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Most everything seem to come down to the college degree bubble.
You can cause so much damage to a society by introducing as stupid a price signal as "we'll issue an infinite amount of risk free loans for this particular service".
You can't blame this on college degree bubble or student loans. The phenomenon is strictly driven from above where secretaries have been cut years ago in the name of "efficiency" while ignoring the basic fact that having a doctor do all the admin work is much less cost efficient than when you have someone who's both good at it, at least somewhat likes doing it and has a salary that's half or less of a full doctor's salary.
The middle and upper management boom is typical bureacracy doing its natural thing and would otherwise be a fairly minor source of inefficiency except they need to pretend to do something useful and thus disrupt actual work as well as make it appear as if the useful administration (ie. low level secretaries) wasn't already cut deep into the bone.
Why do we seem to need to create insane amounts of management jobs if not because there is a huge supply of college educated people?
I think there's a legitimate debate to be had here about the ultimate cause of this extraordinary bureaucratic growth that followed the managerial revolution.
My working theory is that after the world wars and New Deal era, people saw the ascendency of managers and sought this good fortune for themselves, a degree became a surefire ticket to power and status, and it was collectively decided to bestow this boon onto people. The GI bill was the start of this movement that saw education as a magical wealth totem, and thus the start of a cycle that would aliment bureaucracy with fresh legions of young professionals that then advocate for the growth of the bureaucracy, rince and repeat until everyone is festooned with useless credentials. There is a reason every middle class person always agrees that the one thing we need more of is education.
Now, without direct intervention to both grow the bureaucracy and fund higher education at any cost, this would have fizzled out because you would not be able to justify the expense of a degree. But with their newfound power the managerial class maintained the mechanism that grows itself and its power and didn't let price signals tell would be graduates that these degrees would be useless once the bubble pops.
I don't think our theories of this phenomenon are that different, we're just pointing at different components of it.
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