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

[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 ...

[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.

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.