Part of the Chinese dynastic cycle was the number of aspirants for official positions increased due to population growth, but the number of such positions did not. It was also clearly part of the instability of polygynous steppe polities that the elite bred more elite children than there were elite positions. One can see clear patterns of intensified, even destabilising, conflict.
But these were in societies where there were clear limits to the number of elite positions. Technologically advancing mercantile societies do not have the same limitations.
That being said, part of what is going on with “wokery” is the use of purity spirals to force out older incumbents. It is not clear, however, how widespread that is.
Interesting comparison...(I live in Wuhan, am deeply into Chinese history)...
With the increasing mass of universities pumping out tens of thousands of annual graduates, it's not clear to me an economy can expand adequately to accommodate all those grads. In modern architectural study, with the advent of amazing software that has eliminated the drafting rooms like SOM and similar giant firms, architect jobs haven't just disappeared; they've fallen off the cliff. That doesn't mean there are no jobs, but there is very clearly an extreme overabundance of architectural grads that can't find a job. I know too many.
The problem in China is similar. Incredible numbers of recent grads can't find a job that is even close to utilizing the skills and knowledge they gained at university....too many grads, not enough economic expansion. One might argue China economy stagnation, etc., or inadequate expansion, but that's for someone else to determine.
On the plus side in China, there are so few SJW's, the effective number is zero.
Very few young people know that'89 even happened. Seriously. They don't know. If they know anything, it's that some troublemakers were messing around and the government took care of it. I am sure there are some that have studied in the West that know, but they aren't talking, and compared to the number of kids studying in country, it's a teeny tiny percentage....effectively zero/
I am talking home grown Chines, not Hong Kong, not Taiwan. History does not include even the faintest mention of '89. There was a teeny display in the National Museum about 20 years ago, and I do mean teeny and in an obscure corner, but that disappeared when Big Daddy took over.
Look, I've never lived in China, but I have lived in the FSU, and based on that experience I would be careful about making inferences about what young people in Communist or formerly Communist societies know or don't know about historical events from conversations with native acquaintances and colleagues. Assuming you are a foreigner (?) living in China, it is not clear to me that young people would be candid with you on that topic, whether because they don't trust you completely, or they have been taught by their families to fear repercussions, or they are ashamed, or some combination thereof. It is hard for me to believe that knowledge of such events hasn't been passed down from parents and grandparents, with warnings to keep it in the family. Natan Sharansky's story about what his father told him after the death of Stalin is a classic example -- don't reveal your true feelings to anyone outside the family. Maybe you are correct in your assessment, but in my experience, living as a foreigner in a somewhat 'xenophobic' society means that you can never be fully confident that you understand what the home-grown folks genuinely know and believe.
I won’t go into detail about who I am to justify my comment. It was made in friendly honest intent to inform people what it’s like here in China. Folks talking to Chinese anywhere outside are talking to the teeniest slice of the population imaginable. I’ll only say I have a very wide exposure and interaction with young people, mostly from rural and small city environments, which is where the majority of folks still live.
Understood. One of my pet hypotheses is that learning to lie, 'doublethink,' and being two-faced are/were critical survival strategies in Communist and post-Communist authoritarian regimes. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of woke/SJW elites in Western societies, only a small fraction of whom are probably 'true believers.' I am somewhat heartened by signs (the outcome of the election and also the trial of Penny in NYC, as well as the lack of trust in the MSM) that the tide is turning against this pernicious habit.
In my view there is next to nobody deserving of the label "elite." Maybe nobody at all. But the term has become conflated with the credentialed class, and as more and more occupational groups try to limit competition by lobbying for their jobs to require a license, the credentialed class has grown well beyond the number of credentials that even our watered-down higher education system can supply.
The only solution I can see for this is a bottom-up one, unless we can somehow elect a Milei. The public needs to be willing to start hiring, at least for some jobs, consultants who haven't complied with occupational licensing requirements. And for that to happen, some kind of off-the-record way to share reputational information about those workers needs to be created. Services like yelp.com aspire to that role but are too easily abused to achieve the needed level of trust.
But it may be that credentials can't work at all because their issuers will always be corrupt.
Well, Schumpter observed back in the 40s there were enough people with college degrees that some white-collar workers made.less than skilled tradesmen.
In “the Devils” Dostoyevsky described a Russian society in which young people educated in Western culture could not find productive work and were increasingly alienated from traditional Russia. This led them to nihilistic and violent ideologies. America is not Dostoyevsky s Russia but I think there are parallels. What a prophetic genius. But apparently not the nicest guy in the world
“My emphasis. I think that many people in the nonprofit sector, in corporate HR, in K-12 education, and especially in campus administration, have too high an opinion of their intellectual and moral superiority.”
From my personal experience, the non-profit space is littered with people with advanced degrees that don't have any real hands-on experience at anything but very much believe they ought to be in charge and make a lot more money. They basically have to generate supposed problems to solve to justify their existence.
Suppose I were to say, there's too many gold miners in our gold rush. One could point to the price of gold and say it's barely declined, despite the increase in miners, or one could measure it by gold miner wages.
Except if the only 'wages' you can measure at those who get the gold, then you're kind of in a tough spot. Because the price of gold is set by factors outside the local conditions, it can remain high for those who get it, but for those who don't they'll see a significant decline in wages.
Which I think we do see, but measuring that will be a bit harder. It used to be anyone with some knowledge of html could become very rich very fast on the internet, but now you need some actual skill to get to those same prices. Positions that used to require a bachelors now require a masters or PhD, especially in places like South Korea where there is elite over production.
I don't think the problem has been solved by just looking at wages of the elite. It could be the world has gotten more complex (like our HTML worker), or it could be that the world has gotten more Zero-Sum (Like the South Korean needing to get a masters to qualify for a job that used to require a bachelors).
Personally, I'm in Turchin's camp. Per the disputes, Gibson's Law applies...
“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.”
In law and public policy, the observation that equally qualified expert witnesses can come to opposite conclusions.
One is that there’s nuance and context to almost everything involving people, so experts can seem like they’re coming to different conclusions when discussing a variation of the same topic. Harry Truman said he just wanted a one-handed economist – “Every time you come in here you say, ‘On the one hand this, on the other hand that.” But that’s how most things work. Gibson’s law is triggered when an expert – often in an innocent attempt to simplify for a lay audience – tells one side of a story that has many sides, offsets, and counterbalances.
A second is that training and data can be overwhelmed by ideological beliefs and life experiences. This is especially true in fields that study people. There are no conservative meteorologists or liberal geologists, but we happily accept the equivalent in economics and sociology.
A third is that incentives are the most powerful force in the world. They not only get people to say things that aren’t true, but actually believe those things if it’s in their career interest to do so.
(Cut and pasted...from notes taken from other notes. I'd give attribution if I could find the original.)
In the US about 40% of the population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher. Can anyone really make a convincing case that any society needs that many college grads?
I think it is important to distinguish between economic elites, and status elites. The two are not the same. People do often try to convert one into the other.
Someone who went to Harvard, for instance, often considers themself a member of the status elite, even if they work as a barista instead of as a barrister. Such a person may resent someone who dropped out of school to start a business, and is now a billionaire.
If Michael Spence is correct, a college degree is a "signal" that the grad is able and willing to learn on the job and to fit in at the workplace.
If the grad can't land a good job, then the signal is too dilute or too noisy. Too many grads or too much mismatch between college and career.
This would not be "elite overproduction." College does not produce elites. It offers a costly credential — which may or may not be credible, and may or may not be a passport to an elite career. The degree's degree of credibility depends on the college's selection effects ("admissions") and treatment effects (curriculum, standards of gradings, etc).
There is overproduction in admissions because any student who can gain admission to an "accredited" college qualifies for large student loans for tuition. Corrupt incentives in admissions.
There is overproduction of degree completion. Standards are weak insofar as colleges rely on tuition and Departments depend on enrollments in internal politics. Corrupt incentives in education.
There is not overproduction of elites. College grads per se on not elites.
The argument that college grads for the most part end up with decent jobs seems to me to miss Turchin’s point, or at least his model. Firstly, you don’t need a plurality of college grads to have jobs less well paid or high status than they feel entitled to; 20-30% feeling short shafted would do it. Secondly, whether a job is objectively pretty decent matters nothing compared to whether the person who has it feels like it is the job they should have. If all the new college graduates are expecting that they be directors right out of school and C-suite level by their mid thirties, they are in for a world of disappointment. Yet that is what they were promised after being told all their lives they could be anything they want and their degree was their ticket. Once you give someone their sheepskin with elite written on it they are going to have expectations. Unrealistic ones, sure, but that’s exactly the problem.
Invoking HR and K-12 (not sure why you stopped there, as the higher levels surely also have these folks in abundance) - is essentially saying "women". And a few of the sort of men who like being around women, especially if fawning admiration is part of the package.
Someone like your George Mason pals would simply posit that there's money lying on the sidewalk for anyone to trim these people from the workforce.
I think there's more money lying on the sidewalk to employ them in the first place, to keep afloat the Great Delusion, that very much gets at what feminism has wrought: I suppose a voluntary, rather than Lysistrata-like, acquiescence to the demand that all women, all those wives and daughters, should have full employment outside the home. If there's anything Lysistrata-ish about it, I suppose one may call it the price to be paid for the delights of the sexual revolution.
Part of the Chinese dynastic cycle was the number of aspirants for official positions increased due to population growth, but the number of such positions did not. It was also clearly part of the instability of polygynous steppe polities that the elite bred more elite children than there were elite positions. One can see clear patterns of intensified, even destabilising, conflict.
But these were in societies where there were clear limits to the number of elite positions. Technologically advancing mercantile societies do not have the same limitations.
That being said, part of what is going on with “wokery” is the use of purity spirals to force out older incumbents. It is not clear, however, how widespread that is.
Interesting comparison...(I live in Wuhan, am deeply into Chinese history)...
With the increasing mass of universities pumping out tens of thousands of annual graduates, it's not clear to me an economy can expand adequately to accommodate all those grads. In modern architectural study, with the advent of amazing software that has eliminated the drafting rooms like SOM and similar giant firms, architect jobs haven't just disappeared; they've fallen off the cliff. That doesn't mean there are no jobs, but there is very clearly an extreme overabundance of architectural grads that can't find a job. I know too many.
The problem in China is similar. Incredible numbers of recent grads can't find a job that is even close to utilizing the skills and knowledge they gained at university....too many grads, not enough economic expansion. One might argue China economy stagnation, etc., or inadequate expansion, but that's for someone else to determine.
On the plus side in China, there are so few SJW's, the effective number is zero.
I would imagine that the suppression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 would have a long-lasting effect on incentives to become SJWs.
Very few young people know that'89 even happened. Seriously. They don't know. If they know anything, it's that some troublemakers were messing around and the government took care of it. I am sure there are some that have studied in the West that know, but they aren't talking, and compared to the number of kids studying in country, it's a teeny tiny percentage....effectively zero/
I am talking home grown Chines, not Hong Kong, not Taiwan. History does not include even the faintest mention of '89. There was a teeny display in the National Museum about 20 years ago, and I do mean teeny and in an obscure corner, but that disappeared when Big Daddy took over.
Look, I've never lived in China, but I have lived in the FSU, and based on that experience I would be careful about making inferences about what young people in Communist or formerly Communist societies know or don't know about historical events from conversations with native acquaintances and colleagues. Assuming you are a foreigner (?) living in China, it is not clear to me that young people would be candid with you on that topic, whether because they don't trust you completely, or they have been taught by their families to fear repercussions, or they are ashamed, or some combination thereof. It is hard for me to believe that knowledge of such events hasn't been passed down from parents and grandparents, with warnings to keep it in the family. Natan Sharansky's story about what his father told him after the death of Stalin is a classic example -- don't reveal your true feelings to anyone outside the family. Maybe you are correct in your assessment, but in my experience, living as a foreigner in a somewhat 'xenophobic' society means that you can never be fully confident that you understand what the home-grown folks genuinely know and believe.
I won’t go into detail about who I am to justify my comment. It was made in friendly honest intent to inform people what it’s like here in China. Folks talking to Chinese anywhere outside are talking to the teeniest slice of the population imaginable. I’ll only say I have a very wide exposure and interaction with young people, mostly from rural and small city environments, which is where the majority of folks still live.
Understood. One of my pet hypotheses is that learning to lie, 'doublethink,' and being two-faced are/were critical survival strategies in Communist and post-Communist authoritarian regimes. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of woke/SJW elites in Western societies, only a small fraction of whom are probably 'true believers.' I am somewhat heartened by signs (the outcome of the election and also the trial of Penny in NYC, as well as the lack of trust in the MSM) that the tide is turning against this pernicious habit.
A surplus of overgrown children. That covers all sides.
In my view there is next to nobody deserving of the label "elite." Maybe nobody at all. But the term has become conflated with the credentialed class, and as more and more occupational groups try to limit competition by lobbying for their jobs to require a license, the credentialed class has grown well beyond the number of credentials that even our watered-down higher education system can supply.
The only solution I can see for this is a bottom-up one, unless we can somehow elect a Milei. The public needs to be willing to start hiring, at least for some jobs, consultants who haven't complied with occupational licensing requirements. And for that to happen, some kind of off-the-record way to share reputational information about those workers needs to be created. Services like yelp.com aspire to that role but are too easily abused to achieve the needed level of trust.
But it may be that credentials can't work at all because their issuers will always be corrupt.
Well, Schumpter observed back in the 40s there were enough people with college degrees that some white-collar workers made.less than skilled tradesmen.
That would be me. Skilled trade, I made equivalent or more than an ER doctor at my hospital and way more than a degreed cubicle monkey.
In “the Devils” Dostoyevsky described a Russian society in which young people educated in Western culture could not find productive work and were increasingly alienated from traditional Russia. This led them to nihilistic and violent ideologies. America is not Dostoyevsky s Russia but I think there are parallels. What a prophetic genius. But apparently not the nicest guy in the world
Part of the reason all these graduates find jobs is due to the creation of so many useless, and at times destructive, roles in DEI, HR etc.
“My emphasis. I think that many people in the nonprofit sector, in corporate HR, in K-12 education, and especially in campus administration, have too high an opinion of their intellectual and moral superiority.”
This!!
From my personal experience, the non-profit space is littered with people with advanced degrees that don't have any real hands-on experience at anything but very much believe they ought to be in charge and make a lot more money. They basically have to generate supposed problems to solve to justify their existence.
Suppose I were to say, there's too many gold miners in our gold rush. One could point to the price of gold and say it's barely declined, despite the increase in miners, or one could measure it by gold miner wages.
Except if the only 'wages' you can measure at those who get the gold, then you're kind of in a tough spot. Because the price of gold is set by factors outside the local conditions, it can remain high for those who get it, but for those who don't they'll see a significant decline in wages.
Which I think we do see, but measuring that will be a bit harder. It used to be anyone with some knowledge of html could become very rich very fast on the internet, but now you need some actual skill to get to those same prices. Positions that used to require a bachelors now require a masters or PhD, especially in places like South Korea where there is elite over production.
I don't think the problem has been solved by just looking at wages of the elite. It could be the world has gotten more complex (like our HTML worker), or it could be that the world has gotten more Zero-Sum (Like the South Korean needing to get a masters to qualify for a job that used to require a bachelors).
"Positions that used to require a bachelors now require a masters or PhD, especially in places like South Korea where there is elite over production."
I thought you lost me with this sentence but your ending clarified it. What you say makes sense. If you are missing something I'm missing it too.
Personally, I'm in Turchin's camp. Per the disputes, Gibson's Law applies...
“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.”
In law and public policy, the observation that equally qualified expert witnesses can come to opposite conclusions.
One is that there’s nuance and context to almost everything involving people, so experts can seem like they’re coming to different conclusions when discussing a variation of the same topic. Harry Truman said he just wanted a one-handed economist – “Every time you come in here you say, ‘On the one hand this, on the other hand that.” But that’s how most things work. Gibson’s law is triggered when an expert – often in an innocent attempt to simplify for a lay audience – tells one side of a story that has many sides, offsets, and counterbalances.
A second is that training and data can be overwhelmed by ideological beliefs and life experiences. This is especially true in fields that study people. There are no conservative meteorologists or liberal geologists, but we happily accept the equivalent in economics and sociology.
A third is that incentives are the most powerful force in the world. They not only get people to say things that aren’t true, but actually believe those things if it’s in their career interest to do so.
(Cut and pasted...from notes taken from other notes. I'd give attribution if I could find the original.)
In the US about 40% of the population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher. Can anyone really make a convincing case that any society needs that many college grads?
I think it is important to distinguish between economic elites, and status elites. The two are not the same. People do often try to convert one into the other.
Someone who went to Harvard, for instance, often considers themself a member of the status elite, even if they work as a barista instead of as a barrister. Such a person may resent someone who dropped out of school to start a business, and is now a billionaire.
If Michael Spence is correct, a college degree is a "signal" that the grad is able and willing to learn on the job and to fit in at the workplace.
If the grad can't land a good job, then the signal is too dilute or too noisy. Too many grads or too much mismatch between college and career.
This would not be "elite overproduction." College does not produce elites. It offers a costly credential — which may or may not be credible, and may or may not be a passport to an elite career. The degree's degree of credibility depends on the college's selection effects ("admissions") and treatment effects (curriculum, standards of gradings, etc).
There is overproduction in admissions because any student who can gain admission to an "accredited" college qualifies for large student loans for tuition. Corrupt incentives in admissions.
There is overproduction of degree completion. Standards are weak insofar as colleges rely on tuition and Departments depend on enrollments in internal politics. Corrupt incentives in education.
There is not overproduction of elites. College grads per se on not elites.
The argument that college grads for the most part end up with decent jobs seems to me to miss Turchin’s point, or at least his model. Firstly, you don’t need a plurality of college grads to have jobs less well paid or high status than they feel entitled to; 20-30% feeling short shafted would do it. Secondly, whether a job is objectively pretty decent matters nothing compared to whether the person who has it feels like it is the job they should have. If all the new college graduates are expecting that they be directors right out of school and C-suite level by their mid thirties, they are in for a world of disappointment. Yet that is what they were promised after being told all their lives they could be anything they want and their degree was their ticket. Once you give someone their sheepskin with elite written on it they are going to have expectations. Unrealistic ones, sure, but that’s exactly the problem.
Reading about the UHC shooter, perhaps he could qualify as an example of what your discussing.
Invoking HR and K-12 (not sure why you stopped there, as the higher levels surely also have these folks in abundance) - is essentially saying "women". And a few of the sort of men who like being around women, especially if fawning admiration is part of the package.
Someone like your George Mason pals would simply posit that there's money lying on the sidewalk for anyone to trim these people from the workforce.
I think there's more money lying on the sidewalk to employ them in the first place, to keep afloat the Great Delusion, that very much gets at what feminism has wrought: I suppose a voluntary, rather than Lysistrata-like, acquiescence to the demand that all women, all those wives and daughters, should have full employment outside the home. If there's anything Lysistrata-ish about it, I suppose one may call it the price to be paid for the delights of the sexual revolution.