For a few months there every person and their mom was suddenly talking about elite over production. Elite over production was the hot new thing. This was unique in that it was quite a nifty social science concept that does not have connotations of being too boring and academic and seems kind of neat to consider. Because of this the reputational barrier to entry was lower, it feels like something anyone can just say stuff about and more then that it is not attached to much of a group. If you take a concept from psychology, economics, or sociology and dont know what it means and start ranting about it or dunking on it this has connotations towards the kind of group you are trying to possibly disrespect by saying their definition does not matter. When it comes to elite over production it comes from a very very small new obscure sub field that has styled itself as cultural evolution. Culutral evolution, who the heck is that? This means you can opine on it for free, it doesn’t have to mean anything at all socially you can just have opinions for fun.
I am usually of the mind to side with hobbyists over ““experts”” but in some cases a word is not just a word. Many times a word is just a placeholder for repeated iterations of a certain kind of thing mixed in with a certain flavor and connotation. You see people use it enough times and now you “get” the word. Other times a word actually has a set definition that matters. Certain academic concepts were invented, and had specific conditions in mind to mean very specific things. These preconditions are established so they can isolate when those conditions are in play and can discuss them and publish things about them. Yes on some level this is some kind of constructed arbitrary formality and there is some philosophy thing arguing all words are just words but we will not get into that and this is not the important direction for this post. I just mention this to say there exists category of social science concepts that are specific, agreed upon within their field, and intentional enough that if you don’t consider that and start discussing their work and define the word differently to talk past them you are not actually debunking whatever thing they claim. Yes, in some cases this is just a smokescreen and nonsense, but in some cases its just how you set ground rules so you can talk about ideas. I think we can agree both things happen.
Elite over production is very unfortunately positioned in light of all this. The concept basically takes the malthusian cycle and completes it. This is unfortunate because malthusianism is very loaded, charged, and the academic equilibrium we now inhabit sets as one of its foundations as being a backlash against malthusianism. The main problem with malthusianism as I see it is it was noticing a pattern the first time in human history the pattern no longer had to repeat, woops! Despite this many people at the time were not aware this was the first time in human history an ecological pattern no longer applied and they actually made a bunch of policy with the concept in mind. This also coincided with fabian society type things becoming ascendant and winning many cultural victories and the malthusians were run out of town intellectually a certain amount but the flavor of the lesson was because not helping poor people is evil and dumb and poor people could have been helped the whole time. The lesson was not the industrial revolution is good and helps us escape the malthusian cycle. In fact in their telling capitalism is evil and malthusianism is an example of it being so! On top of this the malthusian cycle was not exact and something was kind of missing from it, and people were annoying and continued to believe malthusianism and make policy on it anyway and were worried we would run out of food or make too many poor people. We never ran out of food, but we also slowed the growth of world population, but also the spread of norms that lead to lower fertility seems possibly stranger and unrelated to the attempts to spread it and what is intuitive about where it started and how it works.
All of that is to say the type of concept is very loaded, Peter Turchin is a trained ecologist and essentially solved the malthusian cycle by noticing one could apply the sensibility to a separate carrying capacity for elites. The idea is a binary of elite and non elite is simple for pre industrial revolution history, and by paying attention to this we get a full picture and fill in what the malthusian cycle was lacking. The malthusian cycle said people had children above replacement level and eventually over populated past the point food production was growing or not growing. This would lead to starvation, plague, and lots of the worst things in life and only after many people died off did the cycle continue again. However there is a near hundred or more year period where it doesnt seem to start up again and a bunch of other stuff happens. By paying attention to elites this seems to be explained. Elites extract rent off the poor, after the poor die off suddenly the elites have less rent to extract but they are producing above replacement just like anyone else, elites do not want to see their standard of living lower and have a monopoly on state violence. When you have too many elites they begin to have cycles of civil war because there aren’t enough resources for them to go around. After cycles of violence the elites are whittled down to a manageable level and then the cycle starts all over again. This concept and phase of the ecological process is what is meant by elite over production.
There are two problems with all this. One is this is an obviously useful general concept but after the industrial revolution it does not mean the same thing. The second problem is Peter Turchin handled this by lowering his standards and arguing it is basically still in play the exact same way to this day. A casual observer will see this and assume well he invented it! I guess it is the same! And not only is it the same, it is very dumb. I think Turchin might deserve this, but between you and me dear reader this is quite frustrating! Peter Turchin now defines it as anyone with 2 million dollars but also insists too many people getting college degrees is still a signal of elite over production like it was pre industrial revolution. This, obviously, does not make sense. He has basically just kind of arbitrarily re defined elite just so you can have something to plug in and eyeball and it is not about the specific cutoff but more that by using any measurement you can still notice things.
Personally, I think the concept of elite over production pre industrial revolution is basically exactly correct. It also makes you think about elites in an interesting way, and is a satisfying pattern for most of human history. Peter Turchin had very high rigorous standards in developing and employing this theory. They don’t get anymore rigorous in social science, its amazing! But in updating the theory to explain more recent history he lowered his standards while still using lots of metrics and data. This is a personal judgment. I also think that the concept of elite over production is still relevant, but is no longer something we can be as confident about or can see in the data beyond a shadow of doubt. If carrying capacity is no longer an issue for the poor regarding malthusianism this is one thing, but if they are no longer an issue for elites the ramifications are much more interesting.
People do not have a good handle on what being elite meant in the past. You could be a rich non elite Merchant, and a poor elite with useless title on pointless cottage that could not produce income. Elites had disdain for money making despite being the people with the most money. That having been said one could buy your way into the nobility, and many people did so, and nobility could have ventures on the side. Some people fell from the ranks or had their name die out, and others worked their way up over generations. During some periods of elite over production there could be explosion in minting of new nobility coinciding with there already being too many elites as it is. The takeaway however should not be the issue was that too many were being minted and it could be solved by refusing to mint more, the issue was the invisible bundle of things leading to demand being so much higher was the issue not the mechanism of minting itself. People have the mindset that elite just meant money but the difference is important.
If you think about modern times you can notice a similar pattern. People could have a high status low paying job and be the child of someone that made money but could be considered to advanced somehow. Tony Soprano made a lot of money, and then his daughter went and became a human rights lawyer. Tony Soprano might make backroom deals with local politicians and have a lot of power, but when he goes golfing with high powered lawyers and doctors they think hes some kind of joke culturally. His daughter might not make as much money but we understand as an audience what is going on here. Tony Soprano might meet all the intuitive definitions of being an elite, but ended up having to use all his money for his daughter to enter the lowest rung of becoming one. It can be expensive to buy into even the bottom rung, but we kind of get what it looks like.
If you take a kulak with a successful business and compare him to an intern making no money who is elite? The difference is if you compare all the pick up truck drivers the pick up truck might get more expensive and they might buy a boat, but they kind of mostly look like the same kind of person. And the lower end of kulak we all understand is not elite. If we take the person competing for internships making no money however and compare them with everyone similar, the lower end is making no money but has disdain for a lot of merchant money grubbing types of things while the higher end is crafting laws or lobbying governments. A pick up truck owner that succeeds becomes a millionaire, an intern that succeeds writes the laws of the land and controls acceptable discourse. Which is elite? A lot of people are very attached to the narrative the pick up truck drivers took over the levers of power as some reactionary pro feudalism force while the beleaguered academic or journalist or so on is just trying to fight for democracy. This is confused by the fact the status seeking elite legitimization process has taken on a kind of ponzi scheme format taking advantage of a certain amount of suckers within the framing of meritocracy rather then explicit titles and culture. No institution is more feudal in todays time then the university system. They have serfs, mint titles of nobility, and crush people under debt peonage all while relying on total delegation from the central authority. This institution is also dedicated to accusing pick up truck owning kulaks of being the same force as oligarchs and advancing as much leftism as they can muster. The oligarchs seem to mostly kiss their ass and beg them to let their children attend.
Before we had bosses and peasants in a majority agrarian society and it is quite trivial to denote who is elite and who is not. But now we have a primarily urban society. Denoting who is elite is more complicated. On top of that we are post industrial revolution. You can use the old model of feudalism and looks at who owns what, say its the billionaires and millionaires who employ everyone, and money is what makes elite. Everyone has a job, the people in charge of those are the new elite. This however is rhetorical slight of hand. Most elites of the past were the fifth son of someone with not even that much land. That was the majority of elite, not what we kind of naturally assume. Merchants could get very rich without ever entering the ranks of nobility. If there were too many elites in the past you would send the extra one to college to get a degree so he could get a job working for the king. What behaviors do people clinging on to the lower rung of the elite and those trying to enter or assimilate have in common?
