Historians From The United States

"[T]he problem is that as we get greater numbers of these surplus elites... some of them turn into... counter-elites... the individuals who are willing to challenge... the reigning regime, and in history often... by violent means, and in fact this is happening in the United States... they're willing to break the rules of the game."

"What about ? ...By elites I mean the small percentage of population that concentrates social power in their hands. ...[I]t's a neutral definition. It's neither good nor bad. They're simply power holders."

"GDP per capita shows no break in the 1970s. It slowed down... around the financial crisis of 2007–2008..."

"What does the wealth pump do on the elite side..? Declining relative wages of workers set up this wealth pump that transfers wealth from workers to the economic elites... [A]s a result... a larger fraction of GDP goes to... the economic elites, which are both capital holders and top layers of administration of corporations (corporate officers). ...[T]his creates a favorable economic conjuncture for the economic elites and results in higher rates of upward social mobility. Elite numbers, as a result... grow and so does their consumption levels."

"So far so good. But the problem is, as in many dynamical systems, there are some delayed effects of such dynamics. ...Here are some numbers on the relative distribution of wealth in the American population. You have good data from 1983 to 2019... when we look at the percentage of households with [inflation adjusted in 1995 US dollars] net worth exceeding... Millionaires, roughly 10% of the population (7% now) increased from 3% to 7% but then growth in... classes such as decamillionaires was even more remarkable... more than fivefold, sixfold increase in the proportion of households that have 10 million dollars wealth, or more."

"Let's look at ... wages adjusted for inflation. ...In the late 1970s there was a definite phase transition. Up to that point, for the previous two generations, the wages for both unskilled and manufacturing workers had been growing quite rapidly and almost linearly... [W]ages for manufacturing workers increased... fourfold... a quite remarkable achievement... [I]t was unprecedented in human history to see such a long-term sustained increase in general well-being. Then... the wages stagnated, or even declined. So what was the reason?"

"[T]here are other dimensions. The state fragility and international environment, especially for smaller countries, international environment plays quite a role, but I will focus on the first two."

"I'll use the example of the United States, which I have studied from inside out... over the past 20 years, and I will illustrate how these few forces... have laid out in real life... a particular example..."

"[T]he problem is... if the wealth pump is allowed to run long enough, eventually... the growing elite numbers and their consumption levels will overshoot the productive base, which is what the workers are producing."

"Let me go back to 2010 when Nature, the journal... asked a number of scientists to make some forecasts for the next decade... (2010-2020) and that's when I published the forecast that.., the growing political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade. ...10 years later ...together with my coauthor, , we have revisited this forecast to see whether it had anything to do with reality, and... this is one of the graphs... We looked at several measures of instability, one was anti-government demonstrations. A very similar picture shows up when you look at violent riots. And so we submitted this paper in early 2020 saying that this forecast was actually right... [A]s the paper was [under] review, the summer of 2020, the riots following the death of George Floyd have exploded and... in January of 2021 we had the shocking event... known as the Storming of the Capitol."

"[I]nequality is an excellent proxy for the actual mechanisms that drive instability, but the actual drivers... are several, of which I will focus on two: popular immiseration and . ...[A]t a deep structural level the force that drives those and ultimately instability, is what I would refer to as the "wealth pump.""

"So the forecast seems to have been quite good. The question is "What was it based on?" It was not... a prophecy, it was a scientific prediction because there is a specific mechanism on which it was based. ...[T]he forecast was a scientific prediction in the sense that I wanted to stick my neck out [and] make an out-of-sample prediction to see whether the mechanisms that have been identified by our theory... actually are working in the way that we thought..."

"The main question... Whether there is economic inequality, and social and political instability? Growing economic inequality, especially inequality in income and wealth, is currently a broadly shared concern. It has been a lot of the topics in the Davos meetings... and it is often adduced that growing inequality is a source of political discord. But is it? And if it's the case, how does it do it? What is the direct mechanism?"

"[T]here are some reasons to doubt that growing inequality might be a direct mechanism... of instability, because humans are very bad at perceiving inequality. ...[A] number of studies ...show that people, when... asked to estimate the degree of income or wealth inequality... their opinions essentially have nothing to do with what is actually... measured by economists."

"[T]his is , and it posits several forces that drive social instability and political violence. ...I'll focus on two main ones. ...First ... potential ...based on popular immiseration resulting from the decreased living standards for the majority of the population... This is a fairly obvious effect of growing inequality... Since the days of Malthus this... force has been much in discussion."

"[T]he second condition... is absolutely much more predictive of immediate troubles to come, and that's intraelite competition which results... when elite numbers increase relative to the general population. As a result... we have too many elite aspirants vying for a limited number of positions... causes... intraelite competition, eventually conflict, and that... in our analysis of about 100... cases of past societies sliding into crisis and then out... That turns out to be the most universal and most important force."

"...[A]s a result ...the new elites, let's call them the elite aspirants... their numbers... begin to be so large that there is not enough power positions in... politics or in economics [e.g., corporations]... That's fixed, and as the numbers of elite aspirants vying for these positions increase, then first... the result... is intraelite competition, and secondly... the numbers of frustrated elite aspirants who are denied access to these positions begins to explode."

"It became clear... through quantitative historical analysis that [throughout time] complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a... degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces..."

"[M]y colleagues and I... focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse."

"In 2010... Nature asked specialists... to look ten years into the future, and I made this case... judging from the pattern of US history, we were due for another sharp instability spike by the early 2020s. ...The book is my best attempt to explain this model... I make no claims of radical originality."

"[T]here are important recurring patterns... throughout... human history over the past ten thousand years."

"[C]omplex human societies at base and at some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles."

"[S]ocieties have arrived at this crossroads before, and though... most of the time...the road has led to great loss of life and societal breakdown, sometimes it has led to a far happier resolution ..."

"[W]hen a state... has stagnating or declining ... a growing gap between the rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt... Historically such developments have served as leading indicators of political instability. In the United States all of these... started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to... around 2020... a spike in political instability. And here we are."

"So here you see... in the political domain... in just the decade from 2000-2010... the number of candidates who have spent half a million dollars or more of their own money... the millionaires... have doubled during this period."

"... uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record... as Big Data. It employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions..."

"Many of the wealth holders... aim to translate their economic power into political power... [A]nother measure is the cost of winning ...has been growing also, showing a greater demand for these positions and greater willingness to spend money..."

"Not all of these candidates are wealthy in their own right. Many of the newly wealthy... instead of running themselves... fund other individuals."

"was proposed 30 years ago. Although it was successively refined by other theorists... the theoretical core, and especially the emphasis on intra-elite competition and conflict as the most important driver of socio-political instability and state breakdown, remained constant. Over the past three decades, the theory was empirically tested by a growing number of researchers. Currently, there are detailed investigations of at least twenty crises... to test the predictions of the theory... [T]here are several dozen other less detailed examples. The... verdict is that.. predictions are well supported by data. ...[R]ival theories are not supported."

"[T]he "crude" Malthusian explanation, which connects popular immiseration to social breakdown, fails to account both for the start and end of the "Time of Troubles.""

"[D]isease outbreaks occur much more frequently during... crisis periods. Such epidemics historically have had a disproportionate effect on the less advantaged... and the Covid-19 pandemic was not an exception. ...[I]n terms of ... the pandemic... further worsened the well-being of large swaths of the American population... consequently, drove up the mass-mobilization potential. ...[G]overnmental dysfunction in dealing with the pandemic, coupled with intra-elite infighting, will likely further depress... trust in government institutions. Thus... the coronavirus has... further destabilize[d] the American ."

"Many of the historical "Golden Ages" were... golden... only for the elites, whose high levels of consumption were based on low real wages and falling consumption levels of the great majority..."

"[I]nequality... at least in this model, is not a direct driver. It's a proxie for the direct drivers, which is immiseration and elite overproduction."

"[T]he theory has been applied to two contemporary societies. The first... is a structural-demographic model for the... USA... the basis for the 2010 prediction. The details... were published [by] Turchin and later expanded into a book-length treatment."

"[W]e need to translate the general theory into a specific computational model tailored to the focal state. Over the past four decades this has been accomplished for... historical case-studies, ranging from Ancient empires to Early Modern states and nineteenth century’s revolutions and civil wars."

"[U]ntil the fundamental SD drivers for instability are reversed, there will be other triggering events... social turbulence may continue for years ahead."

"[W]hile declining living standards are often a contributing factor to... instability, reversing this trend does not end instability until elite overproduction is... reversed..."

"This is what I did in... Ages of Discord, I looked at more than 200 years of American history... an aggregated measure of well being... the blue curve has gone through two cycles, and the red curve is a measure of instability..."

"Historical data indicate that periods of enhanced instability and internal warfare usually extend for many years, with the median length... 10–15 years range."

"My colleague has expressed a pessimistic view in his book The Great Leveler... where he says the death is the great leveler so... a major violent shock is needed to reverse the economic inequality. I... look at this a bit more optimistically. Essentially entering into the crisis is relatively stereotypical, that's what our CrisisDB investigations show... [I]t's really conflict that plays a key role, together with mass organization. But the exit is usually contingent, and in fact there could be both good and bad outcomes, as indicated in this graph. Sometimes the decline is mild and followed by rapid recovery, but you... can also have complete collapse."

"[T]he... forecast: “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe” ...was not simply a projection of the current trend in social instability into the future. ...[T]he basis for this forecast was a quantitative model that took as inputs the major SD drivers for instability (immiseration, intraelite competition, and state (in)capacity) and translated them into the Political Stress Indicator (PSI)... strongly correlated with socio-political instability. The rising curve of the... PSI... suggests a growing future socio-political instability."

"(SDT) offers a... wholistic framework for investigating such... forces that... lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of socio-political instability."

"Making scientific predictions about the events that happened, but are not known to the authors of the theory, is a valid scientific approach in historical sciences, such as geology, astrophysics, evolutionary biology, and (history as science). It is sometimes referred to as "". ...[T]he primary way of testing theories in historical dynamics is retrodiction. But when mulitple successful tests using retrodiction (prediction about the past) are complemented with a few cases of prediction about the future, our degree of confidence in the theory is... enhanced."

"SDT is a general theory that guides our understanding of political violence dynamics and social breakdown in all large-scale state-level societies."

"... was proposed by and further developed and tested by... investigators, including [S.] Nefedov, Turchin, [and] Korotayev et al."

"[W]e actually looked at outcomes of crises, measuring them by a collapse. I don't like the word "collapse" because who knows what collapse means. So... we broke it up into various dimensions, and then we can look at more than 100 cases in CrisisDB, and look at the distribution of the severity (where we basically sum of the possible bad things that can happen in societies). Most of the time the crises lead to pretty dire consequences, but there is about 10-15% of cases where the elites manage to pull together, adopt the right set of reforms, and sail the ship of the state through the turbulent waters without major bloodshed."

"The focus [is] on only these four structural components... [E]ach component has a number of attributes that change dynamically in response to... [the] other... variables."

"SDT can be... an explicit computational model capable of forecasting future... social unrest and political violence in specific social systems."

"So this is how drives intraelite competition, intraelite conflicts, rise of the counter-elites and then sociopolitical instability."

"Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom."