The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The 'Decline' of Nations: How Elite Surplus and Inequality Lead to Societal Upheaval with Peter Turchin

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

(Conversation recorded on November 22nd, 2024)   The first few months of the new year have brought a cacophony of political news and power plays, bringing with it an uproar of public outrage in the United States and around the world. In the midst of an unprecedented moment in modern history, what can history – and even mathematics – teach us about moments of political unrest and upheaval?  In this episode, Nate is joined by complexity scientist, Peter Turchin, to discuss his work modeling the key factors that drive patterns of peace, turmoil, and revolution in nations throughout history - and how those connect to the situation in the United States today. Turchin outlines the cyclical nature of 'elite overproduction' and its role in political disintegration, emphasizing the importance of economic inequality and elite struggles for control. How does a declining standard of living, as seen in the U.S. over recent decades, affect a nation's stability, civic engagement, and levels of violence? In what ways has history been shaped by the 'wealth pump' moving economic power towards the hands of the few? Lastly, how can we use these historical lessons to strengthen our communities and act collectively in times of chaos and instability?    About Peter Turchin: Peter Turchin is a complexity scientist who works in the field of historical social science that he and his colleagues call Cliodynamics. His research interests lie at the intersection of social and cultural evolution,  historical macrosociology, economic history and cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Currently his main research effort is directing the Seshat Databank project (and its offshoot, CrisisDB) which builds and analyzes a massive historical database that enables us to empirically test predictions from theories attempting to explain why and how complex human societies evolved, and why they periodically experience political breakdown. Turchin has authored ten books. His most recent books are End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration and The Great Holocene Transformation (forthcoming).   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

We are now in situation of high sensitivity to initial conditions. Even a single individual, if they are in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place in the wrong time, they can push the trajectory either to really kill a civil war or put it on the trajectory of reforms and renovation. Unfortunately, this crisis periods are always taking long time to resolve. And unfortunately, fast resolution usually requires a sea of blood. You're listening to the Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today I'm joined by Complexity Scientist Peter Turchin to discuss his most recent recent research. research, analyzing the historical rise and fall of political tensions and turmoil in civilizations,

including what that can tell us about the current state of social discourse in the United States and the world. Peter Turchin is a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, research associate at the University of Oxford, and emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut. He is also the founder of the field of Clixtor. He is also the founder of the field of clio dynamics, which is the application of mathematical and dynamical system approaches to the study of history. Peter has written several books, including his most recent end times, elites, counter-elites, and the path of political disintegration, which is the subject of today's conversation. Peter's work toward understanding the factors that nudge entire societies towards either revolutions

and violence or reform and cooperation is, in my opinion, critical to avoid the collapse of the social contract, which is one of the five horsemen in my analysis at the Great Simplification. If you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament, where my team and I post special announcements related to the Great Simplification. You can find the link to describe in the show description. that. Please welcome Peter Turchin. Peter Turchin, long-time fan of your work. Good to see you. Glad to be here. So you have studied lots of topics that I am personally very interested in.

Ecology, evolution, zoology, history, sociology. What got you interested in all those things and putting them together? Well, from the beginning, I was interested in working in interdisciplinary fields. So my training was as a complexity scientist, doing computational modeling, data analysis, and things like that, and applying that to population dynamics of animals. But then about, you know, when I hit 40, I decided that I wanted to do something more challenging. And so it turns out that at that point history, that was back in the 1990s, history was the only scientific discipline that has not been mathematicized, not subjected to a complexity science approach. And that's why I started getting into that.

So I just had a curiosity, did you ever read Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, where he developed the concept of psycho-history? you sound like you kind of match up with that. Yes, I read it when I was 20, but it actually did not have much influence on me. In fact, it has not had much influence. Because he wrote it way back after World War II before we had any complexity science,

before we had understanding of what is mathematical chaos. And so it is in many ways his book, books, actually the trilogy, is quite naive. But I'm not knocking him down. His great author is one of my favorite science fiction authors, no question about it. So I'm going to get into your work you've written over 200 peer-reviewed science articles and many books. But you just mentioned a term mathematical chaos. Could you briefly define what you mean by that? Well, it's actually a very important idea for to understand the dynamics of our human societies, because human societies are complex systems. There are many different parts. They're interacting. There are feedback loops.

And those nonlinear feedback loops result in producing unpredictable behavior, which is called mathematical chaos. It turns out that when you see some system behaving quite erratically, One possibility is that there is some kind of external force, stochastic external force that actually drives the dynamics. But the other possibility is mathematical chaos. It's these multiple interactions within the system that generate those erratic-looking dynamics. So you can predict that a system has mathematical chaos. Once you understand it has mathematical chaos, can the results be predicted beyond the present moment. Only in the short-term future, because we never have perfect models for the systems

that we study, even simple systems, you know, like the planetary motions. And secondly, we never have perfect data. The problem with chaos is called sensitive dependence on initial conditions. So this is why we cannot predict whether more than seven or ten days in advance, because we cannot get the perfect snapshot of all the pressures and temperatures around the globe. You have, you know, weather stations, but there is also stuff in between. And so because of that, the weather is predictable until the trajectory start to diverge from the predicted trajectory because of our uncertain knowledge of initial conditions. Hopefully this will not go too much overhead for your listeners, but that's the reason why, for example, in Isaac Asim of psychohistory, it was not,

it's not credible to predict the behaviors of human societies 200 years ahead, or even one year ahead. Because as soon as the initial conditions change, it changes all the variables and it gets incredibly complex really fast, right? That's right. So this is why Dennis Meadows on a podcast here talked about the limits to growth model, And it wasn't a prediction of the 21st century. It was just a prediction of which scenarios would start to change at what point.

But after the change in flexion, beyond that, they weren't predictions. It was just potential scenarios. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's exactly, as you may know, back in 2010, I published a prediction that the United States is gradually sliding into a crisis, which should hit somewhere in the 2020. Now, one thing about complex systems is that they can be in different regimes. So the road to crisis is actually very generalized. And that's, you know, many hundreds of previous societies have followed on this very similar road on which United States was back in 2010, right?

But once, you were just right, once you, Dennis Ledos was quite right, once you get to the cusp, to the crisis. And the whole suite of avenues opens up for you. And that's where, you know, small push by, you know, by good leaders, for example, can either lead to good outcomes or no civil war, no bloodshed, or it could throw the society into such case that, you know, everybody will be very upset. So I want to start with your recent book called The End Times, Elites, Counter-Elepts, and the path of political disintegration,

where you outline the cyclical nature of the rise and collapse of states, as well as the primary contributing factor to those cycles. Could you briefly outline what each of those contributing factors are? Sure. So here in Vienna, I lead a group at Complexity Science Hub is called Social Complexity and Collapse. So we've actually amassed data on about 200 past societies that slide into crisis and then emerge from them. And so what we find is that complex human societies can actually function reasonably well, keep internal peace and order, maybe for a century, sometimes less, sometimes more.

But then inevitably, they get into situations of social turbulence, political disintegration, end times. So the question is, why? And our analysis showed that the most frequent factor that actually develops before the crisis is what we call elite overproduction. All right. So it's sort of like a game of musical chairs, all right, except that you don't take chairs out. You just keep adding players. So you start with 11 players, 10 chairs. You know, one person is an angry loser.

And it's 15, 20, 30, 40 players. You get a big crowd of angry losers. They start breaking rules. You can think back to 2016, for example, and what happened since then. And then you'll see that this is actually a good model for elite overproduction. So that is when the elites start becoming counter elites, those losers who did not gain the power positions that they aimed for, right? Former elites that were in the losing party as an example. Yeah, or the elites who are frustrated in getting into the power positions that they wished.

Not every frustrated elite aspirant is going to turn into counter elite. It takes a certain kind to do that. But the more losers you have, the more angry, frustrated elite aspirants you have, the higher is going to be the proportion. And then they start actually coalescing into a coalition to overthrow the ruling regime. And what were the other factors? There was elite overproduction, and then there was some other factors, right, in your book? Yeah, in fact, let's step back and ask, where does elite over production come from?

Why does it usually develop after long periods of internal peace and order? So what happens is that the elites are simply power holders, right? And the power comes in four different ways. as we know. First of all, it's coercion. Second, it's economic power, it's administrative power, and it's persuasion, right? Ideological power. All right. So when people are in power for a long time, generations change, and they get used to the system functioning well, and there is a temptation to reconfigure the system to be to function even better for themselves. So they become, we call it the selfish phase of the elites. And so what they do,

In different societies, they use different methods, but let's say, in the medieval times, the Lord would actually start oppressing peasants to extract more wealth from them. They turned on the wealth pump, which takes the wealth money from the poor, gives it to the rich. In the United States, this happened in 1970s. This is when the governing elites of our country have abandoned the new deal. institutions. Most importantly, institutions that ensured that fruits of economic growth would be divided fairly between workers and owners and managers of businesses. I'm sure you and your readers have seen those famous graph which shows the increase how the productivity of American workers keeps

increasing. And until late 1970s, compensation goes right in line with that. And then boom, compensation actually stops and even declines, whereas productivity. it keeps going up. So what happened to that gap? That's the wealth pump operating. All right. All that money went to create newly wealthy people in the United States. I'm really not happy that you only have an hour because I have three hours of questions for you.

But I will pick my best questions. So put on your zoology hat for a moment. is the elite overproduction thesis that you have kind of a predictable, just observational outcome of a biological species with access to huge energy surplus, but the biological species is a social species that creates hierarchy. And then what ends up happening is just a power law when there's this surplus running through the system. Well, although my PhD is in zoology, I am not a big fan of making direct comparisons, right? So what's important, at a much more abstract level, the mathematical models and the frameworks we developed for studying population dynamics, they can work quite well for societal dynamics.

