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… - Peter Turchin

...[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.

[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 SDT is not merely a theory for understanding why internal violence outbreaks develop and spike. By providing... understanding of the deep structural causes of socio-political instability and societal breakdown, SDT... gives us tools for adopting... reforms and policy interventions that can reverse these drivers of instability.