What is ‘elite overproduction’?
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
I teach university physics. Intro classes are easier and the exams in these classes are meant to test whether you have learnt physics, not uncover "gifted geniuses". Once you have shown interest in the early classes, you can decide to go into the more challenging classes, whether the classical "problem based" ones celebrated in this blog post, or the more recent "project based" ones which are just as challenging, just a different style of challenging. Which is good, we should encourage all types of genius, not only the masters of algebra. However, yes, we should avoid belittling the masters of algebra in these conversations as well, the same way we learnt to stop belittling "nerds" and "geeks".
For what is worth, the bad "problem based" classes that the author bemoans, have always existed.
Edit: A sibling comment explained that the Socrates quote I used is probably wrong. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
There are several approaches to exams and grading. Testing what the students have learned is a common one. In that approach, the highest grade is the expected one. You earn it if you have learned everything you are supposed to, or at least 90-95% of it. Lower grades are signs of failure.
In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.
One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.
In France you only need half of the points. When I was in college, you had to have at least a mean of 10/20 (we grade on 20 points), and have no course below 8/20. The best students were usually around 16, 17. The worst were around 5. Most of the students were between 10 and 12. I like that system because it gives a vast field to grade people, and most people can always improve. You can also compensate some courses with others, but only to a point.
Meh, if your goal is for students to learn from mistakes, you can give them those any time during semester. No reason to put them on test. The best students will try to crack them, in fact, will spend more time that test allows on them. The difficult questions, especially in math or computer science, may take multiple days and attempts to solve. Going through that frustration is definitely learning experience. Putting time hour limit on it during test just weakens it.
> Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.
In that point, it becomes in scope. Because "beyond scope" is infinite you have people guessing what "beyond scope" they should learn to gain it. The tests and exams should not be game.
Let it be know what are you going to test in advance.
In the second exam type, even a good student can't assume they can solve every problem within the time limit. They have to prioritize the problems based on how easy they expect them to be. The exam tests not only what the student has learned but also how well they understand what they can do and what they can't. The same can also apply to other types of assignments. For example, even a good student can't assume that they can solve every homework problem before the deadline.
The third grading approach is usually used for most important works. Under this scheme, the highest grades are reserved to those who do something exceptional. No matter what the expectations are, if you only meet them 100%, it's not sufficient for the highest grade.
As an example of the third approach, when I studied CS, our department gave the highest grade to only around 1 thesis in 100. There were no set criteria for the highest grade, except that the faculty had to agree that the work was beyond what one would expect from an excellent thesis. It was something not even a smart determined student could expect to gain, except by accident. Even the theses that got the highest grade were rather unexceptional in the grand scheme of things. Except the one that described an OS that runs on billions of devices today. That's the proper bar an undergraduate student should aim for if they want to guarantee the highest grade under this grading scheme.
This untrue implication. You can have difficult exercises that do require special insights with long solutions and still keep it within curriculum or "what you was expected to learn". What you cant do is to give them exercises that require one more chapter or invention of difficult to prove theorems that were not taught.
Sure we can learn some techniques and the way we approach things may let us tackle problems in a way that is more likely to work.
And yet I find it baffling that sometimes formal education wants a student to reach by themselves a conclusion that the brightest minds of mankind had a hard time getting there by themselves.
While spending a fraction of the time thinking about the problem, of course.
If you are meant to reproduce the way to the solution (having studied the method already), that's one thing. But if you are asking some student to come up with some bright idea that people spent years without being able to get it? Now that seems a little too much.
> In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.
On a more holistic level, the second approach seems better in some ways. Except for exceptionally talented students, it removes the ability to achieve "perfection," so good students would become a little more resilient because their exposure to failure.
the problem with this, in the US at least, is that the STEM people might do this, but then the social science and humanities departments were using the other grading scheme. It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.
(which again brings us back to the thread topic I guess, when graduating with latin honors was hard it was a good way to indicate likely entry into the elite. Now that many can achieve latin honors they are no longer good for entry into the elite, but people still expect them to be.
Grade inflation in a nutshell.
I've seen a system where they grade on a curve, A is 4.0. But there's A*, which still gives a 4.0 on the transcript, but denotes that a student (or a group) were statistically far enough from those who got an A that they deserved special recognition (ie, the threshold for an A is 85% but someone managed to score a 98%).
Education needs to take a step back and reexamine what knowledge and understanding means. Right now it's basically a factory for memorization.
Just about every exam I had at university involved solving/proving at least one novel problem that we'd never seen before. For example we might have seen the proof of a statement under certain conditions, but on the exam you where asked if it was also true for a slight different condition. That isn't something you could do just through memorizing the proofs you'd been shown in class.
Memorizing and 'regurgitating' would most of the time get you a passing grade, but never a top grade.
It worked pretty well
I still have stress nightmares about op amps though
First, pedantically speaking it's not a fallacy (as in "logical fallacy"). It's just a statement that can be right or wrong.
And this is regardless of whether it has been repeated "since the start of history". It could still:
(a) be always true (everytime it has been repeated)
(b) be always false (everytime it has been repeated)
(c) be sometimes true and sometimes true
There's no logical necessity that it has to be (b) just because it's a "standard complaint".
In fact, given what we know about periods of acme and decline, and also for periods of stability, it's obviously (c). Sometimes the complain is correct.
So, the question is whether in this case, for this period, it has been true or false -- not a facile dismissal with the non-argument that "people has been saying that since forever, so it must always be false".
It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over. Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true. For example, kids these days in the UK drink less than their parents did at that age, but they don't get any credit for it.
What's actually happening is likely sampling bias, where the person making the pronouncement is looking at a few bad apples as well as nostalgia biasing their recollection of their childhood.
On the contrary, that has been my interpretation of these signals since I first started hearing them.
All living things (cats, societies, lizards, civilizations) are born, have an adolescence of growth and development, then decay and die.
So there must be some brief period in the adolescence of a civilization where "kids these days" cannot be applied. Society is growing, developing and integrating.
After that brief period it may then, indeed, be possible for each successive generation to correctly identify and decry the decay of their (society/civilization).
It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand.
The OP considered this though, to quote: It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over.
uhm, didn't it?
Not really. It's totally logically consistent if things are going downhill with each successive generation. (In fact, it would still be consistent if different things were going downhill, Gen 2 worse on X compared to Gen 1, and Gen 3 worse on Y compared to Gen 2, and so on). Whether that's the case it's another matter.
>It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it.
Exactly.
>But I doubt it.
I wouldn't be so sure.
Note also that since there are no permanent eternal standards standing outside of history, each generation only has to be worse by the standards of its previous generation, for the accusation to be true...
Illegal narcotics would like a word.
There is absolutely no contradiction, because in fact they are complaining about different things. Sometimes they are complaining about kids being more violent then they used to be. Other times they are complaining about kids being more rude, more passive, more drinking. Then they complain about kids dont more sport, less sport, reading too much, not reading enough.
