I've previously discussed Peter Turchin's research and conclusions as to causes of civil war including his assertion of elite overproduction as one of the key factors underlying civil war. So I found this piece by Jared Gould to be interesting: "Degrees of Discontent: How Higher Education Created a Downwardly Mobile Elite." Gould explains:
In February 2010, evolutionary biologist and complexity
scientist Peter Turchin published an essay in Nature arguing that the
United States and Western Europe were headed toward a period of political instability.
He
pointed to widening inequality, stagnant wages, exploding public debt,
and an overproduction of college graduates with advanced degrees.
These trends, Turchin argued, had historically preceded periods of political turmoil.
As academics often do, many challenged his theory of history and questioned his methods; the New Statesman ran a piece in June 2023 dismissing Turchin’s prophecies as “empty.”
But Nate Silver’s recent essay, “The DSA Sweet Spot: Highly Educated, Downwardly Mobile,” brings renewed attention to Turchin’s warning about college graduate overproduction, or elite overproduction: the idea that societies become unstable when they produce more highly credentialed elites than there are elite positions for them to occupy.
Silver finds that the most reliably Democratic voting bloc in America consists of voters with postgraduate degrees earning between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. He notes that this is “very much also the sweet spot for the DSA” (Democratic Socialists of America).
[snip]
The [DSA]’s own membership survey, Silver notes, found that 80 percent of members age 25 or older hold at least a bachelor’s degree, while 45 percent report household incomes below $60,000—a modest income almost anywhere in the country and an especially difficult one to live on in high-cost metropolitan areas.
Those attracted to the DSA appear to be people whose credentials are misaligned with their economic outcomes. Its members are disproportionately rich in credentials yet occupy positions that fall short of the status and financial success their credentials were expected to deliver.
You can read Silver’s essay and make your own inferences, but what I infer from the data is that Turchin was right.
Rather than producing a prosperous professional class, American higher education has produced more graduates with elite aspirations than the economy has elite careers to offer. The result is a growing class of frustrated members of an overproduced elite.
And the reason we have such an oversaturation of such graduates is their desire to move beyond low status and low paying blue-collar jobs--jobs that are low paying because of another factor behind civil wars: the wealth pump. Specifically, the importation of large numbers of foreign workers and exporting of higher paying manufacturing jobs in order to drive down wages. And now, with the H1B program, the same is occurring to white collar workers and professionals.
