Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

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?

A society with too many over-specialized people is a dangerous thing and IMO what's really happening here. The dynamics that play out from that impact all areas of society in deep, negative ways and pose an existential threat that will come home to roost in times of stress (which the situation also makes more likely to occur).

"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times." - G. Michael Hopf

Weak in this context is un-resilient, inflexible in thinking and action. Not weakness in the physical sense. With over-specialisation comes implicit neglect of areas outside of the specialization. Producing well-rounded or 'T-Shaped' individuals inherently foregoes pursuing the highest possible level of performance in specialization.

Evidence abounds that modern developed society and decades of stability have produced a populace of over-specialized individuals - The net result being that we now have a systemic weakness in cross-discipline thinking and action. Over time more and more of the issues sitting on the society-wide bug tracker fall into this cross-discipline category and we just can't clear the tickets. They are building up.

Classic example - politicians are now overwhelmingly career politicians, their skill is in staying employed as politicians. This has transformed politics into a game of its own sake, increasingly unintelligible to those not versed in its lore, networked into its cliques, and thinking in its terms. It has ceased to be an effective means to the ends that it once was and is now an end in itself to its specialists. Outsiders to the political sphere face significant additional resistance in bringing any relevant experience to bear in a political context, which is now actively guarded against such non-specialists (or equally specialist, just of the wrong sort).

That's one example but you can find them absolutely everywhere - for the audience here look at how common it has become for technical specialists to fret about how small a cog they have become and how chasing maximum remuneration, recognition, or achievement in their field leaves them fundamentally unbalanced in other areas of their life, but also unable to pivot to anything else. It explains much of the 'stop the ride I want to get off' sentiment from those burning out in their field when considered as acts of mental rebellion against the confines of over-specialisation.

The dependencies this brings are where the risk really lies on a wider scale - develop a populace over specialized and you'll see great economic growth from whole new fields of shoelace-tyeres,food preparers, and (nod) telephone handset sanitizers. But now those roles become essential to individual survival while at the same time the importance and complexity of the underlying acts cease to be understood by those outside the specialisation whom depend utterly on their maintenance. Less trite examples are provision of food, water, heat, and shelter. Today shockingly few people are involved in the provision of these fundamental human needs, awareness of how they come about is as low as it has ever been, and doing any of them for yourself is at best considered weird and at worst legally prohibited.

I see this on a local level in my field all the time - you want to improve security across your organisation and so you set up a dedicated security team. Then any time security is considered someone from that team needs to be involved, and those outside the team limit their thinking on security-related considerations only as far as passing it off to the team. Net result, the organisation's ability to consider and tackle security is significantly weakened.

I don't really know where I'm going with this rant other than a vague attempt to increase awareness of what I believe is a serious fundamental, insidious issue.