Today’s not-so-long read, courtesy of The Atlantic.
Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle. Turchin excludes the ultimate violent incident, the Civil War, as a “sui generis event.” The exclusion may seem suspicious, but to a statistician, “trimming outliers” is standard practice. Historians and journalists, by contrast, tend to focus on outliers—because they are interesting—and sometimes miss grander trends.
Turchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable. Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them—while others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism. Other policies are simply heretical. He opposes credential-oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such polices, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.
Having read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy a long while ago, I knew about his fictional concept of psychohistory, “a method of predicting the future along mass social change in humanity.”
In the novels this science is used to ‘predict history’ with the intent of warding off societal collapse. An idea that has influenced economists, business leaders, politicians, and geeky nobodies such as myself...that if you could only identify enough variables in an incredibly complex system and map enough data to them, you could see reoccurring trends and their conclusions.
Also interesting is Turchin’s background in the natural sciences and work modeling the dynamics of populations and proposition of what he terms, ‘laws’. Turchin is using some of the same techniques used to discover the ebb and flow of (as far as we know) simpler natural systems to identify how more complex, human systems function and then identify likely outcomes is fascinating. Social science as a life science or a form of theoretical biology.
As the article states, not all the conclusions Turchin makes are ones easily acceptable — I can see the idea of “the world needs ditch-diggers more than think tank fellowships” not going over well in some quarters — but at least we would have a better idea of why, if we are heading off a cliff, why it’s happening.