Dear Noah, this article is well-argued and thoughtful.
If you wanted to bring a bit more darkness to the argument, you can look at the literature on terrorist suicide bombers.
Their backgrounds are often disaffected, medium-high educational attainment, frustrated college-aged men. There has been much research about these political assailants which echoes a number of the themes you raise here.
Apologies for bringing a much more bleak set of data to the conservation, but might be worth looking into and reflecting upon given what you’ve put forward here.
The issue, as any conversation with former humanities majors over 50 will tell you, is that you're not at the height of your humanities superpowers until you're at least 40. Also it used to help to live in a city with rent controlled apartments, an acceptance of genteel poverty, and utilities bills that didn't include laptops, internet, cell phones, and streaming subscriptions.
This is exactly right. Not sure I can add anything.
I was talking to a few of my fellow Gen-Xers the other day about kids and college and expectations. None of us remember being told "you can do anything if you try hard enough". even "college is the only way" wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now.
I have raised 9 kids between the ages of 9 and 25. It's amazing how often I see schools pedaling this story that there are no limits. Anyone can do anything of they just try hard enough.
For those who have been around, we know this is BS. Human beings are imperfect.
These millennials have been raised with these expectations (at least a certain college educated percentage of them have been)... well simple fact is their are only so many writers, so many Architects and so many lawyers. Quite frankly, to many people overestimate their own abilities and where they stand on the pecking order.
I think the expectations part is key. For the far left (the people writing 'kill landlords' and 'rent is theft' and 'abolish the United States' in my neighborhood parks), it seems that nothing is good enough. Tragically, there is no recognition of how good things are: every single one of them has access to a healthy diet, emergency shelter if needed, life-saving healthcare, clean air, public transportation, physical security (the defund movement has successfully dented that to some degree, unfortunately), K-12 education, libraries, weather forecasts, telecommunications, free vaccines, and much more. But they'll happily tell you that America is a failed state, we're in 'late-stage capitalism', etc. etc. If there was evidence that communist or socialist revolutions actually improved things or were sustainable in any way, I'd be all for it. But our best examples are Stalin and Mao, and leftists are willing to excuse body counts in the millions. (not making things up: https://www.koin.com/news/elections/iannarones-tweet-of-violent-despots-stirs-portland-mayors-race/ )
So maybe instead of lowering expectations, this is better solved by educating people about how privileged even the worst off American with a college degree actually is. I've mostly mentioned material things, but I also think the left is insufficiently appreciative of political privileges, like being able to graffiti public spaces with things like "Abolish the United States" and "Kill KKKops" and not end up in a gulag.
I guess the biggest problem with elite overproduction theory is that a bunch of humanities majors should know better. Shouldn't someone steeped in English literature and history know enough, and be enlightened enough, to find satisfaction with their very high standards of living? Even in the 'worst case' scenario of a job at Starbucks, its still a pretty good job all things considered (compare to e.g. mining in the developing world, or sweat shop labor).
It is mildly surprising that the expectations problem isn't automatically limited by the education associated with a humanities major.
In your adumbration of Turchin's theory you stress the happiness element - people didn't land where they expected. People often note a moral aspect as well that young people felt they had been assured something, played their part (and paid their share), but did not get the return promised. I'd like to tack on a few consequences: distrust, humiliation, and confusion.
The borrowed unicorn graph reminds me of the success sequence: go to college, study hard, get a good job, buy a house, get married, then think about kids. Advice of that pattern is actually pretty good, but I also recall from my own youth how assured it was. This is how America works; Go to school, study hard, work hard, and you will get ahead.
It's flatly bizarre to hear people mock that as though young people made it up from whole cloth. It was everywhere. No Child Left Behind rebuilt American public education around it! The whole point was to train people in the measurable, quantifiable skills that would set them on the path to success. Why did we go through all of the testing, measuring, pressuring, and paying for school if people didn't think it worked? At least for me at the time, the Great Recession felt like a thesis long and widely held had been refuted. Everyone thought they knew how America worked and then they didn't.
As an aside: Looking back on that time and my own reactions, it is difficult to disentangle the consequences of the Great Recession and the consequences of Iraq. Finding out that the government truly had lied to start a war, bungled it badly, and setup a network of torture sites, then... nothing. It's hard to express how this too felt like a refutation - empirical proof that our process of public deliberation was farcical. People cooked up nonsense, engaged in true villainy, and seemed to go on being treated as serious and decent people. What does "serious and decent" mean if it includes torturers but excludes those who told the truth?
I imagine all would have been forgiven if other mechanisms for earning social recognition were readily available. As you note, the tenure track was largely blocked in academia, what remained of the press had publicly shit its pants pretending there was a justification for the Iraq War, and the political leadership was more than a little grey around the temples. Whether fair or not, one got the impression that an earlier generation had passed through a functioning social system where participation really did pay off. For them, going to college, getting a unionized job, participating in politics, and thinking big thoughts in the university had all been reasonably good investments as evidenced by the years of post-war abundance. They had achieved enormous gains in material wealth, but also taken leading positions all across society. Now it was difficult to get ahead and those who had earned such a grand premium in yesteryear refused to give ground on any front. They had achieved the American Dream and they were going to die holding onto it!
(In terms of political impact and social cache, I think Gen X may actually be the one slighted the most. Senility will gradually open more spots to the benefit of millennial and younger political entrepreneurs and the press has already gotten much younger. Millennials have clearly effected some changes on social mores, which allow them influence over other, less accessible social domains.)
If the old social mechanisms didn't let you get ahead the way they used to and the theory of success wasn't quite accurate, then what is going on? College education, home ownership, and, for a time, "decent jobs" did provide a lot of social mobility in the United States. They really did lift people into the middle class or higher and it was perfectly reasonable to expect that hard work would result in you living better, making more money, and having more options than your parents. America built a whole set of moral imperatives, practical advice, and causal claims around those facts. And now the facts have changed. So what is one supposed to expect? How is one supposed to interpret wealth inequality, changes in social status, and the general prudence of a life plan? If your broad expectations are nonsense, then that is indeed angering but it is also bewildering.
One final aside: None of this implies that the explanations on offer by young socialists are any more accurate than the ones they are meant to replace. That one theory falters does not imply that a stylistic opposite is therefore true. I suspect the term "socialism" was attractive because it is stylistically distinguished from trust in the market as a social arbiter, because it expresses estrangement from the American mainstream, and because it was left unclaimed at the moment. By adopting that label, one could summarily communicate: "I do not have trust that working hard will give me a fair and decent living, I don't feel like I can exercise my will through existing social/political bodies, and I want to clearly display my distrust of the people in charge (even if they claim to think government can help me." The goal then is not really to build socialism or bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The goal is to (1) acknowledge a change of facts in the life expectations for Americans, (2) motivate changes to government and social policies to accommodate those new facts, and (3) make oneself feel efficacious and accomplished.
When did Humanities become an end in themselves instead as the process whereby, we gain knowledge and the capacity to reason? In Antiquity aristocratic elites were taught the Greek Classics, rhetoric, philosophy and how to write and debate effectively not as a means of social mobility. Aristocratic elites' careers were in the military, in the management of their latifundia and in influence peddling. I have a humanities degree, but at the same time completed my premedical studies. I went to Med School (was accepted in 6!), did my specialty, subspecialty, and an MBA. Now i am retired and enjoying rereading the classics and poetry in two languages. For me, the Humanities was a means to gain understanding of my environment; Medicine was my service to the community and my way of making a living. I think that having a background in the Humanities made me a better human and physician.
One idea that absolutely needs to be knocked out of the thick skulls of faculty and admin is that university is there for some fuzzy nonsense like "educated citizenship" or "molding future leaders". Here's some examples (first one is frankly a caricature of a prof who's gotten high on his farts and looks down on trade school)
These people are fine with enriching themselves at public expense while not producing much of value. A good chunk of the artsy majors Noah writes about don't teach much of value. All they do is produce sullen protestors (which we don't need) instead of innovative workers (which we absolutely do need). The university model needs to be reoriented so that the ethos is research + training the workforce. Not whatever philosophical bullshit the bloat thinks.
I don't usually comment, but this time I will, because I believe I've been experiencing what Noah said on my own skin, apologies if I'll be a bit loo long in my comment.
