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Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

economist.com

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Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#191

Post by undersuit »

wobbly_bush wrote: post #185
bserge wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the US isn't "producing" those lawyers. People choose to become lawyers because they think it's a good idea. And generally, the choice of education seems to lag behind what's actually in demand, even worldwide.

> US isn't "producing" those lawyers. People choose to become lawyers Isn't there any regulatory body which controls the number of law degrees awarded annually, like there is for doctors?

Law Degrees in the US are not limited by some quota beside the size of the classes and the number of schools accredited. The real barrier is the Bar Exam, the ultimate decider if you are allowed to practice law, every state has there own admission process, there is some reciprocity and I think the Federal level has it's own separate Bar standards.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#192

Post by rmrfstar »

munificent wrote: post #150
JamesBarney wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be weird dynamic where there are a ton of lawyers, there is not enough work, and many aren't being paid much. But it's still hard to find a lawyer that charges less than 250/hr. My hypothesis is that law school is not preparing lawyers well enough to be useful right after school. So many can't find a job to get the experience to compete with senior attorneys who charge 250/hr.

I think the trick is that you're using the same word for two groups. There are a ton of law school graduates , but not enough lawyers . Between the two, there is a gating function of bar associations, getting hired at a law firm, etc. If that gate is too small, then you get the effect you observe where there are too many "lawyers" (graduates) looking for work while simultaneously not enough "lawyers" (working lawyers…

You've just articulated the basic economic rational for professional guilds. What inference are we supposed to draw from that, in this specific case? That things are fine? Because "consumers" aren't getting access to anything, and that's kind of the core point.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#193

Post by elindbe2 »

asdff wrote: post #172
elindbe2 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees" I disagree here. The closest equivalent would be people in academia, specifically the portions of academia that don't perform useful work. Basically, the "X studies" crowd. And that's exactly where we see the most political instability coming from these days.

I don't know why you mark people in pursuit of domain knowledge for the wider world as some evil elite, when there are people who exist to solely pursue personal profit at the cost of everyone else. These capitalists are the ones buying political adspace, spreading misinformation, and driving a wedge in the working class that directly leads to the polarized hyperpartisan political environment we have today. Not some…

I have to disagree that many of these programs are pursuing "knowledge" at all. They're pursuing a victim mentality and simply make up rationalizations as they go along and call it knowledge. And they're the ones filing into positions in the mainstream media and other circles (like social media gatekeepers) devoted to spreading misinformation.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#194

Post by Gwypaas »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #147
silvestrov wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how the heck do I pay my student loans and save up for a $2M starter home Not valid for Scandinavia. In Denmark we get paid approx $1000 per month (like a wage) for studying and we pay $0 for attending university. You only have to pay for your own computer. Some students have a part time job, some get extra money from parents. So many students get by with zero loans.

And what proportion of 18/19 year olds goto university?

It's a different culture than the US. Not at all the same pressure to immediately go to university, many people get jobs and travel while feeling out what field they really want to enter. This is of course dependent on the current jobs market. Personally I had three years.

Then university has nothing of the general courses and only specialized following your program.

You have some statistics in page 7 here, for Sweden though. It is influenced by people taking single courses and masters programs instead of the first enrollment so keep that in mind.

https://www.uhr.se/globalassets/_uhr.se/publikationer/2020/s...

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#195

Post by pksebben »

jmeister wrote: post #10

Turchin uses the term “elites”, which is not the same as “brainy”. Genuinely “brainy” people can find new ways to contribute to society, there can never be too any of them. “Elites” on the other hand - highly credentialed and entitled - play zero-sum games. There’s a lot of interesting critique written by heterodox leftists today, in the spirit of Chris Lasch, on how the current progressive movement is just intra-eli…

there's another assumption being made in this article, and that's the (all too common) assertion that stability is always a good thing.

consider the state of affairs; the mechanisms by which we enact and enforce public policy are largely anachronisms from an era when the most efficient method of information exchange was a printing press. we still vote with paper. mostly in a single day. this is not a situation that we would devise from scratch if called upon to create a solution today.

entrenched interests pose a fundamental barrier to social progress. those interests are demonstrably more efficient at gaming the system as it stands. introduction of chaos to such a system may provide the only opportunity for real, fundamental shift in sociopolitical system dynamics. this is a good thing - a forest needs the occasional fire.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#196

Post by luminati »

dusted wrote: post #22

Stupid people who think they're smart because they have a fancy education and are rewarded with high salary, that's probably a dangerous "brainy elite". Along with stupid people who just so happened to get a ton of money by no merit of their own, but don't realize this.

