The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

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

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For me, a telling anecdote that first clued me into this hypothesis was when I debated Jacobin writer Meagan Day in 2018. When I pointed out that very few Americans are financially destitute, she responded that “it’s not just destitution, it’s disappointment”, and proceeded to describe her own frustration with the two unpaid internships she went ... See more

“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.”

Housel argues that expectations take a long time to change, and that people are still expecting to go back to the way things were in the 1950s, when working hard meant a good house, a good car, and social status. Trump leans into that, and Warren leans into that, but it’s a fairy tale. There’s no going back.  In absolute terms, Housel points o... See more

How many highly-educated, ambitious college grads and FAANG alumni start companies chasing low-value problems, because finding the high-value ones is too hard?

Now consider our current situation. Despite all the language professing otherwise, in general the education system of the United States is based entirely on genetic determinism. A child is born assumed to have innate traits, including, for example, a preference as to what they want to be when they grow up (somehow just waiting fully-formed inside o... See more

Will we update our scripts and stories about how the world actually works? Or is this a conversation that people just don’t want to have? Is it easier to pretend that everyone can make it?

I don’t have good answers to these questions, but I sense the disconnect between what people believe at a societal level and the market finding reality of an econ

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