Writing earlier in the week about Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for New York’s mayoral elections, I argued that some of it could be explained by the phenomenon known as elite overproduction (a term coined by social scientist Peter Turchin), a state of affairs in which members of the “elite” (or those with the talents to join it) become too numerous for society to accommodate their aspirations. High rates of graduate unemployment or underemployment are evidence that that that is the situation the U.S. (and not just the U.S.) now faces (and has faced for some time), This problem will get worse as automation cuts further through “graduate-level” jobs, a process likely to accelerate as AI gathers speed.
Some maintain that the idea that today’s far more numerous graduates are, simply by dint of a degree (particularly in some more dubious specialty, puppetry, say), members of the ‘elite’ is ridiculous. That may (often) be so, but it doesn’t change the fact that many under/unemployed graduates feel shortchanged. Writing on this topic in 2016, I argued that:
For many graduates, gently shepherded through often undemanding schoolwork and gently burdened with a monstrous debt, dreams will turn into nightmares. There will be no place for them in the track to success. Their expectations were unrealistic, but their disappointment will be real. If their teachers haven’t already radicalized them, life may do the trick.
And, although this phenomenon is far from the only reason that Mamdani prevailed, it is not a factor that can be ignored either. In an article written the day after the vote, Noah Rothman noted how poorer New York Democrats tended to opt for Cuomo, “while middle- and higher-income residents supported Mamdani by double digits. It is important to remember that, in New York City, “middle-income” (which the Times defines as an annual income of between $62,800 and $117,600) is a modest sum).” That picture then goes into reverse in some of the most affluent areas.
Mamdani racked up huge leads in what Michael Lange has dubbed New York’s “Commie Corridor”—a stretch of neighborhoods filled with young professionals with progressive leanings—which begins in Mamdani’s Astoria district and runs south along the East River through gentrified parts of Brooklyn like Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Bushwick.
Reihan Salam in the Free Press:
If you want to find someone in a revolutionary mood, look to the recent college grad with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans and no solid job prospects, the 35-year-old creative professional who is spending a third of her low six-figure income on rent, or the 40-year-old Ivy-educated adjunct professor living with roommates who never, ever do the dishes.
Drawing on precinct-level data, Owen Winter of The Economist observes that Mamdani fared best in neighborhoods with a median household income between $75,000 and $200,000…Why would Mamdani’s laser-like focus on affordability have resonated more with upper-middle-income professionals living in the city’s gentrifying neighborhoods than, say, low-income retirees living in rent-regulated apartments? One explanation is that this is a population that is too rich for subsidized public housing, can’t save enough to buy a home, and badly wants to keep rents from going up and up. They don’t have civil-service or unionized private-sector jobs with generous pensions, and they’re too young to remember when the city was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Of course they hate hedge funders, and of course they want to blow everything up.
Of course they do, because they want to take over. The hedge funders are not only in the way but are the embodiment of everything that this would-be elite does not have but believes should be theirs, with “socialism” the means to achieve it.
And, as automation moves higher and higher up the career ladder, it is not only “puppetry graduates” who will left behind.
Back in 2016, I wrote this:
Add the impact of automation to the effects of existing elite overproduction and the result will be that the upheaval to come will be steered by a very large “officer class” — angry, effective, efficient, a “counter-elite” (to borrow another term from Turchin) looking to transform the social order of which, under happier circumstances, it would have been a mainstay.
A frequently repeated comment about the Mamdani campaign is just how well run it was.
Of course it was.