If you abstract it away to "kids are bad", then yes, it sounds as if the complain was constantly the same. But that abstraction is manipulative.
> Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true.
I have in fact said that multiple times. The "no one ever says" part is not true either.
Yes, people are more likely to comment on negatives that affect them then on positives. That is true about literally anything, including software updates. And that still does not imply that every complain about bad software update should be shut down.
If ancient Mesopotamians were the pinnacle of civilisation, and we were degrading for a hundred generations, we ought to be living in caves by now. It would be measurable in wealth, IQ, rates of murder, crime, literacy, etc.
Every statistics avaliable indicates that we used to be more ignorant, more violent and less literate. So this complain belong in the same box as:
"back when I was young we used to talk to school 12 miles, through a blizzard, uphill, both ways!"
* technology accretes even if the quality of the average worker is declining across time. Thus tomorrow will still be better than today, at least from the point of view of things like technical advancement, regardless of what is happening within each person.
* population increases, so the smartest can still be smarter even if the average is declining
* Even if population is not increasing, improvements in communication and replication technology can mean that an increasingly smaller share of the brightest people anywhere in the world can design products that are replicated or simply assembled by masses of others, whereas in the past this required local designers. Think of how many people are truly needed to keep advances in jet engines happening. You have basically three companies that supply all the engines to the entire world.
* And one can even make up for the other -- e.g. in previous times all shoes were handcrafted, now they are mass produced. Thus a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period.
Now I'm not saying I necessarily buy the decline thesis. It's an intriguing thesis, basically that you can be pretty dumb and still thrive well enough to keep reproducing whereas in hunter gatherer societies you would have starved to death and so the population would on average be smarter due to the challenges they had to overcome. Maybe this is true, maybe it's not, but the objection that knowledge accretes does nothing to prove or disprove this hypothesis.
I cannot fathom how you possibly write this - surely you cannot be claiming that dumber and dumber workers develop better and better technology, or technology is some independent quantity that develops without human intervention, like a divine gift of some sort?
"a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period."
The last bloke operating the machine doesn't produce anything on his own, you have to compare the whole value chain, including the folks making the leather, making the tools and machines, etc. I am sure the old process includes plenty of people doing unskilled groundwork, although I would not bet my house on which way the dice would fall
That doesn't follow.
Civilization != technology.
And those previous generations weren't lamenting "kids these days have less technology than us", but "kids these days are worse in X, Y, Z" regarding ways of living.
Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?
The complaint itself is always there (absolutely always), and should be dismissed every time because it carries no information at all. This does not technically make it a logical fallacy (ironically, most logical fallacies carry more useful information), just a useless waste of time.
Of course meant "and sometimes false".
Having a grading philosophy that boils down to pass/fail A-F distributions is great from the perspective that there are students who paid for a class and the professor ensured that they had acceptable knowledge by the end of the course. The wide grade distributions tended to be hated by most students, but the few folks who scored well could make up for bad homeworks etc.
Now the curious thing about these two grading approaches is that I always recall the material of the classes with wide grade distributions with more fidelity than those graded on 100% or bust curves (which is saying something after 11 years). In hindsight I believe the "harder" problems sets lead to deeper learning as once could always see what the next skill progression was and incentivized taking risks on spending an extra few hours studying or working a problem to try and get a better score. I also wasn't afraid of coming up with a wrong answer through brave effort vs. looking for a pre-baked solution.
The Featured Article's core claim is that by adopting the 100% or bust style of grading that students optimize to avoid errors. This strongly incentivizes students to crib off of each others work, past homeworks, and other online sources to ensure that they've identified a truly correct answer. It also forces professors to keep problems closer to the book/lectures such that students are largely guaranteed success given some amount of student effort.
It could be that the older method of grading wasn't doing its job by selecting geniuses - but by incentivizing students to take risks. Is it that surprising that students who spent 16 years of school optimizing to avoid mistakes are extremely risk adverse?
Rationalism is almost by design going to be either different logic or a different position from what seems and feels like a good idea. That is why it gets its own word.
So while overt rationalists are often bad communicators, it is quite possible that what you are identifying is inherent in the message anyway. If the rationalists agree with common sense then there isn't much to talk about.
Plus it isn't rational to identify as a rationalist, so the really good rationalists are hard to spot.
Depends whether you're valuing broad acceptance or a tight-knit peer group of people who get you.
Though of course the real trick would be to have both, this can be hard in our omnisurveillance society. I just don't think it's a universal law that people who are easy to spot are bad at it. Certainly people who are bad at it are easy to spot.
That Scott guy is/was somewhat problematic, but recognizably smart. It’s one of maybe five people where I consciously notice someone’s intelligence.
The rest of that community is toxic and misguided, starting with the idea that emotions are somehow “bad’.
I cannot disprove that individual rationalists believe this, but to my knowledge it is not a community opinion.
The problem with emotions arises when you attach emotional valence to beliefs and conclusions, rather than outcomes.
Inasmuch as rationalists can be seen as down on emotions, it is because lots of people allow emotions to distort their thinking about reality. In other words, rather than having emotional preferences over outcomes, they have emotional preferences over beliefs and modes of reasoning. (That's why a core of rationalist technique (short [1] long [2]) is learning to emotionally tolerate the possibility of being mistaken.) This is indeed antithetical to rational thought, but it's hardly the only thing emotions are for.
There is nothing wrong with emotions. They just have no place in the process you use to arrive at beliefs about reality. In other words, rationality rejects the Pratchettian claim that you have to believe "the big [lies]: justice, mercy, duty." [3] Instead, it reframes those as evolved game-theoretic adaptations that are part of the iterated game you are playing with your peers, called "society." This places emotion in its proper context without invalidating it. Quite the opposite, it views emotion as a vital, useful part of human interaction and decisionmaking, rather than the generic default of "just part of what it means to be human".
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-gendlin
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/how-to-actually-change-your-mi...
To me, this leads to almost indistinguishable outcomes as the straw vulcan.
If that's a straw Vulcan, we have moved very far away from Mr. Spock.
Do the rationalists realize that this is fundamentally a metaphysical or even theological argument?
In other words, the idea is that in understanding the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing when we feel things - "get where it's coming from" - we can bring our emotions into harmony with our conscious beliefs, and either support our unconscious brain in its emotional reaction or reign it in where the evolutionary context is no longer valid.
(I'm not sure where you're coming from with "theological.")
I'm happy to continue living in California because emotionally: * I like the weather * I like living close to mountains and beaches and deserts * I like my house and I'm too lazy to move
Rationally I should take the 10% pay cut to go full remote and move to a suburb of Indianapolis.
If under your goals living in California is optimal, then it is rational to live in California.
The point of, for instance, EA is not that giving to homeless people in New York when there's starving children in Africa is a bad goal- it's that it's an inconsistent goal when one also professes that human lives have equal value. And when one wants to live by that tenet, then EA offers better routes to optimizing lives saved.
Ok, I'll bite. If it's the wrong emotions controlling you, what do you do then?
Please don't suggest any course of action that requires you to be in control.
Most people could get a college degree. It's mostly hard work. You don't need to be a genius. The few geniuses stay and do research, the normal people got out and apply what they learned to the world.
1970 or so it broke through, for reference.
> do you think we've all gotten that much smarter?
Yes but not in the way you imply. Having access to enough accurate information and being able to spend time efficiently to accumulate it, has catapulted large swathes of people into investing in a college education. These people who would have been stunted along the opportunity, genetic, and economic axes in the past. This is despite the horrendous increases, in costing, over the last 30 years (imo).
factors you're leaving out that i find much more persuasive -- low interest rates, federally guaranteed loans, credentialism/professional guild dynamics. a degree costs more and gets you less than it did in the past, but you're forced to get one to have most professional jobs. it's an obligate gatekeeping tax, the piece of paper that says you're allowed to be middle class.
The acquisition of degrees is just a form of specialization to avoid the effects of the current money system. The reason why large cities are so rich is that international investors prefer established cities. When parents put money into investments and their children follow that money out of their hometown into a large city. Considering how much we do to compensate the bad influences of our money system I seriously wonder when nations are going to change it. Probably in 2030.
The problem isn't "free market" or "capitalism" although the adherents of those ideas tend to love the existing money system. Of course there are also other non reproducible assets like land and patents but I feel like properly taxing land should be more than enough. Patents only slow down progress, they shouldn't make things worse.
There are two fundamental problems: 1. The velocity of money keeps going down. It's not circulating at all. Meaning fiat currency is becoming less and less a medium of exchange and instead turns into a store of value just like Bitcoin. 2. Positive interest only works with either a growing supply of money at constant velocity or an increase in velocity at fixed supply. Basically inflation via endless debt growth if there is no productivity growth or population growth.
Combine this with the rise in neoliberalism in politics which basically runs into the contradictions of money at every corner. Global trade? Causes deflation which lowers interest rates. Less regulation? Businesses become more efficient. More deflation. Austerity? More deflation. Union busting? Lower incomes mean more deflation. You see, at some point you have created more deflation than the money system can survive. What breaks isn't the economy, it's the people that end up breaking. To be fair to neoliberalism. If there wasn't this pesky zero lower bound on interest rates it could have worked.
I've read an article about the "negative impacts" of negative interest rates and it mentioned a complete subversion of the standard response regarding competition for interest rates. Countries will end up competing to have the lowest negative interest rate. Isn't that absurd? Countries like Zimbabwe, Greece or Turkey who are net borrowers would see negative interest rates that would pull their economy out of the gutter and yet it is considered a negative effect. It's actually weird how that article never mentioned inflation, as if it was dead for some reason.
Practical smarts has probably declined as a result.
I know the stereotype, but is there any evidence that “book smarts” and “street smarts” are mutually exclusive?
Is it possibly an artifact of an economy rewarding hyper-specialization?
I'm not sure if the whole book smart / street smart thing is a good example of what you're saying. Wouldn't that just be an example of people becoming well adapted to their environment (or in fact manipulating their environment)?
"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
Egypt has a huge overeducation problem.[1] For several decades, Egypt had a policy that anyone who got through college could get a government job. Then the oil ran out.
[1] https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-brie...
Turns out he had a doctorate and was a published researcher in his native country. However, when he moved to New Zealand, he found no work in his field. Part of this could be attributed to academia's perpetual lack of job openings, but I always wondered how much the locals' perception of this individual - as a non-white foreigner - and his attendant social status played into it.
Society seems to still have a severe problem with using talent effectively - whether that's elite experience or unskilled labor.
Which is fine. A lot of these foreign degrees are pretty unreliable.
Now that I think about it, I do wonder if this violates trade agreements (e.g. the successor to NAFTA)…
The issue is society producing an elite with a skill set that isn't needed.
If you structure society so that the kids of aristocrats are the only ones that have degrees in basketweaving, then you can say "to get this prestigious job you need a degree in basketweaving" and it all kind of works (for the aristocrats).
Non-aristocrats then do what they've been told will lead them into the elite, and at first a few might make it in. So it all seems to be working for everyone except those too ”stupid" (i.e. poor) to pay their way through 20 years of education in basketweaving. Meritocracy in action.
But as it progresses, and more and more people follow the path things go wrong. Not because there's a limit to the number of basketweaving professionals needed, but a limit to the number of people who can be elite in the society, and that piece of paper used to be the limiting factor (previously acting as a proxy for "are you already connected to the elite")
Am I talking about public policy? Or urban planning? Or law? Or computer science? Or--
You're sifting through sand to try to get the flakes of gold. There might not be a need for the grains of sand that are produced by the system, but without filling the system with them, you wouldn't have been able to extract the gold that's mixed in.
This is why elite overproduction occurs. Many of them may be perfectly competent individuals, but as long as employers are competing to hire only the best of the best, the system will have to massively overproduce to satisfy that demand.
If I've hired the best person in the world, and they're the best out of 100,000 candidates, then if someone else also wants to find the best person in the world, they'll need to be better than the current best person in the world. It may take 200,000 candidates to find that person. To keep finding someone better than the current best person in the world, you constantly need to increase the amount of sand.
To find the new best person in the world, you'll produce geniuses who are as good as the old best person in the world, but they're no longer good enough to be the NEW best person in the world.
So yes, we're overproducing on gold, but now we're looking for something even better than gold.
"People with Diplomas": We have many expensive diploma mills and some effective schools.
"Educated people who work in their field of study": This is an unnecessary constraint on talent and interest. Also, education does not equate to talent or interest.
"Rich People": We appear to have many, both conspicuous and inconspicuous. You're in the planetary top decile if you have healthcare, shelter, clean air, food, and water, and safety.
"Leaders": We have a system to generate simulacra that protect the corporate assets.
"Brilliant minds": Hard to produce by traditional means. We print diplomas instead.
Our society has enormous demand for clean energy, but it has completely failed to fund fusion research. We have spent more on lipstick and casinos.
So physics researchers can't get decent pay while the world is going to hell in a handbasket
Is there enormous "demand" for eg useless plastic garbage or non-nutritive fast food, or is that the choice-of-least-resistance offered to and taken by millions who lack the resources to consistently "choose" more "wisely", and lack the voice or knowledge to demand better choices? Or, why is food optimized for looks and uniformity rather than nutritive value?
Does "society" choose how to allocate resources, or are there a handful of insanely powerful people whose hands rest lightly on an incredible variety of policy levers that they'll never move for personal financial reasons? Or, why is Australia so intent on coal production?
In what world is this pathetic level of funding adequate, let alone heavy? Do you realise the cost of this reactor is roughly in the same ballpark with 'normal' nuclear reactors?
You claim there has been little progress, do you know that fusion has advanced faster than Moore's law?
Maybe it is worth the money to have a large international project involving most the large world powers (China, European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, United States), but like the international space station, there is not going to be a lot of cutting edge science going on there. Especially since it is taking so long to build.
On a brighter note, maybe in part due to the fact that ITER is such a boondoggle, there are now many small (and not so small) VC backed fusion projects being funding that are testing out a wide variety of fusion concepts. High temperature superconductors help and our understanding of how plasmas work and behave is still improving at a great clip. A carbon tax would really improve the economic case for developing fusion power (and fission power, while we are at it)
If society needs some serious phlogiston research because of existential threats, but refuses to fund phlogiston research, can you say phlogiston research is in high demand?
You don't actually know that. I can buy lipstic, and you can measure that in your statistics in X billions.
But I have also been "demanding" fusion for 15 years. I am prepared to soend real money on it, buy I can't buy a fusion, and you have no way of measuring my demand for fusion against my demand for lipstick. There is no 'fusion party' I could vote for either.
Also, the best way to suport green energy is to get a green energy provider rather than solar panels - its more efficient both in terms of physics and allocation of capital.
edit
And I should be crystal clear because finding opportunities to perform being offended is extremely popular these days: many of these people are actually brilliant and capable, the problem is the credentials do not provide a signal.
In this case, though, the gentleman was from Japan, which is hardly a "developing" country.
India, and China also provide much more opportunities for "natural selection" to weed out bad workers.
On other hand, the West has degree mills which will give one, and workplaces which will not test your abilities even to the minimum. And it will be the person's first serious job where the surprise will come.
Some workplaces, canonically software engineering, do test your abilities (I assume you mean in interviews?). There are plenty of logic games and practical tests. I agree most jobs don't do anything like this, and it's a shame.
An incredible boon for whomever was employing them. Having a person who can "debug" equipment problems on the line within minutes, or optimise seemingly innocuous, but critically important, and impactful small tidbits in the manufacturing process is priceless, and this is what makes the whole difference in between a failing manufacturing line, and one which runs well.
Honestly, a lot of foreign universities are... questionable to say the least.
It reveals the actual role of these positions in society. They are not based on demand for a service, rather they are privileged positions awarded through a hierarchical selection process. In return, we get university teachers, which is the de facto service to society.
Lots of people complain about the US’s visa sponsorship process. Basically a company has to offer a job.
Canada will give you permanent residency based on points. Whether or not a job exists.
Not saying one is better than the other - they both have pluses and minuses.
Of course, no licensing board/employer would ever hire them.
> as a non-white foreigner
What was his field of study, and where was he from? Some fields are more niche than others, and I think biases are (understandably) more specific than entirely skintone based.
No, I do not think so. Because it seems to me a lot of this talent is either 'self-described-talent' or grade-inflated talent'.
Some ways privileged people discriminate against unprivileged/unlucky people (e.g. when competing for a promotion or investment):
- "They are too negative, we need someone charismatic." (In fact, PersonX's exposure to wave after wave of bad luck has made them a critical thinker, a realist, which makes them perfect for the job).
- "I don't like PersonX. They can't build rapport with stakeholders." (Because PersonX's has had real problems in their lives, they cannot relate to the artificial problems which members of the elite class constantly create for themselves).
- "They lack confidence." (In reality, what they lack is overconfidence; they have the ideal level of confidence/doubt to navigate a cut-throat marketplace; overconfidence breeds neglect which can destroy the company).
- "They don't have a track record of success" (Because they were always overlooked and never given a first chance to prove themselves; as a result, they've spent decades optimizing themselves and fixing every tiny flaw and gap in their knowledge and personal character; they are highly optimized and perfect for the job).
There is an inversion of cause an effect in the minds of privileged people which makes them think that they need confident people. In fact, confidence is more a consequence of luck than it is of competence. Nobody likes overconfident people. When you have power, you don't need any confidence; the less, the better. Power earns respect and on its own, it is the best substitute for confidence.
And yes, I benefit from this sometimes.
It's quite crazy though because so many charismatic leaders have turned out to be frauds; e.g. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, Adam Newmann of WeWork, Trevor Milton of Nikola, and countless smaller examples which most of us have experienced personally in our own careers. On the other hand, many of us have seen or experienced the effectiveness of more modest critical thinkers in leadership roles. Jeff Bezos himself admitted that "[people who were right a lot of the time] were people who often changed their minds."
Confident people don't change their minds because, in most settings, it projects a lack of confidence.
I think the value of the personality traits you describe changes a lot with culture. For instance, I think the kind of confidence/charisma you're describing would go very poorly in Japan.
My intuition is that what you describe does happen, but it's a very small part of what's going on. I think that people who fall into this feedback loop are already psychologically predisposed, whereas there are plenty of people in the world who display this sort of confidence and charisma and came from nothing. My own internal model is 1st gen immigrants who run successful multi-store businesses.
It often happens in societies where hard work is looked down upon as something only poor people do. The result is that these 'elites' have nothing else to do but agitate politically.
I feel like people have a great need to succeed and further themselves in life. When they don't have an avenue to satisfy these needs through hard and useful work, they find other outlets. Often these other outlets that can be very detrimental to society as a whole.
I wish this was the only problem. I have been exposed to so many 'elites' (investors, diplomats, C-level executives) that are just plain stupid.
For some reason people assume they are very smart, perpetuating this myth.
Like Lisp programmers.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so...
What I found was that all the senior plus level people wanted to do was work on plans and reviews and architecture decisions and so on and so forth. We had a lot of "leadership" but very few people willing to actually put shovel to dirt so to speak. Our ultra-elite team was really unproductive.
I began to think of the senior people as something like salt. A meal may be best with a lot of food and a little salt. One or two high level people to plan for and guide a lot of lower ranking people who could actually do work. The second best configuration would be all food and no salt - people doing work without the high level insights and planning. The worst configuration, I discovered, was all salt and no food - just a ton of meetings, reviews, plans, and missed deadlines.
I'm connecting my experience with this blog post because it seems to me like the process of "becoming elite" causes the damage. Everyone on our software team was so busy trying to have cross team impact, show their leadership, come up with consequential architecture decisions, and the like - because all that stuff is what you need to be well regarded as a senior type person, that nobody wanted to do the more mundane tasks of actually implementing our plans. From the examples of the article it's like everyone is worried about the metrics they can control, like the academics publishing more and more papers in better journals, that they forget about actually discovering or documenting things.
To use the high variance language, maybe in the ur-company, when it was just starting, you could have done something big and consequential. If it was a success you'd get rewarded and become a senior or a principal or whatever. If it failed, even if it failed through no particular fault of your own, you wouldn't, or maybe you'd get fired. Nowadays, as the company has grown, there are fewer of those big risks and more people who want to be seniors and principals, so people take the low variance route - establishing that they are influential planners who wrote and reviewed a lot of stuff and so on, forgetting about the nominal goal of the company - shipping good products.
As a senior person in a big org, you are judge by your leadership efforts / cross team efforts, so this is what they tried to do.
I bet that if their goals were to write code, you would see them write code.
you don't automatically get more pay the more senior you become - you get more pay by increasing sales or products or customer retention etc, which increases equity value.
If everybody just plans and reviews, equity value will not grow.
Senior 2 will naturally come with more equity than Senior 1. The fastest way to increase your pay will be to be promoted from Senior 1 to Senior 2. You’re incentive will be to do whatever it takes to move from Senior 1 to Senior 2, which more often than not isn’t putting shovel to dirt.
Go to Levels.fyi, and look at how equity increases as you raise the ranks.
There are companies where no one from business side knows what is going on in development and they are not interested. They just pour money into dev and what they know it is only that "development is expensive and takes a lot of time".
I bet the goal was something like "just ship the system" which probably never happened or took a lot of time. Maybe even devs making their own requirements according to what they think is needed.
So I think you are too charitable with such interpretation that there were some goals or managers at all.
I suppose the 'thing' being prestigious to write is a differentiator, here. Put that team on AdWords with principal expectations for each of them and it's probably dysfunctional.
I wrote a golang WaitableBool struct for my team's code. I tried to submit it to the company's internal 'contrib' library, but golang-team rejected it. I pointed out that the company's C++ and Java versions of the struct were used in >150,000 places. Clearly there was demand and the Golang version would become widely-used. They argued that all Golang coders should always remember details of channel syntax and be happy to read five lines of boilerplate instead of "value.waitUntilTrue()".
I think their team was too senior. None of them were willing to add breadth to the standard library, despite massive code duplication within the company. They need a junior team member who can get promoted for growing and maintaining the standard library. We all need that.
[0] "Make website search case-insensitive" https://github.com/golang/go/issues/40217
[1] "Make search box remember what you typed" https://github.com/golang/go/issues/40218
[2] "show search box on smaller viewports" https://github.com/golang/go/issues/40220
My guess is that it can go either way and a significant part of it is having the right environment, the right management, probably some luck too.
Isn’t this the exact reason why Google has such a high rate of churn in its product lineup?
I've always wondered if this was true, or if it's an artifact of the survival of records/histories that over-promote governing coalition members instead of non-governing but wealthly and influential citizens.
I.e., most ruling autocratic dynasties are founded through violence, so it makes sense that official records reference individuals who took part in this. Similarly, most autocratic dynasties are sustained through peaceful transitions of power to the next generation of governing members through the acquiescence of coalition members, so it makes sense that - over time - official records will reference individuals who succeeded through their connections instead of their military merits.
If you assume that autocratic governments are unstable over long periods of time, and if you intentionally ignore the large number of ruling coalitions that came to power through war but failed to survive a peaceful transition of power, the author's perspective here makes sense. However, this doesn't mean that it's necessary accurate.
So it would be incorrect to say that General John Smith had high status simply because he was a General. Instead, John Smith's 'status' depended on whether or not he was a peer of other high-status individuals.
In other words, it was always a matter of 'who you know'. It's just that, as you pointed out, in the early stages of a new ruling regime or dynasty, being a General or holding a similar military position pretty much guaranteed that you had the 'right social connections'. This is true even if you gained those connections as a byproduct of your military rank.
This is likely true even in many or most modern states.
War tends to effectively flatten societal hierarchy. When a society is in trouble the best people for the job tend to rise to the top because results are what matter and when the alternative is bad enough people don't care that someone doesn't have the right pedigree if they have the necessary skills.
What does happen is that everyone worth a crap gets their career fast tracked. People go from machinist to plant operator or from junior officer to general in a year, etc, etc. People who would have been promoted because they know someone are passed over because when things are serious like in wartime people feel they cannot get away with forgoing more promising people for those kinds of people.
People who would have had to work a whole career to break between class levels can do it in a fraction of the time.
Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."
Despite record high college attendence, the college wage premium is fatter than ever, and unployment for grads is really low at just 2 percent, the baritista meme not withstanding.
The majority of grads major in actionable fields with good career prospects, not journalism or the humanities. Liberal elites who write highly publicized articles about matters pertaining to gender studies or politics are of the minority of majors. Most grads just want the requisite credentials for a middle class lifestyle, not to change the world or rise to the highest tiers of power.
The more accessible (and popular) college is, the bigger signal it is that someone didn't go. That premium could just as well be the result of the (relative) wage floor falling out for non-grads.
No comment on the greater thesis. Just noting that those two things might not relate.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/
It does feel like people like me are forgotten, ignored and dismissed by these cosmopolitan selective school elites.
That 98% number includes barista employment.
Policies and structures to allow people on the precipice access to funding required to take the leap and which attempt to keep the system stable by putting personal “skin in the game” find support with me.
Not long ago it was below 4% for all workers, how recent is that number?
Is this being said seriously? As someone that once aspired to be a historian this sounds like a massive oversimplification. But maybe this is a hyperbolic rethorical resource. It does sound Toynbeesque though, so maybe the author is taking this from Toynbee's work?
I feel like these examples/arguments/proofs need to be developed a lot more to be consistent, specially for an article hosted in a domain called "overcomingbias.com".
If the bulk of your tax bill comes from special capital gains rates on the fraction of your net-worth-increase that you are ignominiously forced to admit constitutes capital gains, you're an elite. If the bulk of your tax bill comes from a higher income tax tier, you're middle class. If the bulk of your tax bill comes from a lower income tax tier, you're correspondingly lower class.
Needless to say, the principle that taxes reveal true power does not lead me to agree with your premise that 60% of the middle class has disappeared into the upper class.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/squeezing-the-middle-clas...
> the main reason for the shrinking of the middle class (defined in absolute terms) is the increase in the number of people with higher incomes
The "elite overproduction" framework begs you to not view the middle class as a group of people who have achieved a balance where they do valuable work and are rewarded with nice things, but as a group of scheming do-nothings who pose a burden to society as they foolishly aspire to elite-hood and repeatedly fail. It's a laser-guided propaganda missile aimed directly at a fault line in populist movements that have been gaining steam recently.
Given that people like me have only ever participated in the economy during a time when the middle class was shrinking, what are we to do? Most of us agree, if our future is a world of a few 'haves' and many 'have nots', priority one is to become a 'have'. Even from the most moral stance imaginable, a 'have not' has no ability to help others. Hence, too many of us try to get into the elite. To aim for the middle class is to aim for grinding poverty, and why would anyone?
Maybe in some societies it's time to start working to break hierarchies and cease training people to operate within and climb them. It's time to redistribute the wealth, because if we don't the 'excess elites' will rationally hoard it -- leading to civil unrest and ultimately collapse.
I agree with with your perception of the problem. It makes good sense, and this framing could be used to guide reforms you might compare to antitrust law. Do you have anything in mind that could be done from a policy perspective? Because I don't think that asking people to turn inward for validation is going to work.
Let's say we find some policy that works and we can enact. I'm not sure that's enough to fix the problem. Just as policy encouraging a competitive market hasn't fixed the problem there, either. It will keep pooping up and finding new ways to subvert the policy.
I think that just as capital creates capital, hierarchy creates hierarchy. Whether it's human nature or the structure of our societies, the outcome appears always to be consolidation. If the efficiency gains of consolidation cannot counter the social/civil instability, and I don't think they can at a certain level of development, then we should tackle the root cause. But I'm repeating myself.
I appreciate your perspective, thank you for letting me see it.
Obviously, that is a slower thing to change than anything that could be done at a policy level, but I think it gets us towards the right metrics. On an optimistic note, I do think that organisations which make more use of all members' judgement have advantages over those who concentrate decision making - here's a general making that same point in a military context [2]. As for where the points of maximum leverage might be to achieve that kind of change... I'd certainly be interested in any suggestions!
[1] https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7B5pFSq7XA
There is already a degree of randomness inherent, since for example students don't all study all the material with exactly the same level of attention to each individual part of material. And some will be tired the day of the exams. Some will have something else on their mind while studying due to their relative being in the hospital. Some will by chance happen to guess right on some difficult task. etc. So you already have randomness.
This is a quote that I put in a sibling comment that might entertain you. The "kids these days" complaints have been a consistent claim made by each adult generation since antiquity https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love...
This quote is used to devalue anyone who points out some difference between now and then. But, it does not prove that such person is wrong.
The big problem there is that real historians never talk about "past generations" as a whole which is nonsense concept anyway. Historians talk about "1735 English aristocracy" or "1865 lower class women in American north" and so on. Because how the society is organized constantly changes.
Is this really a good example? Building an empire and holding it are different things. Many empires collapse from succession disputes and rebellion rather than a lack of military success over rivals.
Often he would question something fundamental about human interaction that seemed to me (and I suspect most) to have obvious and quite simple explanations. But he is intelligent and couldn't be missing the forrest for the trees I told myself. Clearly he must be operating many steps ahead. Levels above!
Now I wonder if maybe he just isn't so good with trees.
I do not mean to dismiss the entirety of his work. No doubt much of it has been valuable. He seems to struggle to understand people, in much the same way as one of the alien's he's obsessed might struggle.
This isn't a new phenomenon. Eric Hoffer mentions it in "Working and Thinking on the Waterfront", written in the 1950s. He is unimpressed with intellectuals who don't do real work.
At first I didn't agree with OP's claim that there is more visibility of status. I don't think that is entirely correct: I always knew my family was poor, and I knew who the rich kids were, or who the top performers were. But when I circled back to the top of the article I realized it makes sense: 40 years ago in my childhood it was rich/not-rich, smart/not-smart, hot/not-hot. Now there are dozens of metrics for ranking oneself. I agree that overload of negative data is the anxiety driver.
It's like we're all being forced to become data scientists and numbers junkies. We've metricked the hell out of our well-being. At least for this generation. Aren't we infinitely adaptable? Or will future kids just have shorter life spans due to the social stress?
So, don't do that. Don't play a game at which you can only lose.
Even traditional humanities can be used to please people, stimulate them intellectually, organize knowledge and persuade (rhetoric). These may not be trivial to monetize in a market but are still stuff that a developed society needs. Also note that nowadays we don't need boatloads of people to cultivate land with ploughs and sickles and hand produce everything. Maybe the society isn't well organized but it doesn't mean we don't need educated people (indeed, perhaps better educated than modern university system can offer). I think this blog post has some interesting points on history of humanities education for outside professionals: https://scholars-tage.org/for-god-and-progress-notes-on-trai...
Besides I really don't like attempts to solve history by armchair reasoning, instead of empirical evidence. Like the first "theory" of empires failing. When it comes to Rome, there are some examples showing that indeed there were less "great people" war/statecraft accomplishment, but the more apparent (even to the contemporary people) and specific reason being moving to empire from republic. You really didn't want to be too successful because then the emperor would see you as a threat.
There is this public desire to have an unified theory of how civilizations (or "empires", lol) decline. I don't believe we have enough of a sample size, even if we had sufficient historical sources. But there is always unrigorous thinking leaning towards whatever social views the thinker has.
This might be why the "class grades don't mean anything anymore" rings hollow to me -- it's trying to close the barn door when the horses are already gone. Or to use a different analogy, it's like some variant of the fox and grapes fable (maybe there is a fable for it on its own?), where if the elites' markers are shown to be empty, they start saying "well those weren't good anyway."
That might work for awhile but if there's enough of it people start thinking the system is rigged.
Many people with a degree believe that they should be elites (because they would be in the 1960s) and are disappointed that they are not. The elites have circled the wagons and use friendships to determine eliteness (see WeWork and Theranos - where elites started companies that are total frauds and still were billionaires for a while).
At the same time, it is good for society to have a meritocratic component to the measure of "eliteness." This is why generals who won battles was a good example, and college degrees used to be: people who became generals or got into college were generally not there purely on merit, but the cream of the crop became apparent through challenges relevant to the society of the day.
The meritocratic component also allows for social mobility for people who are really damn good at whatever the merit is: great soldiers could find their way into the roman aristocracy from nothing, and colleges always admitted a few exceptionally talented lower-class people who became great scholars. The "elite overproduction" theory suggests that there is too much social mobility for the wrong people, and not enough for the right people.
The problem is there's no consensus on what's fair. A lot of people think they deserve to be part of the elite, and they have reasonable-to-them grounds for that. The people saying "grades don't mean anything" are probably sincere - they really do think something else is now more important than grades and that's why they focused on that something else. But it all adds up to something far too top-heavy.
The problem is that college was never about the education (except for a small minority of students who were usually in the sciences), it was always about the signaling. The part that we think is good (the education) is just a side effect.
Is Social Science considered a rigorous science, or will we look back in 100 years and group it in as we do with phrenology?
1) First, questioning the premise—you may encounter a whole lot more pop-social-science writing than the Real Deal. Consider, for example, what a smart and thoughtful person, whose main exposure to the work of historians was watching Ancient Aliens, might think of history, as an academic field. I don't know what you've read, but it's possible a lot of it's way toward the entertaining-but-wrong end.
2) As for "rigorous science", the social sciences have many limitations that something like chemistry or physics do not. They are necessarily based much more on observation and comparison of complex real-world systems. Limited ability to perform controlled experiments doesn't make them not science, as there's more to science than just that, but it does mean it can be very difficult to prove solid, definitive results in social science. It does also mean that the edges of social science are a great place to hide and nurture some serious bullshit, and if it's politically convenient for someone maybe even get your bullshit a few well-funded think-tanks—that in addition to how much the heart of it's full of bullshit, too, due to careerist game-playing by researchers, but that's not so different from other fields.
