End Times
* Book: End Times. by Peter Turchin.
URL =
Review
- Elites, Counter-Elites and Indicators of Revolution: A book review of End Times by Peter Turchin
Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHoqcGqnAUY
Interview
Transcript of a podcast conversation with the author, by
"Peter Turchin: Well, the book is about complex human societies, organized states, which have been around for 5,000 years, and these societies, they can show longish periods of internal peace and stability, maybe a century or so, but in the past, inevitably they would end up in some kind of end times, periods of social dysfunction, what is called disintegration and things like that. So, you think about famous revolutions like the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, or civil wars like the American Civil War. Why? A common theme that arises from the analysis of 200 at this point of past societies sliding into a crisis and emerging from it shows that the common theme is elite over production.
This is what happens when you have too many elite wannabes or the technical term is elite aspirants vying for a fixed number of power positions. In the book, I use a metaphor of playing a game of musical chairs, but instead of removing chairs one at a time, you keep adding more and more players. And so as they’re twice as many, three times as many players as there are chairs, you can imagine how much of chaos would ensue. So, this is a good metaphor for our societies because elite aspirants typically are energetic, ambitious, well-educated, good at organizing, and therefore when they’re frustrated in getting the positions that they expect, many of them turn to trying to infect, overthrow the unjust social order as they perceive it.
Matt Grossmann: So, it sounds like we sort of have our choice of either a very stable but unrepresentative and unchallenged elite or we have this broader competition which leads to polarization and downfall. We are now in an extended period of having mass higher education and civil rights, at least to the point that people have access to those mass higher education institutions. So, is this kind of our permanent state now or do you expect elite overproduction era to end at some point?
Peter Turchin: Not at all because if you think about it, if all societies, as I said, go through this integrative versus disintegrative phases, and the United States went through its integrative phase from the New Deal until late 1970s. So, this was a good democratic country, but the supply of elites was not greatly overwhelming the supply of power positions. It’s really over in the balance. Some competition is good, but excessive competition is bad because excessive competition tends to destroy cooperation essentially.
Given that at some point this problem will have to be solved one way or another, unfortunately, our historical data analysis shows that in the majority of cases, past societies had pretty violent end times, as I said, revolutions, civil wars. It’s only in a smallish percentage, maybe 10, 15% of cases where we see positive outcomes, such as in fact what happened during the progressive era and the New Deal period in the United States, which in fact in enabled broad-based prosperity. The 30 years after World War II are often called the glorious 30 years because the society was in social balance, the fruits of economic growth were divided fairly between the economic elites and workers, and in principle, maintaining such an equilibrium is possible to do.
Matt Grossmann: So, you list this as one of the drivers of instability, but you also point to the necessity of some degree of deprivation, some kind of fiscal health problems and legitimacy problems with the state, and then kind of a catchall of geopolitical factors. So, how do these all fit in? Is elite overproduction the primary driver, or how do these others fit in?
Peter Turchin: I think it’s a good time to talk about the wealth pump, so the perverse wealth pump that transfers riches from the workers to the economic elites, it was not operating until late 1970s in the United States specifically, and that’s what we see across the societies that we have studied. So as a result, but then it was turned on in the 1970s, and we can talk about why in a minute, but essentially that is the root cause. First of all, I’m sure that you and your listeners are familiar with that graph that shows how the productivity of American workers has been increasing, and for a while until 1970s, the wages were increasing completely in parallel, and then something, boom, happened in the late 1970s. The productivity continued to increase, but the wages stopped growing and even declined. So, all that extra results from the economic growth, they had to go elsewhere.
And where did they go? They went to increase the number of wealthy and their wealth, so leader of production in the United States and in most democratic countries has two aspects because typically the ruling classes are ruling classes are a coalition of economic elite owners and managers of large corporations and credentialed elites, people who get educational credentials and then enter the political process. So in the United States, we have overproduction on both ends, and in fact, the overproduction of wealthy people in many ways is more serious. So, what happened was that between 1980 and 2010s, the numbers of decamillionaires, people who owned a wealth of 10 million or more in real terms, adjusted for inflation, it exploded. It increased tenfold.
So, what happened that suddenly we had many more wealthy people and some of those wanted to translate their wealth into political office. Donald Trump, of course, is the most example that comes first, but Michael Bloomberg is another billionaire. The less successful people like Steve Forbes also ran for presidency, so what happens is that we have 10 times as many such wealthy people, and that translates into roughly speaking, 10 times as many more wealthy candidates. You can see them actually in the election process. And as they competed, the number of elite aspirants increased. So, we have this musical chairs problem. In 2016, there were 17 major Republican candidates in the primaries for the US presidency.
And as in the game of musical chairs, if you have too many people vying for a few chairs, then there is a possibility of rule-breaking starts to happen. People might start scuffing and maybe even fist fights and things like that, and that’s essentially what we are seeing happening in the United States. So, now as the different factions are fighting it out in the law courts, I think it’s going to be a fairly unprecedented situation if the legal proceedings against President Joe Biden go forth, which they are likely to do with impeachment movement, and we of course have Donald Trump under several indictments. So, we’ll have both major candidates in fact being attacked on legal grounds."
(https://www.niskanencenter.org/are-we-overproducing-elites-and-instability/)