Peter Turchin has a theory called elite overproduction. A society trains more people for high-status positions than it has positions to give them. The surplus doesn’t disappear. It becomes a pool of credentialed, underemployed people who did everything they were told and received less than they were promised.
A movement’s demographics are not incidental to its politics — they are close to the whole explanation. Turchin traced the pattern to revolutionary France, where a surplus of law graduates shut out of the aristocracy’s professional class became disproportionately represented among the revolution’s leaders.
Just like our Real Estate Rich Elbow People.
