I have made the analogy before but it is time to resurrect it.

The current "elites" are remarkably similar to the petite nobility of France prior to the French Revolution.   The distinction is the lack of hereditary titles.  In the place of hereditary titles is a kind of branding not dissimilar to the scholars who ran China.  Which were equally incompetent managers. 

Large segments of our population are vested in a branding educational system.  For example there are hundreds of thousands of theoretical Physicists making on average $70,000 dollars a year.  That is not a lot but it is a lot for those pursuing what amounts to a hobby.  There are 1.5 million college faculty members earning about the same average salary.  Arguably more productive and underpaid but considering the quality of graduates they produce still questionable as an investment.  As far as the analogy goes most of the petite nobility were relatively poor, it's what they mismanaged that was the problem.  Teaching staff only makes up about 40 percent of college salaries so you could estimate there are an additional 2.3 million administrative or other positions at U.S. colleges.  That is a lot of resources when you consider that it represents a high percentage of the cognitively elite.  The cost of higher education is however the least of the problem.

The next category is Federal employees.  There are 2.1 million Federal civilian employees. The median annual salary is $$77,000.  Again it's not a lot of money to make in today's world but it is more than the private sector median annual salary of  $49,764. 

Next financial services which employ 6.3 million people.  Average salary $77,289.

There are 9.2 million people employed in primary education.

There are 8,054,120 management positions in the U.S. with a mean annual salary of $122,480.  Maybe half of which are included in the above categories.  Combined that makes up 12 percent of the work force. 

The argument isn't that these people are not essential workers for the most part but that they represent a block of people with a vested interest in the system unrelated to direct productivity.  They also have outsized influence on politics and policy for a variety of reasons.

Perhaps all would be well if these jobs created innovations but the rate of innovation has steadily declined over the last century. 

"the pace of total factor productivity (TFP) – which statistically measures total growth in output relative to the growth in labor and capital – has grown slower since 1970 (at a rate which is roughly a third of the rate achieved between 1920 and 1970). Recognizing that the digital revolution has made progress in the fields of entertainment, communications and information processing, he claims there has not been many meaningful advances in basic areas that are critical for most individuals, e.g., food, clothing, shelter and transportation. For example, Gordon argues that even when cars today are safer and more comfortable than 50 years ago, they still perform the role of transporting people as they did back in 1970. Regarding the much-hyped invention of driverless cars, he quips: Does it really matter whether one has to drive his own car or whether the car drives itself?"

[blogs.worldbank.org]