Evaluating We Have Never Been Woke, Part 1: Elite Overproduction
After spending ten posts (beginning here) outlining Musa al-Gharbi’s arguments in his book We Have Never Been Woke, it’s time to move on to my evaluation of those arguments. In this post, I’ll begin to cover some of my thoughts on al-Gharbi’s more big-picture ideas — the cause of “Awokenings,” and the motivation for “woke” symbolic capitalists in their support for policies that are harmful to the poor and vulnerable.
Elite Overproduction
Overall, al-Gharbi describes Awokenings as periods in which members of what he calls the symbolic capitalist class try to take the reins of social justice movements in order to preserve or enhance their own status. A key factor in this process is “elite overproduction” — the idea that there are too many people who see themselves as destined to join or remain in the elite class than there is actual capacity for elites.
I think the idea of elite overproduction is basically sound. If I had to pick a nit (and I do love a good nitpick!), I’d probably have framed it as more of a supply and demand issue for elites — the term “elite overproduction” makes it sound like it’s purely a matter of excess supply. For example, when al-Gharbi talks about the overproduction of elites leading up to the first Great Awokening (in the 1920s–1930s), he points to data showing the increase in rates of college education, which was (and still is) often seen as a ticket straight into elite status. But while the increases were large in relative terms (the number of people with a PhD quadrupled!) it was still pretty tiny in absolute terms — the percentage of people with a PhD rose from 0.03% to 0.12% of the population. By itself, it doesn’t seem likely that 0.12% of the population holding a PhD would have amounted to much were it not for the impact of the Great Depression and the economic downturn that followed. In short, at least for that Awokening, it seems like the problem was more to do with the demand for elites collapsing, rather than the supply growing at an unsustainable rate.
However, I do think that oversupply does a lot to capture much of the current situation. Many people in my generation grew up being told, in effect, that going to college and getting a degree was important because doing so would lock you into a strong career path. But many have graduated from college and discovered that holding a degree was far from the assurance of attaining a well-paying job they had believed.
Part of the problem is that the strategy of ensuring career success by obtaining a college degree is the kind of thing that works well when most people don’t do it. Pushing more and more people into the college pipeline doesn’t ensure more and more people will be able to gain all the benefits that a degree historically provided. It just devalues the possession of a degree through inflation, leaving more and more graduates holding poor job prospects along with large student loan debt.
A lot of anger over exactly this situation was visible during Occupy Wall Street. I recall at the time of those protests reading a news story about someone working in an office building overseeing an Occupy encampment who had printed out numerous job applications for basic retail and service jobs and tossed them out the window to rain down among the protesters. The not-so-subtle message was “just get a job, you unemployed losers!” And in the story, they interviewed the protesters about it. Their response was that they weren’t just random losers — they were all college-educated, had fancy degrees, and the whole reason they got those degrees was so they wouldn’t have to work those kinds of jobs — jobs they considered to be beneath their rightful station. They felt like the implicit contract they expected had been broken — they graduated high school, went to college, and got a degree, because they had been told their whole life that doing this was their ticket to the top. Yet they ended up feeling very far from secure in their prospects. (The actual details may have been slightly different, because I’m relying on my memory here, but the gist of the story was basically along those lines. But sprinkle some salt on it if you like. Memory can be a fickle thing.)
Though al-Gharbi focuses mostly on the United States, “Awokenings” occurred across the world, and the methods and makeup of the “woke” were similar in different countries: largely highly educated, well-off elites. And the frustration was also about those elites (or elite aspirants) feeling insecure about their own status. This was documented by Martin Gurri in his book The Revolt of the Public (published in 2014), in the midst of the most recent Awokening.
This section of Scott Alexander’s review of that book, describing these movements in all these different countries, sounds strikingly parallel to what al-Gharbi describes:
All of these movements were mostly their respective countries’ upper-middle classes; well-connected, web-savvy during an age when that meant something. Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries’ most privileged ethnic groups. Not the kind of people you usually see taking to the streets or building tent cities…
Gurri isn’t shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty. In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year – “in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US”. The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe’s history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of. They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society’s class pyramids. Yet they were convinced, utterly convinced, that this was the most fraudulent and oppressive government in the history of history, and constantly quoting from a manifesto called Time For Outrage!
So again: There is something to elite overproduction as an idea. It is a well-founded fact that social justice activism, too, is primarily an elite activity.
In my next post, we’ll look at how a well-known explanation of incentives and political coalitions might provide insight into al-Gharbi’s analysis.
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