[sudhirj]

Came here to say this :). Especially with the Foundation TV series coming out now this could almost be a PR stunt.

The thesis seems sound, though. When you have a large number of people who have the aptitude and have invested heavily in joining the ranks of the elite (both financially and time-wise), and there's just not enough room at the top, what do they do?

We see that in India with the rise of a huge number of engineering colleges. There's a massive over-supply of engineers, so people who have invested in a masters degree at great cost and 5 to 6 years of studying wind up working in vocational jobs that could have been done with a six-month diploma / apprenticeship. They're not happy.

[zozbot234]

The thesis is also nothing new, it was developed in quite some depth by early 20th-century sociologists. It has since become unpopular however, largely because the very notion of identifiable "elites" inherently problematizes popular and widespread notions such as democratic representation, or social mobility.

[FredPret]

Sounds like an undersupply of entrepreneurs!

[em-bee]

the problem is that there is an elite to begin with. being highly educated should not make people feel entitled to benefits, but rather it should make them feel obligated to use their education to contribute to society.

if education is free or even comes with financial support then there is no need for higher salaries to compensate the expense. a computer science master and a master baker should have the same incentive.

[sudhirj]

This has not been and never will be the case because of leverage. A master baker can serve maybe a 100 people with an oven, a developer can serve 100 million with a RaspberryPi. Short of violence-enforced "equality" this simply can't happen.

[em-bee]

that's an interesting argument, but i it doesn't add up. i only need one baker to cover all my daily need for bread, but the software that i use requires thousands of developers to maintain. so, yes, while a single developer can reach millions of people, that single developer only contributes a tiny fraction to the life of each of them.

you have to really look at the recipient side of things. how much of a factor is IT in the life of an individual, compared to other professions?

of course they are not all equal. a hairdresser is needed once a month, the baker daily, the doctor once a quarter, IT, well, depends on what kind of work i do. of course it's not all equal. but we also have many more programmers than bakers.

the value of each of those varies for each individual, but in the end it all balances out. i am not advocating that everyone should get exactly the same pay, but there is no reason that one particular profession must be strictly more valuable than another.

[sudhirj]

Yeah, this gets messed up when money is the expression of value. Any profession with leverage will make more money, without necessarily being more valuable. Same way a HFT/quant fund manager makes more than my kid’s schoolteacher, or even my kid’s doctor, but the teacher and doctor are far more valuable than the fund manager.