The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis - Did America produce too many frustrated college graduates in the 2000s and 2010s?
“We're talented and bright/ We're lonely and uptight/ We've found some lovely ways/ To disappoint” — The Weakerthans
Here’s an eye-opening bit of data: The percent of U.S. college students majoring in the humanities has absolutely crashed since 2010.
Ben Schmidt has many more interesting data points?in his Twitter thread. To me the most striking was that there are now almost as many people majoring in computer science as in all of the humanities put together:
When you look at the data, it becomes very apparent?why the shift is happening. College kids increasingly want majors that will lead them directly to secure and/or high-paying jobs. That’s why STEM and medical fields — and to a lesser degree, blue-collar job-focused fields like hospitality — have been on the rise.
But looking back at that big bump of humanities majors in the 2000s and early 2010s (the raw numbers are here), and thinking about the social unrest America has experienced over the last 8 years, makes me think about?Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction. Basically, the idea here is that...