That explains the current state of full stack developers.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#197

Post by jahaja »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #170
ben_w wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the perspective of someone living in 1400 A.D.? Yes, food gets to us by magic. In 1400, ~80% of the population tilled fields with horses and oxen, planted by hand, sorted the wheat from the chaff themselves before grinding the wheat into flour and baking it in an oven heated by an actual fire running from wood (and other flammables) that they collected themselves. Now we have robots (in the broadest sense of the…

True, in fact direct agricultural labor accounts for fewer than a million jobs in the U.S. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricul... One place where technology is struggling to make an impact is in housing. Even ignoring the farcical inflation of land prices in some municipalities, the price of a building itself has not decreased in cost similar to other durable goods. This is in part due to con…

The profit/investment motive is fundamentally behind the scarcity of affordable housing.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#198

Post by rsynnott »

bernawil wrote: post #177
rsynnott wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the middle ages the nobility were effectively the government (and the church provided checks and balances, kind of) This was kind of true early on, and got less true both as the size of the nobility grew (especially in countries like France and Russia, which had serious nobility surpluses) and as a professional class of government emerged (by the time you get to Samuel Pepys, you're talking about largely a profe…

> it was anything from socially unacceptable (England) to effectively illegal (Roman Republic/Empire) for aristocratic landowners to invest in non-land things can you expand on this? It's harder to think about "investment" opportunities back then because the economy was basically agriculture, the slave trade, urban real estate, and trading the fruits of agriculture and slavery. I think landowners in the Roman Empire…

> I think landowners in the Roman Empire did in fact partake in other business, say starting gladiator companies.

I think it somewhat depends on the era, but in general if you were a senatorial family, you wouldn't want to do this, because you'd lose your senate seat (and might face other sanctions from the Censor). There were rich non-senatorial-class people, some of whom would have been much richer than most of the senators who might own land along with other stuff, but the big landowners were generally the senators, because they weren't allowed do much else. I think even, say, building an apartment block on land they owned was dubious territory for a senator. Mercantile activities were right out.

In the English case, the landowning classes generally didn't invest in non-land things, and arguably the trigger of the industrial revolution was less the technological advances, and more the development of the capital infrastructure to invest in using them (banks, joint stock companies, etc).

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#199

Post by bleepblorp »

question000 wrote: post #48
est31 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. (Not to say there is no overlap between those groups.) Investors do a lot of work, because they have to constantly think where to put their money, evaluate alternatives, make sure there is no money wasted on things, etc. Even passive investors who only…

Yeah but even if we accept passive investment is a form of productive labor, there's a limited number safe/good investments for those good investors. As we saw in the 2008 recession when more and investors pile on even the safest investments (mortgages backed securities) the quality of those investments tends to be diluted (via CDO's, errant ratings companies, exploitative real estate practices) This is what's making…

Fundamentally, investments are a bet that the future will be richer than the present.

If there aren't enough good investments now then that's an indication that the market believes there are major structural problems with the economy that will prevent the future from being richer than the present.

That's a far, far, more serious issue than just a question of what the kind of people who expect to receive passive incomes will do with their time.

Obviously, the pandemic is having a major current impact, but as you say, there has been a shortage of good investments since at least 2008.

I believe the underlying issue is a misallocation of resources into rentier economics and not enough into productive growth. We've collectively put far too much money into monopolies that squeeze larger percentages of money out of people and not enough money into innovation that improves the human environment. We need more of the original Google (i.e. the revolutionary search engine) and a lot less of the current Alphabet (i.e. the rentier advertising monopolist).

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#200

Post by jschwartzi »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #169
bserge wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the US isn't "producing" those lawyers. People choose to become lawyers because they think it's a good idea. And generally, the choice of education seems to lag behind what's actually in demand, even worldwide.

By giving the schools a blank check (via giving students a blank check as long as it’s spent on schools), the US government is effectively producing the lawyers. If there was no free money sloshing around, people would have to do a proper cash flow analysis and look at supply and demand before being able to invest their time in degrees that don’t have ROI. Same thing happened with pharmacy school, and now there’s ton…

The problem is that it's also not free money. The students who get their degree but can't use it have to pay the money back just the same as students who got the degree and get the high-paying entry level job.

So getting a degree is a gamble, because you either come out ahead or you get hobbled by it for the rest of your life. Whereas if you did indeed get free money to get a degree it would eliminate the hobble and produce a class of well-educated people who could afford to work for PD wages.

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