I associate this phrase with losers and people trying to sabotage the US. You know who is not wringing their hands about “elite overproduction”? China, who are pumping out tons of smart and capable STEM PhDs, and have in a relatively short time caught up to and in some cases surpassed the US in production of scientific output and technology.
China itself has a PhD and academics glut: https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/19/china-has-too-man... Or maybe the Economist is "trying to sabotage China"?
Elite Overproduction
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Re: Elite Overproduction
#42I have largely gotten to idea that education never made elites. It was just signal most of time for someone who already belonged to elite class. From this people started to think that getting education would mean to become elite. But this was reality only for a few. And even with many of those it was questionable were they elites or only more skilled and more professional groups like say doctors and lawyers.
Re: Elite Overproduction
#43UI and design is weird. There's a saying in fashion "there's no new fashion, just cycled old ideas" and things have a trend cycle. UI have a similar trend, as we can see with IOS pattern update and icon update for Google: they're just new, but we can't really tell if it's "better". But UI designer still require busywork to justify their existence and salary, so we get new UIs now and then. Part of it just falls under the bullshit job category [1]
When we ponder upon this, it boggles down to the fact that it's notoriously hard to distinguish "value creation" vs "value extraction". If I invent a fridge and it become commercially available or cheap enough so that people previously not able to purchase it can buy it, it's fairly easy to see it as value being created. A duopoly diluting milk with water to increase the profit margin, a search engine monopoly intentionally worsening it's search engine so we have to search twice (=twice the use!), a white ware company implementing planned obsolescence but better UI, looks good on the profit and balance sheet but was value now created, or extracted?
Elite overproduction, though this scope, is not about some 1% but most "middle class and up" that doesn't really do anything meaningful (bullshit job, value extraction) in society but expects titles and yearly salary increase.
This is not an issue when a society genuinely have room to grow (value creation is ample) but when the growth is harder to come by, but new generation expectations haven't changed. Then more jobs are created to extract value, and the burden start to bubble up
Re: Elite Overproduction
#44In the Turchin model of societal collapse, discussing elite overproduction alone is not helpful at all. The model calls for 3 pillars: - elite overproduction and limited job opportunities - wealth pump and inequality - declining of popular wellbeing and growing resentment Thus, it only makes sense to consider elite overproduction within this framework.
Re: Elite Overproduction
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just wanted to jam in this conversation your dislike of DEI (which can be criticised but it’s not the subject). Elite overproduction is about everybody wanting to be basically managers and nobody wanting to be production workers. Except that without enough production workers it’s impossible to justify “elite” positions. College graduates took on huge debt only to realise they’re not needed. That’s how you get a c…
This is my model for Reddit. College educated individuals who are angry about their life, leading to a lot of well written posts about how everything is awful and everyone is evil.
Re: Elite Overproduction
#46A lot of does-not-follow suppositions are embedded in this. Nor does the article really seem to be talking about "elites", as career training is not some elite status.
During the period in question Canada saw outrageous levels of immigration. The highest population growth, in absolute numbers, in the developed world. It was incredibly destructive.
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/features/10000_brainiacs/
It was kind of the apogee of a problem that had grown for years, where Canada had leaned on low-cost, exploitable imported labour to avoid salary pressures, with that avoiding modernizing, automation, etc. With that massive immigration bulge we also moved to a housing-based economy where people no longer cared about normal avenues of entrepreneurial effort, but instead everyone became real estate speculators. Why start a business when you can just stand in line for some pre-con condos on the notion that you'll flip it at a big gain when complete. Or buy some dilapidated house and become a slumlord for a dozen international students.
It was perverse incentive, and has been a lost decade for the country.
Re: Elite Overproduction
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
China itself has a PhD and academics glut: https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/19/china-has-too-man... Or maybe the Economist is "trying to sabotage China"?
Yes, and they are currently cleaning our clock when it comes to global competition in science and technology.
They also have that Let it Rot problem so who knows
Re: Elite Overproduction
#48hello fans of professor jiang
My take: "Professor" Jiang is a CCP asset meant to destabilise the west. Change my mind.
His claim to fame is the one where he correctly predicts Trump's win and the current war with Iran, etc.
Addressing your question - he has hours of lectures exploring western culture - the greeks, christianity, rome, germany - the paints them in a really positive way from what I've seen so, if anything, he is indoctrinating people into western culture.
Re: Elite Overproduction
#49hello fans of professor jiang
My take: "Professor" Jiang is a CCP asset meant to destabilise the west. Change my mind.
investigative journalism, activism, historical game theory analysis. makes people smarter, and makes it harder for the elites to lie to their people.
your take gives me the same feelings i have about how we handle africa, asia and latin america. "We can't pay them fair wages and let them control their own resources, that would collapse our system", "sounds to me like our system is built on exploitation and oppression and deserves to collapse".
Re: Elite Overproduction
#50I've observed that when big waves of (labor) change washes over the working classes, it is met with "tough luck!" and some advice to seek a new profession, often starting again at the very bottom. But when this happens to the educated professional class, all hell breaks loose. The system has to change , because it is unthinkable for some professional with a master's degree to become a warehouse sorter. If AI really m…
After the Civil War we compensated slave owners. After the GFC we bailed out the banks. The government giving money to poor people is somehow a moral hazard yet the wealthy not only expect government handouts, they demand them.
Many in tech don't seem to realize that after 2 centuries of automation coming for only blue-collar jobs, AI will finally come for theirs. Jobs losses, depressed wages, unpaid extra work and constant layoff churn. The heady heights of the 2010s will seem like a fairy tale.
Except this time, unlike a century ago, there is no labor movement. It's been decimated. There is no effective pushback against further wealth concentration to like 100,000 people. The Jeff Bezoes of the world will demand even more government money so they can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion and things will get really bad until eventually we have a Russian or french type revolution.
Too many people think it's a big club when it isn't. As George Carlin said, you're not in it [3]. People actively advocate for their own worsening material conditions because they're deluded into thinking they'll be Jeff Bezos one day.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy