Precarity and Artificial Intelligence: The Foundations of Modern AI

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession.  Today's post, however, will begin to explore a particular emerging impact to employment for everyone, whether formally educated or not.  That impact is the impact of machine artificial intelligence on the future of work.

As I mentioned in a previous post, 

Labor casualization has been part of a larger tactical aim to reduce labor costs by reducing the number of laborers...This reduction of the total number of laborers can be achieved by replacing employees with machines.  That replacement has been occurring from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution onward, but in the last two or three decades it has accelerated greatly due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI).  A long-standing motive behind the recent massive investments in research in artificial intelligence is the desire by many of the world's richest people to eliminate the costs of relying on humans by replacing human laborers with automation.

So it is natural to ask what sort of world is emerging as the result of the use of increasingly sophisticated AI in our present economy.  Here we need to be careful, due to the number of shrill voices shouting either wildly positive or frighteningly negative predictions about the likely impacts of AI.  I think we need to ask the following questions:

• First, what exactly is artificial machine intelligence?  What is the theoretical basis of AI?  How does it work? ...

Today we'll start trying to answer the questions stated above.   And at the outset, I must state clearly that I am not an AI expert, although my technical education has exposed me in a rudimentary way to many of the concepts that will be mentioned in our discussion of AI.

First, let's paint a picture.  One of the original motives for trying to invent intelligent machines was the desire for machines that would reliably do the kind of mundane tasks that humans find to be distasteful or unpleasantly difficult.  This desire actually has a very long history, but was popularized in the science fiction of the mid-20th century.  Think of a kid from the 1950's or 1960's who wished he had a robot that could vacuum the living room carpet or take out the garbage or do homework or shovel snow out of the driveway so that the kid could play without being bothered by parents demanding that the kid himself do the tasks listed above.  What kind of "brain" would the robot need in order to know what tasks needed to be performed and when would that brain know the tasks had been performed to acceptable standards?

The question of the kind of "brain" required was solved by the invention of the first programmable all-electronic digital computer during World War Two.  This computer was itself an evolution of principles implemented in previous mechanical and electromechanical computers.  Once engineers developed digital computers with onboard memory storage, these computers became capable of automation of tasks that had been formerly automated by more crude mechanical and electromechanical means such as relays.  Thus the 1950's saw the emergence of digital control systems for automation of chemical processes at refineries; the 1950's and 1960's saw the emergence of computer-assisted or computer-based navigation for ships, aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft; and the late 1960's saw the emergence of programmable logic controllers (PLC's) for automation of factory processes at industrial assembly plants.

The digital electronic automation systems that have been developed from the 1950's onward have thus formed a key component of the development of modern machine AI.  But another key component consists of the principles by which these systems achieve their particular objectives.  These principles are the principles of mathematical optimization, and they also have a rather long history.

Mathematical optimization is the collection of techniques and methods for finding the maximum or minimum value of a mathematical function of one or more independent variables.  Some of the earliest methods of mathematical optimization were based on calculus.  More complex methods include such things as numerical methods for solving nonlinear differential equations.  These methods were only possible to implement easily once electronic digital computers became available.

The first step in optimizing real-world problems consists of turning a real-world problem into a mathematical abstraction consisting of a function of several independent variables.  Each of the independent variables represents an independently controllable parameter of the problem.  Then optimization techniques are used to find the desired maximum or minimum value of the function.  To put it another way,

"Optimization is the act of obtaining the best result under given circumstances.  In design, construction, and maintenance of any engineering system, engineers have to take (sic) many...decisions.  The ultimate goal of all such decisions is either to minimize the effort required or to maximize the desired benefit.  Since the effort required or the benefit desired in any practical situation can be expressed as a function of certain decision variables, optimization can be defined as the process of finding the conditions that give the maximum or minimum value of a function."  - Engineering Optimization: Theory and Practice, Rao, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2009

The function to be optimized is called the objective function.  When we optimize the objective function, we are also interested in finding those values of the independent variables which produce the desired function maximum or minimum value.  These values represent the amount of various inputs required to get the desired optimum output from a situation represented by the objective function.  

A simple case of optimization would be figuring out how to catch up with a separate moving object in the shortest amount of time if you started from an arbitrary starting position.  To use optimization techniques, you'd turn this problem into an objective function and then use calculus to find the minimum value of the objective function.  Since the velocity and acceleration are the independent variables of interest, you'd want to know the precise values of these (in both magnitude and direction) which would minimize the value of the objective function.  Note that for simple trajectories or paths of only two dimensions, adult humans tend to be able to do this automatically and intuitively - but young kids, not so much.  Try playing tag with a five or six-year-old kid, and you will see what I mean.  The kid won't be able to grasp your acceleration from observing you, so he will run to where he sees you are at the moment he sees you instead of anticipating where you'll end up.  Of course, once kids get to the age of ten or so, they're more than likely to catch you in any game of tag if you yourself are very much older than 30!

The easiest AI problems are those that can most easily be turned into mathematically precise objective functions with only one output variable.  Examples of such problems include the following: reliably hitting a target with a missile, winning a board game in the smallest number of moves, traveling reliably between planets, simple linear regression, regulating the speed or rate of industrial or chemical processes, and control of HVAC and power systems in buildings in order to optimize interior climate, lighting, and comfort.

Harder AI problems include machine vision (including recognizing a human face or an animal), natural language processing, construction of buildings, navigating physically complex unstructured and random environments (such as forests), and optimization of problems with multiple objectives requiring multiple objective functions to model.  The machine vision and natural language processing problems are harder because they require the use of logistical regression functions as objective functions, and in order to accurately assign the appropriate "weights" to each of the variables of these objective functions, the AI which implements these functions needs massive amounts of training data.  However, these and other harder problems are now being solved with increasing effectiveness through technologies such as deep learning and other advanced techniques of machine learning.  It is in the tackling of these harder problems that AI has the greatest potential to disrupt the future of work, especially of cognitively demanding work that formerly only humans could do.  In order to assess the potential magnitude and likelihood of this disruption, we will need to examine the following factors:

• The current state of the art of machine learning
• The current state of the art of designing objective functions
• And the current state of the art of multi-objective mathematical optimization.

I'll try tackling these questions in the next post in this series.

The Second Amendment As A Leading Cause of Childhood Death

I've been busy tending to urgent family matters, and as a result, I had to fly back to So. Cal. last week.  When I arrived, all the American flags I saw were flying at half mast.  Because nowadays I'm allergic to the news except in extremely small doses, I had no idea why.  Today I finally found out the reason.

Learning the reason prompted me to do a quick Internet search for the incidence of firearms as a cause of death in the United States.  I learned today that firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S.  (See this and this also.)  This inconvenient truth will no doubt be vigorously denied by the same patriotic right-wing Republican evangelical/Protestant white supremacist types who denied that the COVID-19 virus actually existed and that it could kill people.  These types will insist that the right to keep and bear arms is part of America's "Christian" heritage.  In saying this, they will conveniently elide the fact that Christ told Simon Peter to put away his sword, since "all who take up the sword shall die by the sword".  (Matthew 26).  In considering those who rabidly cling to their guns I am reminded of analyses I read about how the Vikings eventually had to abandon their ancient Greenland settlements even though the Inuit were able to remain and thrive.  The reason is that the Vikings tried to import a culture and way of life that could not survive the reality of their new environment.  Yet the Vikings stubbornly clung to this culture and way of life, even as some of their spiritual and cultural descendants are now clinging to a culture and way of life that has no future.  This can only end badly.

One other thing - I'm still working on the next installments of my series on precarity.  We will shortly start learning more about artificial intelligence.  Beware - some of the discussion will turn rather geeky...

Introducing the Main Street Alliance

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce readers to the Main Street Alliance, an organization which seeks to foster the creation and growth of small businesses in the United States.  As I resume my series of posts on the problem of economic precarity, I will also discuss solutions.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe that the eradication of the monopoly power of the rich and the fostering of small business among the poor are two strategic efforts which can reduce or eliminate economic precarity in the United States.  This is what the Main Street Alliance is working to achieve.

Those who read about the activities of the Main Street Alliance will also learn about how the rich and the powerful in the United States are trying to destroy small businesses, especially those run by minorities, and how these bad actors are using Republican-appointed Federal court justices in their attacks against small business.  This should be of great concern to those of you who are small entrepreneurs.  The latest attack against small business consists of judicial challenges to the Federal tax code.  Readers of this blog can learn from the Main Street Alliance website how they can join in the fight to foster and protect small business.

The Distressing Mirror

Two men went up into the temple to pray, 

one a Pharisee, and the other a tax-gatherer.  

The Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, 

"God, I thank Thee that I am not like other people: 

swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer. . ."

- Luke 18:10-11

Over the last week or so I downloaded an audio narration of another nonfiction book by Haruki Murakami.  (I already had his books Novelist as a Vocation and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.)  Murakami has achieved fame as a novelist due to his complex, dreamlike narratives and complex, multidimensional characters.  However, I personally am drawn more to some of his short stories and nonfiction.  Also, nowadays I like to consume my fiction and narrative nonfiction in the form of audiobooks, since I can listen to them while exercising or doing housework or yardwork.  

The book I downloaded last week was Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, and it deals with the March 1995 terrorist attack against Tokyo subway passengers which was perpetrated by members of Aum Shinrikyo (オウム真理教), a Japanese apocalyptic/doomsday cult founded by a certain Chizuo Matsumoto, known more widely as Shoko Asahara.  Over the years, Mr. Asahara had directed Aum followers to perpetrate a number of violent physical attacks against innocent Japanese citizens, including some who were critical of Aum activities and some who had been members of Aum but had since fled the cult.  (By the way, if you click on some of these links, you will be directed to webpages that are written in Japanese.  If you want to read them in English, simply copy the link address into Chrome or Chromium and right-click anywhere on the page.  An option will appear that says, "Translate to English."  Click on that option.)

The attack that occurred on March 20, 1995, used a liquid sarin solution that was stored in plastic bags.  The perpetrators boarded the Tokyo subway trains, dropped these plastic bags, then punctured them with the sharpened tips of umbrellas.  They then fled the trains at the next stop after the stop at which they boarded, while the liquid sarin solution spread over the floors of the subway cars and the sarin began to evaporate into the air.  As the sarin evaporated, it began to sicken and kill passengers.  It also sickened (and in some cases killed) Tokyo subway workers who were dispatched to clean up the liquid on the floors and who did not know that the liquid contained sarin.  This attack was entirely unprovoked.  None of the people riding those trains or working on those train platforms had done anything evil beforehand to Aum or to Shoko Asahara.

In writing Underground, Murakami sought to correct certain biases which he observed in Japanese media coverage of the gas incident.  In particular, there had been a tendency toward sensationalism which obscured the unavoidable grainy uniqueness of the individual stories of each of the victims and bystanders who had been riding the Tokyo subways on the day of the attack.  This is why there is a large number of interviews of victims in Murakami's account.  

But Murakami also attempted to challenge and correct certain biases in the Japanese societal and cultural perception of the meaning of the gas attack.  This attempt is captured in "Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?", a series of essays at the end of the original edition of the book.  In those essays, Murakami challenged the evolving narrative in which a "right," "sane," "good" Japanese society was juxtaposed against an "evil", "insane," "diseased" adversary.  As time passed, this narrative allowed the birth of a mindset in which "most Japanese [seemed] ready to pack up the whole incident in a trunk labeled things over and done with." (Murakami, ibid.)

What Murakami wanted to do instead was to ask, What kind of society have we Japanese (that is, all of us) become that something like Aum Shinrikyo could have arisen and that something like the Tokyo gas attack could have occurred?  To quote him again,

"In other words, the shock dealt to Japanese society by Aum and the gas attack has still to be effectively analyzed, the lessons have yet to be learned. Even now, having finished interviewing the victims, I can't simply file away the gas attack, saying: “After all, this was 

merely an extreme and exceptional crime committed by an isolated lunatic fringe.” And what am I to think when our collective memory of the affair is looking more and more like a bizarre comic strip or an urban myth? 

"If we are to learn anything from this tragic event, we must look at what happened all over again, from different angles, in different ways. Something tells me things will only get worse if we don't wash it out of our metabolism. It’s all too easy to say, “Aum was evil.” Nor does saying, “This had nothing to do with evil' or 'insanity'" prove anything either. Yet the spell cast by these phrases is almost impossible to break, the whole emotionally charged “Us” versus “Them" vocabulary has been done to death."

In his closing essays, Murakami cites the abortive attempt by Aum Shinrikyo to win seats in the Japanese Diet during the 1990 elections, mentioning in particular an encounter he had with Aum rallies in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo.  He speaks of the discomfort behind the revulsion he felt toward Aum and how he asked himself why he felt that revulsion, that horror.  His answer was that he saw in Aum a mirror of Japanese society itself at the time, and of himself as a Japanese man.  True, the mirror had distortions, yet it accurately reflected elements of the shadow self, the indwelling corruption which each of us must deal with on a daily basis in order not to descend into nihilistic destructiveness. 

I don't know whether other Japanese voices spoke up in the same way as Haruki Murakami in the months and years after the Tokyo gas attack.  But I do see a parallel between the gratuitous, unprovoked destruction of innocent people perpetrated by Aum and the gratuitous, unprovoked destruction of innocent people (especially the poor and the nonwhite) perpetrated by the Global Far Right over the last decade especially.  In particular, I am thinking of the murders of unarmed African-Americans, the abortive wall at the southern border of the U.S., and the many, many deaths of poor and nonwhite people in the United States, Brazil, Britain, and similar places due to COVID-19 in 2020.  I think of how these deaths were aided and cheered by a cohort of largely religious people with an apocalyptic/millenarian/doomsday mindset that justified in their minds their active attempts to murder their fellow human beings.  I think of the cults of celebrity/personality worship that have been created or attempted by people such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk.

I also think of how in the West (particularly the United States), while there have been so many revelations of the existence of destructive cults in our midst over the decades, there have been so distressingly few voices calling us to a time of collective self-examination.  This is particularly true of those who claim to study and write about malignant narcissism.  I think of how the description of malignant narcissism found in the DSM-IV was modified in the DSM-V over the last decade.  The DSM-IV could be summarized thus: "This is what a wolf looks like - and by telling you all what a wolf looks like, hopefully we can keep you from getting bitten!" But the message of the DSM-V seems to me to be more sympathetic to wolves: "A wolf is not really a wolf unless he experiences suffering as a result of being a wolf..."  This obfuscation has helped to distort the discussion of narcissistic pathology among rich and powerful people such as national politicians and heads of big business.  And those who claim to write as the victims of narcissists hid their eyes from the realization that many of these "victims" in 2016 and 2020 had pledged their allegiance to the very narcissistic types against whom they claimed to be angry.  They tried to hide from the fact that their own narcissism was reflected in the political candidates whom they chose for themselves and the collective aspirations they embraced.

