Peter Turchin Quotes

[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 ...

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]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.

This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010–2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe...

[G]rowing socio-political instability results from multiple interacting factors: economic, political, and cultural.

[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.

[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.

We need to find ways to ameliorate the negative effects of globalization... Economic inequality, accompanied by burgeoning public debt, can be addressed by making tax rates more progressive.

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

[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 .

Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and several major Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions.

Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability...

SDT gives us understanding of the deep structural causes of socio-political instability and... tools for adopting... reforms and policy interventions that can reverse these drivers... It remains to be seen whether our society will be able to use these tools.

Both exogenous and endogenous. ...[H]uman societies have changed dramatically over the past couple of hundred years, and you have to take that into account. ...Many people talk about now, especially because of , the effect of technology, the automation, and of robotization, and that is certainly a force that reduces labor supply. But other things... played in the United States at the level of labor supply... first... the baby boom that created a large cohort of workers; and secondly the... massive entry of women into the labor force; and immigration. Immigration actually is much discussed but numerically it's... slightly less important than the... other demographic forces that we're talking about. ...What's exogenous, what's endogenous? It's really a matter of what our best model is, because you can endogenize things. But some things cannot be endogenized, so there are automation processes... this is a very long term process that has been happening over thousands of years... And so in my model that's clearly an exogenous mechanism. But what's the most important (to me) endogenous mechanism is the last thing that I included in the model, which is the attitudes... Think about it as institutions. ...Labor promoting institutions were installed in the United States as a result of the New Deal, and they worked very well until [the] late 70s, and then they... started to be dismantled... especially under the Reagan administration. And so I use the mininum wage as a proxy for the elite attitudes towards workers. It seems to work quite well, but we could use other proxies such as illegal anti-labor moves by firms. So that is an endogenous mechanism in theory because... essentially, ...when ...[a] crisis ...either destroys part of the elites, or frightens them so much that they install institutions that are more pro-labor, and that lasts until the collective memory of the crisis fades, and then you have... [a] recycling process... in my book I unpack these ideas.

A group consisting entirely of self-regarding agents will never be able to cooperate. So cooperation is possible only if some agents are motivated by ‘extra-rational’ prosocial norms, including the norm of moralistic punishment.