The Joe Walker Podcast - The Republic Is In Peril — Jack A. Goldstone

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Jack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist and is widely regarded as one of the world's leading experts on the subject of revolutions.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/jack-goldstoneSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the Jolly Swagman Podcast, where every week I interview a new guest to draw out contrarian insights and help you de-correlate your thinking from the crowd, so that you can both live a more fulfilled life and help society solve some of its most pressing problems. My guests span the worlds of finance, economics, politics, science, history, journalism, entrepreneurship and more, but the topics we cover are not a perfect menu of the world's problems. Rather, I strive to focus on ideas that are both important

and relatively neglected. My guest in this episode will help us to understand a topic that is both important and relatively neglected. That is political instability and revolution. I hope you don't mind, but I want to take just two minutes because I want you to understand why I invited Jack Goldstone onto the show and why he matters at this juncture. Now, regular listeners may have heard me mention the name Peter Turchin on several occasions recently. David Sloan Wilson, for example, is a big fan of Peter Turchin. Now, Turchin is a Russian-American biologist-cum-historian who believes that we can specify some general laws of human history. Mind you, his theory is not deterministic, it's probabilistic. Nevertheless, it's received pushback from historians who tend to agree with Arnold Toynbee that history is just one damned thing after another. Anyway, Turchin's star has been rising lately because many people see him as having predicted the recent political

instability in the United States. There's been a long The Atlantic profile on him and some other press, for example. So 10 years ago, Turchin applied his theory to US history and found something alarming. The US was hurtling towards political crisis. In 2010, he wrote in the journal Nature that political instability in the US looked set to peak in the years around 2020. He then backed this up in his book Ages of Discord, which I recommend, in 2016, showing that America's political stress indicator had turned up sharply in recent years and was on track to send us into the turbulent 20s. So the theory Turchin was applying is called structural demographic theory, and its

founding father is my guest Jack Goldstone. In the late 1990s, when Peter Turchin was having what he calls his midlife crisis and looking for mathematical descriptions of history, he discovered someone had already laid the groundwork for him two decades earlier. That person was Jack Goldstone. Turchin found Goldstone's work remarkable and called him up in 1997. Now, in structural demographic theory,

Jack Goldstone's theory, revolutions are like earthquakes. In both revolutions and earthquakes, there are triggers, sudden events which catalyze the eruption, and there are pressures, structural conditions which build up slowly underneath it. Specific triggers of political upheavals are difficult, perhaps even impossible to predict, but the structural pressures, or so structural demographic theory says, are amenable to analysis and forecasting.

Structural demographic theory models complex human societies as systems with three main components. Number one, the general population. Number two, the elites. And three, the state. These components interact with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of non-linear feedbacks. Jack Goldstone, the father of this theory, was a mathematician-cum-sociologist who, as a Harvard student, once used maths to codify Alexis de Tocqueville's ideas about democracy. He went on to become the first person to apply complexity science to human history, the result being structural demographic theory. When Jack began

his line of research in the 1970s, the dominant view of revolutions saw them as a form of class conflict, but he noticed that individuals from the same elite class often ended up fighting on opposite sides of the conflict. And moreover, he also noticed that revolutions appeared to cluster together in the historical record, but it was unlikely that this was for reasons of class conflict. More likely, he realised, it was because of population growth. Jack's magnum opus, the book which Peter Turchin discovered, was published in 1991. It's titled Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. The book is a doorstopper and it's sitting here in front of me. In it, Jack predicts the rise of a populist-style leader in

the United States. The book is chilling because it's so prescient. For example, he writes on page 482, it is quite astonishing the degree to which the United States today is, in respect of its state finances and its elite's attitudes, following the path that led early modern states to crisis. Well, sadly, Jack's predictions seem to have been John T. Hazel Jr. Professor of Public Policy and eminent scholar in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is also our guest, and for 90 enthralling minutes, he helps me understand the challenges facing the United States today so that we can try to solve them. The first 15 minutes of this conversation are a touch academic, but I encourage you to push through because it is well worth it. So without much further ado, please give it up for the great Jack Goldstone.

Jack Goldstone, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here. I wish I was closer to you. I haven't been in Australia since, I guess, your bicentennial or something like that. It was 1988. Oh, wow. So we're here to talk about revolutions. Is this a somber topic or an optimistic one? Depends on where you are in the world.

If you look back on a successful revolution like many Americans do when they idealize our war of independence, the great American revolution that brought freedom and the Constitution, it's a very happy, exciting topic. You know, if you're a big fan of the French Revolution and the end of kings and aristocracy, then that's great. You just don't focus on the terror and the slaughter of the Civil War that followed. But I don't think revolution is necessarily somber either, even though it's true that revolutions have brought some of the great massacres and genocides of history. There's no papering over that, whether it was the great leap forward and mass starvation in China, or the attack on the

kulaks in Russia, or the great purges and the gulags. There's lots of horror and tears that go with revolutions. But at the same time, I think we need to be grateful without revolutions, a lot of the modernizations, the freedoms, the constitutional safeguards we have wouldn't exist either. So I think it's a mixed bag. I always push back against people who try and put revolution either into the all a great joy or all a great tragedy category. Revolutions are very human. There's a lot of both. So Jack, I understand that the Clinton administration enlisted you back in the early 1990s to study why states fail. Can you tell me that story? Yeah, that's correct. Well, this was in the 1990s. And the Clinton administration,

like everyone in the West, looking back just a few years, this was 1994. So three years earlier the Soviet Union had collapsed and broken up and a couple of years before that in 1989 we'd seen communism collapse in Eastern Europe and these were events that nobody saw coming I mean I won't say nobody because there are a few people who can point to things they wrote about the inevitable collapse of communism, but very few people expected that this was just around the corner. People were pretty happy with the efforts Mikhail Gorbachev was making to loosen things up a little bit in the Soviet Union, and the expectation was that Gorbachev's reforms might help start a gradual process of retreat from strict communism and the beginnings of a little more of an open market and

a little more democracy. Nobody expected either that the Communist Party would be tossed aside very quickly, or that the countries of Eastern Europe would see mass demonstrations, or that a failed attempted coup against Gorbachev would lead to the breakup and the end of the Soviet Union. So these were shocking events, and everyone in the policy world was saying, could we have done any better? Would it have been possible to create some kind of early warning? I mean, we have early warning systems for missiles and hurricanes, but the collapse of governments seemed just as an important alteration in the world we're living in. So the question was, what can we do? And this was really the brainchild of Al Gore, who was kind of a technological visionary. And he believed that

with the new computer analysis tools that we were getting, and I remember this was 1994, artificial intelligence was just starting its earliest algorithms. But he felt that with enough computer processing power and enough data, if he brought the right people together, they could put together some kind of early disaster warning system that would kind of issue the lights to put red or green or yellow or flashing red lights on the map of the world and identify where the next great crisis or collapse was going to be. Wow. And what did the model tell you? Well, it turned out to be much harder than we thought. I mean, they did assemble a great team. They had some of the best computer modelers and statisticians together with first

rate social scientists and experts in revolution. First, we had to try and assemble what was the available data. And we went through kind of all the databases that were available. We looked for economic data, demographic data, military data, social data, climate data, because our mandate was to go out there and scour, get whatever data you think you might need. And of course, a lot of that data was very poor quality. It's not like every country in the world is out there collecting superb data on every aspect of its own performance. So we kind of listed hundreds of variables. We graded them on quality from A, B, or C, and tried to assemble what we thought was the most reasonable and reliable data on conditions in every country where we could get data, which was most of them, for the 40 years from 1955 to 95, which is where we were at that point. And it turned out, much to our surprise,

that the really complicated models with numerical algorithms and machine learning to juggle non-linearities among dozens of variables didn't get us very far. They provided no better than a coin flip type of 50% here, 50% there. Now you have to remember the type of event they were looking for. Sudden violent events that changed the character of a government are pretty rare. On average, we were looking at about three to five such events in any one year

out of 150 countries in the world. And the problem when you're designing a probabilistic model, because there was no way we could guarantee this country at 4 a.m. on the 3rd of July is going to have a revolution. Things just don't work like that. I like to tell people, you know, how many people predicted that Brady would, we had our Super Bowl, our biggest football game of the year, American football, right? And the outcome was kind of an astonishing disappointment. It was supposed to be a close game, two very tough teams, but in fact, one got blown out. And you say, well, how come people couldn't predict that event? There were only about less than 100 players on both sides. We know the life history and performance of every player on every team perfectly well.

We know the coaches. We know the rules. We know the limited time. There are even referees there to enforce the rules. How could you not predict that outcome? Well, you can't because human beings are involved and human beings make decisions. So we always had to tell the people in government,

look, if you know that no one can predict the exact outcome of a football game, don't expect us to predict the exact outcome of what will happen in a country with tens of millions of people with no rules, no referees, not even knowing many of the people who may emerge as important. What we said we can do is do like a football betting handicapper. We can tell you where is a certain outcome more likely or less likely. So out of 150 countries in the world, we can probably tell you once we get this model cranked up and working out of the 150 countries in the world, we can probably tell you, once we get this model cranked up and working, out of the 150 countries, which are the 15 or 20 countries that are

most likely to have a major political upheaval in the next two years. Now, that's a lot better than just saying, well, there's going to be two or three at random somewhere in the world. But it's not quite as nice as you might like of, well, if only three to five of those 15 countries are actually going to have a revolution next year, how do I know which ones? And the answers are, you actually can't. Because at any time in the, you know, there may be 10 or 15 countries that have weak governments, that have bad economic conditions, that have a history of upheaval that make it likely that something will happen.

But we don't know what event might actually trigger the explosion in a particular country in a particular year. But we did make progress, and I'm very proud of the work we did. We achieved that goal of being able to identify pretty well the 10% of countries that proved to be most at risk. And the government used that model, and they were pretty happy with it for a while. They then, however, got flummoxed because the model wasn't very good at predicting peaceful revolutions. That is kind of the Arab Spring and some of the color revolutions. And they came back to us and they said, hey, guys, how come your model doesn't work for these kind of events? These are becoming really

important. And we had to say, look, let us tell you a little bit about the way science works. If we train a model to look for a particular kind of event, it's not going to do well looking for other events. That is, we literally asked the government agency who was supervising this in the beginning. And we said, do you want us to also design the model to try and pre-identify something like a peaceful democratic transition? Like when an autocratic government has these demonstrations that lead to peaceful change. And they said, no, no, no, don't worry about those because those are always good when they happen. We welcome those and we're not worried that they're going to throw us into a tizzy

or change the world as we know it. So that's fine. And so they wanted to kind of watch out for the Rwanda genocide type event or the breakup of a country type event. And so we didn't train the model to look for peaceful color revolutions. And so it didn't identify them after the fact. So it's, you know, these are kind of the things that you learn. Same thing as when you're trying to design an algorithm for a self-driving car. If you teach that self-driving car to brake for pedestrians and brake for bicycles, but then you have somebody who gets off their bicycle and walks the bicycle across the street in front of the car, and the car says, I was never trained to identify a pedestrian

walking a bicycle across the street, and it doesn't react, it doesn't know what to do with that image, and so you have a failure. So all of these models are only as good as your precision in identifying what you want to study. Now, as a scholar of revolutions, I can say, hey, I know that revolutions are not always the same in all times and places. And we can talk about what's happening in the United States or what happened in Myanmar. What's a revolution? What's not? How do you do with kind of outcome, you don't often get all of those nuances in the first version. And that's essentially where we were. I hope that's not too much detail, but it was a fascinating process. No doubt. And not at all, Jack.

The more detail, the better. I find this fascinating. I want to take a different sort of turn now. So the ancients saw history as cyclical, as a never-ending alternation between prosperity and destruction. Very famous examples include Herodotus and Polybius. Do we have a conception of history in the West today? And if so, what is it? Well, I would say the dominant view of history in the West today is ignorance.

Sorry, it's not, you know, and this is a great tradition in which America has been a leader from Henry Ford telling people history is bunk because he was inventing a new world. The disenchantment with history makes a certain amount of sense if you're in the business of creating technology that's going to change the rules by which people interact. So if you have an assembly line that's going to create affordable horseless carriages and change the world from horse-driven to internal combustion-driven locomotion, you may not be worried about history, but you're much more worried about changing the future. And we live since then in a world where technical visionaries have created, you know, jets, planes, digital communication. And there's a reasonable argument to be made that for many things, trying to figure out the future, you know, what's artificial intelligence going to do to the labor market? Will we be able to manage a globally integrated world where people move across national borders and money flows across national borders so quickly and easily it's hard to trace?

Or are we going to live in a world of total surveillance? What's it going to mean if governments can track us and our condition? If there's a monitor somewhere in Washington, D.C. and somewhere in Beijing that's literally tracking the heartbeat of every person moving in the country with a sharp particular identifier, what will that mean for social organization? The Greek ideas of democracy may not matter for that. So I understand and have a certain sympathy to the history is bunk, let's not worry about it attitude. And you see this in American universities, and I'm sure in Australia elsewhere too, the number of people who sign up to study computer science and technology now eclips to attract majors from people who think, well, I'm never going to make a living studying history, and whatever I learn is not going to be relevant

to my future. It's going to be completely different. So that's the philosophy of history, I think, that prevails today. Against that, let me say that human nature has not changed the way our technology has. It's quite recognizable. If you read Shakespeare, you read Herodotus, you read Polybius, you read Julius Caesar and his military campaigns, they come across as completely recognizable individuals who are dealing with the same kind of problems and issues that we struggle with today. So human nature is important. And no matter how important technology is, unless we're willing to dispose of human beings altogether, I hope we don't get to that

point. I hope the machines don't do that to us. But as long as we're talking about how do we deal with technology in a world that's still inhabited by human beings, if you watch Star Trek, if you watch The Expanse, you think of any of the great science fiction works, they tackle this problem. They don't just say, what will the future look like in terms of technology? They say, what will the future look like in terms of technology? They say, what will the future look like in terms of how human beings interact with that technology? How do human beings organize their relations among themselves and with strangers and with other societies in the light of that technology? But the human element is always there. And the best way to understand the human element, I think,

is still through history. So I think we do still deserve and need more of a philosophy of history than most people want or need today. Do you think, in addition to that, there's this sort of amorphous belief in automatic progress that maybe emanates from the enlightenment that you could sort of summarize with Francis Fukuyama's view on the end of history and and that belief has made us complacent and blind to tail risks well Fukama, to give him credit, and he worked at my university, overlapped with me a little bit before he went off to other work, we had a chance to talk about these things. If you read his work carefully, he certainly does believe, he gave that statement at the end of history, meaning the struggle over political ideologies and systems

will fade away. But he said, it's human nature not to be satisfied. So he did expect that there'd still be conflict over something and that there might still be a pull of certain kinds of idealistic or utopian ideologies that would motivate extremists. So he didn't see everything being settled because he recognized history was a little more complicated. But there's been a kind of a popular or crude interpretation of his work that actually was very influential and led to a great deal of overconfidence. I think a lot of people at the end of the Cold War figured, okay, capitalism won, socialism lost. We no longer have to worry about the appeal of socialism to workers. We no longer have to worry about the appeal of strong national authoritarian leaders or fascism.

Everybody's going to embrace democracy, and it's just going to work fine all by itself. Capitalism, democracy, it's just going to be a self-governing, beautiful machine. Now, it never had been in the past. Democracy was looked down on by the Greeks and the Romans for a good reason. It tends to degenerate into mob rule unless there's an elite that is focused on maintaining virtue and institutions that constrain the worst popular impulses. So democracy has always had to be kind of safeguarded and pruned. It's like a garden or a beautiful tree. If you let it run wild, it loses its beauty and it loses its form and function. So democracy has always had to include the type of limits that the founding fathers put into it. And the same thing is true for capitalism.

Capitalism always threatens to give into greed, just like democracy is threatened with giving into kind of the lowest denominator of mob desires. And so capitalism also needs to be regulated, limited, and refined in certain ways. You have to make sure that capital doesn't just accumulate in smaller and smaller groups and that workers are protected against exploitation and so on. But we let all of that stuff somehow slide away from our vision because this triumphalist, yeah, America won. It's the greatest. Democracy and capitalism, just let America won. It's the greatest. Democracy and capitalism, just let it go. It'll be fine.

And so ever since then, the late 80s, early 90s, we've seen a decline of the degree to which both democracy and capitalism actually work for ordinary people, that is, the degree to which they are able to attain their goals and defend their interests through the democratic system and through the capitalist economy, it's really deteriorated. And that has led us to a whole raft of miscalculations and errors by us. I'm saying all kinds of political, intellectual, and economic leaders did not see what was going on.

We didn't expect that life expectancy in the United States and Great Britain would actually start to decline by the 2010s. We'd never seen that in our history. We thought, like you say, progress goes one way. Well, nope, turned out to be wrong. If you don't care for the communities and jobs of people, you start to see these deaths of despair, and they can even make life expectancy turn around because so many people are losing their lives

earlier than they should. We thought that Facebook and the internet and social media, they didn't need to be regulated like other media platforms like TV, radio, print. Hey, you know, just let media go. We don't need competition. That's an old-fashioned idea. We don't need regulation because that would stifle innovation. And so we end up with a few, you know, a handful, whether it's in China or whether it's in the West, a handful of mega technology companies that dominate the way we communicate with each other while raking in huge amounts of money and providing relatively few jobs. It's kind of the worst outcome you could have expected.

Plus, it turns out that social media doesn't only just connect everybody. It is even better at connecting focused groups whose focus is whatever pushes their emotional buttons. And while that's great for butterfly fanciers, it's not great to have social media, dark media, that provides an ideal recruiting and motivational tool for terrorist groups or conspiracy theorists or other people whose kind of worst impulses or fantasies probably wouldn't propagate through a normal social community. It'd kind of be tamped down by community standards. only allow them to interact but actually connect them with algorithms that feed them information and links and video that inflames their passions in a way to

get them to click more and spend more time on media you actually have a very pernicious system you know in ways, media is to conspiracy groups what cigarettes were to nicotine addiction, the perfect socially acceptable tool for getting everybody hooked. And because we have somehow thought that anything in the free market is good and anything that allows people to connect and express themselves as democratic and anything democratic is good. We stopped being watchful. You know, we stopped being careful. We stopped saying, you know, even good things might need a little bit of limitation or correction. You know, airplanes are great, but you need to have frequent inspections

of the airplane frame because bolts get loose and metal fatigues. And so you can't just let people put up planes and fly. Automobiles are fabulous. What would our life be without them? But it turns out that when they crash, they really mangle human bodies. So maybe it would be a good idea to construct them so that when a car crashes, the human body inside is protected,

whether that means steel beams or easy crumple fenders to absorb the blow or seat belts to restrain people. But don't just get the idea that because cars are good, the more people who drive them, the faster they go, the better it will be. There always needs to be some kind of, but what's the downside? How do we minimize the downside while still getting what we can that's good? But with so much of what happened in the last 20 or 30 years we didn't do that what's the downside when do we need to act to minimize it and we're paying the price now right is that one of is that a problem with elites generally that during these periods individual members of the elite think it's not not my problem, everything will be fine. There's like

a collective action problem. There certainly is. And this is where people like me who like to, you know, pour through history and say, you know, is this a one-off? Is this something that we just got wrong once? Or is it a serious recurrent problem? History tells us it is a recurrent problem. The history of great societies, and I'll put America up there as a society that's accomplished an enormous amount. You can put Britain up there too. I like Australia, but it's still got a ways to go

to get into the great civilization category. But you're young, got time. We're running our own race. The thing about being successful, and by successful, I mean, being the country that has accumulated the most wealth and finds itself looked up to by other countries, is that you start to believe your own publicity. You know, you start to forget about all the sacrifices and the hard work that went into making your country wealthy and admired. And you just kind of take for granted that, oh, yeah, we're the wealthiest, most admired country in the world.

We deserve that. That's been how it's been. And of course, you know, that's us. And you see that in the Romans during the Roman Empire. You see it among the Dutch after a couple hundred years of the Golden Age when Holland became the richest part of Europe. You saw that in Victorian Britain where the British thought that they were just dandy and had all the answers to everything and deserved to run the whole world. And yeah, you see a lot of that in America now. It usually kind of creeps up on elites because it takes generations for a country to displace the previous dominant

power and it takes another few generations for elites to get so intellectually lazy that they forget, hey, during the Cold War, we thought we might lose. We thought that maybe authoritarian socialism in the Soviet Union, the communist system. We were worried. We thought they might beat us. They got Sputnik up there first. They were backing revolutions in Cuba and Angola and Nicaragua. And Vietnam joined them and North Vietnam.

And it was very tough for America, even after World War II, when it was a very prosperous country, it was tough to think, oh, yeah, we're clearly the best in the world. We're clearly going to dominate. It was a struggle. I mean, I remember I grew up during the Cold War. And it was like, you know, we have to be on guard. We have to strive to be our best. We have to educate our people. We have to work on guard. We have to strive to be our best. We have to educate our people.

We have to work on our technology. We have to work together to make sure our defenses are strong. So when you're under pressure like that, even elites are willing to say, yeah, of course the government has to raise taxes to make a globally competitive military and to build a globally leading infrastructure and to educate our populace. But after about 20 or 30 years of being kind of top dog undisputed, you start to think, you know, country's fine. We did great. And my job, if I'm a talented person, is just to increase my personal wealth, my personal fame, make sure my family's taken care of.

And, you know, I don't have to worry about anything else because there's nothing else in the picture. And you see that going on, as I say, throughout history. Roman elites said, we're not going to pay for local government anymore because what's in it for us? And so local government started to deteriorate. Areas along the border of the Roman Empire had to bring in barbarian chiefdoms with their military to say, you know, we can't get Romans to defend the border anymore. They don't want to be in these small towns in the provinces. So why don't you guys come in, we'll pay you a subsidy, and you can defend the borders for us. And eventually they decided, you know, defending the borders paid okay, but

raiding the center of the Roman Empire paid even better. So that didn't work out very well. And we saw the same thing with the elites in France, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was, you know, I think the best analyst of late French aristocratic society. He said the aristocrats had gotten so used to the idea that they were in charge no matter what, that when they started putting forth plans for reform and analyzing their own society, they did it in a voice that suggested no one else was listening. So that they told people throughout the country, you know, the system is terrible. The peasants are really suffering. The king is wasting our money. The whole system is pretty rotten. And the bourgeoisie,

you know, they don't really deserve that much. We're going to make sure that they change the system so that they do a better job of serving the king and getting out of the way of the aristocracy. And they didn't seem to even realize that the people who were listening to this would say, oh, well, if the whole society is so fundamentally unjust and corrupt and ineffective. And that's what's leading to all of our problems. Let's just get rid of it. And I think you saw some of that with the elites on, you know, in America, the Democrats and the Republicans, all of a sudden, we're like, why are people lining up behind Bernie and Donald Trump? You know, who are these guys? Because Donald Trump was not a member of the Republican Party, right? He was a Democrat and became a Republican. And Bernie Sanders had been an independent from the little state of Vermont, was not a card-carrying

Democrat, but he came close to winning the nomination of the Democratic Party for president, just like Trump did with the Republicans. These were complete outsiders, and the establishment elite was like, well, why are people all of a sudden going to people on the outside? And the same thing happened in France with Emmanuel Macron overthrowing all of the established parties with a totally new movement. Same thing happened in Great Britain with UKIP, the United Kingdom independence movement, and Brexit. All of a sudden, the elites in both sides in Britain had been big enthusiasts for European Union for decades. It never occurred to them that a popular movement to leave the European Union would dominate national politics. And of course, you know, Italy,

you had the five-star party, and in Greece, and in Spain, you had extreme, you know, Podemos and others. So we've had a situation kind of all across the wealthy countries of the European Union and the United States where people were fed up with the mainstream of conventional politicians and elite leadership. And they said, you're not talking to us anymore. You don't understand our world. And by the millions and tens of millions, they basically threw out the old elite politicians and brought in outsiders, inexperienced outsiders, non-political outsiders, and said, you know, just shake everything up. Tear it down if you have to, but certainly don't follow the old playbook. And the elites were caught off guard because of a failure of collective memory?

Well, as I said, given that their attitude toward history was that history doesn't matter, yeah, they were caught off guard by a myth of their own success. They believed that they were doing everything right and absolutely didn't see the failures that led to the mass enthusiasm for a Donald Trump, for Bernie Sanders, for Ocasio-Cortez, for newcomers, people who promised to just shake things up and do it differently. Now, that doesn't always work. We have Joe Biden now in the United States who was the most established, typical elite politician. And a lot of people still say, how could that guy win?

He represents the past. He represents the old elites. He represents the old elites. He represents the old system. Well, at least the old system in some ways worked, and it did cope with crises. Tearing everything down may be okay if things are going well and you have the time and the leisure to start over. But if you've torn government down and then you get hit with a global pandemic, like we haven't seen in 100 years, you start to say, you know, maybe if we have a government that actually did work like it used to, now we do sort of need that again. And so a lot of the extremist governments have slipped away. Even Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom is now acting much more like a conventional politician and political thinker. He's promising government will do the job,

and he's, at least so far, gotten the vaccination program up pretty well, even though they did a very poor job in locking down to avoid the initial spread. So you mentioned cycles earlier. There are big cycles, and I sometimes wonder if America is now on the way down, that we had elites that took us in a dangerous direction, and maybe we won't recover. Maybe we had our 250 years and it was a good run. Chinese certainly believe this is their time. The official leadership and much of the Chinese population agrees that China has now fought its way forward, that the democratic capitalist system in the United States and in Europe is falling apart. The leaders are fighting with each other. They can't get anything done. They can't fight a virus. They can't maintain economic growth. They can't satisfy their own people. Whereas in China, they have

strong economic growth. They were able to take drastic measures to beat back the COVID pandemic. They are investing around the world. They have a united government that, for better or worse, brooks no opposition and therefore doesn't have the kind of dysfunctional polarization and policy paralysis that we see in the West. So maybe the Chinese, in their view, are right that the US and European system had its day. It's on the downside of a cycle. And now China's turned to rise again, back to where China was 1000 years ago, when it was the most advanced country in the globe. So if you view history, you at the very least have to feel that the United States is at a turning point as its European partners are. Now, I don't believe that history dictates the future or that your destiny can be

read in the past any more than it can be read in the stars. What I think history gives us is scenarios that we can take as warning or guidance. And the United States has been through crises before, whether it was the Civil War or the Great Depression and World War II, and has come out stronger and revived. So I think it's entirely possible, and I prefer to be optimistic and hopeful, that the United States will, as it did after the Great Depression, will say, all right, these are hard times. Let's try some new policies. Let's try and shift things back in favor of unions and working people and build things for everybody. In the days of the depression, they put people to work building post offices, clearing forests, maintaining roads. Maybe we'll get a trillion

dollar infrastructure program that will again give America world leading roads, airports, and bridges. It's entirely possible. No reason it can't happen, but it will require an effort by political and business elites to say, we let things get out of hand the last 30 years. kind of old-fashioned hard work, virtue, community building, sharing, recognizing that all Americans are in this together and need to have a chance to improve their lives. And we've got to give them that opportunity. So if they do that, great. If they retreat to, man, you know, government always screws up. It's not fair for government to tax us at all. And government programs are always a waste of money. Let everybody pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What I've earned is mine. I'm going to keep it or I'm going to ship it over to Panama or I'm going to put it in the Cayman Islands. trouble. We, the United States, the West, and so on. So it all depends on whether we kind of learn some of these lessons of history. I saw a cute cartoon the other day that said, yeah, what do I do, man? Because I'm willing to learn the lessons of history, but even if I do, I'm still condemned to watch people who haven't learned the lessons of history make the same mistakes

and repeat it. So you can listen to people like me, but what we really need is for millions of people who are successful in the world today to say, our success has always led to a better world when we try to bring our whole society with us. And if we're just trying to get ahead for ourselves or our immediate family or my immediate neighborhood, and I'm not going to worry about everybody else, then we're going to lose our way and then pave the way for a different society to take over. That's always a possibility. Success is never assured, but failure is not assured either. I think it's very much up to what the people who have benefited from the last 20 or 30 years decide to do with that.

Are they going to keep their advantage or are they going to share? Right. So essentially you're arguing for the power of human agency. You're arguing that elites should have a sense of noblesse oblige, that they should be like Teddy Roosevelt breaking up the monopolies and Franklin Delano Roosevelt being a traitor to his own class, which helped America emerge out of its last period of great inequality and political instability. Yeah, that's beautifully put, Joe. I'm all for that. Think of the difference between Franklin Delano Roosevelt going to Madison Square Garden and addressing a crowd of thousands and saying, we are in danger because the monopolists and the hoarders of wealth want to continue to run things, and I don't want that to happen anymore. And he said, those people hate me,

and I welcome their hatred. And you compare that to Donald Trump going to his gilded private club at Mar-a-Lago and telling his fellow club members about the tax cut he just passed. You should be happy. I just made all of you a lot richer. I mean, these are completely opposite ways for a leader to deal with their society. And the differences couldn't be greater. And I think the outcomes couldn't be greater. You have one Franklin Delano Roosevelt who gradually pulled America out of depression and saw it through success and led it to be the most respected country in the world. And you have Donald Trump, who left hundreds of thousands dead from a pandemic. But not only that, millions of people

out of work, first president in American history to have more people out of work than when he entered the presidency. And he left with elections in doubt. He left with faith in democracy weakened. He left with the government in enormous head-scratching levels of debt that we haven't seen since World War II. And in disgrace as the only president to be impeached twice. So if you compare where America was as we were under either Teddy Roosevelt emerging from the first Gilded Age or Franklin Delano Roosevelt tackling the Depression. And now the condition of our society, the fragility, the lack of trust, the lack of prosperity that we have under Trump compared to where we were is distressing. So absolutely, it's got to be turned around. It can be turned around,

but it will depend on whether the elites say, let's get united. And we don't like everything Biden is doing, but we need to get together to reclaim our country and put it on a track toward world leadership again, or they're just going to fight. And if the Republicans are going to oppose everything Biden does and say, well, let him do what he can, but in two years, we're going to tear it all down and turn it all around. No one's going to respect the United States anymore if they can't count on us to even keep the same policies or the goals from more than election to election. So I'm worried. I'll be honest with you. I'm worried about where America is going. And we're going to learn a lot in just the next 18 months when we see not only what Joe Biden will be able to accomplish, but whether some of those positive accomplishments

are accepted by people on different parties and both sides, or whether the divisions are going to get deeper and people dig in their heels and say, I'm not going to judge a policy on whether or not it's good for America. I'm going to judge a policy on whether it comes from a Democrat or a Republican. And that's how I'm going to decide what's good. That will be hopeless. So that's got to change and I hope it will. Yeah, it feels 50-50. Yeah, it does. I agree with you.

I want to take a quick detour through structural demographic theory just to give people an intellectual framework for everything we've been talking about. But I want to start with some quick definitions. Jack, can you tell me what Louis XVI's problem is? Not the obvious problem, but the intellectual problem. Sure. The condition that Louis XVI found in France was in many ways very promising. France had the largest population of any country in Europe, which allowed it to field the largest armies. And it had a well-trained and well-disciplined

corps of bureaucrats who carried out the king's commands, but also who did a lot of social welfare work, built roads, provided charity and poverty relief, and so on. But the intellectual problem that Louis had was that all of this population growth was not all in a good direction. Some of the population growth was simply making it harder and harder for peasants to find enough land to feed their family. A lot of the land got subdivided into smaller and smaller plots or they had to sell it to neighbors or to commercial landlords. And so a lot more of the peasantry was finding itself struggling to hold on, increasingly impoverished, harder for them to pay taxes because the smaller the land they had, the less surplus was left

after feeding their families. So the population growth was cutting into the ability of the population, which was still largely a landed peasant population, to meet its own needs and to meet tax obligations. At the same time, that population growth was causing inflation. So the price, especially of food, but land and other things were going up. And if prices go up, the government has to raise more revenue in order to meet its expenses. But since the peasants were already kind of pushed to their limit, the only way to raise taxes was to go to the rich, to the commercial landlords, the wealthy merchants, and the landed aristocrats and say, guys, you need to pay more if we're going to keep these good

things going. Intellectually, however, that was a hard sell. Louis had some talented finance ministers who saw what was going on. But just like the mindset I mentioned about the triumph of capitalism, the French thought that they somehow had the system figured out, that they had the most beautiful, educated, best dressed, elegantly dancing nobles in all of Europe. And that the system that gave those guys tax privileges was actually part of the success. That was part of the system that they valued. And so they came back to these finance ministers and said, you know, we're not going to pay more taxes.

It's terrible if you try and do that. Well, Louis was smart enough and his finance ministers were smart enough to figure out some ways to raise taxes, even on the nobility. But that just made the nobility furious with the king and made them willing to say, you know, well, we're going to dig our heels in and look for something, you know, more conservative policies. Well, that made it impossible for a compromise to be worked out when after fighting in the American Revolution to help the Americans, there was a bit of a financial bind and the government found itself short of cash to pay its debts. And it really needed an emergency infusion of money. And the elites were saying, you know, you guys want to raise our taxes. It's not going to happen. You want us to lend you money? Not going to happen either until you agree to our

conditions. And so Louis was forced to call the Estates General, and that got out of control because the bourgeoisie in the Estates General thought, hey, this is the perfect time for us to push our agenda forward and get rid of some of these overly proud aristocrats. So when you say, you know, Louis' intellectual problem, he was bound on the one hand by conservative elites who thought that everything was perfect and that their privileges were actually making the system go forward instead of realizing that it was holding the system back and he was presiding over a country that was producing a lot of wealth there was a lot of urban wealth a lot of trade wealth There was a lot of urban wealth, a lot of trade wealth. There was a lot of money being created through new overseas efforts and industries. But the system didn't

recognize that. The tax system was still mainly falling on the backs of the peasants, and their population growth was making it impossible for them. And most of that new urban and mercantile wealth was kind of like, you know, like the dot com, like the digital companies now, like the Microsoft, you know, the Nante sugar manufacturers and merchants were like the Microsoft and Google of their day. They had kind of new industries. People didn't know how to tax it effectively. And so they accumulated a great deal of wealth, but that wealth didn't go to serve the needs of the changing society. It went to create conspicuous consumption that made other people angry. So, you know, you take me back to Louis XVI very cleverly because it does illustrate a lot of the same

mindset that we have today. Louis didn't see that as the population was changing and the structure of the economy was changing, the way government function had to change too. And because he couldn't get that change through the system in a peaceful manner due to the political polarization and the resistance to compromise, it ended up breaking through in a violent and revolutionary manner. And I'm not going to say that the attack on the U.S. Capitol January 6th was anything of the magnitude like the attack on the Bastille. Biggest difference is with the attack on the Bastille in 1789, some members of the military joined in and actually, you know, some artillery men brought their cannon and pointed them at the Bastille and said, you know, you got to let these guys in

because we don't believe in the king anymore either. But in some ways, it was a small scale version of that. And there were some, you were some former veterans who joined with the crowds who attacked the Capitol. But they were saying the same kind of thing that the crowd in Paris was saying. We don't believe in the system anymore. We don't think those elections were valid. We don't think the results responded to us. We don't believe this, and we're willing to fight to take it into our own hands. Now, in France, that was followed by massive peasant

uprisings throughout the country due to food shortages, and then it was followed by the elites declaring that they were going to declare a new national assembly and take control of legislation. Now, here in the United States, I don't expect there to be mass uprisings due to hunger because we have food stamps. Otherwise, maybe. I mean, 12% of the population of the U.S. is now on food assistance. So who are we to kind of look down at the French in 1789 and say we've solved all our problems It's not working. We don't believe in this anymore. And that's the big anxiety that elites should be feeling. And hopefully they'll be more willing to change and we'll get a more peaceful change than occurred 200 years ago. But you point to a perfect example, and population changes are subtle.

That's the thing about political demography. You wanted some of the theory and background. I mean, what I do is I study how population changes affect different groups and different institutions in society. And in France, population obviously made it harder for peasants to get land. But in America, population growth with the big baby boom, it shifted the nature of the labor market. We now have a labor market that has a lot of people who graduated from high school in the 50s and 60s when a college degree wasn't needed by everybody. And those people are kind of getting pushed aside now because the skills they gathered 20-odd years ago,

30-odd years ago, are not as valuable in the economy. Meanwhile, the baby boomers who did get college and who are holding professional positions are living longer, not retiring, holding onto their wealth, and they're kind of blocking the way for a lot of young people who are trying to get a foothold today. So we've got kind of a demographically distorted labor market in the United States, too, in terms of who has opportunities, who has advantages, who is being treated differently, you know, and we see that, you know, obviously the effects, and this is of course true in Europe and Australia too, different racial groups, different education groups do very

differently in the labor market. It's not as simple as you go out, you say, I'll work hard, you do well and succeed. That's the way it was 30 years ago. But now you need certain skills, you need to be in certain industries. Otherwise, it can be very difficult. And the population change also tilts things another way. As the population gets older, government is spending more on Medicare and pensions, and that takes money away from other things that we would like to see done and creates shortages of, you know, demand for healthcare, demand for nice fancy housing. You know, all of this is being, in a sense, driven by the fact that we had a big explosive baby boom in the 50s and 60s. Now, we have much smaller cohorts kind of coming up through the system, fewer children,

smaller households, less demand for all goods and services. And so, even though the baby boomers are kind of filling things up at one end and demanding they want consumption goods, they want pensions, they want health care paid for. The labor force that's coming up behind them is not fitting into the market very well and much smaller as in addition. So it's not providing the same kind of burst in demand for goods and services. So the demography turns out to be a kind of very good key for looking at a whole bunch of different things, whether it's competition for housing, competition to get into elite colleges, difficulties fitting various groups of the population into the labor market smoothly and effectively,

dealing with differences in wages, differences in savings. We have not adjusted most of our economic and social institutions that grew up after World War II for a world in which the population of rich countries is older, smaller youth cohorts, and not properly trained and skilled for the kind of technology and job structure that's developing now in the 2020s. So it's going to take, you know, thinking carefully about what's going on in our society, like Louis XVI didn't, like we didn't after the end of history, and say, what do we do? Fortunately, you know, there's some easy things to do. A big infrastructure program would put a lot of those people who have craft skills but not college to work. And if you raise the minimum wage and give them good jobs, they can, again, gain a kind of stake in the system and gain some faith that,

oh, actually, you know, government and the economy will work for us. It'll provide a role where the skills that we bring to the table actually are respected and rewarded. So, you know, big infrastructure, big construction will be a major help. But at the same time, the future is coming. And so for the children of the baby boomers, the millennials, the Generation Z, we need to make sure that those people can all get the bandwidth, the education, and the that the human element, the social element in the future works with the technology and is not somehow victimized or exploited by it. If we think of inequality as a race between education and technology, wouldn't education solve most of these problems? Another way to ask this question is in Angus Deaton and Anne Case's work, the lack of a four-year BA is the crucial factor in deaths of despair.

So is there a way in which all of this just collapses into or could be solved by extending education to more people? Well, the formula that you mentioned, the race between education and technology, is actually at the core of the work of a very distinguished woman economist at Harvard, Claudia Golden, who put the whole 20th century in those terms. And that is a key to the labor market for sure. But education by itself is only a solution if education is flexible and attentive to the market. By that I mean, if not enough people have a college degree, that's bad.

But forcing everybody to get a college degree is not the answer either. It's not one size fits all. Rather, it's ensuring that people have the skills to develop their ability. We need good cooks. Cooking is not going to be replaced overnight by machines that prepare our cuisine. We need skilled healthcare workers. We need people who have design skills who can manage the equipment that records and produces. We need set designers, people who work in music. A lot of these things, you either don't need a standard four-year college degree or you need a different kind of training. You need a kind of vocational training.

Some of that is also true for people working in factories. A lot of really high-skilled technical factory work requires an education, but not necessarily a sit at a desk or work at a computer college education. It may require kind of a hands-on vocational education of the kind that Germany and Scandinavia is very good at incorporating into their system. So my view is we need more investment in education, but giving everybody the money to go to college would actually be a dumb idea. What you want to do is invest in early life education. That is the really critical time to get people's brains primed to perform well in life, is when they're age three to seven. And so that preschool early education should be

universal and top quality, and then give kids multiple avenues to explore. Do you want to be a mathematician? Do you want to be a violinist? Do you want to be a craftsman who builds outstanding buildings or stone craft furniture or design work? Or do you want to be an explorer? Do you want to design surfboards? We need all of these different skills and we'll all benefit if we provide people with multiple pathways without them having to say, well, I got to borrow $50,000 to get a degree in computer coding or I'm going to end up on the streets. You cannot give the whole population that all or none choice and expect to have a happy society. The beauty of human beings is that we are so

different and diverse. Every time I see a dancer on stage or hear a singer perform or look at a painting, I'm amazed at what human beings are capable of doing, right? But it's all different. I couldn't do any of those things, but I don't think less of myself in some ways. Yeah. But I mean, what I do, I care about, and I'm thrilled that I had the opportunity to study history and write about it. I just think everybody should have the opportunity to do what they are passionate about. They should be able to learn what they're good at doing, what feels comfortable to them. And they should have avenues with dignity and respect and decent rewards, regardless of what they choose. The idea that everybody should do the same thing goes against human nature and is not going to be productive.

So in your theory, revolutions are or occur at the conjuncture of popular grievances, elite infighting and state fiscal crises. Are all three of those elements necessary to spark a revolution? Yes, that's one of the reasons revolutions are relatively rare in history. Because you can have elites very antagonistic toward each other or toward the government, then you get conspiracy for a military coup d'etat. That's not a revolution. You certainly have lots of periods, both recently and in longer stretches of history, where workers are angry about their wages or people in the countryside have been unhappy about their rents or their access to land and you have peasant uprisings or worker strikes. But those don't become revolutions

unless the elite joins in and helps lead them against the government. So you need these multiple things. And I should also say the government is not likely to be overthrown if it has been wealthy enough and successful enough to pay off the elites and keep their loyalty. So you need these three things, a government that has gotten weak or in debt and doesn't function well, elites that are willing to turn on the government because they feel it no longer serves their interest or serves the country well. And you good sections large sections of the population who've lost their trust in government and feel that the government is no longer worth following or listening to or even obeying they if they can get away with it gotcha because what i took from peter turchin's ages of discord was it it was the intra-elite

competition which was the most important factor but you're saying that that all three factors are necessary all three factors are necessary because even if you have intra-elite competition if the if the ruler if the state itself is still pretty strong then the intra-elite competition, if the ruler, if the state itself is still pretty strong, then the intra-elite competition just gets to where one elite gets control of state resources, uses it to purge the elite that it's fighting with. And then you have kind of an elite purge and the victory of one side and you get one-sided government for a while. You need that elite polarization and deathly competition to coincide with a situation where the government is in a pickle, and then elites have to decide, how do we solve this crisis, this crisis either of popular uprisings or government finance, but there's some crucial difficulty where

elites are presented with this choice. Do we try and fix the government and restore it, or do we overthrow it and put in something different? And if the elites are really divided, then you'll probably have some groups try and preserve the existing government, and other groups try and preserve the existing government and other groups try and get rid of it and change it. And that's the kind of confrontation that leads to one or the others saying, oh, I got to raise popular support. I need a crowd at my back if I'm going to prevail. And that is when you get revolutions, when you have elites leading popular groups against the government. So it takes all of that.

Got it. So there's a possibly apocryphal story about Louis XVI going to bed early on the night of July 14, 1789, and one of his servants kind of gingerly enters the room and concerned that Louis doesn't really realize the extent of what's going on. He tries to, you know, shake him out of his complacency. And Louis XVI asks, what then? Is it a revolt? And his servant replies, no, sire, it is a revolution. So, how do we know when we are in a revolution? How do you define a revolution? That's a lovely apocryphal story.

And it's the Duke de Rousseau who comes in and finds Louis in his bedchamber in that story. And the answer is we don't know whether a revolt is going to be changed, and that will require overthrowing the existing rulers. In France, as I mentioned, the revolt at the Bastille, which is the event they were talking about, it wasn't just another peasant revolt because members of the army joined in. And saying this is a revolution means you've got a problem if even the army is not following the orders of its officers and is now going over to the insurgents. I mean, you know, in Belarus now, we've got a situation where the population, God bless them, has been out demonstrating weekend after weekend in bitter

winter weather for months. Is that going to be suppressed? Or is it going to blossom into a kind of Ukraine, orange or Maidan type revolution where the government is forced out? We cannot know in advance. Because right now, all we know for sure is that the population certainly wants Lukashenko, the ruler of Belarus, to get out. And in between the population and the ruler is the military and the bureaucracy. And so far, the military and the bureaucracy have been willing to back the government. They have not defected. Now, what would change that in a minute is if Vladimir Putin gave some sign that he's not going to back the government in Belarus and therefore that Lukashenko's on his own. That's essentially what Gorbachev did to the leaders in Eastern Europe when he was trying to reform the USSR and said, I don't want to be distracted

by sending tanks into Berlin or into Budapest. You guys handle it on your own. And that made it very hard for them to keep the loyalty of their own elites, their own military and bureaucratic officers because they saw, gosh, if the Soviet Union isn't even going to back these corrupt communist leaders, we don't want to be in the position of defending them. So as long as Putin keeps sending signals

to Belarus, though, you know, we're, we don't want to see the government of Belarus fall, we're going to be behind you. He did the same thing. Putin did the same thing in Syria. Syria actually did have numbers of the military starting to defect and leave the Syrian government, but Putin kind of rushed in there and said, no, we're going to back you. We're going to support Syria's government with military resources because we don't want the government of Syria to fall. You're our ally. We have a base there and so on. So that becomes very important. I won't know whether the events in Belarus are a revolution or not until we see, does the leadership start to break up and defect? Is the government forced to change?

Then it will be clear. But until then, all we can say is there's a struggle for power going on. Got it. Sorry, I can't be more definite. But as I said, it's like a football game at halftime. You can tell who's ahead, but you don't know how it's going to come out. So should we think of the real wage stagnation in America as mostly a function of just this swollen baby boomer generation, pushing up the labor supply? Is that the implication we should draw from your theory? the short answer is yes. The baby boom clearly shifted the balance of power between workers and

employers such that employers had a lot more workers to choose from. So they could be pickier about the workers' skills and they could pay less to the workers entering the market either more recently or with fewer skills. It's also the case, however, that we had fairly generous immigration during the 60s and 70s. Now, generally, I'm a big fan of immigration, and I think immigration has generally been good for the economy. But we combined the immigration rules with a strange set of conditions, which was we allow a lot of people to immigrate to the country, both legally and illegally, as we didn't control illegal immigration very well at all. That is once people kind of got across the borders, fine. But we made it hard enough for them

to get in that instead of people saying, well, I'll come to the US, I'll get a legal job, I'll work for a few months or a few years, and then I'll go back home. It was so hard to get in that people said, if I can get into the United States by hook or by crook, I'm going to get in and then I'm going to try and bring my family because I'm not going to be able to go back and visit them and I want my family with me. So we built up this illegal immigrant population of about 10 million or more that also made it a little easier on employers to kind of say, oh yeah, we can get undocumented nannies, we can get undocumented gardeners, and pay them very little. Because if they're illegal,

they don't have the normal protections that workers do. So that also was a drag on the labor market. Legal migrants tended to be good. Legal migrants filled skills gaps. Legal migrants got good wages, and they kind of pushed the economy up. But the large number of long-term resident illegal immigrants created an opportunity for kind of unscrupulous employers to cut corners in the labor market and take away value from work. I think the answer for that problem is not to say, kick everybody out. That's impossible now. But people who have been resident in the United States for a couple of years or more should be given some type of legal work status. You don't have to give them citizenship. That's a whole different issue. But in terms of the economy and wages, if you give all workers the same

legal rights and protections so that they can choose where to work and who to work for, you end up with a much more fair system. So I'd say the baby boom was the biggest reason that employers got a big advantage over workers. Illegal immigration helped a little bit. And then also the kind of Republican Reagan attack on the unions and the greed is good ethic that, oh, you know, you can be a good boss and the pillar of the community and we can look up to you even if you pay your workers next to nothing because under capitalism, that's no longer your responsibility. Now, in the 50s and 60s, business people were expected to be good employers and good patrons of their community and to give back to society. Now, they can give money to a college or a museum and get their name on the wall and

feel good and not worry about homelessness or hunger. Those are not their problems. So three things. The baby boom is a big part of it. A smaller part is a large illegal immigrant population that was forced to work under exploitative conditions. And a third was kind of a shift in the ethos to say capitalists and bosses don't have to worry. It's perfectly fine to pay people as little as possible, to hire them on temporary contracts, and so on. So I'd say the general devaluation of work started with the baby boom creating a surplus of workers, but other political factors exacerbated that and contributed to

the depth of the problem we have today. Peter Turchin has a useful distinction in his book Ages of Discord between real wages and relative wages. Can you tell me a little bit about that distinction and why you find it useful? Yeah, that actually was one of the smarter things that Peter has done. And let me give a lot of credit to Peter Turchin here for your listeners. I published a book 25 years ago now laying out the demographic structural theory and saying for countries like France going into the French Revolution or China with the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, looking at how population growth affected the returns to work and labor and farmers and government taxes and developed different kinds of data to help develop

and test the theory. So I give him a lot of credit for taking the theory even to new places beyond what I did. And what he did, particularly for the United States in that book, is to say, how do we understand the position of workers in society? And because America was a young country and transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial to a modern high-tech society in the 200 years he was looking at, he said, you know, I have to allow there's kind of a constant upward flow of wages. If I just look at the level of wages, it's not going to tell me much about the position of workers versus everybody else. So he felt, and I agree with him very strongly, that a better measure of how workers are doing in society is what portion of the total output of society comes back to the workers who did so much to produce that output. And what he did is he looked at total output, what we measure today by GDP, gross domestic product,

and he looked at the level of real wages for people, kind of the return to individual workers. And then he took the ratio of the two. Now, if workers are getting ahead, you would expect that the income of workers would be a constant or growing portion of total output. That is, they would be getting their fair share, or maybe even a little more over time as they become more productive and become more sophisticated workers. But the reality over the last 30 years is that GDP has grown much faster than workers' share of GDP. It's also been the case that growth has been slow, and that means workers' real wages have actually been unusually stagnant, which is unusual in American history. But if you look at other periods in American history, for most of the time from the 1900s

to the 1970s, the wages of individual workers compared to the total output of society kept pace pretty nicely. And in fact, for much of the 30s, I'm sorry, for kind of the late 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, real wages were going up faster than total output, partly because the stock market was recovering slowly, but workers were going to work in more productive factories and companies were trying to get these new, better educated, more skilled workers, people who came back with military experience after World War II. So in some ways, 50s and 60s were kind of a golden age for American workers. That started to change in the 70s and then the kind of 80s, 90s, and 2010s, the workers share, so the ratio of wages to GDP, turn negative. So, Turchin put his finger on what I think is a very useful way to understand in a complex modern society where wages are generally going up for most workers,

does that really matter? Does that tell the whole story? And the answer is not really. You not only want to know whether workers' wages are going up, but also whether they're going up as fast as total output or not. Because if workers' wages are either stable or going up slowly while the rest of the country is getting much, much richer, well, workers are going to feel left out, left behind, cheated, and that's what you get. So good for Peter to realize that that's the better way to look at it in a kind of modern growing society. if their wages were also growing adequately that might make things a little more bearable but the combination of low growth and inequality is just intolerable well Well, that's certainly true. But at the same time, even if workers' wages are growing, you have to look at what really is crucial to their development. So if you live in a society where wages are getting higher and people are saying, you know,

get better dental care, right? So you have higher, you know, get better dental care, right? So you have higher wages, you can afford better dental care. People don't go around with a mouth full of rotten teeth or misshapen teeth anymore. Everybody now, more or less, you can get some type of dentistry and maybe even orthodonture because if you have medical plan and medical insurance, they cover these things. That's good. But if you cannot get your kids into a good college for them to get a good job in the future, you're still going to feel awful. The fact that you have a 65-inch TV, whereas your dad might have had only a 24-inch black and white, that's not going to make you feel like, hey, I've made great progress over my parents if you can't afford a house the same size that your parents had, or you can't afford to live in the same neighborhood that your parents lived in.

So the idea that you can tell everything from something like just the wage or wages compared to prices, I think that's mistaken. I think what's really important is whether the worker's wage is going up or keeping pace with everything else in society. Because if you're not, you're going to find that those neighborhoods are out of reach or that the things that rich people are competing against you for, whether it's outdoor public space or places and universities, all of a sudden, you know,

that game is going to start to look rigged. And in fact, it is getting rigged, as we just saw, when rich people can manufacture fake sports portfolios for their kids to get them into the school they want. You know, what are ordinary people who are trying to get ahead supposed to do? So we're in a world where if we really want to understand how do ordinary people get dignity, have faith in the future, have trust in government, you can't just look and say,

well, you know, some people are making more money and they have better health care and they have bigger TVs or their used cars are only three years old instead of five years old. All of those things may be true, but those do not necessarily give people faith that their future or their family's future will actually be better. For that, we have to look at things that are important to middle-class life, like the cost of housing in a good neighborhood, like the cost of getting your children an education that will allow them to move ahead, like the cost of not just eating but having a healthy diet and getting the kind of attention you need in an emergency or crisis. We need to look at people's savings.

We used to have savings plans for people, and now it's apparently the case that for many Americans, even a small emergency, an unexpected expense of several thousand dollars can be totally traumatic to people. And that is a terrible situation. Empirically, have rent-seeking behaviors been on the rise in the last few decades? And if so, how does that fit in your theory? What switches elites from becoming productive to predatory? Well, you're using social science terms here, obviously. The Asimoglu-Robinson idea of elites being predatory, being bad for society. Elites are by nature predatory, I think.

There are a few saintly elites who have found themselves very successful and much admired and want to give back to society. But most people get ahead through competition with other people and they have a certain tough attitude that says, I had to fight for what I have. I earned it. I'm richer than everybody else. My goal is to make sure I die richer than everybody else. I want to have the most toys and I want everybody else to know it. Now, we counter that with a strong social ethic. The Christian ideal is one that says it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven, right, than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. The argument is being rich may be one sign that you have competed well in one area of life, but we shouldn't lose sight of the other virtues and you shouldn't value yourself entirely by your wealth. That's an important social

aspect to give back. And then we have another government policy aspect, which is if we have inheritance taxes or progressive income taxes, that sends a signal that earning more and more money is not an end in of itself that satisfies everyone's needs, that there are broader social purposes and being part of society and helping everyone do better is also important. So we need to signal to elites that that kind of selfish behavior is not going to be admired. And we need to do even more if elites get to the point of saying, well, you know, I'm going to hide my money in offshore LLCs and, you know, have the people who do the Panama Papers take care of my money because I don't want to share it with anybody. That becomes very predatory behavior. Or when elites buy up whole blocks of property in order to exclude others, that has to be socially regulated.

Now, the beauty of democracy used to be that democratic government provided a check against the selfish and predatory behavior of elites. So, too, did unions, another social institution that was designed for that purpose. And elites, of course, are going to resist it and fight back. But in a healthy society, the necessity to restrain elite selfishness is met by institutional means and creates a proper balance. When the elites are also able to control government policy, as they've increasingly been able to do so by various kinds of political spending and patronage, then that balance is shaken up and you get a type of predatory behavior that is not restrained, but is actually facilitated by the government through various kinds of investment credits and tax breaks that say to the wealthy, get wealthier. We admire what you're doing. We

value what you're doing. Go ahead and get wealthier. But that almost by definition takes capital away from other purposes that could help people who are still struggling to get ahead. So the predatory behavior is getting worse. And when you ask specifically about rent seeking, it's not just a question of buying real estate and charging extortionate rents in high cost cities. The biggest form of rent seeking recently has been with education. We developed what we thought was a meritocracy for the purpose of giving people who were not wealthy an opportunity to use their other skills, go to a university or go to an academy and develop their talents and move ahead in life.

And that meritocracy was supposed to work against maintaining a selfish elite. But over the years, those who benefited from the meritocracy started to say, okay, how do I protect my position in the meritocracy? How do I pass it on to my kids? And they made it, they, meaning the elites who kind of were the alumni and those in government, have turned education, higher education, for what used to be a publicly supported opportunity as a socially desirable good, into an expensive private good that people have to pay for or borrow to afford. And therefore, they've made it less accessible to those who are not like themselves. Neither of my parents went to college. A lot of people in my generation were first-generation college educated, but we didn't have an obstacle. You could afford to put your way through college, pay your way through college,

work your way through college if you wanted to. The University of California, all you had to pay for were your books. Tuition was free. And we've lost that world. We're now in a world where those who control the doors to education don't see a problem in those doors being very expensive and difficult to open. So that's another form of rent seeking, people protecting an existing privilege that other people have started to resent and say, this is terribly unfair. This is not right. And they have a good case until we make it possible for people to enter the elite more freely. And the data will show. Excellent studies have been done at Stanford that show the odds of a young person having a higher income than their parents used to be pretty high

in the 60s and 70s, but has steadily declined to where it's now maybe a 50-50 proposition whether a young person, when they reach 40, is going to be better or worse off than their parents were at the same age. And in America, that's kind of not acceptable. We kind of grew up with the idea that as the society gets richer, and America as a whole has certainly continued to get richer and richer for the last six, seven decades, that as the country gets richer, everybody should be able to move up. But the data show that that has not been happening. Jack, I've really, really enjoyed this conversation. I realize I've taken a lot of your time. Unfortunately, I have to go soon. For people wondering, this began in very inauspicious circumstances.

We had some video conferencing issues. So we're doing this by phone. We can't actually see each other. But I've really enjoyed this. And I think you're a very important voice at the moment. And I'd love to continue this conversation sometime. Is there sort of like a final message you'd like to leave us with? And is there any way us Aussies can help our American brothers and sisters?

We want you to succeed. Oh, I love that. And God bless you all, because the community and the friendship between Australia and America has been fantastic for both our countries and for the world. I would like to see Australia continue to be an example of how democratic government can be competent and popular and meet the social needs. We all have to work together on things like addressing climate change, working with a world that's going to be more diverse ethnically and religiously, and keeping everybody feeling included. These are challenges that both our countries face. But I think the biggest challenge is restoring trust in government. Our worlds are really complex now. The society is complicated, the economy is complicated, and it can seem like it's all we can do to manage our own lives and take care of our own families. And that's true. But what we've learned from this pandemic is in times of crisis and solving problems that are far bigger than any one of us,

we need a competent government, a trustworthy government. And if democracies cannot show that they can manage and maintain trust in government and effective government, then other forms of government will take over. And we're going to see people saying, well, you know, China may be authoritarian and unfree and dictatorial. But maybe that's what we need in order to get leadership that's competent and that we can trust. I hope it never comes to that. I spent a couple years in Hong Kong and Hong Kong also beautiful, wonderful people who also happen to love their freedom, freedom of thought, freedom to assemble and demonstrate and share their ideas, they're now losing that freedom because mainland China believes that everybody should follow the same line and follow the same party

because that's the only way they can solve the problems of a large, growing, and diverse country. So I think China poses that challenge to us. Can a democracy solve the problems of large, diverse countries with big problems? Let's show that we can do it. Let's all put our shoulders to working as members of a community, whether it's an intellectual community or a work community or social community. Put our shoulders together and make democracy work for us, rebuild governments that we can trust, and then I think we'll all be better off. And I do look forward to talking to you again.

We'll see how things go in both our countries over the next six months. Hopefully we can talk with this COVID pandemic behind us. That would be great. Yeah, that would be one less monkey off our shoulders. So I agree. That would be nice. Yeah, that's right. Well, I'm sorry this has to end, Joe. It's been great talking to you. And thank you very much for giving me a chance to reach your audience. It's great to be in touch with Australia, even if I can't put my foot on the soil there right now. It'll come before too long, I hope. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Two things before you go. One, if you want to read the transcript or the show notes for this episode,

you'll find them on my website, thejspod.com. Number two, please subscribe to the show. It means that you won't miss new episodes like this one, and it also makes it easier for other people to find us, and I would appreciate your help. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our dehydrated video editor is Al Fetty. I'm Joe Walker. Until next week, thank you for listening. Ciao. next week thank you for listening ciao