Will The Oligarchy that owns the US eeeevvvvveerrrrrr be slightly reined in?

[lpetrich]

Cliodynamics: can science decode the laws of history? - August 16, 2012

When the French Assembly of Notables frustrated attempts by the royal government to fix the state fiscal crisis in 1788, because they did not want to pay taxes, these aristocrats did not intend to trigger the French Revolution, during which many of them ended up guillotined or exiled. Yet this is precisely what happened.

When the slave-owning elites of South Carolina declared their secession from the [Federal Union](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_(American_Civil_War) in December 1860, they did not intend to trigger a bloody civil war that caused more than 600,000 deaths, killed one quarter of military-aged white Southerners, and resulted in the loss of most of their own wealth, when their slaves were freed. Yet this is precisely what happened

Then speculation about the Tea Party and the Occupy movement fighting each other. That didn't happen, and the Proud Boys and Antifa have also fizzled out.

One is the falling or stagnating living standards of the general population. But contrary to the widely held view, popular discontent by itself is not a sufficient cause of a civil war or a revolution.

A more important factor is what has been called “elite overproduction” – that is, the appearance of too many elite candidates vying for a limited supply of power positions within the government and the economy.

He then describes what has been happening in Gilded Age II:

In the last three or four decades real wages of unskilled workers stagnated. The incomes of the top one percent, on the other hand, grew explosively, leading to ever increasing economic inequality. Signs of elite overproduction include growing demand for educational credentials: tuition rates at elite colleges that rise much faster than inflation and the exploding numbers of new MBAs and JDs.

Intra-elite competition and conflict are indicated by rampant polarisation within the US Congress and increasing legislative deadlock.

It's been 8 years, and the trends continue. Despite his populist promises, Trump has done nothing about these negative trends.

 

[lpetrich]

Will the US Drag Canada into the ‘Turbulent 2020s’? | The Tyee - 28 Nov 2019

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.”

...
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.

End of days: Is Western civilisation on the brink of collapse? | New Scientist - 17 January 2018 - "History tells us all cultures have their sell-by date. Do political strife, crippling inequality and climate change mean the West’s time is now up"

One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society, then, as the population grows, the supply of labour begins to outstrip demand and so becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while the living standards of the workers fall. As the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, in which the misery of the lowest strata and infighting between elites contribute to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and made up of two generations – one peaceful and one turbulent.

...
How and why turbulence sometimes turns into collapse is something that concerns Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. He noticed that while, in nature, some prey always survive to keep the cycle going, some societies that collapsed, such as the Maya, the Minoans and the Hittites, never recovered.

To find out why, he first modelled human populations as if they were predators and natural resources were prey. Then he split the “predators” into two unequal groups, wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.

This showed that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each other,” says Motesharrei.

Part of the reason is that the “haves” are buffered by their wealth from the effects of resource depletion for longer than the “have-nots” and so resist calls for a change of strategy until it is too late.

The elites are often complacent because they are not the ones directly affected by decline. It takes some direct threat to make them concerned, like the COVID-19 virus.

 

[lpetrich]

Panicking about societal collapse? Plunder the bookshelves - "As civilization seems to be lurching towards a cliff edge, historical case studies are giving way to big data in authors’ search for understanding. By Laura Spinney"

Case studies like in Jared Diamond's books, dynamical-system views like in Ugo Bardi's "Before the Collapse".

Scholars have long warned against peering down the ‘retrospectoscope’ at apparently neat examples of what not to do. ...

Nevertheless, societies do go through rocky patches, from which some emerge transformed. It’s not surprising that scholars should want to understand why. In his thoughtful "Understanding Collapse" (2017), archaeologist Guy Middleton surveys more than 40 theories of collapse — including Diamond’s — and concludes that the cause is almost always identified as external to the society. Perennial favourites include climate change and barbarian invasions — or, in the Hollywood version, alien lizards. The theories say more about the theorists and their times, Middleton argues, than about the true causes of collapse.

Is a collapse of some old order necessary for a new order to emerge? That may well be the case. But if it is, then could it be possible to soften the collapse of the old order?

Goldstone rigorously dissected upheaval in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in his 1991 book Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. This convinced him that revolution is an inappropriate response to societal tensions, usually leading to tyranny. Solutions have come instead from deep, meaningful reform. Yet the idea that revolution removes obstacles to progress has “deluded literally billions of people”, he argues.

The American Revolution was more like a rebellion against an occupying army than like a purely internal regime change, like the French and Russian Revolutions.

The Civil War was a revolution for the South, since it destroyed the Southern slave-plantation society.

The New Deal and the civil-rights movement and Sixties movements were both reformist. Some Sixties radicals had fantasies of outright revolution, but they were never very successful.

 

[lpetrich]

Angela Nagle on Peter Turchin, the Russian historian predicting chaos - 2020 Mar 12

In years past, when Americans saw footage of other countries’ parliaments devolving into all-out brawls, they may have laughed at the comical, comforting foreignness of it all. But today, after watching something like the last State of the Union address, which ended with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dramatically tearing up President Trump’s speech, it’s entirely plausible to imagine that with the right triggering event, Congress could erupt into a fistfight. This intense atmosphere of polarization now runs right through America's elite — from the very top to the precarious but highly educated lower tier of elites who are left scrambling for positions in media, academia, and politics.

PT's structural-demographic theory says that the main cause of social instability is elite overproduction, with elite aspirants outnumbering available positions. They then compete for those positions. One faction of the elite may lock out other factions, or elites may fight over positions.

While this happens, ordinary people become more and more miserable. Despite their immiseration, they don't start revolutions on their own. "While there is a romantic view of revolutions as uprisings of the people against oppressive rulers, Turchin notes that historically, they are usually sparked by a faction of the elite that, for some reason, has been locked out of power."

In The Real Class War - American Affairs Journal Julian Krein proposes that the real class conflict is “between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on professional labor.” roughly the 10% and the 0.1% (very rough numbers) The “performance gap between the top 1 or 0.1 percent versus the top 10 percent is actually larger than the gap between those right at 10 percent and any part of the bottom 90 percent.” Author Angela Nagle notes "But unlike those in the bottom 90%, frustrated, lower-tier elites have enough organization and influence to translate their grievances into political power."

PT argues that this is a recipe for trouble, with some incident triggering an escalation of reprisals and counter-reprisals. Like the killing of Black Panther Fred Hampton in a police raid in 1969. Or the killing of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Ferdinand by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip in 1914.

 

[lpetrich]

The Real Class War - American Affairs Journal

While a restive working class might provide fertile ground for po*litical upheavals, any fundamental transformation of Western politics will necessarily be led by increasing numbers of the “elite” who defect from the dominant policy consensus and rethink their allegiance to establishment paradigms. Conventional narratives, including many that are critical of the status quo, paint the elite as a unified block aligned with neoliberalism. But the neoliberal economy has created a profound fracture within the elite, the significance of which is just beginning to be felt.

That's Peter Turchin's view of revolutions.

The last few years have brought about a new “discovery” of working-class immiseration—a media phenomenon arguably pro*voked by renewed elite anxieties. As a result, the story of a declining working class is now broadly understood. It is, after all, decades old, and it was entirely predictable if not exactly intended. ...

At bottom, the economy that has been constructed over the last few decades is nothing more than a capital accumulation economy. As long as returns on capital exceed returns on labor, then the largest capital holders benefit the most, inequality rises, and wealth becomes more and more narrowly concentrated.1 Labor—including elite la*bor—is inevitably left behind. Marxian thinkers have been analyzing these dynamics for almost two centuries, but they have often misread the political effects of these developments, which play out primarily among the elite managerial class, rather than within the binary of capitalists and proletarians.

So while Marxism is right about the importance of class analyses, it is flawed about the details. To use Marxian technology, instead of the proletariat revolting against the bourgeoisie, it's some factions of the bourgeoisie that get the support of the proletariat in their struggles against other factions.

That explains the French Revolution. The ancien regime's three estates were 1. clergy, 2. nobility, and 3. everybody else. The Third Estate contained lots of professionals as well as ordinary people.

Also, Communist revolutionaries have typically had bourgeois class origins. So Communist revolutions were a bourgeois faction recruiting support among the proletariat.

 

[lpetrich]

Lost amid the celebrations of the “information economy” in recent decades is the fact that elite career trajectories are no longer what they used to be. The performance gap of elites versus the working and middle classes has widened, but professionals outside the very top are unlikely to match the wealth accumulation of their parents.

Like Big Law and Big Finance.

Silicon Valley, meanwhile, continues to be seen as the brightest star in the new economy universe. For founders and venture capitalists, it would be difficult to imagine a better system for minting billionaires—even if today’s most celebrated start-ups, like Uber and WeWork, increasingly look like attempts to subsidize revenue growth at a loss in order to pursue monopoly rents, although with dubious prospects.

Though its employees are often highly paid, they have to live in expensive urban areas in order to have their jobs. To get their jobs, they had to get college degrees that required a lot of student-loan debt. "When members of these professions write about embittered working-class Trump supporters in declining industries, they may as well be writing about themselves."

In addition to deindustrialization and sectoral clustering, financialization and rising intra-elite inequality added further pressure. The immediate effect of global oligarchs buying investment properties and pieds-à-terre in prime urban areas was to price out professional elites. These displaced elites then began gentrifying working-class and mid*dle-class neighborhoods. An entire “creative class” ideology was constructed to explain this phenomenon, but its intensity simply concealed the desperation of second-tier elites to assuage their status anxiety. In reality, they simply could not afford to live in the areas where people of their status used to live, just like the working-class people whom they were, in turn, pushing out even further. On the other hand, in areas that were casualties of deindustrialization, many elite neighborhoods steadily declined.

Yes, those cashboxes in the sky. NYC now has enough empty luxury apartments to house every homeless person in the city. The empty apartments mean that parts of Manhattan are becoming ghost towns at street level.

The 2019 "Varsity Blues" scandal" involved some rich people bribing college officials to accept their children, a process that they called "side door". The "front door" is getting in by one's merits, and the "back door" is getting in by one's parents making a big contribution to the college.

 

[lpetrich]

Moreover, while the costs of education have risen, since 2000 the rewards have been declining. During the 1990s, the wage premium for college education grew significantly. From 2000 to 2014, however, wages for young college graduates actually fell.23 In recent quarters, wages for lower-income workers are growing faster.24 These trends, combined with real estate trends, have led to more college graduates—28 percent—living with their parents than ever before.25 (The numbers are around 40 percent in New York and Los Angeles.)

Then a section on "Upper-Middle-Class American Radicals"

This underappreciated reality at least partially explains one of the apparent puzzles of American politics in recent years: namely, that members of the elite often seem far more radical than the working class, both in their candidate choices and overall outlook. Although better off than the working class, lower-level elites appear to be experiencing far more intense status anxiety.

The election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Dem*ocratic Socialists of America (DSA), to Congress offers a clear de*monstration of this. Her strongest support came from comparatively affluent, “gentrifying” neighborhoods.26 Her opponent, the establishment Democrat Joe Crowley, did better in poorer areas.

She was a bartender for a while, and many of those affluent people could well have related to her having a dead-end job.

Likewise, there is more “socialist” organizing in Silicon Valley27 and elite college campuses today than in working-class exurbs. Eliza*beth Warren outpolls the comparative moderate Joe Biden by nearly two to one among voters with college degrees and among voters earning over $100,000 per year.28 (Bernie Sanders is near the top in both categories as well.) Many of the most aggressive proposals associated with the Left—such as student loan forgiveness and “free college”—are targeted at the top 30 percent, if not higher. Even Medicare for All could potentially benefit households earning be*tween $100,000 and $200,000 the most; cohorts below that are already subsidized.

