Carolina Quotes[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.
Peter Turchin Connected to the Carolinas
Source
27:21
- work
- Human environment across time (2023)
- year
- 2023
Cite this record
“[T]he problem is... if the wealth pump is allowed to run lon…” Peter Turchin. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-ACDCD80533. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/acdcd80533
More from Peter Turchin
[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".
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.
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.