On the "elite overproduction" problem

Yascha Mounk on Peter Turchin

Yascha Mounk scrutinizes Peter Turchin’s idea “overproduction of elites.”

Trying to make sense of Turchin’s writings makes you feel like you’ve been staring at an astrological chart for too long. His approach—which, in a reference to the muse of history, he dubs Cliodynamics—is full of grandiose pronouncements which are designed to look scientific but actually present the world in such broad generalities that they are simply unfalsifiable.

I would say that Turchin has the strengths and weaknesses of an Intuitive Leaper. In the Myers-Briggs model of personality psychology, there are four primary antinomies. One is between sensing (S) and intuition (N). An S, who leans strongly toward sensing, is very grounded in reality. An N, who leans strongly toward intuition, tries to interpret experience in terms of patterns and abstractions.

An N, like myself, looks at a new baby and imagines her possible future. An S, like my wife, sees “another ass to wipe.”

Many prominent intellectuals in the social sciences are Intuitive Leapers. Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung (the inspiration for Myers-Briggs), Marshall McLuhan, and Rene Girard, among others. When closely examined, their thinking comes across as sloppy, their theories unfalsifiable, and their reasoning circular. But you still are inclined to give them credit for insights. There is something to it.

Mounk’s critique of Turchin is that what is correct is not original and what is original is not correct—or even coherent. It is correct that when too many people attain the skills that typically lead to affluence but there are not enough high-paying positions in the economy, this can destabilize society.

But Turchin is claiming that America is more unstable than it was in previous periods because of the overproduction of elites. And if we define the elite, in broad terms, as anyone who has completed an undergraduate education, there is simply vanishingly little evidence that American college graduates are less likely to have their expectations met now than in the past.

College graduates for the most part end up in well-paying jobs, which would not be the case if they were in surplus.

The Broad Elite Hypothesis is flat out wrong.

Alternatively, Mounk argues that there is a Narrow Elite Hypothesis. That is people aspire to a form of stardom, as artists, writers, pundits, or what have you, that is never going to be broadly achievable. But since this is always true, it cannot be an explanation for increased strife in contemporary America.

Mounk goes on to point out that “surplus elite” could mean something other than what Turchin had in mind.

Turchin worried that people whose skills or qualifications would at different times have allowed them to climb into the elite were being left out in the cold, potentially turning them into disgruntled revolutionaries. Today, tech founders in Silicon Valley worry that we have accorded too high a status to people who don’t have any real reason to belong to the elite, stifling innovation and enforcing political conformity.

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.

During my brief and unhappy experience as an adjunct economics professor at George Mason, I assigned students short essays, and a portion of the grade was on the quality of their writing. One student complained about the poor grade I had assigned to her on writing, so I proceeded to go over her essay with a red pen and highlight its flaws. It was soon covered in red. Meanwhile, she whined, “But I’ve always been told I’m a good writer.”

Exactly. These midwits have always been told that they are great, but they are not. And that is a somewhat different notion of “surplus elite” than what Turchin seems to be offering.

What we have in surplus are social justice activists.

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There Is No Surplus Elite in America