Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays

[Purveyor]

By Peter Turchin Nov 20, 2013 9:01 AM ET

Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.
Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside. The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the “violent 1910s.”

We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.

The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The “great divergence” between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period.

Wealth Disrupts

How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-20/blame-rich-overeducated-elites-as-our-society-frays.html

[pscot]

1. I would not have thought a surfeit of education

was the problem.

[Chan790]

2. I don't know if it's an excess...

or merely that it's ceased to be practical.

I have two degrees (not counting culinary education)...and neither has ever been useful. Every job-skill I have has been learned post-college in short topic-specific trainings and at my own expense. The outstanding $15K on my student loans has been a waste.

If not for the employer demand that people in skilled roles have degrees, I'd recommend nobody go to college and they instead pursue education in what they want to do in these kinds of training, most of which can be performed online for under $200/class.

[yurbud]

5. without a some training in poli sci, philosophy, psych, and history you can be easily manipulated

politically.

A liberal arts education helps you see you have more choices than what are offered in ads, and that politicians might be up to something other than what they actually say.

And those with that kind of education, a lot of money, and no conscience can tie you up in knots without you even knowing it.

[Igel]

3. He picks and chooses what to see.

To get to the right conclusion. So he looks at the 1970s, when I'd have thought that perhaps the 1960s was more divisive. Problem he, he agrees with the societal shifts and dislocations from the '60s, and only sees the problem a decade later.

He also sees it primarily in terms of what's important for his way of thinking. Money. The Religious Right of the '70s wasn't primarily a money-based movement, yet reflects a reaction. This assumes that the action is right and just and natural. Which is the problem--for the previous 10-20 years on a number of fronts some groups were left out in the cold and not only ignored but insulted when no compromise was deemed "moral". Their ideals had been mainstream. Now they were somewhere between offensive and derisive. They decided they'd had enough.


There are other factors at work, as well. As middle-class culture's been overturned--not primarily a financial issue, this one--it was replaced by not the culture of the 1% but by Jerry Springer. It's the same kind of thing that outraged the Russian "established authorities" in the early '90s: All of a sudden mainstream culture was lower-class culture. And with the lower class culture came things which may have sometimes been practiced by the non-lower-classes but which were considered improper and wrong. With the collapse of the ideals that held a lot of society together, society fell apart.

But if the only lens through which you see all problems is $, then all problems have to involve primarily $ and all solutions have to involve $.

[damnedifIknow]

4. Oh well

[MicaelS]

6. Complete irony this was published in Bloomberg.

I consider Bloomberg to be the biggest, richest, most over-educated, elitist in this country.

Never has one man embodied the concept of someone who think he knows what is best for everyone else.

[Doctor_J]

7. Headline sounds straight from O'Reilly

as if he is a regular guy who clawed his way from the slums of Brooklyn to his imaginary Peabody Award.