The 10 Percent Is in a Fit of Rage Over Airport Lounges

Our topic today, however, is the rage of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich once labelled the professional-managerial class. This cohort, they noted in a 2019 update, has been in decline since around the start of the 21st century. In an email, Dan seconded that:

We sold a broad class of high potential young people on … taking on decidedly un-bourgeois levels of indebtedness to obtain STEM bachelor’s degrees, and advanced degrees in things like economics as well as the hard sciences, with the promise of endless jobs and upward mobility….. Oops!

Things have gotten so bad, the economics blogger Noah Smith noted recently, that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates with degrees in computer engineering (7.5 percent) and computer science (6.1 percent) are double those for recent degree-holders in philosophy (3.2 percent) and art history (3.0 percent). The overall unemployment rate in the United States is 4.2 percent. Before 2020, employment for recent college graduates was always higher than for the population at large, but for the last couple of years it’s been lower.

Fortune’s Lichtenberg identifies the originator of “elite overproduction” theory as Peter Turchin, a retired professor of biology and anthropology at the University of Connecticut who is now project director at a research institute in Vienna. Turchin is a doom-porn guy (he’s both contributed to and been profiled in The Atlantic), and I’m naturally wary of people who espouse, as Turchin does, a highly scientific view of history. (Reader, I am not a Marxist.) Turchin applies to human beings notions he first developed in his studies of population ecology for beetles, moths, voles, and lemmings. Another deficit that I struggle to forgive is an error in the Atlantic profile: Turchin, and also the profile’s author, Graeme Wood, mix up two characters in Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, making reference to the 19th century girl genius Thomasina Coverly when they mean to refer to the 20th century frustrated scientist Valentine Coverly. Sorry, but Arcadia happens to be a favorite of mine. (Dear Atlantic: Please correct!)