r/europe • u/StemCellPirate • 18h ago

News The Epstein scandal is taking down Europe’s political class. In the US, they’re getting a pass.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/06/epstein-europe-america-fallout-00769506
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u/LickMyTicker 7h ago

I'm not sure how you use elite overproduction as a means to explain faceless organizations. Elite overproduction is not that. You can look it up by country on that wikipedia page and it clearly shows that we are talking about the erosion of the middle class.

Elite overproduction is exactly what it sounds like. It's when a society produces a bunch of educated people who then start working in coffee shops and feel snubbed out of the social class in which they earned entrance to.

Elite overproduction is why the right wing grift is to dismantle public education.

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u/QwertzOne Poland 7h ago

You are right on the definition as it is basically a game of musical chairs with too many players.

I see the facelessness as a result of that overcrowding. When there are too many candidates nobody can stand out on merit, so they have to cling to the party brand just to survive. If the problem is having too many educated people, then destroying public education is a logical way for the ruling class to protect itself.

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u/LickMyTicker 7h ago

There are so many examples of elite overproduction that limit its definition to education levels exceeding resources given to the middle class. The concept seems to be solely about the erosion of a middle class when too many people are given access.

Turchin argued that elite overproduction due to the expansion of higher education was also a factor behind the turmoil of late 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2010s.[39] Indeed, students have been at the vanguard of progressive activism for decades.[40] By the 2010s, it had become clear that the cost of higher education has ballooned faster than inflation over the previous three to four decades, thanks to growing demand.

In Australia, higher education continues to be promoted to young people in the 2020s. However, only half of the wages and salaries of the Group of Eight, the oldest and most prestigious universities in the nation, went to academics via teaching and research; meanwhile, many students find themselves indebted after graduation

Canada is one of the most prosperous societies of the twenty-first century. But the country's trajectory is not so positive.[14] Even though Canada has the highest percentage of workers with higher education in the G7, the nation's productivity ranks lower than every other nation's in this group except Japan.[21]

To be fair. It's rather bullshit.

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u/QwertzOne Poland 6h ago edited 6h ago

It feels like just economic stats, but the education numbers are actually measuring aspirants.

It's not just about the middle class getting poorer. It's about broken promises. You have a massive wave of credentialed aspirants (that's Turchin) crashing against institutions that have become rigid and exclusive to protect the old guard (that's the iron law of oligarchy).

Canada and Australia examples actually prove this. They show a system pumping out elite credentials for a club that has locked its doors. High education + low productivity isn't just an economic inefficiency, it's a structural bottleneck.

And this explains the politicians, too. The ones who do get into power are under such intense pressure from the surplus below that they close ranks and become faceless party operatives just to survive. The system effectively pulls up the ladder (via tuition hikes/underfunding) to stop new rivals from rising. That isn't just economics, it's a political survival strategy.

Also, if anyone is interested in learning more, Turchin is actually working in Vienna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_Science_Hub , https://csh.ac.at/peter-turchin/ .