for some time now, the West has been using a massive expansion of higher education to create a new class of functionaries—”knowledge-workers” and would-be managers—in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb. Yet, it is only just now that we are seeing, with clear eyes, that this class of people (which, again, nobody denies the existence of) might begin acting as a class.
Peter Turchin coined the phrase “elite over-production” to describe the volatile situation in which there are too many people with elite class markers relative to high-status positions in society. We “solve” this problem in the United States by putting these surplus elites into college administration and other meaningless non-profit positions. Otherwise, even more of them would end up as baristas, where they would at least be contributing positively to society.
One very uncharitable way to describe the result is that these surplus elites have some unfulfilled desires for power and status. They take these out on the rest of us in fits of woke rage.
Kyeyune puts the uncharitable interpretation this way:
The point of this “totalitarianism” is not to force everyone to think correct thoughts at the risk of getting fired; it is to get them fired. Full stop. Like the medieval guilds of old Europe, surplus managers are threatened by the existence of a mass of people willing to do any job within their ambit that cannot be comfortably accommodated without inviting the pauperization of their entire profession.
I recommend the whole essay.
I suppose it was just a matter of time until Critical Theory was taken up by its original targets as a tool to use against its original proponents. Still it seems jarring to see that done so nakedly in this essay without the slightest trace of conscious irony.
Everything in the analysis in this essay is explained by the structural institutions of power which must be correctly seen as engaged in a class struggle, certainly not a battle of ideas between individuals with a wide variety of different ideas. What greater victory could there be for Critical Theory than to have its foundational logic adopted and validated by its one time enemies.
And there is this:
>—“In an era of elite overproduction, the only realistic means of sustaining the unsustainable elite’s social status and standard of living is by increasing the exploitation of the rest of the population; demands, taxes, and tithes levied against the two-thirds of America that does not attend college by the one-third that does. And so more institutions will be built, more money will be transferred from the undeserving poor to their educated superiors.”
Remember a few minutes ago when the main conservative and libertarian complaint was that taxes were TOO progressive and that the bottom 47% was paying nothing? Never mind. There are new talking points now on the right. Meanwhile Biden claims he will somehow be able to pay for everything he is promising by only raising taxes on those with incomes ABOVE $400,000. And the thing we should conclude from all this is that the underclass is about to see big tax increases? Never mind. It’s really all about structural power. Don’t be distracted by the ideas used to justify that power.
I agree with you: Don’t be distracted by the ideas used to justify that power. It applies to everyone fighting for power. In particular, it applies to rotten and corrupt democrats that will say and do anything to justify their struggle.
But it’s not structural power. It’s simply the power of coercion, the one that politicians have always struggled to monopolize –either by violence or by promising to comply with rules that they will violate expediently.
>—-“I agree with you: Don’t be distracted by the ideas used to justify that power. It applies to everyone fighting for power.”
Yeah, I was being sarcastically derisive of the Critical Theories approach. But thank you for so quickly validating the point I was making. There is a right wing version of it that is a mirror image of the left wing version clearly visible in your own longing for a Pinochet figure for America.
>—“But it’s not structural power. It’s simply the power of coercion, the one that politicians have always struggled to monopolize –either by violence or by promising to comply with rules that they will violate expediently.”
This is a distinction without a difference. The whole point of Critical Theory is to maintain that structural power and the power of coercion are one and the same.
I assume I must denounce your own longing for rotten and corrupt democrats as leaders of your country. Indeed, your comments reflect your support for those democrats. I have met some of them long ago, including Hubert Humphrey and Robert McNamara, and I learned about the Party’s rot and corruption.
I met HH in the Fall of 1969 when he was teaching at U. Minnesota and I was a Ph.D. student. His course met close to one that I was attending and a few times I attended his classes. Yes, everything was about the Vietnam War, and he was questioned repeatedly on his “changing” position. I had known well a few Argentinian politicians and HH was not a match to them: he lied and he didn’t know how to do it.
In 1996, I met RMcN in Beijing during a meeting on the reform of China’s military-industrial complex. He had already written In Retrospect and visited Hanoi. He was visiting China “to learn” and “to apologize”, and someone invited him to that meeting in which I was going to discuss with the managers of some Chinese enterprises their reform plans. RMcN didn’t like that I was there only to listen and ask questions about the plans, and after the meeting, he was not happy because he had been used by the Chinese as if he were supporting the plans. He didn’t know anything about my work on China’s state enterprises but I had to listen to his great ideas that reflected his ignorance about what was going on in China. I challenged him to give me ideas about the Chinese military that could help me to assess the plans but he had nothing to say. I still wonder how many American lives were lost because of RMcN’s ignorance.
EB,
Yes, many live were indeed lost due to McNamara’s pernicious influence in promoting the Viet Nam War. Of course, at the time, the real opposition to his enthusiasm for escalating the war came from inside the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was unambiguously pro-war.
But what the hell does any of that have to do with Arnold’s post on today’s essay about over production of college educated “elite” managers?
Are you making any effort to keep track of which threads you re posting on in these rambling rants down memory lane?
Regarding the point about taxes, it’s always worth asking whether the person who says one thing (that the working class are being exploited by the woke) is the same person who says the other thing (that the working classes are in fact undertaxed relative to the rich). I’m sure many people say both things, of course. But they can still be half right. I think the latter story – that the wealthier strata are the most over-taxed – is the truer one, and in that case the more coherent claim would be that this woke administrative class is parasitizing off of the (generally also well off, often much better off) productive class. Of course this administrative class can exploit *both* poor people and rich people: the poor person who makes 40k a year doing a productive job and paying 20% in taxes and the rich person who makes 500k productively and pays 45% in taxes are both getting screwed over by the bureaucrat making 200k at a job actively causing harm and paying 35% in taxes. It’d be a mistake to conclude that the administrator must be less of a parasite than the productive poor person because the former pays a higher tax rate. If your job shouldn’t exist, the fact that you get paid to do it at all by the taxpayers makes one more of a parasite than *anyone* with a productive job – even someone who pays no tax at all, because productive jobs usually have at least some social surplus. Director’s law is relevant here.
But then it’s also true that there are plenty of parasitic jobs for the lower strata too (e.g., the janitors at the office buildings that house all the useless departments and whatnot), so it’s not clear that much of the working class isn’t riding the coattails of all these useless white collar jobs, and that’s no less concerning to me, but then I’m definitely more of a Randian elitist than a populist.
+1
Let’s take something simple. The higher your income, and more money your paying in taxes to fund something like education. So its certainly true that the rich subsidize the poor for education.
However, its also true that the education product provided by the state is of poor quality. I don’t mean that I reject the null hypothesis. I mean that if most people of all income levels could choose how to spend their education dollars they would probably provide a better service for their children. At a minimum something like safety and order within schools would be better provided for. It would also have knock off effects like de-coupling real estate from school districts which would probably drive down the cost of real estate.
So its possible to state that:
1) The rich pay way to much in taxes to subsidize the poor.
2) Those taxes rather then being provided to the poor as cash or vouchers come in the form of state subsidized services by the professional class, often of dubious value.
So its entirely possible for both classes to be “screwed” by the state. The issue is that since the poor don’t pay for the services provided to them they don’t seem to care much about the quality and are just happy to get something for free regardless of efficiency level (they would of course prefer better services but aren’t that motivated to change things).
So an alliance arises between the poor (who like free stuff, even of low quality) and the professional class that provides those services, and they fleece the productive class together (rich and middle class alike).
The Randian take is that the rich and middle class should actively rebel against such a system. She never came up with a plausible way this should be carried out (the plot of Atlas Shrugged might as well read “A Wizard Did It”).
As to what the unemployed professional class should do if they can no longer provide taxpayer funded bad products to the poor, I don’t know. Some of them could become engineers or entrepreneurs. But some would probably just need to take a hit to their standard of living and get real jobs that were less glamorous and lower paying. No wonder they don’t fight it.
>—“So its possible to state that:..”
Yes, it’s “possible to state” many things. I was commenting on what the essay actually DID state which is that the college educated should be understood as an entrenched class that is using its unearned and undeserved privilege to exploit the non-college educated class in what should be seen as a looming class war between those two groups.
There are many other ways to classify the world into groups. You prefer a system that classifies people as either productive or unproductive without regard to education. That has its appeal because it is always the other guy who is unproductive or surplus. Either way, that would be a different essay than the one in this post.
What happened to Arnold Kling? If you had read this 12 years ago, you would have thought it was ridiculous.
No, we have not reached the limits of human economic development.
The limit of economic development is not the problem. The problem is the over-production of those with useless credentials who have a belief they deserve a sinecure by virtue of birth or matriculation.
Britain used their colonial administration to take up the spare sons of the elite. Germany had a youth movement very like what we are seeing (Mises’ ‘Bureaucracy’) in the years before the Great War. And it was the Great War that cleaned out a lot of the over-production in Europe. So much so, that the “elite” of Britain were slow to show up to defend the realm in the 1930s and the Middle Class earned their rights by staving off disaster in the Battle of Britain. The German youth movement that survived the trenches went on to become the loyal administrators for Hitler,->Stalin and founders of the East German Stasi.
The US until the 1970s was a land of opportunity, but the over-production in the 1960s, built up the bureaucracy that stifles innovation now. The computer/high tech of the ’80s and ’90s innovation was possible because it didn’t need permission like if you wanted to innovate in the physical world where the regulators lay in wait. This innovation/pioneer spirit gave a path to those who wanted to succeed. But now, success is calculated on having a place in the bureaucracy or as “intelligensia” chatters.
I’ve thought for a while what we are experiencing is a war in the intellectual “class” with former gatekeepers finding their sinecures in media, academia, etc., no longer safe. The social media censorship is as much about suppressing the competition more than it is about suppressing ideas.
The problem isn’t producing too many highly educated elites, the problem is that those educated elites often compete for money, status, power through the government in ways that are negative.
At a broad level, we want more productivity and innovation. This means more high skilled elites; not more baristas and waiters and kindergarten teachers and fruit pickers. In that sense, I’m pro-elite and anti-populist. I’m populist in the sense that many elites and elite institutions have enormous amounts of government power that they simply don’t deserve.
At a broad level, we want more productivity and innovation.
Certainly. But just as the economy is not a GDP factory, colleges are not “productivity and innovation” factories. Often, rather the opposite.
I see colleges + universities as contributing both positives and negatives to society. A lot of innovation comes from universities. Even critics will admit that STEM skills are very important. Everyone agrees that reforms are needed, but it’s complicated 🙂
I agree with the second paragraph, but wrt the first paragraph, I think the problem is we’re producing too many of the wrong kinds of elites. We want more Elon Musks and Steve Jobs, but instead we’re running three shifts a day at the factory, 24 hours a day, pumping out Paul Krugmans, Ibram Kendis, Andrea Dworkins, and other New Real Peer Review bloviation machines.
I associate Tesla and Apple with productive win-win activity and Ibram X Kendi with a predatory destructive win-lose activity.
If Ibram X Kendi did productive work, he’d be a great, nice guy. If Elon Musk did more predatory activity like what Ibram X Kendi does, he’d be a terrible person. Society generally can’t produce different people, but it can encourage productive win-win activity and restrict the ability to engage in destructive win-lose activity.
Fair enough.
The over-production of the economically-useless credentialed has hit the problem that the jobs they use to fill to learn to become useful after their “college experience” are now replaced by automation.
Colleges have been slow to adapt to turning out students who aren’t just copies of the professors, but have skills to go beyond their curriculum. More and more non-STEM programs don’t even try to teach students to order their thoughts and solve problems.
This is a very good observation:
–Econtalk podcast with economist Ed Leamer, April 13, 2020
Another quote from the linked article:
“It is one thing to debunk the “Marxism” of the surplus managers, but another thing entirely to strike against the structures of their guild privilege, dismantle their networks of patronage and access, and defund and marginalize their institutions and money pipelines.”
We know individuals maintain habits and the status quo against perceived threats and resist change despite evidence that indicates changes are needed. I think societies do the same. Since reading Scott Alexander’s exposition about increased education spending with little to show for it and David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” essay, I wonder if this teapot tempest we are currently experiencing with academia is simply a mostly unconscious reaction to an existential threat to defund and shrink their system. Another idea: A lot of us worked on farms in the 1920s. A lot of us worked in factories in the 1970s. A lot of us work in offices now. Where would credentialism flourish the most?
Does the quoted sentence above mean anything?
