Carolina Quotes[W]hile declining living standards are often a contributing factor to... instability, reversing this trend does not end instability until elite overproduction is... reversed...
Peter Turchin Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Discussion Ref: P Turchin, S Nefedov, Secular Cycles (2009)
- work
- The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade (Aug 17, 2020)
- year
- 2009
Cite this record
“[W]hile declining living standards are often a contributing …” Peter Turchin. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-913898B548. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/913898b548
More from Peter Turchin
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...
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.
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.