> There is always something for a large class of intelligent achievers to do. The failure to put them to work is more of a societal failure than it is an indictment of the education system.

This doesn’t quite resonate with me, because I’ve lived through it and seen it happen over and over again even in the most functional of societies.

Oversimplifying a bit, let’s call intelligent achievers elites. There is often a mismatch between elite supply and elite slots, and by definition elite slots are scarce — no matter how well your society is functioning.

Elite slots scale with the maturity and breadth of the economy. The U.S., with its size and diversity, has a much larger pool of elite slots than most countries. That’s one reason I moved here.

By contrast, in Canada (a country I love deeply), most Ph.D.s end up underemployed or they leave, because their skills simply aren’t needed at the level of specialization they were trained for. Some jobs only make sense when you have enough scale to support them — and without that scale, those elite positions just don’t exist.

Can intelligent achievers pivot to something else, like entrepreneurship? Sure, but in a smaller economy, the options are much more limited, even if they do a startup and invent new categories. They can also accept underemployment. There are inherent constraints in an economy due to natural factors like scale, geography, etc.

(My understanding is that Taiwan is in this situation -- highly educated people, limited industries that can employ them. Some move abroad, but many just curb their ambitions and try to get by with low pay and accept their lot in life, striving only for "little joys" they can afford like bubble tea and inexpensive street food)

AI seems poised to create more underemployment rather than fix the existing level of it…

The core of Russian revolution were highly educated nerds who would cancel their friends over slight differences in understanding of obscure socioeconomic theories

Even the Russian Revolution was lead by elites: - Kerensky was lawyer - Lvov was an aristocrat - Lenin, Trotsky were highly educated and known for intellectual brilliance

A ruling party having a catastrophic electoral position only for it to rapidly improve as election approaches is a fairly common phenomenon in modern democracies. Most recently, Canada was in that situation. Before that, Britain several times. There are plenty of historical examples as well, Reagan and Thatcher in their first re-elections for one.

The latter would have undoubtedly faced a revolution if Britain had no elections. Later, she'd go on to become an invincible electoral juggernaut.