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This guy has a point.


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2020 Nov 12, 9:51am   752 views  7 comments

by Eric Holder   ➕follow (5)   💰tip   ignore  

(It's Atlantic, I know, but ignore this for a moment)

Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches.

...

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical model­ing unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”

...

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,” he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn’s website describes as a favorite place for students to “read, relax, or ride on the wooden swing.” The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.

“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class,” he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites over­produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-­Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies. Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.
Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

....


https://archive.is/nUNZv

Comments 1 - 7 of 7        Search these comments

1   Eric Holder   2020 Nov 12, 9:54am  

I think he's onto something here. Not only we have more people with real degrees we also have exponentially more people with BS degrees for "sciences" invented in the last couple decades. All these black/womynx/latynx studies and such. Fucking jornos think they are elite too.
2   FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut   2020 Nov 12, 2:37pm  

Right now the big problem is the import of the serf class (unchecked illegal migration), with constant lying about it. Democrats constantly lie and pretend it does nothing bad, but in reality it drives peoples wages down really fast and standards of living. Supply and demand, there are only so much supply of poor unskilled you can take in before your system is overwhelmed... they don't want you questioning that.

Outsourcing is another problem, where elites replace Americans for cheap, while telling us fairy tales about how they are helping poor people overseas... sounds a lot nicer than saying "we fuck American workers over".

That's kind of what I see as problems.
3   Eric Holder   2020 Nov 12, 2:43pm  

FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut says
Right now the big problem is the import of the serf class (unchecked illegal migration), with constant lying about it. Democrats constantly lie and pretend it does nothing bad, but in reality it drives peoples wages down really fast and standards of living. Supply and demand, there are only so much supply of poor unskilled you can take in before your system is overwhelmed... they don't want you questioning that.

Outsourcing is another problem, where elites replace Americans for cheap, while telling us fairy tales about how they are helping poor people overseas... sounds a lot nicer than saying "we fuck American workers over".

That's kind of what I see as problems.


They touch on that in the article too:

Turchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable. Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them—while others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism. Other policies are simply heretical. He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such polices, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.
4   FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut   2020 Nov 12, 2:59pm  

Eric Holder says
FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut says
Right now the big problem is the import of the serf class (unchecked illegal migration), with constant lying about it. Democrats constantly lie and pretend it does nothing bad, but in reality it drives peoples wages down really fast and standards of living. Supply and demand, there are only so much supply of poor unskilled you can take in before your system is overwhelmed... they don't want you questioning that.

Outsourcing is another problem, where elites replace Americans for cheap, while telling us fairy tales about how they are helping poor people overseas... sounds a lot nicer than saying "we fuck American workers over".

That's kind of what I see as problems.


They touch on that in the article too:

Turchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable. Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Eliz...


Sounds very Trumpian yes. And yet somehow they hate him lol.
5   Ceffer   2020 Nov 12, 4:35pm  

Everybody wants to beat their meat with the effete elite.
6   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 Nov 12, 4:38pm  

First Class Lounge: Where the elite meet to eat reheated treats with no meat, if they're effete
7   Patrick   2020 Nov 12, 5:42pm  

The original post sounds valid to me.

Look up Ibn Khaldun, who saw this same stuff happening in the Muslim world in 1375:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ibn-Khaldun#ref225307

Basically, the elite always try to shut off avenues for self-advancement for the working class, and are eventually overthrown because of it.

Then it all starts over again.

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