Julian Krein then cites Elizabeth Warren as typical of that class. She went from Republican to ordinary Democrat to left-winger.

Barbara Ehrenreich described what happened in the late 1970's and early 1980's, in Arthur Schlesinger terms, the transition from the Sixties Era to Gilded Age II:

By the seventies, middle-class opportunities in domestic gov*ernment and academia were shrinking. The war on Vietnam had swallowed up the War on Poverty; the incipient “tax revolt” threatened future federal activism; economic stagflation and the oil crisis seemed to herald an “age of limits.” Making up imagi*nary social problems and appointing themselves to solve them—which is what the neoconservatives now accused the New Class of having done in the sixties—would no longer have worked anyway. Budgets were shrinking for antipoverty programs and for the cadre of planners . . . who were supposed to design and supervise them. If the federal government and the universities were no longer expanding, it was time to find a new patron for the intellectual vanguard of the professional middle class, and the neoconservatives hoped to find one in an obvious place—the corporate elite.30

JK:

Today, the opposite is true. Upper-middle-class opportunities in the corporate and financial sectors are under pressure, and these elites are slowly but inexorably returning to the state. Their interests remain distinct from those of the working class, but they are increasingly aligning with labor rather than capital.

 

[lpetrich]

JK: "Any new realignment of the professional class, however, is complicated by the legacy of its previous turn toward neoliberalism. For this group, the embrace of markets and consumerism did not work out the way either its proponents or critics predicted."

In the Reagan years, the professional class got into becoming financial managers in the shareholder economy. Then in the Clinton years, they got into the "nongovernment sector" - using private funds for nominally public purposes. The Republicans could only offer "greed is good" and the like. The Democrats became detached from their working-class base, and "progressive neoliberalism" proved more successful than Reaganite "reactionary neoliberalism" at freeing capital from political control. In the process, Democrats also got a lot of rich donors.

About Bernie Sanders, he "has insisted on characterizing his movement as a populist protest, rather than an insurgency driven by certain disaffected segments of the elite." "In contrast, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign more explicitly appeals to the professional class, both in form and content." I liked EW's personal history, and I liked her platform - she seems more effective than BS.

The Left is now trying to end dependence on big money, though its crowdsourced fundraising is still dependent on celebrity - AOC has raised as much money as many big-money-dependent Democrats.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, faces a very different problem—the absence of any significant professional elite, which abandoned the party long ago.

From its inception, modern conservatism has opposed the pro*fessional managerial class that came to dominate business and govern*ment in the mid-twentieth century. Despite often shrill rhetoric against this “new class,” however, conservatives could never reduce its size or importance in the modern economy.36 Instead, Republican policies merely encouraged this class to shift into finance and adjacent sectors. At the same time, conservatives sought to build their own new class by setting up parallel institutions in academia, media, law, policy planning, and so on.

All they got was their own self-contained ideological world, a world whose main recruits were people who could not do well elsewhere.

 

[lpetrich]

"Beyond economic pres*sures, at least two additional sources of elite anxiety will push in this direction: the emptiness of today’s professional careers and the obtuseness of the billionaire class."

As working-class jobs have become more precarious and demeaning, professional jobs have become more meaningless and depressing. Anthropologist David Graeber has defined an entire category of “bullshit jobs” and traced their proliferation throughout the corporate world and other sectors.38 In large part, these are make-work positions for professional elites that exist primarily to pad the prestige of those above them. These jobs are not simply menial or dull, and they are often well-paying, but they are utterly pointless and some*times even internally acknowledged as such. For all the talk of market efficiency, the “information economy” has created a vast category of professionals who do nothing but copy and paste McKinsey info*graphics into presentations for no social or even narrowly commercial purpose.

They do those jobs because that's what those with lots of money want to pay people to do. So a challenge would be to make a living without depending on such patrons.

Then how in Silicon Valley, a common goal of startups is now to be acquired by some big company, rather than be sustainable and independent.

The conclusion of one recent empirical study of corporate law firms—“greater amounts of work that associates consider more interesting is negatively correlated with firm profitability”41—could be applied across most elite job categories.

...
The purposelessness of many professional careers in the capital accumulation economy starkly contrasts with the growing number of unaddressed needs in the public sector.

 

[lpetrich]

Gilded Age II seemed like it got off to a good start. I was hoping for something like the Eisenhower years, which was one of the nicer conservative periods in US history. But with Trump's presidency, it has become a caricature of itself.

In the early 1980s, opening up financial markets and other neo*liberal reforms created many opportunities—which were both finan*cially and personally rewarding—for professional elites. The New Deal institutions and “Nifty Fifty” corporations had by that time decayed into dull, IBM-ified bureaucracies. But Wall Street banks and investment firms were exciting places to work, populated by original and fascinating characters. The corporate world was in the midst of needed reorganization; new business models were being created; and Silicon Valley was just getting started.

But such places have settled down into a routine, almost like government bureaucracies. But many pressing present-day issues will need public-sector solutions.

Then the vacuousness of many present-day billionaires. If they possess technical skills, then they don't show much evidence of that.

But they conspicuously lack any self-awareness, much less insight into issues of broader human concern, as will be obvious to anyone who bothers to read Ray Dalio’s autobiography. Likewise, one could watch every episode of David Rubenstein’s talk show vanity project, “Peer-to-Peer Con*versations,” only to come away with the impression that Rubenstein has never asked an interesting question in his life. In fairness, how*ever, he is not half as self-deluded as Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, or Howard Schultz. The case of Donald Trump speaks for itself.

That "stable genius" claims that he is the greatest in many things -- even humility. He once claimed that AOC is "fuming" because Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were more in the news. AOC responded with a tears-of-laughter emoji. He thought that AOC must be as narcissistic as he himself.

To see what competence is like, there is a bit of "Knock Down The House" where AOC compares her campaign literature to her opponent Joe Crowley's literature. She said that she didn't want to brag about it, but she pointed out that hers has when to vote on it, and her platform. JC's has no voting date, and the extent of its platform was opposing President Trump.

 

[lpetrich]

Conservative donor gatherings are somehow even more pathetic. Most of the attendees are there only because they are not smart enough to recognize that the Democratic Party offers a far more effective reputation laundering service. The rest are probably too senile to know where they are at all. There is often a special irony to these events: an uninspiring ideologue is usually on hand to repeat a decades-old speech decrying Communism—recounting the horrors experienced in countries ruled by a self-dealing, incompetent nomen*klatura and marked by a decaying industrial base, crumbling infrastructure, poor education system, a demoralized populace, low confi*dence in public institutions, falling life expectancy, repeated foreign policy failures, a vast and arbitrary carceral system, constant surveillance, and even massive power outages in major cities.42 Imagine that.

Just like home.

The bold thinkers of Silicon Valley are at least as delusional. Mark Zuckerberg must be the only person in the world who still pretends to believe his self-serving banalities about “connecting people” through social media. Jeff Bezos publicly muses about the difficulty of finding a useful way to deploy his “financial lottery winnings,”43 while Amazon stations ambulances outside its warehouses to treat employees who collapse from exhaustion.44

JB could spend some of his money on his workers. As to MZ, he seemed like a nitwit when some Congresspeople questioned about his company's practices. Katie Porter asked him if he would try going through what some of his employees go through. He didn't have a good answer. AOC questioned him about fact checking political ads. He seemed like a deer in the headlights.

"What is remarkable about today’s oligarchy is not its ruthlessness but its pettiness and purposelessness."

Ultimately, the question that will determine the future of American politics is whether the rest of the elite will consent to their continued proletarianization only to further enrich this pathetic oligarchy. If they do, future historians of American collapse will find something truly exceptional: capitalism without competence and feudalism without nobility.

 

[lpetrich]

Thrift? It's more than just thrift that makes billionaires.

He wasn't talking about just billionaires.

