By Andrew Stuttaford
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Signs of radicalization among young voters are growing
harder and harder to miss, and it is a trend that is not likely to ease up any
time soon. At its core, much of it is a byproduct of elite overproduction, a
term coined many years ago by Peter
Turchin, then a professor at the University of Connecticut, and about which
I first wrote in 2016:
To put it more crudely than
Professor Turchin ever would, this occurs when members of the elite (or those
with the talents to join it) become too numerous for society to accommodate
their aspirations.
In 2026, I would rewrite the second half of that sentence
as follows:
This occurs when members of the
elite (or those with the talents to join it, or who have been led to believe
that they have such talents) become too numerous for society to accommodate
their aspirations.
I touched on the issue that amendment reflects in my
original 2016 article:
If a third of new entrants to the
work force are university graduates, they won’t all be above average,
especially those who attended one of academe’s less leafy groves. Their degrees
will be the equivalent of the high-school diplomas of half a century ago, a
ticket to the ballpark, not the VIP suite. 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 on 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 so to a recent article in the Financial
Times by John Burn-Murdoch. In it, he notes the discontent felt by many
young adults but adds that they are earning more than their parents at this stage
in their lives. That can, of course, be explained in part by factors such as
housing affordability, but something else is going on.
Burn-Murdoch:
[W]hat shapes people’s
satisfaction with their place in the economy isn’t so much their pay cheque as
where they sit relative to others like them both today and in the past. As
Andrew Clark and Andrew Oswald showed many years ago, this aspiration gap, between someone’s position in society
and the one they could reasonably have expected given their age and education
level, reliably drives discontent.
Why has this gap grown so wide?
Burn-Murdoch:
Over recent decades, we have
unwittingly engineered a society and economy in which the aspirations of every
subsequent generation have been raised while their ability to realistically
achieve them has not. Specifically, the expansion of higher education, while
well intentioned and clearly beneficial in many aspects, has upset the balance
between expectations and outcomes. . . .
As more and more people go to
university, the average graduate shifts from being among the economic elite to
being the norm, placing them much further down the socio-economic pecking order
than graduates of yesteryear. They were told putting in the years of hard work
would bring with it not only a good job and wage but a certain status in
society; most have found out it hasn’t.
Burn-Murdoch writes that even though only 10 percent of
graduates are in the lowest earnings quartile, one in three are in that bottom
segment when it comes to earnings relative to expectations (something similar,
incidentally, is happening to nongraduates). Perhaps those expectations were
unrealistic, but, as noted above, their disappointment is real enough, and
that’s what counts.
As I argued last year, the radicalization produced by
this sense of disappointment played a significant part in Zohran Mamdani’s rise and eventual
victory in New York City, and it is not easy to see
what will reverse it, especially if AI creates more losers than winners, even
if only for a while.
I doubt if that will be good news politically, and so I
will dust off (again!) my thoughts from 2016 of what policies shaped by the
demands of the elite “surplus” could look like:
[It] will be focused on a largely
fruitless (but for a few, fruitful) “war against inequality” centered on a
drastic redistributive effort. Taxes will rise steeply, on capital gains as
well as income, and, given time, on the mere ownership of capital: We can
expect a wealth tax on the living, a foretaste of death taxes to come.
Spending will doubtless soar, on
infrastructure (occasionally even sensibly) and on retraining schemes for jobs
that will never be. Health care will grow ever closer to single-payer. For the
upper middle class squeezed by automation, reinvented as Robin Hoods on the
make, all this will combine power play (the opportunity to redistribute away
the gains of their more successful competitors) with marvelous career
opportunities (someone has to operate the machinery of redistribution) and, of
course, claims to the moral high ground. . . .
I hope that I am wrong.
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