“surplus managers are threatened by the existence of a mass of people willing to do any job within their ambit that cannot be comfortably accommodated without inviting the pauperization of their entire profession.”
This guy Kyeyune writes like one of those worthless academics.
Funny you mentioned Graeber’s viral essay, as I thought of it too after reading this post: their “unfulfilled desires” pour out of it. After someone sent me that link earlier this year, I asked him if he thought it better if those people were unemployed altogether? Because after all, that is the alternative, as they presumably couldn’t find a non-BS job, so someone has pitied them and made up a BS job for them. I pointed out that rather than raging against having a BS paycheck, maybe they should be grateful to whoever made up that BS job for them. I don’t think that went over well.
For those who regard STEM as the exception, that is actually not the case: demand for US engineers like electrical/electronics engineers or mechanical engineers is down significantly over the last two decades. Anecdotally, I know of some who’re unemployed, had to move overseas, or shifted into sales as a result.
The country or institutions that get a handle on this problem of worthless education are going to do best in the coming century, but the common tendency right now is to deflect them into worthless bureaucracies instead.
That sentence means that middle management isn’t that hard, and if it was open to everyone who could do it the wages would drop to poverty-level. Therefore middle managers use credentialism to exclude the “unqualified”-yet-capable and maintain high wages.
I admit it could have been written better.
+1.
Thanks!
There is an assumption–that free competition will drive compensation to “poverty level” rather than to “marginal productivity”, which is a competing hypothesis and a standard hypothesis in price theory.
I thought the essay was interesting and provocative. Parts including insights from Sweden were especially good. There are parts that either I don’t follow or don’t like or don’t agree with.
A suggestion for a future post at the askblog: It would be nice at some point to discuss reading comprehension. Perhaps Prof. Arnold Kling could have a thread about the social phenomenon of arguments online in which it’s hard to add value because a substantial percentage of commenters don’t understand the initial post.
I’m guilty of not sticking to the point myself.
Thanks for coming out to play!
There is an assumption–that free competition will drive compensation to “poverty level” rather than to “marginal productivity”
These are not mutually exclusive. The productivity of the marginal middle manager may be, and probably is, unable to sustain the costs of human life.
Happy holidays!
Was this essay satirical?
The baroque, hyper-academic language and discursive thought process seemed by themselves to be a mockery of the chattering elite classes the author allegedly sets out to denigrate.
It is far too long to have found a place in Orwell’s “Politics of the English Language,” but it’s of the same piece as Orwell’s examples of the slovenliness of language.
We all behold with envious eyes
Our equal rais’d above our size.
Who would not at a crowded show
Stand high himself, keep others low?
I love my friend as well as you
But would not have him stop my view.
Then let him have the higher post:
I ask but for an inch at most.
-Jonathan Swift
+1
Spot on! The poetry you add, edgar, often has a “same as it ever was” perspective that helps provide a bit of zen-like detachment.
The point of education isn’t to use it in a tournament fashion; the point is to shorten timelines on behalf of the potentially-employed and employers.
Where it once would have simply provided some measure of skills and aptitude gating, and practitioners would have actually developed a craft over a span of years after graduation, now it’s replaced this “journeyman” phase. This works all along the spectrum of employment. People get one wrenching transition – graduation – and the rest is just empty careerist motion, with the odd exception where real progress is stumbled upon.
Shelby Singleton produced “Harper Valley PTA”. He left employment as an an engineer with Remington-Rand because his prospects improved there only when somebody literally died. See hsi thing with Joe Chambers on YouTube.
Again – this is now broadband. You can’t just point to the academy. It’s infected everything, even software. It’s galloping Mandarinism.
“…for some time now, the West has been using a massive expansion of higher education to create a new class of functionaries—”knowledge-workers” and would-be managers—in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb.”
The irony of the above passage is that it is largely a *market driven* outcome. No autocrat, benign dictator, monopsonist or monopolist forces the market to create this “over-supply” of knowledge workers. So in what sense is the number of knowledge workers in surplus? A simpler explanation is that knowledge and learning are forms of consumption, perhaps conspicuous, and a type of consumption that the government subsidizes through low-interest student loans, below-cost tuition rates and other mechanisms. But that is what voters have demanded of government rather than the other way around.