That assumes that low income earners get paid enough to put money aside as savings. Low income and thrift are inseparable. Nor, as pointed out, does this help the economy as a whole.

Lots of right-wingers seem to think that everybody is upper middle class.

 

[DBT]

That assumes that low income earners get paid enough to put money aside as savings. Low income and thrift are inseparable. Nor, as pointed out, does this help the economy as a whole.

Lots of right-wingers seem to think that everybody is upper middle class.

Giving the impression that the lives of the rich have far more importance and value than those who work at low paid jobs, who sacrifice a large portion of their time and their lives for very little reward.

 

[lpetrich]

I found some video some of Peter Turchin's talks:

This View of History: A Conversation With Peter Turchin - YouTube - "This webinar features evolutionary anthropologist and author Peter Turchin discussing his new book “Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth”"

Mentions some simulations of the growth of premodern empires - fairly successful in simulating the expanse of the real ones.

#27: A History of the Near Future: What history tells us about our Age of Discord - YouTube

Abstract: Social and political turbulence in the United States and a number of European countries has been rising in recent years. My research, which combines analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, has identified the deep structural forces that work to undermine societal stability and resilience to internal and external shocks. Here I look beneath the surface of day-to-day contentious politics and social unrest, and focus on the negative social and economic trends that explain our current “Age of Discord.”

Its slideshow:
What history tells us about our Age of Discord

One of his slides is titled "Structural Forces Driving Social Instability and Political Violence"

• Mass mobilization potential - When the supply of labor exceeds its demand, the price of labor decreases, depressing the living standards for the majority of population, thus leading to popular immiseration and growing mass-mobilization potential, but creating favorable economic conditions for the elites.
• Intraelite competition - Favorable economic conjuncture for the elites results in increasing numbers of elites and elite aspirants, as well as runaway growth of elite consumption levels. Elite overproduction results when elite numbers and appetites exceed the ability of the society to sustain them, leading to spiraling intraelite competition and conflict.
• State fragility - A fiscal crisis reduces the state’s control of the coercive apparatus (police and army). The state’s legitimacy crisis undermines the willingness of the elites and the population to defend state institutions against the assault by radical groups.
• International environment - Whereas the first three mechanisms are internal, societal stability is also affected by external factors: geopolitical (e.g., foreign support for the opposition), geo-economic (shifting prices of international commodities), and geo-cultural (a successful revolution in a culturally similar country).

He noted that the US is headed in that direction, and he cited his collection of social-indicator data: ordinary-people immiseration being correlated with elite overpopulation and political violence.

Walter Scheidel's book "The Great Leveler" is about mass death, occurring in these forms:

• Mass-mobilization warfare
• Transformative revolution
• State failure/collapse
• Lethal pandemic

But there has to be some better way to make society more equal than some way that involves large numbers of people dying, and Peter Turchin is cautiously optimistic. He uses the analogy of a ginkgo leaf - one path in and several paths out.

He notes that predicting social unrest and political violence is difficult. The end of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union were very startling and unexpected when they happened, and the Arab Spring included some countries that seemed relatively stable, like Tunisia.

Is using qualitative ("Thick Data") and quantitative ("Big Data") approaches.

Analogy with paths of hurricanes: they tend to share some common features, even if individually not very predictable.

 

[lpetrich]

Arthur Schlesinger I made predictions using his cyclic theory. He noticed how long the liberal and conservative periods usually last, and he made predictions over his lifetime. From AS II's book "The Cycles of American History":

The Schlesinger formulation, when first set forth in a 1924 lecture, included the prediction that Coolidge-style conservatism would last till about 1932—a thought that elicited an anguished cry of “My God!” from a member of the audience. (The crier, David K. Niles, served in the next liberal period as a special assistant to Roosevelt and Truman.) The first published version—“Tides of American Politics,” in the Yale Review of December 1939—predicted that the then prevailing liberal mood would run its course in about 1947. When my father brought the argument up to date in Paths to the Present in 1949, he wrote, “The recession from liberalism which began in 1947 [with the arrival of what Truman called the “do-nothing, good-for-nothing” Eightieth Congress] was due to end in 1962, with a possible margin of a year or two in either direction. On this basis the next conservative epoch will commence around 1978.”

