If your prestige depends on the funding of others, there is no prestige to be had.

From There's Just Too Many Damn Elites by Erik Torenberg.  The subheading is And not enough high-status cushy jobs to go around.

This is similar to a situation that was emerging in developing countries back in the late seventies and early eighties.  I recall doing research on the Egyptian education system at that time.  They had thrown in their lot with the Soviet Union, had a planned economy, and their universities were intended to help improve to the human capital that the nation required for a glorious future.  

The problem was that their planned economy was not generating the profits or job growth necessary to accommodate the increasing flow of university graduates.  The young people studied hard but had no where to go.  They wanted the prestigious jobs that should go with prestigious education certificates but those were simply not available in the planned economy.

The government increasingly became the employer of last resort, hiring the surfeit of university graduates and placing them in various departments and agencies.  But there was little actual work to be done.  The positions were prestigious sounding titles to go with the university degree but with little actual responsibility or activity.

Increasingly, university graduates worked two jobs.  Their official government job and then, off the books, a second private sector job.  Between the two jobs, the graduate could put together an adequate income.  Just.

It was, of course, not a sustainable model.  Unutilized graduates with fake jobs became restless, and the national budget could not afford all the outflow.  

Thats the background with which I read Torenberg's piece.

The PMC exists somewhere between what we think of as the traditional working class and the ruling class. While they aren’t capitalists and don't own the means of production, they do play a big role in upholding and extending capitalism’s reign.

In other words, managers are a specific type of employee that are materially on the side of labor—but symbolically on the side of capital. 

What Ehrenreich noted was a bifurcation: On the higher end more commercial PMCs were peeling off to join the elite tier of wealthy CEOs and managers, while on the lower end the PMCs were suffering from a collapse of many of their preexisting professions (e.g. academics, journalists, etc).

And so the academics and journalists had to make a choice: they could either join the traditional working class to fight against the capitalists or they could join the capitalists against the working class in the hope of getting rich in the process.

[snip]

Activism became not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker. As David Brooks once put it, “You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx”. More specifically, you have to go to college to learn those words, which excludes two-thirds of the country.

Activism also became a strategy for professional advancement beyond college. By calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them in the corporate pecking order, young elites became able to intimidate Boomer administrators and usurp power from them.

This isn’t all just ideological posturing, it’s also a practical necessity. The truth is that we have too many college educated people without technical skills who expect high-status and high-paying jobs and there simply aren’t enough jobs for them. So the posturing isn’t only a way to signal high-status, it’s also a way to ensure they continue to hold an elite job. 

[snip]

Summarizing Elite Overproduction theory: The problem with having too many elites is that we don’t have enough cushy jobs for them. As the number of elites expands, there's a growing pressure to find roles for them so that they can keep their luxurious lifestyles. Thus, the state steps in to create roles for these excess elites that are  appropriate for their status. The state can’t create jobs for all of them, so the private sector is expected to step in as well, hence the explosion of administrative jobs in companies. 

As the elites continue to expand and the state struggles to find roles for them all, we begin to see intense competition for the few positions that exist. In the face of  losing out on the money and status they expected to get, elites become very angry and turn on each other, creating intra-elite conflict.

One signal of intra-elite conflict is an emphasis on credentialing. In the old days when the majority of the elite youth could expect to inherit their parents’ wealth and status, they didn't bother to go to university. But in the wake of elite over-expansion, we watch them now fight for credentials as a way of distinguishing themselves.

Thomas Sowell makes this point as well - that unserious people gravitate to jobs with little clear responsibility or accountability:

Malcolm Kyeyune has an interesting thesis around all this: He noticed that many jobs in the professional class — academics, journalists, activists, bankers, consultants, middle-managers — lack clear accountability. They claim to hold others accountable but have little accountability themselves, neither to the market nor the electorate. The most ambitious people sometimes self-select out by becoming entrepreneurs. Conversely, bureaucracies attract people (on average) who conform, which means that these bureaucracies become increasingly run by people who prioritize conformism over quality. You see this in Corporate America too, where the organization is increasingly influenced by HR and PR. 

[snip]

What this means is that we've created a huge surplus class of administrators in our imperial machine. And there's simply not enough things for them to do since all the manufacturing is done somewhere else. So one way to view some of these activist-oriented jobs is to see them as a make-work program for elites. There is a whole web of managerial technocrats, government regulators, activists, people who run media orgs, NGOs, etc that helps serve this goal. To be sure, there’s lots of great people doing important work at philanthropic organizations, but there are also plenty of people at both private and public sector organizations who are claiming to be doing important work but are not actually having an impact—and there’s often insufficient accountability mechanisms to do something about it. As we just saw with the FTX blow up, just because someone claims to be doing good does not mean they are.

When activists advocate for new rights, they’re also implicitly advocating for a permanent cast of managers to monitor the implementation of these new rights. This is why some of the problems the multi-billion dollar activist class was created to solve will in fact never be “solved”. It’s a challenge of incentives: people are less likely to solve a problem if solving the problem means losing their jobs.

The PMC of course wants to retain high-paying jobs as consultants and communicators — And for many years, companies could get away with a bit of excess in the name of social impact (and good marketing). But with increased interest rates and a deteriorating macroeconomic environment, these roles are increasingly harder to justify. 

 

The message being that the only prestigious jobs are those which actually produce prestigious improvements in productivity.  Everything else may have nice titles and impressive degrees but they are not prestigious because they are entirely dependent on mooching off the productivity of others.