When I first started reading complexity scientists Peter Turchin’s I was very skeptical. In the first chapter, he makes bold and vague claims, and I wondered where the logic and evidence were to back them up. As End Times continues, though, Turchin provides clear arguments, strong evidence, and copious details about the data analysis that underlies his claims.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised;after all, Turchin is a well-respected scientist. In fact, he’s one of the founders of a new discipline: cliodynamics, the science of history, named after Clio, the muse of history from Greek mythology. Turchin and other researchers in this new field “focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse.”
In End Times, Turchin defines cliodynamics this way:
“[cliodynamics] uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record, compiled by generations of historians, as Big Data. It employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions between the different ‘moving parts’ of the complex social systems that are our societies. Most importantly, cliodynamics uses the scientific method, in which alternative theories are subject to empirical tests with data.”
But End Times is only partially about cliodynamics. The book’s central thesis is that the U.S. is currently in a particularly difficult period of political disintegration. He claims that around the 1970s, a “wealth pump” started extracting money from the poor to the rich. We entered the “Second Gilded Age” after 1980, comparable to the first Gilded Age of about 1870 to 1900. This is characterized by greater economic inequality and something he calls “elite overproduction.”
In addition to economic inequality and elite overproduction, Turchin defines the term “popular immiseration.” This is a situation where the non-college educated get poorer (their real wages actually decline) and their life expectancy declines. “The twin forces pushing America into civil war — immiseration and elite overproduction –continue unabated as of 2022,” Turchin claims. End Times looks beyond the U.S., too, giving evidence from historical analyses around the world, going back 5,000 years. Turchin claims that no society his team has studied has had a peaceful era of more than “around 200 years”.
End Times turns back to his U.S. analysis and “plumbs the numbers” on US inequality, looking from the time period 1976 to 2016. What he finds is a shocking stagnation of income in the middle and lower classes. Surprisingly, over those years,wages decreased for workers without a bachelor’s degree. In fact, only workers with bachelor’s or advanced degrees saw their wages increase during this time period.
Despite those sobering figures, Turchin says we should be even more worried about those with bachelor degrees or higher who failed to make it into the highest wage groups. “History tells us that the credentialed precariat (or, in the jargon of cliodynamics, the frustrated elite aspirant class) is the most dangerous class for societal stability,” he says. “Overproduction of youth with advanced degrees has been the most significant factor driving societal upheavals, from the Revolutions of 1848 to the Arab Spring of 2011.”
Turchin makes another bold claim, that “on the evidence, it’s more than fair to call the USA a plutocracy, or a society ruled by the wealthy. This is not a conspiracy theory but an accurate statement broadly accepted by social scientists who study the flows of power.” Interestingly, End Times spends three entire pages detailing the difference between conspiracy and science in order to make this point. As Turchin says, “The most important, indeed decisive, difference between conspiracy and scientific theories is that the latter make novel predictions that can be tested with data,” Turchin says.
End Times also points toward the issue of immigration in the U.S. as a prime example of the plutocracy: the losers of high immigration rates are working citizens, while the winners are business owners who are able to keep wages lower thanks to the high supply of labor. Turchin says that the stable period from 1930 to 1970 was facilitated in part by restrictions on immigration that were put in place in the 1920s.
Nevertheless, Turchin claims that elite overproduction during that period was reversed “through entirely nonviolent means. No social revolution did this; the ruling class did it itself,” by cooperating together during the New Deal and Progressive periods. End Times says this is rare among societies, and that more often than not, well-meaning elites create or foster the very conditions that lead to instability, crisis, and even their own removal from power.
End Times also takes aim at extreme competition where people are fighting ever more relentlessly for fewer resources:
“Unlike its milder versions, extreme competition does not lead to the selection of the best candidates, the candidates most suited for the positions. Rather, it corrodes the rules of the game, the social norms and institutions that govern how society works in a functional way. It destroys cooperation. It brings out the dark side of meritocracy. It creates a few winners and masses of losers. And some of those failed elite aspirants convert into radicalized counter-elites who are motivated to destroy the unjust social order that has bred them.”
About halfway through End Times, Turchin gives us a stark warning: “Many observers were taken aback by the intensity of the ‘cancel culture’ that appeared seemingly out of nowhere,” he says. “But such vicious ideological struggles are a common phase in any revolution. Jacques Mallet du Pan […] formulated this observation as a dictum: ‘Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.'” Turchin says that the only way for stability to return is for there to be fewer elite aspirants.
makes predictions of what could happen in the U.S., and Turchin’s analysis is chilling while remaining grounded in data. Can the U.S. turn divisiveness into cooperation again? In this must-read book, Turchin presents a rough multipath forecasting model which suggests we can’t avoid crisis at this point. Our future could depend on learning its key lessons.
Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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