You are reading a State of Dystopia post. These entries deal with current events that put us on the cyberpunk dystopia timeline. Read them now to see the future we’re going towards. Or read them in the future to figure out where things went wrong.
I recently exited five months of unemployment — by getting a part-time job from a former employer. It is the same position I resigned from two years ago, when I thought I was moving up in my career, and the pay is the same too despite inflation. I only went from unemployment to underemployment, so the job hunt continues.
How did I use my extra time? I attended four protests and blogged more about politics. I also became bitter about the success of my peers, particularly those with advanced degrees.
I became, in short, a typical member of the surplus elite.
This post is (actually) not about me. I’m just an immediate and useful anecdote. It’s about renegade historian Peter Turchin’s long scholarship on elite overproduction, and how it intersects with our current political economy.
Turchin is a pioneer in cliodynamics, a relatively new and niche discipline that seeks to transform history and sociology into harder sciences — fields with falsifiable theories and general principles.
Turchin is not a prophet, and the new academic field he leads will doubtless get things wrong, like any other. But it’s not just that Turchin’s work makes sense: he’s gotten some things right before anyone else did, and therefore we should at least consider his ideas seriously.
For example: in the conclusion of War and Peace and War, Turchin suggested that American intervention in the Middle East will “eventually generate a counter-response, possibly in the form of a new theocratic caliphate.” The book was published in 2005, meaning Turchin predicted ISIS years before the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan started to “go bad.”
Another example: in 2013, years before Trump was a factor in national politics, Peter Turchin predicted that US political upheaval would climax in the 2020s. The years of 2020-2021 saw the most political unrest in decades, so his assessment has already shown merit. Now we need to puzzle out whether that was the peak, or whether there’s more ahead.
A brief explanation of elite overproduction
In describing myself as a surplus ‘elite,’ I do not mean to imply that I was born wealthy or well-connected. I grew up in a downwardly-mobile, yet solidly middle-class, family. But I graduated from a preppy liberal arts college and work in the knowledge economy. Perhaps decades ago my position in society would’ve been secured by that alone, but no longer — because I am hardly unique. Hence the first part of the descriptor: surplus.
The elites as a group include a wide range of people, from those with four-year degrees to billionaires, and while wealth is the most common identifier of an elite, cultural influence and prestige count towards elite status as well. The form of elite overproduction varies between societies and time periods, but in the modern United States, it is most visible in the abundance of degree holders.
This grouping might sound overly broad, but as Turchin notes, nobility in feudal Europe ran a similarly wide gamut. In medieval England, for instance, the lowest nobles were about as wealthy as the best-off peasants. Nobles still only accounted for a few percentage points of the population, but then again, that was also true of degree holders decades ago.
Elite overproduction in the US has taken place at all levels, not just with four-year degree holders. The number of graduates from the most elite institutions has steadily piled up, and the number of people obtaining various advanced degrees has exploded. So has the number of millionaires and billionaires. And elite surpluses are arguably most destabilizing at those higher levels.
To keep things brief, I’m going to let Turchin explain himself here:
Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.
— Bloomberg (2013)
Per Turchin, here’s a concrete example:
From the mid-1970s to 2011, according to the American Bar Association, the number of lawyers tripled to 1.2 million from 400,000. Meanwhile, the population grew by only 45%. Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. recently estimated that twice as many law graduates pass the bar exam as there are job openings for them. In other words, every year U.S. law schools churn out about 25,000 “surplus” lawyers, many of whom are in debt. A large number of them go to law school with an ambition to enter politics someday.
Turchin has found elite overproduction and intra-elite competition to be a consistent factor in societal upheavals throughout world history. The cases range beyond the West, but for the sake of a particularly relevant example: in medieval England and France, the cost of a college degree rose dramatically in the decades preceding societal breakdowns.
At the University of Paris, it took eight years to earn a Doctorate degree in the thirteenth century. […] In the fourteenth century, it took 16 years to earn a Doctorate. The cost of education increased much faster than inflation in sixteenth-century France. Enrollments in Oxford and Cambridge peaked just before the Great Revolution, then declined during the eighteenth century.
— Peter Turchin, ‘War and Peace and War’ (Chp 13)
In the US, the wage premium for a four-year degree has stagnated for the last decade even as the cost of obtaining such degrees has risen dramatically. The chart below measures the average wage gap between college graduates and those who only graduated from high school. (Aside from showing stagnation in the wage premium, it also shows that degree holders still earn much more on average.)
Turchin theorizes that elite overproduction alone is not enough to destabilize a society. Intense wealth inequality, of the kind that reduces the quality of life for large tracts of the population, is the other key factor. A lot more matters, but in simple terms: disgruntled elites and desperate peasants make for a powerful combination.
Such a combination was markedly present in the lead-up to the US Civil War:
The America of the 1850s and the America of 2020, despite being very different countries, share a number of striking similarities. Between the 1820s and the 1860s, the relative wage, the share of economic output paid out as worker wages, declined by nearly 50 percent — just as it did in the past five decades. […] One clear sign of building social pressures was the incidence of urban riots.
— Turchin in End Times (2023).
A similar pattern holds for trends in life expectancy and average height (a proxy for standards of living): they stagnated or fell in the decades leading up to the US Civil War, and have also stagnated in the neoliberal era.
This is not to say that we are destined for civil war. Many more factors are at play and unforeseen circumstances (like a pandemic) can always change things. But the situation is certainly precarious.
What did America’s surplus elites do in the early 2020s?
They protested.
Data on who attended the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 is sadly limited, but what we have paints a generally consistent picture.
The Kaiser Family Foundation found in a 2020 poll that about 9% of respondents claimed to have recently attended a BLM protest. Of them:
73% of the respondents who recently attended a BLM protest had either graduated from college, were attending college, or had dropped out of college.
Another poll by Civis Analytics, which had a sample size of about 4,400 people and (like the KFF) found about 9% claimed to have attended a BLM protest, indicated that wealthier income groups were more likely to see protest participation. From the New York Times‘ description:
The age group with the largest share of protesters was people under 35 and the income group with the largest share of protesters was those earning more than $150,000. […] Half of those who said they protested said that this was their first time getting involved with a form of activism or demonstration.
A smaller survey of about 200 protestors in 3 major cities found that protesters were disproportionately white and well-educated:
The researchers who collected data last weekend found that the crowds were overwhelmingly young and well educated. More than three-quarters of those surveyed were under the age of 34, and 82% of white protesters had a college degree, while 67% of black protesters had one.
Other surveys only tracked age and race/ethnicity. But even then there may be a hint of elite presence: many have noted that the 2020 BLM protests featured a proportionately large number of white demonstrators, and as is common knowledge, white Americans tend to be wealthier and well-educated on average.
The demographics of the national protests contrast with the localized unrest that popularized the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014: the police shooting of Michael Brown sparked outrage in Ferguson, MO, a majority-black town with high rates of poverty.
But it was not only the left-leaning elites who inaugurated the politics of this decade. Just months after the biggest protest wave in American history, hundreds of conservatives made a different mark on history by storming the US capitol.
Researchers on political extremism, comparing 193 Jan. 6 arrestees to participants in other right-wing extremist incidents, had this to say:
A large majority of suspects in the Capitol riot have no connection to existing far-right militias, white-nationalist gangs, or other established violent organizations. […] Connections were far more common among the suspected right-wing extremists arrested after incidents of deadly violence from 2015 to 2020.
The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40% are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9% are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right-extremist suspects we studied, 61% were under 35, 25% were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations.
Researchers revisited the analysis as more were arrested, and after a year, found the trend largely held up:
We’ve now studied nearly 700 who have been arrested, and we’ve brought the study up to date as of early December. What we see is, over half of those who have been arrested are business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects.
(Note: The researchers found a lot more, including that rioters came from the counties with the largest relative declines in the white population and from areas that went blue in 2020. I’m skipping over that only to save space, but it’s an important finding in itself.)
Immediately after the riot, a Washington Post analysis of 125 riot defendants found 60% had prior money troubles, including 18% who had faced bankruptcy (twice the national rate) and a fifth that had nearly lost a home at one point.
Now, whether WaPo’s initial analysis still holds up remains to be seen. But either way, things seem clear: many (and maybe most) of the Jan. 6 rioters were disaffected elites.
This decade opened with two tumultuous events that could not appear more different. But in my view, they are fraternal twins all the same.
I am not equivocating the morality of their causes, just their place in social relations. I agree with the oft-mocked description of the 2020 protests as “mostly peaceful.” Because they actually were mostly peaceful. I align far more with the politics of the BLM movement (even if I have my quibbles with it). I generally reject the “both sides” cliches.
But the parallels are undeniable. They took place just months apart, in the midst of a pandemic and its concurrent economic crisis, and during an election cycle to boot. Both drew in the disaffected elites of their political camps, particularly those who hadn’t previously been much involved.
And crucially, each event is seen as a watershed moment by rival elite factions. Broadly speaking, conservative elites believe the 2020 protests were a demonstration of nationwide lawlessness. Left-wing elites believe that Jan. 6 was an attempted coup or insurrection. Both believe the rule of law was violently subverted — and the blame is not attributed solely to commoners, but to the leaders.
Whether either of those events is actually so serious is besides the point. What matters more is that these two camps now see their opposites as literally, physically threatening the integrity of the United States. That is a severe and oft-ignored escalation in an already polarized political environment.
Anyway, it shouldn’t be controversial to link the 2020 racial justice protests and the 2021 Capitol riot. Protests often come in waves. It’s been forgotten now, but 2019 was a time of massive protest for countless countries. (In many of them, college students or white-collar workers represented a sizable or even leading faction of demonstrators — such as in Hong Kong, Sudan, and Lebanon — but let’s put that extrapolation aside until I have more evidence.)
In 2019 it seemed odd to me that the protest wave never arrived in the US. It turns out it did; the pandemic just delayed it by a few months.
What will trigger the surplus elite next?
I don’t know. You can probably guess as well as I can. Here is an extreme simplification of a few things that may be worth watching:
Artificial intelligence
- If AI comes for white-collar jobs as many predict, we can probably expect more turbulence.
- If AI turns out to have a smaller impact on job security, including by potentially creating enough new jobs, things might cool down.
A recession and/or renewed inflation
Whether the US economy will enter a recession remains to be seen. Everyone expected one last year, but it didn’t quite materialize; few expect one now.
Economist Philip Pilkington believes the Houthi Red Sea blockade is creating a significant supply shock comparable to the start of the pandemic, which triggered the first round of the recent inflation. The blockade could elevate inflation and prompt more rate hikes, which the US economy may not be able to take, or so his argument goes.
On inflation itself: So far wages have risen along with it. Many people still took effective pay cuts, but it could’ve been worse. And importantly, wages rose most for the lowest-paying jobs, potentially defusing the other half of the surplus elites + poor commoner equation.
Above: the chart measures wage growth from the third quarter of 2019 to the third quarter of 2023, adjusted for inflation. Workers in the bottom 25th income percentile saw the greatest inflation-adjusted wage increase.
But that means real problems could start if this trend fails to hold up — if inflation returns without corresponding wage increases for higher earners. Or, if less credentialed workers fail to see further wage increases, they could find more common cause with disaffected elites, who’ve already seen relatively slow wage gains.
Multipolarity hits sooner than expected
That we have a multipolar world order is increasingly accepted, but no one quite knows what that means until the big events happen.
For Americans, major geopolitical shocks could come in the form of the US Dollar losing its status as the world’s reserve currency, or coming close to it.
Such a trend could result in US consumers paying more for imported goods. Sounds boring, but as US consumers have long enjoyed relatively cheap imports, a trend to the contrary would not only sting economically, but strike at the core of modern American culture.
Alternatively: if multipolarity results in more conflicts erupting, supply shocks of the kind caused by the Russo-Ukraine war could become the new normal.
The US mobilizes for war
It depends on the scale of the mobilization, which in turn depends on the hypothetical adversary.
A war against a regional power like Iran would likely be intensive, without producing the domestic ‘benefits’ of a total mobilization. A lot of public spending for another war in the Middle East would likely invoke more resentment among Americans than it would eagerness, especially if paired with the neglect of social spending.
In theory, a total-war mobilization — which would likely only come from a conflict with China, or possibly Russia — could produce a military Keynesianism, akin to how US military-industrial policy in World War II propelled economic growth and employment. A more contemporary example might be Russia: as it sustains a resource-intensive war and resists foreign sanctions, Russia’s manufacturing sector is expanding at the fastest rate in 18 years.
The problem with that theory is that the US today is far from the industrial powerhouse it once was.
On the note of industrial policy though…
The US successfully pursues industrial policy
The rise of China, and the supply chain shocks of the last four years, have renewed political appetite for rectifying some of the downsides of globalization. The Biden administration’s signature policies — the Inflation Reduction Act and infrastructure law — have been touted as enormous investments in infrastructure and climate change readiness. That’s on top of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan attempt to create a homegrown semiconductor industry to rival China’s.
The appearance of good blue-collar jobs could defuse part of the situation Turchin has outlined: even if elites remain discontent, the rest of the population may not be sufficiently moved to serious action.
There are many questions, all crucial. Even if one were to assume true the number of new jobs corporations say their new factories will create, it remains to be seen whether these new jobs will be good jobs. A few not-so-promising signs:
- Most of the new green jobs are being created in states with weak labor laws.
- Some of the new jobs aren’t great. In 2022, for example, the solar industry gained jobs — but they earn significantly less than fading fossil fuel jobs.
- The UAW’s historic strike against the Big Three US automakers was due in part to concerns that the shift to EVs would harm auto employment.
- TSMC, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, has struggled to get its new plant in Arizona operational because of disputes with unions. One of those issues: TSMC is trying to staff the plant with foreign workers.
So far, manufacturing jobs have barely increased, but investment in domestic manufacturing is indeed surging to an extent not seen in decades, and we’re still in the early days of that. Whether this will materialize into real output, whether the new plants will produce good jobs or just act as enormous corporate tax incentives, remains to be seen.
Above: The current surge in investment in manufacturing is mighty, but has a ways to go.
And there’s the question of time. Deindustrialization took decades. How long would re-industrialization take, if it even happens? And can a state re-industrialize after hollowing itself out?
It’s an important question that pertains to more than manufacturing. It is not clear to me that the state necessarily lacks the will to govern — it seems at times simply to lack the ability.
Frankly, it’s possible that none of the things above matter much to the question at hand. Hopefully the peak of instability is already behind us. But we are also dealing with a confluence of factors that have been building up for decades. With such issues unresolved even in 2024, it may well be that tension will simply continue to build up until some random thing reignites the fuse. We’ll see.