I have some bad news for you. You probably won't ever be a tech worker at a FAANG company, a bulge bracket finance bro or a high-powered corporate executive.
我有个坏消息要告诉你。你可能永远不会成为大厂技术人员、顶级金融大亨或高级企业高管。
Society needs people to do the real jobs that keep us housed, fed and safe, and it needs them a lot more than it needs another McKinsey consultant.
社会需要人们从事真正的工作,让我们有家可归、吃得饱、住得安全,而且社会对这些人的需求远远超过对麦肯锡顾问的需求。
This is a problem because no matter how you put it, a job where you sit in an air-conditioned office making six figures a year in your first year out of college is way more desirable than doing roadwork in Arizona for 20 bucks an hour.
这是一个问题,因为无论你怎么说,大学毕业第一年坐在空调办公室里,年薪六位数的工作,都比在亚利桑那州每小时20美元修补道路更令人向往。
The problem is that everybody is trying really hard to pretend this isn't true, and the system that has sprung up to maintain this dream has caused more problems than you realize.
问题是,每个人都在努力假装这不是真的,而为维持这一梦想而兴起的系统造成的问题比你想象的还要多。
How many jobs on these two websites? It's been over a thousand combined.
这两个网站上有多少工作?加起来有上千个。
How much money would you say you save or you plan on saving out of that salary? It's gonna be around 2K per month mostly.
你觉得你能从这份薪水中省下多少钱或计划省下多少钱?大部分情况下,每月大约2K。
Every day it just feels like Groundhog Day or waking up doing the same thing.
每天都感觉像土拨鼠日,醒来做着同样的事情。
I feel confused sometimes because it's just like I had this idea of what my life would be like at this age and that's just not exactly how it is.
我有时会感到困惑,因为我似乎已经设想过自己在这个年龄的生活会是什么样子,但事实并非如此。
Peter Turchin is a complexity scientist, who mathematically models the statistical dynamics of historical societies. He coined the theory of "Elite Overproduction".
彼得·图尔钦(Peter Turchin)是一位复杂性科学家,他用数学方法模拟了历史社会的统计动态,提出了“精英过剩”理论。
He argues in his books and papers that societies make workers just like they make anything, a car goes through a factory, and a college graduate goes through a few decades of schooling.
他在自己的书籍和论文中指出,社会制造工人就像制造任何东西一样,汽车经过工厂,大学毕业生要经过几十年的学校教育。
At the end you get something you can drive around in and something that can make pivot tables in excel.
最后,你会得到可以驾驶的东西和可以在Excel中制作数据透视表的东西。
The only difference is that a lump of steel doesn't care if it's turned into the engine block of a Bentley or a Buick.
唯一的区别是,一块钢铁不在乎自己是变成了宾利还是别克的发动机缸体。
But people given the option will naturally opt for more prestigious careers if they are available.
但如果有选择,人们自然会选择更有声望的职业。
Turchin's work effectively argues that roles in all societies form something of a hierarchy with fewer actual people required to do the jobs further up the pyramid.
图尔钦的著作有效论证了社会中的所有角色都形成了一种等级制度,金字塔上层的工作需要更少的人员来完成。
We need a lot more tradesmen, nurses, teachers and laborers than we need so-called elite roles like corporate executives.
我们需要的工匠、护士、教师和劳工比所谓的企业高管等精英角色要多得多。
By their nature these roles only exist to watch over the work of dozens of other people.
从本质上讲,精英角色的存在只是为了监督数十人的工作。
But for a variety of reasons, too many people have been directed into getting qualified for these roles up here and discouraged from doing these roles down here.
但由于各种原因,太多人被要求获得中层职位的资格,而被劝退担任这些职位。
This is how you end up in a system where everybody is qualified to deliver a stakeholder engagement deck to synergistically blitz scale a busino business platform for ingesting marketing survey data from the cloud.
这就是你最终进入这样一个系统的原因:每个人都有资格提供利益相关者参与平台,以协同扩展业务平台,从云端获取营销调查数据。
But you can't find anybody to fix your plumbing. We have simply trained too many people to fill too many elite roles and not enough people fill the everyday roles of society.
但你找不到人来修理你的管道。我们培训了太多人来填补太多的精英角色,而没有足够的人来填补社会的日常角色。
This has cost us a lot in more ways than you might realize and the first is just the cost.
这让我们付出了比你想象的更多的代价,首先就是成本。
I know that you are all well aware of the cost of attending college but there is more to it than just the student debt that you're going to take on to Le your first job in the cubicle farm.
我知道你们都很清楚上大学的费用,但不仅仅是你要承担的学生债务,你还要找到第一份在办公室的工作。
If everyone gets a college degree which qualifies them for a prestigious job, then those qualifications aren't special anymore.