But the actual mechanisms are different. It's not like predator prey relations. It has to do because humans are both predators and prey. right. So we have to look at the differentials in power. So that gives us a small proportion of powerholders. These are the elites. And then everybody else, the commanders. What percentage of a population are

elites, roughly? Roughly, it's 1, 2, 3%. But the whole point of elite or reproduction is that the social pyramid becomes more top-heavy. And so that's why, let's go back to this the wealth pump that has been operating in the United States since 1970s. Between 1980 and 2020, the number of Uber wealthy, people who own 10 million dollars or more in wealth, the households, increased by a factor tenfold, right? The population has grown by a factor 40%, but we have 10 times as many decadillionaires as we had before, all right? So,

saying that what is the property, clearly people who have $10 billion or more, they're part of their economic elites, right? Because they used to be 0.05%. Now they're close to 1%, but not quite. So you're Russian or a Russian ancestry. You were born in Russia. You hear in the news a lot about Russian oligarchs. Does the United States have an oligarch problem by a different label, perhaps?

Well, I actually grew up in the Soviet Union, a country that does not exist anymore, and I hope the United States will not do the same. But, yes, so what happened in Russia, and actually I have a chapter in my book in times talking about it, is that, first of all, during the run-up to the Russian Revolution, there was a huge reproduction of gentry, essentially, nobility. And in fact, revolution was done not. by peasants and workers, it was done by the frustrated members that came from those elite classes. Right. And fast forward to 1990, Soviet Union actually managed to solve this problem by essentially

exterminating the previous ruling class or driving them into the governor class. and it lasted for about 70 or so years, but then they had their own problems. They overproduced credential deletes. We have not talked much about that, but this is very important to look both at the wealth route and the credential drought. In particular, interestingly enough, they overproduced engineers, technical intelligence, and so called. And these are the ones who actually were in the squares, and they who overthrew the communist

regime. And that freed up a lot of people to generate a huge amount of wealth. Even as the economy of Russia was collapsing in the 1990s, a number of newly wealthy billionaires actually were making huge amounts of money. And in fact, for a while, they controlled the government during the 1990s. But then there was a sort of counter-revolution against them, by the military and administrative elites led by Putin, essentially. And that's why the oligarchs now are either in exile or some of them actually died, and the rest could remain. They are thoroughly subordinated to the bureaucratic apparatus in modern Russia.

So why does what you refer to as elite overproduction eventually lead to a collapse of society, is it really the overproduction of elites, or is it the elites relative to the services available to the general person and that delta gets wider and wider or some other factors? How does elite overproduction manifest in collapse or societal decay? Okay, well, yes, because we live in complex societies, situation is a bit more complex than I portrayed it a minute ago. So let's unpack some of those, you know, complexities. First of all, the wealth pump that I was talking about, it has three negative consequences.

The first one is the stagnation and even decline of the living standards of the general population. That creates popular discontent, right, and as a result of that mass mobilization. There are many people who are willing, who are actually dislike the regime and are willing to, help anybody who wants to overthrow it. But by themselves, they have no power. They have no organizational power. They have no wealth, they have no persuasion, and so on so forth. That's why production of Elysses is critical. Once you see counter elites show appear in large numbers and they start coalescing, they are the ones who actually organize and channel popular discontent. All right. So the combination of immiseration and elite were production, that's the

explosive one. Also, important are, I don't want to go into too much detail, but the state strength, it's, first of all, how much legitimacy it has, right, and also its fiscal health. These are also important factors, although they are not ubiquitous. Sometimes they play in the road to crisis, sometimes they don't. And finally, the geopolitical situation also can be an important factor. But the two main ones is elite production together with immiseration. Defining elites, there are four categories, the economic or financial, military or power, the ability to persuade and administrative, as you said. Which category of those four is most dominant in the United States today?

And how does this compare with the rest of the world? So in the United States, the elites, the power holders, come from two routes. One is the wealth route. The other one is credential. drought. And that's why some commentators consider that we have the 1% who is the wealth power and to the 10% who are the top, you know, people who have especially professional degrees such as law, you know, doctor or professor, and so on and so forth. So I have a PhD in ecological economics, which very few people care about. Am I an elite? So again, there is no such a hard

A bill, a billion ball, okay? It's just as in the wealth categories, you have billionaires, people who have $100 million, $10 million, and that people like myself, right? And that same thing is in other hierarchies. So, you know, a columnist of New York Times is much more influential that columnist at Idaho son and news. all sort of at different levels in this in the spearing it. So I've been lucky enough, even though I came penniless to this country, 47 years ago or so, right,

I've been lucky to get into the upper 10% essentially because of credentials and also accumulated some pension money and so on so forth. So this actually gives me enough power over my life. life, all right, but not really much power over other people. Whereas somebody who is the President of the United States, right, they obviously have much, much more power over people. So this is a degradation thing. That's important to keep in mind. So it sounds like if living standards are getting worse for the average person, which you term immiseration. And the elites, what we're experiencing now is a yo-yo. pendulum swing between the elites and the counter elites who then become the elites again and the elites become the counter elites. And that whole process keeps yo-yoing until it breaks. Is that the trajectory that we're on?

Usually it doesn't go back and forth. So if you look at other previous end times, in the French Revolution, right, their old elites, the nobility and the clergy, they were overthrown. by a coalition of counter-elites. But then, as we know, a revolution tends to devour its children. So different segments of country elites eventually started fighting amongst themselves. And they also did quite a good job exterminating themselves. And by doing that, they essentially solved the problem of elite overproduction, by eliminating all those extra surplus elites.

So in the United States, right now, we, are at a very interesting cusp, because the way, looking through the lens of our theory, what happened on November 5 was the revolution, bloodless, fortunately, revolution in which a coalition of country elites came to power, or at least is in the process of coming to power. We don't know what's going to happen in the next two months. Now, why do I, so you have, the Democratic Party has become the home of the ruling class. And that happened because, first of all, they have abandoned their roots as a workers' party, you know, back in the 1990s. But more recently, as Trump was taking over the Republican Party, right, many of the established Republicans bolted to the Democrats.

So, Liz Cheney and her father, you know, neocons, and so on so forth. And there was the opposite movement of some Democrats like R.FK Jr., Robert Kennedy Jr., or, Tulsi Gabbard, used to be Democrats, but now they are ardent Trump supporters. So we see this sorting out, it's very interesting Republicans, are in the process of becoming a party, as they say, the party of the working people, or as their critics say, the party of the extreme right-wing populism. But we see this sorting in terms of theory between counter-inids and the ruling elites. Now, if Trump is successful, right, then the goal. is clearly, judging by the kinds of people that he wants to appoint to the top position,

and also what they want to do to the bureaucracy, right, which means decimated, right? So the goal is to overthrow what they call the deep state or the established elites and replace them with a new crop of counter-elites. So that's how I interpret what's happening. But this revolution is still work in progress. there are many things that the ruling party can do to derail it in a variety of ways, as they were very successful in 2016 and, you know, the first term of Donald Trump. So in your study, you said hundreds of historical societies.

Every time that there was elite overproduction and immiseration in society, did it result in a collapse of that structure and those institutions, or were there times that it got close and was averted? Well, first of all, it turns out collapse is a completely overused word. I agree. You now have about 200 of this crisis, right? And it turns out that there's no such thing as a typical collapse. Each collapse is unhappy in its own way, as Anna Karanina.

Well, the heroes of Anakaranyan might have said. And that's what I meant, that once you get to the crisis, that road is pretty narrow. But once you get to crisis, there's so many different possibilities. So one kind of collapse is when there's a geographic collapse. Another kind of collapse is political fragmentation when, you know, the country ceases to exist and it's replaced by a number of smaller countries and so on so forth. There's a huge number of dimensions along this can happen. And most importantly for us, in about 10, 15,000,

15% of cases, there is no bloodshed, no huge amounts of violence. Somehow, sometimes society is led by unusually prosocial and, you know, functional elites managed to navigate their way through this crisis and bring the ship of state, you know, safely to the other side. And what were the characteristics of those situations where there was a pro-social leader that brought the ship to the other side. Are there any standard things that you noticed? Well, I can give you some examples,

but this is actually why we are connecting so much data, because we want to first at least characterize statistically the different types of outcomes, and then you want to probe the causal factors. But this is very much work in progress. In fact, I don't know. I have no yet, apart from saying that you have to shut down the wealth pump, right, because that's how all societies, they actually left crisis by shutting down the wealth pump,

reversing the stagnation of the majority of population. This chants down the little production, and so on. But in each case, they've done it in very different ways, right? And so I don't yet have a general lesson to. So wouldn't naturally the wealth pump be shut down just by market forces like Weimar, Germany or the Great Depression with a financial collapse? Or can you actually use policy and legislation to shrink the wealth pump? Let's take the aftermath of the of 1920s in the United States. The stock market collapse.

In fact, it was not just stock market collapse. United States had experienced terrible recessions before that. In the 1870s, there was a long recession, and so it was like every 20 years there was a recession, which actually some of them were even worse than the Great Depression. What actually turned the country around was the institutional remaking of the country. It basically, it started during the, it took 30 years to do that because it started at the beginning of the 20th century during the progressive era. All right. And then it was finished during the New Deal.

All right. So that's actually what got United States, not only out of crisis, but also without a revolution or civil war, because the previous crisis was, of course, ended with the civil war, which took high. hundreds of thousands of casualties and really caused a lot of, you know, pain to the country. So the trick here is that it's not just a terrible war or terrible revolution or stock market collapse. It has to, the way it works is indirectly. It focuses the attention of the leaders. on what they need to do in order to get the country back on track. So we look at the elite overproduction, which you've described in the United States today,

but does any society, looking back in history, is it inevitable that there is an elite overproduction, or does it only happen sometimes when things are stable for a long period of time? Exactly. It follows after long periods of internal stability. and when the elites get used to the state of things, and I think that it will, they can actually monkey with the system, make it work better for them, right? And it will not ruin anything.

This is called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Just because they have power, right? They can actually, you know, try to get even more out of the system. And by doing that, they turn on the wealth pump, and then after some time actually takes, 20, 30, 40 years, they actually look at the ruination of their class as a result of the revolution of civil war or civil war.

So this wouldn't happen in pre-agricultural societies where we had 100, 300 people living on the savannah in Tanzania. This has to exist where there's storable, tradable, surplus and commodities, right? Isn't this kind of a social, optimal foraging? dynamic with humans in a broader society? Well, I would just say that, yes, in order to have a state collapse, you have to have a state. The states appear about 5,000 years ago, and so we have this triparitite structure, the general population, people with power elites, and the state structures, which is another agent that may have a lot of autonomy, for example. Interestingly enough, recently, I together with my collaborators, we looked at the Neolithic societies and they have their own collapses, actually pretty terrible collapses.

But it's, of course, not a state collapse. It's just the conditions of war, breakout, and people run away and whole areas, large regions get abandoned, essentially. And even though they didn't have states, was there some analog to having elite overproduction and popular, immiseration in those societies? No, it's more over, it's overpopulation. Overpopulation. Yes. So when there are too many people, they live all in their political independent villages, right? There is no overarching authority that would prevent conflicts from escalating.

And so when the whole landscape fills up with villages, those people start competing over some squares or precious resources, all right, and that leads to some violence. and then eventually they find themselves in the world. They forget how it all started. Now it's basically it's blood revenge against those bad guys. And the other side thinks it's blood revenge against those bad guys. Exactly. So let me ask you this.

You said earlier that once we get to this point, it's a very thin line. You also said that it's very difficult to predict more than the very near term because the initial conditions of future moments will change. But I'll ask you, Peter, a different question. Knowing all the things you know, and yes, it's not psychohistory, but it's mathematical chaos that you've studied, you know, your entire career. If you were not advising someone today how to avert what's coming, that's a separate question. But if you were planting the seeds for a more stable future society that would not fall into these same stability breeds complacency and overproduction of elites.

What sort of firewalls and constraints and laws or rules would you recommend to a future society to avoid this buildup and eventual different flavor of collapse for the state due to these trends? that you observe all over history and all over the world? That's a very good question. And in fact, that's a big reason why we do our science is because we want to figure out how to prevent future collapses. Now we are in a revolutionary situation already. It's too late to prevent this revolution, right?

But in the future, we can do it. And that's what our science actually can be predictive. It's predictive not of how the trajectory will, unfold because that depends too much on the actions of individual people, especially influential leaders. But it's predictive of what we should do to avoid such collapses. And in fact, our analysis shows that 5,000 years ago, the states were much, much more fragile. They would more easily collapse and they would stay collapsed with more severe consequences for longer times. So we collectively, the humanity collectively is learning. We are accumulating good institutions.

You know, even if you think about democracy, of course democracy, democratic institutions is not when I see. It's not going to, you know, prevent necessarily those things. But it helps to manage the crisis in much less bloody way. And also things like productive economies, you know, at least in miseration in the United States, it doesn't mean that the majority people are starving, like it would happen in 14th century France. So it's relative immiseration, not absolute. We compare our situation to the recent past. Yeah, no, it's actually absolute. I did not think it would get to this point,

but in 2017, the average life expectancy for Americans started to decline even before COVID. And so now we are still not regain some ground, but we are still below that 2017. So in some aspects of it actually, you know, are amazing. I never would have predicted that to tell the truth. So if you put a time capsule into the future, a post whatever happens. So what are you, let me start here. What are you predicting now? You have your 20, 23 book, and then you had

your paper in 2010 predicting events in the 2020s in the United States. What do you think is going happen in the next five or ten years broadly in the U.S.? First of all, one thing we can say that it's not over. Many people thought that after 2020, when the ruling class quashed the revolution, right, it was over. No, unfortunately, this crisis periods are always taking long time to resolve. And unfortunately, fast resolution usually requires a sea of blood. All right. So let's hope for a longer resolution that would involve reforms that would change the country.

Right. But exactly what happens is, as I said, we are now in situation of high sensitivity to initial conditions. Even a single individual can actually, if they are in the right place at the right time or the wrong place in the wrong time, they can push the trajectory either to a real, chaotic civil war or put it on the trajectory of reforms and renovation. So because this is so hugely contingent, anybody who will try to predict to you that we're going to have this or that, they're either fooling you or they are themselves false. But do you have a base case? It's kind of too late to really change the current trajectory I heard you say earlier.

Yeah. But but look at this. We are still in the situation where there is no hot civil war. We are teaching of cold civil war. So some recommendations are actually don't start a hot civil war. Even if you think you're right and Trump is horrible, right? Don't use violence to derail his presidency. And I say that not because I am a partisan of Trump.

I'm just, I just know how easily violence can spiral up in this situations. So that's one thing. And also the ruling elites they should now understand. It's not Trump. It's not, you know, bad, you know, deplorables. I mean, they are the ones who let this country over the past 40 or 50 years to this situation. All right. So if they regain power, then they should follow in the footsteps of FDR or in England the chartist period, right? So take, this is a serious situation and you will have to sacrifice some of your, you know, interest, right? I mean, it doesn't mean that you have to give up all your billions, but you still would have to get the country to the situation where the fruits of economic

labor shared fairly, which means that owners, for example, of their businesses would be getting less than they are used to over the past 40 years. So the profits would be smaller. There still would be profits, but they would be smaller, and they would be in balance. And are there examples in history where there was elite overproduction and the wealth pump had gotten out of control, and so there was popular immiseration where the elites recognized the risk and they reversed a little bit of the gains from the wealth pump in order to stabilize society. Were their examples, were that worked out? Yeah, and I talk about them in my book. So, for example, the previous complete wave of this crisis wave is known to historians as the age of revolutions.

Right. So it's mostly from very late 18th century, picking during the revolutions of 1848. And of course, there were civil wars in China in 1860, states and so and so forth. The only two major countries that escaped it were, first of all, the British Empire, and they managed to deal with it by adopting the right reforms. And the other one may surprise you,

it was Zaris Russia. So Zaris Russia in 1860 was in a remandustrian situation. The peasants who were half of them, who were still serves. they were burning the houses of their landlords. You know, the state lost all the legitimacy as a result of catastrophic defeat in the Crimean War. Zahar Alexander II made a speech, he told to the nobility.

We'll either have revolution from below or revolution from above. Actually, it was because his brother was reading the book called Democracy in America, who suggested this thought to Alexander. So they did. It was over the period of about 10 years, it's called the Great Reforms. They actually, the free deserves, you know, they completely reformed the system. And they bought Russia 50 years. Unfortunately, then during the 1905 and 1970 revolutions,

Russia was put, especially 1917, under such huge geopolitical pressure that it broke. All right. But still, they gained Russia 50 years. That actually was not a bad, you know, achievement. Do you ever read fiction, Peter, or like, watch Netflix shows? Or I just get the feeling that you are interested in this topic and thinking about it and solving it all the time. Well, no, I do. yes, I read, if I did not read fiction in the evening, my brain would keep churning. And so, yes,

no, I don't, it's for my health reasons. You know, I have certain routines that shut down the brain and allow me to rest and so on and forth. And yeah, and I watch some, especially, well, but of course, some of the, you know, movies that I watch, like the Game of Thrones. I mean, I can't watch. without saying, yes, this is how elite overproduction works. Yeah, I hear you, I hear you. So you've done all this amazing historical meta-analysis of, and come up with this thesis of elite overproduction and emisseration of the common population. But how much of this is separate from energy and,

material resource depletion and the environment and the ecology. I don't hear you talk about those things so much. Is this dynamic that you're observing independent of energy and ecology? I do talk about this in my book because these are treat them as secondary factors. Because we find that in about half of the crisis periods, there was a major pandemic or even a pandemic. It's not ubiquitous, all right, but what we had, the COVID that we had, which really put the social system on the edge, right? That actually is quite a typical situation. For example, the Black Death in 1348 killed half of the population of peasants, but much smaller proportion of the elites because they could escape it.

As a result of it, the pyramid became even more top-heavy, and that's what caused France, for example, go into 100 years of hostility. And the same thing with climate. Climate can, long stretches of good climate can extend good periods, right, because they, for example, help against immiseration because their crops, you know, yields grow, right, during the periods of good crisis. and vice versa, when you have a period of famine, that could be a trigger for system collapsing. So in France in 1789, the trigger that actually released the pent-up pressure was the sharp job in food prices. It resulted in hunger strikes, urban riots, and that was the final sort of straw that broke the camel's back. Does the trends in the United States that you're monitoring and you've discussed, are these common throughout the world right now or is the United States a special case? No, not at all.

In fact, but keep in mind that there is no strict synchronicity here. So France, for example, if we're judging by such proxies as the growth of inequality in wealth and income, in France, it started growing much later than in the United States. And then if you look at places of China, China has only recently emerged from its own end times, which lasted for over a century. So they still have a lot of slack to go through before they get to their own end times. So the dynamic that you're describing is kind of ambivalent. about the absolute magnitude of wealth in a country.

For instance, there may be some materially poorer countries in the world that have much lower GDP per capita than the United States, but that they have a better elite versus immiseration in the populace level relative to the United States. Is that true? Yeah. So in fact, immiseration, even though it's now in the United States in the absolute, terms because of the life expectancy. But in reality, of course, humans are social creatures. And we have, we are, as we grow up in our parents' households, you sort of get imprinted on what is

what normal life should be like. So if you are exceeding, you know, as was happening from the 1930s all the way into the 1980s, right, if the next generation lives better than their parents, they are quite happy, even though back in the, you know, in the 1930s, or even go back to 11th century France, right? Those persons were poor, but their life was actually as good as their parents. And so they were not rebelling, right? So that's, so that is a dynamic that is very important. So it's our expectations as a society that play a large role on whether we're in misery or not.

Yeah, it's the same thing for the elites. So one way that elite reproduction is sold is, of course, when they get exterminated or, you know, forcefully driven down. But in many situations, many of the elite aspirants just give up, right, especially if they have some decent job to go to, right, which is why you need to solve immiseration. If you solve a miseration, then many of those elite aspirants, they would basically say, okay, to help you that. I'll just become a carpenter or whatever. So it's again, yeah, it is very much expectations and ability to match your expectations. So recently I had Jeremy Grantham on this show who outlined a prediction of declining human population in the not too distant future due to plummeting fertility rates, partially due

to endocrine disrupting chemicals, but how would a decline in overall population in the world or overall population in various countries affect the pressures on mass immiseration and elite overproduction? So here we are in good shape because very many of this crisis periods in the past resulted in population decline. So for immiseration, population decline is an unwarded good because it reduces the supply of labor, right, and it tends not affect too much the demand for it, or less. And as a result of that, we saw, for example, after the black death, you know, the English peasants started eating white bread, drinking beer, which they could not afford before because they were so immiscerated. and things like that.

Of course, before we can get on the sustainable trajectory, societies have to deal with literal production. So in a short term, population decline exacerbates a little production because of the social pyramid becoming too top heavy. So you have to somehow deal with that problem, but eventually that is, this is one of the, mechanical ways of shutting down the wealth pump is essentially making labor supply to be insufficient for the jobs you did, because that inevitably will drive up the wages, and then you have

the reversal of immiseration. So interjecting my own work on describing the carbon pulse as a driver of our well, wealth and productivity, we have effectively 500 billion human workers in the form of coal, oil, and gas that we're adding to the work of machines, adding to the five billion actual workers. And as that fossil workforce gradually retires and declines, that's also going to have an impact on immiseration and the dynamic you discuss. Yes, but the fortunate thing is that, this carbon-based energy is in the process of being replaced with, especially solar.

Solar technology development has been amazing in terms of the costs of producing electricity and storing it, the batteries, you know. So many people, well, techno-optimists, and I'm sort of on their side, they think that we will just have huge amounts of plentiful energy just in the five, ten years period. I mean, let's think about it. If you just put half of Arizona, which nobody uses, just put solar panels there,

you can supply the whole world, essentially, for many decades to come. Have you thought about how artificial intelligence might influence and impact the science backdrop that you've laid out here with elite overproduction and immiseration? Yes, in fact, I have a blog post about this. So here's my thinking that previous technological advances have replaced workers. Workers have very little power because they're not organized.

Now AI has come for the elites. It is replacing elites. Remember I was saying that there is a credential route to power. If you want to gain a political office in the United States and you don't have wealth, What do you do? You go to the law school. Now, about two years ago, we produced in the United States three times as many lawyers as there were positions for them. All right. Now, about half of those positions are being eliminated. Just two weeks ago, I was at a conference of, you know, pension fund fund holders. And they're saying that I have fired all my, you know, legal assistance, you know. We have three times the graduates, then there are law jobs available, but now AI has caused that to be six to one? Exactly. And lawyers are the most dangerous profession from the point of view of social stability. Lenin was a lawyer, Castro was a lawyer. You know, Robespierre was a lawyer. Gandhi was a lawyer over the peace of revolution. Is it shorthand that we have a lawyer overproduction?

Yeah, we have overproduction of many. We have our overall. production of PhDs also. But PhDs, professors are not terribly dangerous people. Lawyers are. And I say that not because I hate them or anything, all right, but it's just historically they have been the leaders of many revolution and civil wars. Why do you think that is? Is it because lawyers know how to think in logical Machiavellian ways? Or what do you think explains that? Yeah, partly that, because you have to be very flexible ideologically. You cannot just start by being a socialist. You know, just think about people like Stalin. Stalin kept changing his ideology depending on, you know, on what the landscape was as a result of that he got ahead. Whereas Trotsky, he kept pushing for the

world revolution, right, and so he ended up, you know, I speak in his brain. So that's, you know, being flexible and being able to argue at his side is actually an advantage in a successful revolutionary. So standing here today at the dawn of 2025, what do you think is the single most pressing issue to address? First of all, keep things peaceful. Don't allow any violence to escalate. And secondly, the Trump administration has really, from what they are saying, They don't really have an idea. First of all, they don't understand, you know, the idea that you have to shut down the wealth pump. Interestingly enough, some of that members, so J.D. Vance, for example, or Tucker Carlson,

they actually talk, the right talk periodically, although they also say many other things, right? But I don't see any understanding of this as being the key thing for us to resolve. So let me put you on the spot, kind of. If someone from the Trump administration were to watch this podcast or even the next administration after that, hypothetically, and they're like, oh, I've heard about this Clio Dynamics and Dr. Peter Turchin and they contact you, what would be like a short list of recommendations that you would give to slow what's coming and make it, more likely to be bloodless and a possible transition to something lower scale but stable? What would be a few things that you would say? You know what I would do? I would do a self-serving thing.

I would say that we have, you know, clearly we are studying a very important question. How do you avoid civil war, all right? We have amassed quite a lot of data. But there is a lot of science that needs to be done. We've been applying, we've been writing grant proposals, and they get denied, right? Because people think what we do is unimportant. So I'll just say now, here and now, I would say that give us resources so we can hire the historians, you know, data scientists, modelers, and then give us four or five years,

because fortunately research takes time. And then we'll come up with much, much better answers for you than I could just wing now. Do you think we have four or five years? I hope so. Why not? What we need to do is what in epidemiology, they call flatten the curve, right? We need to flatten the curve.

We need to give ourselves time. This is, by the way, what historical example of that is the chart is period. They were able to flatten the curve because during this time, which is like 1830s, 40s and 50s, 1830s through 1850s and 60s in the UK. They actually shipped millions of immeasurated population to places like Australia, and they also shipped hundreds of thousands of surplus elites to positions in the British Empire, in India, Africa, Burma, and so on and so forth. So there are some ways we can flatten the curve. But what we need to do is flattening the curve just gives us time to get the right reforms enacted. So I have a hundred more questions for you.

This is like so overlapping with my work, but I want to keep my word to you because you had a limitation on time. So I'm going to ask you just a few closing questions I ask all my guests. Do you have any personal advice to listeners of this show who are well aware of Dennis Meadows and Joseph Tainter and probably many of them have read your book? They're aware of the times that we live in. Do you have any personal advice on how to manage this, whether the listener is an elite or a commoner, you know, just general audience. About 40% of our listeners are in the United States. The rest are international. Especially to the young people, I would say this, that there is no impenetrable border between commoners and elites.

So become elite. There are a variety of ways you can do it. You can start up a business, earn 100. millions and then you could use that money to fund social movements or become inflation inflation blogger or you know work your way up you know in the administration and acquire power that way and then also organize associate with other people spread the better ideas don't be tempted by violence so those are very simple you know suggestions. Try to get some social power and use the social power for pro-social ends.

Exactly. Thank you for formulating that. What do you care most about in the world, Professor Turchin? The truth. I'm a scientist first and foremost. No one has ever answered that question that way. I care about the truth too, and I'm trying to unpack it hour by hour, week by week. If you could wave of a magic wand and being a scientist, you probably don't like this concept. But there was no personal recourse to your future. What is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? Well, am I also a world dictator? Yes. Yes. Well, then I actually know what to do.

But all those world dictators, they tend to have their hands cut off. But yeah, I would just, first of all, I would go to Washington and install myself as a dictator. And then I would select better people who have an idea what needs to be done. And some of the politicians would be, both from the Democrats and from the Republicans, right, get the social scientists, economists, so, so, so forth, and so on, so forth. But you know, this is completely ridiculous. Well, it is ridiculous, but it acts as an Overton window of what actually might work, and then it expands the horizon and we might move in that direction.

What you're saying is instead of politicians seeking personal power to somewhere in the government have technical, capable people with social science, natural science, system science, at high levels of authority. Yeah. And one thing is that I would definitely not do, I would not say that, okay, do this, that and that. Because that's not how, even if you're a dictator, that's not how things work.

You need to, the most important thing that the dictator can do is to appoint the right people. Right? You need, that's because all action is collective, all good action is collective action. So for anyone interested in the details of how you analyzed all these trends in your work field called ClioDynamics, is there somewhere they can read about the methods you used in your modeling? How do they find more about your work? Sure. In fact, in End Times, there is an appendix. There are three appendix chapters, and there I try to explain what Clioidynamics does in non-technical language. And do you have a website or something where people can find you? I have a website, peterturchin.com.

Okay. Right. So that's, and in fact, I am planning to restart my blogging. There was some reasons why not, but that's actually, it will happen before the end of the year. So this has been wonderful. I think we just scratched the surface of this. We've talked about elite overproduction and immiseration and how this has worked out in the past. If you were to come back on this podcast, Peter, what is one topic that you have a particular passion and interest in, relevant to our future that you'd be willing to take a deep dive in?

Yeah, I'm not whistling, but it depends on what will happen this year. All right, because if we are in a middle of a hot civil war, then we would need to be thinking about how do we end that. But if there is a lot of, you know, intellectual turmoil about how, what do we need to do, to what kind of reforms need to be adopted, that would be a very different conversation. When you leave history, this is actually, you know, you have to adopt. Adapt, yeah. Adapt. So, well, let's see how things are in six or nine months. And maybe you come. back. Thank you so much for your important work and please make sure to read some fiction and watch some Netflix at times. Yes. You'll do that. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of the Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with

fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.