Interest Groups and Political Time: Cycles in America | British Journal of Political Science | Cambridge Core
by Andrew S. McFarland
[table="class:grid"]
[tr][th]Reform[/th][th]Trans.[/th][th]Business[/th][/tr]
[tr][td][/td][td][/td][td]1890s[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]1901-14[/td][td]1915-18[/td][td]1919-33[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]1933-39[/td][td]1940-48[/td][td]1949-61[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]1961-74[/td][td]1974-80[/td][td]1980-[/td][/tr]
[/table]
Reform = liberal, Trans. = transition, Business = conservative

Closely agreeing with AS I's predictions for the Sixties Era (beginning in 1962) and Gilded Age II (beginning in 1978).

 

[lpetrich]

I'll try to time the beginnings of the Sixties Era and Gilded Age II.


First, the Sixties Era.

Civil-rights activism does not offer any good landmarks. It barely got started in the Progressive Era, though the NAACP was founded in it, in 1909. It did not go very far in the New Deal Era, except toward the end, when FDR decreed non-discrimination in all military and civilian government jobs, and when Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces. The latter event is the last big reform of the New Deal Era. It restarted again in the mid-1950's, and continued until the mid-1960's. So it does not offer a good marker.

The closest I can think of is the Freedom Rides of 1961, when white activists joined black activists in bus rides across the South, breaking segregation laws and rules as they went. They were viciously attacked by their opponents, and their activism got national and international attention.

Environmentalism? Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was published in 1962.

Feminism? Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique" was published in 1963.

DC Electoral Votes? Proposed in Congress in 1960 and ratified in 1961.

So the early 1960's is a good time.


Then Gilded Age II.

The New Right was on the rise in the late 1970's, with Newt Gingrich and others entering Congress in 1978. But their first big triumph was in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of several prominent Congressional Democrats. Much of the current Democratic party leadership still has mental scars from those defeats, thinking that those defeats were the result of liberals going too far in the 1960's and early 1970's.

So 1980 would be a good time, though 1978 is not far off.

 

[lpetrich]

Peter Turchin and several others have a big collaborative project, Seshat: Global History Databank It is to quantify humanity's political and social history, so one can more easily test hypotheses about it. Hypotheses like what was involved in the emergence of large-scale societies.

It started with a sample of 30 Natural Geographic Areas" with the societies in them coded for a lot of features over time - how populous, what kind of political leadership, what was in its economy, various social features, ... They formed a grid with these variables:

Appearance of complex polities (3): Early, Intermediate, Late

World region (10): Africa, Europe, Central Eurasia, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, North America, South America, Oceania-Australia

The appearance-time set for Europe was Latium, Paris Basin, Iceland. Latium is the part of Italy near Rome, nowadays Lazio.

Beyond the World Sample 30 - Seshat: Global History Databank - adding five more NGA's, with more to come.

 

[lpetrich]

It's been used for such things as testing hypotheses like Peter Turchin Do “Big Societies” Need “Big Gods”? - Peter Turchin Peter Turchin What Came First: Big Gods or Big Societies? Round Two - Peter Turchin -- "The proponents of the Big God hypothesis have an answer: all-seeing and all-powerful supernatural beings will see when people do wrong and punish them, sometimes in this life (by bringing misfortune on their heads) and sometimes in the afterlife." Includes moralizing impersonal regularities (laws of nature), like karma. If you're bad, you'll be reincarnated as a cockroach -- your miseries in this life are punishments for sins committed in past lives.

Big Societies came first, followed by Big Gods, likely a part of attempts to stabilize them.

