Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History

Full disclosure: Peter Turchin posted a rough draft of this book on his blog a couple years ago, to invite people to provide input. I read (and commented on) it with enthusiasm then, in its previous form, and was surprised to find myself thanked for this in the Acknowledgements of the final version. So, you already know my basic opinion (thumbs-up). But, on to the details, which are more important in a review anyway.Turchin's book opens and closes with the same figure: the front cover and the last page show a graph of two variables called "Well-Being Index" and "Political Stability Index", with the x-axis showing the years from 1780 to 2020. But what seems like more of an opinion, not much more objective than a Venn Diagram joke, turns out by the end of the book to be backed up with quite a lot of data. That it is not mere hyperbole does not, on the other hand, mean that it is fact. But it is a bit chilling to see the "Political Stability Index" headed into territory not seen in this country since the late 1850's. As Turchin points out, there's nothing inevitable about us going down the path towards civil war again; we have knowledge, we know more about how society works (or fails to) than we did in the mid-19th century, we can choose to do something about it.For all the drama of that introduction, I now need to mention something that you might find to be a bit of a buzzkill: there's a lot of mathematical notation in this book. Some of it is pretty tame, occasionally it gets a little bit beyond pre-algebra, but nothing too difficult. It's not like YOU need to solve any of the math, anyway, just follow along as he does. Most of the book is history, not math, including some bits you might not have been aware of. Did you know the only time the U.S. military ever used air power against its own citizenry in this country was in a labor dispute?I would not do justice to Turchin's basic thesis here if I tried to summarize it, but here's his basic strategy. Unlike the fictional Hari Seldon of Asimov's Foundation series, Turchin does not pretend to be able to predict human history in advance, much less predict it for centuries. However, that is not the same thing as saying that there is nothing we can say, either. Like mathematical chaos, there are patterns in the apparent randomness. Especially in a larger country such as the United States (which is unlikely to be thrown about the map like a roulette wheel ball the way, say, Poland has been), there are shorter and longer term cycles and repeating patterns. Income inequality goes up sometimes, and down sometimes, but it doesn't trace out a random walk. The degree of political polarization goes up sometimes, and down sometimes, but it has long-term patterns as well, and it turns out that they are neither the same as, nor precisely independent of, the patterns on income inequality.One could imagine an alternate world in which our ability to gather data, and analyze it, and our theoretical machinery for dealing with nonlinear dynamics, all came together to this point when we happened to be about to enter into a period of unusually placid and stable history. I wonder if the Peter Turchin of that alternate timeline would be able to get anyone to listen to him, and his nicely reassuring new theory.We'll never know, because that's not the world we live in. In fact, one of the things which the couple years since I read that rough draft have convinced me of, is that Turchin is onto something. Again, nothing is certain, but the events of the last couple years have clearly been moving along the lines that his theory suggests. If you have spent the last year or so wondering, "what the hell is going on here, and why?", you may not have expected anyone to actually give you an answer. You may not actually want to get one. But if you really do, and you don't let the occasional equation send you fleeing, then this book has it. Take a deep breath, and dive in.

A great analysis cuts through the 'noise' and let's you see what's really going on. Turchin applies methods developed over years of studying what makes societies rise, thrive, fight and fail to the history of the United States. The result is a map of how cooperative and contentious cycles are driven by changes in population growth, labor supply/demand, conflict between elite factions, and willingness of wealthy elites to contribute to a society's public resources. That human societies are so predictable in their patterns is both comforting and disturbing; comforting in that the current era of political polarization is not unique and that thus we can expect a bad cycle to end, but also disturbing in that we seem to have little ability to avoid the 'next' cycle of conflict. These cycles appear to be just emergent properties of the evolution of the human species, and nothing short of evolution of the human brain is likely to change the fundamental impulses toward competition and self advancement that drive the cycles.The book is written in a moderately academic style that can take some focus to read, but for the most part the concepts are straightforward and seem like 'common sense' once they're laid out. For example, he shows how working class wages are determined by the supply of and demand for labor, and then how wage levels are one of the main drivers of popular happiness or unrest. Convert this into a math formula and you have one of his main analytical techniques.While he models the entire history of the US, the implications for current events are, of course, of great interest. One insight is that current right-wing populist hostility toward immigration has some rational basis in that higher immigration increases the labor supply, shifting the supply/demand balance and suppressing wages. While the expression of populist anger might use the language of racism, and those who express hostility direct it at immigrant groups, the core motivation for the anger is the stress of intense competition for jobs. At least that's what the model implies. That said, Turchin's aim is to explain big, long-term trends and patterns, and his work doesn't dive into the individual or inter-group social psychology that may be involved.Turchin's analysis does deliver great insights on current events.

