There is one gaping hole in this otherwise excellent overview of how we find ourselves in this "situation":
Parents.
As a parent of only 10 years, one of the biggest surprises to me, In spite of the realities of life laid out here, has been the persistence of the "participation trophy", or as I prefer to see view the problem: the avoidance of accurate assessment. When we as parents do not accurately assess our children, we deprive them of the ability to accurately assess themselves.
The very statement "overproduction of elites" is an oxymoron. One is elite because of their abilities is relation to others. They cannot be overproduced. What we have is simply the over production of people who *think* they are elite.
This inevitably leads these individuals to the expectation vs reality problem that causes unhappiness. The unhappiness persists because the individual lacks the ability to self asses. The problem they conclude is the system.
As I struggle to find the correct balance between encouragement and criticism of my children, I find my wife and I alone in our struggle. "I just want my kids to live in reality when they grow up", I explain to my wife as we discuss potential strategies to motivate without deluding.
As I often say, do no underestimate societies ability to normalize self destructive behaviors. The solution is not policy, it's Parenting.
Right. The term elite is meant to literally mean the best of the best. Education and practice only get you so far, but the real elites are rare like people who play professional sports at major league level . Maybe the term managerial class or professional class would be better .
As a newer parent, and person who is around lots of young parents I wish I could like this 100x. Also the social media algorithm doesn't encourage self assessment, people want maximum output with minimal input, and they want because they see other people attaining, they don't care if they aren't as talented. It's frustrating.
This does assume assessments are accurate, measure ability in a classroom in a way that can extrapolate outside of it, can tease apart ability from confounding factors like quality of opportunities and teaching.
Yes, assessments do exist with varying levels of accuracy across competencies.
But many exceptions exist of people who had underwhelming results in school yet went on to achieve more than those assessments would have predicted.
The lesson is we ought to strive. What else are you going to do anyway? Settle for that which is withing reach? Is that the road to contentment?
In any pursuit there is room for error, I do not dispute that and even acknowledge it in my comment in my "search for balance". However, what I am observing as a parent is the response to the concerns you list is not better assessment, but NO assessment.
Before getting to "settling for what's in reach" I am first advocating for teaching kids the skills to determine what is in reach, and what is required to achieve ones goals.
"Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss you'll still end up among the stars" we tell them. But many kids today dont even realize they never built the rocket.
I think I see the disconnect in your corporate drone comment. As an example, I know someone who was all in on this humanities/socialism track and the ended up being a sales trainer for a pharmaceutical company and loved it. There are still a ton of great jobs out there but a lot of kids just don’t know what’s available. And part of that is how common the idea of the corporate drone job is from people who don’t know what they are talking about. A lot of those jobs are fun and lucrative and way better than the prestige jobs that many focus on.
Also, a lot of these young people who don’t have the lives that met their expectations. Think they have some sort of God-given right to live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or any other big city with big expenses. There are lots of other places in America, Charlotte, Atlanta, Denver and Kansas City come to mind where someone could have a great job and a fulfilling life. Some of these people need to take a vacation to America and see what the rest of the country has to offer.
True but if you want to work in finance you probably are better off trying to make it in NYC. And if you have creative talent you probably would want to make it in Hollywood. The point of the book Abundance is to address the affordability crisis in these elite cities. You can’t replicate what the Hollywoods , Silicon Valley and Wall Street on Main Street 😎
Yeah, I never thought I would work in “business” or “tech,” but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for two decades now and mostly loving it. How I got there was completely contingent and an indirect result of the Great Recession and lowering expectations on “more intellectual” career tracks that were clearly dead-ended. Do I wish I could have wrote or taught college for a living like my parents? Maybe. They were great jobs in the late 20th Century! But I can’t and there are other options I have that they didn’t, so it’s fine.
I just had a dinner with old college friends who all studied humanities and then mostly went into finance. At the time, I was struck by how strange it was that people study International Relations or Art History and go into… finance? But also by how there were so few job options forwarded to us 20-year-olds back then. Everyone kind of needed to suddenly fit in five career tracks that were high-status in the mid-2000s. Today, it’d be heavier on tech than finance and law. But either way, college students just don’t know what’s out there and they aren’t helped to know at all by career services. And a lot of that is also down to the cynical pyramid scheme that universities are running, running on high-endowment budgets and then shunting their graduates into sure-thing, conventional, high-paid jobs so that they can turn around and give generously.
I think people at the very least need to stop with the expectation of constantly rising home prices . If the ideas in the abundance agenda are successful then home prices will go down and society as a whole will be better off. People need to have other sources of long term wealth other than housing.
