Elite Overproduction: Impact of Too Many Qualified Workers

Elite overproduction causes societal issues due to an excess of qualified individuals for prestigious roles, leading to underemployment and title inflation.

### The Consequences of Elite Overproduction in Modern Society
* 🎓  Elite overproduction, as theorized by Peter Turchin, has led to an **excess of qualified individuals seeking prestigious roles**, resulting in a **scarcity of non-elite workers in essential fields**.
* 💼  The pursuit of elite jobs has led to title inflation, where individuals are given **exaggerated job titles** to compensate for the lack of **actual senior roles**.
* 💰  The cost of college education has increased while its value has decreased, with **more than half of the workforce now holding a degree**.
* 🏢  Underemployment is a major issue, with many overqualified individuals working in low-paying jobs rather than pursuing **blue-collar opportunities**.
* 🏘️  The housing crisis is exacerbated by the lack of tradesmen, as the focus on **elite careers** has led to a **shortage of workers in essential fields**.
* 🌐  The outsourcing of non-elite jobs overseas has temporarily masked the issue in Western societies, but may have **long-term negative effects**.
* 🗳️  Elite overproduction creates political pressure to maintain unnecessary roles, as **eliminating them would disrupt the established system**.
* 🔮  The situation has been compared to historical collapses, with Turchin warning that it is a **unifying issue in the downfall of great civilizations**.

I have some bad news for you. You probably won't ever be a tech worker at a Fang company, a bulge bracket Finance Pro, or a high-powered corporate executive. Society needs people to do real jobs that keep us housed, fed, and safe, and it needs them a lot more than it needs another McKinsey consultant. This is a problem because no matter how you put it, a job where you sit in an air-conditioned office making six figures a year in your first year out of college is way more desirable than doing road work in Arizona for 20 bucks an hour. The problem is that everybody is trying really hard to pretend that this isn't true, and the system that has sprung up to maintain this dream has caused more problems than you realize. How many jobs on these two websites? It's been over a thousand combined. How much money would you say you save, or you plan on saving, out of that salary? It's going to be around 2K per month, mostly. Yeah, every day it just feels like Groundhog Day or waking

up doing the same thing. I feel confused sometimes because it's just like I had this idea of what my life would be like at this age, and that's just not exactly how it is. Peter Turchin is a complexity scientist who mathematically models statistical dynamics of historical societies. He coined the theory of elite overproduction. He argues in his books and papers that societies make workers just like they make anything. A car goes through a factory, and a college graduate goes through a few decades of schooling. At the end, you get something that you can drive around in and something that can make pivot tables in Excel. The only difference is that a lump of steel doesn't care if it's turned into the engine block of a Bentley or a Buick, but people, given the option, will naturally opt for more prestigious careers if they are available. Turchin work effectively argues that roles in all societies form something of a hierarchy, with fewer actual people required to do the jobs further up the pyramid. We need a lot

more Tradesmen, nurses, teachers, and laborers than we need. So-called Elite roles, like corporate executives, by their nature, these roles only exist to watch over the work of dozens of other people. But for a variety of reasons, too many people have been directed into getting qualified for these roles up here and discouraged from doing these roles down here. This is how you end up in a system where everybody is qualified to deliver a stakeholder engagement deck, to synergistically Blitz scale a business platform, for ingesting marketing survey data from the cloud, but you can't find anybody to fix your plumbing. We have simply trained too many people to fill too many Elite roles and not enough people to fill the everyday roles of society. This has cost us a lot in more ways than you might realize, and the first is just the cost. I know that you are all well aware of the cost of attending college, but there is more to it than just the student debt that you're going to take on to land your first job in the cubicle Farm. If everyone gets

a college degree, which qualifies them for a prestigious job, then those qualifications aren't special anymore. According to data from the US Census Bureau and compiled by Statista, the number of Americans with a college degree has increased from 7.7% of the population in 1960 to 37.7% today, an almost six-fold increase. The remaining 62.3% of the population are not all going to be blue-collar workers either. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 62.6% of Americans work at all, so more than half of the workforce holds a degree. A degree is not enough to stand out anymore; it's barely enough to land a job at all. So people are getting more degrees to prove they are worthy of a role. The price of a college degree has gone up and its value has gone down, but people are still willing to take on life-altering amounts of student debt to get them so they can access a job that is prestigious. The ironic thing is that many blue-collar trade

