government sinecures.

This feels wrong. Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension.

The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees and net tax recipients.

By contrast, the median government salary in the US is 51k. Notably many government sector employees like teachers are paid at about the same level of other industrialised countries (although with enormously worse paid vacations, and less autonomy than in most EU countries).

Source: https://work.chron.com/average-salary-government-employees-7... https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...

That is pretty much the definition of the nobility.

Someone many generations ago did something perceived as meritorious by the monarch and was awarded a title and some land. To get to the position where they could have done something to earn them a peerage, their ancestors would have worked a job for payment, and so on.

The only difference is the timescale. The 16th Duke of Hamilton is 400 years from someone who had to work for a living. A highly privileged modern investor whose only job was a sinecure at Daddy's company might have parents or grandparents who worked an upper-middle class job.

> The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees

That is a ridiculous snark. Government employees work for a wage, just as commercial and third sector employees do. If they stop working, they end up destitute same as any other employee. You do realise that Ron Swanson is a fictional character, don't you?

An investor who is a completely layabout won’t stay rich very long, there is a natural terminus to that sort of behavior. Look at interest rates, the risk-free rate of money is 0%, less with inflation. We have inheritance taxes and can move that slider up/down as needed to prevent aristocracies from forming. Perhaps this is where your real disagreement lies?

>If they stop working, they end up destitute same as any other employee.

https://calmatters.org/category/economy/california-pension-c...

>You do realise that Ron Swanson is a fictional character, don't you?

Funny you falsely accuse me of snark and then reach into your bag of insults.