I’ve heard it said many times that housing cannot both be an investment and affordable and that’s pretty true.
But once you set up a whole economy and culture around “the housing ladder,” it’s really hard to undo it. Most middle-class Americans use their home as their primary store of wealth and it *has* to grow in value or else they won’t be able to afford their extremely expensive retirement, eldercare, and end-of-life costs.
I was rather brutal in my assessments to my children - and they ended up thanking me for it. I knew their IQ's and I saw how they did on Differential and Integral Calculus as well as their science and other classes while they were in high school.
Daughter - you would make a rather mediocre to average physcist, go into engineering. I told her to avoid Materials Science because of its close links to manufacturing, which is too much outsourced (I am a Physcist with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering - Materials Science). She ended up in Civil Engineering and had her MS at 21. She does bridge and tunnel seismic work.
Son - You would make a mediocre engineer but have good social and organizational skills, go into Business. He did Business - MIS and had his MS in MIS - Data Security at 21. His backup if he didn't have an aptitude for business was Eastern European studies with a minor in Russian and Army ROTC (this was approximately 8 years ago, I could see the priority and his mother is Ukrainian and he is somewhat familiar with Ukrainian.)
Also, I am old and they knew that they had to launch immediately, so their objectives were practical.
I'm super-envious of your children for having a well-educated father to advise them!
I was the first person in my family to go to university (and from a former mining village in northern England where there seems to be a rather toxic anti-intellectual culture) and I can see how thoroughly I was myself screwed over by my background (as well as my specific family situation)!
While the overall culture here in the States is anti-intellectual, the intensity of the anti-intellectualism varies. Areas that have high fractions of highly educated adults will have at least some intellectual pockets. Areas that have low fractions of highly educated adults will not. I had not known the state of affairs in England, but am not surprised.
What does not appear to be discussed though is the impact of human migration on local prosperity and culture. The mountain culture in the Appalachian mountains lasted until shortly after World War 1 and the building of better roads. Then it fell apart. I believe one of the reasons was the selective emigration of the most capable individuals and their families to other locations where they had better opportunities.
There was a recent paper in Nature that looked at polygenetic scores for intelligence in England and Estonia (I am sure chosen for reasons of relative ethnic homogeneity). The scores were lower in old mining regions in England and rural areas in Estonia. I assume due to migration for better opportunities.
Population has been evaporating from rural areas in the States for generations. On the average, I suspect that the emigrants were more capable and adaptable than the stayers. Over time this has a substantial impact on the culture, economic prospects, and I assume on the politics.
On a personal note, your children will have the advantage of an educated parent. It does make a difference.
My father is a professor with the best education that money can buy and he gave absolutely horrible advice. It comes down to the person and not the education, though I guess its more excusable without the education.
I feel like the rise of manosphere and tech right and this comp sci steuggling to get job are under discussed!
And what is happening I guess is like the arrival of “normies” to comp sci essentially pushed out the type of ppl we typically imagine to be CS (socially awkward and not taking showers) struggles more in the job market and that pushes them into this online right field.
good or bad, their verbal intelligence is relatively lower vis a vis their quantitative one or compared to those disgruntled humanity grads and their low social skill kinda shows up in the movement now I feel…
With the first "frustrated STEM majors who are overwhelmingly male and go radical right wing" being Arab engineering students who became jihadists in the 1980s, after the oil price bust destroyed their job prospects.
I wonder how real that stereotype ever was. I work in tech, and to be a software engineer in a large company it absolutely requires quite a lot of collaboration, and therefore effective verbal and written communication. I haven't been in the industry that long, but I don't really understand how that would have been different 20 years ago.
The normies used to think that engineering was for losers (think 1980s "Revenge of the Nerds" jock culture), but as geek culture took over the mainstream, tech lost its stigma. So you ended up with a lot of normies going into tech for the money, and they were better at networking than the weirdos.
I envision a future of millions of STEM grads, three of whom will know something of American history, world history, political economy and philosophy, and one will have read two pages of a Shakespeare masterpiece.
I almost hate to say it as a humanities grad myself but consider those millions of humanities grads, three of whom know Ohm's law and one of whom knows one of Newton's laws of motion.
True enough. On the other hand, how often does Ohm's law come up in a dinner conversation, and, if it does, for how long can host and attending guests sustain it — or would want to? And though I'm no authority on Ohm's law, I'll venture that it has little application to a gathering attempting to sort out the present horrors of this country (and the world), and what can be done about it.
Also, true enough, but seriously how often does Shakespeare come up in dinner conversations? Or, maybe I just hang out with the wrong people. I'm a big fan myself.
But, also, knowledge of things like Ohm's law, the Standard Model, etc. are necessary, if not sufficient, to guarantee the kind of abundance necessary to turn the tide on the horrors which tend to revolve around the denial of the wisdom of such things.
Let me put it this way. Eons ago, as a TA for an intro history course, I was grading essays. I came to one written by a junior majoring in electrical engineering. He spelled "cities" "sities." So yes, I suppose that somehow I'm "genuinely skeptical" that high-level engineering enlightenment has, by itself, so much as one bloody thing to do with "sorting out [the] major problems" of America under a dictatorship, and others desiring to see the world burn. I appreciate that the example provided is singular. My broader experience, however, is not.
Are we optimizing for elegance in dinner conversations or for ability to create value in therefore capture a slice of that value for yourself towards a good life? The above comment is the literal definition of decadence.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Pushkin’s verse is one of the most beautiful things in the world and high end literature is God’s gift to humanity. But there are choices, and there are consequences.
Knowledge of things like Ohm's law has solved more problems in the world than all philosophers put together. And if you think anything in this country presently qualifies as a "horror" it's you and not the STEM grads you talk about that needs to study more history.
An excerpt from "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" by C.P. Snow:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
How is that different than what the college-educated were indoctrinated with? Qatar poured $13 billion into US universities with an expected ROI that has finally showed up in force.
Strange that you bring this largely unrelated issue up on a thread that is about the _economic prospects_ of graduates rather than their political leanings?
Ok so it isn’t my imagination that the job market is terrible for software. The tidbit that there are more CS majors than all of the humanities is an insane factoid.
Keep in mind that for 80% of these kids the CS degree just proves to corporate American that they aren’t an idiot. They aren’t going to be working at OpenAI or SpaceX. Maybe something like a business analyst telling ChatGPT what code to write.
The universities largely tapped out on faculty positions half a century ago. The situation has actually gotten a lot worse with the shift to adjunct faculty rather than all full time faculty. This is made much worse by the worship of 'originality' and 'innovative and surprising' viewpoints, particularily in the liberal arts and social sciences. It is not easy to say something new while being reasonably accurate concerning something that has been studied for hundreds of years - say Chaucer or Shakespeare. I think this is a major factor for various intellectual fads in the academic sphere - critical theory, oppressor/oppressed victimization studies, equity, ...
As I understand it, the elite overproduction problem is primarily focused at the sphere of want to be politicians, policy makers, and the like. It doesn't seem to include leading business people, who typically have to start and grow their own businesses or rise through the ranks to lead the business (Note that they frequently will have a rising career across a number of companies.)
The job market is inherently unstable. The economy and fields go up and down and people make decisions about what to study based upon current information but show up on the job market years later - any time you have a time lag in a dynamical system you have oscillations. So you get booms and busts - and they will alway be with us. I remember the .com crash of the late 90's as well as the earlier collapse of the tech job market when the Soviet Union collapsed resulting in both major cuts in government funding and related business as well as an enormous influx of Soviet engineers and scientists. The tech job market was grim for a very very long time.
I told my kids to learn to program and get proficient at it, but not to be programmers. I told them to become domain experts who could use programming as a tool and told them their programming would probably become more scripting of more and more capable tools.
Yes, the number of administrators has grown enormously. As has the staff keeping up with all the reporting requirements that the government is so fond of.
Yeah, that's the worst part of bureaucracy. The bureaucrats create rules that require the companies they regulate to hire their own bureaucrats to comply with the rules. Cost multiplies 100x. e.g. every university has to have a "Title IX office." See also the chart in this post where the amount of lawyers has tripled since 1970.
Thanks for sharing these models/frameworks, Noah...intuitively they seem to explain much of what we've experienced during the past 20+ years, and the statistics/metrics you cite, as expected, seem to provide plausible empirical support. As I read through your post, however, I kept projecting much of your analysis (and the forces/drivers you apply) onto the nationalist movements and the growth of "right" here in the US -- especially the expansive growth of the Trump/MAGA movement and acceptance of its foundational model/values -- and around the world. In particular, the "revolution of rising expectations" would also seem to provide some substantial support for how the large non-elite, working class segments in society have also been driven by their own "happiness gap" (negative) which, in turn, causes them to succumb to Trump's false hope of "improving reality" by promising to make the future replicate the past (when expectations were original set)...and "defining deviancy down" as he moves forward. Of course, many other forces ("earthquakes") -- the impacts of technologies across society, the rise of powerful/focused global economic competition, etc. -- have been at work to disrupt and drive down their expectations, but the gap is both perceived and real. And Trump has been the perfect, timely grifter to sing the siren's song of "yesterday." All this is to say, can you -- using "revolution of rising expectations" theories and others -- construct a plausible/defensible theory for our national movement to the right? Hope you have safe, fun visit to Japan...Happy 4th! 🇺🇸😁🇺🇸
Saying “this time it’s a revolt of the college educated” in comparison to past upheavals, means a lot less when so many more people are college educated.
