Elite Underproduction

> the professions he lists are "lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum.

True, people with zero-sum, "I want more!" attitudes might very well self-select for the listed lines of work, perhaps because of the greater potential payoffs and arguably-weaker checks and balances there. But at the risk of sounding defensive, zero-sumness really does depend greatly on individuals' attitudes: Lawyers can be useful in the same sense that cars' transmissions and oil pumps are useful; MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses; financiers can get people who have money to part with it voluntarily so that others can make use of it.

When I took a review course for the patent bar exam many years ago, Professor Irv Kayton told us forcefully that our job as patent attorneys was not to be scientists or engineers ourselves — we all had science- or engineering backgrounds — but instead to be the "noble servants" of those innovators in society.

> The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum

I disagree with you. From the article, those very professions existing would be explained by Elite Underproduction. It is an example of the system optimizing for all surplus to be competed away. Thus we have created an Elite which include the science and study of competing where only so many resources and only so much status is available.

If you read his argument, it is that we create an "elite" whose role is not to advance the frontier of understanding and achievement, but instead to capitalize on the currently available resources and status.

I think the part that is a little bit of a stretch, is that he's redefining "elite", he seems to say that "elite" should be a status held by those who innovate our capabilities of understanding and producing for all. And then he says, if you take "elite" to mean that, you'll see that we do not produce a lot of those, therefore we are "underproducing elites".

That said, I think generally people think of "elites" more as the "aristocracy", a.k.a, those who have entrenched themselves with social capital and status. With that definition, you can say we produce too many "elites", as in, too many people who are trained in trying to acquire a big slice of the social capital and status, and because there is a limited pool of that, these people fail to acquire a big chunk of it as they all compete for that limited resource. Thus the theory of "Elite overproduction".

So you see, it really just depends how you define "Elite".

But the main point of OPs' article is valid, our system does not reward or invest enough in trying to push our understanding and capabilities in order to advance all of humanity. And because of that, if you have the qualifications to try and do so, you instead choose to capitalize on maximizing your slice of the existing wealth by going into Quants for example, because the system pays well to do that, but doesn't for true research.

This is a good article and I disagree but in subtle and nuanced ways. For example, say that "overproduction of elites" did lead to the Civil War, well we can look to the FDR years and see that a progressive tax -- that successfully taxed the wealthiest at a rate that dissuaded concentration of wealth beyond a certain level -- actually helped: we made libraries and schools and public infrastructure in the US.

So while having too many "elites" (by which I assume "wealthy people" is meant), we have a storm brewing. Whether that storm rains daggers or flowers depends. More "elites" does not always result in more "political instability" or "declining living standards of the general population." Of course, this is often the case in almost every nation especially ones with concentrations of power AND concentrations of wealth.

A beautiful aspect of America is that power and wealth are not so tightly coupled as in other places. When the populous is educated and informed with quality information and ethics, we end up having power that is often at-odds with the aims of the wealthy who aim to preserve their wealth at the expense of the greater good, be it human education, or environmental protection and preservation, and matters of that ilk.

So while I do agree that "overproduction of elites" can be problematic, I do not agree that this is a uniquely American problem or issue. Rather, I contend that America, with our innovative and novel system (in the span of historical political apparati) is in the best position to combat this parasitical relationship the wealthiest of people can have on the majority of citizens. Other systems, such as communist systems or monarchical systems, are not as fortunate.

Also "money number go up" is -- as a sole motivator -- problematic. But this flippant verbiage dropped with much aplomb is not representative of the difficulties in merely surviving and having enough resources to do so. We, in this modern age, still indoctrinate our offspring and ourselves with a scarcity mindset, and while much of this brain power that goes from "physics to quants" would be better spent defeating scarcity, I find it peculiar that you did not offer up your own income or savings to fund such research and therefore offer to sustain those who are seeking sustenance through said career shift. Emblematic of the problem, I suppose.

> What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry?

We have zero idea how gravity works, how to predict the properties of vast stretches of new materials, if the island of stability is real, what the limits to know propulsion technologies are, what the limits to know fusion technologies are, et cetera. And I’m not even getting to batteries or biology or hosts of related fields.

it doesnt even need to be explainable. If a model comes up with an equation that reconciles quantum physics with gravity then we could try to reason how it came to it, but we don't need to. As long as the model described in the equation is understandable by humans it should be enough. However most ML models are black boxes that solve problems without generating models of the world (that we know of)

Physicists and mathematicians are uncomfortable with computer-generated proofs. I think they 'd be less uncomfortable with computer-generated theories because they can understand those