Cliodynamics Of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites And The Path Of Political Disintegration

>> Niall Ferguson: Hello, my name's Naill Ferguson. I'm the Milbanke Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and I chair the Hoover History Working group. We've been very fortunate indeed to have as our guest Peter Turchin, project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, also research associate at the University of Oxford and an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut.

Peter is somebody who has pioneered an entire discipline, a kind of subfield of history or clear dynamics. His approach has been to take quantitative methods, complexity theory, and a lot of computation, and apply those two historical problems, and in particular to the problems of the rise and fall of polities.

His books include Historical Dynamics, which was published back in 2003, War and Peace and War 2006, and most recently, End Times, which takes ideas that he's tended to apply to the distant past and applies them to the recent history of the United States. Peter, it's a great pleasure to have you here at the Hoover history working group, welcome.

And let me ask you a fairly straightforward question to give you a chance to set out your stall. How is it you think societies rise and then fall? What are the things that cause them to fall apart, whether it's in revolution or civil war? Give us a kind of reduced form version of your theory.

>> Peter Turchin: Well, it really is the question of social cooperation. So in my book outer society, I devote quite a lot of space to it. The idea is that our wonderful, large scale, complex societies, organized states, they're based on some degree of cooperation, especially between the rulers and within the elites, but also between the elites and the rest of us, 99%.

Now, in very general terms, as long as social cooperation is working well, the societies, the politics, function well and can flourish. But when social cooperation breaks down, especially when the inter elite conflict starts to take over, right, then that's when we get into trouble, we get dysfunctional governance and oftentimes collapse, but not necessarily.

>> Niall Ferguson: Inequality plays quite a big part in your theory, and I think, if I understand it, it's rising inequality that is one of the warning signs of approaching trouble. Does that mean you're a Marxist in all by name or is there something else that differentiates your view from the old 19th and 20th century theories of the Marxists?

>> Peter Turchin: So inequality, to me, is not a driving force. I think you got it right, it's a very good sign or a proxy for processes that are undermining their social cooperation and undermining the functionality of our states. All right, so the actual drivers are, because think about this, inequality is not something that people can measure.

You ask somebody in the streets what's the Gini number of United States, 99.9% would have no idea. No, what matters is what people feel on their skin. Now, for the great majority of the American population, especially the workers, they know, they feel it in their bones that their lives are worse than their parents.

So they feel that they're sliding down, they're losing out. So the technical term for this in the theory that we have developed, is popular immiseration, declining or stagnating living standards of the population. But of course, when a population is getting immiserated, our wonderful economists continue to churn wealth, the wealth has to go somewhere.

The wealth goes to the economic elites. These are the people who manage and own corporations and other businesses, all right. And as the time accumulates over the past 40 years, for example, the numbers of wealth holders, and especially Uber wealthy, explodes. So, for example, the numbers of people with 10 million or more dollars in their wealth has increased by a factor of ten, tenfold over the past 40, 45 years.

And so that creates another problem that leads to what you call elite overproduction, but maybe I'll give you a chance to ask another question.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, yes, you're queuing me up to talk about elite overproduction. You give the example of the mass production of people with master's degrees in business and law, and you show that they're a rising share of the us population.

But in addition to elite overproduction, you emphasize elite fragmentation, which I guess is illustrated by the extreme partisanship of American politics today. So all of this seems to imply that the country that we're living in, the United States, is in danger of some kind of crisis. And you, indeed, well before the fact, suggested that 2020 might be another of those years when social political instability might spike, as it did in 1870, as it did in 1920, as I think it did in 1970.

And it looks like you were right. How worried are you about the United States in the 2020s? Should we expect this crisis to worsen, and what forms do you think it's going to take?

>> Peter Turchin: Yes, I'm very worried, in fact, I became very worried when I started applying the historical lessons we learned from analyzing historical states as complex societies to the state in which I live, the United States.

This happened during the two thousands. And in 2010, I published the forecast based on the theory, which predicted that ten years later we would get into crisis. And this was done in order to do a scientific test of the theory. All right, I'm not a prophet, and I don't pretend to be one, but I am a scientist, and I want to know whether theories work or not.

