Turchin's prediction:
> “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”.
...overlooks something key: they didn't produce an a new elite, only "elitists," who never quite arrive. The resentment from people who became middle class after graduating from debt funded college is the result of how all that work didn't deliver on the promise of upper-middle security. The Gen-X cliche of baristas with masters degrees has simmered for a couple of decades, and it has metastisized into a deep loathing for the working people Gen-X grads haven't been able to differentiate themselves from, and hence the "burn it all down," attitude you see in a lot of them. The coders and general contractors who didn't go to university who out earn and out-succeed grads is a real cultural factor, and a big part of the U.S. red/blue divide.
If you look up Girard and "mimetic violence," you can get a useful framework with predictive power on the dynamic they're describing. The promise of college and debt was they would be elevated into an elite, but of course, they weren't, and now these smart-enough and educated people bitterly hate what they call the "trash" and neighbors they still too-closely resemble, and who the remaining elite confuses them with.
The political instability aspect of it in the article is that if you want to see who is setting fires in cities and throwing rocks at police, it's people with just enough security and social capital to get away with it, but not enough to meet their self image as legit members of the elites their educations allowed them to percieve.
Brainy? No. Promised something and told it was because they were brainy? Probably.