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End Times
Peter Turchin
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In February 2010, Peter Turchin, a relatively obscure researcher at the University of Connecticut, wrote a letter to the distinguished journal Nature. He was responding to their '2020 visions' issue - an upbeat dawn-of-the-decade exercise that collected predictions of progress from across science and politics. Turchin assumed the role of Cassandra. The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe, which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe. He pointed to waves of disruption that tend to recur every 50 years. All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020. There was still time to change course, though: with measures to improve wellbeing and reduce economic inequality, records show that societies can avert disaster.
Normally scientists enjoy being proved right, but for Turchin, the way the following decade panned out must have seemed a bit too on-the-nose. The response to the financial crisis wasn't a New Deal-style rescue package as he'd recommended, but austerity and a widening of the gap between rich and poor. Frustration at the established order threw up Brexit in Britain and Trump in the US. Right on cue, 2020 delivered a pandemic, economic chaos and a president who refused to concede defeat at the polls. The following January saw the storming of the Capitol, and images of insurrection that seemed like a throwback to an earlier revolutionary era.
In the 70s I saw the end of the Golden Age, from the common people's perspective - and it's been downhill since then
Now Turchin is having another go at explaining those cycles of disruption and what it might take to emerge unscathed (though he tells me that, unlike in 2010, it's past time to avoid the consequences entirely: We are in crisis - but it's not too late to take a less bloody exit. His book's title, End Times, doesn't exactly inspire confidence, but it does provide a clear theory about how we got into this mess, and how to get out of it. There are some familiar concepts here - falling living standards leading to mass discontent - but others, 'elite overproduction' in particular, are much less widely recognised, and genuinely eye-opening.
For a global prophet of doom, Turchin cuts a surprisingly ordinary figure. He speaks to me over Zoom from the sofa in his modest living room in Storrs, Connecticut, essentially a village with a huge university campus attached. We have a house in the woods, he tells me, and praises the area's low population density in a way that makes me wonder if he's prepping for the apocalypse. The reality is less alarming. You know, my wife has a garden, it's very comfortable. A bit like a dacha, he observes - a reminder, alongside his strong accent, that he was born in the USSR - a country that doesn't exist any more. He emigrated with his dissident parents in 1977, when he was 20.
That background makes him less sanguine than others might be about the prospect of societal upheaval - even state collapse. I went back for the first time since leaving in 1992, and I experienced a failed state. Now, when I'd moved to the United States in 1977, the [country] was really at the brink of several trends beginning to point downwards, he says, tracing the path of a rollercoaster with his right hand. I saw the end of the Golden Age - from the common people's point of view - and it has been downhill since then. So I'm really worried about ending up in another failed state.
I point out that this will seem like hyperbole to lots of people. I don't say that it's 100% certain, he counters - and notably refuses to be drawn on whether Trump will be re-elected in 2024. The road out of crisis opens up a whole set of possibilities, from pretty mild instability all the way to collapse. At this point, pretty much anything is possible.
What were those downward-pointing trends in the 1970s, then? That decade, Turchin argues, was when the social contract established in the 1930s - Roosevelt's New Deal - began to disintegrate. For 40 years, America had effectively replicated the Nordic model under which the interests of workers, owners and the state were kept in balance (he's careful to point out that a significant portion of the population - mostly Black Americans - were always shut out of this cosy arrangement). After that, things began to shift in favour of owners. The power of unions was eroded, as were labour rights. Typical wages started to lag behind economic growth, or even decrease. Quality of life suffered, and with it life expectancy. 'Diseases of despair' such as opioid or alcohol abuse grew. Turchin even links the rise of mass shootings to a generalised hopelessness he refers to as 'popular immiseration'.
At the same time, the rich got richer - far richer. A system of taxation that weighed most heavily on the highest earners, including a top rate of 90%, was dismantled. The number of decamillionaires, or households worth over $10m, increased from 66,000 in 1983 to 693,000 in 2019, accounting for inflation. The economy chugged along nicely, but the share of it controlled by the wealthiest got larger at the expense of the average earner. Turchin calls this the 'wealth pump'. Things are now set up, he argues, so that money gushes away from workers and towards the elite, like a blowout from an oil well.
This has an interesting effect: so-called 'elite overproduction', a phrase coined by Turchin's colleague, the sociologist Jack Goldstone. The social pyramid has grown top heavy, with rich families and top universities churning out more wealthy graduates than the system can accommodate. To illustrate this, Turchin describes a game of musical chairs with a twist. There's always been a limited number of powerful positions, be they senator, governor, supreme court justice or media mogul. In an era of elite overproduction, rather than chairs being taken away whenever the music stops, the number of competitors increases instead. Before you know it, there are far more people than can realistically attain high office. Fights break out. Norms (and chairs) are overturned as 'elite aspirants' - those who have been brought up in the expectation of a say in how things are run – turn into counter-elites, prepared to smash the system to get their way. This isn’t just a US problem, by the way; Turchin says that Britain is on a similar trajectory. In fact, among OECD countries, it's next in line. Germany is further behind, but also on the same slippery slope.
One thing we know about historical exits from crisis is that at some point the different factions have to be reconciled.
Turchin, who was a mathematical ecologist before turning to history in the mid-2000s, brings a numbers approach to his adopted subject. He was able to predict the turbulent 2020s by looking at economic and social indicators from 100 historical crises, gathered together in a database called CrisisDB. They range from medieval France to 19th-century Britain, and show that periods of instability are pretty consistently preceded by a decline in wages, the emergence of a wealth pump, and most combustibly, elite overproduction.
Why is the latter so important? Well, the masses may be miserable, but without someone who has the status and resources to organise them, they'll simply languish. Their revolutionary potential is only realised once a political entrepreneur - usually a frustrated elite aspirant - gets involved. Robespierre, Lenin and Castro are all examples of highly privileged individuals who felt excluded from existing power structures and led popular movements to overthrow them. In 19th-century China, a young man from a well-to-do family failed the exams that would have enabled him to become a top flight imperial administrator four times. Hong Xiuquan went on to lead a rebellion in which at least 20 million died.
Things may not be quite as bad as that yet, but it's not hard to identify modern-day figures who fit the elite aspirant mould. Donald Trump is the most obvious, a beneficiary of the wealth pump whose only route to power was as a political entrepreneur stoking grievance. Nigel Farage? He's a good example. He's personally wealthy, a member of the economic elite. And he has been channelling discontent. Sometimes counter-elites mount their takeover from the inside. With Brexit, “there was a traditional segment of the Conservative party, but then there was an insurgent part. And they were [also] using this discontent. What we see in history is that one segment of the elite channels popular discontent to advance their political careers. This happened in Republican Rome 2,000 years ago, and it happens now.
Another distinctive feature of elite overproduction is the fierce ideological competition it generates. Turchin believes we've transitioned from the pre-crisis period, where political entrepreneurs largely attacked the established order, to a phase in which newly powerful factions are fighting among themselves. This, he argues, is one of the mechanisms behind 'cancel culture'. Such vicious ideological struggles are a common phase in any revolution, he writes. There is a race to the extremes, with denunciations becoming more and more intense. “In the struggle between rival factions, the ones willing to escalate accusations win over the moderate ones.
So how do we fix things? It strikes me that there are some pretty obvious political conclusions to be drawn from Turchin's research, but he's reluctant to be led too far down the road of punditry. I don't want to enter into the political infighting, he says. One thing that we know about historical exits from crisis is that at some point the elites and population have to pull together, the different factions have to be reconciled. That's why I try to stay away from taking sides.
He will, however, admit to several recommendations, saying that some of them will please liberals, others will please conservatives. Liberals, presumably, will be heartened by the idea that we need to give workers more power. In order to turn off the wealth pump you have to increase labour's share of the pie at the expense of business. Partly by redistribution, but partly by beefing up workers' ability to demand higher pay.
