Predicting the Collapse of Society
Book Review: End Times by Peter Turchin. An ambitious, but not exactly optimistic, take on history, current events, and our near future.
→ Get the book here: End Times, by Peter Turchin (aff.)
End Times is the new book by Peter Turchin, where he presents his theory for understanding world history and the era we live in, explaining how he predicted in 2010 that we would witness more riots and turbulence in the 2020s.
The title, End Times, may sound excessively bleak. And I’ll grant that the content is not an optimistic “everything is better now than before” reading of history, of the kind that has recently been popularized by people like Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker.
However, it’s not all pessimism and apocalyptic prophecies in Turchin’s book. Mostly, sure. But not all.
The book also contains a few lessons we can hope to learn, if we want our children to grow up in a less turbulent future. In fact, that seems like the purpose of the book, even if it is hidden under layers and layers of calamity and ominously waving red flags.
What to learn from history
The theory laid out in the book is based on findings and observations from a field of study Turchin himself has helped establish: Cliodynamics.
You know how people always say we can learn from history, but then never quite tell us exactly what we’re supposed to learn? Turns out, they don’t tell us because they don’t know.
For the longest time, lessons from history have been a bit vague and hard to articulate without a lot of hedging. A bit like what we can learn from reading great fiction… mumble, mumble, something about the human condition and morality, and, you know, stuff. Oh! And also, don’t marry Henry VIII or shoot an Arch Duke. That never turns out well.
Don’t get me wrong. I love history–and fiction–even without crystal clear takeaways. The characters and stories are fascinating, and not everything has to be educational. But wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to distill the lessons we were supposed to learn into something more specific?
History will probably never have laws as unbendable as the laws of physics, or outcomes as predictable as chemical reactions.
But it would be tremendously helpful if history were at least as formulaic and predictable as a Hollywood plot line.
Enter Cliodynamics.
Calculating history
Cliodynamics is all about quantifying history–finding numbers to describe how happy, healthy, wealthy, secure, or just how numerous people were–and then plugging those quantities into mathematical models from complexity theory.
When you add enough numbers, and run the right algorithms, the noise recedes and patterns emerge. Patterns as steady and predictable as the waves on the beach.
It becomes clear how and why populations increase and decline, and how their wealth and power rise and recede. And the more patterns you uncover, the better your predictions get.
Turchin, who coined the term cliodynamics, originally earned his a Ph.D. in biology. It makes sense when you think about it.
At the beginning of his career, he studied beetles and rodents, and used mathematical modeling to make predictions about them. It wasn’t that big a leap to a more interesting species. I’m sure studying mice and lemmings can be fascinating, but it doesn’t really have that mass appeal. When a population of human beings throw a civilizational collapse, on the other hand, people can’t stop talking about it.
The cliodynamic approach to history can be used for many things, but Peter Turchin goes straight for the red meat: The often bloody and violent rise and fall of dynasties, nations and civilizations.
Nods to Marx and Malthus
It sounds undeniably a bit too ambitious to be realistic. And I doubt any model of history can capture everything we’re interested in.
Having said that, however, End Times outlines a very useful perspective for understanding significant portions of world history, much of the political and economic world we live in, and the direction it is heading.
The model appears to have significant explanatory power, far beyond the many, rich examples he uses. If it’s true that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” then it feels like Turchin describes the metre of history very well.
Much of the analysis seems familiar, to the point were it feels almost obvious: Class struggle, oppression and immiseration of the common people, as well as exploitation, rent-seeking and colonization all play a role in Turchin’s understanding of how and when things go horribly wrong. (You don’t grow up in the USSR, as Turchin did, without ingesting a little marxist social critique.) As do population levels and available land and resources, economy and demography.
But Turchin brings a lot of cold, hard data to the table, where many philosophers, political scientists, and history buffs have previously stiched their narratives together from anecdotes, artifacts, and empathy.
He draws on a huge database about political upheaval and unrest–Crisis DB, he calls it, and it contains more than 200 historical case studies of social breakdown, and the conditions surrounding them.
When he makes claims about how people were doing and feeling in a particular place at a particular time, you can be sure he’s brought the receipts to back that up.
How things go horribly wrong
So what is Turchin saying?
Societies around the world use the resources available to them. As long as there is an abundance of resources, there is relative prosperity and happiness in society. Everyone becomes richer, and the standard of living increases. People are generally happy, and they don’t mind all that much that the elite skims the milk and the rich get richer.
Over time, however, society reaches a Malthusian level, where there is no longer an abundance of resources, and it becomes harder for everyone to maintain their standard of living. Maybe some natural disaster or war exacerbates the problem. Either way, ordinary people feel it first and most.
The elites feel it too, of course, but they can extract more value from ordinary people. Turchin calls this the wealth pump. The elite just has to raise prices and rents, maybe lobby for some tax cuts and subsidies, and they can keep their good life. No need to sympathize with the common people. Let them eat cake.
If only this were sustainable, Marie Antoinette and Princess Anastasia might have grown to become classy, old grandmothers.
Spoiler alert: It’s not sustainable.
The Miserables
There are many factors that play a role in bringing about the collapse of society, but the two most important ones are popular immiseration and elite overproduction.
Popular immiseration is just a fancy way of saying that people are miserable. At first blush that might seem like something that’s tough to quantify, but the author has many tricks up his sleeve.
He looks at economic indicators, such as real wages, unemployment, and even things like how much wine a country imports. He looks at indicators or health, such as expected life span and average height. He considers crime rates, number of deadly riots, and the impact of droughts, famines and pandemics.
And, importantly, he looks at how those numbers evolve over time, and how they compare to other times, places and populations. By putting it all together, he gets a good sense of people’s sense of well-being and their future prospects.
Looking back throgh history, this all feels a bit distant and theoretical. Then he turns that lens on America today, to capture the mood there.
He points to decades of stagnation in real wages, and in average height, and the increasing cost of social mobility. To how an increase in suicides and drug and alcohol abuse has caused a recent reversal in life expectancy in parts of the population.
You don’t really have to ask them to see that many Americans are miserable these days. Nor to understand why. Bleak.
Too many chiefs
The second factor, which is actually more important than widespread misery when it comes to predicting when the manure is going to hit the fan, is elite over-production.
Basically: There are just too many people who want the top jobs.
Whether it’s a seat in the senate, or in the board room, or at some prestigious faculty. Whether it’s the top one percent, or ten percent, or point-one percent… Along virtually any dimension of power or wealth.
Either way, there are always far fewer available positions than there are people vying for them – elite aspirants, as Turchin calls them.
The number of elite aspirants grows when the elite reproduces, and the elites want to pass their privilege and opportunities on to their children.
And it grows when ambitious people work hard and get an education (ever higher education) and become as deserving of opportunity as the existing elite.
And it grows because the elite has better health, and lives longer than others, and they survive pandemics and famines and high crime rates better than others.
For a while, the surplus of elite aspirants can be solved by expanding through war and colonization and trade deals, acquiring more resources and more citizens at the bottom of the hierarchy.
And for a while, the elite can divide their wealth and large properties into slightly smaller pieces for each of their children to inherit. And the clergy can recruit more priests, the military can promote more officers, and universities can tenure more professors.
This can give elite aspirants a sense of success, and a path forward – at least while times are good. But it really puts the system under pressure.
The social hierarchy started out looking like a pyramid, but it trends toward something more like a tower – or even the Space Needle — and it is not sustainable.
When the illusion breaks
At a certain point, there just isn’t enough resources and citizens and customers to go around. It’s no longer possible to keep up the illusion that there’s room at the top – not even for hard-working, disciplined people with good educations and the magnificent student loans to prove it.
When the illusion finally breaks, you’re left with a large number of competent and resourceful people who feel cheated and disillusioned.
A counter-elite emerges: Bitter people who have no intention of going down without a fight, who are willing to fight dirty, and who will happily tear the system down if that’s what it takes.
Unlike common people, who can be oppressed for generations, the counter-elite has the necessary networks, resources, knowledge, and education to organize and lead revolutions, coups, and civil wars.
They may not even know it themselves. They may think they are just mobilizing activists and empowering people to stand up for justice and their rights. Whether they call themselves Antifa or Proud Boys, Occupy Wall Street or Oath Keepers, they are organizing for the revolution.
Perhaps the system experiences a sudden and destabilizing shock that makes the top-heavy hierarchy shake. Such as a famine or a Reichstag fire or a pandemic. Either way, the counter-elite seizes the opportunity.
They organize the miserables, and riot. People fill the streets and the squares. Torches and fuses and car dealerships are lit. The Bastille, the Winter Palace, or the Congress in Washington is stormed.
Sound familiar? This is roughly were we are now, according to Turchin.
And–take note!–there’s no reason to think the first or second or third such eruption of violence will be the last. It won’t.
The unrest comes in waves. Periods of frequent riots and rebellion, that get a little bit worse each time around, until the problem is solved.
The ugly solution
One generation of counter-elites may be subdued, but as long as the problem remains, a new generation of counter-elites will emerge that will fight harder, bloodier and dirtier than the last.
The unrest will continue until the problem is solved. That is, until the elite and its aspirants are no longer too many, and the resources are no longer too scarce.
One of the most common “solutions” — the “simple” way out — is also the most bloody and gruesome: Delete the elite. Put them up against the wall. Send them to the gulags, the concentration camps, the guillotine. Send them to the battle fields or the killing fields, to the colonies or out on crusade.
Sooner or later, the balance is restored, and you can expect a few generations of relative peace, growth, and surplus before history repeats itself again–or at least rhymes.
Bleak.
A better way
But I promised you that not everything is pessimism and apocalyptic prophecies in Turchin’s book. He does suggest another, better alternative that seems to work.
It’s a bit tough for the elite to swallow, and it requires a lot of solidarity among the potentially miserable people, so it’s hard to get it to work, but it’s been done before: Social democratic reforms like the New Deal or the Nordic model, often with high taxes on the rich, but well-balanced against the interests of business and the elite.
Historically, when the elite, a strong government, and ordinary people can work together, with shared identity and purpose, they can avoid popular immiseration, curb elite over-production, and interrupt the cycles of violence.
But the commitment to the collaboration needs to be renewed for every generation.
Well-supported
This is, of course, a simplification of a simplification — I have simplified the book for this review, Turchin has had to simplify the research for the book, and even the best research can only provide a simplified perspective on reality. And when there’s so much simplification, things start to feel a bit unreliable.
But this is not just a simple and attractive narrative.
Turchin supports his arguments with large amounts of data and research. He also has examples from virtually all over the world — from Mongolia to Denmark, England to Egypt, the Roman Empire to the USA, China to France, and so on.
With the all the historical data and examples supporting such a grand theory, with all its apparent explanatory power, it is tempting to call End Times timeless.
However, Turchin also uses plenty of current examples and references, like Steve Bannon, Viktor Yanukovych, el-Sisi, and, of course, Donald Trump, which emphazises how relevant the book is to our current day.
I don’t think Turchin’s perspective is the only useful perspective to have on the world, our history or our society. If you exclusively look at the world, its history and its societies in light of the numbers, and on the scale of populations, you’ll miss out on the fantastic stories about the individual characters who lived through it all.
But Turchin’s cliodynamic model of troubled times is a very useful mental model to have in your toolbox and draw upon. It’s worth a read
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Buy the book: End Times, by Peter Turchin (affiliate link)
This post was originally published on Medium
Thanks for sharing, I saw the link in the ACX comment thread.
This review was clear and to the point, especially compared to some of the ACX entries which, while interesting, often meandered down a very scenic route.