如果每个人都获得了大学学位,并有资格获得一份体面的工作,那么这些资格就不再特殊了。
According to data from the US Census Bureau and compiled by statista, the number of Americans with a college degree has increased from 7.7% of the population in 1960 to 37.7% today, an almost six-fold increase.
根据美国人口普查局和statista汇编的数据,拥有大学学位的美国人数量已从1960年的7.7%增加到今天的37.7%,增长了近六倍。
The remaining 62.3% of the population are not all going to be blue-collar workers either.
剩下62.3%的人口也不全是蓝领工人。
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 62.6% of Americans work at all. So more than half of the workforce holds a degree.
根据美国劳工统计局的数据,只有62.6%的美国人在工作。因此,超过一半的劳动力拥有学位。
A degree is not enough to stand out anymore. It's barely enough to land a job at all. So people are getting more degrees to prove they are worthy of an role.
学位已不足以脱颖而出,几乎不足以保证找到工作。因此,人们正在获得更多学位来证明自己有资格担任某个职位。
The price of a college degree has gone up and its value has gone down, but people are still willing to take on life-altering amounts of student debt to get them, so they can access a job that is prestigious.
大学学位的价格上涨,价值下降,但人们仍然愿意承担改变生活的学生债务来获得学位,这样他们就可以获得一份体面的工作。
The ironic thing is that many blue-collar trade jobs actually pay much better than even midlevel corporate roles because there is a shortage of these non-elite workers.
讽刺的是,由于非精英工人的短缺,许多蓝领技术工作实际上比公司中层职位的薪水还要高得多。
So they have much more negotiating power in the real market than a history PhD applying for a research role. Sorry, Sam, from how history works.
他们在现实市场中的谈判能力远远超过申请研究职位的历史博士。对不起,山姆,这是历史的运作方式。
Despite this most people still agree that someone sitting behind a desk is more elite than someone working with their hands.
尽管如此,大多数人仍然认为坐在办公桌后面的人比用手工作的人更精英。
So given the choice, they would rather work in an office. You knew all of this already. Colleges have been pumping out graduates for decades now.
如果可以选择,他们宁愿在办公室工作。您已经知道了这一切。几十年来,大学一直在大量培养毕业生。
But what is interesting is what happens to the people that are left over.
但有趣的是,剩下的人会发生什么。
Eventually there are only so many roles that can be done in a suit and tie in a nice office, which means some of these elite qualified individuals will be left behind to work jobs that they are completely overqualified for.
最终,在一间漂亮的办公室里,穿着西装打着领带可以完成的职位是有限的,这意味着其中一些合格的精英人士将下沉。
Underemployment is already a major issue in America. Highly paper qualified people are working casual jobs with bad pay and fewer benefits because they don't want to get a bluecollar job because that would be admitting that their expensive degree was useless.
未充分就业已经成为美国的一个主要问题。高学历的人从事着薪水低、福利少的临时工作,因为他们不想找一份蓝领工作,那等于承认昂贵的学位毫无用处。
Turchin in his book End Times has likened the glut of people who are too qualified for the job to the accumulation of deadwood in a forest.
图尔钦在其著作《终结的时代》中将那些过于胜任这份工作的人的过剩比作森林中枯木的堆积。
It doesn't do anything by itself but if anything goes wrong, it will cause a cataclysmic fire.
枯木本身不会产生任何影响,但如果出现任何问题,就会引发灾难性的火灾。
I will leave a link to his book in the description below. If you like depressing videos like this, it's definitely worth the read.
我会在下方描述中留下他这本书的链接。如果你喜欢这种令人沮丧的视频,那绝对值得一读。
Turchin has likened our current period of elite production with the late Roman Empire, the French Wars of religion and various Chinese dynasties.
图尔钦将我们当前的精英过剩与罗马帝国晚期、法国宗教战争和中国历代王朝进行了类比。
But America and the rest of the western world has had one sneaky advantage over these other low energy empires.
但美国和西方世界的其他国家比其他低能量帝国拥有一个隐秘的优势。
We have taken all of these non-elite jobs that we didn't want to do and outsourced them overseas. For a while it let more of us work in jobs that we could brag about on LinkedIn.
我们把所有我们不想做的非精英工作外包给了海外。一段时间以来,它让更多人从事可以在LinkedIn上吹嘘的工作。
But that strategy may have come with some serious side effects. So it's time to learn How Money Works to find out what happens. Now that we have too many people that are literally too good for their job.
但这种策略可能带来了一些严重的副作用。所以现在是时候学习How Money Works来弄清楚发生了什么。现在有太多优秀的人下沉。