The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

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The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

So if the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis is broadly correct, 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.

Noah Smith • The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

Stuart Evans added

Basically, the idea here is that America produced a lot of highly educated people with great expectations for their place in American society, but that our economic and social system was unable to accommodate many of these expectations, causing them to turn to leftist politics and other disruptive actions out of frustration and disappointment.

Noah Smith • The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

Stuart Evans added

There’s another way to understand Just America, like the other three narratives, and that’s in terms of class. Why does so much of its work take place in human resources departments, reading lists, and awards ceremonies? In the summer of 2020 the protesters in the streets of New York were disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees m

George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

The result is that new college graduates have increasingly been forced into relatively unskilled jobs—often displacing nongraduates in the process.

Martin Ford • Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“There is something very odd about a society where the most talented people get all tracked toward the same elite colleges, where they end up studying the same small number of subjects and going into the same small number of careers… It’s very limiting for our society as well as for those students.”

The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis