Peter Turchin

North Carolina · connectedBorn 1957

Russian-American complexity scientist

Studied at Duke University

academic, sociologist, ecologist, scientist, historian, biologist

Quotations with a citation

[W]e need to translate the general theory into a specific computational model tailored to the focal state. Over the past four decades this has been accomplished for... historical case-studies, ranging from Ancient empires to Early Modern states and nineteenth century’s revolutions and civil wars.

Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and several major Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions.

Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom.

[T]he... forecast: “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe” ...was not simply a projection of the current trend in social instability into the future. ...[T]he basis for this forecast was a quantitative model that took as inputs the major SD drivers for instability (immiseration, intraelite competition, and state (in)capacity) and translated them into the Political Stress Indicator (PSI)... strongly correlated with socio-political instability. The rising curve of the... PSI... suggests a growing future socio-political instability.

[D]isease outbreaks occur much more frequently during... crisis periods. Such epidemics historically have had a disproportionate effect on the less advantaged... and the Covid-19 pandemic was not an exception. ...[I]n terms of structural-demographic theory... the pandemic... further worsened the well-being of large swaths of the American population... consequently, drove up the mass-mobilization potential. ...[G]overnmental dysfunction in dealing with the pandemic, coupled with intra-elite infighting, will likely further depress... trust in government institutions. Thus... the coronavirus has... further destabilize[d] the American polity.

Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability...

[W]hile declining living standards are often a contributing factor to... instability, reversing this trend does not end instability until elite overproduction is... reversed...

This prediction was based on a computational model that quantified in the USA such structural-demographic forces for instability as popular immiseration, intraelite competition, and state weakness prior to 2010.

Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected... the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability.

[S]uch measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010–2020 decade in all of these countries.

How resilient are our societies to internal and external shocks?

Can we model and forecast the dynamics of social resilience and its opposite, social breakdown?

[G]rowing socio-political instability results from multiple interacting factors: economic, political, and cultural.

Structural-demographic theory (SDT) offers a... wholistic framework for investigating such... forces that... lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of socio-political instability.

SDT can be... an explicit computational model capable of forecasting future... social unrest and political violence in specific social systems.

Structural-demographic theory... was proposed by Jack Goldstone and further developed and tested by... investigators, including [S.] Nefedov, Turchin, [and] Korotayev et al.

The SDT proposes that the causes of revolutions and major rebellions are... similar to processes that cause earthquakes. In both... it is useful to distinguish "pressures" (structural conditions, which build up slowly) from "triggers" (sudden releasing events, which immediately precede a social or geological eruption).

Specific triggers... are difficult, perhaps... impossible to predict. ...[S]tructural pressures build up slowly and more predictably, and are amenable to analysis and forecasting.

Many triggering events... are ultimately caused by pent-up social pressures ...[i.e.,] the structural factors.

The main focus of SDT... is on the structural pressures undermining social resilience.

The theory represents complex human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks.

The focus [is] on only these four structural components... [E]ach component has a number of attributes that change dynamically in response to... [the] other... variables.

SDT is a general theory that guides our understanding of political violence dynamics and social breakdown in all large-scale state-level societies.

[T]he theory has been applied to two contemporary societies. The first... is a structural-demographic model for the... USA... the basis for the 2010 prediction. The details... were published [by] Turchin and later expanded into a book-length treatment.

Structural-demographic theory was proposed 30 years ago. Although it was successively refined by other theorists... the theoretical core, and especially the emphasis on intra-elite competition and conflict as the most important driver of socio-political instability and state breakdown, remained constant. Over the past three decades, the theory was empirically tested by a growing number of researchers. Currently, there are detailed investigations of at least twenty crises... to test the predictions of the theory... [T]here are several dozen other less detailed examples. The... verdict is that.. predictions are well supported by data. ...[R]ival theories are not supported.

[T]he "crude" Malthusian explanation, which connects popular immiseration to social breakdown, fails to account both for the start and end of the "Time of Troubles."

Many of the historical "Golden Ages" were... golden... only for the elites, whose high levels of consumption were based on low real wages and falling consumption levels of the great majority...

