If you pick up End Times at all, I recommend reading only Chapter 7: State Breakdown, which walks through several interesting historical examples of state collapse, including Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and Ukraine.
Otherwise, with its clickbait title, lack of focus, noticeable errors, and even a certain amount of copypasta from his prior work, readers may get a sinking feeling that author Peter Turchin sausaged out End Times to meet a marketing deadline. This book was much, much weaker than his earlier War and Peace and War.
It can be revealing to read a book's acknowledgments for clues about the author's struggles writing it. Here we learn that after feedback from an early reader, Turchin "extensively restructured and streamlined the storyline." Unfortunately, End Times remains poorly structured, certain chapters remain badly unfocused, and the book could have used yet another restructuring and streamlining before publication. Most importantly, Turchin certainly should have completely rethought his idea of using imaginary characters and imaginary dialogue to illustrate aspects of his sociological frameworks. Chapters 3 and 4 contain various made-up people (a proletarian Trump-supporter, a 1%-er, other elites of various types, and so on), and Chapter 5 contains an imaginary dialogue between two imaginary "ruling class" members who come off so implausibly that the reader wonders if the author has any idea at all how this class thinks and operates.
In a book on therapy, an author would be expected to make up "composite" characters to protect patient privacy. That is one instance, at least, where it would be reasonable to use made-up characters, although the reader still must trust the author to render them accurately and ethically, not just make them up out of whole cloth to "prove" a therapeutic method. However, in a book on sociology, which this author prefers to call "real science" (see the next two paragraphs), this is quite possibly the worst way to bolster any argument--or your field's "scientific" reputation for that matter.
We could even go so far as to call this the "argument by imaginary friend" fallacy! All the imaginary friend segments of the book should have been cut.
In its last few chapters and in the appendices End Times entirely loses focus as the author subjects his readers to an extended defense of cliodynamics, his subject domain. Here I want to briefly address the author's repeated insistence across the last third of the book that sociology, and specifically cliodynamics-based sociology, is "real science."
This reminds me of a story one of my oldest friends told me about his first day at college. He and the other entering freshmen were in the university auditorium for a welcome session, and when the chief of public safety got up to speak, the first thing he said was "we are a real police force." Laughter tittered across the auditorium.
The moral is this: if it's actually true you don't have to say it.
Notes:
Preface:
ixff: The author attempts to persuade the reader that there is such a thing as the science of history. He begins his career as an ecologist, has to learn mathematics to study complexity science and then applies complexity science to human societies; he argues that complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and even predictable waves of instability brought about by similar forces.
xi: Metrics used in his model: stagnating or declining real wages, growing inequality, overproduction of educated elites, declining public trust, exploding public debt; noting also that all these things are "related to each other dynamically."
Part I: The Cliodynamics of Power
Chapter 1: Elites, Elite Overproduction, and the Road to Crisis
3ff: Who are the elites? The author thinks of the various ranks of power holders: economic wealth, bureaucratic wealth/administrative wealth, also ideological power (like public intellectuals who may shape policy).
7ff: Understanding "social reproduction of the elites" in order to understand "elite overproduction"; on established elites versus elite aspirants; on the rapid growth of the super-rich since the 1980s: decamillionaires ($10 million in wealth or higher) increased tenfold to 693,000 people from 1983-2019; this compares to 53% growth in households; thus decamillionaires swelled from 8 basis points (0.08%) to 54 basis points (0.54%) of the population. [The author considers this "bad" but I wonder if it really is good or bad]; "When the social pyramid becomes top-heavy, this has dire consequences for the stability of our societies."
9ff: Elite overproduction leading to wider and wider rulebreaking behavior.
11ff: Leading to "popular immiseration"; the author describes the elites acting as a "wealth pump" of resources from everyone else to them; parallel narratives of both Trump and Lincoln, outsiders put into power during times of instability.
20: The author is a little bit fast and loose with his tour of pre-Civil War North-South dynamics: for example it is not true, in fact not even close to true, that most southerners owned slaves as he asserts on page 20. [Admittedly, this number can be looked at in different ways but in terms of total population in slave states approximately 5% owned slaves, and if you look at it in terms of households (in other words you count the total number of people living in a household that happens to own a slave but yet you count each of the household members separately as slaveowners) it is still well less than 20%. This is a bit of a basic, and quite honestly a lazy, error.] [Note also this quote: "the South seceded, triggering the American Civil War" which is an interesting way to put it. In reality the American Civil War was "triggered" when the North violently invaded the South, using a constructed incident at Fort Sumter as a causus belli.]
21ff An overproduction of elites in China during the late part of the Qing dynasty and the collapse from 1820 through to the 20th century; the mandarin system; the strange story of Hong Xiuquan (1814-1864), frustrated licentiate who started a religion, ultimately fomenting the Taiping Rebellion, a tremendously bloody civil war. Hong gathered half a million immiserated followers, even setting up a semi-state of his own before being reconquered 11 years later.
Chapter 2: Stepping Back: Lessons of History
29: Discussion of integrative-disintegrative cycles, roughly a century long; iterations in this cycle due to the father-and-son cycles that happen within; this is a review of the wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels idea from War and Peace and War.
31ff: The author will now apply his model to medieval France, and to the various waves of instability in France and Western Europe. [This again will be repeat material to readers of War and Peace and War]; France peaking in 1300, a population boom, then famines and then the plague, all in the 14th century, cutting France's population in half, to 10 million, by 1400). Also across the 13th century there was elite overproduction again, acting as a wealth pump, enriching landowners at peasant expense; inflation and state insolvency; breakdown in the state and general order by 1350 with Jacquerie peasant rebellions, the urban uprising in Paris of Etienne Marcel, etc; not until 1453 did France evict the English, reunify, and get back on its feet, followed by a century-long integrative phase.
38ff: Now onto England for a second example: England's disintegrative phase was delayed as so many English elites found war in France to be tremendously lucrative, so elites were essentially "exported"; when evicted by the French in 1380, England's tailspin began, massive brutality, disorder, Richard II deposed in 1399; then another integrative cycle with Henry V, but then followed by more disorder; the War of the Roses which was incredibly brutal; the author says elites at all levels declined "severalfold" during England's Late Medieval Crisis [measured indirectly by imports of wine from Gascony, which fell fourfold during this period].
43: The author teases us here with why England didn't have a state breakdown in 1830; to be discussed in Chapter 9.
44ff: Elites in Islam and steppe societies where polygamy was practiced: driving much faster elite overproduction and thus shorter integrative phases in these societies. Referring [again, just as he did in War and Peace and War] to 14th century historian Ibn Khaldun who noted this too.
46: On dynamic entrainment as a force pulling countries into sync with each other; if you put several metronomes on the same board and start them swinging out of sync, eventually they will swing in synchrony; there may be external forces affecting many countries at the same time, causing correlated societal collapse. [Is this a real reason, like a scientific reason, or is it like a made-up "I need an epicycle here to make my model fit better" kind of reason?]; also "direct contagion" as another synchronizing force, see the Antonine plague in Rome or the spread of the Black Plague through Eurasia which drove the Late Medieval Crisis in many regions. See also cholera pandemics during the Age of Revolutions in the mid-19th century; societies reach an epidemiological threshold thanks to population growth, density, lack of nutrition, economic immiseration, etc.; typically epidemics or contagions undermine social order because the social pyramid becomes top heavy; whatever the reason, they tend to tip societies into crisis. Note also a contagion doesn't have to be an epidemic: it can also be an idea like the Arab Spring [or even Islam itself, although the author doesn't use this as an example].
Part III: The Drivers of Instability
Chapter 3: "The Peasants are Revolting"
55ff: This chapter begins with a made-up dialog/portrait of a Trump supporter. We learn the term "precariat" (an economically precarious proletarian); the author includes all the expected stereotypes of our Trump supporter character, he checks all the boxes.
60ff: Now a portrait of a liberal 1%-er from Washington DC; This sounds equally unrealistic..."life has never been better";
60ff: I have to take a moment to note that Turchin appears to be oblivious to the so-called "Pinker problem" as memorably explained by Nassim Taleb: while Steven Pinker argues that "the world is getting safer," this is only true if you ignore the world wars and various genocides of the 20th century! Essentially this is equivalent to kicking all the gigantic outliers out of your dataset, and then claiming that what's left still describes reality.
60ff: Data on median household income, which increased from $52,000 to $63,000 from 1976 to 2016, up 21%, note here that the median real wage increase from $17.11 to $18.90 over that same time, just 10%; [Michael Hudson here would comment that people's "monthly nut" and the "rake" they have to pay to the financialized layer of the economy has likely more than doubled over that time, perhaps possibly tripled, thus the median household is getting squeezed on the income side, but getting squeezed way harder on the expense side. Note also this stuff also affects wealthy elites too: if you live in a major city you really need to be in the 1%, not the top 10%, for this not to affect you.]
65: Discussion of inflation statistics and various incentives that a government has to understate inflation: one of the largest would be that it inflates real GDP per capita, Until recently I never really thought about the implications of this, this is a huge, huge political incentive.
66: The author talks about the increasing cost of college, both in nominal dollars, inflation-adjusted dollars and in labor hours terms. The cost is astronomically higher, the author views this as "the cost to move up in the system," and correctly so. [Furthermore you could add in a separate problem which is our system is producing semi-elites beyond its needs, a sort of semi-elite or credentialed class overproduction problem!]
67ff: On biological, social and health well-being. The author discusses declining height metrics since the 1960s as evidence of declines here. [I would argue that the author makes a major oversight here by not mentioning immigration trends which accelerated radically in 1965 and thereafter, this almost certainly would skew the numbers]; also on life expectancy declines.
70ff: The credentialed class [college-educated or advanced educated classes] is allegedly doing much better, according to the author [I would argue this is not true either: Their wages have stagnated, they get blown out of their careers at precisely the wrong time, the academic world is filled with precariously positioned adjunct professors, etc]; also discussion here of "deaths of despair" across demographics; [you can really see how our civilization has become fully atomized; we have a misdirected and undirected populace that's being chewed at from all sides.]; Note also that the author initially thought we had achieved a post-Malthusian world, but when he comes into contact with the work of Case and Deaton (see Anne Case and Angus Deaton: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism), he learns he was wrong.
73ff: Idealization here from the author about Roosevelt's New Deal and the alleged social contract that emerged between the state, elites and the commoners: he thinks in the 1970s a new generation of elites replaced the "great civic generation" of elites from before, and these new "mean elites" began dismantling the social contract; the author sites supply and demand imbalances with labor, bringing women into the workforce, greatly increasing immigration and the movement of production overseas, all of which squeeze wages. [Very strange also here that the author uses a statistical aggregate analysis of the real minimum wage when it is largely set by fiat on a state by state basis, and furthermore the economics of minimum wage work varies dramatically with the economics of the specific region of the USA.]
77: On "subjective well-being" studies.
79ff: Discussion of the "wealth pump": this is the argument that as the elites grow in numbers they pump more wealth away from everyone else into their pockets. [This is an interesting idea that will clearly resonate with people, but I wonder to what extent the author grasps how wealth works as you derive it increasingly from investments and as you move away from W-2 salary income: beyond a certain point your asset inflation/capital gains component is what really moves the needle, the income becomes increasingly less important and even arbitrary, as you have more and more ability to dictate your income (or not have any income at all!) based on the types of investments you make or what assets you might sell (producing either gains or losses) in a given year. This is a perception error you sometimes see from W-2 salaried academics.]
81ff: "The peasants are revolting" as a pun: it indicates the disdain upper classes feel towards lower classes; also "the rich are perhaps even more vulnerable than common people" during periods of social and political turbulence.
Chapter 4: The Revolutionary Troops
[This chapter is low value]
83ff: Here we have a made-up story about Jane, a privileged child of an affluent Manhattan family, who went to exclusive private schools, then went to Columbia University; she signs up for a language school in Guatemala and experiences the all-too-common gringa irony of living with a host family that is far happier than hers despite their poverty; her Guatemala experience radicalizes her and she starts joining radical student groups, then joins the occupy Wall Street movement, and then joins ANTIFA, and then becomes an anarchist ("she thinks that classical Marxism is now somewhat outdated. She doesn't feel much solidarity with the working classes. Too many of them are racists and homophobes.") etc., etc., and then... She ends up at Yale Law School, but claims "I am not going to become a corporate lawyer, however." [This whole life arc sounds like parody, like an example of Poe's Law.]
85ff: [Although for whatever it's worth, it's a striking irony to read the author's description here of police brutality, when just a couple days ago, while putting the finishing touches on my review of Turchin's prior book War and Peace and War, I read through discussions of peasant control mechanisms used in 14th and 15th century France that involved essentially killing off most of the peasants. Note that during the police "brutality" described by this author at Occupy protests, there was just one victim with a skull fracture, and no deaths, despite police suppression of protests all over the US. Quite striking to note the contrast.]
90ff: on "elite precariats" or "the frustrated aspirant class"
91-2: [Interesting discussion here on changes in law school compensation, the author uses this to try and illustrate a maldistribution of rewards going to "aspirant class" people; but I wonder if the author ever thought about what actually goes into the production of these starting salary numbers, how much number massaging and GIGO go into manufacturing "law school starting salary" statistics. If the author is credulous about this, how credulous might he be with other GIGO-related numbers that he's analyzing...?]
93ff: More on the results of elite overproduction: an increase in cheating, terror of being left behind, etc.
95ff: The fragmentation of the ideological landscape [here the author could have tied the book into his concept of asabiya from War and Peace and War]; in the USA, both the left and right are fragmenting; various pre-1970s "norms" breaking down dramatically (the list of norms the author chooses here includes "tattoos and piercings frowned on"); breakdown of the post WWII consensus.
105: On Vera Zasulich, anarchist and later Marxist, who shot and wounded the Governor of St. Petersburg and was acquitted at trial.
Chapter 5: The Ruling Class
[This is also a scattered chapter, talking about the USA's elites, a tangent on military elites, back to the USA, etc.]
