Peter Turchin Wants to Avoid Political Disintegration

Peter Turchin, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Peter Turchin

Thank you, Justin.

jmk

Well, Peter, your book was really interesting. It’s called End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. But it’s hard for me to find a place to really start the conversation. So, what I’d like to do is begin with something that’s not really part of your book. Back in 2010, you made a very famous forecast about conflict coming in the 2020s. We’re now in the year 2023. I want to know from you, in your opinion, how did your forecast hold up?

Peter Turchin

Sure. Well, let me just say that I believe in these wonderful complex societies and in principle, they’re capable of delivering high quality of life to the majority of the population. But complex societies, as our historical analysis shows, always get to the point of breakdown or end times. Right now, we are in such end times. Why? That’s a good question. The common theme that we found in analyzing hundreds of past societies entering into crisis and then emerging from it is elite overproduction. So, that is what I saw when I made that forecast in 2010. At that point, my team and I had been studying only dozens of societies. Since then, we have built up our sample size and found those common themes. But people kept asking me, ‘Where are we?’ Still, I didn’t want to go there in the beginning.

But eventually I broke down and started putting the numbers in their places, so to speak. And I was shocked, truly shocked. This was late around 20007-2008. The numbers were showing that we were clearly on the path to crisis. That’s why I decided to publish this forecast. Since 2010, periodically people come and ask me, ‘Where are we?’ Every time I look at the numbers and we are still on the same path to what usually leads to political disintegration. So, I kept saying, ‘We are still on track.’ Unfortunately, there’s been no trend reversals that would give much hope that this is not happening. Then, of course, 2020 happened.

jmk

Do you consider to be 2020 as the inflection point of the real crisis or do you think that the crisis is still ahead of us?

Peter Turchin

Well, the inflection point is actually the late 1970s. That’s when a number of indicators, including elite overproduction and also the trends for the popular wellbeing, for the wellbeing for the majority of population, changed trends. Our social systems are very inertial. It takes a long time for them to develop. Similarly, it’s not going to be just 2021, one year or one day even or whatever. No. Again, our analysis of past societies is that it takes multiple years, sometimes between one and two decades. Actually, most of the time between ten and twenty years to turn around. That is why I think in response to your question, we still have more turbulence to come.

The reason for that is not just my feeling and not just statistical patterns, that’s of course part of the answer, but also that I see no evidence that the fundamental trends that drive turbulence and social disintegration have been reversed. We have not got to that point yet.

jmk

So, I want to press you a little bit on this, because if we’re talking about social turbulence and crisis in moments, like what happened at the Capitol on January 6^th or just increased polarization between the political parties, I can definitely foresee something like that happening. But if you’re talking about a complete disintegration of society itself, that America is going to completely collapse and become some kind of anarchic state, that comes across as a little bit hyperbolic. So, I want to get a sense of what you mean by end times, because you even said we’re approaching end times. I mean, are we approaching end times of one epoch and about to head into another, but it’s still going to be a continuation of the American state or are you talking about a complete collapse of society?

Peter Turchin

Exactly. End times are often also the times of new beginnings. Therefore, I am actually an optimist by nature, and I hope that our society will find a way to leave this crisis without too much bloodshed. However, if we look at the societies in the past, and we can do statistics on that, so we have quantified the degree of breakdown by using a scale of about 10 points from zero to 10. A very deep collapse is fairly rare, but most societies experience a very serious collapse, so population declines, sometimes even loss of cultural sophistication. Certainly, bloody civil wars and social revolutions are very common, but in maybe 10-15% of the cases, the societies managed to pull together. Some social elites come forward and convince the rest of the elites that they need to avoid revolution from below by proposing reforms from above.

We have such several cases such as this. So, for example, a New Deal in the United States, the Chartist period in the UK. You can go as far back as the Roman Republic where the elites pulled together to solve their problems with the population. So, this is not a common outcome, but it is possible to avoid the worst.

jmk

I guess one of the other reasons why I wonder if this is a little bit hyperbolic is because, America has had many different moments where people come together and make dramatic reforms. You mentioned the New Deal, but we could also talk about the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s as well as the Vietnam War protests that were around the same period that had a lot of changes that empowered youth and lowered the voting age to 18. We could talk about the generation before the New Deal in terms of the Progressive movement that added a number of different constitutional amendments. It feels like almost every generation has a challenge before it and has some moment of political crisis that they have to overcome. So, why would the 2020s be any different?

Peter Turchin

What we have learned is that the road to crisis seems to be quite generalized. It’s like a value with steep slopes and a ball rolling downhill really doesn’t have anywhere to go but to crisis. But once you get to the crisis, then you get to your cusp and a whole lot of different avenues open up. That’s what I mean that there is a whole spectrum of possible solutions. American history illustrates that. We can compare the crisis of the 1850s that led to a bloody civil war with 600,000 people dead and the early 20th century. In fact, I tend to think about the Progressive Era and the New Deal as really part and parcel of a whole because much of the legislation that was set in stoned during the New Deal was proposed, discussed, and even tried during the Progressive Era.

So, here we have two examples, two possible pathways for us today. We can either end up in a really bad civil war resulting in perhaps a fragmentation of the United States. I mean, when you look at historical periods before revolutions, before the French Revolution, before the Russian Revolution, before the American Civil War, those people could not imagine that they were about to get into the bloody thing. They had been extremely incautious and the result was a horrible tragedy. This is what I hope that we will avoid.

jmk

Your book introduces a lot of concepts that listeners will not be familiar with. You’ve already mentioned a few of them, quite a few of the concepts center around the idea of elites. You talk about elite overproduction. You talk about elite aspirants. Why don’t we start with the idea of who are the elites in your mind? Is it specific type of elites or rather how do you define it?

Peter Turchin

That’s right. I use this neutral sociological definition. Elites are simply a small proportion of the population who concentrate social power in their hands. Examples could be the proverbial 1% in America, the Mandarin class in Imperial China, or military nobility in Medieval France. Those elites concentrated the different types of social power, such as military, administrative, economic, and ideological. Those are the four types of social power that explain how societies really operate. So, the key question about elites is how they are recruited and reproduced. Where do new elites come from? This is where the crux of the problem is. There are always more elites wannabes, or rather elite aspirants in our more scientific jargon, than there are elite positions and that’s normal.

But when there is a disbalance between the elite aspirants, the number of aspirants and that fairly fixed number of power positions… Think about it. We only have hundred senators, 435 representatives, and one president. So, those numbers are fairly fixed. But what if you start getting not just 20% or 50% but two times, three times, four times as many elites as there are positions. It’s like a game of musical chairs in which the chairs are kept at a constant number, but the number of players keeps increasing.

So, you can imagine a larger and larger proportion of those elite wannabes are going to be frustrated. They become angry and many of them turn into what we call counter-elites. That’s the second segment of the population who is willing to challenge the system and to try to even overthrow the unjust social order that led to their positions. That is why elite overproduction is so dangerous for political stability.

jmk

Now in the United States, there’s a somewhat fixed number of political office holders that exist, but there are many other types of elites. I mean, we could talk about in business, we could talk about in academia, we could talk about in culture, even within government. I mean, there’s a number of different bureaucracies that exist today that exhibit political power that didn’t exist 100 years ago. Some that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Do some elites matter more than others? Are we talking only about political office holders or are we talking about other types of positions that also exhibit political, social, economic power?

Peter Turchin

Yes, we are talking about all the different types of elites. I mentioned the four different sources of social power and therefore there are four types of elites that specialize in each. Political powers tends to be the most important because if we have a system that ensures elite rotation in the political sphere, then that leads to political stability. When there are too many people willing to change the political system, that leads to the breakdown of the political system and with potentially dire consequences. But in other spheres, the same thing happens. If you think about it, there are 500 CEOs in the Fortune 500. The number of successful companies can grow, but it can grow not as much as the number of potential CEO wannabes.

The same thing in the ideological sphere. There is a huge competition for positions either in established newspapers and channels or in the new media. So again, there is a competition between those things. Some competition is good. It’s sort of non-linear. It’s excessive competition that is bad. For example, why do we have such an outbreak of cancel culture and things like that? That can be traced to elite overproduction leading to intensive competition.

Again, intense competition leads to the breakdown of social norms that govern it, such as in the political sphere where you will see politicians like Trump here or Boris Johnson in the UK who are willing to break the rules to get ahead. The same thing happens in other spheres. In academia, it has been terrible because there has been a lot of competition and it is partially driven by the overproduction of PhDs. So, yes, to answer your question, in all of those spheres excessive competition leads to socially dysfunctional outcomes.

jmk

So, you’re studying a very long period of time. You describe it sometimes as a 10,000 year overview that you’re trying to study. Society has obviously changed a lot over that period of time. A few of the traits that the United States has that older generations did not have would be democracy and capitalism. I bring those up because capitalism in particular, I think of as a way to try to deal with elite overproduction. It allows people to create startups on their own so that if they feel like they can’t move up within an established company, you can go start your own company. Many of the wealthiest billionaires that exist today are people who did start their own company like Mark Zuckerberg, like Bill Gates. You could go on and on about those different people.

Democracy does the same thing where instead of having a fixed number of positions that are guaranteed for life, such as in an aristocracy, you have the ability to be able to change office and different people hold positions for fixed periods of time. So, it allows you to bring in an even larger number of elites than previously would’ve existed in past societies. Does democracy and capitalism work that way in your model? Do you see those as allowing a greater number of elites than previously would’ve existed in past societies?

Peter Turchin

Well, I think the most important thing here is not really elites, but wellbeing. But let me step back. Yes, we have studied hundreds of societies over the past 10,000 years and the one interesting pattern that has emerged is that the severity of collapses or breakdowns… I’m actually not a collapsologist. Different people understand different things by collapse and remember, collapses are generally understood as only one potential outcome from these types of crises anyway. The degree of social breakdown seems to be getting less deep and less prolonged as we go in time. So, cultural evolution has apparently accumulated enough institutions to allow our societies to be less fragile and democratic institutions are clearly one part of that parcel.

Also, more productive economies such as brought about by capitalism, whatever one means by that. But certainly, over the past 200 years human societies became economically much more productive. So, that brings the promise of greater wellbeing. The problem is that just by themselves, capitalism and democracy, are not going to automatically ensure that we escape real serious problems. Think about the United States. In 1850s, it was decently democratic society. Yes, it had slavery. There were all kinds of problems, but they had a democratic system of governance, which was unable to deal with the pressures at that time. So, that’s the same reason why we don’t want necessarily today to assume that things will take care of themselves so dramatically.

Historical experience shows it always takes a very contentious period and by the way those periods when societies avoid the worst outcomes tend to be much longer. It takes 20, 30, 40 years. For example, you were talking about the beginning of the 20th century in the United States. It took almost 40 years to work out the roaches to solve this problem. The same thing happened during the Chartist Period in the mid-19th century in the UK. So, it is possible to avoid the worst, but it takes a lot of work. It takes some social segments of the elites who would lead and a population who puts pressure on the elites to find the right solutions.

jmk

So, one of the things in my mind when I think about elite overproduction is going to be the way that demographics seem to be changing all around us. People are having fewer children, but people are also living much longer. How does changing demographics affect the models that you run and how crises would actually occur?

Peter Turchin

Well, the road to crisis is still pretty much the same, but demographics does have a strong effect. In fact, the theory that we use is called structural demographics because you have to understand what happens to both democracy and structural indicators. In particular, there is a well-known process in sociology, which is called the youth bulge. Youth bulges are very destabilizing. Youth busts are the opposite. The dangerous people are people in their twenties, maybe early thirties, so those typically will become revolutionary troops. You need them to push a radical agenda. If you don’t have a youth bulge, then the pressures for instability decline. This is not the main factor. However, it’s one of the secondary factors that modify things.

jmk

Wouldn’t the aging population then work against that model and say that we probably, even with all the problems that we’re having, just don’t have enough young people to actually push forward a revolutionary movement or even a civil war.

Peter Turchin

It’s not working against the model. It’s part of the model. The model allows you to take the different variables and show their effect. So, if you have a youth bulge, then the model predicts a higher potential for crisis. If you don’t have a youth bulge, it shows a lower potential. So, I agree that… Let me put it this way. We have a youth bulge, but it’s subsiding. The youth bulge has been more prevalent during the 2010s. It is the shadow effect of the baby boomer generation, the children of baby boomer generation.

If you look at the data, they had a bulge, but it was towards the late 2010s and now it is subsiding. So, this is one of the factors that shows that the probability of really severe outcomes is gradually declining. But again, it is just a secondary factor. The major drivers are popular immiseration and elite overproduction. They’re still populating and there is nothing to stop those from continuing to push us to the brink.

jmk

At the same time, it does feel that the youth bulge may work differently in the future because people have lived so much longer that they’re holding onto those positions at much older ages. We can look at our own political offices. We have a president who’s in his eighties. We’ve got many congressmen and senators who are in their seventies and eighties that in past generations would’ve been people who were in their forties and fifties. So, people are having to keep pushing back expectations of when they’re going to have their opportunity to be able to be in office or have political power and move into elite positions. So, more and more elites are typically older people and elite aspirants are now far younger people. How has aging demographics really changed things in terms of elite aspirants and elite overproduction?

Peter Turchin

Yeah, that’s a very good point. This is the dark side of the aging population. The established elites live longer, stay healthier for long times, and therefore are less willing to move from their positions. So, we see this in politics. For example, I’m an academic. We see the same thing in academia, but this part is already part of the model. Remember that elite overproduction is a relative thing. We want to see how many positions, so for example, how many positions in academia and how many people who are looking to find one such position.

This disbalance is explained by several factors. In academia, the disbalance is really very bad right now, partly for the reason that you mentioned, because the older professors tend to stay on. But also, because there are fewer young people to go to universities, so fewer people pay tuition and therefore this is also the reason why we have fewer academic positions for newly minted PhDs. So, that’s essentially how it’s working out in this particular field.

jmk

Let’s take that to the next step. If you have a lot of young elite aspirants that are not moving into traditional elite positions, you say that they become counter elites. What does that mean? What is a counter-elite?

Peter Turchin

Well, first of all, let’s take one particular type of young people with advanced degrees: lawyers, recent graduates from law schools. Now, this is important because in the United States, for example, and in many countries, there are two routes in modern societies, modern democratic societies into political office. One of them is wealth, which is very important in the United States, but less important in Europe. The second one is educational credentials. Now in the United States, the most important educational credential that you want to get, if you want to enter politics is the law degree. By the way, in Ancient Rome, it was the same thing. It’s actually quite common. Well, if you look at the distribution of starting salaries from law school graduates 30 years ago, it was not a remarkable thing.

But by 2000, the overproduction of lawyers has resulted in the emergence of two groups: The winners and losers. So, today there are about one quarter of law graduates who get great salaries like $190,000 and they are clearly on their ways to the elites. But then the majority of the population is way below that around $60K or so. There’s nobody in between. So, there are two clear classes: the winners and losers. The losers are those who will not be able to pay off the loans that they had to get to finish law school. There are no jobs for them. They’re crushed by debt. What are they going to do? Well, as it happens, most of the great revolutionaries were lawyers. For example, think about Robespierre, Lenin, Castro, Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer, and Gandhi also.

So, what we have created, not purposely, but inadvertently, is a huge class of frustrated elite aspirants who are smart, highly educated, energetic, ambitious, and there is nothing for them to do. That is the class that traditionally served as the source of radicals and revolutionaries. If you look at some of the more radical people in the United States on both the left and right… Curiously enough, Yale Law School seems to be the most disproportionate producer of fairly radical politicians on both sides of the aisle currently. So, that’s a very dangerous condition.

jmk

Let me push back a little bit about Yale Law School being so radical because Yale Law School is going to produce people that can get extremely high incomes. I mean, JD Vance is a great example. He is somebody who many would call a radical on the political right. But he was working in Silicon Valley and working at a tech job that was paying incredibly well beforehand. He is not somebody who is a dissatisfied elite aspirant. I mean, he is one of the elites. I mean, Yale Law School is producing a really good batting average of elites. It would be the schools that are significantly downstream that would be struggling to be able to do that. I mean, it’s not Yale Law School that’s producing people that are frustrated at their position. It’s people that are going to small state schools or small private colleges that don’t have the same advantages and opportunities as somebody at Yale.

Peter Turchin

Well, even Yale Law School graduates also fall into two different classes. I blank out at the name of the leader of Oath Keepers who has just got 18 years in prison, but he was also a Yale Law School graduate. Still, you are quite right. I don’t want to single out Yale Law School. We really should worry about the tens of thousands of graduates who will not even be perhaps known as the great leaders, but they are ready revolutionary troops.

jmk

So, is somebody who’s a counter-elite, is it somebody who is truly a revolutionary trying to bring down the system or can it be somebody that’s a little bit milder than that?

Peter Turchin

Well, the human mind is unknowable still. We have not yet learned how it works. But especially for historical people, it is not terribly important whether motivations are purely altruistic or purely selfish. Human minds are very complex and both of these motivations are mixed. So, if you think about it, the burning desire for justice is something that you would expect to arise from this mass of frustrated elite aspirants, because clearly, they see that, ‘No, I’m not the only one here. The system is rotten. It doesn’t work.’ Of course, we have not talked much about popular immiseration. But perhaps now is a good time to bring this in. So, capitalism, on the one hand, is a great system for ensuring economic growth, but naked capitalism is a pretty horrible system for distributing the fruits of economic growth.

This is another very important concept in my book I call with the wealth pump. The question is how are the fruits of economic growth divided? There are different historical periods. The United States, for example, has shown very different patterns. After the New Deal and until the late 1970s the wealth pump was not working because worker salaries were growing together with both their productivity and GDP per capita, which measure similar things. Then something happened in the late 1970s where productivity continued to increase, GDP per capita increased, but worker salaries stagnated and even declined. Where did all that extra wealth go? It went to the proverbial 1%, but also to the 1% of the 1%, even more than that.

So, essentially there was this perverse wealth pump which was pumping wealth from the 90% of the population upstairs. What this creates is a huge feeling of discontent because people see that they’re losing. These are the majority of people and that’s why we see the deaths of despair. That’s why we see support for populist politicians. So, elite overproduction creates the leaders, but popular immiseration creates the medium in which they can organize and lead those radical social movements. So, both of them work together.

jmk

I’m glad you brought up popular immiseration because it was something I was hoping to get to next. That makes me wonder whether the real problem that you’re talking about can really be boiled down to just economic inequality. Is economic inequality, really just the root of all the problems that we’re talking about here or is it just a symptom of an even larger problem?

Peter Turchin

Yes, to me, economic inequality, growing economic inequality, after all the great majority of humans are against completely egalitarian societies because there is a feeling that those who work harder should get a reward for work. So, growing economic inequality is one of the indicators, but it is a surface indicator, because what really is driving it is the overproduction of wealthy elites, wealthy people, wealth holders, and the runaway inflation of their numbers and their incomes while you have stagnating or even declining conditions for the majority of the population. This is something more than inequality. In fact, if you think about inequality, especially like the Gini Index, it’s just very hard for people to understand. There’s been some studies that show that people who are non-specialists, which means 99% of them, find it very difficult to gauge the degree of inequality.

