Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

- In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility

- A person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.

- Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do.

- You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites

- Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners.

- If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels.

* it's a summary of main points of the article, if you cared to read it, downvoters

It's interesting to think about how covid interacts with this theory. Turchin suggests three major conditions that contribute to decline:

1. Overproduction of aspiring elites

2. Decline of living standards

3. Explosion of public debt

The pandemic could accelerate 2 and 3 in many parts of the world: governments are spending huge amounts of public money to cushion the economic blow, but they are unlikely to do so completely and it could take years for living standards to recover.

To further clarify, from his blog

“elites are simply a small segment of the society who concentrate social power in their hands”

and

“social power [is the] ability to influence other people’s behavior”

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/who-are-the-elites/

So we aren’t producing jobs for influencers fast enough, acc’d to point 3. What is the smallest ratio of influencers/influences an economy can support? And for what size niche of interest? And how many niches? The grand YouTube experiment...

I’m a bit concerned point 3 means that critical thinking, as influencer kryptonite, is a jobs destruction program. Seems unfair...

The postEmpire UK is a bit of a counterexample to point 6.

Point 5 is a little thesis/antithesis-ish without the synthesis.

Thank you for the succinct summary. You might be interested in one theory on why Elizabeth Warren was so popular: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...

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