Not quite... I've gone through the classics, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, General Theory of Employment etc, and about to start Ricardo. What I've found is although they sound logical and use many examples to make their case, I still see most (with some exception to Keynes) of these are just opinion with possibly selective bias of examples.
What's bad here, is that these authors each take themselves as gospel, which then politicians have implemented these ideas with a blunt hammer.
There is a divide between political philosophy (and adjacent economic work) and social science proper, that's analogous to the divide between the theoretical side of modern physics and the experimental side but cranked up a few notches. As in most other sciences, journals, low-print-count and narrowly-scoped books from academic presses, and (to some degree) textbooks, are where the scientists really work (this doesn't mean it's all good work, of course)—though the standard reading (which you seem to be working through) is standard for a reason, and guide the vocabulary and context of that work.
> possibly selective bias of examples.
Heh, when you're lucky there are a good number of even biased examples. The really painful ones are mostly "suppose if..." fairy tales spinning fantasies based on some questionable premises and definitions, the odd bad syllogism, and a very small number of cherry picked examples that, if you dig, aren't even presented accurately. Whole schools of political and economic thought can be based almost entirely on this, as their adherents sneer at the illogic and idiocy of those who aren't convinced.
Its not really that analogous. Theoretical physics is at least in theory still predictive, though it may be vert distant from the pragmatics of verification. There are areas of political/economic science that are like that, but political/economic philosophy is predominantly normative rather than predictive (Austrian school economics, despite being called “economics” rather than “economic philosophy” and despite occasionally making fact rather than value claims is, and fairly openly admits to being, part of this.) There's a lot of people who are active as public intellectuals on both sides of the predictive/normative world, and the media (who are often the employers of public intellectuals) do an extremely poor job of explaining, when they aren't straight up concealing, the divide between predictive and normative elements of controversies in political and economic debates.
Maybe Carlyle was right after all - it really is the dismal science :)
I think there's a middle ground between being a rigorous science and being an anti-science like phrenology. I think there's no problem with having soft sciences, as long as the difference between them and hard sciences is understood, and one does not confuse the levels of rigor and certainty between the two.
There's a lot of soft science when it comes to policital economy, and countries have gone all-in with policies from different branches, even though there's really no hard evidence and rigor of some of these ideas. It's mind blowing when you think that millions of people's lives are affected because politicians have had gut instincts of a soft science sounding scientific.
> The choices they make are based largely on what they consider the best evidence available to them at the time
But they're not doing this, and this was my point. A lot of political economy is opinion rather than based of fact, and these non-fact based opinions are what politicians are choosing over hard evidence.
Bees have different roles, among them, the queen bee. Bees have the ability to create queens by feeding them with royal jelly. When for any reason there's more than one queen, queens fight to death.
I wonder if the writer is familiar with the class system? Or noticed the democratisation of connection through technology? From a historical perspective, this part at least seems backwards to me. At best, the “now” is irrelevant and there is either no such trend or it has changed more form than quantity.
Made me suspect that the rest is over-thought.
Not sure how it applies to modern society, as we seem to manage food scarcity much better than previous millennia. And disgruntled elites alone is not enough to start rebellions if they lack popular support.
The more I think about this statement, the harder it is for me to actually come up with any examples of this happening. While military success of a general might well be useful for status, it is hard to find any examples where that's the primary source of status. The closest I can think up are steppe confederations, whose great size (when they attained such a size) was driven in large part by the personal charisma of the leader, and the loot they could bring to the table, and almost invariably fell apart the moment said leader died, even if their successor were tremendously militarily successful (such as Kublai Khan's conquest of China).
I can come up with some more examples where the military caste ultimately robbed the polity of military success, but these came about because the military caste was unwilling to adapt to modern military technologies and opposed military reforms that might lessen their status. And even then, military nonsuccess didn't lead to empire collapse very quickly (cf., the Ottomans).
> So early on, ambitious soldiers tried to figure out how to win battles, and to get involved in promising battles. But it was hard to guess just how to do this, and outcomes were noisy functions of efforts.
... do you know anything of military history? Because the key to success is invariably training. Whether we're talking about the citizen soldiers of Greek city states (where soldiering was a part-time job) or the professional army of Rome (where it was a lifelong career), soldiers trained. Hell, the sports of elites (e.g., polo, fencing) are basically military training in disguise. And if you're not talking about common soldiers but elite generals, that military training will absolutely include studying the great generals of yesteryear to be able to apply their tactics and strategums when the time comes due.
> So no one could be very sure of their future status, or with whom to associate to gain status. But later on, ambitious soldiers would need to come from the right family, and make good new social connections.
Is the implication meant to be that common soldiers uncommonly good at soldiering could leverage that into high society? Because... again, I'm hard-pressed to any time that was true. Even in cases such as the Aztecs, where military prowess was a prized status symbol and was theoretically open to anybody (and everybody received military training!), in practice, actually getting yourself in a position to demonstrate military prowess required elite connections. If we instead restrict ourselves to elites whose power derives from their demonstrated military abilities, well, most such people you can point to could only do what they did because of their connections. Alexander the Great was the son of the guy who conquered all of Greece. Julius Caesar was the scion of one of the most powerful families in Rome, and even after he found himself on the losing side in a civil war, he was able to get plum military and political appointments by attaching himself to the richest man in Rome.
So I again ask, what is this society of which the author speaks? It doesn't match with any empire, ancient, medieval, or modern, of which I am aware.
The Controller explains how a society of Alphas couldn't help becoming restless and unstable, so instead they produce just the right social pyramid for a happy society.
What is the point of considering that there are people that are worth more than others? Merit already doesn't work, only inheritance and social reproduction really matter.
Why are there so many people who disagree that 100% of people should have access to healthcare, food and shelter? Elites shouldn't really exist. Nobody is really above anybody else. That's the point of having human rights.
Of course some people are more specialized for certain things, but nobody is really "above" others. At best, leaders or people with responsibility are "accountable", but their efforts are done as an effort to help other, not to reap the benefits.
Market fundamentalists are going to argue that risk must be rewarded, but investors will always work hard to lower risk to a minimum to increase ROI, so why are they really rewarded at all if they reduce risk, since they argued risk must be rewarded?
Having any inequality at all produces elites. You can have human rights while having inequality, and we generally do.
But what is motivation, really, and do we really need it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc short answer: motivation is not what we think it is. Does motivation matter more than happiness?
> You need some inequality of outcome to incentivize people to do what they are good at -
Most of those people are paid about the same anyways. All professions should be paid about the same. I don't see why inequality is necessary when so many are paid the minimum wage. There is no job that is more worthy than another.
> the Soviet Union has showed us that.
The soviet union was a political disaster. Corruption will cause problems in any economy. There are no proof that communism is bad because the soviet union was corrupt and collapsed.
Even the notion of merit doesn't really exist. We just disagree and I honestly don't want to spend time arguing about this eternal debate.
Galileo was ordered to abandon heliocentrism by the Pope. Ultimately he was sentenced to prison for his views (commuted to house arrest).
He had plenty of gatekeepers.
No, I totally disagree with you and just pointed out the most obvious weakness in your argument.
One example is the american revolution where the one group of elites in the british empire wanted good relations with the indians to protect their fur trade while another group of elites wanted to invade native areas and steal their land. Don't think there was an issue of elite overproduction in the british empire in the mid 1700s. But there was an issue of divergent interests and there was no room for compromise as these competing interests directly conflicted with each other.
Another one is the civil war, where the interests of the industrial north ( the desire to protect industry via tariffs ) directly conflicted withe the interests of the agrarian south ( who wanted to remove tariffs ) so they could sell cotton/agricultural goods to foreign markets. Once again, I don't think there was an overproduction of elites in the north or the south in the 1850s.
But I guess if the elite overproduction was severe enough, it could structural conflict of interests. But my guess is that conflicts would naturally arise amongs the elites long before elite overproduction.
Of areas where the north and south’s interests conflicted in the civil war that’s not the one most people call out.
David Graeber argued that the people who controlled the two major parties in the United States, until recently, were into Finance, which benefits from deindustrialization and a weak middle class, and that Trump was different because his interests were in Real Estate, which actually requires domestic consumers -- hence trade war and antiglobalism.
(For someone as "far left" as Graeber, it sounded more apologetic for Trump than I expected.)
Now, I find this theory interesting, but I'm not sure I buy it.
Do you have another one?
I can't tell if there's truth to it or if he's just really good at stringing words together.
The most interesting is probably the Republican party establishment. I recently read books by two partisans on either side [1] (both prolific authors and MIT PhDs) and they were in almost total agreement historically on the people and timeline. The Republican party starting with Barry Goldwater underwent an internal revolution, and an upstart and more hard-line faction won, driving out the Eisenhowers and Rockefellers. The second author is a member of this group, and he believes strongly in very small government (for example, he is against the post-1950s government and believes America was last America in the 1930s).
The other Republican faction is roughly the Tea Party, which this [2] book goes into more detail. It started being a more major force in politics starting in 2010 after financial crisis. I think Boehner who was the speaker of the house at the time has talked more candidly about this period after leaving office. They are angry at the status quo and lean more to the conspiracy side of things.
On the Democratic side there are the left (Sanders, AOC, etc) and the center-left establishment. They both generally support social-democratic policies so can work together, but the center-left is more market-oriented (maybe you could also say capitalistic or neoliberal) and they also differ in political style. I think people are pretty familiar with Sanders etc but here's [3] an article by a center-left economist talking a little bit about how the nature of this coalition affects what policies are possible.
[1] Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal and Murray's By the People
[2] https://www.amazon.com/When-Party-Came-Town-Representatives/...
[3] https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/passing-the-baton-th...
- Eisenhower Republicans : New Dealers
- Reagan/Gingrich "small government" Republicans : Clinton/Obama/Blair market liberals
- "moderate Trumpists" (if there can be such a thing) : "Progressives" (who, I will add, are somewhat less "left" than Wokeists)
They form a 3x2 matrix. Each column represents a side, and each row the spirit of an age.
I guess you could call the rows: "Institutions", "Markets", "Movements".
Then, breaking the symmetry, the "Progressives" are moderated a little by the ghost of FDR/LBJ, while the ghost of Eisenhower lives on in the Never Trumpers, who... weirdly, might ally with what "respectable" Neocons remain, and turn into some kind of "establishment" figures aligned as much with the center-left market liberals as with anyone. Sort of a "deep state" faction without a party.
What does “into finance” even mean? And how can you be in real estate without being “into finance”? The real estate business is all financing.
But yeah. What does Graeber mean?
The argument would go something like --
Many countries are in debt to the United States (immediate question: Isn't the US in huge debt to China?), which drives up demand for US dollars (since everyone needs to pay those back), which makes the dollar strong. As a result, if you have access to these dollars at low interest rates (i.e, are a bank), you can get lots of stuff from other countries "for free". But a strong dollar also has the effect of destroying domestic industry, because it makes exports too expensive for anyone to buy.
So he's saying "finance" is all these institutions with access to dollars, and "real estate" is a bunch of other institutions that are one more step removed from the Fed.
Something like that.
Like, are you a cloud provider, or do you run a lot of cloud jobs? Either way, you're "into the cloud", but you're on opposite sides.
That's about as much sense as I can make of it.
Or maybe it's all bullshit. Which would be funny, given the other things Graeber has written. I don't know.
I do notice it's weirdly aligned with RT's narrative. Not that that means it can't also be true.
The US is in huge debt to the rest of the work because that is how a reserve currency works. You issue currency, in this case USD can only be created through debt, when it leaves the country to enter the world economy there is not enough USD in the US so the government has to do deficit spending or tax cuts (i.e. never retrieve the money it created).
In other words Finance here refers to investing money not directly in real economy, such as building factories, houses etc., but in speculative products such as I listed above. It is possible that the money so invested in Finance somehow eventually makes it to the real economy. But since late 20th century the size of Finance relative to Real Economy has exploded. Multiple trillions of dollars worth of products are traded each day in Financial markets but in real economy (i.e., people buying/selling goods/services) only a fraction of that amount changes hands. So there is a growing disconnect between Finance and Real economy; which is why Wallet Street (Finance) and Main Street (real economy) have grown so much apart.
Coming to Trump and Real Estate. For a real estate builder, their domain expertise is around forecasting future needs and invest in building houses/office spaces. They invest some of their own money, borrow some from banks, build houses, sell for profit, repay banks and pocket some of that profit. So this part is well understood.
A builder can do well only when millions of people are earning well and are able to buy/rent their buildings. Falling wages is a really bad news for real estate firms. As Graeber says in that video, you can not export real estate buildings. So for them to do well the domestic real economy must do well. The Finance sector however has no such constraints. At the shortest of notice they can seamlessly move their money across the border chasing higher returns. There are times when Finance feels the effects of worsening real economy however as we saw in 2008 when falling housing prices (which were artificially inflated to being with, thanks to speculation) lead to Wall Street crisis.
I usually don't trust Wikipedia now a days but it does have good content in this case[1].
There are clauses in the constitution to systematically deny any human rights to Hindus. The state restricts education and opportunities to English speakers. Basically the classical civilisation is denied any sense of agency. The situation isn’t much different from the treatment of native Americans back in the barbaric days.
Little wonder the Anglo-Indian class and their brainless supporters in the West are up in arms anytime a more rooted Indian leadership emerges.
There is much to criticise the current idiots in power but the old colonial crooks are so stupid and insipid that in their toxic discourse of ‘Hindu fascists’ ‘Hindu Nazis’ (in a country which has oppressed Hindus for a millennia) they’re only digging their own graves.
Which laws are those?
I can’t help but laugh.