Most people can’t see beyond the television, or perhaps the preacher standing before them on Sunday. The fact is historical forces are at work on us constantly, shaping the world around us, the opportunities presented, and the way we think about them. This isn’t to say there isn’t free will; there is. Only that there is a lot more going on than the simplistic “I’m good, they’re bad” terms most of us use to parse the moment we inhabit.
Before anyone goes jumping to conspiratorial conclusions, this is precisely the inclination I am speaking to. While by the very nature of our social relations conspiracies of a sort do happen, there is no grand, overarching one (although, like Roberts Shea and Anton Wilson, I might write a novel about one someday). For most of us, individual interest is the prime mover; we are as likely to enter into alignments with “bad” actors as we are with “good”, oftentimes without knowing, or even attempting to know, what side of the line said actors fall in an ethical or moral frame.
One example of such misgiving inducing congruence is the campaign of Mike Rowe.
The premise underlying Rowe’s efforts is straightforward and believable:
Society tells us to “follow our passion” and “pursue our dreams” by borrowing six-figures for a degree we may not use. Meanwhile, millions of essential jobs—that pay well, provide security, and actually keep the lights on—go unfilled. (https://mikeroweworks.org/)
How Rowe arrived at this conclusion is difficult to ascertain. For one, Rowe himself has no personal connection to the “Dirty Jobs” he promotes; his own career arc is decidedly that of a television personality, beginning as a pitch man on the home-shopping network QVC. He is himself college-educated, a privilege he loudly decries and dissuades others from pursuing today.
It is this discontinuity that opens the door to a modicum of skepticism, for what motivates a relatively well-to-do person to not only discourage others from following the very path they themselves took to success, but indeed presses them to seek employment in sectors that could reasonably be categorized as proletarian?
Peter Turchin, a Russian-American scientist, has a theory.
Elite overproduction is a concept that Turchin developed, building on the work of Barbara and John Ehrenreich (“The Professional-Managerial Class” (Radical America, 1977) and Jack Goldstone (Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World). At its core, elite overproduction theorizes that, throughout human history, periods of political and social instability have resulted from the purely self-interested behavior of the bourgeois.
Turchin’s particular contribution is to note that when a society produces a surplus of elite aspirants relative to the number of actual elite positions available to fill, conflict ensues. Competition amongst the elite intensifies, its membership becoming more ruthless and covetous as downward pressure increases. This, more than any regard for the well-being of new entrants to the workforce, is the likely basis for Rowe’s efforts, given certain nuances regarding the underwriting of his mikeroweWORKS foundation.
The foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, received $7.1 million across 204 grants from 86 funders between 2019 and 2025. Its largest funder is Charities Aid Foundation America, a pass-through that, despite its legitimacy, obscures the underlying donors. Charles Koch, the world’s nineteenth richest person, is a known benefactor.
None of this necessarily indicts Mike Rowe, particularly in the sense of something nefarious and meditated on his part. But it fits with Turchin’s theory. In Turchin’s terms, steering young people away from degrees reduces the future supply of frustrated credentialed aspirants, an outcome that, wittingly or no, the likes of Charles Koch certainly desire. Intended or not, the “learn a trade” campaign works as a pressure valve against elite overproduction. It also addresses real shortages, which is why it has gotten so much traction.
Whether these are the shortages that we should be targeting is debatable. The only skilled trades jobs in the top 20 occupations with the greatest projected growth over the next decade are industrial machinery mechanics (79,700 openings) and electricians (75,900 openings), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of the top 5, four are in health care, and the other is data scientist, a decidedly education-intensive pursuit.
Critical to this conservation is what is known as the college premium. While it has been flat or falling in recent years, the data continues to demonstrate that college graduates consistently earn more over their lifetimes than those with only a high school diploma. Intensive training, such as that supplied by trade schools, can serve to reduce the disparity, but the simple fact remains that the clearest path to maximizing one’s earning potential is higher learning.
What makes Rowe’s endeavors unseemly, as opposed to merely disingenuous, is that he is actively encouraging people to enslave themselves. Not that the trades aren’t essential to a functioning society; they undoubtedly are. The point is that, in the developed world at least, they are servile to the rich.
Again, this implies no grand conspiracy. In service to a career in television, Mike Rowe became host of Dirty Jobs. This put him in contact with numerous hard-working individuals doing eponymous dirty jobs that elites such as himself had zero interest in doing, something that surely made a profound impression. But, at some point in the journey, Rowe’s efforts crossed the line from occupation to ideology.
Most troubling, this ideology explicitly encourages young people to sacrifice their aspirations at the altar of the almighty dollar. While empirical evidence in support of the claim is lacking, the parsing of aspirants – some to graduate degrees, some to unskilled labor – largely resolves itself; those who haven’t the knack for advanced studies self-select out. If anything, we should impel more people to pursue education, not less. Immense amounts of talent are lost to society simply because it is never discovered. Students from low socio-economic strata are 6–7× less likely to be labeled gifted, and fewer than 4% of them are identified, compared with approximately 20% among their high-SES peers.
In no way is this an indictment of those who wish to do “dirty jobs”. Somebody has to, and in a world where supply and demand actually ruled the day, they would be paid relatively well for doing so. Neither is it demeaning of those societal roles, as is practiced in some caste systems. It is, however, an indictment of the elites who find, in the United States at least, a dwindling supply of people to unclog the toilet, work the kill floor, and refine the kerosene for their private jets.