Elite Overproduction: When Too Many People Want to Run Things

Series: Cliodynamics | Part: 3 of 10

In 1789, France had more lawyers than the entire judicial system could employ. Thousands of credentialed, educated, ambitious men had been trained for positions that didn't exist. They couldn't get the offices they'd been promised, the incomes they expected, the status they'd prepared for. So they did what frustrated elites always do: they mobilized popular discontent and burned the system down.

This isn't historical color. It's the mechanism. Elite overproduction—when a society generates more people with elite aspirations than it has elite positions—is the single most reliable predictor of political instability in Turchin's model. Not poverty. Not inequality alone. Not even state collapse in itself. The driver of revolutionary crisis is ambitious, educated people with nowhere to go.

The pattern recurs across civilizations. The late Roman Republic flooded with senators who couldn't advance. Late Medieval Europe swarmed with younger sons of nobility who couldn't inherit. The Taiping Rebellion began when a failed examination candidate mobilized millions. The Russian Revolution was led by lawyers and intellectuals, not peasants. The contemporary United States produces more law degrees, PhDs, and MBAs than it has positions that justify their debt and expectations.

Elite overproduction doesn't just correlate with instability. It causes it through a specific mechanism: counter-elite formation. When the path to elite status is blocked, talented and ambitious individuals don't give up. They build alternative coalitions, develop oppositional ideologies, and compete for power by mobilizing those outside the elite against those inside it. The political system becomes paralyzed by intra-elite conflict disguised as principled disagreement.

This is where we are. Right now. By every measure Turchin tracks.

What Counts as "Elite"

Elite isn't a slur or a cultural marker. In structural-demographic theory, the elite class consists of those who control significant resources, hold political power, or possess high social status. This includes:

• Wealthy individuals and families (top 1-5% by wealth)
• Political officeholders and appointees
• High-ranking bureaucrats and administrators
• Corporate executives and board members
• Credentialed professionals (lawyers, doctors, professors)
• High-status cultural producers (prominent journalists, intellectuals, artists)

The key feature is positional scarcity. There are only so many Senate seats, Fortune 500 CEO positions, tenured professorships, federal judgeships, influential editorships. These positions confer power, status, and material reward far beyond what's available to non-elites.

Elite status can be achieved through wealth, credentials, connections, talent, or inheritance—usually some combination. But whatever the pathway, the destination is a scarce position. And when the number of people qualified and ambitious enough to seek these positions exceeds the number of positions available, you get overproduction.

How Overproduction Happens: The Mechanisms

Elite overproduction emerges through several interacting dynamics:

Biological Reproduction
Elites have children. In most societies, elite children receive elite education, inherit elite resources, and develop elite expectations. If each elite family reproduces at replacement or above, the elite class grows generationally. In the integrative phase of the secular cycle, this growth is absorbed by economic expansion and institutional growth. In the stagflation and crisis phases, it isn't.

French nobility in the 18th century multiplied through biological reproduction faster than the monarchy could create new offices. English gentry in the 16th-17th centuries expanded faster than colonial and commercial opportunities could absorb them. American upper-middle-class families in the late 20th century produced more credentialed children than the economy has elite-track positions.

Social Mobility and Credential Inflation
Successful commoners become elites. This is healthy in the integrative phase—it replenishes the elite class with talent from below, maintains legitimacy, and signals that the system rewards merit. But as opportunities narrow, credentialing becomes a tournament.

When a bachelor's degree confers elite access, more people get bachelor's degrees. When a bachelor's isn't enough, they get master's degrees. When a master's isn't enough, they get PhDs, law degrees, MBAs. Credential inflation spirals: more education is required to qualify for the same positions, but the positions don't increase proportionally.

The result is tens of thousands of people with elite credentials competing for hundreds of truly elite positions. The rest face a brutal choice: accept downward mobility into positions that don't justify their debt and effort, or fight to change the system.

Wealth Concentration Without Position Expansion
Financialization and globalization in recent decades have created a wealth explosion at the top without a proportional expansion in political or social positions. The number of billionaires has increased dramatically. The number of Senate seats has not. The number of Fortune 500 CEO positions is fixed. The number of Supreme Court justices is nine.

This creates a class of people with elite-level wealth but without proportional political power or social status. Some of these individuals use their wealth to buy influence, fund movements, or create media platforms. They become counter-elites, challenging incumbent elites for control.

Geographic and Sectoral Concentration
Elite positions cluster: Washington D.C. for political power, New York for finance, Los Angeles for entertainment, Silicon Valley for tech, Cambridge/Boston for academia. This concentration creates intense local competition. Thousands of ambitious people in the same city competing for the same hundred positions breeds both innovation and viciousness.

When economic downturns or technological shifts devalue entire sectors (journalism, academia, middle management), credentialed elites suddenly find themselves with nowhere to go. They don't become working-class. They become radicalized.

Counter-Elites: The Revolutionary Vanguard

When elite aspirants can't access elite positions through normal channels, they pursue alternative strategies. The most destabilizing is counter-elite formation: building oppositional movements that challenge incumbent elites for power.

Counter-elites emerge from elite overproduction. They're not the desperate poor—revolution requires organizational capacity, ideological sophistication, and social networks. Peasants don't organize revolutions. Blocked lawyers do. Failed scholars do. Downwardly mobile gentry do.

The Mechanism
Counter-elites mobilize popular grievances as a weapon. They don't necessarily care about the poor (though some genuinely do). But they recognize that mass mobilization is the only lever available to challenge entrenched incumbents. So they develop ideologies that frame incumbent elites as corrupt, illegitimate, or incompetent. They build coalitions with workers, peasants, or marginalized groups. They promise systemic transformation.

Sometimes this is cynical—a pure power play. Sometimes it's sincere—genuine belief that the system is broken and needs radical reform. Often it's both. But the structural driver is the same: ambitious people who believe they deserve power and don't have it.

Historical Examples
The late Roman Republic's civil wars were fought by ambitious senators and generals competing for limited positions of power. Julius Caesar, Pompey, Crassus—these weren't outsiders. They were elites who couldn't advance within the existing framework, so they broke it.

The English Civil War emerged from a swollen gentry class competing for access to royal patronage. When Parliament couldn't deliver, factions formed, ideologies hardened, and the system collapsed into civil war.

The French Revolution was led by credentialed elites—lawyers, journalists, minor nobility—who couldn't get the offices they'd been trained for. Robespierre was a lawyer. Danton was a lawyer. Marat was a doctor and journalist. They mobilized the sans-culottes not because they were sans-culottes, but because mass mobilization was the only tool available.

The Bolsheviks were intellectuals, not workers. Lenin was a lawyer. Trotsky was a journalist. The Russian Revolution succeeded because counter-elites mobilized workers and soldiers, but the leadership was educated elite aspirants who couldn't participate in the Tsarist system.

Contemporary Manifestation
The current American counter-elite class includes:

• Credentialed journalists and academics whose institutions have lost status and funding
• Tech entrepreneurs whose wealth doesn't translate to political power
• Lawyers and MBAs who discovered elite credentials no longer guarantee elite positions
• Regional elites (Southern, Midwestern) who resent coastal elite dominance
• Ideological entrepreneurs on both left and right building media empires and funding movements

These aren't marginal figures. They're educated, connected, resourced individuals who believe the current system is rigged against them. Some mobilize populist anger from the right. Some mobilize progressive discontent from the left. Both are symptoms of the same underlying structural problem: too many people competing for too few positions.

Intra-Elite Competition and System Paralysis

Elite overproduction doesn't just create counter-elites. It transforms the behavior of incumbent elites. When positions are scarce, cooperation gives way to zero-sum competition.

In the integrative phase, elites cooperate because there's enough to go around. Compromises work because everyone expects to benefit eventually. Norms of fairness and reciprocity hold because they're in everyone's long-term interest.

In the disintegrative phase, cooperation collapses. Every position becomes a battlefield. Every policy debate becomes existential. Compromise becomes betrayal. The political system becomes paralyzed by factionalism masquerading as principle.

Norm Breakdown
When elite competition intensifies, norms that constrain elite behavior erode. Unwritten rules that maintained stability—not investigating your predecessor's crimes, not blocking judicial appointments, not using procedural loopholes to force through legislation—break down. Each side justifies escalation as response to the other side's violation. Soon no norms remain.

This isn't moral failure. It's game theory under resource constraint. When positions are scarce, the incentives favor defection. The tragedy of the commons operates on elite cooperation.

Polarization as Symptom
Political polarization isn't primarily driven by ideological disagreement among the masses. It's driven by elite competition. Elites develop and signal strong ideological commitments to differentiate themselves from competitors and mobilize coalitions. The masses sort into teams, but the teams are organized by elites competing for power.

The result is what political scientists call pernicious polarization: divisions that make governance impossible. Not because citizens disagree (they always have), but because elite factions can't cooperate even when cooperation would serve their shared interests.

The Credential Trap: When Education Becomes Arms Race

One of the clearest symptoms of elite overproduction is credential inflation. As more people compete for elite positions, credentialing requirements escalate.

Fifty years ago, a bachelor's degree qualified you for management positions. Thirty years ago, a master's degree. Today, many entry-level "elite track" positions require graduate degrees, prestigious internships, professional networks, and cultural capital that only elite families can provide.

The expansion of higher education was supposed to democratize opportunity. Instead, it created a tournament. More people have degrees, so degrees are worth less. To stand out, you need better degrees from better schools. To get those, you need resources. Elite families can provide those resources. Working-class families cannot.

The result is what sociologists call the "credential society": a system where paper qualifications replace demonstrable skill, where access to education determines access to positions, and where education costs escalate faster than the value of credentials.

This creates two classes of credentialed people:

1. Those from elite backgrounds whose family resources can subsidize extended credentialing and unpaid internships
2. Those from non-elite backgrounds who go into massive debt for credentials that may not deliver the promised positions

The second group is particularly volatile. They did everything right—got the degrees, followed the rules, accumulated the debt. But the positions aren't there. They feel betrayed. They're angry. And they're exactly the population that counter-elites mobilize.

Elite Overproduction and Violence

The correlation between elite overproduction and political violence is strong across historical datasets. Not because elites themselves engage in violence (though sometimes they do), but because elite competition destabilizes the political system in ways that make violence more likely.

When intra-elite conflict intensifies, factions mobilize mass support. Some of this mobilization is peaceful—campaigns, protests, media campaigns. But when normal political channels are blocked, mobilization becomes confrontational. Protests become riots. Rhetoric becomes incitement. Paramilitaries form. Violence becomes acceptable as a political tool.

The state's response matters. A strong, legitimate state can manage elite competition through institutional channels. But elite overproduction tends to coincide with state fiscal stress, which weakens the state's capacity to manage conflict. A weak state cannot maintain order. Violence fills the vacuum.

The historical record shows:

• Elite overproduction precedes civil wars
• Elite overproduction precedes revolutions
• Elite overproduction precedes coups
• Elite overproduction precedes state collapse

Not every instance of elite overproduction leads to violence. But violence almost always occurs in contexts of elite overproduction.

Solutions: Can Elite Overproduction Be Managed?

If elite overproduction drives instability, preventing it should prevent crisis. But the solutions are politically difficult because they require elites to act against their short-term interests.

Expanding Elite Positions
Create more positions with genuine power, status, and material reward. This is what happened during American westward expansion, European colonialism, and the post-WWII economic boom. New territories, new industries, new institutions created new elite positions.

But this requires economic growth, territorial expansion, or institutional creation at scale. Without those, the number of truly elite positions is relatively fixed.

Redistributing Wealth and Power
Prevent wealth concentration through progressive taxation, anti-monopoly enforcement, and robust social safety nets. Reduce the inequality that makes elite positions so attractive relative to non-elite positions. If the gap between elite and non-elite life isn't so extreme, elite competition relaxes.

This is politically challenging because incumbent elites resist redistribution, and counter-elites often become incumbent elites who then resist redistribution.

Credentialing Reform
Reduce the role of credentials in allocating positions. Emphasize demonstrated competence over degrees. Reduce the cost of education. Break the link between elite education and elite access.

This fights against credentialing institutions (universities, professional associations) that benefit from the current system.

Cultural Shift
Change cultural norms around success and status. Valorize non-elite pursuits. Reduce the shame of downward mobility. Create alternative status hierarchies that don't route through political or economic power.

This is the softest intervention but potentially the most durable. If being a craftsman or a teacher or a farmer confers genuine respect rather than pity, elite competition relaxes.

None of these solutions are easy. All of them require collective action problems to be solved. And elite overproduction itself undermines the elite cooperation needed to implement them.

The Contemporary Landscape: Diagnosing the Present

By every measure Turchin and colleagues track, the United States is experiencing severe elite overproduction:

• Law schools graduate 35,000+ JDs per year for a legal market with shrinking demand
• PhD production far exceeds tenure-track academic positions, creating a permanent adjunct class
• MBA programs proliferate while corporate management structures flatten
• Wealth concentration creates billionaires competing for fixed political positions
• Media fragmentation creates thousands of elite-credentialed journalists competing for shrinking legacy positions

The results are visible:

• Intra-elite political paralysis
• Counter-elite movements on both left (democratic socialists, progressive activists) and right (populist nationalists, MAGA)
• Norm breakdown across institutions
• Rising political violence
• State fiscal stress and declining capacity
• Polarization that makes governance nearly impossible

This isn't a moral judgment. It's a structural diagnosis. The system is producing more elite aspirants than it can absorb. Those aspirants are competing for power through increasingly destabilizing means. The political system is fragmenting under the pressure.

The question isn't whether we're experiencing elite overproduction. The data is clear. The question is whether we can manage it before it produces the kind of crisis that has historically resolved elite overproduction: violence, state collapse, and population reduction.

History suggests we're not managing it. We're living through it.

This is Part 3 of the Cliodynamics series, exploring Peter Turchin's mathematical history through AToM coherence geometry.

Previous: The Secular Cycle
Next: The Age of Discord

Further Reading

• Turchin, P. (2016). Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. Beresta Books.
• Goldstone, J. A. (1991). Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. University of California Press.
• Turchin, P. (2013). "Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability." Cliodynamics 4(2).
• Scheidel, W. (2017). The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press.