lpetrich
Contributor
Biologist turned historian has written a book on American history that I find most interesting.
Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History
A successor of his previous books,
A project that he supports: Seshat: Global History Databank - Seshat
Lots of articles, many of them online.
I've posted on his work earlier, like Peter Turchin's Cycles of History and Peter Turchin: US-History Cycles
Here is how the structural-demographic theory works. A nation goes through a cycle with two main phases: integrative and disintegrative, what I like to call rising and falling.
The falling phase's political violence is typically off-and-on, with the violence following a two-generation or fathers-and-sons cycle. A generation fights, then the next generation does not want to repeat that experience. But the succeeding generation has less memory, and fights again.
PT then started researching the United States, an early industrializer with a relatively uninterrupted history, a nation with good data on it. He found that it fit that model remarkably well. He has numbers on a variety of indicators, and their variations track each other very well, and in the directions to be expected from that model.
Here is roughly what he found:
Rising - Early Republic, Era of Good Feelings
1830
Falling - Jackson Era, Civil War, Gilded Age
1910
Rising - Progressive Era, New Deal, Eisenhower Era
1960
Falling - Sixties Radicalism, Reaganism, Gilded Age II
He also found a two-generation cycle of peaks of political violence with a period of roughly 50 years. 1870, 1920, and 1970, though no 1820. But not much other political violence in 1820.
These two cycles look like they are coming together to make a big peak in violence and strife in 2020. So expect a rough ride in coming years.
- - - Updated - - -
Peter Turchin has had to use a lot of proxies for various variables, things that are relatively easy to quantify. A (-) means something that goes in the opposite direction from the trend. Here are those that he could find for most of the US's history.
For elite overproduction, he has numbers of lawyers and medical interns.
For intraelite cooperation/competition/fragmentation, he has college and law-school tuition, political polarization, filibusters, and judicial confirmations.
For social cooperation, he has the tax rate on top incomes and "cooperation" in Google Ngrams.
For patriotism, he has visits to national monuments. For the 19th cy., he had names of counties (Figure 5.4, p.108). Which notable people were they named after? Before the Revolutionary War, it was usually Britons. From that war to about 1840, it was equally national and local notables. After that year, it was typically about 2 to 3 local ones for each national one.
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PT suspects that a cause of the Civil War was elite overproduction in the decades just before it. Elite overproduction leads to more competition for top positions, and in many past societies, that has led to civil wars.
As to suppressing elite overproduction, PT mentions some ways that were used in the early-20th-cy. US.
The American Medical Association limited how many people could become doctors, and several medical and dental schools closed.
The leaders of some elite universities decided that they didn't want a lot of non-WASP's (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) going to them, establishing quotas like at most 15% Jews. They claimed that academic merit was not as important as "character".
As to economic egalitarianism, progressive taxation does work, but the economic elite can feel exploited and oppressed by such taxes, however silly it might seem for such well-off people.
Another thing that supports economic egalitarianism is reducing immigration. In the late 19th cy., US business leaders loved all the immigrants that the US got, because it was such a great way of suppressing wages and breaking strikes. But by the early 20th cy., some immigrants started going on strike themselves, and doing even more radical activism. Then the Bolsheviks took over Russia over 1917 - 1921, and the US had a big "Red Scare". Also in 1921 was the Blair Mountain War in West Virginia, of coal miners against US troops. So in 1925, the US politicians decided to heavily restrict US immigration, especially immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History
A successor of his previous books,
- Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth
- War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires
- Secular Cycles, by him and Sergey Nefedov
A project that he supports: Seshat: Global History Databank - Seshat
Lots of articles, many of them online.
I've posted on his work earlier, like Peter Turchin's Cycles of History and Peter Turchin: US-History Cycles
Here is how the structural-demographic theory works. A nation goes through a cycle with two main phases: integrative and disintegrative, what I like to call rising and falling.
- Integrative - centralized, unified elites, strong state, order, stability -- wars of conquest against neighbors
- Expansion (Growth) - population increases
- Stagflation (Compression) - population levels off, elites increase
- Disintegrative - decentralized, divided elites, weak state, disorder, instability -- civil wars
- Crisis (State Breakdown) - population declines, elites continue, lots of strife
- Depression - population stays low, civil wars, elites get pruned
- Intercycle - if it takes time to form a strong state
The falling phase's political violence is typically off-and-on, with the violence following a two-generation or fathers-and-sons cycle. A generation fights, then the next generation does not want to repeat that experience. But the succeeding generation has less memory, and fights again.
PT then started researching the United States, an early industrializer with a relatively uninterrupted history, a nation with good data on it. He found that it fit that model remarkably well. He has numbers on a variety of indicators, and their variations track each other very well, and in the directions to be expected from that model.
Here is roughly what he found:
Rising - Early Republic, Era of Good Feelings
1830
Falling - Jackson Era, Civil War, Gilded Age
1910
Rising - Progressive Era, New Deal, Eisenhower Era
1960
Falling - Sixties Radicalism, Reaganism, Gilded Age II
He also found a two-generation cycle of peaks of political violence with a period of roughly 50 years. 1870, 1920, and 1970, though no 1820. But not much other political violence in 1820.
These two cycles look like they are coming together to make a big peak in violence and strife in 2020. So expect a rough ride in coming years.
- - - Updated - - -
Peter Turchin has had to use a lot of proxies for various variables, things that are relatively easy to quantify. A (-) means something that goes in the opposite direction from the trend. Here are those that he could find for most of the US's history.
- Population Well-Being
- Employment Prospects -- fraction of people who are foreign-born (-)
- Relative Wage -- median wage / GDP per capita
- Health -- physical height (stature)
- Health -- longevity
- Family -- age of first marriage (-)
- Elite Overproduction (-)
- Top Wealth - largest assets / median wage
- Education Cost - Yale-University tuition / median wage
- Elite Fragmentation - party polarization in Congress
- Political Violence (assassination, lynching, terrorism, riots) (-)
For elite overproduction, he has numbers of lawyers and medical interns.
For intraelite cooperation/competition/fragmentation, he has college and law-school tuition, political polarization, filibusters, and judicial confirmations.
For social cooperation, he has the tax rate on top incomes and "cooperation" in Google Ngrams.
For patriotism, he has visits to national monuments. For the 19th cy., he had names of counties (Figure 5.4, p.108). Which notable people were they named after? Before the Revolutionary War, it was usually Britons. From that war to about 1840, it was equally national and local notables. After that year, it was typically about 2 to 3 local ones for each national one.
-
PT suspects that a cause of the Civil War was elite overproduction in the decades just before it. Elite overproduction leads to more competition for top positions, and in many past societies, that has led to civil wars.
As to suppressing elite overproduction, PT mentions some ways that were used in the early-20th-cy. US.
The American Medical Association limited how many people could become doctors, and several medical and dental schools closed.
The leaders of some elite universities decided that they didn't want a lot of non-WASP's (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) going to them, establishing quotas like at most 15% Jews. They claimed that academic merit was not as important as "character".
As to economic egalitarianism, progressive taxation does work, but the economic elite can feel exploited and oppressed by such taxes, however silly it might seem for such well-off people.
Another thing that supports economic egalitarianism is reducing immigration. In the late 19th cy., US business leaders loved all the immigrants that the US got, because it was such a great way of suppressing wages and breaking strikes. But by the early 20th cy., some immigrants started going on strike themselves, and doing even more radical activism. Then the Bolsheviks took over Russia over 1917 - 1921, and the US had a big "Red Scare". Also in 1921 was the Blair Mountain War in West Virginia, of coal miners against US troops. So in 1925, the US politicians decided to heavily restrict US immigration, especially immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.