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Book review: End Times by Peter Turchin [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-16
I like books about what is sometimes called “Big History”. End Times is an attempt to apply Peter Turchin’s science of history to our present position. Turchin has led the creation of what he calls Cliodynamics , which attempts to use modern data science to study history. He admits that studying history requires complexity theory and is not an exact science. I suspect that at best forecasting history is about where weather forecasting was in 1900. Still his ideas seem interesting.
The subtitle is “Elites, Counter-Elites and the path of Political Disintegration”. According to Turchin, over-production of elites is the most common element in political instability. The other cause is what he calls popular immiseration, where average people get smaller and smaller shares of a society’s wealth. It is not hard to see how this could apply to the United State today.
Turchin likes to use the measure he calls relative wages, which is the wages earned by a person divided by GDP per capita. The peak of relative wages in the US was in the 1960s. By now, it has fallen to nearly half the peak. This means that almost all of the growth in wealth in the US since the 1960s has gone to the wealthiest, what Turchin refers to as the wealth pump. Most people are only dimly aware of this directly. But they do realize that it is getting harder and harder to maintain a middle class lifestyle, especially home ownership. The direction of the economy is probably more important psychologically then the absolute state. The decline of the middle class in America is demoralizing for a lot of people.
The over-production of elites is a more original idea, but you can see how it might apply to Trump’s movement. Trump himself felt that other influential people did not give him the respect he deserved. It probably never occurred to him that his dishonesty and narcissism might be the reason. People like Steve Bannon, Peter Hegseth, or Stephen Miller would be unknowns if they had not attached themselves to Trump. They went to great lengths to try to become important people. They claim they despise elites, but that is because they want to become the new elite. Even Elon Musk was dissatisfied with his place in the world, since he seems to think he deserves to be a world historical figure. Everybody with a fancy degree or a lot of money thinks they should be in charge. There are not enough elite positions to satisfy them all.
The book was written shortly after the end of the first Trump administration. I think that at least at that time Turchin did not understand just how much Trump’s populism is fake. The move to plutocracy happening now will not help the average person at all. Turchin points out that the US has been a plutocracy for a long time now. He cites the well known study by Martin Gilens that the policy preferences of the top 10 percent of income almost always prevail.
I think that whatever direction we look at our current predicament we have to figure out a way to have an income distribution more like that in the 1960s, when a full time job usually provided a middle class lifestyle. To do this will require greatly reducing the political power of the very wealthy, and somehow greatly restructuring the economy. Easier said than done.
Trying to prevent too many people fighting for power by any means is also easier said than done.
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