What happens to a society with too many chiefs and not enough Indians?

When you combine the ongoing expansion of higher education with automation, you’ve got a recipe for social unrest

Photo by Olga Zabegina on Unsplash

Around three decades ago, I began work on what would become my MA (hons) thesis. Technically, I was doing a postgrad degree in Mass Communications, but the topic was more in the wheelhouse of sociology and cultural studies. In my final semester as an undergraduate, I’d written a paper about middle-class youth subcultures. It noted goths, ferals and fans of what was then called ‘indie music’ were culturally middle class and frequently university educated but, unlike the counterculturalists of the 1960s and 1970s, not particularly political. The lecturer teaching the course suggested I enrol in a Master’s degree and explore the idea more fully, which I eventually did.   

At that point, most of the academic research into youth subcultures had been done on working-class ones, like the mods and rockers of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The consensus was that young working-class men recognised they were never going to achieve status in the conventional sense. (That is, by landing a prestigious, well-paid job and being able to afford markers of wealth such as a fancy car or big house or trophy wife). Academics theorised that getting involved in a subculture was an ego-salving compensatory mechanism. A blue-collar teenager might not get much respect during business hours. But on weekends and bank holidays they could be respected, at least by fellow subculturalists, for their fashion sense, or musical knowledge, or fighting ability. If the subculturalist was feared by what we’d now call ‘normies’ and demonised by the tabloid press, so much the better.

Back in the early 1990s, I suspected something similar was going on with goths, indie music fans and ferals. Thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, you can read my entire thesis here, if you are so inclined. But the TL; DR version is that even though a university education results in someone being culturally middle class, even by the late 1980s it no longer guaranteed they would be economically middle class.

Indeed, as governments across the Western world, including Australia, pushed ever greater numbers of students to finish high school then go onto university – in no small part to make the youth unemployment figures look less dire – increasing numbers of university grads were struggling to even establish a foothold in the lower-middle class.

As I noted in my thesis, individuals on their way to being highly paid accountants, CEOs, doctors, dentists, investment bankers, engineers and lawyers tended not to get involved in subcultures. The kind of person who did get heavily involved in them typically had a worthless credential, at least as far as most potential employers were concerned. More often than not, this was a Bachelor of Arts from a second-tier university that didn’t lead to anything other than a low to mid-level retail or hospitality job.

Even 30 years ago, I suspected encouraging ever greater numbers of young people to attend university because there was once a strong correlation between having a degree and attaining an upper-middle class, or at least comfortably middle class, lifestyle was eventually going to end in tears.

For even the dumbest first-year Bachelor of Arts student can tell you that correlation isn’t causation.

Top-tier law firms only need so many staff, which means massively increasing the number of people with law degrees doesn’t increase the amount of well-paid legal jobs. It just floods the market and depreciates the value of law degrees, especially ones issued by second-tier universities. Likewise, as I can personally attest, making young people interested in a career in the media do a communications degree rather than a newspaper cadetship doesn’t result in the salaries of journalists increasing. It just means you get (still poorly paid) journalists who pepper their copy with references to Foucault and Baudrillard.  

I coulda been a contender

Back in the days of my youth, the highly intelligent and highly driven could still complete a ‘sensible’ degree and be more or less assured of holding down a well-paid, socially esteemed job for the following four decades. It was only the less driven and intelligent, or more bohemian, individuals who were likely to end up dealing with a jarring gap between their lofty expectations and a disappointing reality when it turned out – as it usually did – that they wouldn’t actually become a high-profile author, actor, book editor, cartoonist, dancer, fashion designer, film director, graphic designer, journalist, musician, painter, photographer, puppeteer, screenwriter or slam poet.   

In my experience, creative individuals are inclined to believe they’ve brought their pink-collar/low-level white-collar fate upon themselves. After all, if they haven’t made it in their chosen field, that must have been due to a lack of talent or personal drive or luck. If you’ve ended up being the assistant store manager of a JB Hi-Fi rather than the frontman of a chart-topping grunge band due to a dearth of talent, drive or luck, there’s little point lashing out at the powers-that-be. Far better to get a faceful of piercings, dress all in black and tell yourself you were never really interested in a ‘corporate job’ and are happy to be working at a ‘chill’ workplace with ‘cool’ coworkers, even if you are earning minimum wage.

Which brings me to Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis 

Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be accountants and lawyers

There’s a whole website devoted to elite overproduction created by the guy who came up with the theory. But let me quote Noah Smith, one of the most insightful writers I’ve discovered since getting with the Substack program: 

Looking back at that big bump of humanities majors in the 2000s and early 2010s (the raw numbers are here), and thinking about the social unrest America has experienced over the last 8 years, makes me think about Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction. 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. From the Wikipedia article on Turchin’s theory:

Elite overproduction has been cited as a root cause of political tension in the U.S., as so many well-educated Millennials are either unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise not achieving the high status they expect. Even then, the nation continued to produce excess PhD holders before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, especially in the humanities and social sciences, for which employment prospects were dim.

I suspect the situation is even direr than Turchin and his growing legion of fans realise. Speaking as a humanities grad myself, I’d argue that members of my tribe are frequently insufferable but rarely dangerous. A man, woman or non-binary individual with a PhD in Gender Studies and a casual job as a barista might bore you senseless about the Cis-Heteropatriarchy if they corner you at a party. They may even join a mob demanding the firing of a professor who has said something vaguely unorthodox. (Especially if that increases the odds of them landing a gig as a sessional lecturer.) But they are unlikely to start fomenting a revolution.

The dangers of benching the übermenschen

Unsurprisingly, it’s exceptionally intelligent and ambitious individuals who make the most effective revolutionaries. Robespierre wasn’t a sous chef; he was a lawyer. As were Lenin, Gandhi, Castro, Mandela and Milošević. (Among many other things, Mao was a law school dropout.) The genocidal President of Republika Srpska (think Bosnia and Herzegovina) Radovan Karadžić, was a psychiatrist by trade, as was Frantz Fanon. Che Guevara didn’t have a theatre studies degree; he had a medical one. Like many people on this list, Rosa Luxemburg was a brilliant student who spoke several languages. She got a PhD in economics at a time when most women were lucky to complete more than a primary school education. She also found time to birth a political party and play a seminal role in a (failed) revolution before being assassinated at age 47. Neither Clement Attlee nor Margaret Thatcher quite classify as revolutionaries, but both worked as barristers before going into politics. Thatcher also had a chemistry degree from Oxford. 

The point is, if you want to avoid radical or revolutionary change to your society, you want the best and brightest inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside the tent pissing in. If a critical mass of the most able and ambitious members of a society aren’t having their expectations accommodated by the existing economic and social system, expect them to sooner or later start mobilising to upend that economic and social system.

Which, naturally enough, brings me to the growing prospect of a helot’s revolt led by enraged accountants.

What happens when it’s not just blue-collar men being thrown on the scrap heap?

I was interviewing an AI expert the other day who pointed out that the tax-collection process, in Australia and everywhere else in the world, could be fully automated tomorrow, if the political will to do so existed. Long story short, your employer, super fund and bank would upload all the relevant financial data about you to a cloud where AI would analyse it. Then a refund or bill would be emailed to you.

In this scenario, almost everyone wins. Citizens are spared the hassle of ‘doing their tax’.  Governments end up with more revenue, as there’s less opportunity for taxpayers to make honest mistakes or engage in deliberate tax avoidance. (With this extra revenue, governments can cut tax rates or improve services.)

Of course, the downside is that an enormous amount of work disappears for accountants, be it the 20,000 odd staff employed by the ATO or the tens of thousands of suburban accountants who help millions of Australians complete their tax returns.

I repeat, this isn’t some sci-fi fantasy. It’s something that could be done right now. Granted, I don’t see it happening in Australia anytime soon. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of the ‘digital superstar’ nations such as Singapore, Estonia or Israel do it in the next few years. In any event, regardless of what happens with the ATO, accountants are already seeing their world being eaten by accounting software.  

The AI expert I spoke to was relaxed about this process, arguing that once freed from bookkeeping gruntwork, accountants would find higher-value tasks to occupy themselves with.

Much in the way that all those American factory workers who found themselves out of a job in recent decades seamlessly morphed into highly paid software developers, rather than going on the disability pension then fervently backing a right-wing populist who promised to bring the jobs back and drain the swamp, I guess.