I studied broadcast journalism in college for 3 whole months to prepare for this moment.

Fascinating.  From America’s Collapsing Meritocracy Is a Recipe for Revolt by Paul Musgrave.  The subheading is Chinese history shows what happens when an old system loses its force.

TikTok star Addison Rae caused a sensation on social media last week for something other than her dance moves. Rae posted a tweet that included a picture of her holding an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) microphone before a match between Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier. Her caption read: “I studied broadcast journalism in college for 3 whole months to prepare for this moment.”

The seemingly innocuous tweet received thousands of angry responses, many from students or recent journalism school graduates expressing dismay that Rae had apparently taken one of the scarce jobs in their field. As one Twitter user wrote, “i got a 33 on my ACT and was a national merit semifinalist, spent thousands of dollars and hours of hard work to receive a bachelor’s degree from the best journalism school in the country, was commencement speaker, and applied to 75+ jobs to be unemployed.” The tweet received over 100,000 likes and thousands of retweets.

The internet produces no shortage of cheap drama, but outrage on this scale suggests something deeper. Understanding why Rae’s joke inspired so much outrage depends on appreciating the tensions between those who achieve fame and fortune in the marketplace and those who seek the climb the career ladder in a declining empire with narrowing paths to success. 

Musgrave is right to notice the class issue here.  The Mandarin Class hates interlopers (from Donald Trump to Addison Rae) who ignore the rules or pursue their own goals.  Musgrave has an extended discussion on the old Chinese exams structure.

In the late Qing period, discontented literati without jobs expressed their bitterness at a system that failed them through pamphlets, essays, and posters. The discontented, underemployed American literati now do so on Twitter. And so the controversy surrounding Addison Rae dramatizes the political tensions caused by incompatibility between what a system promises those who play by its rules and what it actually rewards.

The idea that a commoner who hadn’t gone through that official hazing route would achieve a distinguished place would be outrageous to milling crowds of disaffected Chinese exam-takers. We can even imagine one of them sitting to write, “I earned my juren degree, was a finalist for a jinshi degree, spent thousands of taels and decades of hard work, and am nevertheless unemployed.”

Rae, in other words, is blameless (at least in this regard). Rather than spending her career trying for conventional measures of success—a college degree, perhaps a master’s in journalism from Columbia University or a doctoral degree in political science—she instead sniffed out a route to success better suited to her day. That mixture of aspiration, cleverness, and hard work commands an audience of 80 million followers on TikTok.

In doing so, Rae made herself the target for the frustrations of those who thought they were succeeding in the American version of the examination system. For an aspiring journalist, probably thousands of dollars in debt, the future seems bleak. Federal statistics show that the number of jobs in that field is projected to plummet by 11 percent over the next several years, and those who do find work will find it hard to pay back student loans. Similar bitterness plagues academic Twitter, where the overproduction of doctoral degrees has left a highly educated class with ample spare time and cultural capital to express their grievances. The frustrated take to social media to denounce someone who demonstrates that their entire theory of success is wrong.

Musgrave then focuses on buying off the surplus Mandarin Class in order to avoid social tensions.  I do not think that works.  If you subsidize a bunch of non-producing Mandarin class wannabes, a) you are robbing some to pay others based on class, and b) there are many more being asked to pay to subsidize the Mandarin Class wannabes than there are Mandarin Class wannabes.  Someone will eventually notice.

There is a far easier way compatible with our Age of Enlightenment values.

Simply stop producing so many of the Mandarin Class wannabes.  Slim down the supply.  That is far more efficient and reduces the societal cost of overproducing Mandarin Class wannabes.  

The irony is that Musgrave, an inherent Mandarin Class member, goes straight to subsidies of the Mandarin Class without ever recognizing that it is easier to reduce the production of the Mandarin Class members.