Elite Overproduction is a concept coined by Peter Turchin in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. At its core, the book argues that a great predictor of societal instability is when there is a surplus of elite aspirants, especially during periods of popular immiseration. Because elite spaces are exclusive and exclusionary, the higher you ascend the social ladder, the fewer people you encounter. In other words, elite spaces are limited. But what happens when there is a disproportionate number of people who aspire to occupy these very limited elite spaces? What happens when the supply of elite aspirants is greater than the demand for elites? This is what Peter Turchin means by Elite Overproduction.
For a while, the surest path to ascending the social ladder was getting a university degree. A degree conferred not just better fortunes but also social prestige. But now that every Tom, Dick, and Harry has a degree, credentials don’t necessarily correlate with better fortunes. There are lots of graduates who are unemployed. The ones who are lucky enough to get a job are often underemployed. Having a degree no longer offers an escape from popular immiseration.
Turchin explains that elites are of different stripes, like ideological (as in religious leaders, thought leaders, social media influencers), political, coercion (law officers), or bureaucratic (bosses). For the purpose of this thinkpiece, I will be restricting the meaning of elite overproduction to the exponential growth of the credentialed class.
Let me use two examples to illustrate how much of a problem this is. Sometime in 2014, the Nigerian Immigration Service was recruiting nationwide. Applicants (graduates, of course) were told to go to the assigned centres in their respective geopolitical zones for an assessment. Those in the North Central region went to the National Stadium in Abuja. For context, the stadium has a seating capacity of 60,000. On the day of the assessment, the stadium was filled to the brim with jobseekers. At some point during the assessment, there was a stampede, which unfortunately led to the deaths of seven people.
In 2020, the Nigerian government launched the Special Public Works Programme, a community sanitation initiative for 774,000 unskilled workers. The programme would last for three months and pay N20,000 (that’s $53, adjusted for inflation). Guess what? In Ogun State alone, it was reported that four PhD and 200 master’s degree holders applied. That doesn’t factor in the thousands of first-degree holders who applied, by the way. Why would someone with a master’s degree, let alone PhD, apply for an unskilled community sanitation job that pays them $53 per month? These two examples show how much of a problem the overproduction of degrees is.
This problem is particularly acute in the humanities and social sciences, Peter Turchin argues. And as someone who has a couple of degrees in the arts and social sciences, I couldn’t agree more. The 21st-century economy has rendered many of these degrees obsolete. There’s been a degree equivalent of creative destruction, I suppose. A degree in philosophy, history, or literature is of little relevance in the market, except, perhaps, if you desire a career in academia. Being aware of the problem of degree obsolescence, China is restructuring its universities to prioritise AI. Already, Chinese universities have cut thousands of arts and humanities degrees.
So essentially, there’s been an overproduction of the credentialed class in Africa over the past few decades. But it has created an imbalance. We have a disproportionate number of jobseekers chasing limited job opportunities. The supply of degrees outweighs the demand for them. Africa, like the rest of the world, is experiencing the overproduction of elites.
Now the second horn of the paradox – Elite Underproduction. This is when a country is not producing enough elites it needs to attain the growth and development it needs. It goes without saying that I took the intellectual license to adulterate Peter Turchin’s concept to come up with Elite Underproduction. That said, I’ll like to use an extreme example to illustrate this point. William Easterly, in The Tyranny of Experts, gives us a picture of what DR Congo was like at independence.
He tells us that,
“at the independence of the Belgian Congo, only 16 Congolese had college degrees. Roads were nonexistent and radios scarce, so few of the Congolese learned of their new identity as Congolese.”
Now, given that DR Congo had just gained independence, we can understand the poor fortunes the country had then. But this extreme example underscores how society suffers when it underproduces elites and skilled talents. By global standards, illiteracy is still a problem in Africa, though there have been real gains made over the past 20–30 years. The global average for literacy is 87%. It is 71% for Africa. My country, Nigeria, has an estimated 18 million out-of-school children. That’s the highest of any country in the world. It is worth acknowledging the variations that exist between different countries, regions, states, and municipalities in Africa when it comes to literacy rates. I would assume, for instance, that Mauritius has a higher literacy rate than Mauritania. Most of the out-of-school children in Nigeria are in the northern region, not the south. But acknowledging the nuances in these statistics doesn’t change the fact that illiteracy remains a problem in Africa. And based on that, we can conclude that Africa is underproducing elites.
Another way elite underproduction manifests in Africa is from a talent-scarcity perspective. I am talking about talents in advanced and technical fields like pharmaceuticals, nuclear physics, genomics, molecular biology, astrophysics, aeronautical engineering, robotics, and so on. Africa has contributed its fair share of world-renowned talents in the creative and liberal arts, but very few in advanced and technical fields. Africa’s contribution to global science is less than 2%. As long as our scholarship remains restricted to the arts and humanities, we can never compete globally. This is an uncomfortable fact for me to acknowledge as someone who has a background in the humanities.
Elite overproduction has manifested in the rise of revolutionary ideologies globally. Around 2015, it led to the rise of rightwing populism and democratic socialism in America, with Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders being their first respective iterations. The second generation of democratic socialists has even gone farther than Bernie Sanders. The election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York City, the capitalism capital of the world, speaks volumes. The people who support these socialist candidates the most are often college-educated. These are frustrated elite aspirants. They are disgruntled with the system. They’ve realised that their degrees are worthless, and that has made them easy prey for these revolutionary movements. They believe billionaires are the cause of their misfortune, so they support candidates like Mamdani and AOC, who promise to tax the rich.
In Africa, elite overproduction is manifesting differently, however. We are yet to see the rise of revolutionary movements like socialism, at least not in the way it’s happening in America. What we see instead is the rise of Japa. Rather than attempting to capture and transform the political system, many educated young Africans simply try to exit it. Also, there’s been a rise in what I call monetised altruism. There’s been an exponential growth of NGOs and CSOs in Africa over the past decade. Claiming to fight a social cause is lucrative because it gives you access to international funding and opportunities. Of course, this is a generalisation. I’m sure there are NGOs and CSOs that are truly altruistic. But the fact remains that this has turned into a grift among the credentialed class in Africa.
So, to summarise, Africa, on the one hand, is overproducing elites because there are far more graduates than there are jobs and, on the other hand, underproducing elites if you think of Africa’s literacy rate by global standards and also our lack of talents in highly advanced and technical fields.