Why, Often, The Democrats Are Morons

What are the downstream effects of overpopulating society with supposed "elites" who want to briefly live on the coasts, and then realize it's mostly too expensive?

Here is a video to start:

The argument in said video, mostly tied to the writings of Peter Turchin, is that we produce too many “elites,” and thus not enough people to do the fundamental jobs of society, i.e. social workers, nurses, building homes, cops, etc. I would generally agree with this, but like I said, it’s complicated. There are a few things going on, including:

Cost of living: As this continues to rise, you almost need to be “an elite,” or at least “an elite” in the sense of having a well-paid white-collar job, just to keep your head above water. The truth is that our collective mental health would probably be better if more people worked with their hands and could see the output of their labor, but those jobs often pay shit and you have to be outside in sweltering heat for 11 hours, so we’d rather manage spreadsheets to buy fancy cheese. I get it. I am guilty of it too. The cost of living thing is a big component. I bartended a little bit in August and September (and into October) of 2023. It was OK and you meet some cool people, but at the same time it’s very hard to predict your income with any stability, so when I got a BDR sales offer, I went and took it.

What is an “elite” anyway? No one really knows and it’s a suitcase word for political circles. J.D. Vance, who went to fucking Yale and worked for billionaires, claims that “elites hate me.” But like, uh, aren’t you also thus elite? It’s confusing, semantically.

Politics and employment: The sheer fact of the matter is that automation and SaaS and better AI is going to come for a lot of white-collar jobs, especially at the top of the funnel of how we hire for roles. In 25–30 years, there won’t be as many jobs for a recent graduate. I want to say “Maybe there won’t still be college either,” but college is deeply tied to how people view their parenting success, so it’ll probably stick around and maybe cost $100,000/year by then. Nice. But, politicians need to say “I created jobs!” and the easiest jobs to create, in reality, are bullshit jobs that don’t need to exist for companies that are willing to have those jobs to show growth to an investor class. Then, of course, when revenue tanks and the investors are scowling, those jobs will be laid off. Perfect boom-bust cycle, baby! Part of the whole dance here with “elites” is that we still believe universities matter and teach you things (paper ceiling) and politicians still want to get the votes of the educated class, so we exist in this circle where we cook all these books around employment, and many of those “elites” end up essentially underemployed in the process, managing marketing deliverables out of Cornell.

We still deify college: Even though many colleges just spend money to overstaff on mid-tier, pointless admin-type roles.

Now we come to some downstream implications of all this. If you’re told that you’re “an elite,” but you enter the job market and all you can get is a $65,000/annum job updating spreadsheets, and then you get laid off from that job in 17 months, you will eventually become bitter and angry about “the system.” This has happened to me four-five times since I was 22. Whne you become angry about “the system,” as vague as that is, you can easily be swayed by someone talking about bashing down the system. That kind of explains the rightward shift of young men, at some level. It’s bigger than just that, and involves #MeToo and sexuality and the appeal of guys like Rogan, but some of why young men move to the right is because they feel like they don’t have any purpose or respect vocationally, and guys on the right more directly speak to that concern — they don’t solve it, but they speak to it.

In reality, we’d probably all be better off going to junior or community college and working on roofs or with our hands, but then how would we afford anything these days? That’s back to Issue 1, above. And that’s also why it’s so frustrating to hear people on the news talk about “a hot economy” or “good jobs” or “growth,” because the macro picture can feel very different from the micro, day-to-day picture.

Do you think we over-produce “elites?”