Peter Turchin Beresta Books Publishes Seshat History of the Axial Age - Peter Turchin

Seshat History of the Axial Age – Beresta Books

Fairness and equity, universal rights and freedoms, representative, balanced, democratic governance, the notion that no one is above the law— these are ideas many of us cherish in the modern world. But where did they come from?

According to some scholars, these features of modernity have their roots in the period between 800 and 200 BCE. In this “Axial Age,” they state, crucial intellectual, moral, and political changes took place more or less simultaneously in five core regions across Eurasia, reaching from present-day Greece, Israel-Palestine, Iran and India to China.

Seshat History of the Axial Age challenges the view that there was a single Axial Age in human history. Applying insights from a massive historical research project, Seshat: Global History Databank, the volume reveals that societies all over the world gravitated more strongly towards egalitarian ideals and constraints on political authority—traits usually associated with axiality—as they reached a tipping point in the evolution of social complexity.

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Co-editors Daniel Hoyer and Jenny Reddish paired some of the world’s leading historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists with members of the Seshat team. Using information on religious beliefs, social norms, and equity collected in the Seshat Databank, the authors find that traditional, archaic forms of rule, characterized by very powerful, unconstrained rulers and toleration for deep-seated social and economic inequalities, receded as societies grew in scale and complexity. In their stead, new forms of cultural systems evolved that fostered cooperation and societal cohesion on larger scales, such as systems favoring formalized law, institutionalized constraints on political authority, and ideals of egalitarianism and universalism.

“The data show that ‘axial’ traits emerged repeatedly,” says co-editor Dan Hoyer. “They did so in many parts of the world and at their own pace, some much earlier than 800 and others much later than 200 BCE. We see increasing social complexity as the driving force.”

 

[lpetrich]

Peter Turchin The Puzzle of Neolithic Cycles: the Strange Rise and Collapse of Tripolye Mega-Settlements - Peter Turchin

As the readers of this blog know, a big chunk of my research focuses on why complex societies go through cycles of alternating internally peaceful, or integrative, phases and turbulent, or disintegrative periods. In all past state-level societies, for which we have decent data, we find such “secular cycles” (see more in our book Secular Cycles).

Most of this work is on preindustrial societies, because there is a big paper trail of them.

What was a surprise for me was to find that pre-state societies also go through similar cycles. Non-state centralized societies (chiefdoms) cycle back and forth between simple (one level of hierarchy below the chief) and complex (two or more hierarchical levels) chiefdoms. But now evidence accumulates that even non-centralized, non-hierarchical societies cycle. The work by archaeologists, such as Stephen Shennan, showed that various regions within Europe went through three or four population cycles before the rise of centralized societies (see, for example, his recent book The First Farmers of Europe).

These cycles were quite drastic in amplitude. For example, last month at a workshop in Cologne, I learned from archaeologists working in North Rhine that population declines there could result in regional abandonment. Several hypotheses have been advanced, including the effects of climate fluctuations, or soil exhaustion. But there is no scientific consensus—this is a big puzzle.

 

[lpetrich]

Introducing the Historical Peace Index - Seshat: Global History Databank

Seshat: Global History Databank (Seshat) and the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) are teaming up to explore a critical issue facing all human societies, past and present: how can we achieve a stable, lasting peace?

Together, Seshat and IEP are working on developing a Historical Peace Index (HPI). The purpose of the HPI is to track long term trends in peace and conflict and to allow comparisons across regions over time. The HPI is modelled on the IEP’s Global Peace Index (GPI) reports (e.g. Figure 1), which has been ranking modern independent states and territories according to their level of peacefulness since 2007. The GPI is the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness, using comprehensive data-driven analysis on trends in peace, its economic value, and how to develop peaceful societies.

Launch-of-the-Historical-Peace-Index.pdf

Institute for Economics and Peace | Analysing peace and quantifying its economic value

Vision of Humanity – Global Peace Index and Positive Peace

Global Peace Index – Vision of Humanity - the US is unusually bad when compared to similar nations, though not as bad as some other nations. The US scores among the worst in high incarceration, weapons exports, and involvement in external conflicts.