In effect, people always misunderstand it and misestimate it. But if you have grown up in a household which had decent quality of life and now you are struggling, you cannot even match the degree of wellbeing that your parents achieved, this is very obvious and makes people to feel completely dissatisfied with the system that we have now. This is much, much more immediate than some kind of a gini number.

jmk

That’s completely fair. I mean, I don’t want to boil things down to numbers. I want to boil things down to the meaning behind those numbers, obviously. But it does feel that there’s a really simple solution to all of this, which is to tax the wealthy significantly higher and redistribute that wealth to people at the bottom. Now, I think that that’s probably oversimplifying things, but I want to hear from you whether or not it really is just that simple in your mind.

Peter Turchin

Well, it’s not that simple. This is the reason why we need a science of history. You know, it’s one thing to sit here and wave our arms and try to say that, and then, yes, do what you just said. Others would say, ‘Oh, you are a Marxist because you hate the wealthy.’ There are all kinds of things that people will tell you in response to that. But since we have some idea about how past societies got out of it, we can use that as our guideline. In fact, in all the successful and also unsuccessful cases – remember that when you had a bloody civil war like in America – it resulted in the destruction of the ruling class.

The Antebellum United States ruling class was the southern slave holders in collaboration with northeastern merchants who shipped cotton to Europe. Well, these people, first of all, had a huge mortality. Secondly, after the end of the war, they were destroyed as a ruling class because their wealth, the slaves, were taken away from them. Look at the other great revolutions. They turn off the wealth pump in a particularly bloody way, usually by exterminating the elites. So, this is why it’s good to have some examples where the elites themselves managed to get enough collective action together to avoid those things. Sometimes it took them more than one generation actually to accomplish it. 30-40 years, as I said, but they achieved those more optimal outcomes by shutting down the wealth pump.

That is why we had a period of unparalleled prosperity following the New Deal or rather following the end of World War II. Of course, that was about 30 years, the French call it the glorious thirty, when our societies worked extremely well. So, in answer to your question, it’s going to be very difficult, because in order to shut the wealth pump, it means that the people in power have to give up all that extra wealth and power. This is going to take a very difficult political process with many sectors of the elites fighting bitterly to the end against any such thing. So, it’s not simple at all to do these types of things.

Also, you don’t need to take the historical lessons literally. You don’t need to do the same thing as the New Deal. No. You need to understand the principles and then adapt those principles to our current situation, which is quite different to what was prevailing in the United States a hundred years ago.

jmk

One of the things that bothered me when I was reading through your book was that when we talk about elite overproduction, it gives me the impression that what we need to do is give fewer opportunities to people to move into the elites. That what we need to do is have fewer elite aspirants by telling them that you just belong in the masses, that you shouldn’t have the opportunity to move into political power or move into a position of authority. There are parts that feel anti-democratic, so I want to give you a chance to respond to that. How is it that we can continue to give people opportunities while still managing elite overproduction?

Peter Turchin

In many ways, but let’s first look again at the connection between immiseration and elite overproduction. Why do we have so many people seeking to get advanced degrees? Some of that is because people are ambitious. There are always ambitious people. There are also some not so terribly ambitious people whose ambition really is to escape immiseration, to escape precarity. Now that huge proportion of the American population lives under the conditions of precarity. That creates the push for those people to escape and that is why we have so many people going to colleges. I just retired a year ago, but I have taught at a not-so-good state university. Maybe three quarters of my students were there, not because they were interested in the content of education, but to get the credentials they needed to compete for a better job in the future.

