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

In my book, Ages of Discord I talk about the Progressive Period... [the] 1920s especially. Remember... the original Red Scare was in the 1920s. So when we look at the existence of the Soviet Union, established in 1920 and collapsed in 1989, this is the period when... I grew up, by the way, in the Soviet Union, and I remember how the newspapers like were talking about the horrors of capitalism... There are multiple lines of evidence that show that the influence from the Soviet Union... By the way, also from during the 1930s. Those were, in fact, important influences on the Roosevelt administration in... designing an equitable system. ...When the Soviet Union ... collapsed, it was misinterpreted as the triumph of neoliberal economics... and here we are essentially. ...This is an important factor. So the failure by the elites. It could be both due to internal challenges... and by the way, in the 1920s there were challenges... even earlier from [the] 1890s... from the Populist movement in the United States, and the Socialist movement in the United States. ...So those were internal. There were also external influences from competitors such as the Soviet Union.

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.