The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse (The Atlantic)

[entremet]

This article is about historian Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut at Storrs.. His historical models have proven to be scarily accurate. He based his models on over 10,000 years of recorded history and rise and falls of civilizations.

He has codified Iron Laws that make his models.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can't cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they've succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of "megahistories," such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin's historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: "At this point," Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, "I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him."

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The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. "You are ruling class," he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily "elite overproduction"—the tendency of a society's ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.

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Long article, but really good. If you like the stuff from Jared Diamond and Noah Harari, who have penned similar works, you'd find interest here.

My peeps at the Socialism OT are probably not surprised at his conclusion.

The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse

A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.

www.theatlantic.com

I personally see this in the tech sector. You have companies like Door Dash, Uber, and so on, creating a lot of value to a few elites--early investors, and creating a permanent underclass.

 

[Weiss]

God, I'm so fucking terrified of what the future is going to bring.

 

[RedHeat]

Just a question in regards to his "you are the ruling class" quote, will people start drawing negative and similar lines for people who enjoy luxuries like videogames and such?

 

[That1GoodHunter]

No theoretical model is going to matter when predicting this shit. Climate change means every coming decade being worse is a given, done deal. There, saved you the trouble.

 

[Joco]

I've pretty much resigned myself to the idea that every year will become increasingly worse in my lifetime. Shit sucks.

 

[Regulus Tera]

Climate change alone is proof that we are not going back to any sort of status quo.

 

[entremet]

Just a question in regards to his "you are the ruling class" quote, will people start drawing negative and similar lines for people who enjoy luxuries like videogames and such?

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No, he clarifies this in the article.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners' living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners' lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

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[Penny Royal]

While I like Turchin's approach and the idea of Cliodynamics, he's pretty unaware that his position as a tenured professor very much places him in the elite class.

I think the criticisms about human variability are probably valid, but that can be resolved by better tuning of his models, rather than an outright rejection of his math which a lot of historians will no doubt be wont to do.

 

[Amnesty]

Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.

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I'm sceptical about anything like 'iron laws' when it comes to social theory. I also think this line of reasoning falls prey to believing that because things were like X before they will be like X in the future, without accounting for a lot of things that can muddy the waters, like technology that can bring with it unprecedented alterations in how humans interact with each other (consider how we're still in the early years of the internet and that level of radically different mass communication - it's not something you can use historical data to model since it has little precedent). I think any model that tries to present a grand, unifying architecture is ultimately fragile and still beholden to potential contingencies that could shake things up in unforeseen ways.

 

[Dyle]

Every subsequent decade of our lives will be worse or harder than the previous ones. Climate change alone will ensure that.

 

[texhnolyze]

So it's all thanks to capitalism. The rich getting richer, while the poor going the opposite way.

 

[Penny Royal]

I'm sceptical about anything like 'iron laws' when it comes to social theory. I also think this line of reasoning falls prey to believing that because things were like X before they will be like X in the future, without accounting for a lot of things that can muddy the waters, like technology that can bring with it unprecedented alterations in how humans interact with each other (consider how we're still in the early years of the internet and that level of radically different mass communication - it's not something you can use historical data to model since it has little precedent). I think any model that tries to present a grand, unifying architecture is ultimately fragile and still beholden to potential contingencies that could shake things up in unforeseen ways.

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Did you read the article? It addresses the proposition of uniqueness that historians claim means you can't make these kinds of rules.

 

[Deleted member 18823]

I thought this is about the next inevitable global pandemic. I believe Climate Change alone is enough to ensure that the coming decades are going to be very rough. Ughhh

 

[Zip]

So it's all thanks to capitalism. The rich getting richer, while the poor going the opposite way.

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Could be seen as an inevitable consequence of capitalism.

Rules and regulations have been devised to help prevent the elite groups from getting out of hand, but the problem is that those same elites have the ability to modify the rules towards their own interests. They are often the ones making the rules in the first place anyway, and will always at least have a seat at the table.

So over time the rules get chipped away and elites become more and more unfettered with amassing of wealth and separation from the experiences of the majority of the population. Eventually there's a snap back break, new rules and regulations may be set up while sentiment is strong, and elite power is somewhat reduced or altered. Then the process begins anew. And that's even assuming it doesn't end in dictatorship.

All this coming to a head while at the same time countries around the world are facing crisis after crisis is setting up a lot of dominoes to be knocked over. Shit seems like it is going to get bad around the world. Democracies around the world already seem on the back heel.

 

[halcali]

God, I'm so fucking terrified of what the future is going to bring.

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I'll protect you~ <3

 

[Sordid Plebeian]

 

[Sectorseven]

There was another article recently about the overproduction of elites and it is something I had never considered.

edit: apparently this is the same article, or at least it's quoting the same guy.

 

[Thorn]

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This.

 

[maxxpower]

Crazy how we killed the planet in only 200 years.

 

[TrueSloth]

Thank you, capitalism.

 

[Muppet of a Man]

As a society, we must stop participating in convenience culture, value quality over disposability, push to rebuild a welfare state that redistributes wealth away from the few back to the many, increase public investment in basic and applied sciences (with a focus on building out sustainable energy production and sustainable infrastructure in general), and increase and enforce a simple progressive tax system.

Things are out of balance. Let's put them back into balance.

 

[John Rabbit]

Article doesn't even mention automation; that alone is going to seriously rock all the boats for the next decade at least.

 

[MetagrossMaster]

The conclusion is correct, but the reasoning is flawed. He claims that there exists a group of people who are well-off and educated, but do not have enough "elite positions". And apparently, these people (the "counter-elites" are the ones who are driving all the social unrest, by riling up the people after their living standards slip. Look at this passage:

Trump's former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a "paradigmatic example" of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. "He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge," Turchin said.

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How is Bannon an example of a "counter-elite"? He got an elite position as an investment banker. Turchin sidesteps the question by talking about political power, but that isn't an answer. Elites are not solely (or even mostly) political elites, something which Turchin seems to acknowledge elsewhere. It is also funny for him to talk about how "counter-elites" align with the common man. Does anyone believe that Bannon or Trump give a single shit about the common man? These people simply used and exacerbated existing prejudices in the US for their own ends. This is an old tactic, used by elites in this country and others for thousands of years. This analysis of social unrest seems pretty poor, which is not surprising, given this person isn't an actual historian.

 

[Amnesty]

Did you read the article? It addresses the proposition of uniqueness that historians claim means you can't make these kinds of rules.

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I don't think the article sufficiently addresses the point and actually kinda does this 'those old fuddy duddy historians' thing and glosses over much refutation of his work. It gives voice to a dissenter - Dingxin Zhao, for like a paragraph and then goes back to the 'historians are allergic to science' rhetoric. I don't know, it's not very persuasive and seems to be making claims that Turchin's methodology is sound science, but doesn't really explain how that is the case very well.

Back to my point- I'm not even really talking about 'uniqueness' so much as unforeseen contingencies, in that its flawed reasoning to conclude that X will continue to be the case because it was the case in the past and that we can actually determine this with 'iron laws' or whatever.

 

[Melpomene]

This is an interesting article, although I find some of the smaller trends brought up (e.g. the "50-year cycle" of political violence in the U.S. with the suspicious-no-matter-how-you-justify-it-statistically exclusion of the Civil War)... questionable. I disagree with staunchly traditional historians that history can't even theoretically be quantified or analyzed for persistent trends, but I also don't know that this analysis is entirely accurate - in fact, even if we are right at the cusp of an explosion of civil unrest, I still don't think I would be willing to confidently state I endorse this model. It's full of tiny holes that I think exhibit that its laws aren't "Iron," and a model is only as good as its constructor, who is unavoidably human. In other words, I guess I come down around where the article places Steven Pinker.

Anyway, I think the broader message, that policy ought to be enacted with an eye to a more distant future and the broader past, is on-point, and even if this model isn't perfect, it's almost certainly a very valuable lens through which to look at history, and probably one most historians haven't given enough attention.

 

[Oddish1]

I remember reading this article before and the way he frames Trumpism as an anti-elite movement bothers me. It gives too much cover and benefit of the doubt for the inherent racism and authoritarism that Trumpism includes. I think his ideas of elite and counter-elite are too murky. Maybe his books explain his ideas better.

 

[Sanctuary]

Crazy how we killed the planet in only 200 years.

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Yep. Just said this the other day. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and we've done more damage in the last one hundred years than all of the previous damage across the previous years combined. Our greatest conveniences led to the most overall destruction.

 

[RCSI]

Now wait just a minute, who does he think he is, Hari Sel...

...he likens himself to Hari Seldon...

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Well oh god damn it, beaten by the article.

 

[daveo42]

This very well be the decade we get actual populist revolutions and the downfall of free market capitalism. Or maybe not and the world will just kill itself to make a few people richer before they jump on their rocket ships to flee a dying world.

 

[Aaronrules380]

While I like Turchin's approach and the idea of Cliodynamics, he's pretty unaware that his position as a tenured professor very much places him in the elite class.

I think the criticisms about human variability are probably valid, but that can be resolved by better tuning of his models, rather than an outright rejection of his math which a lot of historians will no doubt be wont to do.

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Yeah. competition over those positions is super fierce. Like comparatively since he mentions people who can reach over 100,000 people as elites, the number of total tenured professor positions in the US is around 30000 from what I can find and the number of youtubers with subscriber counts over 100k is over 230000. In other words having a tenured professorship is way, way rarer than being able to have a platform followed by over 100k people

 

[JaseC64]

Millennials never stood a chance.

 

[Deleted member 13188]

Yeah you don't need to be Hari Seldon to realise the shit is gonna hit the fan. I wish I could get paid to write about how fucked we all are... (or our children at least, we saw the peak you guys).

 

[Aaronrules380]

Honestly I think one of the biggest reasons to be skeptical of models like this is that they've had nowhere near enough time to demonstrate any practical predictive power. Having a huge data set behind you might seem nice, but it's not actually that hard to create a totally irrelevant model that seems to capture the data perfectly because you're looking for trends that might not exist. For example, a pattern of random noise can be fit with an equation perfectly if you make it complex enough, but that equation is ultimately meaningless. And while it sounds like they were right about some stuff from when they published the model in 2012, I don't think they've shown enough data to prove that their model has any meaningful long term predictive value. Especially since it's not clear how precise the correct prediction is

 

[samoyed]

I will read this tomorrow. Just a comment on the current topic.

Hari Seldon is Marx for sci-fi nerds.

 

[Deleted member 4461]

It's interesting that the issue is not the rich getting richer - but specifically the poor becoming poorer relative to where they were before. Incidentally, I believe this becomes the case as long as some people are fighting to stay where we are...

For example, Conservatives don't ever want to improve lifestyles in response to changing environments. The minimum wage thing is a perfect example - instead of allowing people to live and at the very least keep where we are, their lives become worse with an increased cost of living. They fall for counter-elites (on either side of the spectrum), and we keep pushing downwards.

 

[leder]

I guess I agree is at confirms my priors, but I'm not all that sold on this guy's method. The article trying to lend him credence by Ross Douthat doesn't do him any favors in my world lol. Also stuff like this:

In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn't view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. "You reach hundreds of thousands.") Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. "You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites," Turchin said.

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Like... this just doesn't make any sense. Of course in his system a professor at a prestigious university would be an ideological elite. And just the fact that his books and this article exist reveal his argument for why he's not to be complete bullshit.

 

[samoyed]

I like the positive comparison to Diamond.


I think GGS is important for mainstreaming a materialist view of history but the actual history seems to be shaky.

 

[Yoshimitsu126]

What a Brave New World we are facing and for the wealthy to control.

 

[takriel]

While I like Turchin's approach and the idea of Cliodynamics, he's pretty unaware that his position as a tenured professor very much places him in the elite class.

I think the criticisms about human variability are probably valid, but that can be resolved by better tuning of his models, rather than an outright rejection of his math which a lot of historians will no doubt be wont to do.

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That's my issue with him. This guy is elite as fuck. The fact he doesn't want to realize this is just laughable.

 

[Foffy]

"Could?" How cute.

It will get worse. Significantly so. Climate will just keep on burning on, and the issues of a rising precariat class only increase with recessions, depressions, pandemics, and climate catastrophes. When the gig economy hires temp workers to help evict people who are behind on payments, you know late-stage capitalism is here in full form. All that's missing is the mainstreaming of paying for clean air as a real commodification pipeline.

Begin to ask yourselves how people can be getting richer as more Americans are sinking into an abyss, and you have the general direction regarding failures of policy and political vision. Things can get better, but they won't, and in America's specific case, how anybody can imagine anything other than deterioration and outright collapse is incredibly blind to the wounds of the country now starting to become fatal.

I'm very much on the same page as Chris Hedges on this issue, and this was long before we saw the GOP become an insurrectionist party and have to entertain fucking coups in the future.

 

[Josh378]

Real question is, at what point will families who are desperate for food and water start killing and breaking into people houses.

Once the middle class is gone and all that is left is upper and lower class, I expect all he'll to break loose.

 

[Morrigan]

Very interesting article and it has given me a lot to think about. But I have to agree that the claim that being a tenured professor isn't an elite position is some breath-takingly blind spot from this guy, heh.

Also, the headline doesn't really match the article content a whole lot. Or rather it doesn't go into predictive details. What will make this coming decade "worse", and worse in what way? The article doesn't even mention climate change, which is odd.

The conclusion is correct, but the reasoning is flawed. He claims that there exists a group of people who are well-off and educated, but do not have enough "elite positions". And apparently, these people (the "counter-elites" are the ones who are driving all the social unrest, by riling up the people after their living standards slip. Look at this passage:



How is Bannon an example of a "counter-elite"? He got an elite position as an investment banker. Turchin sidesteps the question by talking about political power, but that isn't an answer. Elites are not solely (or even mostly) political elites, something which Turchin seems to acknowledge elsewhere. It is also funny for him to talk about how "counter-elites" align with the common man. Does anyone believe that Bannon or Trump give a single shit about the common man? These people simply used and exacerbated existing prejudices in the US for their own ends. This is an old tactic, used by elites in this country and others for thousands of years. This analysis of social unrest seems pretty poor, which is not surprising, given this person isn't an actual historian.

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I interpreted the "align" part as the counter-elites exploiting the commoners for their (the counter-elites) own goals, rather than the counter-elites caring about their plight. An antiquated or medieval equivalent would be a group of nobles convincing commoners that the current rulers are corrupt and must be deposed for the common good, when in reality they just want to seize power for themselves and use the commoners to further their own goals.

 

[0h-so-Cold]

So basically Mad Max in the next what 40 years?

 

[Feep]

ResetERA does love a good doom and gloom.

I don't know. Climate change is the obvious ticking time bomb but the true global disaster-level stuff won't be taking place before 2030, though it may well be too late to do anything about it before that date. It'll "just" be increased levels of natural disaster until then, for the most part.

I have some level of optimism, but holy shit do right wing governmental systems need to purged from every country on the planet, pronto. Every year that Republicans are able to take any branch of government back is an absolute disaster for the planet. Even Democrats need to step up with the Green New Deal, but some early promises from Biden are promising.

 

[Cotton McKnight]

Honestly I think one of the biggest reasons to be skeptical of models like this is that they've had nowhere near enough time to demonstrate any practical predictive power. Having a huge data set behind you might seem nice, but it's not actually that hard to create a totally irrelevant model that seems to capture the data perfectly because you're looking for trends that might not exist. For example, a pattern of random noise can be fit with an equation perfectly if you make it complex enough, but that equation is ultimately meaningless. And while it sounds like they were right about some stuff from when they published the model in 2012, I don't think they've shown enough data to prove that their model has any meaningful long term predictive value. Especially since it's not clear how precise the correct prediction is

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Thank you for saying this (got the vibe early in the article), it is exactly what I've been thinking. I know plenty of people that like to use cherry picked data to support some pretty horrendous stuff as the right way.

It's also articles (and headlines) like these that makes some people say f'you got mine, gonna watch the world burn now. We need less of that attitude going forward.

 

[Telamon]

Does his modelling take into account things like climate change, AI, drone armies, pandemics, the threat of nuclear weapons etc? I'm not trying to poke holes in his theory, I'm just genuinely curious. For most of human ("civilised") history, life from century to century wasn't that different. If you could take someone from the 12th century and drop them into the 15th century, some things will have changed but, other than language changes, life will still be very much comprehensible. Now take someone from 1721 and drop them into 2021 and see how they cope.

My point being, I can see how modelling would have worked in the past when technologies advanced extremely slowly, but unless it takes into account some of these major changes, I'm not sure how much use it will be.

That's not to put a positive spin on it by the way, it may be that things will be even worse than the model predicts. Yey.

 

[peppersky]

i think there might have been a guy with a funny beard who figured this shit like a hundred years ago

 

[entremet]

i think there might have been a guy with a funny beard who figured this shit like a hundred years ago

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The biggest difference here is that Turchin has ideas, but he's not a policy guy at all. He admits that it's above his pay grade.

He does has some recommendations, but they don't follow consistent ideological threads.

 

[Brawly Likes to Brawl]

Article doesn't even mention automation; that alone is going to seriously rock all the boats for the next decade at least.

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Seeing the negative reactions to $15/hr min wage being federalized gives me very little confidence that automation will be approached with any sort of caution. Too many people see certain forms of labor as not deserving any sort of meaningful compensation, they'd probably be happy that they no longer have to interact with riff raff to buy their groceries.

 

[Xando]

The fall of the american empire will hit the US hard and make the failed governing system even more apparent but overall i'm pretty optimistic.

There is huge progress in a lot of fields happening right now that will improve life by a considerable measure.