Making scientific predictions about the events that happened, but are not known to the authors of the theory, is a valid scientific approach in historical sciences, such as geology, astrophysics, evolutionary biology, and cliodynamics (history as science). It is sometimes referred to as "retrodiction". ...[T]he primary way of testing theories in historical dynamics is retrodiction. But when mulitple successful tests using retrodiction (prediction about the past) are complemented with a few cases of prediction about the future, our degree of confidence in the theory is... enhanced.

The SDT is not merely a theory for understanding why internal violence outbreaks develop and spike. By providing... understanding of the deep structural causes of socio-political instability and societal breakdown, SDT... gives us tools for adopting... reforms and policy interventions that can reverse these drivers of instability.

[N]one of the fundamental structural-demographic drivers have been reversed, so far. Thus, the American social system continues to be very vulnerable to additional "quakes".

[U]ntil the fundamental SD drivers for instability are reversed, there will be other triggering events... social turbulence may continue for years ahead.

Historical data indicate that periods of enhanced instability and internal warfare usually extend for many years, with the median length... 10–15 years range.

SDT gives us understanding of the deep structural causes of socio-political instability and... tools for adopting... reforms and policy interventions that can reverse these drivers... It remains to be seen whether our society will be able to use these tools.

Let me go back to 2010 when Nature, the journal... asked a number of scientists to make some forecasts for the next decade... (2010-2020) and that's when I published the forecast that.., the growing political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade. ...10 years later ...together with my coauthor, Andrey Korotayev, we have revisited this forecast to see whether it had anything to do with reality, and... this is one of the graphs... We looked at several measures of instability, one was anti-government demonstrations. A very similar picture shows up when you look at violent riots. And so we submitted this paper in early 2020 saying that this forecast was actually right... [A]s the paper was [under] review, the summer of 2020, the riots following the death of George Floyd have exploded and... in January of 2021 we had the shocking event... known as the Storming of the Capitol.

I claim that structural-demographic theory... gives us a very good theoretical framework within which we can look at many different seemingly disparate trends in the United States... they suddenly start making sense... [[w:Disease of despair|[D]eaths of despair]] ...I would argue that the opioid crisis is one of the manifestations of the immiseration, and in fact... go to Case and Deaton original book (project) on deaths of despair. They make this argument very eloquently. They give a lot of data, much better than I can do, so [the] opioid crisis is part of the bundle of reasons why immiserated population (people)... results in large swaths of [the] population who are falling... and many of them take the way out by either drugs and overdosing, or... suicide, or... alcoholism... or simply become careless and die in accidents... So this is clearly, and thanks to Anne Case and Angus Deaton for their excellent work, because here we can really see... The book is excellent. They talk about social immiseration, broken families and many other things. It really is a very coherent understanding of these problems.

I began my career... as an ecologist... studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer. ...I embraced the turn of the field to complexity science, which mixes computer modeling with Big Data analytics to answer such questions as... why many animal populations go through boom-and-bust cycles. By the late 1990s... I began to consider how the same... approach could be brought to the study of human societies. A quarter of a century later, my colleagues... and I have built out a flourishing field... cliodynamics (from Clio... the... Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change)...

[T]here are important recurring patterns... throughout... human history over the past ten thousand years.

[C]omplex human societies at base and at some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles.

[M]y colleagues and I... focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse.

It became clear... through quantitative historical analysis that [throughout time] complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a... degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces...

In 2010... Nature asked specialists... to look ten years into the future, and I made this case... judging from the pattern of US history, we were due for another sharp instability spike by the early 2020s. ...The book is my best attempt to explain this model... I make no claims of radical originality.

[S]ocieties have arrived at this crossroads before, and though... most of the time...the road has led to great loss of life and societal breakdown, sometimes it has led to a far happier resolution ...

[W]hen a state... has stagnating or declining real wages... a growing gap between the rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt... Historically such developments have served as leading indicators of political instability. In the United States all of these... started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to... around 2020... a spike in political instability. And here we are.

