Egypt is experiencing massive civil unrest, and reports indicate it’s military is poised for a coup to regain control of a rapidly deteriorating situation.

Professor Glenn Reynolds notes is part the explanation is that the country is finally paying “the wages of a higher education bubble“, after reading Walter Russel Mead’s assessment of the situation.  Mead notes:

It would be a mistake to attribute the ineffectiveness of Egypt’s opposition to the purely personal failings and intellectual blind spots of the people currently prominent in its ranks. We are looking at something more deeply rooted and harder to fix. An intense rage and dissatisfaction with the status quo without any idea in the world how to make anything better: this is the typical condition of revolutionary movements in countries without a history of effective governance or successful development. It is also often typical of political movements in countries dominated by a youth bulge. The unhappiest countries are the places where this large youth bulge comes up against failed governance and curdled hope. Think Pakistan, where a comprehensive failure of civil and military leadership is turning one of the world’s most beautiful countries into one of its most miserable ones.

Inexperienced 18 years olds who have grown up in corrupt, poorly governed societies, and been educated in trashy schools by incompetent hacks know very well that the status quo is unacceptable. Young people who know they are being ripped off and abused are typically not very patient. Throw in healthy doses of sexual frustration and contempt for an establishment that has lost confidence in its own capacity to lead, and you have a cocktail much more explosive than anything Molotov knew.

Egypt’s university system is particularly destructive. Year after year it turns out people with paper credentials, high expectations, and no real skills or understanding of how the world works. Those who manage to acquire real skills often go work in the Gulf, where Egyptian expats are able to have something approaching an effective professional career. But many Egyptian secondary school and university graduates end up in the worst of all possible worlds: too well-educated to accept the grinding poverty, soul-crushing drudgery and lack of status that so many jobs there entail, but not well-educated enough to build a better future for themselves or to organize effectively to remedy the ills of a society that creates such a dismal trap for youth.

Countries like Egypt a critical mass of people with a vision of how to build a modern society and an ideology through which they can effectively mobilize the majority to support a project which the masses of the people may not fully understand.

Reynolds’ wry closing remark is with noting, too: Ugh. Good thing nothing like that could ever happen here.