introduction

Part 1.
Historical dynamics of power

Chapter 1.
Elites, Elite Overproduction, the Road to Crisis
Chapter 2.
One Step Back: Lessons from History

Part 2.
Factors driving instability

Chapter 3.
“Farmers are disgusting.”
Chapter 4.
Revolutionary Army
Chapter 5.
ruling class
Chapter 6.
Why is America a plutocracy?

Part 3.
Crisis and its aftermath

Chapter 7.
The collapse of the state
Chapter 8.
Histories of the Near Future
Chapter 9.
The Wealth Pump and the Future of Democracy

Acknowledgements
supplement
A1.
New historical science
A2.
Historical Macroscope
A3.
Structural dynamics approach
main
References
Search

Competition and conflict within the elite, anti-elites who failed to enter the elite,
Mass impoverishment leads to recurrent political instability.

In his book, Re-Enlightenment, Steven Pinker argues that the world is getting better and that science and rational thinking are the driving forces behind social progress.
But looking at the chaotic situation today, it's hard to be optimistic that the world will necessarily get better.
According to Peter Turchin, all complex human societies have experienced recurring waves of political instability, and modern times are no exception.
Turchin examines some 300 crises that have occurred on every continent around the world, from the Napoleonic era to the present day, and analyzes why societies fall into crisis.
According to him, four structural drivers lead to cyclical political instability.
These include impoverishment leading to mass mobilization potential, elite overproduction resulting in internal conflict within the elite, weakened fiscal soundness and weakened state legitimacy, and geopolitical factors.
The most important driving factor is competition and conflict within the elite, which is a reliable predictor of an approaching crisis.
For today's America or other large, powerful empires, geopolitics is of little importance (according to Arnold Toynbee, empires die not by murder but by suicide).


It is clear that the United States (and the world order it leads) is entering a turbulent period.
Many people point to Trump's election as a symbol of that.
How did Trump become president of the United States? Trump is not the first "super-rich" person to run for president without political experience.
Steve Forbes (who lost in the Republican primary in 1996 and 2000) and billionaire Ross Perot (who ran as an independent in 1992 and 1996) ran unsuccessfully.
What's the difference between these two? First, the impoverishment of the American public is far greater in 2016 and 2024 than it was in 1990. (According to Angus Deaton's "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism," life expectancy in the United States has been declining since 2014, and especially for white workers aged 45-54 with a high school education or less.)
Americans who felt left behind expressed their discontent with the ruling class by voting for Trump (according to Turchin, the Democratic Party, which had been the party of the working class during the New Deal era, became the party of the top 1% and 10%, and the Republican Party, which had been the political vehicle of the top 1%, was taken over by a populist faction).


Second, the overproduction of elites in the United States was at work.
This can be confirmed by several indicators. First, the number of super-rich people in the United States (those with assets of more than $10 million) began to increase rapidly starting in the 1980s.
The number of millionaires increased from 66,000 households in 1983 to 693,000 households in 2019 (inflation-adjusted figure).
Additionally, the number of wealthy individuals seeking to become federal representatives (both House and Senate) has been increasing since the 1990s, with the number of wealthy aspirants running for office nearly doubling between 2000 and 2018.
And highly educated people are being mass-produced.
American universities are churning out graduates with advanced degrees like master's and doctorates, but by the 2000s, the number of positions available for these graduates was far below the number of graduates with advanced degrees (Guy Standing, famous for his basic income argument, calls these frustrated elite aspirants the "precariat").
The impoverishment of the masses, the overproduction of the elite, and the resulting conflict within the elite are increasingly undermining our civic cohesion.
At the same time, the social contract that underpins American society is weakening and the national spirit of cooperation is fading.
The result is a collapse of trust in state institutions and a dismantling of the social norms and democratic institutions that govern public discourse.


History is driven by structural forces:
Historical Path Changed by Elite Overproduction

The factors that triggered the American Civil War were mass impoverishment and elite overproduction.
Between the 1820s and 1860s, relative wages (the share of GDP paid to workers) fell by nearly 50% (similar to what has happened in the last 50 years!).
The impact this had on the well-being of ordinary people was enormous.
Life expectancy decreased by 8 years and height decreased.
Signs of discontent were also evident in the greatly increased number of deadly riots in the cities (38 between 1855 and 1860).
And there was elite overproduction.
Since the 1820s, most of the fruits of growth have been concentrated in the hands of the elite, whose numbers and wealth have increased dramatically.
In particular, the economic interests of the wealthy Southerners, who had originally been America's ruling class, clashed with those of the new millionaires in the North, who had their roots in railroads, steel, and mining.
As the number of elites increased rapidly, competition for government positions intensified.
History books tell us that the Civil War was a conflict over slavery, but in reality it was a fight over "slavery politics."
Lincoln initially did not seek to abolish slavery, but only opposed its expansion into new states. However, after he was elected, the South seceded from the Union, triggering war.

Let's look at the 2011 Egyptian revolution (the starting point of the Arab Spring).
We've heard that the Egyptian revolution was the result of massive popular protests against excessive police violence, the lack of civil liberties and freedom of expression, high unemployment, rising food prices, and low wages.
To some extent, that is true.
But there were forces moving beneath the surface.
Before the 1990s, only a small minority of young Egyptians had achieved a high level of education, but the Mubarak regime, with its modernization goals, massively expanded university education, and the number of university graduates increased rapidly after 1995.
But the number of positions available for young people with these degrees remained largely unchanged, and unemployed graduates turned out as revolutionary forces in mass anti-regime protests.
There was conflict within the elite.
Mubarak, Sadat's successor, broke with the centuries-old military rule of Egypt since the Mamluks when he took power and groomed his son, Gamal Mubarak, to succeed him.
When mass protests erupted in 2011, the military stood by and watched as Mubarak's regime fell.
Egypt returned to military rule after the military overthrew the disparate forces that had seized power through revolution (Morsi's regime).

Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, which dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991 with the Belarus Agreements, were similar in that they had similar cultures and were anocracy states moving from dictatorship to democracy.
But it is ironic that Ukraine, the most democratic of these, is the poorest and most unstable, while Belarus, the most authoritarian, enjoys relative prosperity and stability.
The reason the 2014 revolution in Ukraine succeeded and the 2021 uprising in Belarus failed was because the ruling groups had different characteristics.
In Ukraine, the wealth pump created by the mass privatization of state-owned enterprises after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to overproduction by oligarchs, conflicts among them, and repeated collapse of the state.
In Belarus, the state retained ownership of major industrial conglomerates, preventing the rise of oligarchs.
In 2020, mass protests against the Lukashenko regime erupted, but contrary to popular expectations, the regime did not collapse.
Lukashenko has built strong links with the military elite, and there have been no defectors.
In Belarus, there was no wealth pump, no oligarchs and no conflict between them.

Lessons from History: How to Escape the Crisis

What was the conclusion of the crisis database cases collected by Turchin? The overall conclusion is bleak.
There were also many cases of significant population decline (due to war, revolution, epidemic disease, etc.), and in about two-thirds of cases, large-scale downward migration was observed, with elites falling to the ranks of the commoners.
There are very few instances where societies have weathered a crisis with minimal or no major impact.
Representative examples include Britain and Russia, which survived the revolutionary period in the 19th century, and the United States after the Great Depression in the 20th century.
Britain in the mid-19th century was undoubtedly a politically unstable society.
As unprecedented, long-term economic growth took hold, the number of economic elites and college students began to increase significantly.
Comparing the riots and resulting deaths from 1830 to 1867 with those of earlier periods provides insight into the extent of political instability Britain was experiencing.


However, Britain got through this period without a large-scale civil war or revolution.
First of all, because it was a vast empire, some of the overproduced elite emigrated to various parts of the world (such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand).
And there were important institutional reforms.
As the uprisings continued, Britain's political elite began to feel the need for decisive reform.
In 1832, the right to vote was extended, in 1834 the Poor Law was reformed, and over the next two decades numerous further reforms took place (including the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846).
Through this process, real wages in Britain doubled over the 50 years after 1867.
As one historian has noted, from the 1820s onwards, British elites demonstrated a remarkable ability to reform institutions and transform themselves from a fiscal-military state into an administrative state capable of meeting the demands of an increasingly complex commercial and industrial society.

Another example is the period of the Great Compression (a phenomenon in which the income gap between the rich and the poor and the wage gap between workers narrowed rapidly due to strong tax policies such as tax increases) that lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s.
During the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, America's economic and political elite paid no attention to the well-being of the working class.
But as riots became more frequent (notably the 1917 St. Louis riots that left 170 dead and the 1921 Tulsa riots that left 300 dead) and the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union heightened anxiety, the idea that measures to stabilize the situation were needed began to take hold among elites.
Through legislation, collective bargaining by labor unions was legalized, a minimum wage system was introduced, and a social security system was established.
In 1924, the passage of the Immigration Act reduced immigration, creating a powerful impetus for real wage increases over the next several decades.
At the same time, the Great Depression partially eliminated elite overproduction (the number of millionaires fell from 1,600 in 1925 to less than 900 in 1950).

Predictions of historical dynamics: What about South Korea?

Turchin argues that there are important recurring patterns in history, and that these can be observed across the entire span of history, spanning the past 10,000 years.
The field he leads is called Cliodynamics.
He began his research career as an ecologist and experienced the revolution brought about by complexity science in animal ecology in the 1980s, along with the development of computers.
It combined computer modeling and big data analysis to answer questions such as why many animal populations go through cycles of population growth and decline.
He has been applying this methodology to history since the 1990s.
In this respect, Turchin's analysis is unrelated to values ​​such as conservatism or progressivism.
We observe the laboratory with a cool-headedness, as if from the outside, and seek ways for society to change steadily without a cataclysmic event that could kill or injure many people.
South Korea has been producing an overabundance of elites by mass-producing college graduates since the 1980s, and inequality has worsened since the 2010s.
In a situation where conflict has already reached its peak, even the authority of the courts, which can be considered the most basic social agreement, is being undermined through martial law and the impeachment of the president.
According to Turchin's analysis, it is time for South Korea to gather its wisdom to understand where it is now, where it is going, and how to overcome this crisis.