The main question... Whether there is economic inequality, and social and political instability? Growing economic inequality, especially inequality in income and wealth, is currently a broadly shared concern. It has been a lot of the topics in the Davos meetings... and it is often adduced that growing inequality is a source of political discord. But is it? And if it's the case, how does it do it? What is the direct mechanism?

[T]here are some reasons to doubt that growing inequality might be a direct mechanism... of instability, because humans are very bad at perceiving inequality. ...[A] number of studies ...show that people, when... asked to estimate the degree of income or wealth inequality... their opinions essentially have nothing to do with what is actually... measured by economists.

[I]nequality is an excellent proxy for the actual mechanisms that drive instability, but the actual drivers... are several, of which I will focus on two: popular immiseration and elite overproduction. ...[A]t a deep structural level the force that drives those and ultimately instability, is what I would refer to as the "wealth pump."

So the forecast seems to have been quite good. The question is "What was it based on?" It was not... a prophecy, it was a scientific prediction because there is a specific mechanism on which it was based. ...[T]he forecast was a scientific prediction in the sense that I wanted to stick my neck out [and] make an out-of-sample prediction to see whether the mechanisms that have been identified by our theory... actually are working in the way that we thought...

[T]his is structural-demographic theory, and it posits several forces that drive social instability and political violence. ...I'll focus on two main ones. ...First ...mass mobilization potential ...based on popular immiseration resulting from the decreased living standards for the majority of the population... This is a fairly obvious effect of growing inequality... Since the days of Malthus this... force has been much in discussion.

[T]he second condition... is absolutely much more predictive of immediate troubles to come, and that's intraelite competition which results... when elite numbers increase relative to the general population. As a result... we have too many elite aspirants vying for a limited number of positions... elite overproduction causes... intraelite competition, eventually conflict, and that... in our analysis of about 100... cases of past societies sliding into crisis and then out... That turns out to be the most universal and most important force.

[T]here are other dimensions. The state fragility and international environment, especially for smaller countries, international environment plays quite a role, but I will focus on the first two.

I'll use the example of the United States, which I have studied from inside out... over the past 20 years, and I will illustrate how these few forces... have laid out in real life... a particular example...

Let's look at real wages... wages adjusted for inflation. ...In the late 1970s there was a definite phase transition. Up to that point, for the previous two generations, the wages for both unskilled and manufacturing workers had been growing quite rapidly and almost linearly... [W]ages for manufacturing workers increased... fourfold... a quite remarkable achievement... [I]t was unprecedented in human history to see such a long-term sustained increase in general well-being. Then... the wages stagnated, or even declined. So what was the reason?

GDP per capita shows no break in the 1970s. It slowed down... around the financial crisis of 2007–2008...

What about elite overproduction? ...By elites I mean the small percentage of population that concentrates social power in their hands. ...[I]t's a neutral definition. It's neither good nor bad. They're simply power holders.

What does the wealth pump do on the elite side..? Declining relative wages of workers set up this wealth pump that transfers wealth from workers to the economic elites... [A]s a result... a larger fraction of GDP goes to... the economic elites, which are both capital holders and top layers of administration of corporations (corporate officers). ...[T]his creates a favorable economic conjuncture for the economic elites and results in higher rates of upward social mobility. Elite numbers, as a result... grow and so does their consumption levels.

So far so good. But the problem is, as in many dynamical systems, there are some delayed effects of such dynamics. ...Here are some numbers on the relative distribution of wealth in the American population. You have good data from 1983 to 2019... when we look at the percentage of households with [inflation adjusted in 1995 US dollars] net worth exceeding... Millionaires, roughly 10% of the population (7% now) increased from 3% to 7% but then growth in... classes such as decamillionaires was even more remarkable... more than fivefold, sixfold increase in the proportion of households that have 10 million dollars wealth, or more.

[T]he problem is... if the wealth pump is allowed to run long enough, eventually... the growing elite numbers and their consumption levels will overshoot the productive base, which is what the workers are producing.

...[A]s a result ...the new elites, let's call them the elite aspirants... their numbers... begin to be so large that there is not enough power positions in... politics or in economics [e.g., corporations]... That's fixed, and as the numbers of elite aspirants vying for these positions increase, then first... the result... is intraelite competition, and secondly... the numbers of frustrated elite aspirants who are denied access to these positions begins to explode.

So here you see... in the political domain... in just the decade from 2000-2010... the number of candidates who have spent half a million dollars or more of their own money... the millionaires... have doubled during this period.

Many of the wealth holders... aim to translate their economic power into political power... [A]nother measure is the cost of winning ...has been growing also, showing a greater demand for these positions and greater willingness to spend money...

Not all of these candidates are wealthy in their own right. Many of the newly wealthy... instead of running themselves... fund other individuals.

[E]ssentially the effect of increasing the number of wealth holders is translated into increased competition for political positions.

[T]he problem is that as we get greater numbers of these surplus elites... some of them turn into... counter-elites... the individuals who are willing to challenge... the reigning regime, and in history often... by violent means, and in fact this is happening in the United States... they're willing to break the rules of the game.

So this is how elite overproduction drives intraelite competition, intraelite conflicts, rise of the counter-elites and then sociopolitical instability.

[I]nequality... at least in this model, is not a direct driver. It's a proxie for the direct drivers, which is immiseration and elite overproduction.

This is what I did in... Ages of Discord, I looked at more than 200 years of American history... an aggregated measure of well being... the blue curve has gone through two cycles, and the red curve is a measure of instability...

My colleague Walter Scheidel has expressed a pessimistic view in his book The Great Leveler... where he says the death is the great leveler so... a major violent shock is needed to reverse the economic inequality. I... look at this a bit more optimistically. Essentially entering into the crisis is relatively stereotypical, that's what our CrisisDB investigations show... [I]t's really conflict that plays a key role, together with mass organization. But the exit is usually contingent, and in fact there could be both good and bad outcomes, as indicated in this graph. Sometimes the decline is mild and followed by rapid recovery, but you... can also have complete collapse.

[W]e actually looked at outcomes of crises, measuring them by a collapse. I don't like the word "collapse" because who knows what collapse means. So... we broke it up into various dimensions, and then we can look at more than 100 cases in CrisisDB, and look at the distribution of the severity (where we basically sum of the possible bad things that can happen in societies). Most of the time the crises lead to pretty dire consequences, but there is about 10-15% of cases where the elites manage to pull together, adopt the right set of reforms, and sail the ship of the state through the turbulent waters without major bloodshed.

To conclude, the structural causes of Ages of Discord... I have shown the example using the United States, but... they are quite generic. ...[T]hey show up... in more than 100... past crises. ...[W]e are now in the United States ...clearly in crisis. ...We are at the cusp. ...In fact, collective actions can result in positive... or negative outcomes. What will happen we will see.

[A]t a very deep and abstract level these forces, immiseration and elite overproduction... are playing out in very similar ways in very different societies. However, ...the theory has to be tailored to each society because ...the critical dimension is what's happening to the elites. Now different societies have ...a variety of ways in which the elites are defined and ...regenerated ...so even if you look at western democracies, you compare the United States, let's say to France, the United States is basically a plutocracy, the reigning elite is the economic elite in collaboration with the political elites. But France is a bureaucracy. In France the elites are created in different ways, and there are other examples, other societies. ...[I]n Egypt, for example, it's militocracy essentially. So those details are very important. ...[T]hat's why the general ideas, elite overproduction, they have to be filtered through the specific structures of different societies. ...[T]he Democratic societies have different ways that the power flows in them compared to autocratic societies... [I]f we take a step back from specific arrangements in which power flows, and... focus on more structural, more fundamental issues, then the theory works surprisingly well.

Look at a more traditional society in which the elites are... landed nobility. ...[T]he way the wealth pump operates there is that when elite overproduction occurs... Nobles basically oppress peasants and turn on the wealth pump. So instead of economic mechanisms that transfer wealth from commoners to the Elites, in this case you have more coercion methods. ...So this is a variation on the theme ...

[E]ssentially in any society, however the elites are defined, whether economic, administrative, military, or ideological, they need to support a certain level of income, and so when their numbers grow, inevitably they have to extract that income from the commoners.

