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Peter Turchin
87 quotes
“[T]his is , and it posits several forces that drive social instability and political violence. ...I'll focus on two main ones. ...First ... potential ...based on popular immiseration resulting from the decreased living standards for the majority of the population... This is a fairly obvious effect of growing inequality... Since the days of Malthus this... force has been much in discussion.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he second condition... is absolutely much more predictive of immediate troubles to come, and that's intraelite competition which results... when elite numbers increase relative to the general population. As a result... we have too many elite aspirants vying for a limited number of positions... causes... intraelite competition, eventually conflict, and that... in our analysis of about 100... cases of past societies sliding into crisis and then out... That turns out to be the most universal and most important force.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here are other dimensions. The state fragility and international environment, especially for smaller countries, international environment plays quite a role, but I will focus on the first two.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'll use the example of the United States, which I have studied from inside out... over the past 20 years, and I will illustrate how these few forces... have laid out in real life... a particular example...”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let's look at ... wages adjusted for inflation. ...In the late 1970s there was a definite phase transition. Up to that point, for the previous two generations, the wages for both unskilled and manufacturing workers had been growing quite rapidly and almost linearly... [W]ages for manufacturing workers increased... fourfold... a quite remarkable achievement... [I]t was unprecedented in human history to see such a long-term sustained increase in general well-being. Then... the wages stagnated, or even declined. So what was the reason?”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“GDP per capita shows no break in the 1970s. It slowed down... around the financial crisis of 2007–2008...”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What about ? ...By elites I mean the small percentage of population that concentrates social power in their hands. ...[I]t's a neutral definition. It's neither good nor bad. They're simply power holders.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What does the wealth pump do on the elite side..? Declining relative wages of workers set up this wealth pump that transfers wealth from workers to the economic elites... [A]s a result... a larger fraction of GDP goes to... the economic elites, which are both capital holders and top layers of administration of corporations (corporate officers). ...[T]his creates a favorable economic conjuncture for the economic elites and results in higher rates of upward social mobility. Elite numbers, as a result... grow and so does their consumption levels.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he problem is... if the wealth pump is allowed to run long enough, eventually... the growing elite numbers and their consumption levels will overshoot the productive base, which is what the workers are producing.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...[A]s a result ...the new elites, let's call them the elite aspirants... their numbers... begin to be so large that there is not enough power positions in... politics or in economics [e.g., corporations]... That's fixed, and as the numbers of elite aspirants vying for these positions increase, then first... the result... is intraelite competition, and secondly... the numbers of frustrated elite aspirants who are denied access to these positions begins to explode.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So here you see... in the political domain... in just the decade from 2000-2010... the number of candidates who have spent half a million dollars or more of their own money... the millionaires... have doubled during this period.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many of the wealth holders... aim to translate their economic power into political power... [A]nother measure is the cost of winning ...has been growing also, showing a greater demand for these positions and greater willingness to spend money...”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not all of these candidates are wealthy in their own right. Many of the newly wealthy... instead of running themselves... fund other individuals.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]ssentially the effect of increasing the number of wealth holders is translated into increased competition for political positions.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he problem is that as we get greater numbers of these surplus elites... some of them turn into... counter-elites... the individuals who are willing to challenge... the reigning regime, and in history often... by violent means, and in fact this is happening in the United States... they're willing to break the rules of the game.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So this is how drives intraelite competition, intraelite conflicts, rise of the counter-elites and then sociopolitical instability.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]nequality... at least in this model, is not a direct driver. It's a proxie for the direct drivers, which is immiseration and elite overproduction.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is what I did in... Ages of Discord, I looked at more than 200 years of American history... an aggregated measure of well being... the blue curve has gone through two cycles, and the red curve is a measure of instability...”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To conclude, the structural causes of Ages of Discord... I have shown the example using the United States, but... they are quite generic. ...[T]hey show up... in more than 100... past crises. ...[W]e are now in the United States ...clearly in crisis. ...We are at the cusp. ...In fact, collective actions can result in positive... or negative outcomes. What will happen we will see.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look at a more traditional society in which the elites are... landed nobility. ...[T]he way the wealth pump operates there is that when elite overproduction occurs... Nobles basically oppress peasants and turn on the wealth pump. So instead of economic mechanisms that transfer wealth from commoners to the Elites, in this case you have more coercion methods. ...So this is a variation on the theme ...”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]ssentially in any society, however the elites are defined, whether economic, administrative, military, or ideological, they need to support a certain level of income, and so when their numbers grow, inevitably they have to extract that income from the commoners.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Immiseration is important, but... societies can... be pretty stable with quite a lot of immiseration. As long as the elites are united and the state is strong, the state can suppress all those peasant rebellions... All "successful" revolutions and civil wars were the result of the intraelite conflicts. Even today, if you look at Donald Trump, who is sort of the main "revolutionary" so to speak, ...he is not particularly immiserated himself, but he's channeling... the tens of millions of immiserated Americans.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have analyzed CrisiDB because there's plenty of data on weather proxies. ...Weather, climate worsening seems to serve often as a trigger for crisis. But the key question is whether the societies have resilience... When populations are not immiserated and elites are not overproduced the social stability and resilience is very high, and societies adjust reasonably well to climate shocks. It's really when drivers for instability have been working for a while, that's when the climate can often serve as the trigger.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Societies adjust to climatic shocks when they are internally coherent and social cooperation is high, and therefore they can find solutions, but when such climate shocks happen when the elites are divided, essentially different factions of elites start using the climate shocks as a weapon in internecine struggle. We see this in the United States where one party denies... there is quite a large fraction of climate deniers, and so it has become part of the political infighting, rather than trying to find a collective decision, collective action that would address this issue.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he... forecast: “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe” ...was not simply a projection of the current trend in social instability into the future. ...[T]he basis for this forecast was a quantitative model that took as inputs the major SD drivers for instability (immiseration, intraelite competition, and state (in)capacity) and translated them into the Political Stress Indicator (PSI)... strongly correlated with socio-political instability. The rising curve of the... PSI... suggests a growing future socio-political instability.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction. Ref: JA Goldstone. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1991) Ref: Turchin P. "Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability" Cliodynamics (2013) 4:241–80.