jobs actually pay much better than even midlevel corporate roles because there is a shortage of these non-Elite workers. So they have much more negotiating power in the real market than a history PhD applying for a research role. Sorry Sam from how history Works. Despite this, most people still agree that someone sitting behind a desk is more Elite than someone working with their hands. So given the choice, they would rather work in an office. You knew all of this already. Colleges have been pumping out graduates for decades now. But what is interesting is what happens to the people that are left over. Eventually, there are only so many roles that can be done in a suit and tie in a nice office, which means some of these Elite qualified individuals will be left behind to work jobs that they are completely overqualified for. Underemployment is already a major issue in America. Highly paper-qualified people are working casual jobs with bad pay and fewer benefits because they don't want to get a blue-collar job. Because that would be admitting that their expensive

degree was useless tchin in his book end times has likened the glut of people who are too qualified for the job to the accumulation of Deadwood in a forest. It doesn't do anything by itself, but if anything goes wrong, it will cause a cataclysmic fire. I will leave a link to his book in the description below. If you like depressing videos like this, it's definitely worth the read. Tchin has likened our current period of elite production with the late Roman Empire, the French Wars of religion, and various Chinese dynasties. But America and the rest of the western world has had one sneaky advantage over these other low-energy Empires. We have taken all of these non-Elite jobs that we didn't want to do and outsourced them overseas. For a while, it let more of us work in jobs that we could brag about on LinkedIn, but that strategy may have come with some serious side effects. So it's time to learn how money Works to find out what happens now that we have too

many people that are literally too good for their job. This week's video is sponsored by Manta sleep. Manta sleep is on a mission to enable Better Lives through better sleep in naps and makes the world's best sleep masks and function sleep accessories. I've gotten both the Manta sleep mask Pro and the Manta sleep mask sound, and I didn't put a lot of stock in sleep masks until I tried these. The sleep mask Pro offers c-shaped eye cups for a 100% blackout, deeper sleep, and ventilation for breathability. The sleep mask sound has everything that the pro pro has but with headphones that allow you to listen to calming music to help you sleep, and my favorite. Manta sleep is leading a pro nap movement, rejecting the corporate BS of waiting around pretending you're working when you could be re-energizing for when you actually need to do something important by sleeping. Start improving your sleep today with Manta and use my link in the description and code how money works for 10% off your

order start prioritizing one of the most important things in your life with Manta sleep. One of the less serious impacts of a system that has too many people qualified for too few Elite jobs is title inflation. If you can't find a senior role for everybody with an MBA from the University of Phoenix, then you have to give them a fancy-sounding title. Salesmen are now account executives, receptionists are now directors of first impressions, and marketers are brand presidents. Job title inflation like this sounds extremely dumb until you realize that it works. A UK study found that 70% of workers would give up a pay raise to get a job with a better-sounding title, with some forgoing as much as $10,000 to take a role that sounds more senior. This study is very old now, but one look at LinkedIn will show you that it hasn't gotten much better. Now, while it's fun to laugh at goobers on LinkedIn, the problems of elite overproduction as outlined by Tchin manifest in other

areas. As well as more people become qualified and expect to fill glamorous corporate roles, it creates a political pressure to make sure that people get those roles. The anthropologist Steven Graber spoke about his role of the Box tickers in his infamous book jobs. These were roles that only existed to satisfy some arbitrary requirements, overseen by other box tickers to give the appearance that something useful was being done. The best way to create these roles is through laws and programs that mandate them. I made a video last year about the homelessness crisis in America and why, despite spending billions of dollars on it, we are only making it worse. One of the problems is that there were thousands of roles being created in various local, state, and federal government departments, alongside nonprofits, that paid workers very well. With so many elite roles on offer, there is no real incentive to fix the problem because for the individuals running the programs, they would have to find a new job, and for the politicians approving the budget, they would have to explain why thousands of professional roles went

missing under their Administration. Now, I just wanted to shamelessly mention my old video, but it's by no means limited to this one problem. Millions of people across America are employed in some kind of compliance role with a private company. Some of these roles are incredibly important, some less so, but if compliance standards are dropped, then the politician who passed that law would have a lot of potential voters angry that they made their job irrelevant. Now, so far it all sounds like the blame of elite overproduction ultimately falls on the people who thought they were too good for a real job and felt entitled to an elite position just because they got a communications degree. That is not entirely unfair, and there does need to be a level of personal accountability for your own personal DEC decisions, but we've made it incredibly easy to follow the path of least resistance into the pile of college graduates striving for an elite job has also become a necessity in many parts of the country if you want to live a comfortable version of the American dream in most cities across the

country these days you need to have an extremely good job. More than a third of Americans earning $250,000 per year are still living paycheck to paycheck because the places where they can access these Elite jobs are ludicrously expensive. The study unsurprisingly found that bu stress was Far higher amongst younger earners because the only consistent way for them to earn that much money was to get an elite job in an elite City. Blue Collar work can make a lot more than entry-level corporate roles but unless you can successfully start your own business, the ceiling on how much you can earn in these rules is much lower in areas away from expensive cities. That's okay but if you grew up in a major city and you want to keep living there, then you kind of have to play the game of fighting for an elite job by working your way up the corporate ladder or fighting through ultra competitive internships. If you are successful congratulations you can buy a Tesla Model 3 and rent a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle but if you are not then you

can contribute to the biggest problem that tchin discusses in his writing. People who have invested a significant amount of money, not to mention years of their life, into pursuing a role that they were told they were entitled to, breeds a lot of discontent when they end up underemployed. These people, who fairly rightfully feel scammed out of what they were told was a guarantee, are now a significant voting block that's created political pressure to not only maintain as many of these nonsense jobs as possible, but also to pursue student debt relief, advanced education subsidies, and retraining initiatives. It might fix a lot of problems, but there is no getting around the fact that it's not exactly fair to people who have already paid off their debt or never took them on in the first place because they didn't pursue an elite career path. Now, this is not to say that these are good or bad ideas. It's only to say that they wouldn't even be considered if there weren't so many people that had become trapped as an overproduced elite enough.

people to make this politically viable. Unfortunately, as the great DJ Khaled would say, we have played ourselves to get here in the first place. Beyond the expense and tensions caused by having so many people qualified to do roles that are inherently rare, we have forgotten how to do the foundational stuff. America's housing crisis is, in part, being accelerated by the cost to build new homes because we don't have enough tradesmen to keep up with the demand for new housing. The fact that housing is so expensive only makes this problem worse because people see that the only way they will ever be able to afford a home of their own is to compete for an elite role with every other hopeful graduate. We have also become more reliant on skilled migration to fill the gaps in our workforce, which also drives more demand for housing and more desire to be elite just to stay afloat. Now, Turin makes the argument that this is the single unifying issue that has led to the collapse of all great civilizations. That might be a bit of hyperbole to move

some books, but it does make it a little bit worrying when you see the symptoms that he first warned about several decades ago. I will be writing a follow-up article to this video about the clown show that is modern internships for high-end Finance firms. It might be the most obvious example of terin's warnings in action, and that will be up this week on my free email newsletter link below. Living costs are at the center of this problem, especially housing. But go and watch this video to find out if we can even make housing affordable without destroying the economy in the process. To keep on learning how money works.

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Society overly values prestigious careers, leading to an overproduction of people in elite roles and a lack of workers in essential everyday jobs.

This imbalance has resulted in a shortage of trade workers, nurses, teachers, and laborers, while pushing too many people into high-prestige careers.

The consequences of this elite overproduction are far-reaching, impacting society in more ways than just the economic cost of attending college.

The Dilemma of Increasing College Degrees

The percentage of Americans with college degrees has risen significantly from 1960 to the present, leading to a decrease in the uniqueness of a degree.

Despite this, people are still willing to take on substantial student debt to obtain a prestigious job, while trade jobs often offer better pay.

The surplus of highly qualified individuals has resulted in underemployment and a reluctance to take on blue-collar jobs, leading to a growing dilemma in the job market.

The Impact of Overqualified Workers and Elite Job Overproduction

Manta Sleep offers high-quality sleep masks and accessories for better sleep, sponsoring the video.

Job title inflation is a result of an overproduction of qualified workers, leading to a preference for fancy-sounding titles.

The surplus of elite roles creates a lack of incentive to address important issues, as individuals are reluctant to give up their positions and politicians hesitate to explain the elimination of professional roles.

The pursuit of elite jobs has become a necessity for a comfortable life, especially in expensive cities, leading to intense competition and stress.

Many individuals feel scammed and underemployed after investing significant time and money in pursuing these roles, creating a significant voting block that influences political decisions.

This has resulted in pressure for student debt relief and retraining initiatives, causing a debate about fairness for those who did not choose an elite career path.

The Impact of Housing Costs on the Workforce and Economy

The high cost of housing is exacerbating America's housing crisis by creating intense competition for elite roles.

The shortage of tradesmen is driving up the expense of building new homes, further contributing to the problem.

The reliance on skilled migration to fill workforce gaps is increasing the demand for housing and perpetuating the need to compete for elite positions.