Carolina QuotesMany 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...
Peter Turchin Connected to the Carolinas
Source
29:45
- work
- Human environment across time (2023)
- year
- 2023
Cite this record
“Many of the wealth holders... aim to translate their economi…” Peter Turchin. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-721B7EC985. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/721b7ec985
More from Peter Turchin
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.
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.
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.