It seems like a good book, but there is no way to enlarge the figures on my device, and that renders this book largely unreadable in this format. I can’t believe the geniuses at Amazon have not figured this out yet. I put up with it in the last book, but I can’t do that with this one. The figures would be a great help in understanding the text. I may purchase the hardcover edition at my local bookseller, if I can find one.

Based on lots of statistical data, Turchin develops a model for the historical development of the USA from its beginning. Periods of growth and prosperity are followed by periods of instability and decline. These cycles last about 150 - 200 years. The second cycle that started after the civil war is now coming to an end with a decline in social cohesion, stagnant cooperation and social turmoil.According to the data and the model used by Turchin, the present cycle of discord will culminate in about 2020 and usher in a period of extreme violence and upheaval before the USA will find its roots again and restore its march towards prosperity.

Canadians, having just weathered our federal election and watching the United States revving up for its own, may wonder at the polarized moods on both sides of the border. Albertans angrily applaud a premier who blames nefarious outsiders for thwarting the oil affluence to which they are entitled. A third of Americans salute Donald Trump’s populism that scapegoats immigrants for why their lives aren’t yet “great again.”All to be expected, concludes Peter Turchin, a Russian-born scientist now based at the University of Connecticut, Vienna’s Complexity Science Hub, and Oxford. After publishing several other books, Turchin brought out Ages of Discord in 2016, as the U.S. election was about to deliver Trump to the White House.Turchin is a major exponent of cliodynamics, a new discipline which applies mathematical modelling to historical events and finds that its formulas work both ways in time: they can “retrodict” past events and predict future ones.Ages of Discord is fascinating and worrying in equal measure — in part because if Turchin is right, the U.S. and Canada are in for a very, very rough decade.Turchin’s arguments are based on what he calls structural-demographic theory, which finds that history has cycles.His theory focuses on four components: the common people, the political elites, the state and how their interactions create a “political stress index.” These components have operated in American history through about one and a half “secular cycles,” each beginning with very low political stress and ending in one of high political stress and violence. Immigrants and their role in the labour force are a catalyst in Turchin’s formula.Elite overproductionThe theory says when established common Americans have adequate incomes, and the elites are united and in control of the state, political stress is low. But when elites encourage immigration to drive down labour costs, stress levels rise. As elites prosper off cheap labour, they multiply and must deal with “elite overproduction”: too many kids expecting cushy jobs (especially working for the state and in the professions), and far too few jobs available.For example, Turchin argues that by the end of the First World War, the U.S. had cycled itself into so much labour violence and political stress that the nation verged on revolution. With Russia gone communist, radical immigrants seemed to threaten victorious America. The “Red Summer” of 1919 wasn’t communist; it was just a series of violently bloody strikes, culminating in the Palmer Raids that deported thousands of left-wing immigrants.Thereafter, says Turchin, political stress levels dropped, but the elite had learned a sobering lesson from the violence. Immigration was shut down; if some employers needed cheap labour, too bad. The elite, as an entity, sacrificed some elite members’ needs for the greater good of the elite. That set the stage for the New Deal after the Depression hit: the elite (including patrician Franklin D. Roosevelt) realized that higher wages and more employment for the common people were just a cost of staying