I read Turchin's site extensively... and I can say this is NOT what this is about.

Turchin is talking about when you have too much elite in general, not necessarily smart or educated elite, compared to spots where the elite can fit, and then what happens because of that.

This applies to any leadership role.

For example, what happens when there is only one Emperor spot, but a handful of candidates?

They murder each other.

Now, what happens when you have THOUSANDS of candidates, as China once did in the past?

Well... then you end with civil war, in China's case more than once centuries-long civil war.

Now larger scale, what about non-king nobility? Like Dukes, Counts, and so on? Again, same thing, if you have too many nobles compared to physical places for them to rule, you end with more and more wars, as the nobles without a fief start to recruit people to attempt to take a fief by force or cunning.

Turchin mention advanced university degrees as a symptom of this, in a world where nobility doesn't exist anymore properly... what would be the USA equivalent of aristocrats or king candidates?

----

a non political example:

Suppose you have a military. What happens if you start to promote a ton of people to be general? If you have 10 high command spots, but 200 generals, how the 200 generals will sort out what 10 of them will rule?

In college many years ago. I worked at a small pet store. Managers wore red shirts rest of us blue.

Customer walked in, looked at 4 of us. Other 3 wore red I had blue. Customer went to me as I was clearly the manager.

That was the day I realized 75% of the staff was managers.

Well the US Navy has 232 Admirals for only 254 commissioned warships.

Job title inflation is also common in many businesses. You have huge numbers of "Directors" and "Vice Presidents" with no direct reports and little real responsibility.

There is also the problem, that "hacking" the system is rewarded higher then adding to the system.

If you get a job at wallstreet, gambling the system, you will be higher rewarded in money and status, then if you joined a lab that researched fusion or asteroid mining.

Worser still, society will communicate to you, that you are a "sucker" for working so hard for so little.

This has nothing to do with "hacking" the system and wall street is not gambling the system - they provide value otherwise they would not exist.

I think it's more about utility. While the value of fusion research or asteroid mining is potentially very high, there is a large probability of failure. The risk adjusted return is actually quite low. Providing liquidity and services to markets has a higher risk adjusted return because it affects people now and with high probability.

> value of fusion research or asteroid mining is potentially very high, there is a large probability of failure

it's not that the probability of failure is high - more that the value creation is not capture-able by private interests.

Fusion research, or anything that is fundamental research leading to new tech, will unlikely to bring private wealth to those who fund it. Applied research, on the other hand, would. So you do see well paid researchers in fields, such as pharmaceuticals.

Wall-street investment bankers get paid a lot because all of the value that is created there get captured - very little of it flows out into society.

I think that the Economist headline misrepresents Turchin's theory. The issue is not that there are too many smart people, it is that there are too many university graduates who feel entitled to a limited set of niches in the upper strata of society. Those are two different things.

And reading between the lines, the issue is specifically that there are too many university graduates with degrees of "elite" image and prestige but very dubious usefulness otherwise, that essentially set them up to fail in modern society. An attitude of entitlement can be especially unattractive to many employers, and many universities do not exactly try to warn their students that they should avoid this.

I agree it reads that universities making up marketing BS are hurting people.

I think it is the same way of hurting people with YT influencers, where they BS how their lifes are great but never show real behind scenes.

I agree with that assertion: that universities are making up marketing BS and hurting people.

As a gateway to a high-paying job, a University degree is (in many cases: NOT ALL), more of a signal that the candidate is white, upper-middle or higher class, likely to not have a criminal record, likely to not have problems with mental illness (never mind substance abuse), and that's mainly what they're looking for, and why that gateway became such a high-demand commodity that it commanded a price that is often as much as buying a house. (easy access to student loans also probably played a role).

I say this as a person who thinks that every American should have an opportunity to go to college and get appropriate training for the career of their choice (as long as they otherwise meet qualifications). I think it should be "free" (and I think that business should pay into a tax-pool to fund the training of their workforce).

But I think that universities should ABSOLUTELY be tied down in how much they can charge for degrees, based on the actual economic value of that degree. If they train 100,000 underwater basketweavers, who make on average $15000/yr, then they sure as hell should not charge $100,000 for that degree, and they shouldn't be allowed to.

This market is horribly broken, and I don't think that it is presently workable without some much stronger government intervention. Otherwise, no player in this game has any incentive to change what it's doing. Since the government has a stake in having a viable and productive national labor-force, it's literally a matter of national security that this resource receive appropriate investment.

The alternative is to continue our downward spiral.

Also, there's this: https://ncses.nsf.gov/indicators

The best way to align supply with demand would be to eliminate the government intervention. It's government subsidies dished out in defiance of actual market demand that allows so people students to study underwater basket weaving simply because they find it interesting. If students had to rely on (normal) bank loans or corporate sponsorship that problem would dry up really fast.

It's government intervention that caused this situation in the first place.

>a limited set of niches in the upper strata of society

Otherwise known as "owning a house" and not being buried in student debt.

Too many people believe those things are entitlements when in fact they are tradeoffs. Like half my high school graduating class dropped out of college or didn't even start and many make decent wages or have dual income with a significant other. Many of which own homes or live decently. None of which demanded free rent and a college education.

Sure, but why should someone who goes to university and studies, say, literature for 4 years feel more entitled to owning a house than someone who, say, did not go to university and instead read and studied literature on his own for 4 years?

I would imagine both groups would consider themselves equally worthy.