The rent is too damn high in more way than one. The rent sought on educations, land, and the imbalance of taxation on labor vs. capital. It’s not just expectation miss for “vague reasons” - it’s a system disadvantaging of young in favor of old.
Adjusting expectations downward — on steroids — is a perfect description of the GOP mindset.
This is a mindset that cuts medical care for an estimated 17 million people with dismissive justifications: “They’ll get over it”; “Oh for heaven’s sake, we’re all gonna die.” Was the explicit promise of retributive redistribution for the working class an electoral guise for planned upward redistribution?
There is no consideration of long term risks and rewards when adjusting expectations downwards; like the evidence that spending for children’s healthcare is more than repaid in increased future tax receipts from children whose lives were improved, versus those who lost health coverage.
Likewise that scientific R&D, apparently cut by about 50%, has been the cornerstone of economic growth and prosperity for the U.S. Examples abound. When private funding for a prospective human genome project did not materialize, gov’t began the investment that has led to estimates of returns of between $141 and $796 for every dollar invested.
I suspect that Trump doesn't care about anything that will only be a problem after he dies of old age. Hence, inaction on climate change, attacking universities, cutting funding for research...
In his apparent addled state I think he is unaware, even of bullet points for what’s inside the BBB. All he cares about is passing something -anything- with his signature beneath it. It’s all ego boosting performance. Well, perhaps he cares about hurting certain individuals or groups and he must have assurances from aides that so-and-so and such-and-such were gored.
It's almost like Noah and the other faux-raging moderate right-wingers like Klein, Thompson, and Yglesias regularly forget the word Inequality. The politics of inequality isn't allowed to get a lot of mileage and it's not in vogue, they refuse to go on and on about it. If we taxed the shit out of the fat cats(FDR ask for a 100% rate on the highest earners, the repub-corp-socialist thugs don't negotiate from a place of weakness), invested in R&D and other aspects of our civilization that are severely under-invested, the idea that there isn't enough good work to go around is far-fetched.
Stepping back to a higher level, since grad school (many moons ago) I have always been fascinated by the concept of how individual beliefs about the future affect investment decisions today. For example, I believe that tomorrow there will be even more demand for my product/skill so I had better invest today to reap the rewards tomorrow. Smashing this concept together with a description from a humanities professor about Tolkien being a medievalist. Essentially tomorrow will always be less than today. The concept is reflected in Tolkien’s works and Beowulf and it extends from the concept that in 1000 CE people were walking on bridges built by the Romans a 1000 years before that they didn’t know how to build in the current era. Essentially, the future will be less than today. From that expectation we got the dark ages and institutions that hoarded power. How much of today’s angst is not only about outcomes being less than expected, but expectations of the future being worse than today? Or another perspective, how much are people’s expectations of the future distorted by a romanticized view of the past?
Curious if you see this happening in China as well. Feel like there have already been lots of anecdotes (lay flat) of this in China but the demographics, education, and wage levels would make it even more acute.
Noah - your writing is beyond brilliant - and I would love to speak with you anytime. I am about to launch my 11th and for sure last startup - totally agree with your thoughts and opinions. I have 2 children and 3 grandchildren - and live in NYC. One of the major topics of my new business is global gender inequality - and this chart is something that I hope to working with as one of the handful of other projects to begin to make a difference
There is one gaping hole in this otherwise excellent overview of how we find ourselves in this "situation":
Parents.
As a parent of only 10 years, one of the biggest surprises to me, In spite of the realities of life laid out here, has been the persistence of the "participation trophy", or as I prefer to see view the problem: the avoidance of accurate assessment. When we as parents do not accurately assess our children, we deprive them of the ability to accurately assess themselves.
The very statement "overproduction of elites" is an oxymoron. One is elite because of their abilities is relation to others. They cannot be overproduced. What we have is simply the over production of people who *think* they are elite.
This inevitably leads these individuals to the expectation vs reality problem that causes unhappiness. The unhappiness persists because the individual lacks the ability to self asses. The problem they conclude is the system.
As I struggle to find the correct balance between encouragement and criticism of my children, I find my wife and I alone in our struggle. "I just want my kids to live in reality when they grow up", I explain to my wife as we discuss potential strategies to motivate without deluding.
As I often say, do no underestimate societies ability to normalize self destructive behaviors. The solution is not policy, it's Parenting.
Right. The term elite is meant to literally mean the best of the best. Education and practice only get you so far, but the real elites are rare like people who play professional sports at major league level . Maybe the term managerial class or professional class would be better .
As a newer parent, and person who is around lots of young parents I wish I could like this 100x. Also the social media algorithm doesn't encourage self assessment, people want maximum output with minimal input, and they want because they see other people attaining, they don't care if they aren't as talented. It's frustrating.
This does assume assessments are accurate, measure ability in a classroom in a way that can extrapolate outside of it, can tease apart ability from confounding factors like quality of opportunities and teaching.
Yes, assessments do exist with varying levels of accuracy across competencies.
But many exceptions exist of people who had underwhelming results in school yet went on to achieve more than those assessments would have predicted.
The lesson is we ought to strive. What else are you going to do anyway? Settle for that which is withing reach? Is that the road to contentment?
In any pursuit there is room for error, I do not dispute that and even acknowledge it in my comment in my "search for balance". However, what I am observing as a parent is the response to the concerns you list is not better assessment, but NO assessment.
Before getting to "settling for what's in reach" I am first advocating for teaching kids the skills to determine what is in reach, and what is required to achieve ones goals.
"Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss you'll still end up among the stars" we tell them. But many kids today dont even realize they never built the rocket.
> "Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss you'll still end up among the stars" we tell them
This we definitely should not tell. Shoot for the stars and you may end up among the moons :)
And I agree (with suitable caveat's around Goodhart's Law etc.) that we improve assessments.
I think I see the disconnect in your corporate drone comment. As an example, I know someone who was all in on this humanities/socialism track and the ended up being a sales trainer for a pharmaceutical company and loved it. There are still a ton of great jobs out there but a lot of kids just don’t know what’s available. And part of that is how common the idea of the corporate drone job is from people who don’t know what they are talking about. A lot of those jobs are fun and lucrative and way better than the prestige jobs that many focus on.
Also, a lot of these young people who don’t have the lives that met their expectations. Think they have some sort of God-given right to live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or any other big city with big expenses. There are lots of other places in America, Charlotte, Atlanta, Denver and Kansas City come to mind where someone could have a great job and a fulfilling life. Some of these people need to take a vacation to America and see what the rest of the country has to offer.
True but if you want to work in finance you probably are better off trying to make it in NYC. And if you have creative talent you probably would want to make it in Hollywood. The point of the book Abundance is to address the affordability crisis in these elite cities. You can’t replicate what the Hollywoods , Silicon Valley and Wall Street on Main Street 😎
Yeah, I never thought I would work in “business” or “tech,” but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for two decades now and mostly loving it. How I got there was completely contingent and an indirect result of the Great Recession and lowering expectations on “more intellectual” career tracks that were clearly dead-ended. Do I wish I could have wrote or taught college for a living like my parents? Maybe. They were great jobs in the late 20th Century! But I can’t and there are other options I have that they didn’t, so it’s fine.
I just had a dinner with old college friends who all studied humanities and then mostly went into finance. At the time, I was struck by how strange it was that people study International Relations or Art History and go into… finance? But also by how there were so few job options forwarded to us 20-year-olds back then. Everyone kind of needed to suddenly fit in five career tracks that were high-status in the mid-2000s. Today, it’d be heavier on tech than finance and law. But either way, college students just don’t know what’s out there and they aren’t helped to know at all by career services. And a lot of that is also down to the cynical pyramid scheme that universities are running, running on high-endowment budgets and then shunting their graduates into sure-thing, conventional, high-paid jobs so that they can turn around and give generously.
How does one go about getting a "corporate drone" job? Sometimes it seems like there's nothing but back-breaking warehouse work out there to be had.
I think people at the very least need to stop with the expectation of constantly rising home prices . If the ideas in the abundance agenda are successful then home prices will go down and society as a whole will be better off. People need to have other sources of long term wealth other than housing.
I’ve heard it said many times that housing cannot both be an investment and affordable and that’s pretty true.