109ff: Another imaginary "ruling class" couple, Clara and Andy: these characters are not believable or plausible on several levels, indicating the author doesn't understand how people in this class actually think.
113: "...if you can persuade the people to do what you want, you will not have to pay them or force them to do it." On controlling ideological power, via priesthood/religion, via economic or land power, via bureaucracy, via the modern state, etc.
114: The Mamluks under Saladin in Crusade-era Palestine and Egypt; a military dictatorship but one that avoided elite overproduction by forbidding sons to inherit their fathers' positions. The author believes the 2011 "Arab Spring" in Egypt resulted from elite overproduction there.
120: [The author may be making a very basic error here in his understanding of the repudiation of all war debts of the Confederacy after the American Civil War: he argues that this wiped out the wealth of the South, but on the contrary, it was literally a debt jubilee imposed by the North, where the South repudiated debts which were mostly payable to European borrowers. This is a debt jubilee, it's not "wiping out the wealth of the South. This is an elimination of a liability and thus it would make the South not less wealthy but wealthier, certainly it wouldn't wipe out Southern wealth.]
120ff: Extremely broad brush summary of the post Civil War elite, bouncing from odd factoids about the number of millionaires from 1860 to 1870; the railroad industry which was a dominant political economic force; the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th amendment; the homestead act; the Gilded Age social register; and then leaping forward to post-1920s policy planning; nonprofit organizations; with half a paragraph on each of these topics one after the other, the reader struggles to see a central thread here.
124ff: American plutocracy today: the author considers "owners and managers of large income-producing assets such as corporations, banks and law firms" to be "at the top of the power pyramid in America." The author is very quick to argue that saying "America is a plutocracy is, to be clear, not a conspiracy theory. It's a scientific theory."
124: Interesting blurb here on Martha Mitchell, an early whistleblower who tried to expose Watergate, who was branded mentally ill for her claims. This will send you down a rabbit hole.
129-130: [The author makes a basic and common error with his discussion of the estate tax; he fails to understand that while an estate tax might only affect the super rich, that money still flows through the government via the Cantillon effect, and thus it flows right back to the elites, thus re-enriching the rich all over again. It's a strange delusion that well-meaning inheritance tax fans have here: that they think somehow that money will be magically redistributed to the rest of us. Turchin should be aware of this; in fact later, on page 236, Turchin will explain the "Iron Law of Oligarchy," which says basically when an interest group acquires a lot of power it starts using this power in self-interested ways. It's interesting that the author can't seem to see this exact problem with estate tax/Cantillon effects. A powerful elite will likewise use it in self-interested ways!]
132-3: Note also the footnote here on page 133 in a discussion of immigration, which takes the reader to a massive wall of text debating the question "Does immigration depress wages?"--something that should be blindingly self-evident to even the most innumerate economist. Fortunately the author realizes it: "My statistical analysis of long-term data trends indicates that immigration has been a significant contributor to the stagnation/decline of wages in the United States over the past several decades."
134: Note also the language used in the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration: "the development of a surplus labor force"... This was before they figured out the post-modernist technique of naming a bill for the exact opposite of what it does.
Chapter 6: Why Is America a Plutocracy?
137ff: The first three pages of this chapter should have been a sentence or two. Claiming the USA inherited its plutocracy via English aristocrats grafted onto land here. Actually the more I think about it: this chapter should have been combined with the prior chapter (there's a lot of repetition here), and the author should have also cut out Chapter 5's "imaginary friend" section too. This would have reduced these two chapters down to one short, tight chapter.
149-150: About the only really useful insight in this chapter is right here openly stating that the immigration reduction laws of 1921 and 1924 had a broad effect of reducing labor oversupply, thus they helped limit inequality significantly in the coming decades.
153: [The author makes a basic, basic error here confusing wealth with income in his discussion of top marginal tax brackets (he presumes the high top tax brackets of the 20th century worked to level inequality). Note: anyone who wants to maintain a stable plutocracy would always want the highest possible marginal tax brackets. Why? Because it prevents the production of new rich. Once you have serious wealth--thus your annual income doesn't move the needle with your wealth--you don't care about taxes at all.]
154ff: Disappointing also that there's absolutely no discussion of inflation as a factor that increases the relative wealth of the richest, because they already own assets! Think of it like a sort of "speeding up of the treadmill of life" for all people who are still trading their labor value for money. When people are stuck in the fiat money trap getting paid in "melting ice cubes" and haven't yet saved up any asset-based capital that could give them a shot at keeping up with inflation, they are basically held down by the mechanism of inflation itself. This whole idea seems to be lost on the author. In fact there's no mention of inflation, not one use of the word, in these entire two chapters of plutocracy! A whiff. Inflation plus high marginal income tax rates are perhaps the two most important elements of maintaining a plutocracy.]
Part III: Crisis and Aftermath
Chapter 7: State Breakdown
[With this chapter the quality of the book takes a step higher: this chapter is more coherent, more readable, better written, the author has a better bead on what he's trying to do here.]
161ff: Starting with the story of Nero in AD 68, waking up alone as all of his guards and servants fled. "States die in a great variety of ways. Some go out in a bang of violence; others unravel quietly and die with a whimper." On how in general people "severely overestimate the power of rulers," it's both lazy language and bad sociology.
163: Wild blurb here on Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan right before it collapsed to the Taliban in 2021. Ghani used to be an academic studying state collapse, and he even co-wrote a book on the subject, Fixing Failed States. (!!)
164ff: Stalin as "perhaps the most successful dictator of the twentieth century"; he appointed loyalists to key positions, and then appointed another layer of loyalists to watch the first group, then repressed key subordinates and replaced them with ambitious underlings; he literally took care of elite surplus in Russia by exterminating them. "...he was a master of building and maintaining a power network, with himself at its center."
166: on "Clio-Freudianism", the author calls it a pseudoscience "which uses Freud's psychoanalysis to understand the emotional origins of the behavior of leaders." Also a discussion of "great man" versus sociological analysis of history, which is rehashed from War and Peace and War.
168ff: "The best predictor of whether a country will be experiencing a violent internal conflict next year is whether it is already in conflict this year." [On one level you have to laugh at the circularity of this but his point here is that civil wars tend to drag on a long time, but their onset is extremely difficult to predict]
175ff: Moving on to a discussion of the Soviet Union post breakup, which "was really a giant corporation in which the state owned the wealth producing assets" that were rapidly privatized in a corrupt and violent process after the breakup; see the joke between two Russian oligarchs, Berezovsky and Guzinsky: "Why did you put a contract on me? No, it was you who put a contract on me!" They had both hired assassins to eliminate the other; discussion of how the oligarchs made a deal with Yeltsin: in return for guaranteeing privatization of state enterprises, they would finance his campaign and use their media resources (which they controlled) to help him. Also they brought in American campaign consultants to manage and basically steal Yeltsin's re-election. "Russia became an extreme plutocracy in 1996." Also on the 1998 financial crisis in Russia, when the ruble was devalued, plus the state defaulted on its sovereign debt. What followed then was two power networks formed: the ruling faction was the oligarchs plus the mass media under their control; the second group was the administrative and military elites, who won out under Vladimir Putin. It was a gradual revolution where oligarchs were exiled or imprisoned, also note that the oligarchs didn't control the "coercive state apparatus" and were "heartily disliked by the population." The author goes on to argue that "The new ruling class in Russia turned out to be quite corrupt and nepotistic. Its members enriched themselves enormously by stripping wealth-producing assets from the oligarchs and by diverting a large proportion of state expenditures into their own pockets."
178: The author argues "in Belarus the oligarchs never gained power" and "the state retained ownership of major industrial corporations and prevented the rise of oligarchs."
179ff: Ukraine as a plutocracy which paralleled Russia in the 1990s; but they also did not form a cohesive ruling class; also noting that Ukraine is "particularly vulnerable to external pressures" as it sits on the fault line between NATO and Russia.
181: [A really interesting footnote here talking about how the USA and its NATO lapdogs had the power to freeze assets of various billionaires in Ukraine and Russia (and obviously they did just that in 2022 to Russian oligarchs); you can't help but think that we actually did Putin's bidding in Ukraine by further weakening the oligarchy class in the favor of the bureaucratic/military class there! Also the footnote cites a Russian oligarch in the UK who was limited via sanctions to GBP2,500 a month in spending, lamenting "I don't know how to live. I don't know. I really don't know."]
182ff: Discussion here of direct power exercises by the US government over many Ukrainian plutocrats, see for example how the US put in place legal proceedings to extradite Dmytro Firtash, who was an [likely very pro-Russian and Russified] oligarch from Donetsk; also American "proconsuls" [this is the author's word here] including diplomat Victoria Nuland using Department of State money to exert influence over the Ukrainian ruling class [very interesting and disturbing how it seems so easy for the USA to mess up the coherency of an entire country and then install a puppet regime in power.]
185: Discussion here of the election of Vikyor Yanukovych in Ukraine, who came to power in 2010, he jailed his predecessor Yulia Timoshenko; following the arc of his regime and how his power support structures deserted him after the Maiden Square protests in Kiev, this was his "Nero moment" where his support melted away; he ran away to Southern Russia where he now lives in exile. The author cynically says "The people had triumphed, and democracy was restored. At least, this is how the Euromaidan Revolution was portrayed in the corporate media. In reality, the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution was no more a people's revolution than any other revolution in history. It was driven by the same forces that we have discussed in the pages of this book--popular immiseration and elite overproduction. The people didn't gain as a result of this revolution. Ukrainian politics continued to be as corrupt as before."
186: "The most catastrophic consequence of the 2014 Revolution was a bitter civil war in the two Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the Donbass militia, aided by Russia, battled against the Ukrainian military and openly neo-Nazi volunteer brigades, such as the Azov Regiment." [I'm surprised this paragraph made it through editing, as it contains clear samizdat information about the widely denied existence of neo-nazis in this region, see photo below]
186: Zelensky put in place as a result of a rivalry between two oligarchs, Poroshenko and Kolomoiski, who needed a candidate to oppose Poroshenko.
187ff: Discussion here of pseudo-democracies, states with the trappings of democracy but not run for the benefit of the population; also a discussion of the differences between Ukraine and Belarus: on the 2014 uprising that was "successful" in Ukraine and the 2021 uprising in Belarus that wasn't; where Belarus had a cohesive administrative-military elite that weathered the protests without problem whereas Ukraine had economic elites who hated each other and plotted against each other; also the author argues that Ukraine had a wealth pump that overproduced oligarchs, whereas Belarus had no wealth pump and no intra-elite conflicts. [What's most disturbing here in the case of Ukraine is to see how they're losing all their military age men in the conflict with Russia--a conflict that appears only designed to keep the current oligarchy in power, while NATO indirectly "fights Russia to Ukraine's last man." It's just gross and offensive on every level.] The author later concludes that "America is no Ukraine. The American ruling class is unified and organized by a set of overlapping institutions" discussed in Chapter 5.
189: The next chapter covers the possible trajectories the United States might follow in the coming decades.
Chapter 8: Histories of the Near Future
[Another unfocused chapter that's all over the place; the author starts talking about his sociological model, but then ends the chapter talking about Tucker Carlson and JD Vance.]
191ff: "Now that America is in crisis, we want to know what could happen next." [This chapter quickly becomes frustrating as the author spends page after page going over aspects of his "model" only to say that his model's predictions "should be taken with some degree of skepticism" and "the goal is not to predict the future but to use the model to understand how possible actions may shape different futures."]; The author wants to use formal mathematical models to make predictions; he and his colleagues have been trying to work on an approach called multi-path forecasting; the heart of his MPF model is the "wealth pump"; he tracks factors like labor supply, immigration, job supply, [basically this sounds like economic forecasting (with all of its lack of rigor) combined with making historical predictions (which is sociology's unique brand of "science")], note that there are more discussions of his approach in Appendix 3.
194: An almost staggeringly specious assumption by the author right here: "When worker wages increase faster than GDP per capita (that is, when relative wages grow), the creation of new superrich is choked off. Some exceptional individuals continue to create new fortunes, but their numbers are few. The old wealth, meanwhile, is slowly dissipated as a result of bankruptcy, inflation, and the division of property among multiple heirs. Under such conditions, the size of the super wealthy class gradually shrinks." [You could only say this if you had no idea how to build wealth, and how wealthy families are very much capable of building wealth during periods just like the author describes. If these are the types of assumptions upon which this author builds his MPF model, we're going to have a problem predicting anything...]
195ff: A lot of "on the one hand/on the other hand"-type language in here: if there are a lot of radicals in a population, this happens; if not, then this happens; and so on. By the way, this is another variable that his MPF model tracks: the number of radicals proportionate to the total population. "The model keeps track of three kinds of individuals": naive individuals who become radicalized if exposed to the virus of radicalism, actual radicals and moderates. [Wait, he left out "glowie-inspired radicals"!]
199ff: Another module of his MPF engine is the "social contagion module" and his "political stress index" combining the strength of immiseration and elite overproduction; he measures popular immiseration by inverse relative income, or median income divided by GDP per capita [holy cow this sure looks like a datamined model if I ever saw one].
206ff: The remainder of this chapter seems to be all over the place: talking about corporate elites not being willing to contribute to the common good like they used to; talking about obstructionist networks of wealthy ultraconservatives; the author appears unaware of the political capture of the Southern Poverty Law Center organization; a sidebar on the guy that supposedly plotted to capture Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; he considers senator Elizabeth Warren to be a dissident (??) when she is clearly the opposite, advocating for the tradfi banking system; interestingly he seems to be almost a Trump fan (at least he was idealistic about him as a counter-elite until his presidency happened), and he's even complimentary of Steve Bannon, who he considers a genuine anti-elite; later quoting extensively from Tucker Carlson's 2018 book, etc; a strange sidebar on JD Vance and the fact that he was encouraged by his professor at Yale Law School to write a memoir which became Hillbilly Elegy, etc.
215: The author describes the 2020 election as "The Establishment ran a 'counterinsurgency campaign' which succeeded in removing this irritant [Trump] from the body politic."
215ff: Tucker Carlson "is interesting because he is the most outspoken anti-establishment critic operating within the corporate media." Also the New York Times poring over transcripts of all 1,150 episodes of the show over six years and describing it as "the most racist show in the history of cable news."
220: Weird, out-of-place discussion of J.D. Vance as a potential elite figure. [A reader should be totally forgiven here for mistakenly thinking this chapter was about his MPF model and predicting which way the USA was going to go.]
222: The author concludes that United States is in a revolutionary situation, and for the ruling class there are two routes out of it: one is overthrow, the other is to adopt reforms that re-balance the system and reverse the trends of popular immiseration and elite overproduction.
Chapter 9: The Wealth Pump and the Future of Democracy
223: The author and his team have collected data on 100 historical breakdown/reform-type periods and finds a wide range of paths of widely different severity.
224ff: The author focuses on the last complete wave of state breakdowns: the Age of Revolution between 1830 and 1870, "a turbulent period in world history" when "nearly all major states experienced revolutions or civil wars (or both)." He covers the two examples where the ending was a positive one (where a revolutionary situation was resolved with reforms) the Chartist era in England of 1819-1867 and the Russian reform period of 1855-1881.
225ff: England's Chartist Period: the key ameliorating factors were Britain's Empire, which allowed millions of commoners to emigrate to places like Canada, Australia and elsewhere which was a sort of pressure venting for demographic pressures; also elites emigrated too; there were reforms also, for example, England extended voting rights to smaller landowners and certain urban residents in 1832 with the Reform Act, also the Poor Laws of 1834, also the repeal of the Corn Laws which helped food prices; The parliament concessions on voting were forced after sustained public protest and near-rebellion, elites were divided on how to deal with all the unrest, but they ultimately at least partly met the demands of the immiserated majority.
228ff: On Russia's reform period of 1855 to 1881, components of this involved the tremendous number of different peasant protests, Alexander II freed the serfs (kind of), starting with a speech Alexander gave in 1856, they were officially freed in 1861; see also Russia's shocking defeat in the Crimean War which delegitimized the Tsar's regime; there was "downward social mobility" for many nobles; Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. [It's fascinating that the author considers this a "success story" when just a couple decades later the unrest and destabilization of 1905 happened, and then twelve years later 1917 happened! This was just a preamble to much worse things in Russia, it is hardly seems an example of a "good outcome" as the author claims.]
233: Turchin really comes up empty-handed on what we can learn from these success stories; one is to have a lot of land or have an empire; also per the author both countries had "leaders who were willing to sacrifice short-term selfish advantage for long-term collective good." Both of these are rather squishy things to "learn."
236: Why democracies are vulnerable to plutocratic elites; on the sociological concept of the "iron law of oligarchy": when an interest group acquires a lot of power it starts using this power in self-interested ways; see also the transition in Western democracies from class-based party systems to multi-elite party systems, we have a perfect example with the Democratic party, which represented the working class in the earlier parts of the 20th century, but by 2000 became the party of the credentialed 10%. Further, the wealthiest can buy mass media, fund think tanks, reward influencers, and build enormous power to sway the electorate.
239: It's fascinating that the author cites Denmark and Austria as two countries that are well-governed states: the comportment of Austria's government during the COVID era and the mRNA mandate era was absolutely appalling, the polar opposite of a well-governed state. Not to mention both of these countries have also given away a significant amount of their sovereignty to the supranational European Union.
Appendix:
Chapter A1: A New Science of History
247ff: I hate to say it, but this appendix--which is supposed to explain the details of his discipline--is masturbatory. First we hear a cute story, borrowing from the science fiction story In the Land of the Blind by Michael Flynn, then a discussion of Asimov's Foundation stories [that, Turchin tells us, did not influence him or his career choices at all, not at all], then we get a rundown on the author's career trajectory. The reader does not need to know this. Note also the extended discussion of Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels is copy-pasta from War and Peace and War.
254: On the Osipov-Lanchester equations for gauging the outcome of military conflicts; the author adds other factors: army size, casualty infliction rates, army replacement rates, total population, industrial base and morale; on Lanchester's square law: the idea that an incremental factor is multiplicative between the two opponents.
262ff: Historical roots of the science of history: see Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Quetelet, Tolstoy; see also Nicholas Rashevsky's 1968 book Looking at History Through Mathematics; on how the "great man" theory of history is anti-cliodynamic; see Thomas Carlisle, the Scottish philosopher widely credited with advancing it. [Odd to see no mention here of Herotodus, the literal "father of history."]
Chapter A2: A Historical Microscope
269ff: Starting off with another cutesy story: this time it's about aliens observing Earth over time and speculating about the life arc of the United States of America. This does not really work structurally, it makes the appendices seem unserious and light.
273: On converting history into data: "When there are resources like the Domesday Book... we eagerly squeeze them for any information they can yield. But where such troves are not available (which is the usual case), we have to rely on indirect indicators, or 'proxies.'" [Unfortunately, this is where the GIGO happens, this is often where the made-up stuff begins and the "science" breaks down; I would expect that all the time there's very little actual data to go to, and most of it subject to wide interpretation and narrative. And this of course says nothing about the fact we can only consider data that "survived" a sort of gigantic informational survivor bias problem. This data will always be tremendously gappy and suspect.] This information process would be something like paleoclimatology where you use proxies to reconstruct climate dynamics reaching millions of years back: ice cores, tree rings, pollen counts [these would never be used to fulfill a narrative of course... would they?]; in human history we have proxies like composition of pollen blown by wind onto lakes that show up in sediment: this can measure land clearing via cores taken from lake bottoms; also measuring spurts of building activity by dating the precise year of building beams; measuring human waste and garbage; also human remains: here you can measure height via single bone, etc.
280: Using parish records of births, deaths and baptisms statistics as raw data for family reconstruction via data that dates back to 1538 in England; note that England's first census wasn't until 1801.
283: The author switched study domains from theoretical biology to cliodynamics, struggling with convincing other ecology colleagues and empiricists of the value of mathematical models, pointing to population models like the Lotka-Volterra equations for predator-prey cycles (this was a simultaneous discovery in 1925-26 explaining boom and bust cycles of many animals).
285ff: On the Seshat Global History Databank; the idea here is to have a historical database of everything; launched in 2011; note the discussion here on how to code different pieces of data [I'd mention here that as healthcare has migrated to electronic records, there's a "coding" problem that exists there in the sense that we force analog medical information into a Procrustean coding system, and this is causing downstream second-order effects and problems with healthcare in many ways no one expected.]
286ff: An unintentionally amusing section here on how the actual work is done: the author described how at first they were using actual "experts" to put their data into his Seshat database, but they then realized this was not a good use of their time because these experts had to "fill in hundreds of boxes" (!!!) so they started doing this work with research assistants [holy cow what a terrible job], of course these RAs are under "close supervision" by "PhD level social scientists" [I can't help but hear a voiceover in my head saying "really really please believe me, our data is amazingly good, and very accurately entered, we supervise, please clap].
289: On the big question on the emergence of the State: How did it the so-called "great Holocene transformation" happen, such that nearly all people today live in large-scale states?
Chapter A3: The Structural Dynamic Approach
[This is a general criticism of "traditional" history (history based on narrative), and a criticism of what the author calls "amateur armchair theorists": he believes these amateur armchair theorists use both cherry picking (choosing only historical examples that fit) and the Bed of Procrustes (stretching data here, cutting off some of the data there) to force historical events to conform to whatever their theory happens to be (whether the theory is one of historical cycles or whatever). He then claims that "Cliodynamics is different" and that it uses historical knowledge "in an objective scientific way"--as if doing this with indirectly interpreted and/or tremendously gappy data itself isn't ever subject to these [and many, many other] problems as well. This chapter starts off really reeking of doth protest too much. [I'll also note that if you read Turchin's book War and Peace and War, pay particular attention to Chapter 11, where he force-fits the decline of Rome into his "asabiya" and "integrative-disintegrative" cycles model--adding epicycles where needed, explaining away deviations, etc.--in quite a striking example of a Procrustean Bed. It is right there for all to see in the author's own previous work.]
295: [An apparent error here on pension math, which leads the reader to a type of scientific meta-error: first the pension math error: the author talks about demographers trying to calculate and make projections of Social Security liabilities going forward: yes, he is correct that they use models and a lot of math, but he leaves out how remarkably sensitive these models are to tiny changes in underlying assumptions (you can easily make a pension plan appear under- or over-funded with minuscule changes in your discount rate, your inflation assumption, your equity market returns assumptions, your interest rate assumptions, etc.). And this brings us to a catastrophic metaproblem common to all soft sciences, including sociology and "cliodynamics": what are those critically important assumptions, and how can they be manipulated or used to create the result that is "needed"? Many "scientific" domains are easily subject to manipulations like this to fit favored narratives or fulfill specific political needs of the day: we have seen this blatantly done in economics, medicine, and of course in all social sciences. I think what's ultimately frustrating here is the author's implicit claim that his domain sits in some sort of pure fact-based, narrative-free realm, when self-evidently there are countless vectors by which his field can (and will) be manipulated--manipulated ironically to serve the purposes of the very elites he writes about.]
To Read:
R.L. Storey: The End of the House of Lancaster
Anne Case and Angus Deaton: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
Jack A. Goldstone: Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
Barbara Walter: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them