One of the less serious impacts of a system that has too many people qualified for too few elite jobs is title inflation.

If you can't find a senior role for everybody with an MBA from the University of Phoenix, then you have to give them a fancy sounding title.

Salesmen are now account executives. Receptionists are now directors of first impressions. And marketers are brand presidents.

Job title inflation like this sounds extremely dumb until you realize that it works.

A UK study found that 70% of workers would give up a pay rate to get a job with a better sounding title, with some forgoing as much as $10,000 to take a role that sounds more senior.

This study is very old now but one look at LinkedIn will show you that it hasn't gotten much better.

Now while it's fun to laugh at goobers on LinkedIn, the problems of elite overproduction as outlined by Turchin manifest in other areas as well.

As more people become qualified and expect to fill glamorous corporate roles, it creates a political pressure to make sure that people get those roles.

The anthropologist David Graeber spoke about his role of the box tickers in his infamous book Bullshit Jobs.

These were roles that only existed to satisfy some arbitrary requirements, overseen by other box tickers to give the appearance that something useful was being done.

The best way to create these jobs is through laws and programs that mandate them.

I made a video last year about the homelessness crisis in America and why despite spending billions of dollars on it, we are only making it worse.

One of the problems is that there were thousands of jobs being created in various local state and federal government departments alongside nonprofits that paid workers very well.

With so many elite jobs on offer, there is no real incentive to fix the problem.

Because for the individuals running the programs, they would have to find a new job and for the politicians approving the budget, they would have to explain why thousands of professional jobs went missing under their administration.

Now I just wanted to shamelessly mention my old video but it's by no means limited to this one problem.

Millions of people across America are employed in some kind of compliance role with a private company. Some of these roles are incredibly important, some less so.

But if compliance standards are dropped, then the politician who passed that law would have a lot of potential voters angry that they made their job irrelevant.

Now so far it all sounds like the blame of elite overproduction ultimately falls on the people who thought they were too good for a real job and felt entitled to an elite position just because they got a communications degree.

That is not entirely unfair and there does need to be a level of personal accountability for your own personal decisions.

But we've made it incredibly easy to follow the path of least resistance into the pile of college graduates. Striving for an elite job has also become a necessity in many parts of the country.

If you want to live a comfortable version of the American dream in most cities across the country these days, you need to have an extremely good job.

More than a third of Americans earning $250,000 per year are still living paycheck to paycheck because the places where they can access these elite jobs are ludicrously expensive.

The study unsurprisingly found that budget stress was far higher amongst younger earners because the only consistent way for them to earn that much money was to get an elite job in an elite city.

Blue-collar work can make a lot more than entry-level corporate roles but unless you can successfully start your own business, the ceiling on how much you can earn in these roles is much lower. In areas away from expensive cities, that's okay.

But if you grew up in a major city and you want to keep living there, then you kind of have to play the game of fighting for an elite job by working your way up the corporate ladder or fighting through ultra competitive internships.

If you are successful, congratulations! You can buy a Tesla Model 3 and rent a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle.

But if you are not, then you can contribute to the biggest problem that Turchin discusses in his writing.

People who have invested a significant amount of money, not to mention years of their life, into pursuing a role that they were told they were entitled to, breeds a lot of discontent when they end up underemployed.

These people who fairly rightfully feel scammed out of what they were told was a guarantee are now a significant voting block.

That's created political pressure to not only maintain as many of these nonsense jobs as possible but also to pursue student debt relief, advanced education subsidies and retraining initiatives.

It might fix a lot of problems but there is no getting around the fact that it's not exactly fair to people who have already paid off their debt or never took them on in the first place because they didn't pursue an elite career path.

Now this is not to say that these are good or bad ideas. It's only to say that they wouldn't even be considered if there weren't so many people that had become trapped as an overproduced elite enough people to make this politically viable.

Unfortunately, as the great DJ Khaled would say, we have played ourselves to get here in the first place.

Beyond the expense and tensions caused by having so many people qualified to do roles that are inherently rare, we have forgotten how to do the foundational stuff.

America's housing crisis is in part being accelerated by the cost to build new homes because we don't have enough tradesmen to keep up with the demand for new housing.

The fact that housing is so expensive only makes this problem worse because people see that the only way they will ever be able to afford a home of their own is to compete for an elite role with every other hopeful graduate.

We have also become more reliant on skilled migration to fill the gaps in our workforce which also drive more demand for housing and more desire to be elite just to stay afloat.

Now Turchin makes the argument that this is the single unifying issue that has led to the collapse of all great civilizations.

That might be a bit of hyperbole to move some books but it does make it a little bit worrying when you see the symptoms that he first warned about several decades ago.

I will be writing a follow-up article to this video about the clown show that is modern internships for high-end finance firms.

It might be the most obvious example of Turchin's warnings in action and that will be up this week on my free email newsletter link below.

Living costs are at the center of this problem, especially housing. But go and watch this video to find out if we can even make housing affordable without destroying the economy in the process. To keep on learning How Money Works.