“was proposed 30 years ago. Although it was successively refined by other theorists... the theoretical core, and especially the emphasis on intra-elite competition and conflict as the most important driver of socio-political instability and state breakdown, remained constant. Over the past three decades, the theory was empirically tested by a growing number of researchers. Currently, there are detailed investigations of at least twenty crises... to test the predictions of the theory... [T]here are several dozen other less detailed examples. The... verdict is that.. predictions are well supported by data. ...[R]ival theories are not supported.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[D]isease outbreaks occur much more frequently during... crisis periods. Such epidemics historically have had a disproportionate effect on the less advantaged... and the Covid-19 pandemic was not an exception. ...[I]n terms of ... the pandemic... further worsened the well-being of large swaths of the American population... consequently, drove up the mass-mobilization potential. ...[G]overnmental dysfunction in dealing with the pandemic, coupled with intra-elite infighting, will likely further depress... trust in government institutions. Thus... the coronavirus has... further destabilize[d] the American .”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Postscript Ref: P. Turchin, "Modeling periodic waves of integration in the Afro-Eurasian world-system" Globalization as Evolutionary Process: Modeling Global Change (2008) ed., G Modelski, T Devezas, WR Thompson, p. 163…
“I began my career... as an ecologist... studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer. ...I embraced the turn of the field to complexity science, which mixes computer modeling with Big Data analytics to answer such questions as... why many animal populations go through boom-and-bust cycles. By the late 1990s... I began to consider how the same... approach could be brought to the study of human societies. A quarter of a century later, my colleagues... and I have built out a flourishing field... (from Clio... the... Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change)...”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let me go back to 2010 when Nature, the journal... asked a number of scientists to make some forecasts for the next decade... (2010-2020) and that's when I published the forecast that.., the growing political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade. ...10 years later ...together with my coauthor, , we have revisited this forecast to see whether it had anything to do with reality, and... this is one of the graphs... We looked at several measures of instability, one was anti-government demonstrations. A very similar picture shows up when you look at violent riots. And so we submitted this paper in early 2020 saying that this forecast was actually right... [A]s the paper was [under] review, the summer of 2020, the riots following the death of George Floyd have exploded and... in January of 2021 we had the shocking event... known as the Storming of the Capitol.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2:46 Ref: "The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010-2020 decade: A retrospective assessment", Peter Turchin, Andrey Korotâyêv PLOS ONE
“So far so good. But the problem is, as in many dynamical systems, there are some delayed effects of such dynamics. ...Here are some numbers on the relative distribution of wealth in the American population. You have good data from 1983 to 2019... when we look at the percentage of households with [inflation adjusted in 1995 US dollars] net worth exceeding... Millionaires, roughly 10% of the population (7% now) increased from 3% to 7% but then growth in... classes such as decamillionaires was even more remarkable... more than fivefold, sixfold increase in the proportion of households that have 10 million dollars wealth, or more.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My colleague has expressed a pessimistic view in his book The Great Leveler... where he says the death is the great leveler so... a major violent shock is needed to reverse the economic inequality. I... look at this a bit more optimistically. Essentially entering into the crisis is relatively stereotypical, that's what our CrisisDB investigations show... [I]t's really conflict that plays a key role, together with mass organization. But the exit is usually contingent, and in fact there could be both good and bad outcomes, as indicated in this graph. Sometimes the decline is mild and followed by rapid recovery, but you... can also have complete collapse.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e actually looked at outcomes of crises, measuring them by a collapse. I don't like the word "collapse" because who knows what collapse means. So... we broke it up into various dimensions, and then we can look at more than 100 cases in CrisisDB, and look at the distribution of the severity (where we basically sum of the possible bad things that can happen in societies). Most of the time the crises lead to pretty dire consequences, but there is about 10-15% of cases where the elites manage to pull together, adopt the right set of reforms, and sail the ship of the state through the turbulent waters without major bloodshed.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]t a very deep and abstract level these forces, immiseration and elite overproduction... are playing out in very similar ways in very different societies. However, ...the theory has to be tailored to each society because ...the critical dimension is what's happening to the elites. Now different societies have ...a variety of ways in which the elites are defined and ...regenerated ...so even if you look at western democracies, you compare the United States, let's say to France, the United States is basically a plutocracy, the reigning elite is the economic elite in collaboration with the political elites. But France is a bureaucracy. In France the elites are created in different ways, and there are other examples, other societies. ...[I]n Egypt, for example, it's militocracy essentially. So those details are very important. ...[T]hat's why the general ideas, elite overproduction, they have to be filtered through the specific structures of different societies. ...[T]he Democratic societies have different ways that the power flows in them compared to autocratic societies... [I]f we take a step back from specific arrangements in which power flows, and... focus on more structural, more fundamental issues, then the theory works surprisingly well.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have to think dynamically... I'm talking as a scientist about entering into a crisis, and then... societies have to somehow get out of it, so in Douglass North and his colleagues, for example, they look specifically at the Glorious Revolution... the exit from about 60 years of conflict, which started... in Scottish Wars 1639 and... ended in 1690s with the new arrangements. So... when societies exit from these crises... Sometimes, by the way, they don't exit, they essentially have political fragmentation. ...Think about the Roman Empire, which has fragmented, and there was no new Roman Empire. But frequently we do have reconstitution, ...England, for example, reconstituted itself. So think about it dynamically. You have to look at the path of the crisis, and then the path out of the crisis.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Both exogenous and endogenous. ...[H]uman societies have changed dramatically over the past couple of hundred years, and you have to take that into account. ...Many people talk about now, especially because of , the effect of technology, the automation, and of robotization, and that is certainly a force that reduces labor supply. But other things... played in the United States at the level of labor supply... first... the baby boom that created a large cohort of workers; and secondly the... massive entry of women into the labor force; and immigration. Immigration actually is much discussed but numerically it's... slightly less important than the... other demographic forces that we're talking about. ...What's exogenous, what's endogenous? It's really a matter of what our best model is, because you can endogenize things. But some things cannot be endogenized, so there are automation processes... this is a very long term process that has been happening over thousands of years... And so in my model that's clearly an exogenous mechanism. But what's the most important (to me) endogenous mechanism is the last thing that I included in the model, which is the attitudes... Think about it as institutions. ...Labor promoting institutions were installed in the United States as a result of the New Deal, and they worked very well until [the] late 70s, and then they... started to be dismantled... especially under the Reagan administration. And so I use the mininum wage as a proxy for the elite attitudes towards workers. It seems to work quite well, but we could use other proxies such as illegal anti-labor moves by firms. So that is an endogenous mechanism in theory because... essentially, ...when ...[a] crisis ...either destroys part of the elites, or frightens them so much that they install institutions that are more pro-labor, and that lasts until the collective memory of the crisis fades, and then you have... [a] recycling process... in my book I unpack these ideas.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 50:43 Ref: End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023)
“In my book, Ages of Discord I talk about the Progressive Period... [the] 1920s especially. Remember... the original Red Scare was in the 1920s. So when we look at the existence of the Soviet Union, established in 1920 and collapsed in 1989, this is the period when... I grew up, by the way, in the Soviet Union, and I remember how the newspapers like were talking about the horrors of capitalism... There are multiple lines of evidence that show that the influence from the Soviet Union... By the way, also from during the 1930s. Those were, in fact, important influences on the Roosevelt administration in... designing an equitable system. ...When the Soviet Union ... collapsed, it was misinterpreted as the triumph of neoliberal economics... and here we are essentially. ...This is an important factor. So the failure by the elites. It could be both due to internal challenges... and by the way, in the 1920s there were challenges... even earlier from [the] 1890s... from the Populist movement in the United States, and the Socialist movement in the United States. ...So those were internal. There were also external influences from competitors such as the Soviet Union.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I claim that ... gives us a very good theoretical framework within which we can look at many different seemingly disparate trends in the United States... they suddenly start making sense... [[w:Disease of despair|[D]eaths of despair]] ...I would argue that the opioid crisis is one of the manifestations of the immiseration, and in fact... go to Case and Deaton original book (project) on deaths of despair. They make this argument very eloquently. They give a lot of data, much better than I can do, so [the] opioid crisis is part of the bundle of reasons why immiserated population (people)... results in large swaths of [the] population who are falling... and many of them take the way out by either drugs and overdosing, or... suicide, or... alcoholism... or simply become careless and die in accidents... So this is clearly, and thanks to Anne Case and Angus Deaton for their excellent work, because here we can really see... The book is excellent. They talk about social immiseration, broken families and many other things. It really is a very coherent understanding of these problems.”
Peter Turchin (born 1957) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 58:01 Ref: Anne Case, Angus Deaton Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020)