I thought you were joking about social ecology being real!

I perceive it as the bursting of the educational bubble. There was a time when A College Degree, in most anything, was indeed useful for upward mobility. Once universities figured that out, then, because they're businesses, they started selling degrees for anything, to anyone who could buy one. Now we have a glut of college graduates who not only got something mostly useless, but are now in debt, and likely to spend their lives as a net economic loss for society.

The Chinese have a word for this type of American: Baizuo.

TBF, if you're intelligent and hard-working, and you indeed endeavor to study medieval poetry or some such, that's fine. But, that should be maybe 1 out of 1 million people, which would give us about 325 medieval poetry scholars in America. That's perfectly reasonable for a healthy society.

It will be interesting to see what happens when China's development is no longer fueled by picking the lowest-hanging industrial fruit, AND when Chinese citizens increasingly clamor for civil rights.