I've always loved History as a subject (and I still do), when I was 13 I was already reading biographies of Hannibal and Julius Cesar, and in High School I even had my history teacher pulling me out of the religion hour (in Italy even public school have an hour of Catholic religion every week) so that I could go to another class and teach other students of my own age how medieval armies worked, so it was only natural that in 2007 I decided to go to college to study history.
But while studying the Great Recession happened, and it didn't took me much to understand that I was completely screwed.
If you think that History majors have it hard in the US, I let you imagine how it's in Italy, where unemployment is (and was) far higher.
So once I finished my bachelor in history I did something extremely uncommon for Italy, and decided to restart from square one, doing a bachelor in Economics, and, after that, a Master in Quantitative Finance, and although it was very hard moving from humanities to something a lot more technical (yes, I did have to learn how to code!) my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.
Almost all my mates that graduated in History ended up being unemployed or underemployed, with meager salaries and unstable jobs, while now I'm earning four or five times their salary, and my biggest problem is that I'm changing job too often, because there's always another company offering me a higher pay that the one I'm making.
So I can see very well why people would abandon the Humanities for more "practical" career paths, because that's in fact what I did in my own life.
There needs to be a ban on use of the word "elites" for very large groups of people. If you want to use it to describe billionaires (or just very wealthy folks) or Nobel Prize winners okay. All other usage should stop.
"how do we get out of this mess? If happiness equals reality minus expectations, simple math tells us that we basically have two options for pacifying our educated youth — improve reality, or reduce expectations."
At the risk of vastly oversimplifying the problem, the happiness literature has a pretty clear suggestion -- when people are unhappy because they expected something better the easiest way to address that is to engage in an activity to help somebody else.
I don't want to blame the victims here ("people would be happier if they were just better at being of service") but to suggest that another diagnosis that could explain the same symptoms is a crisis of lack of community -- people spend more time stewing over the ways in which life disappoints because they have less connection to their peers and their community.
I found this argument very persuasive and interesting!
One thing that has always struck me as a millenial transplant from Japan is constant outrage of my generation here. I understood this as a byproduct of incentive structure on social media but after I read this post, I increasingly start to think the causal direction might be the other way around.
Also, I personallly found interesting that gen X in Japan didn't really revolt although they faced same kinda fate (economy collapsed and their struggle in finding jobs in postraduate). My weak hypotheses for now are
(i) we had a history of socialism (or communism) movement (which involved a lot of "elite" college students) going extreme and then collapsing in 70s
(ii) Aum Shinrikyo shenanigans (which also involved a lot of "elite" college graduates) and collapsed
This reads like a misunderstanding of Turchin's thesis. His definition of the elite has little or nothing to do with college degrees. His definition is more about the number of people who have f--k you money or the number of millionaires or billionaires. The elite are the ruling class, those actively ruling and those who would like to be. Our politicians are not necessarily members of the elite themselves. They may be, but the elite is their big donors and supporters and the people and the companies they own and run who hire lobbyists and fund "think tanks" and the like.
Consider Turchin's analysis of ancient Rome. Rome had a senatorial class, an equestrian class and a plebian class. The elite competition was largely within the senatorial class though equestrians might strive for promotion. A senator was expected to have a certain net worth to maintain his position, but competition was fierce even within the senatorial class. There was surely competition for wealth, but the real elite competition was for honors, government appointments, consuls and proconsuls and other leadership roles.
Turchin notes that after the Punic Wars, the elite to non-elite ratio was down, because so many had died in the war. That made it relatively easy to get honors, especially as Roman power and influence were growing. If you were an equestrian, this was a good time to buy your way into the senatorial class. The elite was more open. As the elite to non-elite ratio rose, the competition for position among the elite got tougher and the cost of this competition was borne by the general population. Eventually, the Republic collapsed.
You can read Turchin for more on how this plays out, and then plays out again and again and again.
Most college graduates are not members of the elite. Getting a degree doesn't get one into the elite. An elite family may want to get their children into a prestigious institution. A child at Stanford or Harvard is one of those many honors one competes for. The number of legacy admits or outright purchased slots might make it harder for non-elite children to get into the school, but that is just collateral damage from elite competition. Odds are, a child of the elite will do just fine financially whether admitted to a brand name college or they just goof off playing video games. That's not what elite competition is about.
We may or may not be producing too many college graduates or too many or too few college graduates in certain fields, but this has nothing to do having too many members of the elite. You'd do better to look at our economic policies that have been creating so many millionaires and billionaires. Look at our lax policies regarding corporations that allow unlimited, untaxed wealth to be retained indefinitely. Those are the monsters about whose feet the non-elite have to scramble to avoid getting crushed.
I think reducing expectations is probably our best bet here. If the government were to embark on a punitive campaign of progressively making life worse for young people they’d have no reason to expect life to get better.
Raise student loan interest rates to the point that credit card interest looks like a steal. Continue to hike the fed funds rate until we’re back at Great Recession levels of unemployment. Do to primary school teaching jobs what we’ve done to tenure track positions at universities. Give massive tax breaks for every job that a company manages to offshore.
There should be no expectation that getting an education is going to be a useful endeavor, and we should instead instill the opposite sentiment. The ideal situation is one where after filling out hundreds of applications out best and brightest should be extremely happy just to land a position working the midnight counter at a rural gas station.
If we want to maximize the Happiness side of the equation we need to be willing to commit to a program of decimating expectations, the labor force, and human capital for decades.
On a slightly more serious note, we have emphasized satisfaction at our jobs far too much. Given that a vanishingly small number of us will ever do something that is interesting, intrinsically rewarding, and financially lucrative, I’m not disappointed in the (stupidly named) “quiet quitting” phenomenon. This tells me that folks are reorienting their lives and placing their personal lives and interests first. This is a good thing! People should be as mercenary as their employers have been for decades, and if that means clawing back some meaning into your life that a job was never going to give you, good!
This is an excellent post. However, from personal experience things are not that bleak. I received my PhD in chemistry in 1975 and after two post- doctoral stints moved out of research and into the biopharma industry where I had a great 27 year career in drug regulator affairs. I was a project manager on a multi- million dollar drug safety project which is today doing great things. As Noah himself knows there is life beyond academia.
One of my hires who had a PhD and worked for me for five years found she enjoyed photography and is now a I highly respected event photographer who has shot at New York fashion week.
I have mentored and counseled dozens of young people. My advice has always been to learn how to write and communicate well, present yourself and all will fall into place. My first job after working as a senior fellow at NIH came partly from some book reviews I wrote for the Ithaca Journal when I was at Cornell!!
Fidel Castro got a law degree. But lawyers were neither well-paid, nor highly respected in 1950s Cuba. Fidel had been a relatively pampered son of a prosperous farmer in the hinterlands and his maid, both uneducated. Fidel expected life to continue to indulge and acclaim him.
He was brutally dissuaded from his adolescent hubris at the University of Havana when he fell in love with the prettiest girl on campus: Mirta Diaz-Balart, of the wealthy Havana Diaz-Balart's. Her family loathed his "guajiro" background (and a maid for a mother!). Mirta was eventually allowed to marry Fidel, but the Diaz-Balart clan looked down on the eloquent, but unsophisticated, untraveled and comparatively "poor" Fidel.
He could not afford to give Mirta an upper-middle-class life in Havana. His pride and foiled expectations led to frustration. His legal education led him to Marx.
He took to the hills of Oriente, near his dad's farm, with a bunch of "over educated for expectations" "fighters". Friends he had met at the University of Havana. All had had their social climbing dreams frustrated by lack of jobs paying enough to live well in Havana.
None could even shoot straight; none had military training. But, they were pissed at the limited avenues for economic mobility and social acceptance. They were doctors (Che) and lawyers. Their frustrated rage was their ammo.
Fast forward a few years and they've taken over the country and the Diaz-Balart's were all chased out of the island.
(We are now the beneficiaries of the Diaz-Balart's enduring, "high life" presence -- you can see them on MSNBC and in Congress).
I think "expectations" is a little bit misleading term here:
I could have expectations about a dinner or a a summer vacation, but in the scenario above it means much more than that. When I'm getting a college degree and think about my future career it becomes part of my identity and it is way more powerful. I wouldn't be able to just "lower" the expectations, it is actually requires restructuring my identity and at this point it is getting much easier to blame someone else (globalists, immigrants, capitalists, freemasons, etc).
Dear Noah, this article is well-argued and thoughtful.
If you wanted to bring a bit more darkness to the argument, you can look at the literature on terrorist suicide bombers.
Their backgrounds are often disaffected, medium-high educational attainment, frustrated college-aged men. There has been much research about these political assailants which echoes a number of the themes you raise here.
Apologies for bringing a much more bleak set of data to the conservation, but might be worth looking into and reflecting upon given what you’ve put forward here.
The issue, as any conversation with former humanities majors over 50 will tell you, is that you're not at the height of your humanities superpowers until you're at least 40. Also it used to help to live in a city with rent controlled apartments, an acceptance of genteel poverty, and utilities bills that didn't include laptops, internet, cell phones, and streaming subscriptions.
This is exactly right. Not sure I can add anything.
I was talking to a few of my fellow Gen-Xers the other day about kids and college and expectations. None of us remember being told "you can do anything if you try hard enough". even "college is the only way" wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now.
I have raised 9 kids between the ages of 9 and 25. It's amazing how often I see schools pedaling this story that there are no limits. Anyone can do anything of they just try hard enough.
For those who have been around, we know this is BS. Human beings are imperfect.
These millennials have been raised with these expectations (at least a certain college educated percentage of them have been)... well simple fact is their are only so many writers, so many Architects and so many lawyers. Quite frankly, to many people overestimate their own abilities and where they stand on the pecking order.
Anyway... great article.
I think the expectations part is key. For the far left (the people writing 'kill landlords' and 'rent is theft' and 'abolish the United States' in my neighborhood parks), it seems that nothing is good enough. Tragically, there is no recognition of how good things are: every single one of them has access to a healthy diet, emergency shelter if needed, life-saving healthcare, clean air, public transportation, physical security (the defund movement has successfully dented that to some degree, unfortunately), K-12 education, libraries, weather forecasts, telecommunications, free vaccines, and much more. But they'll happily tell you that America is a failed state, we're in 'late-stage capitalism', etc. etc. If there was evidence that communist or socialist revolutions actually improved things or were sustainable in any way, I'd be all for it. But our best examples are Stalin and Mao, and leftists are willing to excuse body counts in the millions. (not making things up: https://www.koin.com/news/elections/iannarones-tweet-of-violent-despots-stirs-portland-mayors-race/ )
So maybe instead of lowering expectations, this is better solved by educating people about how privileged even the worst off American with a college degree actually is. I've mostly mentioned material things, but I also think the left is insufficiently appreciative of political privileges, like being able to graffiti public spaces with things like "Abolish the United States" and "Kill KKKops" and not end up in a gulag.
I guess the biggest problem with elite overproduction theory is that a bunch of humanities majors should know better. Shouldn't someone steeped in English literature and history know enough, and be enlightened enough, to find satisfaction with their very high standards of living? Even in the 'worst case' scenario of a job at Starbucks, its still a pretty good job all things considered (compare to e.g. mining in the developing world, or sweat shop labor).
It is mildly surprising that the expectations problem isn't automatically limited by the education associated with a humanities major.
In your adumbration of Turchin's theory you stress the happiness element - people didn't land where they expected. People often note a moral aspect as well that young people felt they had been assured something, played their part (and paid their share), but did not get the return promised. I'd like to tack on a few consequences: distrust, humiliation, and confusion.
The borrowed unicorn graph reminds me of the success sequence: go to college, study hard, get a good job, buy a house, get married, then think about kids. Advice of that pattern is actually pretty good, but I also recall from my own youth how assured it was. This is how America works; Go to school, study hard, work hard, and you will get ahead.
It's flatly bizarre to hear people mock that as though young people made it up from whole cloth. It was everywhere. No Child Left Behind rebuilt American public education around it! The whole point was to train people in the measurable, quantifiable skills that would set them on the path to success. Why did we go through all of the testing, measuring, pressuring, and paying for school if people didn't think it worked? At least for me at the time, the Great Recession felt like a thesis long and widely held had been refuted. Everyone thought they knew how America worked and then they didn't.
As an aside: Looking back on that time and my own reactions, it is difficult to disentangle the consequences of the Great Recession and the consequences of Iraq. Finding out that the government truly had lied to start a war, bungled it badly, and setup a network of torture sites, then... nothing. It's hard to express how this too felt like a refutation - empirical proof that our process of public deliberation was farcical. People cooked up nonsense, engaged in true villainy, and seemed to go on being treated as serious and decent people. What does "serious and decent" mean if it includes torturers but excludes those who told the truth?