You have to think dynamically... I'm talking as a scientist about entering into a crisis, and then... societies have to somehow get out of it, so in Douglass North and his colleagues, for example, they look specifically at the Glorious Revolution... the exit from about 60 years of conflict, which started... in Scottish Wars 1639 and... ended in 1690s with the new arrangements. So... when societies exit from these crises... Sometimes, by the way, they don't exit, they essentially have political fragmentation. ...Think about the Roman Empire, which has fragmented, and there was no new Roman Empire. But frequently we do have reconstitution, ...England, for example, reconstituted itself. So think about it dynamically. You have to look at the path of the crisis, and then the path out of the crisis.

Immiseration is important, but... societies can... be pretty stable with quite a lot of immiseration. As long as the elites are united and the state is strong, the state can suppress all those peasant rebellions... All "successful" revolutions and civil wars were the result of the intraelite conflicts. Even today, if you look at Donald Trump, who is sort of the main "revolutionary" so to speak, ...he is not particularly immiserated himself, but he's channeling... the tens of millions of immiserated Americans.

We have analyzed CrisiDB because there's plenty of data on weather proxies. ...Weather, climate worsening seems to serve often as a trigger for crisis. But the key question is whether the societies have resilience... When populations are not immiserated and elites are not overproduced the social stability and resilience is very high, and societies adjust reasonably well to climate shocks. It's really when drivers for instability have been working for a while, that's when the climate can often serve as the trigger.

Societies adjust to climatic shocks when they are internally coherent and social cooperation is high, and therefore they can find solutions, but when such climate shocks happen when the elites are divided, essentially different factions of elites start using the climate shocks as a weapon in internecine struggle. We see this in the United States where one party denies... there is quite a large fraction of climate deniers, and so it has become part of the political infighting, rather than trying to find a collective decision, collective action that would address this issue.

In my book, Ages of Discord I talk about the Progressive Period... [the] 1920s especially. Remember... the original Red Scare was in the 1920s. So when we look at the existence of the Soviet Union, established in 1920 and collapsed in 1989, this is the period when... I grew up, by the way, in the Soviet Union, and I remember how the newspapers like Pravda were talking about the horrors of capitalism... There are multiple lines of evidence that show that the influence from the Soviet Union... By the way, also from Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Those were, in fact, important influences on the Roosevelt administration in... designing an equitable system. ...When the Soviet Union ... collapsed, it was misinterpreted as the triumph of neoliberal economics... and here we are essentially. ...This is an important factor. So the failure by the elites. It could be both due to internal challenges... and by the way, in the 1920s there were challenges... even earlier from [the] 1890s... from the Populist movement in the United States, and the Socialist movement in the United States. ...So those were internal. There were also external influences from competitors such as the Soviet Union.

In the libraries

Open Library Complex Population Dynamics · 2013 View library record ↗ Open Library End Times · 2023 View library record ↗ Open Library Figuring Out the Past · 2020 View library record ↗ Open Library Historical Dynamics · 2018 View library record ↗ Open Library Secular Cycles · 2009 View library record ↗ Open Library Wealth Pump · 2023 View library record ↗

Read Peter Turchin

Figuring Out the Past 2020 Find a copy End Times 2023 Find a copy Complex Population Dynamics 2013 Find a copy Historical Dynamics 2018 Find a copy Secular Cycles 2009 Find a copy Wealth Pump 2023 Find a copy

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability... which could undermine... scientific progress...

In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. These... social indicators are... related... dynamically. They... experienced turning points during the 1970s. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. ...50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020.

We are also entering a dip in the so-called Kondratiev wave... This could mean that future recessions will be severe.

All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.

We need to find ways to ameliorate the negative effects of globalization... Economic inequality, accompanied by burgeoning public debt, can be addressed by making tax rates more progressive.

[W]e should not expand our system of higher education... An excess of young people with advanced degrees has been one of the chief causes of instability...

This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010–2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe...

A group consisting entirely of self-regarding agents will never be able to cooperate. So cooperation is possible only if some agents are motivated by ‘extra-rational’ prosocial norms, including the norm of moralistic punishment.

Cliodynamics... uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record... as Big Data. It employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions...