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Ages of Discord by Turchin,
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Ages of Discord

by Turchin,

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852314,699 (4.4)None
We are on the wrong track. Seventy percent of Americans (and counting) think so. The real wage of a US worker today is less than it was 40 years ago but there are four times as many multimillionaires. As inequality grows, the politics become more poisonous. Every year, more and more Americans go on shooting sprees, killing strangers and passers-by and now, increasingly, representatives of the state. Troubling trends of this kind are endlessly discussed by public intellectuals and social scientists. But mostly, they talk about only a small slice of the overall problem. After all, how on earth can yet another murderous rampage have anything to do with polarization in Congress? And is there really a connection between too many multimillionaires and government gridlock? Historical analysis shows that long spells of equitable prosperity and internal peace are succeeded by protracted periods of inequity, increasing misery, and political instability. These crisis periods Ages of Discord have recurred in societies throughout history. Modern Americans may be disconcerted to learn that the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s and, more surprisingly, with ancien r?ime France on the eve of the French Revolution. Can it really be true that there is nothing new about our troubled time, and that similar ages arise periodically for similar underlying reasons? Ages of Discord marshals Structural-Demograpic Theory and detailed historical data to show that this is, indeed, the case. The book takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through American history, from the Era of Good Feelings of the 1820s to our first Age of Discord, which culminated in the American Civil War, to post-WW2 prosperity and, finally, to our present, second Age of Discord.… (more)
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Title:Ages of Discord
Authors:Turchin,
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Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History by Peter Turchin

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If anyone can claim to be making Isaac Asimov's dream of psychohistory manifest it's Turchin, who has done more work to create a truly scientific and predictive theory of macrohistorical patterns than probably anyone else. While this is of course impossible in the strictly Asimovian sense of being able to tell exactly when major crises will arise - and unlike Asimov, Turchin does not even pretend to then be able to present timely solutions via hologram - this book makes a convincing argument that we can discern real lessons about general trends in societal upheaval, while still humbly emphasizing how difficult it is to make even modest predictions about the future. Unfortunately, as the title unhappily alludes to, Turchin's prediction is that the 2020s will be even more unpleasant than today, an era of strife that echoes previous periods in history where the existing social order proved unable to accommodate internal divisions, and the political system could not easily resolve these tensions due to elite greed and status-hoarding. While not Marxist in analysis or conclusion, Turchin's Structural-Demographic Theory broadly aligns with the notion that the rich and powerful have diverted too much of society's wealth and privilege towards themselves, and general wage stagnation combined with class immobility is already having dangerously destabilizing effects on our cultural norms. Even though the book's prognosis is negative, it's just as high-quality as Turchin's other recent works, which collectively form one of the most impressive oeuvres in contemporary social science.

The idea that societies have semi-regular patterns of crisis and stability is thousands of years old; Polybius' anacyclosis model in The Histories predates the Caesars, and the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms famously begins "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." However, since as a rich post-Industrial Revolution nation we have escaped a simple Malthusian equilibrium that would lend itself to the easy use of closed-system dynamics, you have to get more a bit more complex in order to discern any kind of cyclical trends in American history. Picking the right variables can be extremely difficult and frankly, some of the choices Turchin makes come off as questionable; when he was describing how in addition to the steady multi-century Structural-Demographic Theory sine waves of peace --> complacency --> conflict there are also 50-year "fathers and sons" cycles, I was reminded of cargo cult science like the Dow theory model of stock prices, where you hallucinate a bunch of overlapping variable-length "patterns" of main movements, medium swings, and short swings on top of a bunch of random-walk price data in order to derive whatever trendlines look most convincing to your investors. Turchin does his best to avoid pareidolic numbers games, but his well-intentioned attempts to find proxies for inherently squishy concepts like "cooperative social mood" for SDT - measures like "visits to national parks and monuments" or "relative frequency of the phrase 'corporate greed' according to Google Ngram" - have the unavoidable air of arbitrariness, even if he does make a good case that they're measuring something real.

Still, once I got over my quibbles with his exact choice of indices, his basic theory seemed unimpeachable. The highest level of the model is simple: the Political Stress Indicator = Mass Mobilization Potential x Elite Mobilization Potential x State Fiscal Distress. Each of the right-hand terms is then composed of a few variables:

- Mass Mobilization Potential combines measures of real wages, urbanization rates, and the relative proportion of young (20-29 years old) people in society
- Elite Mobilization Potential combines elite income and intraelite competition for important governmental positions
- State Fiscal Distress combines national debt relative to tax revenue, and popular elite trust in the ability of the government to service the debt and in institutions more generally

That's it! Or nearly it, because some of the components depend on a few other variables (e.g. real wages are determined by labor supply vs demand, which is also affected by immigration levels and the birthrate and so on). It's a bit more tractable than a gigantic matrix of 330 million Lotka-Volterra equations, or the unreadably long Prime Radiant from Foundation, and though it seems almost impossibly oversimplified (no separate measures of religious sectarianism, racial strife, technological stagnation, etc?), Turchin is able to justify most of his choices well by connecting each part of the model to social science literature that I happen to agree with. The historian Arnold Toynbee had a famous line that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder", and in Turchin's view, societies have an amazing ability to create problems for themselves due to selfishness, interpreted broadly. So if you've read Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, you will agree that economic inequality is reinforcing partisan polarization as the Republican Party moves ever rightward in response to the wishes of its donor class; per Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics, our elites have gradually gotten greedier and treat our country as being more profitable to steal from than invest in; as Mark Ames' Going Postal documented, workplace shootings are a frustrated response to the decline of unions and corresponding increase in the worker-as-serf labor model; and so on. This might seem like standard left-wing/progressive/labor liberal analysis, but if you've read anything about social network analysis (Duncan Watts' Everything Is Obvious... Once You Know the Answer) or cultural multilevel selection (Joe Henrich's The Secret of Our Success), or even Turchin's own prior books on asabiya like Ultrasociety, it's hard not to nod along to descriptions of how cooperation within a society can break down over time:

"These four mechanisms, (1) competition between groups, (2) competition within groups, (3) cultural distance between competing groups, and (4) cultural homogeneity within groups are not the only processes that can affect the spread of cooperation norms. However, these four processes are interesting because historical evidence suggests that all of them play a role in trend reversals during secular cycles, and because they happen to be connected by one of the most important formulas in multilevel selection theory, so in a certain sense they are just four aspects of a single, more fundamental mechanism."

I think even a conservative would agree that Democrats and Republicans right now check off all 4 of those points: they're competing intensely with each other for control, there are vicious intraparty struggles, they're far apart from each other on many issues, and they're purging moderates/dissenters via litmus tests. The key point is that they are doing all of those things to a far greater degree than they have in the past, and with no sign of abatement. Even though you can find examples of people writing "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" about essentially every year since the beginning of time, there are plenty of social indicators that are showing worsening conflict and increasing unhappiness with how our theoretically vast prosperity is actually experienced. It probably won't get better either: vital programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are under continuous attack, and the fiscal irresponsibility of the Republican Party is actually starting to look pretty good to left-wing proponents of Medicare For All or Universal Basic Income. Why worry about paying for useful social programs if Republicans don't feel they have to pay for their wars or tax cuts for the rich? We're not quite into the 70s radical era chronicled in Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage, with a climbing murder rate and open domestic terrorist violence, but steady background problems like housing unaffordability, wage stagnation, career precariousness, and so on have become foregrounded, because in the same way as the middle and lower classes are being squeezed, the American elite has worked to close itself off, and so frustrated would-be elites have amplified the struggles of the population at large as inequality and social immobility move up the ladder.

It might not be fully appreciated that many of history's most famous revolutionaries have not been actual poor or working class people, but upper-middle class bourgeois types who leveraged popular discontent into mass movements in conjunction with their own personal grievances. Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao - while they all might have felt genuine sympathy and identification with the lower classes, it's fairly easy to imagine that if the ruling classes had just bought each of them off with a relatively nice government post early on, they might have remained inside the system more or less happily without engaging in violent class struggle. There are many historical examples of this "closing of the patriciate" when there aren't enough elite positions to go around, and indeed the popular caricature of a contemporary Democratic Socialist of America member devoted to the destruction of capitalism is a liberal arts graduate who can't use their expensive college degree to reach the station they think commensurate with their self-identity. This is not to say that they don't have perfectly legitimate problems or that their grievances aren't as real as anyone else's, but it's an important component of Turchin's model, and I think of reality, that when there are more potential elites than elite positions available, that those frustrated elite aspirants will turn against the system more effectively than a prole would. They're certainly much more capable of upsetting the system than the stereotypical laid-off factory worker or fast-food employee who is barely keeping their head above water and doesn't have time to go to rallies and meetings and whatnot. And on the other side, those lucky elites who got in while the getting was good feel little or no broader loyalty to the society that they wield their power in, which explains why so many of them are such awful and craven apologists for a status quo that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. Relative positioning is hugely important to people, and the most common way to resolve this conflict is... conflict.

Now, surely not every single period of internal strife in every country in every historical period is due to the fact that the Marx of the day had idle hands, but Turchin convincingly applies Structural-Demographic Theory to the broad arc of American history, and he analyzes events like the Civil War in ways I had not thought of before. He doesn't deny that the Civil War was fought over slavery, but he does raise the question of why war became unavoidable in 1860 specifically. It's one thing to say that the Compromise of 1850 was "good enough" for another 10 years of peace, or suggest that by 1870 the North would have been too industrially powerful for the South to attempt secession, but Turchin's theory is capable of connecting the Civil War backwards to the Era of Good Feelings and then forward to the Gilded Age in a way that aligns neatly with more orthodox explanations like those of Eric Foner while still showing that immigration patterns, urbanization trends, and elite fragmentation made the 1860 election particularly volatile in a way that 1840 or 1880 was not. Every era has its own problems, but to get an all-consuming crisis like the Civil War, it takes a very particular confluence of internal contradictions, and even those other factors like "states' rights", nullification, or tariff disputes can easily be reinterpreted as intra-elite arguments over distributing wealth and power. I was struck by the difference in partisanship between then and now, however; Foner's excellent book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men described the coalescence of the Republican Party out of a whirlwind of competing parties, but these days more of the struggle is within the two major parties rather than between them and the constellation of minor parties like Turchin describes, perhaps due to more sophisticated party organizations and a more entrenched Duverger's Law:

"As David Potter notes, in 1854 voters were presented with a stunning array of parties and factions: Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers, Republicans, People's Party men, Anti-Nebraskaites, Fusionists, Know-Nothings, Know-Somethings, Main Lawites, Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindoos, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells, Adopted Citizens, and others. This fragmentation was a remarkable change from the situation 40 years before. During the Era of Good Feelings, after the demise of the Federalist Party, there was only one significant political party in the United States. Even when Democratic Republicans split into Democrats and Whigs, parties represented not ideologies but interests and support for specific leaders. The 1860 presidential election, by contrast, was a four-way race, in which Abraham Lincoln got only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, with candidates from other parties receiving 29.5, 18.1, and 12.6 percent."

One major criticism of SDT that I had was how immigration fits into the model. Immigration was at historic lows during the 1960s and 70s, which were a time of violent social upheaval and the decoupling of wages from productivity growth. Immigration is higher now, but for the most part immigrants are fairly positive for America (they commit fewer crimes than natives, start more businesses, bring better foods, etc) and seem to be used as easy scapegoats rather than truly being actual causes of dysfunction. Turchin ties high immigration to labor oversupply, and therefore to the wage stagnation part of the Mass Mobilization Principle, but while there might be a few visible instances of immigrants lowering wages in a particular sector, like H1-B programmers in Silicon Valley, those sectors are often actually the most supportive of increased immigration, and the areas most opposed to immigration are stereotypically places like Iowa where immigrants not only don't compete with natives, they're absolutely crucial to the agricultural sector and to rural society more generally. The relationship between immigration and political instability seems more likely to be via the channel of greater ethnic diversity lowering general public trust, although even there, the places with the most immigrants (i.e. big cities) typically like them the most, and it's the low-immigrant areas who produce the angry ranting nativist politicians. Either way I think immigration has more complex effects than are being captured in his model, though to be fair I couldn't honestly say that I believe that raising immigration empirically produces greater political stability, especially if I think of international comparisons and the global rise in nativism. Maybe the suggestion that the more the US absorbs Latin American immigrants the more we will develop a Latin American society has some uncomfortable truth to it.

But even if Structural-Demographic Theory may not be completely accurate to the level of Hari Seldon, in the main I think he has captured the dynamics of this "Age of Diminished Expectations", in Krugman's phrase, in a provocative and useful way. Certainly this book is far more readable, and more empirical, than anything Marx wrote, thanks to Turchin's careful grounding in the cliodynamic data of SESHAT and use of familiar scientific models from other disciplines, but as Robert Fitch once said, "vulgar Marxism explains 90 percent of what happens in the world", and a lot of Marxist concepts would fit in comfortably here. Of course, his prediction that the 2020s are going to be even nastier than the 10s were is a real bummer, and he doesn't even pretend to offer solutions - the collective action required to reorient ourselves to the common good is exactly the thing being eroded by elite overproduction, popular immiseration, and our likely imminent fiscal crisis - but it took us a good while to get into our current gridlock, and short of the vanguard of the proletariat violently overthrowing the bourgeoisie, which is a cure worse than the disease, it will take a while to get out of. Nobody likes the "hey guys, all let's work together!" type of liberalism, but here are my quick thoughts on ways that the Political Stress Indicator could be lowered, divided by components:

- Mass Mobilization Potential: Medicare For All to reduce health costs, curtail zoning restrictions to reduce housing costs, institute a points-based immigration system, encourage unionization to increase wages and job security, consolidate welfare programs under a UBI, guaranteed jobs program, bring down college costs via increased state support and reform of alumni donation and endowment policies
- Elite Mobilization Potential: institute proportional representation and greatly expand the House, eliminate/disempower the Senate, pass anti-corruption measures like HR1, implement Elizabeth Warren's codetermination proposal, actually prosecute elite criminals, expand meritocratic advancement systems and elite accountability mechanisms more generally
- State Fiscal Distress: tax rich people a lot more by whatever means necessary, shift to less regressive taxation methods like Georgist land taxes, enhance macroeconomic stability via Federal Reserve policy reform

Maybe it's not possible to solve every societal problem permanently, especially inherent ones like elite corruption, but there's no reason not to try. ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
Read this after "The Fourth Turning." Predicts a civil war in the US using data analytics and based on the theory of elite conflict. When society over produces elites, they turn on each other. Chaos ensues. The conflict ATM between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein makes total sense when viewed from this perspective. ( )
  anandrajan | Apr 10, 2018 |
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We are on the wrong track. Seventy percent of Americans (and counting) think so. The real wage of a US worker today is less than it was 40 years ago but there are four times as many multimillionaires. As inequality grows, the politics become more poisonous. Every year, more and more Americans go on shooting sprees, killing strangers and passers-by and now, increasingly, representatives of the state. Troubling trends of this kind are endlessly discussed by public intellectuals and social scientists. But mostly, they talk about only a small slice of the overall problem. After all, how on earth can yet another murderous rampage have anything to do with polarization in Congress? And is there really a connection between too many multimillionaires and government gridlock? Historical analysis shows that long spells of equitable prosperity and internal peace are succeeded by protracted periods of inequity, increasing misery, and political instability. These crisis periods Ages of Discord have recurred in societies throughout history. Modern Americans may be disconcerted to learn that the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s and, more surprisingly, with ancien r?ime France on the eve of the French Revolution. Can it really be true that there is nothing new about our troubled time, and that similar ages arise periodically for similar underlying reasons? Ages of Discord marshals Structural-Demograpic Theory and detailed historical data to show that this is, indeed, the case. The book takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through American history, from the Era of Good Feelings of the 1820s to our first Age of Discord, which culminated in the American Civil War, to post-WW2 prosperity and, finally, to our present, second Age of Discord.

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