The new age of automation might give rise to a serious political upheaval.

The emergence of Zohran Mamdani “from nowhere” is yet another sign that “elite overproduction” (a term coined years ago by social scientist Peter Turchin) in an age of automation will give rise to serious political upheaval, a topic I first discussed in an article for National Review in 2016. To oversimplify, elite overproduction describes a state of affairs in which members of the “elite” (or those with the talents to join it) become too numerous for society to accommodate their aspirations. That leads to frustration and, more specifically, the formation of a “counter-elite” set on reorganizing society in a way that gives them the leading roles to which they believe they are entitled.

So it is worth noting that Mamdani seems to have fared well among the young and the college-educated and, in particular, with voters who are young and college-educated. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates (aged 22–27) is nearly 6 percent and, highly unusually, is higher than the total national unemployment rate of 4.2 percent. CBS news recently cited a new report from Oxford Economics that shows that:

Unemployed recent college grads account for 12 percent of an 85 percent rise in the national unemployment rate since mid-2023. That’s a high number, given that this cohort only makes up percent 5 percent of the total labor force.

There has also been a jump in recent-graduate underemployment, which the New York Fed defines as “graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree.” As I noted in a Capital Letter earlier this month, that rose to 41.2 percent in March, up from 39.4 percent in January. The increase is more immediately worrying than the absolute number, which has been high for years, although the implications of that are bad too.

In the Capital Letter, I added that:

[Underemployment among all graduates] has been steady at around one-third, a surprisingly high number which probably arises out of the spread of university education. A degree has, for many employers, become the equivalent of graduating high school half a century or so ago. The lower rate of underemployment among older graduates is because, as they get a bit older, they have worked themselves through the labor market into the “right” level, a pathway that will narrow if entry-level graduate jobs are eaten up by AI.

As the long-term persistence of still high-level graduate underemployment indicates, that pathway was never too wide in the first place. A report cited by CBS suggests that early underemployment does not bode well for a graduate’s future:

Seventy-three percent of graduates who start out underemployed remain so 10 years after completing college, making them at that point about 3.5 times more likely to be underemployed compared with those who start out in a college-level job.

Widespread unemployment or underemployment means that many graduates will find that the expectations fostered by their education will be dashed. They now face, or are already experiencing, to use an ugly term, proletarianization. To be sure, for many of them, their aspirations may have been unrealistic, but disappointment is subjective.

Meanwhile their counterparts who have found good “graduate-level” work will start to wonder how long their jobs are going to last, especially as automation grinds its way up as well as through the labor force.

Anecdotal evidence (and some data) would suggest that, as I discussed in the Capital Letter, AI is beginning to gnaw through entry-level coding jobs. And AI is only the latest stage in the long-running process of automating white-collar work.

Back in 2016, I wrote that the encroachments of automation meant that we were “on a conveyor belt to what Marx described as a ‘plastic moment,’ when old assumptions crumble and everything is up for grabs.” That, argued Martin Ford, who had just written Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, meant that we were ultimately “headed for a disruption that will demand a far more dramatic policy response.”

That remains an all too distinct possibility, if it is not already underway. If so, a lot will hang on who does the demanding. My typically gloomy view was that the “policy response” would be shaped by the demands of that “surplus” elite, and that it would be:

focused on a largely fruitless (but for a few, fruitful) “war against inequality” centered on a drastic redistributive effort. Taxes will rise steeply, on capital gains as well as income, and, given time, on the mere ownership of capital: We can expect a wealth tax on the living, a foretaste of death taxes to come.

Spending will doubtless soar, on infrastructure (occasionally even sensibly) and on retraining schemes for jobs that will never be. Health care will grow ever closer to single-payer. For the upper middle class squeezed by automation, reinvented as Robin Hoods on the make, all this will combine power play (the opportunity to redistribute away the gains of their more successful competitors) with marvelous career opportunities (someone has to operate the machinery of redistribution) and, of course, claims to the moral high ground.

And so, in 2025, Zohran Mamdani ran as an outsider in the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral election and — barring some truly astonishing ranked choices — will be the Democratic candidate in November. He fought an upbeat, clever campaign, and attracted a wide range of support across the city. Nevertheless, as Noah Rothman noted today about the Democratic vote:

[Poorer voters] backed Cuomo by 13 points while middle- and higher-income residents supported Mamdani by double digits. It is important to remember that, in New York City, “middle-income” (which the Times defines as an annual income of between $62,800 and $117,600) is a modest sum. And yet, the New Yorkers experiencing real penury (by city standards) rejected Mamdani’s sops in large numbers.

The Hill:

Polling had regularly shown Mamdani’s strengths to be with young voters, in particular millennials and those from Generation Z. . . . Mamdani was also seen to be stronger with white voters and those with college degrees, the latter of whom increasingly are part of the Democratic base and are regular voters.

Hmm . . .