Where would you draw the line? Which classes of society do you deem unworthy of home ownership other than the aforementioned groups and (presumably) every group below them?

I don't think anyone should feel entitled to home ownership, but certainly the classes who voted for today's zoning/planning laws (pulling the ladder up behind them) are unworthy of it.

>Which classes of society do you deem unworthy of home ownership other than the aforementioned groups and (presumably) every group below them?

I do not know where you are getting this from. I have no interest in drawing a line and I do not deem anyone to be unworthy of home ownership.

That's exactly the point of the comment above - own a house you need to be an 'elite'. So people trying to become 'elite' is really just people trying to own a house and get a tiny bit of stability.

Home ownership is within a couple percent of where it was in the 70's and 80's [1] and much higher than earlier in the centry [2]. People have selective memories and remember everyone buying into the housing bubble in the 90's but have forgotten about the crash after where they lost those houses.

The reality is that home ownership is the same or better than any time before the Clinton administration, but those who grew up in the boom have a mismatch between expectations and reality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

[2] https://www.census.gov/housing/census/data/owner/owner_tab.t...

I don't see how that maps into the argument. First of all, you need to look into youth home ownership, not total home ownership, second of all you need to look into the rate of change and not the overall amount.

Beyond that, it's not arguable that you need to be into a so called 'elite' job to be able to afford homeownership in most of the country.

I think it maps onto the argument as an explanation for both 1) why youth feel entitled to homes and 2) why they are experiencing such disappointment.

Growing up through a bubble explains 1) and the rapid decline from the bubble popping explains the intensity of 2)*.

I agree that the youth ownership numbers are dismal and indicate housing is harder to get into for that age group[1]. On the other hand, ownership is going up for the elderly as fewer old folks fall into poverty and lose their homes, leading to a bit of a wash for the overall population.

It is hard to call home ownership an 'elite' while the majority of Americans are homeowners.

*There are a ton of other factors that play into the affordability crisis

-Increasing migration to more expensive urban areas.

-Housing stock not keeping up (NIMBY, regulation)

-Loss of blue collar jobs, and immigration depressing wages

-College debt burden

[1] https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03...

I'm not even sure if he would argue that this is a bad thing?

I 100% think a society with a stratified lower caste could be more stable than one where everyone has equal resources - but I don't think that makes it better.

It's a bad thing if people feel entitled to things they cannot possibly have, of course. It's not even necessarily about how resources are actually distributed, it's just pointing out that we aren't supposed to be selling people a false bill of goods. Of course people can strive to be upwardly mobile and perhaps fail in these ambitions, but it should be a very clear, voluntary choice.

My argument does not preclude stratification as a concept - every competitive system has stratification by nature.

My point is that you cannot stratify people into two separate classes and then perpetually move one of those classes down into total barbarism and call it a better move than rewriting your existing inefficient system.

I'm not a believer in the idiotic communist ideology, and did not even mention equal resources in my post. Communism can burn, save for all of the people forced to live crippled lives under it. But you cannot have communism for 99.999% of people and true competitiveness for the leftover if you want a stable system. Specifically if you want a stable system.

Comparison without the means of acquisition will cause revolution.

Elite does not necessarily equal smart, in this context.

(This comment doesn't make any sense after you edited your comment. Weak sauce.)

Exactly, educated doesn’t mean schooled/credentialed. The word for this is “discrimination”— the more educated people we produce the less discriminating our institutions must be. If academia doesn’t discriminate the few from the many, it’s non-functional. Colleges are not to educate the public, they’re supposed to advance human knowledge. These are incongruent goals.

No they're not. They are related in theory if not in actual practice.

The Economist pretty clearly said elites equals educated. Maybe they misstate Turchin's position but it's understandable the parent responded to that.

-- And the whole "elite = educated" trope is a vicious rightwing canard that's gotten way too much play on this site, so clarification is useful.

I edited it 5 seconds after posting it. You posted 20 minutes after I posted it.

> I edited it 5 seconds after posting it.

And those edits don't propagate to pages that are already open.

> You posted 20 minutes after I posted it.

GP could easily have taken 20 minutes to read the article and comments before wading in. I know I've posted replies after leaving a tab open for hours before.

That is hardly OP's fault, since there is no way to be aware of others' HN reading behavior.

> That is hardly OP's fault, since there is no way to be aware of others' HN reading behavior.

I don't remember assigning fault.

“Weak sauce”?

> “Weak sauce”?

Whether that counts as assigning blame or not, I have not typed those words in the last decade or more.

I only just realized you aren't even the person who posted it.

Let's drop this thread, if he has a problem with me editing it, that's on him to say; I thought you were him considering how deep this got.

Here's the underlying: he responded late, it's his job to refresh, that's not etiquette, it's how the site functions.

Sure, but as a casual passer-by it seems like you're rationalizing the somewhat petulant comment from tpmx which did include those words: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27755083

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

You could have said that to the person complaining about 'weak sauce' in the first place. Or you could have applied it to my previous comment* instead of quibbling. It's a two-way street.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27756583

maybe some smart people are at the root of those problems. The huge bureaucracy is composed of mostly educated people. That was his point even though I don't agree with him.

The bureaucracy comes in because of too many stakeholders, not too many smart people.

Exactly - in the modern world if we chose to say tackle climate crisis like the moon shot or wwII production was tackled, we would likely cause a massive step up in labor consumption of educated elite. Maybe the core problem is one not of overproduction of one of poor allocation choices for how to use human capital in failing societies.