Peter Turchin interviewed by Aaron Bastani. Interesting to see Peter Turchin as I've read two of his book but never seen him before. Well, I don't know if "read" is the right term for one of the books. The two books are Age Of Discord and Figuring Out The Past. And speaking of books, he's got a new one out, which is the occasion of this interview.
Age Of Discord was about how societies go through cycles of cohesion and integration vs disintegration and internal conflict. But first I should mention that Peter Turchin is a "quantitative historian" -- he looks at history quantitatively, through numbers and math. The model he presents in Age Of Discord uses 44 variables in differential equations. You probably won't be surprised he found we're in a disintegrative phase. And he predicted it would not end soon.
Figuring Out The Past is a book of data. It has thousands of numbers and other data points on historical civilizations, hundreds of kingdoms, empires, and countries from ancient times to modern times, with all sorts of information on their populations, governance structures, taxation systems, economic systems, agricultural systems, methods of warfare, and so on. I can't say I've "read" this book as that would be reading data tables. It's more accurate to say I've "browsed" it. It's always interesting to flip around and read about the various civilizations that existed in history.
As for the current book, it's called End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. I've ordered it but haven't read it yet. Hopefully it'll be written in less academese language than his Age Of Discord book. That's the reason I haven't been recommending it to people. From this discussion, it looks like Peter Turchin isn't just predicting the current period of turmoil will persist for a while before things get better. It looks like he's predicting the turmoil will get worse -- possibly a lot worse, and that we might be in "End Times" -- the end of the current political order.
In this interview, he uses a lot of the concepts I'm familiar with from Age Of Discord but which people seem to frequently misunderstand, in part because of his lousy terminology. Turchin may be a smart guy and brilliant with differential equations, but, he's not very good at inventing terminology that resonates with regular people. One such terms you'll see pop up in this discussion is "elite overproduction". People frequently think this means, for example, too large a percentage of the population getting college degrees, then being upset when they don't get "elite" jobs but end up working as baristas. That's not actually what Turchin means by "elite overproduction", not at all.
What he's talking about is when a society becomes highly unequal in its wealth distribution, not only do the vast majority of people become poorer while a wealthy elite becomes richer, but the number of rich people increases. This might be counterintuitive. The number of rich people is still small compared to the masses. But the number of rich people is large compared with the number of positions of political power.
If you imagine a position of political power, such as a governorship of a state. If there is only one person who wants the job, then that person gets the job. If there are a few people who want the job, then there's competition for the job, but maybe not too much. But if a lot of people become very wealthy and, instead of setting their sights on escaping poverty and becoming wealthy, set their sights on political power, now suddenly you have thousands of people competing for that governorship. And the fight can become very vicious. In Age Of Discord, Turchin shows how this competition can be quantified, in, for example, the amount of money that has to be spent to acquire a political office, which the candidate must either have from their own wealth or be able to fundraise through their personal connections to other rich people. The "price" of political office has gone up and up and up, with Presidential campaigns costing in the billions. This is what Turchin is referring to when he uses the phrase "elite overproduction". And why he thinks "elite overproduction" leads to social division and disintegration.
It has nothing to do with how many people get college degrees. If you have a college degree but your ambition in life is to make more money and not political power, because you don't yet have so many millions that making more money for its own sake has lost its meaning for you, you don't count as "elite".
This is a pretty wide-ranging conversation, ranging from European and Russian history to current-day US politics. For non-college educated people, life has not just been stagnating, it has been getting worse -- purchasing power has been going down and down and down. It now takes 4 times as much money to put a child through college as it did in the 1970s. This is because more and more people want out of the declining 90% and into the 10% for whom life is getting better. Turchin has another term for this which won't catch on, "popular immiseration". This opens the door for elites to break ranks from other elites and try to obtain political power by becoming "populists", appealing to the discontent of the masses. It looks like in his new books, Turchin refers to these elites as "counter-elites".
#geopolitics #domesticpolitics #economics #demographics #history #cliodynamics