in power.As a result, Turchin argues, the Great Depression was likely far milder than those of the 1870s and 1890s; now, at least, the government was hiring millions of otherwise unemployable workers. (Turchin doesn’t mention the Mexican Repatriation that sent a million people to Mexico, including many born in the U.S., during the Depression.)Turchin’s evidence includes American life expectancy (it kept going up through the 1930s) and height (Americans kept getting taller thanks to good child nutrition). Significantly, American height has fallen again, and so has life expectancy.So the U.S. had gone through a secular cycle from 1780 to 1930, and began another cycle with a relatively easy depression, a war that made it the world’s superpower, and then 20 years of working-class prosperity and low political stress.RecyclingEven in the 1960s, Turchin says, the next trend was under way. Union membership fell, and wages began a stagnation from which they have yet to recover. The elite, whose income had fallen in the Depression, began to accumulate wealth again. At the same time, access to education, the professions and politics became far more expensive. So much for the North American dream of social mobility.At the same time immigration began to increase, creating a labour surplus that kept wages stagnant. “Between 1977 and 2012,” Turchin says, demand for labour increased by only 31 per cent while labour supply grew by 56 per cent.”Having tolerated high taxes and state involvement in the economy for 40 years, the elite began to delegitimize the state altogether. It railed against “red tape” regulation and told citizens the hard-earned taxes they paid were wasted by useless bureaucrats. A series of scandals made politics seamy, steamy and then swampy: Watergate, the Clinton impeachment, and now Trump.Living next door, Canadians found themselves roughly in step with the Americans. We welcomed a strong state during and after the Second World War and prospered through the 1940s and ’50s. Education boomed in both countries, raising competition for the elite jobs. And the immigration rate rose — but with different results.Immigration: problem or solution?Turchin sees immigration as a problem; most Canadians see it as a solution. Anti-immigration groups like the People’s Party of Canada found little support in the October election, unlike Trump and the Republicans.But stresses build in both countries as more students — striving to join the elites — go deeper into debt to become lawyers and doctors, and millionaires (or those backed by millionaires) become the only ones who can afford to run for office.So when Turchin foresees a “turbulent 2020s” ahead for the U.S., we would be wise to brace for a wave of worsening political violence south of the border, perhaps tied to U.S. economic collapse.“Given a very shallow level of generalized trust in state institutions,” Turchin warns, “there is a real danger that investors in the U.S. debt may suddenly lose confidence.... Sudden collapse of the state’s finances has been one of the common triggers releasing pent-up pressures toward political instability.”To the extent that Turchin’s analysis of U.S. inequality is accurate, it’s also accurate for other countries. It may help to explain the Arab Spring, as well as the current unrest in Hong Kong, Lebanon and many Latin American countries. And it may portend similar upheavals in Russia and China. The fall of the Soviet Union, Brexit in the U.K., and Trump in the U.S. all demonstrated that even a legitimate state is a fragile house of cards.I have some issues with structural-demographic theory: it relies too heavily on a very few factors like wages; it underrates the long-term benefits of migration; and it treats national elites as the only real agents of historical change.Despite these objections, I found Turchin’s arguments generally persuasive and thought-provoking. And alarming: It’s one thing for a scholar to discover cycles within our U.S. neighbour’s tumultuous past. We continue to live next door. So it’s quite another thing if his theories do predict the future, and we must navigate the tumult coming.

Societies go through secular cycle of integrative and disintegrative (age of discord) phases : prosperous and high on economic and social well-being, with a cooperative mood (a willingness to go beyond one's group narrow interest), then anxiety ridden, low on well-being and cooperation. Turchin shows how the Structural-demographic theory first championed by Jack A. Goldstone in the antic (Roman) and (French, English, Russian) medieval eras can also account for the United States's secular cycle (going from 1780 to 2010, with the Civil War being the first Age of discord).Structural-demographic theory (SDT) is adapted to industrial societies by going beyond the Malthusian view. Population growing over food and land supply, pushing the surpluses in cities, no longer act as the main driver to the strive for survival. Thanks to a scientifically steered production, and thanks to rational policy making, industrial societies know of no food shortage, while land shortage only matters for a limited transitional phase to urban life. Arguably. Labor oversupply, bolstered by population growth and immigration, takes precedence as the new, neo-malthusian premise of the SDT. So far, so good.Elite overproduction is the second, main set of variables which SDT use in accounting for secular cycles and in accounting, more specifically, for Political Stress Indicator, and Mass and Elite Mobilization Potentials.Roughly, SDT goes like this : labor oversupply causes wage reduction. Wage reduction favor elite growth. Elite growth instill a within elite rivalry for decisional / public offices, for high valued academic diplomas, and for conspicuous consumption more broadly. Up to a certain point, elite rivalry turns into an Elite mobilization, "closing the patricians" (closing entry for aspirant), polarizing ideological stances, fragmenting interest groups, and driving real and relative elite wages to extreme, following a winner takes all (looser aspirants bite the dust) scheme. Frustrated aspirants may turn into anti-elites that steer popular and other aspirants contempt.Labor-oversupply (mass mobilization potential) and Elite overproduction (closure of the patricians) makes for a growing structural, socially disruptive, Political Stress. Within this context, many contingent, contextual events can ignite major crisis. Structural causes, Contextual/Evenemential triggers.Turchin's use of the SDT is enlightening, not only for its neo-malthusian view on immigration (which act as a mean of keeping wage low, and as a premises for social crisis). But even more so in bringing both Complexity Theory and Cultural Evolution (often labeled Multi-level selection) theory into view.For complexity theory, evolutionary tendencies are best taken as grand sets of variables interacting in feedback loops. Wage do not fall immediately with labor oversupply; instability do not rise immediately because of wage reduction and elite overproduction, but may follow a Father and son scheme (those who lived long enough to take lesson from a prior crisis, and who act as social moderators, have to die before youngsters got entrapped into radical as-if new ideological stances).Turchin's recognition of Culture as the major variable that glue grand sets of variables together and that can accounts for the causally complex interaction among these, is worth the read. The fine tuned definition of the sets of variable is also enlightening (cooperative mood can be traced, for instance, by the names given to new counties - be it names given after National figures, or after local figures; elite competition is tracked by, among other things, tuition fees in Harvard, Princeton, Yale for Law and MBA).Following David Sloan Wilson, Herbert Gintis and other proponents of the Multi-level selection theory, Turchin sees all the structural parameters as, either leading to (i) a broad, social cooperative mood, taken as a disposition to act toward common goals and doing compromises (be it in accepting taxes, in putting confidence in political institutions, in going to war), or leading to (ii) an uncooperative mood, with narrowly defined, partisan interest groups indulging in greed and egoistic celebration.In line with the Transition view of biology, living matters went through eight transition phases that are similar at the formal level : be it by the first molecular coalescence, by the formation of RNA chromosome, by the formation of DNA, by eukaryote steming from earlier prokaryote, by sexual reproduction rising after self-same, asexual reproduction, and going such until the formation of social groups (be it insect like wasps and ants, or ape and human groups), the same transitional form occur where prior self-sufficient individuals can no longer reproduce and self-regulate except as a part of a greater, new individuality. Fighting against the milieu (of hostile, low-energy substrate, or the milieu of other, energy-consuming rivals) is ofter taken as the main driver for the evolutionary emergence of a new individuality. In defending the ecological niche in which individuals rise their offspring and feed, these same individuals may unite, transcend their rivalry and form one cooperative group outcompeting other, less integrated or uncooperative predators.For short : fighting a common enemy makes for a good social whole to emerge and to put common goals over individual's proximate fitness and interest. This is one dominant view of cooperation, morality, culture, sociality, religiosity and cognition right now (in case you doubt it, read Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them; or Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter; or Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality; or Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion; or David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society; for a departing view, Sarah. B. Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding).This transition view is not taken, word by word, to account for American's success at building their prosperity, well-being and cooperative cultural mood during two eras of Good-Feeling (1780-1830; 1930-1970). But this very same view is easily recognized : first era was one in which heterogenous, European breed settlers put aside their adversity (as Quakers, as Mormon, as Protestant, as Catholic) to better fight and defeat, under a common "White" flag, the American Indians. Second era was one in which middle and upper classes, together with political milieus, on their way to the New Deal, united against the threat of foreign ideologies spreading, through immigration, at home (mainly communism and anarchism), and against prior intra-elite's competition (with massive, losers bite the dust externalities). Reading comments by Rockefeller and Roosevelt favoring cooperation between unions and corporation feels special and contrasting with today.Turchin tests SDT for the US secular cycle through large sets of variable interacting in feed back loops with trend reversal points and cultural markers, giving the Political Stress Indicator and its reverse : Social and Economic Well-Being. The latter covers age at marriage, life expectancy, stature (or height, taken as indicating how formative years of life are secured against high level of stress and work effort), child living with two parents, portion of GDP per capita distributed through wage policies, degree of inequality. The historical, statistical datas are showed in graphs, compared with the SDT hypothesized curves in an layered way (adding one interacting variable after the other), and showed to match the SDT full hypothesized curves.All variables for a new, ongoing social crisis are met since 1970, and Turchin's wish is to give us a warning against not taking things seriously, and not endeavoring to look at possible peaceful issues.This book, for sure, displays a great deal of mathematical sophistication that can discourage the lay reader (like me). But holding on is truly worth the effort since it makes you feel like great books do : wiser.

This book Predicts the 2020 riots in the U.S.

Understanding changes of society through structural demographic theory