Peter Turchin

Well if you read https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/ he is saying that we are in the "Turbulent Twenties" and compared to the recent past there is significant political and social upheaval. Essentially the US is in a "chaotic period" where a spark could start a civil war or government collapse. But on an absolute scale, though, I guess this trend is easy to miss. The riots have only involved a few thousand people, and they haven't been incredibly violent or anything, a few people dead but not a lot. If you don't follow the news closely you could probably miss everything but the Capitol riot.

The article is a puff piece about Peter Turchin,[1] a historian who takes the long view - sort of similar to Braudel's Annales school. The relevant theses of Turchin's here are that political unrest goes in cycles of 60-70 years, and the idea of "elite overproduction" -- too many people who think they belong at the top of the heap and not enough prestigious positions for them, which leads to infighting among the political class and increasing irrelevance of politics to the world of ordinary citizens. 1. http://peterturchin.com/

I would say the best analysis of this is by Peter Turchin: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/population-immiseration-in-americ…

I think social media and technology in general ism while important, to some extent a second order effect response to a breakdown in community This is measured in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone as occurring after 1965-ish[1] through a variety of measures, or for example more recently measuring where couples meet in the US, [2] which were declining well before the 2010s. The Middletown studies of the 1920s for example noticing decreased community activities such as church attendance pointed the finger at new passive and individual leisure activities such as radio. While there's a variety of factors Robert Putnam points towards, I think income inequality and it's effect on well-being is the most under appreciated measure. Putman's measures roughly line up with Peter Turchin's[2] Inequality and Well being measures - the 1965 Great society program coincides with a measured high water mark of well being. You can also point to a lot of the measures on the WTF happened in 1971 website as being roughly equivalent. When people have more money and time for leisure activities, they are more able to engage with their communities and form healthy social bonds. The more time people spend frustrated, screwed over and left behind, the less time and they have for social engagement and other activities like…

The framing in the article is ahistorical. The post-WW2 period was a period of exceptionally _low_ inequality. If you look back to just the 1800s there were swings in inequality comparable to the present day. We're now moving back to the historical baseline. There are some contributing factors to the shift in inequality, a major one being that labor is now oversupplied compared to the post-war period, and the competition is driving wages lower. The U.S. has much higher immigration rates now, which contributes to the oversupply of labor. The late 1800s and early 1900s had similarly high immigration and high inequality. [1] Whether the historical baseline for inequality is the best amount of inequality is a different question though. It's clear that as redistribution flattens the income curve there is dead-weight loss as highly productive people stop wasting their time doing taxable work. It's also clear that investing in children who would otherwise be malnourished or lack education or healthcare is a net positive for society. It's not clear to me that the current level of inequality is the wrong one - we're admitting a lot of immigrants who are vastly improving their life prospects as a result, the economy is growing, and technology is amazing. Spending more money on health care would have limited benefits [2]. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether inequality should be higher or lower (it's hard to find a good-faith analysis in these terms), but the Time article…

Look up Peter Turchin. http://peterturchin.com

Interesting point, that 17% of the workforce (30% by compensation) are people with "manager" titles. This is in line with Peter Turchin's "cliodynamics" (https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/), the phase of "elite overproduction". I've been in the professional workforce as an aerospace engineer and a computer programmer since 1984. The need for non-management career paths was overwhelmingly obvious in the mid-80s. I have zero hope that corporations will see some light and decide to create a career path that doesn't include managing others.

Just to put in context, Collapse is one of the three possible post-crisis trajectories, beside Recovery and Continuing Instability; and it must be triggered first by a Revolutionary Situation. Before worrying about a collapse, we should check if we are in a revolutionary situation. And perhaps we are not yet there. https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019.pdf

Turchin has also correctly predicted that the elections would be very close : http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/america-in-november-2020-a-struct… However, so far he has been "wrong" about his "prediction" that after that the events would be completely unpredictable. In fact, so far events have been very predictable - this might change after the inauguration though?

Turchin (not in the linked article, but elsewhere[0]) explicitly refers to rise in number of underemployed graduates as a trigger for the creation of a counter-Elite. [0] http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-storming-of-the-u-s-capitol/ "Elite overproduction, and especially overproduction of the youth with advanced degrees, continues unabated. Our institutions of higher education have been churning out law, MBA, and PhD degrees, many more than could be absorbed by the economy. In a Bloomberg View article published just a few days ago Noah Smith provides the numbers for the overproduction of PhDs (America Is Pumping Out Too Many Ph.D.s)."

I read Turchin's Secular Cycle where he goes over the data sets he uses to draw these conclusions on earlier societies. While the things he's trying to measure are not easy (for instance he uses the number and dates of found coin hoards as a relative measure of instability in England), the amount of data is pretty impressive. I actually gave up after he did all the data on England and skipped France, the Islamic Empires and I think there was one other society, and went to the conclusion. I haven't read "Age of Discord" yet, but it looks like he has a pretty detailed summary here. http://peterturchin.com/age-of-discord/

To further clarify, from his blog “elites are simply a small segment of the society who concentrate social power in their hands” and “social power [is the] ability to influence other people’s behavior” http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/who-are-the-elites/ So we aren’t producing jobs for influencers fast enough, acc’d to point 3. What is the smallest ratio of influencers/influences an economy can support? And for what size niche of interest? And how many niches? The grand YouTube experiment... I’m a bit concerned point 3 means that critical thinking, as influencer kryptonite, is a jobs destruction program. Seems unfair... The postEmpire UK is a bit of a counterexample to point 6. Point 5 is a little thesis/antithesis-ish without the synthesis.

See Peter Turchin's write up to this http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-mad-prophet-of-connecticut/

Peter Turchin has a blog post (http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-mad-prophet-of-connecticut/ ) expressing his own views about the Atlantic article, explaining: "I cringed in a number of places as I read his article. Yes, I propose a fairly ambitious program of testing theories about historical processes by translating them into explicit models and then testing model predictions with large datasets. But no, I don’t think of myself as a Hari Seldon. In fact, the fictional Hari Seldon had no appreciation of nonlinear dynamics and mathematical chaos (because Asimov wrote the stories before the discovery of chaos). And cliodynamics is not psychohistory."

To his credit, intentional or not, according to his CV [1] he's only advised four PhD students and hasn't advised any since 2004. Four students per advisor lifetime might even be below replacement rate for having enough professors. [1] http://peterturchin.com/curriculum-vitae/

On a lark, I Googled the scientist's name, Peter Turchin, and "psychohistory"[0]; was not disappointed: Psychohistory and Cliodynamics (2012) http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliodynamics/ Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past (2013) https://www.wired.com/2013/04/cliodynamics-peter-turchin/ Empire of the sums (2005) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/aug/25/controversiesinscience [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)

Another driving factor is intra-elite competition: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/intra-elite-competition-a-key-con…

For context, about the author: > Peter Turchin is a Russian-American scientist, specializing in cultural evolution and cliodynamics — mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies. > He is a professor at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as well as in the Department of Anthropology and in the Department of Mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin --- Introduction to his latest book, published 2017: Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American Society http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/

Looks like he's been writing for a while, including sticking his neck out quantitatively in a 2017 blog post: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/quantitative-prediction-political… The linked short interview was probably prompted by his 2012 paper: > Extending the sequence of 1870, 1920, and 1970 forward suggests that the next instability peak shouldoccur in the United States around 2020. This is a simple projection, rather than a scientific prediction (which requires an understanding of mechanisms bringing about outbreaks of political violence; see Turchin, 2006a). The analysis of structural causes of instability waves is beyond the scope of this article and will be pursued elsewhere(Turchin, forthcoming) http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf (And yes, for the conspiracy theorists, you can search the DOI number to confirm this really was published in 2012.)

I was going to suggest Peter Turchin as an outsider to history / sociology but he seems to have been able to get published in highly reputable journals http://peterturchin.com/academic-publications/#Articles_in_Nature_Scie…

Perhaps you'd be interested in Peter Turchin's theory of "overpopulation of elites" being a root cause of societal dysfunction. http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/intra-elite-competition-a-key-con…

Source: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/cultural-evolution-knew-statistic…

You might want to look at Cliodynamics: the Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution [1] which attempts to develop scientific theories of history and sociology. Peter Turchin, one of the authors of the study described in TFA, has a brief description of the journal in his blog [2]. [1] http://escholarship.org/uc/irows_cliodynamics [2] http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/

Inequality always expends until the political interests of the rich and poor diverge so much that societies come apart at the seams. Relative equality is just as important, people get all kinds of stress related illnesses if they cannot keep up. One example is people people putting themselves in debt in order to get a college degree. Furthermore, the financial system works as a procyclical tool for the wealthy, since they can use debt financing as a leverage mechanism, while the poor have an insufficient credit score. This makes is easy for those with money to commandeer an outsized share of the available resources within an economy. For example, wealthy owners using real estate and as an investment vehicle, bidding up house prices for everyone. The banks make a killing on selling mortgages while the population becomes indebted and precarity rises. Here are some theories which I find interesting: The Iron Law of Oligarchy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy Structural Demographic Theory https://peterturchin.com/structural-demographic-theory/ Elite Overproduction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction Firm Hierarchy predicts Income https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/11/19/firming-up-hierarchy/

See also Cliodynamics http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/

Asimov introduced the concept of "psychohistory" in his Foundations series [1]. Psychohistory "combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people" [1] Almost a decade ago I heard about a researcher who took up the gauntlet of developing psychohistory. His name is Peter Turchin. Because there was an established academic field already named psychohistory [2], he named his field of study "Cliodynamics" [3]. When I first heard about Dr. Turchin, he had recently made a prediction that we were likely to see political violence in the 2020s [4, 5]. In this current blog entry he talks about factors that are likely to influence whether there is or is not political violence in the next few years. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory [3]: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/ [4]: http://www.zdnet.com/article/cliodynamics-a-science-for-predicting-the… [5]: http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf