I just finished End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. The book has a fascinating premise that I’d never heard so clearly said: social unrest arises because unhappy populations are subjected to countries with political infighting. Which, well, that’s not necessarily news. What is news is that he identifies why the political infighting occurs, which is a surplus of wannabe elites, the elite aspirants.
It’s a relatively simple premise but broadly applicable. When the number of people seeking power grows far past the number of positions of power, the elite aspirants become increasingly ruthless and corrupt. Eventually, unless something happens, they will tear society apart, which involves culling the elites to more manageable levels. Successful societies manage to control the proliferation of new elites and/or keep the people content.
He uses a fair number of examples, ranging from Ukraine to the United States, but what hit me is when I started going through the places he didn’t mention. For instance, he doesn’t mention the crises of the Late Roman Republic, but it fits his hypothesis. In earlier days, the Republic’s population was primarily small landowners. By the Late Roman Republic, power had been consolidated in massive slave-run colonies. The number of happy people – private landowners working their land – had decreased while the number of massively wealthy people had increased. What followed was a century of bitter political infighting characterized by increasing violence and a series of civil wars that only ended when Augustus, well, killed a lot of them. A whole lot. With the overproduction of elite aspirants curtailed, including, eventually, his own family after his death, the new Roman Empire was ready to embark on the multi-century Pax Romana.
Heck, it even explains nonsense like gang wars. During peace, the gangs of a given territory grow rich, as they grow rich they grow in numbers, finding it easier to recruit. Eventually, there are too many gangsters looking for a piece of the action, and violence invariably escalates, reducing the number of gangsters to manageable levels. (With the interesting corollary that a strong police presence helps maintain “order” between gangs because they curb the overproduction of elites, which is something we see. Gangs have got to successfully corrupt police departments before they can overproliferate and cause serious intraelite competition.)
When overproduction of elites is combined with an unhappy population (which he calls “social immiseration,”) the intraelite fighting can start general wars. Which is what we saw during both of the World Wars, for instance.
He believes the United States has started a conflict phase between elite aspirants. The people are unhappy because real wages have declined (I would add that this social immiseration is also caused by contemplation of a bleak future due to environmental changes, too; it’s hard to feel good about the world when it’s on fire,) while the number of super-rich have increased (think “tech bros.”) So, at the top, you see a lot of intraelite conflict (think “Trumpism.”) In his view, well, it’s too late to stop this current round of discord. In the US, the poor are too poor, and the rich are far too rich, and other countries have the same problem. But he has some optimism for the future if we understand the forces at work.
I am more cynical. If he’s right and we’re in a period of general unrest in the US that is going to last decades, the chances of a general war – World War III – are pretty high. In World War I, about 1% of the world’s population was killed. In World War II, about 3% of the world’s population was killed. So, we can expect World War III to kill at least 10% of the world’s population. That’s hundreds of millions of people. Additionally, there is the whole “climate issue.” A period of general instability will hamper, if not destroy, global response to the unfolding climate catastrophe. Wars are terrible for the environment. It isn’t possible to calculate how much damage will happen, but it’s likely to be severe, perhaps the biggest die-off event in global history. I know it isn’t part of his thesis to calculate how many more general global conflicts can happen with our increasingly murderous technology and fragile environment, but it feels like it’s a big part of the story. It’s possible that any general conflict could do damage on a truly unprecedented scale. We might not, as a species, survive fifty years of instability in the United States.
Additionally, he never says that, given his premises, the most stable society is one with a flat hierarchy—where people aren’t made miserable by their government and which produces few elites with systems against overproliferation. To me, this is obvious from his premises. And since he says data back up his studies, well, uh, if he’s right, science is telling us to get rid of the elites and make an equitable society.
Otherwise, the book is pretty tight. There are parts of it that are likely to annoy people. I’ve read some comments about the book, and he’s accused of being both too far to the right and too far to the left, but I know historians. He’s trying to be objective, but what that means is wildly different for different people. For instance, he thinks it is objective to call Ronald Reagan a racist but also thinks saying Putin is the reason Trump was elected in 2016 is a conspiracy theory. In both cases, he’s probably right, but everyone wants historians to conform to their view of the world. It’s why it’s always such a battlefield. Anyway, if you’re interested in an interesting take on history from the data sciences, it’s a book you should check out.