The concept of “elite overproduction” was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something specific: too many rich people for not enough rich-person jobs. It’s a byproduct of inequality: a ton of poor people, sure, but also a superfluity of the wealthy, without enough positions to house them in the influence and status to which they think themselves entitled. In a modern context, that would mean senior positions in the government and civil service, along with the top tier of finance and law, but Turchin tested the hypothesis from ancient Rome to 19th-century Britain. The names and nature of the contested jobs and titles changed; the pattern remained. Turchin predicted in 2010 that by the 2020s it would be destabilising US politics.
Turchin didn’t specify exactly how much wealth puts you in a situation with an overproduced elite, but he didn’t mean debt-laden students; he didn’t mean MPs; he meant, for brevity, billionaires or the top 1%. When a lot of your media are billionaire-owned, those media sources become endlessly inventive in taking the heat off billionaires, nipping criticism in the bud by pilfering its vocabulary and throwing it back at everyone.
Elon Musk could never have got himself elected into office in the US. But as the cost-cutting tsar, a made-up role Trump has promised him, he would exert extraordinary power to cause pain, with the only choice left to citizens being whether or not to hug it. Another billionaire donor, John Paulson, has been floated for the treasury secretary job, and Trump has a track record of rewarding big-ticket donors with a seat at the table – the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman boasted in print about his role in the new North America Free Trade Agreement negotiations in 2018, and as part of Trump’s “strategic and policy forum” during the 2017 administration.
I truly believe the world would be a much better place if there was a clear cutoff for wealth. But of course, there would still be weasles out there circumventing such measures. Greed is such an incredibly harmful thing.
Not a single redeeming thing about billionaires. Not a single one. Their “philanthropy” would be entirely unneeded, if they simply paid their fair share back to society, without which they wouldn’t have what they have in the first place.
One billionaire is an excess.
One cannot earn that much money without exploiting workers.
I’d argue against the word “earn” even. One cannot earn one billion dollars at all.
Nobody deserves $1 billion when it would take a teacher about 20,000 years to make the same amount. And it’s not earned if it’s not deserved.
But that’s just semantic ranting, you’re right.
No, I realized that after I wrote it and did the lazy thing and didn’t edit.
While I agree, billionaires don’t just have a 10+ figure checking account. Most of their networth is in non-liquid assets.
Which is why we should tax unrealized gains over a certain amount, and loans against those unrealized gains.
Owning that much of a company that is valued that highly is still damaging to society, even if it isn’t liquid cash. Even putting aside their ability to take out loans with the shares as collateral, if the company is really worth that much it should be owned by a larger number of people with each taking a reasonably sized share to ensure that decisions are not made selfishly.
Taxing unrealised gains also hurt working class people dabbling in the stock market to try and improve their circumstance. IMO once you reach a net worth of $1B you get a pat on the back that you won captalism, and a 200% tax rate on anything beyond that to force you to give it up. No one person should own and control so much of a company if it truely has so much value, divide it among those that created the value i.e. the employees.
Just like academics predicted based on repeated patterns throughout the recorded human history
“Let them eat cake!” (Which Marie-Antoinette never said.)
When people say humans are bad at big numbers and you see all those “this is how big a billion is!” They do indeed pack a punch.
This one packs the biggest, to me, though.
As much as I love Tom Scott and it’s a fantastic visual/temporal representation, I doubt a lot of people have the patience.
I like “1 Million seconds is 11 days, 1 Billion seconds is 31 years” as a more succinct example.
One person earning $3600/hr, 24/7, without spending any of it, would take 31 years to become a billionaire.
This just in: Bathroom breaks cost 200 million dollars a year in lost productivity.
[Sharpens guillotine with revolutionary intent]
I warned you about the tendency for wealth to accumulate under capitalism bro!!!
I told you dawg!
It keeps hapening!
Keep it up, and soon the masses will destabilize the meat from their bones.
the only solution
When money gives a handful of individuals more power than the rest of society, what could possibly go wrong?
You call this news? Or new information?
It’s always been like this … it was more discreet before … now it’s just blatant.
The thesis also elicited that elite overproduction tends to favor political change in the dispossessed elite’s favor
It posits most revolutions, including communist revolutions, were pushed by elites who weren’t given the station they were promised.
That’s what will happen to the Trumpublican Party when its figurehead is gone. They’ll spend years clawing each other to pieces to fill the yuge void.
Theres this dazzling student of Hegel that has a few novel ideas about just that. You may have heard of him . . .
s/An\ excess/The\ existence/Never thought I’d see communist regex getting downvoted on lemmy
turn of the century
2010
😭