How can we decide who is elite when compared to feudalism the market is unbounded, in theory even poor immigrants can start a business and hit it rich, and the feudal institution of universities are pawning suckers with watered down titles of nobility we all know don’t quite mean the same thing.? If elites before were around two percent of the population it does not make sense they could make up as much as thirty percent now. And it does not make sense to say if there are too many the issue is too many degrees when if anything there being too many would drive up the demand for degrees. Anecdotally I believe there is some kind of elite overproduction going on. This seems proven to me from the period of complaining about their being too many hipsters and the flavor of millennial complaints. Hipsters are basically the same as beatniks or whatever and there are many historical equivalents. It is basically a version of elite. There is however seemingly much much more of this version of elite now than in the past. Likewise when all the news sites were complaining about millennials it was because they noticed the quality of their interns lowered. The interns they were exposed to began to come from a different slice of demographic.
My intuition is that decades ago internships just mostly went to people who wanted to distinguish themselves via working harder. I think a certain amount of elite over production happened and now these people must compete with snobby spoiled clueless rich people, snobby spoiled rich people who can out compete them both in resume and capability in being floated for unpaid work. Now everyone’s intern or competing student seems more snobby spoiled and clueless, and clueless boomers assume this must be a milllenial thing. The problem is for some reason in the recent past the snobby spoiled rich children did not have to even bother to compete like this at all, but now they do. This seems scary to me.
That having been said we now live in a world with a questionable carrying capacity for an entirely cultural thing that can have an earning potential bonus but does not have to, that causes people to no longer be willing to do certain kinds of jobs without necessarily denoting joining the ranks of elite, and presumably competing for a limited number of status positions. The limit is no longer money, death, or ability to support children but entirely socially constructed status things and the creativity of a society to invent enough of them to go around. People are very very creative in differentiating themselves and creating new scenes that could satisfy the need for status, but some people are less creative then others. In some ecological sense there might be a hard limit on the number of positions or roles we all agree in some animal sense are generally high status not just locally or situationally high status. What happens when that pressure increases with no mechanism to decrease it? How do you control for escaping carrying capacity and becoming less violent inflation? How do you speak about something when there is no longer any for sure way to measure it as there was before, and where everyone disagrees on what it constitutes? The problem with elite over production is it is probably something that can still happen but it has become mostly psychological instead of material, and is no longer something we can beyond a shadow of doubt measure. It is some kind of pressure, but the way to prove or measure it is not order of magnitude as solid as pre industrial revolution. Nevertheless there will always exist such thing as elite, and the possibility of there being too many of them.
Frustration over elite over production
The modern cliched notion of “the elites” is effectively a strawman that aims to win over the hearts and minds of people by appealing to tropes better left in action movies. Hierarchy is a natural phenomenon - but the image of fighting against elites has become extremely romanticized and cartoonish to the point of no longer being about fighting injustices but rather now about combatting the mere thought of higher and lower classes. A class of nobility has existed de facto or de jure in every society that has manifested on the face of this earth. It is ridiculous to think that anything above the scale of perhaps a dozen (maybe even less) people could have any semblance of social flatness or homogeny without any notion of rank.
Admittedly, I get a bit lost in this piece – I probably am just not attuned to some discourse on twitter – but, I am not sure I buy that there are people decrying pick-up truck drivers as elites. Perhaps some references could help as a guide?
I do wholeheartedly agree with you that the university system – combined with the larger corporate employee system is a yoke placed around the necks of individuals and looks to strip them of individuation, volition, and dignity. You seem to be reaching at the fact that there are issues of scale here. And I don’t think this is disconnected from my first point.
Elites in the past came tied with certain societal duties; mostly protection of the land and people on the land. Later in the early stages of the industrial revolution in the West, elitism shifted from landed gentry to the merchant class a much more amorphous group not defined by birth or proper title – yet these people still provided a good – economic means and production in exchange for their own sacrifice – personal economic risk and their labor. As social elites, especially in American society, got more removed from direct social benefits and sacrifice via corporatism and the general corruption and collusion between large corp interests and the revolving door of government bureaucracy there naturally grew to be a disdain for elites. This disdain is ironically reaped upon by the establishment to put the mark of ham on individuals who are enemies to their interests by labelling them as elites. And as repugnant as it is that there exist a social class of prestige fully lacking skin in the game – we cannot allow that to blind us to the manner in which the term elite has been used to hoodwink people into a further deleterious and damaging ideology. It is okay to both hate the leeching corporate class and also decry the wanton use of “elite” slur.