But once you set up a whole economy and culture around “the housing ladder,” it’s really hard to undo it. Most middle-class Americans use their home as their primary store of wealth and it *has* to grow in value or else they won’t be able to afford their extremely expensive retirement, eldercare, and end-of-life costs.
I was rather brutal in my assessments to my children - and they ended up thanking me for it. I knew their IQ's and I saw how they did on Differential and Integral Calculus as well as their science and other classes while they were in high school.
Daughter - you would make a rather mediocre to average physcist, go into engineering. I told her to avoid Materials Science because of its close links to manufacturing, which is too much outsourced (I am a Physcist with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering - Materials Science). She ended up in Civil Engineering and had her MS at 21. She does bridge and tunnel seismic work.
Son - You would make a mediocre engineer but have good social and organizational skills, go into Business. He did Business - MIS and had his MS in MIS - Data Security at 21. His backup if he didn't have an aptitude for business was Eastern European studies with a minor in Russian and Army ROTC (this was approximately 8 years ago, I could see the priority and his mother is Ukrainian and he is somewhat familiar with Ukrainian.)
Also, I am old and they knew that they had to launch immediately, so their objectives were practical.
I'm super-envious of your children for having a well-educated father to advise them!
I was the first person in my family to go to university (and from a former mining village in northern England where there seems to be a rather toxic anti-intellectual culture) and I can see how thoroughly I was myself screwed over by my background (as well as my specific family situation)!
While the overall culture here in the States is anti-intellectual, the intensity of the anti-intellectualism varies. Areas that have high fractions of highly educated adults will have at least some intellectual pockets. Areas that have low fractions of highly educated adults will not. I had not known the state of affairs in England, but am not surprised.
What does not appear to be discussed though is the impact of human migration on local prosperity and culture. The mountain culture in the Appalachian mountains lasted until shortly after World War 1 and the building of better roads. Then it fell apart. I believe one of the reasons was the selective emigration of the most capable individuals and their families to other locations where they had better opportunities.
There was a recent paper in Nature that looked at polygenetic scores for intelligence in England and Estonia (I am sure chosen for reasons of relative ethnic homogeneity). The scores were lower in old mining regions in England and rural areas in Estonia. I assume due to migration for better opportunities.
Population has been evaporating from rural areas in the States for generations. On the average, I suspect that the emigrants were more capable and adaptable than the stayers. Over time this has a substantial impact on the culture, economic prospects, and I assume on the politics.
On a personal note, your children will have the advantage of an educated parent. It does make a difference.
My father is a professor with the best education that money can buy and he gave absolutely horrible advice. It comes down to the person and not the education, though I guess its more excusable without the education.
I feel like the rise of manosphere and tech right and this comp sci steuggling to get job are under discussed!
And what is happening I guess is like the arrival of “normies” to comp sci essentially pushed out the type of ppl we typically imagine to be CS (socially awkward and not taking showers) struggles more in the job market and that pushes them into this online right field.
good or bad, their verbal intelligence is relatively lower vis a vis their quantitative one or compared to those disgruntled humanity grads and their low social skill kinda shows up in the movement now I feel…
True.
Frustrated humanities majors who are overwhelmingly female go radical left wing.
Frustrated STEM majors who are overwhelmingly male go radical right wing.
With the first "frustrated STEM majors who are overwhelmingly male and go radical right wing" being Arab engineering students who became jihadists in the 1980s, after the oil price bust destroyed their job prospects.
https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-rise-and-fall-of-geek-empire.html
Yeah, that is def true…
I wonder how real that stereotype ever was. I work in tech, and to be a software engineer in a large company it absolutely requires quite a lot of collaboration, and therefore effective verbal and written communication. I haven't been in the industry that long, but I don't really understand how that would have been different 20 years ago.
The normies used to think that engineering was for losers (think 1980s "Revenge of the Nerds" jock culture), but as geek culture took over the mainstream, tech lost its stigma. So you ended up with a lot of normies going into tech for the money, and they were better at networking than the weirdos.
Yeah totally!
And I guess another aspect of this is tech companies were much smaller than they are now?
I envision a future of millions of STEM grads, three of whom will know something of American history, world history, political economy and philosophy, and one will have read two pages of a Shakespeare masterpiece.
I almost hate to say it as a humanities grad myself but consider those millions of humanities grads, three of whom know Ohm's law and one of whom knows one of Newton's laws of motion.
True enough. On the other hand, how often does Ohm's law come up in a dinner conversation, and, if it does, for how long can host and attending guests sustain it — or would want to? And though I'm no authority on Ohm's law, I'll venture that it has little application to a gathering attempting to sort out the present horrors of this country (and the world), and what can be done about it.
Also, true enough, but seriously how often does Shakespeare come up in dinner conversations? Or, maybe I just hang out with the wrong people. I'm a big fan myself.
But, also, knowledge of things like Ohm's law, the Standard Model, etc. are necessary, if not sufficient, to guarantee the kind of abundance necessary to turn the tide on the horrors which tend to revolve around the denial of the wisdom of such things.
Are you genuinely skeptical that understanding electrical engineering and physics can assist in sorting out major problems?
Let me put it this way. Eons ago, as a TA for an intro history course, I was grading essays. I came to one written by a junior majoring in electrical engineering. He spelled "cities" "sities." So yes, I suppose that somehow I'm "genuinely skeptical" that high-level engineering enlightenment has, by itself, so much as one bloody thing to do with "sorting out [the] major problems" of America under a dictatorship, and others desiring to see the world burn. I appreciate that the example provided is singular. My broader experience, however, is not.
Are we optimizing for elegance in dinner conversations or for ability to create value in therefore capture a slice of that value for yourself towards a good life? The above comment is the literal definition of decadence.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Pushkin’s verse is one of the most beautiful things in the world and high end literature is God’s gift to humanity. But there are choices, and there are consequences.
Knowledge of things like Ohm's law has solved more problems in the world than all philosophers put together. And if you think anything in this country presently qualifies as a "horror" it's you and not the STEM grads you talk about that needs to study more history.
An excerpt from "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" by C.P. Snow:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
How is that different than what the college-educated were indoctrinated with? Qatar poured $13 billion into US universities with an expected ROI that has finally showed up in force.
Strange that you bring this largely unrelated issue up on a thread that is about the _economic prospects_ of graduates rather than their political leanings?
(Are you Israeli by any chance?)
(((You mean?)))
Ok so it isn’t my imagination that the job market is terrible for software. The tidbit that there are more CS majors than all of the humanities is an insane factoid.
Keep in mind that for 80% of these kids the CS degree just proves to corporate American that they aren’t an idiot. They aren’t going to be working at OpenAI or SpaceX. Maybe something like a business analyst telling ChatGPT what code to write.
"a fun post that I wrote back in 2022"
If this is your idea of a "fun post," I'd like to hear about the fun funerals you've been to recently.
The universities largely tapped out on faculty positions half a century ago. The situation has actually gotten a lot worse with the shift to adjunct faculty rather than all full time faculty. This is made much worse by the worship of 'originality' and 'innovative and surprising' viewpoints, particularily in the liberal arts and social sciences. It is not easy to say something new while being reasonably accurate concerning something that has been studied for hundreds of years - say Chaucer or Shakespeare. I think this is a major factor for various intellectual fads in the academic sphere - critical theory, oppressor/oppressed victimization studies, equity, ...
As I understand it, the elite overproduction problem is primarily focused at the sphere of want to be politicians, policy makers, and the like. It doesn't seem to include leading business people, who typically have to start and grow their own businesses or rise through the ranks to lead the business (Note that they frequently will have a rising career across a number of companies.)
The job market is inherently unstable. The economy and fields go up and down and people make decisions about what to study based upon current information but show up on the job market years later - any time you have a time lag in a dynamical system you have oscillations. So you get booms and busts - and they will alway be with us. I remember the .com crash of the late 90's as well as the earlier collapse of the tech job market when the Soviet Union collapsed resulting in both major cuts in government funding and related business as well as an enormous influx of Soviet engineers and scientists. The tech job market was grim for a very very long time.
I told my kids to learn to program and get proficient at it, but not to be programmers. I told them to become domain experts who could use programming as a tool and told them their programming would probably become more scripting of more and more capable tools.
Too bad they didn't tap out on administrators instead
Yes, the number of administrators has grown enormously. As has the staff keeping up with all the reporting requirements that the government is so fond of.
Yeah, that's the worst part of bureaucracy. The bureaucrats create rules that require the companies they regulate to hire their own bureaucrats to comply with the rules. Cost multiplies 100x. e.g. every university has to have a "Title IX office." See also the chart in this post where the amount of lawyers has tripled since 1970.
