This article is kind of clumsy in how it links a complex theory with highlights of current politics. Also seems a glaring error to speak of predictions of chaos without referring to how Turchin's theory characterizes the turnaround following the Great Depression. US culture has rebounded from such failures before and it is worth reviewing how all that played out as we search for ways of dealing with current crises.
My first concern was whether it's some kind of operative, a guy who goes 'oh please don't throw me into that briar patch, and here is why we must all expect civil war immediately'.
If it ain't, it looks like this is a guy who can be used for that purpose. I guess it all depends on how wedded he is to his 'terrifying predictions'? I too am interested to know what his theory makes of the period after the Great Depression.
I'm wary, put it that way. So often, this message is not an alarm bell, but a payload. You're meant to take on board his assumptions, but they can be suspect. He might be sincere.
Real wage growth might be technically defined in terms of inflation but isn’t it clear that technical definitions are often just agenda-driven instruments that economists are giving to politicians, and this won’t match the ground truth?
Who cares what the gamed metrics say when Housing and food and education are pretty unaffordable for some people, arguably for a whole generation of Americans. The problem is worse outside of stem. Even inside stem jobs I see people choosing to stay childless due to the expense, literally planning to die young because retirement planning seems like a crazy ideal.
It’s not everyone but how many do we need to say there’s a problem? Not sure how people can still be in denial about these things.
I think "real" wage growth is exactly that point. There hasn't been any, and the recent growth is miniscule and is not even close to having kept up with inflation over that time.
That assuming that the 'real' inflation figures are used.
To maintain his buying power since 1963, a blue-collar production worker should be earning about $5000 a week 60 years later. That just does not occur.
It's the main reason that the US is no longer as rich and powerful as it was in the 1960s. If the 'working man' is not able to spend as much as he once could, the economy is a lot weaker than it should have been.
I’m now of the age where I’ve seen several of these books predicting the decline of America/Europe/the West/the market/Capitalism, or the inevitable rise of America/Europe/Japan/China/the market/capitalism. They all fall apart by making linear predictions of short term trends and ignoring regression to the mean. I’m not saying things don’t change or that some trends can’t be predicted, but it is always more complicated than the predictions and the real world throws up lots of black swans.
your view is definitely outdated by about 20+ years and traveling recently made me aware of how far behind the West is and how deeply ingrained Western exceptionalism is in the psyche here preventing them from seeing reality with objectivity.
East Asian cities are far more peaceful, safe, and advanced than any north american/europe counterpart. Much of the infrastructure in the latter are outdated, old, rustic even as the historical look & feel triumphs over efficiency. Whereas cities like Singapore blows backward cities like Vancouver out of the water on civic report card.
Even in cities widely marketed as a desirable "western liberal progressive bastions" are filled with corruption, ideological drives from special interest groups (ex. NIMBY/YIMBY), that makes it impossible for any sort of progress to happen at the rate that is beneficial to the citizens. Especially now we had the pendulum of compassion swing so far towards the left to the point of ridiculousness (ex. math is racist, 1x1=2) that everybody is so worried about losing their jobs about going against the narrative of their employers that they can't/won't introduce homeostasis when the equilibrium is knocked off. It's only NOW that this pendulum is swinging to the far right but extreme swings are not what produces peaceful progressive societies, they produce violence because of the absurdities that followers believe about themselves to support whatever narrative is being disseminated through their favourite echo chambers.
Most of the west's rich (double to five digit millionaires) are sending their offsprings to Singapore, not Paris or Berlin.
Both accurately predicted the rise of oppressive society that attempts to eliminate all sources of complexity, contradiction, and confusion to ensure uncomplicated happiness for all its citizens by making them believe excitement is happiness and chaos, boredom and order is oppressive (ironically).
Yes, because the west is absolutely a totalitarian dictatorship where books are burned. I love dystopian literature and sci-fi authors have sometimes done a better job of predicting the future than the academics and journalists, but neither of those books predicted the present. In fact, both were describing the past: 1984 is about Stalin; 451 is about McCarthy. If anything, you’re describing Brave New World. We don’t live in that future either.
All these surveys are sketchy. Methodology is all over the map, and in some cases influenced by marketing. However, if you keep all that in mind, summary here:
My dad was a demographer. There’s lots of demographic data, but it’s really hard to analyze. Migration is influenced as much (in many cases more) by policy than by personal preference.
East Asian cities are far more peaceful, safe, and advanced than any north american/europe counterpart.
Not just East Asian. In West Asian cities too, things are far more upmarket. The United Arab Emirates, for example, have cities that are far and away better in most respects than Western cities. Cleaner, tidier, more advanced buildings, bigger shopping centres, etc.
To be fair, I’m reading “The New Leviathans” by Gray right now. It includes the ideas of Turchin in its analysis of the “decline of liberalism” and I’m intrigued (and concerned) by the arguments. But I read “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” when in came out in 1987, found it convincing, and yet practically everything it predicted went wrong within 5 years.
interesting rabbithole here, Peter Turchin was into cliodynamics, which is a transdisciplinary area of research focused on the mathematical modeling of historical processes.
I happen to live in a place (Portland, OR) where the graduate / progressive elite class still rubs elbows with the working class. But that's not what I see in most of the rest of America. And even 20 miles from here, the working class loathes Portland and its politics, and people here with a lot of degrees have no concept of that or what those people actually believe. Both groups have no more than a caricature of each other in their minds. I happen to split my time between both places and it's pretty clear they are living in completely separate spheres of information.
So my other place is in Yamhill which is even more extreme, but basically all counties surrounding Multnomah are full of people who swear they haven't stepped foot in Portland since 2019 and will never go back because it's, according to them (who don't visit), a "I'm sorry you live in that shithole" level shithole. Which is obviously absurd. But that's how extreme the urban/suburban divide is here.
Same in Seattle. I walk around my neighborhood, get coffee, talk to people working in their gardens, pet friendly cats, it’s quiet at night, I go to Jazz Alley, then walk home around Lake Union. My friends from rural Washington ask me how I can stand to live in Seattle. They literally try to convince me that I’m wrong to believe it isn’t a hellhole. Of course, they turn me down when I suggest they come visit. Come to think of it, when I suggest a roadtrip to Portland, some of my Seattle friends look at me in horror too. It’s surreal—even intelligent people prefer to believe what they see in the news and on social media to their lived experience.
Even before the economic divide, there might be mental issues at play, but the article goes there only very briefly, when mentioning identity. I don't know this Turchin guy, but you can't always explain everything with just numbers. Did he really say that people are deemed "deplorables" due to economic or education status, as this blog implies? I'm sure anyone can think of plenty of people with multiple degrees and millions in the bank who are horrible humans, sociopaths, inveterate narcissists or any combination of those.
Those 5 key predictions are rather easy to predict relative to the boomer retirement phase of society. Many easy conclusions can be made when simply looking at population pyramids.
Now lets just go to the fourth turning predictions. Covid was predicted. This world war tension mainly between india and china; but with russia/ukraine as backdrop. This isn't significant enough for the end of the Millennial Saeculum, assuming the theory is set to repeat.
But lets consider, world war is a given in asia, china will shed their incels, and end this saeculum. But what comes after? By about 2030 we're going back to the 'american high' or the 'gilded age'. Optimism is to be expected bigtime.
Today I shall refrain from sharing content about AI (although the incomparable Donald Clark has often been an intriguing source when it comes to AI-powered learning and education).
Instead, I'll share Donald Clark's remarkable review of Peter Turchin's landmark book, End Times. The book is essential reading, the review shakes you up.
