A Glut of Elites? No, It’s Much Worse Than That

Capitalism has a glut of ordinary humans now

Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Noahpinion’s The case of the angry history postdoc introduced me to Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction theory. But it’s not just the elites we have a glut of. 

I’m no elite.

I do not have a graduate degree. I earned a bachelor’s degree from a state school. But I think I speak for millions of resentful unemployed or underemployed people who wrongly thought they’d earned the right to a reasonably enjoyable career that would cover the costs of a basic middle class life. That’s what we were promised.

For millions of us, the world either doesn’t value our skills, values them but lacks a sustainable business model to pay for them or only needs a small number of us to fill the few available jobs. We have to figure out some other way to live. Naturally, we’re unhappy about this.

I got a journalism degree and spent 30 years in community journalism, finishing up as editor of a small-town daily newspaper. That it did not pay well and required enormous amounts of unpaid labor to do it right didn’t change the fact that it fulfilled me and provided a steady paycheck that (barely) covered the cost of my ultra-thrifty lifestyle. I’m still not over my job disappearing. I will never be over it.

The work of telling people what is going on in the community is crying out to be done, and many of us very much want to do this work, but we can’t. Many shenanigans are occurring outside the public view. I hear about a few of them and know the staff I used to lead would have an absolute field day covering these stories. People ask me all the time why I don’t just cover them myself, and the answer is that covering the news is not a hobby. 

It takes significant work and brings in very little money. Who is going to pay me to sit at a council meeting, sift through courthouse filings, interview school board members, show up at a murder scene? Couldn’t I collect advertising to pay my expenses? That’s yet another full-time job and one for which I am unsuited. 

I still have lots of journalism contacts and I know about an awful lot of talented journalists who are trying to do this kind of thing, and most of them can’t make it work. I know of one man who used to teach at one of the top journalism schools who now runs a weekly newspaper – at a loss. He teaches high school and uses his salary to support himself and his newspaper. 

Thus, my presence here and on Medium, and my books, and my freelance writing. I cobble together a lot of things to get by.

You may know a brilliant barista.

It’s no wonder more young people are skipping college, understanding that it’s no longer a certain way to a comfortable living but that it is a certain way to immense debt. It took about a generation for people to realize that the risks and benefits of a college degree had turned upside down. The barista at your favorite coffee shop may well have more education than most of her customers.

It’s true that we don’t have a lot of job openings for history or philosophy professors. Or for literature majors. Or, sadly, for journalists. Since my degree was in journalism, with an English minor, I of course deserve my fate. 

But we only need so many engineers and lawyers. For that matter, if every young person becomes a plumber – the job conservatives seem to believe should be the ambition of every teenager – the plumbers will soon be in hot water, too. 

We don’t just have a glut of elites who are angry they cannot land cushy elite jobs. We have a lot of non-elites who are angry they cannot even land OK-ish jobs. The “nobody wants to work anymore” brigade is talking about unskilled jobs without benefits, like cashiers and servers, that can’t support a family. The NWTWA people are just mad that they have to wait longer for a table and when they’re finally seated, their server is too overstretched to wait on them hand and foot.

Middle-class jobs are scarce, no matter what any pundit claims. Talk to real people with education, skills and experience who are trying to find jobs a notch or two above entry-level, and you will hear tales of frustration, anger, fear and defeat.

Work and jobs are not the same thing.

Meanwhile, we have a lot of important work going undone because we can’t figure out how to pay for it. 

Journalism is the obvious example, and I use it because it’s the world I understand. We desperately need professional, well-trained people to perform actual journalism – not public relations, not propaganda, not sales copy pretending to be news – but actual journalism. I have known hundreds of newspaper journalists through the years. Most of them were dedicated people who did their best, especially at the community level where I was content to serve.

If you want to know what happens when nobody is actually covering your news anymore, look around and see who is in office. 

The same is true in many other fields. Have you tried to place an elderly loved one in a nursing home? You will pay $10K per month and the place will be so understaffed that your loved one may not be fed, bathed or toileted appropriately. 

The horror of sitting in a full, leaking diaper of your own waste, desperately hungry and thirsty but unable to obtain nourishment, is a fate many of us will face someday because we refuse to hire, pay and value enough caregivers.

Nobody wants to perform childcare because the business model doesn’t work – the cost of providing daycare exceeds what most parents can afford to pay. Yet even parents who yearn to stay home with their baby for a few years often can’t afford to take time out. The work is important but the very people who may be the most motivated to do it well (the baby’s parents) can’t afford to. 

After the agricultural revolution and until the last 150 years or so, most humans spent most of their time farming and preparing food, but few of us are farmers now and plenty of people don’t even cook. At most, they might combine a can of this and a box of that and call it “cooking.” 

This is because we have arranged modern life so that nobody values housekeeping, childcare and food preparation. People who perform these tasks suffer from lack of status, even though the things they do are desperately needed. They are far more important than, say, the work of a hedge fund manager or a digital advertising specialist.

We can eat and clothe ourselves with relative ease. We have enough housing for all, too – although not all of it is where the demand is, and too much of it sits empty as investment properties.

So the question arises: What good are humans, anyway? What are any of them good for? We don’t just have a glut of postdocs. We have a glut of everyone, and AI is making more of us redundant every week.

This is where we are now:

1. We don’t need people to do much of anything that’s important. AI and tech handle a good proportion of what people used to spend their days doing for pay.

2. Other things that are very important but for which we have no viable business model (journalism, elder care, child care) are badly done if done at all.

3. People still need to work because all this abundance modern technology provides costs a lot of money, and we would rather let you die than let you have what you need without paying for it. 

Do we have to monetize everything?

Why can’t we champion learning and education without tying it to paid careers? Do we really think we should drop the torch of literature, philosophy and history? Does absolutely everything have to be monetized?

I don’t think the answer is to stop encouraging education in favor of the trades. I think we need more education, not less. A classical education is for everyone, even if they never earn a dime from it.

I read a lot, and not just novels and news. I have not formally studied anthropology or sociology beyond a few electives, but I read books on these subjects because I want to. How did I know I wanted to learn more about these subjects? It’s because I got a taste from those college electives, and my best teachers taught me how to continue learning on my own.

That’s why I shake my head when people say you only need to take classes in your major, as if the only purpose of education is to learn how to make money. 

Most people may as well be illiterate.

They know how to read and write, but it does them little good because they don’t know how to think. They never read anything longer than a tweet and they don’t understand how to evaluate a news source. This is the tl;dr generation.

Mention something from history and they may know nothing about it. But this will not stop them from having strong opinions based on some 280-word post they once read while sitting on the toilet.

I was talking to a woman (over the phone) with much more formal education than I have one day during the Covid lockdowns. She felt these lockdowns were intolerable. I said people in our time had gotten off pretty lucky, historically speaking, and mentioned the London Blitz as an example of a time when ordinary people suffered much worse. She didn't know what I was talking about. 

No wonder she questioned Covid restrictions. From her perspective, her suffering was just about at the max of what any human should be expected to deal with. A bit of history would have done her some good.

Whether you’re a history postdoc or a laid-off journalist with only a bachelor’s degree, your education is not wasted. The world might make you sell insurance or something else you didn’t dream of, but the point of education was never to make money or gain status. If you don’t know that, maybe your education was wasted on you.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules. Tips accepted here.