Producing more candidates for elite positions than there are positions raises intra-elite competition and political instability.
Turchin's structural-demographic approach treats the ratio of aspirants to places as a driver of conflict: frustrated aspirants have the education and connections to organise, and some become counter-elites. The pattern is claimed across several historical cases, and the difficulty is that both variables are hard to measure consistently across the periods compared.
In practice
- A profession that trains four times the number of entrants it can place generates organised discontent rather than surplus talent.
- A firm that promises partnership to twenty and can appoint two has manufactured eighteen problems.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is competition: when credentialled aspirants outnumber the positions available, those who lose have the education and connections to organise opposition rather than to accept the result. Another is that the conditions producing many aspirants, such as rising wealth and expanded education, also raise expectations faster than institutions expand.
- In its favour
- The mechanism is specific, and it fits several historical episodes in Turchin's datasets, including the late Roman republic and the decades before the English civil war.
- Against it
- Both the count of aspirants and the coding of instability are disputed, which makes the fit hard to test, and critics argue the model can be fitted to almost any period after the fact.
- Standing
- Contested. The quantitative historical modelling behind it has been criticised on data selection and on the coding of instability, and the mechanism is easier to state than to test.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change