I imagine all would have been forgiven if other mechanisms for earning social recognition were readily available. As you note, the tenure track was largely blocked in academia, what remained of the press had publicly shit its pants pretending there was a justification for the Iraq War, and the political leadership was more than a little grey around the temples. Whether fair or not, one got the impression that an earlier generation had passed through a functioning social system where participation really did pay off. For them, going to college, getting a unionized job, participating in politics, and thinking big thoughts in the university had all been reasonably good investments as evidenced by the years of post-war abundance. They had achieved enormous gains in material wealth, but also taken leading positions all across society. Now it was difficult to get ahead and those who had earned such a grand premium in yesteryear refused to give ground on any front. They had achieved the American Dream and they were going to die holding onto it!
(In terms of political impact and social cache, I think Gen X may actually be the one slighted the most. Senility will gradually open more spots to the benefit of millennial and younger political entrepreneurs and the press has already gotten much younger. Millennials have clearly effected some changes on social mores, which allow them influence over other, less accessible social domains.)
If the old social mechanisms didn't let you get ahead the way they used to and the theory of success wasn't quite accurate, then what is going on? College education, home ownership, and, for a time, "decent jobs" did provide a lot of social mobility in the United States. They really did lift people into the middle class or higher and it was perfectly reasonable to expect that hard work would result in you living better, making more money, and having more options than your parents. America built a whole set of moral imperatives, practical advice, and causal claims around those facts. And now the facts have changed. So what is one supposed to expect? How is one supposed to interpret wealth inequality, changes in social status, and the general prudence of a life plan? If your broad expectations are nonsense, then that is indeed angering but it is also bewildering.
One final aside: None of this implies that the explanations on offer by young socialists are any more accurate than the ones they are meant to replace. That one theory falters does not imply that a stylistic opposite is therefore true. I suspect the term "socialism" was attractive because it is stylistically distinguished from trust in the market as a social arbiter, because it expresses estrangement from the American mainstream, and because it was left unclaimed at the moment. By adopting that label, one could summarily communicate: "I do not have trust that working hard will give me a fair and decent living, I don't feel like I can exercise my will through existing social/political bodies, and I want to clearly display my distrust of the people in charge (even if they claim to think government can help me." The goal then is not really to build socialism or bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The goal is to (1) acknowledge a change of facts in the life expectations for Americans, (2) motivate changes to government and social policies to accommodate those new facts, and (3) make oneself feel efficacious and accomplished.
When did Humanities become an end in themselves instead as the process whereby, we gain knowledge and the capacity to reason? In Antiquity aristocratic elites were taught the Greek Classics, rhetoric, philosophy and how to write and debate effectively not as a means of social mobility. Aristocratic elites' careers were in the military, in the management of their latifundia and in influence peddling. I have a humanities degree, but at the same time completed my premedical studies. I went to Med School (was accepted in 6!), did my specialty, subspecialty, and an MBA. Now i am retired and enjoying rereading the classics and poetry in two languages. For me, the Humanities was a means to gain understanding of my environment; Medicine was my service to the community and my way of making a living. I think that having a background in the Humanities made me a better human and physician.
One idea that absolutely needs to be knocked out of the thick skulls of faculty and admin is that university is there for some fuzzy nonsense like "educated citizenship" or "molding future leaders". Here's some examples (first one is frankly a caricature of a prof who's gotten high on his farts and looks down on trade school)
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/21/the-case-against-law-school/the-right-preparation-for-lawyer-citizens
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/21/the-case-against-law-school/a-law-degree-is-priceless
These people are fine with enriching themselves at public expense while not producing much of value. A good chunk of the artsy majors Noah writes about don't teach much of value. All they do is produce sullen protestors (which we don't need) instead of innovative workers (which we absolutely do need). The university model needs to be reoriented so that the ethos is research + training the workforce. Not whatever philosophical bullshit the bloat thinks.
I don't usually comment, but this time I will, because I believe I've been experiencing what Noah said on my own skin, apologies if I'll be a bit loo long in my comment.
