Peter Turchin predicted recent US Unrest

[lpetrich]

Can History Predict the Future? - The Atlantic

The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.

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.

PT said about US society "It's too late". Like a ship headed 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." "We are almost guaranteed" five horrible years, and likely more. The big problem is that there are too many highly educated, upper-middle-class and upper-class people. "You are ruling class," he said.

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 over*produce 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.

... 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.

 

[lpetrich]

Donald Trump certainly looks elite, but PT explains that Trumpism is a counter-elite movement, a movement of elites that opposes existing elites. Interviewer Graeme Wood notes "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."

PT calls Steve Bannon a very typical sort of counter-elite, someone in an elite position who opposes elites in power. "He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge," said PT.

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 in*security 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.

 

[lpetrich]

GW then gives us a biography of PT.

Turchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, a city built by the Soviet state as a kind of nerd heaven, where scientists could collaborate and live together. His father, Valen*tin, was a physicist and political dissident, and his mother, Tatiana, had trained as a geologist. They moved to Moscow when he was 7 and in 1978 fled to New York as political refugees. There they quickly found a community that spoke the household language, which was science. Valen*tin taught at the City University of New York, and Peter studied biology at NYU and earned a zoology doctorate from Duke.

He then got into ecology, the science of population biology and not environmentalist ideology, and he got into mathematical modeling of the dynamics of populations. But PT noted that early in his career, "the majority of ecologists were still quite math-phobic."

GW: "In the late ’90s, disaster struck: Turchin realized that he knew everything he ever wanted to know about beetles." In a final paper, PT proposed that "there are several very general law-like propositions" which can be applied across species and ecologies.

"Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws," PT said. Like populations growing exponentially rather than linearly. GW: "The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—*generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks."

 

[lpetrich]

This law of exponential growth is counterintuitive, because we expect growth to be linear. It is also a big hole in Thomas Malthus's argument about humanity reaching a carrying capacity. He expected human population growth to be exponential, 1 2 4 8 16 ..., but available resource growth to be linear, 1 2 3 4 ...

Malthus got the population growth right, but the resource growth he did not get right. Instead, it is initially exponential, because each new person can contribute to the development of resources. But it eventually runs into the region's carrying capacity, and growth stops. It may not be a brick wall but a slowdown from increasing difficulty of growth, however.

Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings. He’d long had a hobbyist’s interest in history. But he also had a predator’s instinct to survey the savanna of human knowledge and pounce on the weakest prey. “All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”

Historians read books, letters, and other texts. Occasionally, if they are archaeologically inclined, they dig up potsherds and coins. But to Turchin, relying solely on these methods was the equivalent of studying bugs by pinning them to particleboard and counting their antennae. If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.

“There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.”

 

[lpetrich]

A lot of people don't see much value in such theorizing about history. In fairness to such people, a lot of such theories have been very embarrassing and Procrustean.

GW makes what seems like an allusion to | Seshat: Global History Databank - a big collection of details of societies carefully coded in as comparable a fashion as possible. They started out with 30 regions, and they are gradually expanding their coverage, recently adding 5 more regions.

Some recent research that Seshat made possible was resolving the question of the emergence of the belief in moralizing gods, and moralizing laws of nature like karma. PT and some collaborators used “records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality” and they discovered that moralizing gods emerged *after* increased social complexity.


But some of PT's conclusions many of us will find unwelcome. Like concluding that complex societies arose through war. That happens because having a shared enemy makes people want to set their differences aside and fight alongside each other. He also proposes that democracy emerges as a result of facing a common enemy.

Another one is that the US is headed toward a period of civil strife. PT and his colleagues collected incidents of social and political violence - riots, lynchings, and the like - anything that killed people - over 1780 to 2010. They published their work as Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780–2010 - Peter Turchin, 2012 with a preprint at Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780–2010 That paper starts off by noting that several societies have had long-term ("secular") waves of unrest, with a short-term two-generation cycle on top of those waves.

They excluded the Civil War as an outlier event. It killed more Americans than any other war, both in absolute and in relative numbers, but it was an atypical event, because it was two nations fighting each other.

There was a trough in 1820, in the Era of Good Feelings after the War of 1812, a long-term peak roughly at 1900, at the end of the Gilded Age, and another trough in the late 1950's, the Eisenhower Era, a sort of Good Feelings II era. It has been going up since then.

Imposed on that were three big spikes of "instability events", in 1870, 1920, and 1970, to within 5 years each. There was none in 1820, however. This fits the two-generation cycles in other societies, and it implies that another spike is on the way around this year.

 

[lpetrich]

The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians. (The most famous of these was the assassination of James A. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, by a lawyer who had demanded but not received a political appointment.)

It wasn't until the early 20th cy. that elite overproduction was slowed, at least for a time. PT mentions some ways of doing so in his book "Ages of Discord". Methods like the American Medical Association restricting how many people can get MD degrees, thus acting like some obnoxious labor union. Which it is, in a sense. Also of elite universities trying to restrict their students to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and trying to keep out Jews, no matter how well they did in school. They did that with legacy admissions, a form of affirmative action for offspring of alumni, and also wanting essays and a broad background of extracurricular activities, both convenient for selecting affluent WASP's.

Back in 2010, Nature magazine run several scientists' predictions for the coming decade. Many of them were optimistic about what was to come, but PT wasn't.

 

[lpetrich]

GW: "Turchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable."

Some of them are right out of the social-democratic left, what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC might want. Like taxing the elites to reduce their status.

Some of them are "Trumpian protectionism", like reducing immigration.

Some of them are just plain heretical, like opposing credential-based higher education, something that produces lots of elites without producing jobs for them. Such policies are "creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites." He would prefer keeping the numbers of elites small and increasing the real wages of the bulk of the population.

PT doesn't feel that it's his job to know. "I don’t really think in terms of specific policy. We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?"

He concedes the possibility of side effects, and he recalled when the Forest Service once tried to kill some bark beetles with some pesticide. That attempt failed, because the pesticide killed the beetles' predators more efficiently than the beetles themselves, and the beetles multiplied.

 

[lpetrich]

PT can imagine an Asimovian agency that would monitor long-term trends and advises accordingly. Something like the Federal Reserve, but with a broader mandate.

Many of PT's colleagues don't like his approach. Historian Jo Guldi: "Some historians regard Turchin the way astronomers regard Nostradamus."

Instead of trying to find general laws, they consider each event in isolation.

Dingxin Zhao, another mathematical ecologist turned sociologist, said "I came from a natural-science background, and in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes." But he notes that human beings are much more complicated than bugs.

Although some woodpecker might bully other woodpeckers to give itself the easiest termites to catch, a woodpecker "will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right."

Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”

 

[TomC]

Imposed on that were three big spikes of "instability events", in 1870, 1920, and 1970, to within 5 years each. There was none in 1820, however. This fits the two-generation cycles in other societies, and it implies that another spike is on the way around this year.

Here's the problem I have with this sort of predictions based on historical analysis.

So much is changing so fast that I don't see how it can be accounted for. Take the internet as an example. In 1970 it was at most a science fiction concept. By 2000, it was a force. By 2010, it became the dominant media. And not just in the western 1st world. Nothing can compare with the globalizing power of instant, real time, information. And in the unregulated media market, disinformation has been weaponized in a way that tyrants of old could only dream about.

And that's just one. Recognition of climate change is another.

I just don't think that such prognostication is particularly relevant, even if someone guesses right. I don't see how anybody can control for all the important variables.
Tom

 

[lpetrich]

Many historians have an aversion to considering long-term trends, and that has created an academic niche for the likes of PT. GW: "He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history."

PT is also post-Soviet in rejecting the Soviet Union's official ideological pretension that human history was tending toward international Communism. Instead, human history is a perpetual cycle of boom and bust. Many American historians, however, believe that liberal democracy is the end state of history. Much like Soviet ideologists, though with a different end state.

Stanford historian Walter Scheidel says "If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historian." However, he takes PT's work seriously and has even coauthored a paper with PT. The most notable work in this field is Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", covering some 13,000 years of human history. Steven Pinker, likewise, covers thousands of years of historical territory.

Other historians, however, call such megahistorians "laughingstock" and "patently tendentious". SP is skeptical of PT's claims of historical cycles, but he firmly believes in data-driven historical inquiry. This requires large datasets, and SP thanks traditional historians for accumulating their data. Like "brushing the mouse shit off moldy court records in the basement of town halls" as one historian put it to SP.

JG has also embraced quantitative methods, but a different sort. Like searching for words in transcripts of British parliamentary debates during the last century of the British Empire to understand its history of land use.

GW: "Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians, who deny that the subject to which they have devoted their lives can be expressed in Excel format."

He concludes: "Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—*revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus. For my own sake, there are few thinkers whom I am more eager to see proved wrong."

 

[TomC]

He concludes: "Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—*revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus. For my own sake, there are few thinkers whom I am more eager to see proved wrong."

Honestly, I had trouble getting into that series because Seldon was so implausible. Asimov is a God, but that was too much of a stretch for a hard science fiction writer.
Tom

 

[lpetrich]

Graeme Wood on Twitter: "My profile of Peter Turchin, the mad prophet of Connecticut, is up at @TheAtlantic: https://t.co/L0GUaUoQif" / Twitter

PT responds: Peter Turchin "The Mad Prophet of Connecticut" - Peter Turchin

He credits The Atlantic's staff with good fact checking. "But Graeme is a journalist and it’s his job to present facts in ways that sell journal copy (or subscription)."

He then denied that he was a prophet. He stated that he was mainly interested in testing theories about the past. But one can extrapolate from the past to the future, and PT himself has done so. So in common parlance, he is a prophet.

Neither am I a writer of “megahistory”. I enjoy books by Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, because they generate interesting generalizations that can serve as testable hypotheses. But these authors stop at that. Where I take over is translating their verbal ideas into dynamical models, extracting quantitative predictions from them, and then testing them with historical data. Although I have proposed my own “grand theories,” my main job is slaying theories, not multiplying them.

PT also says that he has a lot of respect for historians and archeologists and the like. He concludes with

History can exist (and has existed) without Cliodynamics, but Cliodynamics cannot exist without History. And my hope is that Cliodynamics will eventually pay its debt to History by showing that studying past societies is not just an academic endeavor — it can help us understand, among other things, our current Age of Discord, how we got into it, and what we can do to navigate the turbulent waters ahead.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

He concludes: "Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—*revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus. For my own sake, there are few thinkers whom I am more eager to see proved wrong."

Honestly, I had trouble getting into that series because Seldon was so implausible. Asimov is a God, but that was too much of a stretch for a hard science fiction writer.
Tom

Seldon is simply the top of the organization, it's not just his own work.

I do agree that prediction to that degree is impossible, though.

 

[lpetrich]

Imposed on that were three big spikes of "instability events", in 1870, 1920, and 1970, to within 5 years each. There was none in 1820, however. This fits the two-generation cycles in other societies, and it implies that another spike is on the way around this year.

Here's the problem I have with this sort of predictions based on historical analysis.

So much is changing so fast that I don't see how it can be accounted for. ...

But there are still plenty of things that have not changed very much over the years.

He concludes: "Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—*revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus. For my own sake, there are few thinkers whom I am more eager to see proved wrong."

Honestly, I had trouble getting into that series because Seldon was so implausible. Asimov is a God, but that was too much of a stretch for a hard science fiction writer.

I concede that that is the case. Being able to work out precisely when each Seldon crisis is going to happen - that's an absurd level of precision.

Look at  Cyclical theory (United States history) - the two main cycles of US history are the Schlesinger internal ones and the Klingberg foreign-policy ones, and the period lengths in them jump around quite a bit.

 

[lpetrich]

Unfortunately, Peter Turchin has not discussed the Schlesinger and Klingberg cycles in his work.

Schlesinger:

• 1776-1788 12 Lib Revolution & Constitution - CrdPss
• 1788-1800 12 Con Hamilton Era - 1st PrtySys
• 1800-1812 12 Lib Jefferson Era
• 1812-1829 17 Con Era of Good Feelings
• 1829-1841 12 Lib Jackson Era - 2nd PrtySys - SkowRgm - CrdPss
• 1841-1861 20 Con Slaveowner Domination
• 1861-1869 8 Lib Civil War & Reconstruction - 3rd PrtySys - RacUph
• 1869-1901 32 Con The Gilded Age
• 1901-1919 18 Lib Progressive Era - 4th PrtySys - SkowRgm? - CrdPss
• 1919-1931 12 Con Roaring Twenties
• 1931-1947 16 Lib New Deal Era - 5th PrtySys - SkowRgm
• 1947-1962 15 Con Eisenhower Era
• 1962-1978 16 Lib Sixties Era - 6th PrtySys - CrdPss - RacUph
• 1978-???? ?? Con Gilded Age II - SkowRgm

Phases:

• Liberal, public purpose, expanding democracy, human rights, wrongs of the many
• Conservative, private interest, containing democracy, property rights, rights of the few

Liberal phases end as a result of society-scale activism burnout.
Conservative phases end as a result of accumulative of unsolved social problems.

PrtySys = beginning of a new party system (platforms and constituencies for each party)
CrdPss = creedal-passion period
RacUph = racial-upheaval period
SkowRgm = beginning of a new Skowronek regime, with a reconstructive President and with the previous President being a disjunctive one.

Klingberg:

• 1776-1798 22 Int Revolution, establishment of government
• 1798-1824 26 Ext French naval war, Louisiana Purchase, War of 1812
• 1824-1844 20 Int Nullification Crisis, Texas question, no assistance of the Canada revolts
• 1844-1871 27 Ext Texas and Oregon annexations, Mexican War, Civil War
• 1871-1891 20 Int No participation in the Europeans' Scramble for Africa
• 1891-1919 18 Ext Spanish-American War, World War I
• 1919-1940 21 Int League of Nations rejections, Neutrality Acts
• 1940-1967 27 Ext World War II, Cold War, Korean and Vietnam Wars
• 1967-1987 20 Int Vietnamization, détente, dissolution of Soviet Union
• 1987-???? ?? Ext Post-Cold-War assertion, Gulf War, War on Terror

Phases:

• Extroverted: willing to challenge other nations, go on military adventures, and annex territory
• Introverted: unwilling to do so

Extroverted phases end as a result of burning out on military adventures.
Introverted phases end as a result of unmet challenges from abroad.

 

[lpetrich]

Elizabeth Mika on Twitter: "Trump's character defect has not been a secret. He was elected not in spite but because of it. ..." / Twitter

Trump's character defect has not been a secret. He was elected not in spite but because of it.

The time has been ripe in America as in other countries for electing psychopathic leaders to do what psychopaths do best: destroy the system seen as responsible for pain and misery.

The rise of collective narcissism that ushered Trump presidency can be seen as a defense mechanism designed to compensate for the very real loss of hope among undereducated whites--the deaths of despair demographic--and a resultant real threat to their identity and existence.

Trumpism has never been just about Trump who is only an instrument of forces he doesn't understand.

It is in fact a cry for help and an urgent call to transformation, not just for "them," but for all of us.

 

[lpetrich]

DavChat on Twitter: "@yourauntemma @NastyOldWomyn White people who listen to conservative radio and watch conservative media have dysfunctional world views - centred in grievance & vindictiveness. They are dying in middle age from ‘deaths of despair’ - overdose, suicide etc. (links)" / Twitter

Racial gaps in hope, ill-being, and deaths of despair

Despite facing discrimination, a lower life expectancy, and higher mortality rates, minorities today have continued to make gradual progress in narrowing the gap with white Americans in areas including mortality and education.

The U.S. is the only wealthy country in the world with a rising mortality rate. This is partly due to “deaths of despair” or the huge increase in premature deaths among less-than-college-educated, middle-aged white people.

DavChat on Twitter: "@yourauntemma @NastyOldWomyn Oh and this is the evidence for an association between counties with high deaths of despair and conservative outlooks.

High premature death rates for white middle aged people is strongly associated with high rates of voting for Trump. https://t.co/psJBI63WfS" / Twitter
noting
Where 'despair deaths' were higher, voters chose Trump - "Counties where life expectancy fell also swung to Trump, the researchers found."

They seem like they are too proud to ask for help.

 

[lpetrich]

Paul Rosenberg on Twitter: "In 2016 *Ages of Discord* @Peter_Turchin IDed 29 trends related to social integration vs. disintegration, 28 of which reversed direction ~1970+/-10yrs. Life expectancy was the sole exception, only reversed since 2016. For clarity, pasting chart in following tweet. 1/2" / Twitter

Then
Paul Rosenberg on Twitter: "From *Ages of Discord* by @Peter_Turchin. Life expectancy was only social trend related to social integration that didn't turn sour circa 1970+/-10yrs: (link) 2/2 (link)" / Twitter

The turnover times in that diagram range from 1950 to 1981, with the median being 1970. Here is how many of each date:

• 1950 - 2
• 1955 - 1
• 1960 - 6
• 1965 - 3
• 1970 - 9
• 1975 - 5
• 1978 - 1
• 1980 - 9
• 1981 - 1

Total: 37

So the 1960's and 1970's is when society started going downhill in its social indicators.

 

[lpetrich]

From Peter Turchin's book "Ages of Discord",

Table 11.1 Timing of trend reversals of structural-demographic variables in the current
secular cycle, with references to the relevant graphics elsewhere in the book.

• Labor oversupply - Proportion Foreign Born - 1970 - 3.2b
• Labor oversupply - Foreign Trade Balance - 1975 - 12.7
• Labor oversupply - Demand/Supply ratio, estimated - 1970 - 12.1
• Wellbeing, economic - Real wage - 1978 - 3.3
• Wellbeing, economic - Relative Wage - 1960 - 3.4
• Wellbeing, health - Average stature - 1970 - 11.1
• Wellbeing, health - Life expectancy - none - 3.5
• Wellbeing, social - Marriage Age (-)* - 1960 - 3.6
• Wellbeing, social - Proportion Married - 1960 (1970) - 11.2
• Wellbeing, social - Children in 2-parent household - 1960 - 11.2
• Inequality, economic - Extreme Value Index - 1980 - 4.1
• Inequality, economic - Top 1% income share - 1975 - 11.3
• Inequality, economic - Top 1% wealth share - 1975 - 11.3
• Elite overproduction - Lawyers/population ratio - 1970 - 4.4b
• Elite overproduction - Medical internships - 1975 - 12.9
• Intraelite competition - Yale tuition - 1950 (1980) - 4.7
• Intraelite competition - College and law school tuition - 1980 - 4.6
• Intraelite fragmentation - Polarization - 1950 (1980) - 4.8
• Intraelite cooperation - Filibusters (-)* - 1960 (1970) - 11.4
• Intraelite cooperation - Judicial Confirmations - 1965 (1980) - 11.5
• Social cooperation - Tax rate on top incomes - 1965 (1980) - 5.6
• Social cooperation - "Cooperation" in Google Ngram - 1975 - 12.3
• Cooperation and Equity - Real minimum wage - 1970 (1980) - 12.4
• Cooperation and Equity - Labor union coverage - 1955 (1970) - 12.2
• Cooperation and Equity - Labor union suppression (-)* - 1980 - 12.2
• Patriotism - Visits to national monuments - 1970 - 5.5
• State legitimacy - Trust in government - 1965 - 5.3
• State capacity - Public debt/GDP -)* - 1981 - 5.1
• Sociopolitical instability - USPV events per 5y - 1960 (1980) - 6.1a

*The minus sign indicates that this proxy correlates negatively with the structural variable.

 

[lpetrich]

WTF Happened In 1971?

Productivity and compensation started to diverge for ordinary workers.

In another graph, the incomes of the bottom 90% increased over 1940 - 1970, then leveled off. The incomes of the 1% increased only a tiny bit until 1985, then started increasing much more. The 1% numbers passed the 90% ones over 2000 - 2015, producing a wealth distribution more typical of the early 20th cy.

The highest incomes reached 24% for top 1% and 19% for top 0.5% in the late 1920's. During the Great Depression, they dropped to 16% and 12%, and by 1960, 11% and 8%. By 1978, they reached 6% and 9%, and they started rising again, now reaching the levels of the late 1920's.

The decline was started by the stock-market crash of 1929, though stockbrokers jumping out of windows is pure urban legend.

The wage share of total national income has declined from 49-51% to 42-44% since 1970.

Black Americans' income rose rapidly from the late 1940's to the early 1960's, going from 50% to 68% of white income, then slowed down, recently reaching 73-75%.

Wealth shares of bottom 90% and top 0.1% were roughly equal until the 1930's, then the bottom 90% got 35% and the top 0.1% got 7% in 1980, then the two have converged, recently becoming approximately equal again.

The two parties were ideologically very different in 1900, but they converged on each other, being very similar over 1930 - 1970. Then they diverged again.

Filibusters used to be rare in the US Senate, if counts of cloture votes are any guide. But they started to increase in the late 1950's, slowly at first, and after the mid 1960's, much faster.