What kind of thing would please conservatives? Here he seems to hesitate slightly. Let's say, massive immigration does depress the wages of common workers. It's just now the new left is focusing more on cultural issues, and they are all for immigration, but conservatives are now against immigration. He elaborates, saying it's an iron law of economics that if you increase the supply of something - in this case, labour - then its price will decline. But, it won't happen if workers have enough social power, if there are good labour organisations and, also, if the elites internalise the need for dividing fairly the fruits of economic growth. So if you have those institutions, then immigration is not a problem.
And what about those surplus elites? Well, if you happen to be one, look away now. Halfway through End Times Turchin remarks, somewhat blithely: In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of - historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility. In fact, CrisisDB allows us to be even more precise: in 40% of crises, rulers were assassinated; 75% ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in 20%, those civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of the time the state in question disappeared, either through conquest or disintegration.
It would be nice to avoid a century-long civil war. Perhaps instead we can select 'voluntary downward social mobility' from Turchin's grisly menu. This would require elites to be persuaded to give up some of their wealth, or to decide to do so off their own backs. Patriotic Millionaires, a pressure group made up of rich people, including members of the Disney family, who share a profound concern about the destabilising level of economic and political inequality in America is probably unrepresentative of the class as a whole. More likely, things will have to get so bad that a new social contract becomes the only alternative to levels of discontent that would threaten private fortunes in any case. That's what happened in the 1930s. It also happened in Britain in the 1830s, when the prospect of a revolution like the ones sweeping Europe was kept at bay by the Great Reform Act and the repeal of the corn laws (it also helped that frustrated elite aspirants could try their hand at running distant parts of the empire).
In any case, it seems we'll know what the denouement is before too long. The nice thing about CrisisDB is that we now have statistics on how long these periods last. Roughly speaking, it's 10 to 20 years. Very few shorter, some much longer. But for those who think that we're [already] out of it in the United States? That's not very likely.
(Mother Jones)
Pessimism is in. Swaths of the global elite are uncertain enough about the future to be fortifying their doomsday bunkers designed to evade both popular uprisings and climate catastrophe. 'Billions must die,' a meme that germinated in alt-right, blackpilled internet communities that see mass death and depopulation as inevitable, is shared with only a note of semi-irony. Whether it's making art about mass extinction events or taking part in ambiently self-destructive behaviors like smoking cigarettes, other expressions of pessimism's cousin, Nihilism, are in vogue among segments of the cultural vanguard.
Data backs up the notion a lot of people see gloom on the horizon. As of January, 63% of the country believes the economic outlook is worsening. Under a quarter of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction; over 40% believe that a civil war is at least somewhat likely within the next decade.
The Russian-American academic Peter Turchin doesn't think this outlook is just a vibe. Turchin, who helped develop an area of study known as 'cliodynamics,' which attempts to scientifically quantify how history moves forward, predicted in 2010 the US would see a significant uptick in political violence by 2020. Today Turchin's cliodynamic models remain pessimistic. In his 2023 book End Times, Turchin says political violence and societal instability have already increased, a condition that is here to stay for another five to 10 years, even if we started trying to fix things.
Turchin posits that the operation of what he terms a 'wealth pump' has disproportionately benefited the top sliver at the direct expense of every other socioeconomic band. With too many people aspiring to join the top echelons and not enough slots - as Turchin argues in End Times, citing an array of historical examples - the structures holding society together start to get a bit shaky.
People get more radical in the name of political ends: They do things like storm capitol buildings, threaten federal judges, and take part in ominous convoys. And if the conditions that are generating surges in violence are left unresolved, he warns they start to get substantially worse. Turchin and I spoke last month about this cycle of wealth capture and resentment that he sees at play not only across history, but in my generation.
Can you explain what cliodynamics is and what you were trying to achieve in developing it?
We live in large-scale complex societies, which are quite recent in our evolutionary history. That's one big question: How did this happen in the last 10,000 years? But also, the states in which we live periodically experience social breakdown and fragmentation, and even worse things like civil wars. So the other question is: Why are our societies so fragile?
History has a long and detailed record of thousands of states over the past 5000 years. And historians, when they write books, they offer explanations. We can treat them as scientific hypotheses, but they are not compared with each other using data, which is the essence of science. Science is not only about erecting theories, it's also about testing them and rejecting them, like in physics or other natural sciences. This is what cliodynamics does.
Human social systems are complex systems with nonlinear dynamics and without mathematics, you cannot really understand what is going on in them. And why is that necessary? Because without understanding why societies go into these end times, periods of social instability and potentially political collapse, we cannot avoid them, or at least resolve them in a way that is less costly, in terms of human lives.
You used cliodynamics in 2010 to predict political instability in 2020. What did you see in your models that forecasted this?
It was not a prophecy. Predicting the future with any accuracy is essentially impossible. What scientists use prediction for is to separate good theories from bad theories. Good theories make good predictions, bad theories make bad predictions.
What I did in 2010, there was a theory called structural-demographic theory. It has been built on studying about a couple dozen examples. In the past, it suggested the mechanisms of why societies go into social instability and potential collapse. In around 2007 and 2008 I looked at the trends, which by that point had been developing for a couple decades in clearly bad directions.
I was drawn to your work because the arc of my life sort of falls onto the arc of your work. When you made that prediction, I was about to graduate high school. I don't know if I was aware of your prediction at the time, but I remember listening to an NPR interview about how my generation will live in smaller houses and experience more economic uncertainty and inequality.
There are tons of people like that who are your age, experiencing huge pressure and anxiety. Everybody I talked to in this generation is extremely, extremely stressed. I thought it was hard when I was in the job market in the 1980s. God, it's just got so much worse.
A lot of my friends in college, the ones that could, just went into finance and consulting to avoid that uncertainty. To the point of End Times though, there weren't enough slots in those secure, elite jobs for everyone that wanted in. Why is this kind of elite overproduction so destabilizing? Also, what is your definition of elite?
Elites are a small proportion of the population who have social power, which means that they have coercive power, economic power, administrative or political power, and ideological power. Typically, there are always more elite wannabees than there are positions for them. Some competition is good because it allows better people to move forward. But the problem that many people don't realize is that excessive competition is extremely corrosive for social cooperation and for the capacity of a society to function well.
I use the game of musical chairs in my book as a metaphor for elite overproduction. But instead of removing chairs, you keep the number of chairs the same and you keep increasing the number of players. As the number of players becomes 2, 3, or 4 times as many as there are chairs somebody is going to start breaking rules. Then the rule-breaking spreads. In history, that typically escalates into a spiral of violence and counter-violence that ends up in some kind of revolution or civil war.
But until that happens, as long as elites are unified and the state strong, states can endure very large levels of popular discontent. In the past, peasant rebellions would be easily destroyed by a small number of mounted and armored knights. Today, you have all those robocops in the streets that look like Martians who quite handily disperse demonstrations and things like that. That’s why intra-elite conflict is the most important ingredient in predicting social fragmentation and social collapse.
Even if there is tremendous economic inequality, unless you have an immiserated elite class, it's not possible to pull off revolution or civil war?
In our theory, inequality is not the driving force, because 99.9% of people cannot measure the degree of inequality. How do you experience a Gini index of whatever, right? The actual driver is something that people need to feel on their own skin.
There's a semi-fictional character in my book who basically grew up in a household with parents that were lower middle class, but were doing quite well. But he cannot approach that status. That's how people become disenchanted and even radicalized. They see that they're living worse than their parents. They feel a sense of injustice as society becomes wealthier and wealthier, but they're falling. It's not just a rational-agent type thing, although some people are rational agents. They are the ones that become revolutionaries, because a revolution is 10,000 new positions. But most people are driven by emotions.
To come back to your question, what is important is not economic inequality itself but how it creates the feeling of immiseration in the majority. And then via intra-elite competition, it creates huge winners and huge losers. Inequality strikes in between the elites as much as it does between the elites and the rest of the population. That's even more important. That is what creates the feelings of injustice and a burning desire to set them right.
So then they become counter-elites and revolutionaries. Is economic inequality necessary at all for the counter-elites to have a mass to tap into to help with revolutionary activity?
Let me introduce another key concept from my book: the wealth pump. It's the perverse mechanism that takes the riches from the poor and gives them to the rich. In medieval societies, this would be accomplished by means of coercion: the lords would just extract wealth from the peasants. In capitalist societies, it is done in a more gentle way.
It happens when the wages of the median, typical American, or a member of some other population, starts to decrease with respect to the overall level of wealth, which we can measure with GDP per capita. When this measure of relative wage declines, that creates the wealth pump, because all that extra wealth that society is producing goes right up to the economic elites.
This has three bad consequences for society, particularly in regard to stability. First of all, it creates immiseration, and the majority of the population loses faith in institutions and the governing order.
Secondly, it bloats the number of wealth holders. From 1980s, in the United States, the numbers of deca-billionaires - people who have $10 billion or more - increased tenfold. I mean, its unbelievable. The population only grew by 40%.
The third consequence is people in your situation. When you grew up, you had a choice, you could have gone to work in some not terribly demanding profession. You could have worked your 40 hours, come back home, raise a family. At least that's what people did, one or two generations ago. The problem is that because of the general immiseration, many people realize that they cannot do this if they just go in the normal way. They will not do as well as their parents. So you have to escape precarity.
How do you do that? You obtain an education. Which college did you go to for your degree?
This was also a big point of stress. I went to the University of Texas at Austin, but I was weighing private schools where I would have incurred lots of debt.
Okay, that's actually a good school. But if you went to Stanford or Yale, then clearly you would have a much better gig. The way to get out of precarity, if you don't inherit a lot of wealth, is to go the education route. That's why the number of of high school graduates who expected to go to college exploded. That creates an overproduction of degree holders.
All three of these are consequences of the wealth pump. They're all destablizing and they all work together. In history, societies ended these periods by turning the wealth pump off. Unfortunately, in many cases, this was done by a revolution or a civil war that exterminated a substantial chunk of elites, or produced downward social mobility. This is a process that is often very painful for elites.
One thing that especially free market-minded people might struggle with is the idea that money is not zero-sum. Some might push back and say, 'Well, the wealth pump is something that can benefit everyone, not just elites.' How would you respond?
Before the Industrial Revolution, the economy had grown so slowly that it was essentially a zero-sum game. Now it's a positive sum game. If all segments of the population, including the owners and managers of corporations and their workers, if their wages grow together with the economy - this is what happened in the thirty glorious years, from 1945 to 1975 - everybody is happy.
Even though it's a positive sum game, since the 1980s all of the gains have gone to the top 1%, or even the 0.1%. This tide did not raise all boats. In fact, many of the boats have been sinking, especially for those of the 10% of the poorest, less advantaged segments of the population. We see this very vividly in the explosion of deaths of despair and also in biological standards. Disadvantaged segments of the population have been shrinking. Life expectancy is shrinking, especially in disadvantaged segments of the population. This is a Malthusian factor that I did not expect to see in this world. So most of the population is becoming immiserated, despite the whole economic pie growing.
There has already been an uptick in the kind of political violence you talk about, mostly from the right. Not from counter-elites or the elite aspirants, but from this group of people who are often from the interior of the country. Some are local elites, and some aren't. What's happening there?
On the path to social breakdown, we see these conflicts happening at all levels. For example: the late medieval crisis in France. At first, there was a whole bunch of very local violence. Knights were killing each other. In a province, two contenders would fight for a count position. And then at the top, there was a conflict for the crown.
What we see now looks very much like that. The first time I wrote about the epidemic of indiscriminate mass killings in the US was in 2008. This was a very clear sign of growing social pressures because it's essentially suicide terrorism. People would go out and kill random people - or random people in their firm, or random people in their school - and then either commit suicide or get killed by cops. I saw designs of this social pressure building up back then. We are now having a breakdown at the very top level.
In the past, elite aspirants would actually kill each other. One of the hopeful signs is that people now use character assassination instead of actual assassination. And instead of bringing your followers to go kill your rival and their followers, what we see now is lawfare.
You're saying when like Chrissy Teigan gets canceled, or Bill Ackman tries to get Claudine Gay fired, that's a sublimated duel?
Yeah. Much of the me-too culture has been canceling rivals. Not necessarily directly rivals, but it has often been directed at people who already work in an established elite position. You cancel them and then that position becomes available.
I'm having a little bit of trouble seeing it in cases where they're not direct rivals. Claudine Gay and Bill Ackman aren't in competition. I guess they're sort of in competition for the ideology of Harvard. I don't think that Harvey Weinstein's accusers are aspiring to take his position or anything like that.
No, I agree. I think that in the majority of cases, what drives counter-elites are is not a calculation that 'Okay, I'm going to free up so many vacancies in positions.' It's the sense of injustice. The injustice has been taking the form of a struggle against racial, sexual, and other types of inequalities. But I believe that at the base of it is the feeling amongst the great majority of elite aspirants that they are losing ground, and somebody has to be blamed, instead of realizing, what are the deep causes, like the wealth pump.
I looked at your Twitter, and the many people that are following you that I also follow anecdotally are people who are dissident-elites and counter-elites.
I follow a lot of counter-elite journalists, people like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Mate. I think you're making a very interesting general point here. Let me step back. One of the ways we can get out of this situation is to use modern technology more intelligently. Glenn Greenwald left his job at The Intercept and now he is extremely successful, and this is thanks to new technology.
I wrote a popular book in 2015 called Ultrasociety. I went to several different agents, nobody wanted to take me on, and no publishers wanted it. So I started I started my own imprint, it's called Beresta Books, and published it. This new technology is actually really empowering people to achieve things without the gerontocratic, set in their ways established elite. Now with End Times I have an agent and a publisher, but I'm not going to abandon my business either.
Are you a dissident-elite?
No, no. I'm not a counter-elite. My role to be dispassionate and nonpartisan because I want my message to reach all the different factions.
To do that, I have to stay very strictly neutral in this in this struggle, so, I'm not either elite or counter-elite.
Don't your affiliations with the University of Oxford sort of make you some kind of elite?
Let's go back to the definition. Elites have social power. I wield no coercive power. No economic power. And no administrative power. My only power is ideological. And here, yes I admit that one of the reasons I wrote the book is because I want its message to influence people and that is the definition of power.
What you advocate for, I assume, is something that would dissent against establishment views, in at least the United States?
America's established elites actually go through these cycles. We had a really great set of elites, especially from the New Deal, but actually even a little earlier. By the '70s all of that was gone. Yes, today, in order to speak truth to power, you sort of have to become some kind of a dissident. But my message is very much to the established elites also: don't bring things to the point where you will have a revolution, where you to lose your power, and maybe even worse.
What is the way out of impending violence? In the book, you talk about how this is a cycle that we're sort of damned to for at least a decade, but it's reversible.
I have no detailed agenda because detailed agenda would have to be hammered out in the political process, and I'm not a politician. I can only point to the root problem: the wealth pump, which we need to turn off. There are many different ways to do that: giving more power to workers, maybe taxing wealth more, increasing the minimum wages, changing social norms, and so on and so forth. And we should not expect quick results. I already have a computational model that suggests it takes five to 10 years once the wealth pump turns off before positive effects start.
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