I've always loved History as a subject (and I still do), when I was 13 I was already reading biographies of Hannibal and Julius Cesar, and in High School I even had my history teacher pulling me out of the religion hour (in Italy even public school have an hour of Catholic religion every week) so that I could go to another class and teach other students of my own age how medieval armies worked, so it was only natural that in 2007 I decided to go to college to study history.
But while studying the Great Recession happened, and it didn't took me much to understand that I was completely screwed.
If you think that History majors have it hard in the US, I let you imagine how it's in Italy, where unemployment is (and was) far higher.
So once I finished my bachelor in history I did something extremely uncommon for Italy, and decided to restart from square one, doing a bachelor in Economics, and, after that, a Master in Quantitative Finance, and although it was very hard moving from humanities to something a lot more technical (yes, I did have to learn how to code!) my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.
Almost all my mates that graduated in History ended up being unemployed or underemployed, with meager salaries and unstable jobs, while now I'm earning four or five times their salary, and my biggest problem is that I'm changing job too often, because there's always another company offering me a higher pay that the one I'm making.
So I can see very well why people would abandon the Humanities for more "practical" career paths, because that's in fact what I did in my own life.
I hope I haven't bored you.
There needs to be a ban on use of the word "elites" for very large groups of people. If you want to use it to describe billionaires (or just very wealthy folks) or Nobel Prize winners okay. All other usage should stop.
"how do we get out of this mess? If happiness equals reality minus expectations, simple math tells us that we basically have two options for pacifying our educated youth — improve reality, or reduce expectations."
At the risk of vastly oversimplifying the problem, the happiness literature has a pretty clear suggestion -- when people are unhappy because they expected something better the easiest way to address that is to engage in an activity to help somebody else.
I don't want to blame the victims here ("people would be happier if they were just better at being of service") but to suggest that another diagnosis that could explain the same symptoms is a crisis of lack of community -- people spend more time stewing over the ways in which life disappoints because they have less connection to their peers and their community.
So perhaps the solution is more hot pot.
I found this argument very persuasive and interesting!
One thing that has always struck me as a millenial transplant from Japan is constant outrage of my generation here. I understood this as a byproduct of incentive structure on social media but after I read this post, I increasingly start to think the causal direction might be the other way around.
Also, I personallly found interesting that gen X in Japan didn't really revolt although they faced same kinda fate (economy collapsed and their struggle in finding jobs in postraduate). My weak hypotheses for now are
(i) we had a history of socialism (or communism) movement (which involved a lot of "elite" college students) going extreme and then collapsing in 70s
(ii) Aum Shinrikyo shenanigans (which also involved a lot of "elite" college graduates) and collapsed
This reads like a misunderstanding of Turchin's thesis. His definition of the elite has little or nothing to do with college degrees. His definition is more about the number of people who have f--k you money or the number of millionaires or billionaires. The elite are the ruling class, those actively ruling and those who would like to be. Our politicians are not necessarily members of the elite themselves. They may be, but the elite is their big donors and supporters and the people and the companies they own and run who hire lobbyists and fund "think tanks" and the like.
Consider Turchin's analysis of ancient Rome. Rome had a senatorial class, an equestrian class and a plebian class. The elite competition was largely within the senatorial class though equestrians might strive for promotion. A senator was expected to have a certain net worth to maintain his position, but competition was fierce even within the senatorial class. There was surely competition for wealth, but the real elite competition was for honors, government appointments, consuls and proconsuls and other leadership roles.
Turchin notes that after the Punic Wars, the elite to non-elite ratio was down, because so many had died in the war. That made it relatively easy to get honors, especially as Roman power and influence were growing. If you were an equestrian, this was a good time to buy your way into the senatorial class. The elite was more open. As the elite to non-elite ratio rose, the competition for position among the elite got tougher and the cost of this competition was borne by the general population. Eventually, the Republic collapsed.
You can read Turchin for more on how this plays out, and then plays out again and again and again.
Most college graduates are not members of the elite. Getting a degree doesn't get one into the elite. An elite family may want to get their children into a prestigious institution. A child at Stanford or Harvard is one of those many honors one competes for. The number of legacy admits or outright purchased slots might make it harder for non-elite children to get into the school, but that is just collateral damage from elite competition. Odds are, a child of the elite will do just fine financially whether admitted to a brand name college or they just goof off playing video games. That's not what elite competition is about.
We may or may not be producing too many college graduates or too many or too few college graduates in certain fields, but this has nothing to do having too many members of the elite. You'd do better to look at our economic policies that have been creating so many millionaires and billionaires. Look at our lax policies regarding corporations that allow unlimited, untaxed wealth to be retained indefinitely. Those are the monsters about whose feet the non-elite have to scramble to avoid getting crushed.
I think reducing expectations is probably our best bet here. If the government were to embark on a punitive campaign of progressively making life worse for young people they’d have no reason to expect life to get better.
Raise student loan interest rates to the point that credit card interest looks like a steal. Continue to hike the fed funds rate until we’re back at Great Recession levels of unemployment. Do to primary school teaching jobs what we’ve done to tenure track positions at universities. Give massive tax breaks for every job that a company manages to offshore.
There should be no expectation that getting an education is going to be a useful endeavor, and we should instead instill the opposite sentiment. The ideal situation is one where after filling out hundreds of applications out best and brightest should be extremely happy just to land a position working the midnight counter at a rural gas station.
If we want to maximize the Happiness side of the equation we need to be willing to commit to a program of decimating expectations, the labor force, and human capital for decades.
On a slightly more serious note, we have emphasized satisfaction at our jobs far too much. Given that a vanishingly small number of us will ever do something that is interesting, intrinsically rewarding, and financially lucrative, I’m not disappointed in the (stupidly named) “quiet quitting” phenomenon. This tells me that folks are reorienting their lives and placing their personal lives and interests first. This is a good thing! People should be as mercenary as their employers have been for decades, and if that means clawing back some meaning into your life that a job was never going to give you, good!
This is an excellent post. However, from personal experience things are not that bleak. I received my PhD in chemistry in 1975 and after two post- doctoral stints moved out of research and into the biopharma industry where I had a great 27 year career in drug regulator affairs. I was a project manager on a multi- million dollar drug safety project which is today doing great things. As Noah himself knows there is life beyond academia.
One of my hires who had a PhD and worked for me for five years found she enjoyed photography and is now a I highly respected event photographer who has shot at New York fashion week.
I have mentored and counseled dozens of young people. My advice has always been to learn how to write and communicate well, present yourself and all will fall into place. My first job after working as a senior fellow at NIH came partly from some book reviews I wrote for the Ithaca Journal when I was at Cornell!!
Fidel Castro got a law degree. But lawyers were neither well-paid, nor highly respected in 1950s Cuba. Fidel had been a relatively pampered son of a prosperous farmer in the hinterlands and his maid, both uneducated. Fidel expected life to continue to indulge and acclaim him.
He was brutally dissuaded from his adolescent hubris at the University of Havana when he fell in love with the prettiest girl on campus: Mirta Diaz-Balart, of the wealthy Havana Diaz-Balart's. Her family loathed his "guajiro" background (and a maid for a mother!). Mirta was eventually allowed to marry Fidel, but the Diaz-Balart clan looked down on the eloquent, but unsophisticated, untraveled and comparatively "poor" Fidel.
He could not afford to give Mirta an upper-middle-class life in Havana. His pride and foiled expectations led to frustration. His legal education led him to Marx.
He took to the hills of Oriente, near his dad's farm, with a bunch of "over educated for expectations" "fighters". Friends he had met at the University of Havana. All had had their social climbing dreams frustrated by lack of jobs paying enough to live well in Havana.
None could even shoot straight; none had military training. But, they were pissed at the limited avenues for economic mobility and social acceptance. They were doctors (Che) and lawyers. Their frustrated rage was their ammo.
Fast forward a few years and they've taken over the country and the Diaz-Balart's were all chased out of the island.
(We are now the beneficiaries of the Diaz-Balart's enduring, "high life" presence -- you can see them on MSNBC and in Congress).
I think "expectations" is a little bit misleading term here:
I could have expectations about a dinner or a a summer vacation, but in the scenario above it means much more than that. When I'm getting a college degree and think about my future career it becomes part of my identity and it is way more powerful. I wouldn't be able to just "lower" the expectations, it is actually requires restructuring my identity and at this point it is getting much easier to blame someone else (globalists, immigrants, capitalists, freemasons, etc).