And the best way to do that is to extract predictions from them and then test them with data. So, when I saw the data, I was shocked back in 2010, because United States looked like a very reasonable country, especially for an immigrant like me. I came from the Soviet Union, I left Soviet Union in 1977, all right?

And I arrived, actually, what now, in retrospect, looks like the peak period of social cooperation and functionality in the United States. But I didn't realize until I looked at the numbers, how deep and persistent the problems are. So until we solve these drivers, this immiseration, and elite overproduction, until we solve those drivers for instability, until we reverse them, I will continue to remain very worried.

>> Niall Ferguson: The only consolation I can offer anybody watching this video is that, when I read your most recent book, End Times, I thought perhaps the same model could be applied to China. And I wonder if you saw that review and add any response to it. I remember thinking that in many ways, China has as big a problem with inequality and immiseration.

It clearly has an overproduction of qualified young people. Indeed, it's so bad, they've had to conceal the youth unemployment numbers. And I wonder if elite fragmentation is just around the corner? Do you think there's a possibility that bad though the situation may be in the United States, it could turn out to be worse in China?

>> Peter Turchin: Without doubt, the theory applies to China. In fact, the previous great cycle, the cycle of the Qing empire, we recently published an article and it was amazing how all the data lined up, the way that theory predicts. However, keep in mind that there is a certain rhythm to these periods, these end times.

China has experienced a period of one century of national humiliation, from 1850 to 1950, roughly speaking. So, by 1970s and 1980s, it has just started coming out of it, and it has not yet accumulated all the negative trends. Remember, for example, United States, we are now in crisis, but the crisis started, the negative trends are traced back to late 1970s.

It takes time for all this to develop. Now, undoubtedly, if the Chinese leadership does not take our theory seriously, in about 30, 40, 50 year time, they will be in the same situation. But now they are not. But let me qualify it, I have not done as careful study on China as several other countries.

So let me just go by what I see happening in the popular news, in the media. First of all, remember that China has a baby bust, they are so worried about it. But it is from the point of view of societal stability, this is actually a plus. Because the numbers of young people who enter the labor market at all the different levels is shrinking, whereas the economy grows still quite reasonably well and the new positions open up.

In fact, about ten years ago, China has exhausted its inexhaustible labor supply. So yes, now I have read these persistent reports over the past couple years, that young college graduates, the jobless rate amongst them is very high. Now, this is definitely a worrying sign, but the question is whether it will start to undermine the stability when it accumulates over the period of a decade or several decades.

So let's see how and well it will develop. Finally, so the third leg on which are theory stands is the state health, a big part of it is state legitimacy. Many people doubt the sociological polls that Chinese respect their governance institutions much, much more than Americans are. But traveling in China and talking to many other people, it looks like these numbers reflect some reality.

If that is correct, then losing legitimacy, also a lengthy process. The government has to do stupid and bad things for like 10, 20 years before they lose all that accumulated well wishing from the population. All right, again, I'm just telling you looking at the different aspects of the theory, some of them don't look so good, but others look better.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, Peter, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you. I don't know of any scholar working certainly in the field of history more ambitious than you and producing more interesting and wide reaching findings. The book, the most recent book, End Times, came out last year, and I highly recommend it.

That went, make you sleep any easier. The paper that we just heard Peter present at the Hoover History working group, higher dynamics of end times elites, counter elites, and the path of political disintegration. If things go to hell in a handcart, you'll know that Peter saw it coming, not as a prophet, but as somebody who applies cloud dynamics, quantitative methods to the processes of historical change.

Peter Turchin, thank you so much for joining us, and I'm not sure I look forward to the next book if it's as frightening as the last one, but I'm sure I'll learn a lot from it.

>> Peter Turchin: Thank you very much, Naill. And I have also learned a lot from your books, so it's a pleasure to talk to another author and hear such praise from you.

>> Niall Ferguson: Thanks so much.