I too am a victim of cultic activity - as a person of color victimized by a society which claimed a religious mandate to Make Itself Great by trashing me and my ancestors - and as a former cult member myself - yet I too find that I must engage in a time of self-examination in light of the fact that I live in a society (namely, American society) which tends to form cults as prolifically as mangy dogs produce fleas.  For I must admit that during my days as a member of a particular cult I did damage to other people, because the cult appealed to a latent desire in me to dominate other people, to have power over other people.  To fulfill a latent desire within myself to be A Big Part of Something Great, I surrendered myself to someone else's prefabricated narrative.  My story became similar to that of the Aum devotees described by Murakami:

In order to take on the “self-determination” that Asahara provided, most of those who took refuge in the Aum cult appear to have deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood — lock and key — in that “spiritual bank" called Shoko Asahara. The faithful 

relinquished their freedom, renounced their possessions, disowned their families, discarded all secular judgment (common sense). "Normal" Japanese were aghast: How could anyone do such an insane thing? But conversely, to the cultists it was probably quite comforting. At last they had someone to watch over them, sparing them the anxiety of confronting each new situation on their own, and delivering them from any need to think for themselves.

A time of self-examination - both individual and collective - is urgently needed, both in the United States and throughout the West, particularly in those countries that have become "Murdochified."  This is because the 21st Century has already begun to bring urgent societal challenges that will require intelligent responses on both an individual and a collective level.  But if we are going to combine safely and equitably in order to craft collective responses, we need to be mentally healthy.  We must, as much as possible, eliminate our susceptibility to the voices of cult leaders who appeal to the darkness within each of us in an attempt to turn us into an embodiment of the darkness that exists in these cult leaders.  My concern is that achieving this may be a challenge in the United States.

Trouble, As Sparks Fly Upward

It's looking like my blogging may be on hold for a while.  Last week I was informed that one of my siblings has been diagnosed with a severe health issue.  I am obliged therefore to drop a number of things so that I can fulfill my duty to my family.  I don't exactly know yet what will be needed.  I am flying to So. Cal. next week to find out.

Precarity, Late Capitalism, And Artificial Intelligence: Pinocchio's Mischief

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession.  The two most recent previous posts in this series discussed the fact that there are now more college graduates being produced in our society than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.  The most recent post discussed why this is the case.  As I wrote last week, 

"...the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.  In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.

Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..."  These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout.  And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible.  The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us.  The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy..."

A basic strategic aim in capitalism is that business owners should maximize profit.  A basic tactic for the achievement of this aim is to maximize profit per unit of goods sold by lowering the cost of production for each unit of goods sold.  Lowering costs can be achieved by attacking the cost of materials, capital machinery, energy, and labor.  In the limit, at the extreme of optimization, this leads to extremely flimsy goods sold for extremely high prices, goods that are produced by extremely poor laborers.

The labor part of this tactic is what we have been discussing in our consideration of precarity.  By making employment casual and temporary, with no fixed covenant between businesses and laborers and no benefits (other than a wage) granted to laborers, businesses have succeeded in driving down the cost of labor.  As mentioned in last week's post, that pressure on labor costs has reached even technical professions requiring a baccalaureate degree or above.  This is leading to an increasingly unsustainable situation in which, for instance, you might spend more than $40,000 to earn a four-year engineering degree - only to find yourself working for an engineering temp agency after graduation!

Labor casualization has been part of a larger tactical aim to reduce labor costs by reducing the number of laborers.  If you're the CEO of a large company, the progression of this tactic can be sketched as follows: First, destroy any expectation of stable employment or decent wages among your labor pool.  Then, reduce the actual number of laborers you use.  This reduction of the total number of laborers can occur by a number of means (including working employees to death by giving each employee the amount of work that should normally be handled by two or three such employees).  It can of course also be achieved by replacing employees with machines.  That replacement has been occurring from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution onward, but in the last two or three decades it has accelerated greatly due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI).  A long-standing motive behind the recent massive investments in research in artificial intelligence is the desire by many of the world's richest people to eliminate the costs of relying on humans by replacing human laborers with automation.

So it is natural to ask what sort of world is emerging as the result of the use of increasingly sophisticated AI in our present economy.  Here we need to be careful, due to the number of shrill voices shouting either wildly positive or frighteningly negative predictions about the likely impacts of AI.  I think we need to ask the following questions:

• First, what exactly is artificial machine intelligence?  What is the theoretical basis of AI?  How does it work?
• What can AI do and not do?
• What countries are at the forefront of AI deployment in their societies?
• How will AI capabilities likely evolve over the next few decades?
• What effects might AI have on human life and human societies over the next few decades?
• How will AI affect the world of work over the next few decades?

The next few posts in this series will attempt to tackle these questions.  I must warn you that what you'll get in those posts are merely my guesses at an answer.  However, because I want the guesses to be educated guesses, I'm going to need to do some research.  So these guesses might be slow in coming.

The Educated Precariat: Why The Mismatch?

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession.  The most recent previous post in this series discussed the university system as a machine that produces graduates for use within the larger machinery of modern late-stage capitalism, and what is happening to those graduates because of the fact that there are more graduates being produced than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.

That previous post highlighted the fact that from at least the 1990's onward (and possibly starting from the 1970's onward), there has been a growing number of college graduates who have found themselves underemployed after graduation.  Moreover, as time has passed, the number of college graduates who have entered long-term underemployment after graduation has increased as a percentage of total college graduates.  Note that to be underemployed as a college graduate means to hold a job that does not require the knowledge, skills, and abilities that a person would acquire as part of a college education.  As a hypothetical example, think of a gas station cashier with a recent baccalaureate degree in organizational psychology.  Moreover, the sources cited in that post listed the types of college major most likely to lead to underemployment and precarious work.  From those sources it would seem that baccalaureate degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) offer the greatest likelihood of full employment and decent wages.  However, note that a 2018 Canadian study titled, "No Safe Harbour: Precarious Work and Economic Insecurity Among Skilled Professionals in Canada" cited the fact that a technical professional degree is no longer an ironclad guarantee against precarious employment.  

Why then is there such a huge mismatch between the number of people obtaining degrees and the number of available jobs which would utilize the skills implied by these degrees while paying the degree holders a decent living wage?  That is the question which today's post will try to answer.  

First, let's consider the answer offered by people like Peter Turchin, the well-fed Russian emigre to the United States whom I mentioned in another post in this series on precarity.  Turchin asserts that the supposed "excess" of college graduates, the supposed "mismatch" between the number of college graduates and the number of appropriate jobs for these graduates, is the result of an imbalance between the higher education sector and the rest of the economy.  He also asserts that the "excess" of college graduates is increasing the likelihood of instability in society caused by the radicalization of these "excess" graduates.  To put it in the language of Wikipedia, 

"Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status." [Emphasis added.]

Note the first sentence and its mention of the capacity of a society to absorb newly educated citizens into an existing power structure.  I will return to the notion of existing power structures later in this post.  Note also that Turchin's "solution" to this problem of "overproduction" is to limit access to higher education.  This "solution" is remarkably similar to the "solution" proposed by Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe in their 2013 report titled, "Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor-Market Realities" which I cited in the previous post in this series.  To quote their report,

"The mismatch between the educational requirements for various occupations and the amount of education obtained by workers is large and growing significantly over time. The problem can be viewed two ways. In one sense, we have an “underemployment” problem; College graduates are underemployed, performing jobs which require vastly less educational tools than they possess. The flip side of that, though, is that we have an 'overinvestment' problem: We are churning out far more college graduates than required by labor-market imperatives. The supply of jobs requiring college degrees is growing more

slowly than the supply of those holding such degrees. Hence, more and more college graduates are crowding out high-school graduates in such blue-collar, low-skilled jobs as taxi driver, firefighter, and retail sales clerks..."

In evaluating whether these assertions are valid, it is helpful to consider the present-day structure of the American economy as a representative of the typical economies of the Global North.  It is also helpful to consider the background of the people who have made these assertions in order to glimpse something of their possible motives.  As I mentioned previously, Peter Turchin is an academic who is already both tenured and well-established (thus well-fed, with multiple income streams), and his assertions of the need to limit access to higher education are not likely to hurt him in any way.  As for Vedder, Denhart, and Robe, Vedder is an adjunct member of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).  Denhart is one of Vedder's former students.  I don't know how much of Vedder's ideology was passed on to Denhart and Robe, but I do know that Vedder is a strong supporter of big business even when it pays exploitative wages to workers, as seen in his support of Wal-Mart and of the 2008 taxpayer bailout of American businesses deemed to be "too big to fail".  (Note that that 2008 taxpayer-funded bailout is one of the biggest reasons why the richest Americans are now so rich!) Moreover, the AEI itself has the policy goal of supporting big business at the expense of small businesses, going as far as advocating that the role of the American government should be to help big businesses grow bigger.  The AEI wants further to eliminate all government support for small business, especially small business incubation, as I pointed out in a previous post.

From such observations, it is possible to move to a consideration of the structural reasons for the mismatch between jobs requiring a college education and the supposed "excess" of college graduates.  I will once again state my belief that high-quality, advanced education should be made available to as many people as want it - regardless of race, creed, national origin, or economic status.  Moreover, I once again assert that education is one of the great equalizing factors in a society, as it is a key component in the struggle of historically oppressed peoples to liberate themselves from historical and ongoing oppression.  This, for instance, was the motivation for the Polish underground "flying universities" which were organized in the 1800's when Poland had been partitioned by Germany, Austria, and Russia, and these nations had forbidden Poles from having access to higher education.  This was also the motivation for the underground "freedom schools" which sprang up in the American South during the antebellum days when white Southern power made it illegal to teach Black people (my people) to read.

But education alone is rather impotent without an opportunity to use it.  And the opportunities for the use of education are constrained by the structure of the society in which that education must operate.  Too often, the structure of a society is dictated and constrained by the dominant power-holders in that society.  I will therefore suggest that the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.  In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.

Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..."  These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout.  And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible.  The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us.  The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy, as is the crafting of laws and regulations (especially by Republicans) which disadvantage small businesses (and all the rest of us, especially those of us who are not of their "tribe") while giving breaks to big business.  

What would a society look like if it provided citizens with the maximum optimal education and the maximum optimal opportunity to use that education in the pursuit of meaningful work?  I'd like to suggest that first, such a society would have a mechanism in place to prevent any one person or entity from concentrating more than a very small fraction of economic output into one set of hands.  Second, I suggest that such a society would be composed largely of artisans, artists, and small businesses owners who exercised their knowledge, education, and creativity to a maximal extent.  In other words, this society would be largely composed of "yeoman entrepreneurs" similar to the "yeoman farmers" idealized by Thomas Jefferson.   Some might say that such a society would be impossible in the 21st century, but I'd like to suggest that some positive aspects of what such a society might look like can be found in the depiction of the fictional Mars City in Hao Jingfang's novel Vagabonds.  I will mention that novel again in a future post. (Note also that although there was much to like about Mars City, it was not exactly a perfect utopia - there were indeed a few flies in that ointment, so to speak.)

Lastly, I suggest that such a society would be resilient - much more so than a more stratified, unequal society would be.  This is because such a society would have a much higher degree of decentralized group intelligence than would exist in a society of stratification and inequality.  This would make the more egalitarian society much more able to respond to emergent threats and opportunities than the more stratified society.  Consider the late 19th century and early-to-middle 20th-century history of Britain as a stratified society of the Global North.  Consider how its rigid class hierarchy and caste system prevented some of its principal actors from seeing the big picture and acting appropriately in the face of challenges.  Cases in point include the failure of Robert Scott's Antarctic expedition in comparison to the successful expedition of Roald Amundsen, as well as failures in World Wars 1 and 2 that resulted from a hidebound British system of honor, privilege and caste which blindsided British leadership.  The strident attempt by the Republican Party and other right-wing elements in the United States to re-establish an American system of caste and privilege constitutes the real threat to the "existing power structures" cited by Turchin, because it is leading to the "fragilization" of these structures.