In a previous post I listed some books on social change, indicating that I hoped to get around to reviewing them. They were
Neither Vertical nor Horizontal – theories of political organisation by Rodriguez Nunes (2021) who is interviewed here
Augmented Humanity – being and remaining agentic in a digitised world by Peter Bryant (2021). One of these annoying academic books which disfigures every second sentence with (bracketed) name references which require you to consult the end of each chapter. How AI is used is a fundamental issue which deserves better than this. John Naughton has just recommended this short paper on the risks of Artificial Intelligence which includes Geoff Hinton as one of the authors
World Protests – study of key protest issues in the 21st Century I Oriz et al (2022). A slim book which focuses on description. What I missed was any attempt to offer advice or theorise
If we Burn – the mass protest decade and the missing revolution by Vincent Bevins (2023) interviewed by Chris Hedges here and by DIG here . I have to confess that these interviews really put me off the book – with Bevins coming across a rather arrogant young man
End Times – elites, counterelites and the path of political disintegration by Peter Turchin 2023 with Turchin interviewed by Aaron Bastani. The most fascinating book not least because it uses Big Data to challenge our understanding of history. Tuchin graduated in zoology and biology but has grown out of these disciplines to venture in the last 2 decades into the field of history
I want to concentrate on “End Times” mainly because it is the more over-arching of the books, looking not at internal aspects of political organisation but rather on how various changes have come together to threaten the future of civlisation as we know it.
What, then, is this model? To put it somewhat wonkily, when a state, such as the United States, has
stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars),
a growing gap between rich and poor,
overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees,
declining public trust, and
exploding public debt,
these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability. And here we are.
“I will look across human history for examples, but my primary goal is to speak to how we have slid into our current age of discord, with the United States as my empirical focus”.
Because the crisis has deep historical roots, we’ll need to travel back in time to the New Deal era, when an unwritten social contract became part of American political culture. This informal and implicit contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses, and the state in a way similar to the more formal, explicit tripartite agreements in Nordic countries. For two human generations, this implicit pact delivered unprecedented growth of broadly based well-being in America. At the same time, the “Great Compression” dramatically reduced economic inequality. Many people were left out of this implicit pact—Black Americans, in particular, a fact I will address in some detail. But overall, for roughly fifty years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance in this country, such that overall income inequality remained remarkably low.
But the social pyramid has now grown top-heavy. We now have too many “elite aspirants” competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within. Growing social fragility has manifested itself in collapsing levels of trust in state institutions and unraveling social norms governing public discourse—and the functioning of democratic institutions.
This is, of course, a bare-bones summary. The meat of the book will unpack these ideas, relate them to the statistical trends for key economic and social indicators, and trace some archetypal human stories of people buffeted by these social forces. Although my focus here is primarily on America and Americans, the book will make forays into other parts of the world and into previous historical eras. Again, our crisis in America is not without precedent; we are in a position to learn from our past.
Interviews with Turchin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcrbz4EoTfw&ab_channel=INETOxford
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R-AotyKPDU&ab_channel=UncertainThings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsbLZYDWLfQ&t=29s&ab_channel=TheRealignment
