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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?

#231

Post by dragonwriter »

bleepblorp wrote: post #205
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…

I generally take the view that the SJW identity politics plague was born due to nominally left-leaning people striking it rich in SV and wanting some way to feel 'woke' without feeling guilty over all the money they've acquired. SJW identity politics is left politics made safe for the California startup equity/VC/IPO crowd because it pays utterly no attention to economic inequality at all.

> SJW identity politics is left politics made safe for the California startup equity/VC/IPO crowd because it pays utterly no attention to economic inequality at all.

The general shape of this critique of bourgeois identity politics is much older than either the phrase "identity politics" or Silicon Valley itself (its at least as old as divides within late-19th/early-20th century feminism between radical and bourgeois feminism.)

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

#232

Post by krisroadruck »

rwmurrayVT wrote: post #219
krisroadruck wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2M is not a starter home. The national median home price is $230K. It's only that high because 4-5 states are dragging it up. Keep in mind that is the median. There are homes that can be had for less. Nice homes. Buying a house in one of the most expensive markets in the entire nation (SF, NYC) as your first home is a choice, and perhaps not a particularly wise one. Where I live in, in Charlotte, NC a $1-2 million h…

That's quite a distance from city center.. Your costs go way up when you don't live spitting distance from S.C..

It's 17 miles of highway driving. 20-30 minutes from your garage to city center, with a whole lot of plenty to do between the 2 points as well.

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

#233

Post by a9h74j »

m000 wrote: post #19

Dangerous for whom?

An old trope, perhaps associated with Eric Hoffer, is that unrest stems not from absolute poverty, but disappointment relative to hopes. It can be people who are relatively better off, but let down, who threaten the more established elites.

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

#234

Post by ssalka »

simonh wrote: post #45
lwneal wrote: post #20

In Peter Turchin's book War and Peace and War [1], the term "elite overproduction" does not refer to an overproduction of smart people, education, or college degrees. Instead, it refers to an overproduction of nobility , individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work. For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nob…

I don't think that's right, Turchin himself pointed out the "overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The problem is the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite. If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of peo…

>Investors that don't work for wages don't strike me as a likely group to develop growing levels of resentment.

That's correct, but is not what is implied by "The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share". Those investors are analogous to the knights & nobles of the 1200s, who most likely will gladly support the existing system because they benefit greatly from it.

What is implied is that people _who train to be investors but cannot find work investing_ will be more likely to develop growing levels of resentment. They are in the same boat as the extra 25000 lawyers per year.

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

#235

Post by imtringued »

jschwartzi wrote: post #200
lotsofpulp wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

It's a gamble that the government offers to you even when it knows you can't meaningfully pay the loan back.

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

#236

Post by moosey »

xenocratus wrote: post #101
moosey wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid. Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their…

> There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid. But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of ever…

> But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone?

Yeah, essentially. We need so few people dedicated to this line of work because of the wonderful scientific, technological and logistic discoveries of the past century. The fact that we have people that starve today is a failure of culture and politics and nothing more. With such a rich soil in which to build an advanced society, the fact that we haven't produced the creativity to produce a more advanced society is not exactly alarming. It says more about the human mind and condition than anything else.

Uhm, we already do all of that stuff that you mentioned with a tiny subset of the population working on all of it, hence the concept of a 'service' economy. We could replace 'service' with any number of alternative concepts that could advance humanity far more significantly.

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

#237

Post by jahaja »

pksebben wrote: post #228
jahaja wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that would just make it somewhat more expensive to build. The problem is that the supply is always kept insufficient. If, for example, the government would build good quality housing according to need, the housing market would implode. To build according to need was the default in here in Sweden before ~1990.

Making it more expensive translates to a lack of supply - the government has far more limited resources than huge real estate development firms. The pipes thing is just an example. Of course, this is one of a great many factors that make it nigh-impossible to get affordable government housing built. Not the least of which is the actual expense of land vs. cash-strapped local governments (who are broke because our tax…

Sorry but to imagine that labour costs and unions are somehow responsible for the housing shortage is just a strange distraction. We had labour unions in Sweden with good working conditions & benefits etc etc all along that period. The goal to inflate the price of housing is the main issue.

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

#238

Post by raziel2701 »

krisroadruck wrote: post #168
TuringNYC wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I studies CS back in the 80s and back then every student I knew was genuinely interested in the subject and motivated to learn. In my last job at a bank I regularly interviewed recent CS graduates and candidates able to demonstrate a genuine passion for the subject were few and far between. You are comparing college students from the 1980s to those from 20xx. I'll tell you what is on the mind of the new students:…

$2M is not a starter home. The national median home price is $230K. It's only that high because 4-5 states are dragging it up. Keep in mind that is the median. There are homes that can be had for less. Nice homes. Buying a house in one of the most expensive markets in the entire nation (SF, NYC) as your first home is a choice, and perhaps not a particularly wise one. Where I live in, in Charlotte, NC a $1-2 million h…

His point still stands though, we are doing things to maximize money because we are hugely indebted from students loans, rent, and medical bills. Scott Galloway mentioned in a podcast how he went to business school and paid $1000 in tuition and got a job after graduation that paid $100k. That's a 100:1 ratio that you can't find today. Today that same business school charges $70k and you get a job that pays $140k, that's a 2:1 ratio.

He also talked about how he was able to buy into amazon stocks when it was $60. If you are just starting your career you're jumping into a world where everything is at an all time high, that includes housing as well, every decent asset is currently at an all time high and we know that there's no room for us.

So we're left out of the big party, and we're scrunching to try to survive as we cope with our depression and anxiety about what an insecure future we have with climate change looming in the distance. Yes, take a job for the money. It's the only chance you have.

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

#239

Post by rmah »

centimeter wrote: post #222
lwneal wrote: post #20

In Peter Turchin's book War and Peace and War [1], the term "elite overproduction" does not refer to an overproduction of smart people, education, or college degrees. Instead, it refers to an overproduction of nobility , individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work. For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nob…

Investors already did the work for those wages - you just don’t intuitively understand deferred consumption. The closest thing to French nobility we have today is probably people with government sinecures.

If having ancestors that ran the violent gangs that terrorized, plundered and murdered their way into a protection racket over the locals is "work", then sure.

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

#240

Post by joe_biden123 »

elindbe2 wrote: post #164
lwneal wrote: post #20

In Peter Turchin's book War and Peace and War [1], the term "elite overproduction" does not refer to an overproduction of smart people, education, or college degrees. Instead, it refers to an overproduction of nobility , individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work. For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nob…

"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.

the beauty of turchin's equations is that they seem to be universal. what elites are doesn't depend much on details, except that they are possible to exist because there is a surplus produced by the peasants, slaves or in the modern era, supermarket workers or 3rd worlders. today's elites are those who were able to work from home while being served by those people essentially.
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