Thanks for sharing these models/frameworks, Noah...intuitively they seem to explain much of what we've experienced during the past 20+ years, and the statistics/metrics you cite, as expected, seem to provide plausible empirical support. As I read through your post, however, I kept projecting much of your analysis (and the forces/drivers you apply) onto the nationalist movements and the growth of "right" here in the US -- especially the expansive growth of the Trump/MAGA movement and acceptance of its foundational model/values -- and around the world. In particular, the "revolution of rising expectations" would also seem to provide some substantial support for how the large non-elite, working class segments in society have also been driven by their own "happiness gap" (negative) which, in turn, causes them to succumb to Trump's false hope of "improving reality" by promising to make the future replicate the past (when expectations were original set)...and "defining deviancy down" as he moves forward. Of course, many other forces ("earthquakes") -- the impacts of technologies across society, the rise of powerful/focused global economic competition, etc. -- have been at work to disrupt and drive down their expectations, but the gap is both perceived and real. And Trump has been the perfect, timely grifter to sing the siren's song of "yesterday." All this is to say, can you -- using "revolution of rising expectations" theories and others -- construct a plausible/defensible theory for our national movement to the right? Hope you have safe, fun visit to Japan...Happy 4th! 🇺🇸😁🇺🇸
Saying “this time it’s a revolt of the college educated” in comparison to past upheavals, means a lot less when so many more people are college educated.
The rent is too damn high in more way than one. The rent sought on educations, land, and the imbalance of taxation on labor vs. capital. It’s not just expectation miss for “vague reasons” - it’s a system disadvantaging of young in favor of old.
Nothing shows why we can't get anything done in this country better than that graph showing that the amount of lawyers tripled in the last 50 years.
Adjusting expectations downward — on steroids — is a perfect description of the GOP mindset.
This is a mindset that cuts medical care for an estimated 17 million people with dismissive justifications: “They’ll get over it”; “Oh for heaven’s sake, we’re all gonna die.” Was the explicit promise of retributive redistribution for the working class an electoral guise for planned upward redistribution?
There is no consideration of long term risks and rewards when adjusting expectations downwards; like the evidence that spending for children’s healthcare is more than repaid in increased future tax receipts from children whose lives were improved, versus those who lost health coverage.
Likewise that scientific R&D, apparently cut by about 50%, has been the cornerstone of economic growth and prosperity for the U.S. Examples abound. When private funding for a prospective human genome project did not materialize, gov’t began the investment that has led to estimates of returns of between $141 and $796 for every dollar invested.
I suspect that Trump doesn't care about anything that will only be a problem after he dies of old age. Hence, inaction on climate change, attacking universities, cutting funding for research...
In his apparent addled state I think he is unaware, even of bullet points for what’s inside the BBB. All he cares about is passing something -anything- with his signature beneath it. It’s all ego boosting performance. Well, perhaps he cares about hurting certain individuals or groups and he must have assurances from aides that so-and-so and such-and-such were gored.
It's almost like Noah and the other faux-raging moderate right-wingers like Klein, Thompson, and Yglesias regularly forget the word Inequality. The politics of inequality isn't allowed to get a lot of mileage and it's not in vogue, they refuse to go on and on about it. If we taxed the shit out of the fat cats(FDR ask for a 100% rate on the highest earners, the repub-corp-socialist thugs don't negotiate from a place of weakness), invested in R&D and other aspects of our civilization that are severely under-invested, the idea that there isn't enough good work to go around is far-fetched.
Stepping back to a higher level, since grad school (many moons ago) I have always been fascinated by the concept of how individual beliefs about the future affect investment decisions today. For example, I believe that tomorrow there will be even more demand for my product/skill so I had better invest today to reap the rewards tomorrow. Smashing this concept together with a description from a humanities professor about Tolkien being a medievalist. Essentially tomorrow will always be less than today. The concept is reflected in Tolkien’s works and Beowulf and it extends from the concept that in 1000 CE people were walking on bridges built by the Romans a 1000 years before that they didn’t know how to build in the current era. Essentially, the future will be less than today. From that expectation we got the dark ages and institutions that hoarded power. How much of today’s angst is not only about outcomes being less than expected, but expectations of the future being worse than today? Or another perspective, how much are people’s expectations of the future distorted by a romanticized view of the past?
Curious if you see this happening in China as well. Feel like there have already been lots of anecdotes (lay flat) of this in China but the demographics, education, and wage levels would make it even more acute.
Noah - your writing is beyond brilliant - and I would love to speak with you anytime. I am about to launch my 11th and for sure last startup - totally agree with your thoughts and opinions. I have 2 children and 3 grandchildren - and live in NYC. One of the major topics of my new business is global gender inequality - and this chart is something that I hope to working with as one of the handful of other projects to begin to make a difference