So, by turning down the wealth pump and getting the popular wellbeing back on track, we will diminish this particular push for creating extra elite aspirants. Secondly, our economy is capable of making workers more productive. That means it frees up many new professions that society can support. I am very partial to the profession of historians. I’m not a historian myself. Cliodynamics, our history science, needs as many historians as can be trained, because we need the data. Also, just think about it. Why not create more historians and archeologists to do their things, publish papers, increase knowledge? Knowledge is good. Education when it is separated from the credential system is an unadulterated good in my view.

So, it doesn’t mean we will be creating elite positions because a professor in the United States is not a member of the elite. But we’ll be creating decent positions that would be producing a collective good for the society, better scientific knowledge, and also using those people who are interested in doing things. It doesn’t have to be just history, of course. Pretty much any kinds of sciences and humanities could be supported at a much, much greater rate than we do now.

jmk

That’s fascinating. That’s not something that I got from the book. I definitely got the idea that popular immiseration and elite overproduction were working together to produce a crisis. I did not get the impression that by alleviating popular immiseration that you would alleviate the problem simultaneously of elite overproduction. That’s actually fascinating.

Peter Turchin

The truth is that in my book, I talk mostly about the road to crisis and only the last chapter is talking about solutions. I am more willing to talk about it extemporaneously rather than put it on paper, because as soon as you start proposing specific things like when you said, ‘Let’s increase the taxes on the rich,’ I’m afraid that half of the minds of the population will shut with a click or if you propose something else, the other half will shut with another click. So, that’s why I did not want to. But also, I am just an academic and definitely not part of the elite.

The solution would have to be worked out in the political sphere. It’ll be hard to do it and it’ll take some really good politicians who are thinking about the overall wellbeing of the society rather than selfish, narrow interests of the ruling class.

jmk

So, as we look to wrap up, your book was really different in a lot of ways. One of them was that I actually found your appendix to be possibly more fascinating than the actual text of the book.

Peter Turchin

Interesting.

jmk

It’s rare for that to happen. It’s the only time I think it’s happened.

Peter Turchin

You know what happened? The appendix was chapters two and three and my editor said, ‘You’ve got to get to the point faster.’ So, he moved those chapters into the appendix.

jmk

Well, I didn’t want to start out by talking about what cliodynamics are because I wanted to get to the heart of the conversation. But just as we’re wrapping up, do you want to take a moment and explain what we’re talking about when you say that you’re running these models and coming up with different ideas. We’ve mentioned cliodynamics, but just give the elevator pitch of what exactly you’re doing to come up with these different ideas and models.

Peter Turchin

Yeah. Essentially, I would say that if you don’t have a science of history, we are doomed to repeat this crisis. This crisis tends to happen every couple of hundred years or so. We go through this one and now there is another one down the road. That’s why we need to understand our societies as complex systems. So, I’m not a historian. I’m a complexity scientist and it is amazing to me that until maybe 10 or 20 years ago, human history was not mathematized and that the scientific method was not thrown at it.

The scientific method is not just creating mathematical models. Even more important than that most of my effort over the past modern decade has been put into building the databases, historical databases that allow us to test those models. The models have to run with real data and so we have now reviewed something called Crisis DB. It is a crisis database at this point. It’s close to 200 societies and it’s growing as they enter into crisis and then emerge from it. So, this is what was the basis that allowed me to make the prediction of the turbulent 2020s, but more importantly by building up a large library of trajectories we can get at what should be our post-crisis strategies.

As I said, entry into the crisis is quite generalized, but then the whole fleet of opportunities opens up. You want to choose better trajectories. But you cannot do that simply by arguments by analogy, because each society is different and that means that we have to translate historical data into a model of our society and then tailor that model to society and use that model to calculate the unforeseen consequences of our actions. I think that’s the only way.

jmk

Well, Peter, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. This has been just a fascinating conversation. I want to plug your book one more time. It’s called End Times: Elites. Counter-Elites, and The Path of Political Disintegration. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.

Peter Turchin

Thank you so much for writing your book. Thanks Justin, and I enjoyed this conversation very much.

Key Links

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution

Learn more about Peter Turchin

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100 Books on Democracy

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