Re:Crises of Elite Competition in the East and West
by soundnote on Thursday December 02, 2021 @07:07AM
(#29415111)
If it draws on Turchin's idea of elite overproduction, calling the degreed Starbucks baristas elites is sensible. Turchin's thesis is that society can only productively assimilate so many people with certain kinds of degrees, or academics in general. Past that, training academics creates a class of people who expect to have status, but cannot have it because there's no productive thing for them to do. Partly numbers, partly due to the nature of the degrees involved. So we end up with degreed people serving coffee at Starbucks.
But serving coffee at Starbucks isn't high status, as academic jobs should be, which creates a frustration in these failed mandarins: They don't treat the status as something they took a shot at and missed, like you would when trying for a three-pointed in basketball. They have the degree, they feel the status belongs to them, so ending up at Starbucks is a loss, not a miss, and humans take losses like that badly. Turchin contends that overproduction of these kinds of people is a key cause of social instability.
Analysis is a bit generous. It's a retread of some pretty stale ideas. It's flagship idea is a redefinition of the word elite to include "even a college degree holder working at Starbucks".
He doesn't outright say it because it's so transparently self serving but it's very obviously painted.
Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch would approve.
It's a reactionary piece designed to protect and promote elite power by, in essence, rhetorically disguising it.
It mirrors somewhat the way that "boomer" has cleverly been positioned as a sponge for the post-occupy fury directed at the 1%.