12 November 2020

The roots of social violence

The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class,” he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites over­produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job... Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-­Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies. Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
Excerpts from an article in this month's The Atlantic.  I have no idea whether these speculations are valid, but they are thought-provoking.

6 comments:

  1. The role of higher education as gatekeepers to the upper middle class is what makes me skeptical of the efficacy of "free college for all". You can pay for everyone to take classes at their local public college, but the same two dozen elite universities will still be in control of who does and does not get into the professional class. The rest will just lose out on 2 or 4 years of otherwise productive time that could be spent building capital and learning practical knowledge.

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    1. Is that all education is for? Getting better jobs? Are we to define ourselves merely by our productivity?
      IMO, what you'd probably call 'impractical knowledge' is the sort of stuff that lifts people out of the ignorant malaise that empowers our current rendition of 'Dear Leader'... knowledge of art, literature and world history... philosophy.

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    2. Is this a real comment? It reads like the perfect pantomime of a elitist academic.

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  2. Free College For All - if College and University can do online courses, the seats quota will be moot. Everyone can have a Harvard education by logging in. That would knock the elites down a peg or two when anyone with Wi-Fi can be in your lecture and levels the field. Some of those elite students are only there because daddy could pay the exorbitant fees.

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    1. Er, I don't think that anybody is talking about making Harvard, Yale, et al. free, just like state universities. The "elite" will stay elite, never fear.

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  3. Very thought provoking! I will check with my economist friend at the World Bank who probably has a better understanding of how these things work. If I learn anything, I will definitely share. Thank you for posting such intriguing content.

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