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Article mixes "elites" and real elites. The mere usage of the term employment is a dead giveaway, among other issues. Real elites are not employed by someone as a general rule, with some exceptions of course. Article would be more aptly named "Overproduction of qualified or overqualified workers".
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.
The massive shift in careers, not just due to LLMs but technology and society in general, threaten the promises given to prior generations. And this is also happening in China, see “tang ping” / “lying flat”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I associate this phrase with losers Completely separate from the substance of your point, this sort of language does not encourage constructive dialog, it frames the discussion in such a way that you are either going to get a. People who agree with you, resulting in you not learning anything b. People who are triggered into fighting with you, once again, resulting in you not learning anything c. People ignoring you…
Yeah, you are not wrong. The topic is a bit like troll bait for me. Probably because I have a first hand view of how the current strain of anti intellectualism and resulting policy in the US is destroying jobs and eroding competitive advantage. My observation is that this type of rhetoric tends to be produced and consumed by “elites”, and is often used to advocate for policy that limits socioeconomic mobility. The ir…
I've always taken the elite overproduction thing as an _analytical tool_ to help us make sense of why we have experienced the rise of an oppositional anti intellectual position in contemporary culture.
But you make the good point that it can also be a _weapon_, leveraged by those oppositional groups, to justify their oppositional position.
Perhaps this seeming tautology can be resolved with some systems thinking. Maybe there's some insight in the elite overproduction analysis, but that means that, as an argument for further polarising society it's a pretty effective tool. It's actually reinforcing the feedback loop! A fascinating example of a self fulfilling prophecy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities were just elite finishing schools. It's a status signal to be able to afford to spend 4 years of your youth not working, partying, and paying tuition to "study" subjects that have no economic value (studying practical things like medicine and law was not elite because it shows that you need to work for a living). This stopped being a status signal with the advent student loans because it removed the excl…
> Universities were just elite finishing schools. Quite some time ago, I read the claim on HN that in the USA, elite universities rather serve the purpose that - "rich/elite" kids, and - highly smart and ambitious kids get mixed together so that when they finish university, these groups become (mostly) indistinguishable. The reason why this a central purpose of elite universities is that these two groups need each ot…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with educated youth who understand the game is that if there’s no room for them to join the ruling class they become very angry. They will want to topple the elite so they can replace them.
> The problem with educated youth who understand the game is that if there’s no room for them to join the ruling class they become very angry. My experience/observation is that only few (university-)educated people really do understand the game. Only a subset of them actually make serious attempts to understand the rules of the game, and of those, most get to believe in often very dangerous falsehoods about what the…
I've discussed Elite Overproduction with some economists and the best way for me to conceptualize this in modern day is with software, UI/design specifically. UI 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 t…
> 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. When you think about it, it actually isn't even as obvious as you might think - which is the whole problem you are talking about. Another way to recast it is there is some theoretical optimum use of resources and it is unclear whet…
I'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…
There's a double-whammy here of the Myth of Meritocracy [1] under capitalism and Prosperity Gospel [2] under Protestantism. 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 automa…
I 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.
Universities were just elite finishing schools. It's a status signal to be able to afford to spend 4 years of your youth not working, partying, and paying tuition to "study" subjects that have no economic value (studying practical things like medicine and law was not elite because it shows that you need to work for a living). This stopped being a status signal with the advent student loans because it removed the excl…
For some reason people keep telling you that you will get a better education if you pay a ridiculous amount of money for it and even if it's not better and you can't figure out how to pay the student loan off, you should still go for it, because education is it's own goal, as if it was a consumer product.
This obviously doesn't make sense from an educational perspective. If education is good for you, why make it unaffordable and out of reach? You'd want education to be as cheap as possible so nobody gets left behind, but getting left behind seems to be the entire point behind these inflated tuition fees. Low cost colleges are supposedly inferior and not everyone gets to become "an educated well rounded individual".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with educated youth who understand the game is that if there’s no room for them to join the ruling class they become very angry. They will want to topple the elite so they can replace them.
> The problem with educated youth who understand the game is that if there’s no room for them to join the ruling class they become very angry. My experience/observation is that only few (university-)educated people really do understand the game. Only a subset of them actually make serious attempts to understand the rules of the game, and of those, most get to believe in often very dangerous falsehoods about what the…
What’s sophisticated are the layers of ideology and falsehood that made people believe that aristocracy was dead.
The thing is, these societies are as obsolete as their ruling classes, who view young people seeking culture with concern. What we need is to evolve our societies to ensure there's a place for culture, letting automation do its job to generate a new economy where we work less and live better, the exact opposite of the classic https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg
If only computerisation were done properly, for the benefit of the many rather than just a select few, we would roughly have a tenth of the consumption and time currently required to do almost anything, simply thanks to greater efficiency. This isn't the case because both the ruling classes and the masses are mentally incapable of understanding a society organised differently through TLC and IT. The few who do understand have, on average, found ways to profit handsomely from the ignorance of the majority, and the remaining handful who understand but aren't among the giants profiting from it are the "rebels" that the WEF "feared" back in 2016 http://web.archive.org/web/20161206153258/https://www.forbes... and they don't have much room to get anywhere.
In the first paragraph, I said "in theory" we have trained people, because training is largely obsolete, stuck in another era, with the bulk of universities, courses, and lecturers being even more reactionary than the average person. The reality is that people who actually know what they're doing are incredibly scarce compared to the past, precisely because of this general lack of evolution. This is a massive disaster because knowledge and intelligence are the only natural resources that grow with use and recede otherwise.
Today we truly need a great reset, as foreseen by the current élites, only of a different nature, because we need a different civilisation from the current one.
