Weakening democracy lol

[lpetrich]

Seshat's home page headlines three projects:

The horse bit and bridle kicked off ancient empires – a new giant dataset tracks the societal factors that drove military technology at The Conversation
Some 3000 years ago:

This era saw the advancement of the ability to control horses with bit and bridle, the spread of iron-working techniques through Eurasia that led to hardier and cheaper weapons and armor and new ways of killing from a distance, such as with crossbows and catapults. On the whole, warfare became much more deadly.

During this era, many societies were consumed by the crucible of war. A few, though – the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the Roman Empire and Han China – not only survived, but thrived, becoming megaempires encompassing tens of millions of people and controlling territories of millions of square miles.

noting
Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution | PLOS ONE

We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role.

Thus showing the power of a comprehensive database of world history.
Back to The Conversation.

Let’s illustrate these dynamics with a specific example. Around 1000 B.C., nomadic herders in the steppes north of the Black Sea invented the bit and bridle to better control horses when riding them. They combined this technology with a powerful recurved bow and iron arrowheads to deadly effect. Horse archers became the weapon of mass destruction of the ancient world. Shortly after 1000 B.C., thousands of metal bits suddenly appeared and spread within the Eurasian steppes.

This led the settled states to develop new armor and new weapons like crossbows, and to recruit and manage large armies of footsoldiers, including keeping them well-fed. This required administrative complexity and ideological support, including the rise of major world religions: SocArXiv Papers | Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank

Using a broad range of new measures of belief in moralizing supernatural punishment, we find strong support for previous research showing that such beliefs did not drive the rise of social complexity in world history. By contrast, our analyses indicate that intergroup warfare, supported by resource availability, played the most significant role in the evolution of both social complexity and moralizing religions. Thus, the correlation between social complexity and moralizing religion would seem to result from shared evolutionary drivers, rather than from strong direct causal relationships between these two variables.

Thus showing what one can do with a comprehensive database of world history.

 

[lpetrich]

Seshat links to Home | Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion and Home | School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography

Other Seshat headlined articles:
Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses

During the Holocene, the scale and complexity of human societies increased markedly. Generations of scholars have proposed different theories explaining this expansion, which range from broadly functionalist explanations, focusing on the provision of public goods, to conflict theories, emphasizing the role of class struggle or warfare. To quantitatively test these theories, we develop a general dynamical model based on the theoretical framework of cultural macroevolution. Using this model and Seshat: Global History Databank, we test 17 potential predictor variables proxying mechanisms suggested by major theories of sociopolitical complexity (and >100,000 combinations of these predictors). The best-supported model indicates a strong causal role played by a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and invention/adoption of military technologies (most notably, iron weapons and cavalry in the first millennium BCE).

and
America’s Dysfunction Has Two Main Causes - The Atlantic June 2, 2023 - by Peter Turchin - "History suggests how to stave it off."

But it's paywalled. Here is its beginning:

All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.

 

[lpetrich]

Some more Seshat projects:

Freedom of Religion or Belief Leadership Network | Seshat

Seshat: Global History Databank is collaborating with the Freedom of Religion or Belief Leadership Network in constructing a Historical Volatility Index (HVI). The HVI tracks the volatility and cohesiveness of societies over time. A special focus is placed on the question of whether religious tolerance reduces or contributes to societal volatility.

Historical Peace Index | Seshat

Seshat: Global History Databank is collaborating with the Institute for Economics and Peace to produce the Historical Peace Index (HPI). Loosely modeled on the IEP's annual Global Peace Index reports, the HPI will track long-term trends in peace and conflict, to facilitate comparisons across regions and through time.

HoloSim: Modelling Dynamics in the Past | Seshat

The HoloSim project includes a number of efforts to develop spatially-explicit agent-based models of historical processes.

... Modelling boom-and-bust patterns in the mid-Holocene.

... Modeling the Rise, Spread, and Fall of Large Complex States.

Evolution of Trade | Seshat

Thousands of years ago, humans lived in predominantly small-scale societies, interacting with few other communities at most a few hundred kilometers away; today, we live primarily in large states with hundreds of millions, exchanging goods and information globally with often anonymous individuals that we may never interact with more than once. What drove this enormous expansion of trade networks, their periodic contractions, and what have been the consequences for economic and social development and interstate conflict? How have negative side-effects been mitigated in the past, and how can we manage the continuing expansion of global exchange in the future?

Agricultural Productivity and Carrying Capacity | Seshat

Agricultural productivity and its variation across time and space plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social and cultural evolution. Because agricultural societies enjoy a demographic advantage over hunter-gatherer societies, the transition from foraging to agriculture fueled a series of population expansions world-wide, which spread the farmers’ culture, language, and genes with them. However, although the Neolithic Revolution was one of the most consequential transitions in human evolution, we lack systematically collected quantitative estimates of the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale.

 

[lpetrich]

How We Work | Seshat - "Generating a Global Historical Sample"

The project's participants started off by selecting 10 regions and in each one, 3 subregions, an early-developing one, a late-developing one, and one in the middle. The participants later added 5 more regions, making 35, but more recently, they have aimed at being comprehensive.

Seshat data is all normalized to values in a set of categories, either numerical values or else categorical values like "present", "absent", "inferred present", "inferred absent", and "unknown".

"All data are linked to scholarly sources, including peer-reviewed publications and personal communications from established authorities."

Seshat Data Types

• Seshat regions: 47, macro-regions 10
• Polities: 857
• General variables: 26, datapoints: 8855
• Social complexity variables: 77, datapoints: 20637
• Warfare variables: 49, datapoints: 17529
• Human sacrifice: 357
• CrisisDB: power transitions: 3449, crisis consequences: 169 cases
• US Political Violence Database: 1903 cases

Seshat: List of All Polities
By macro-region: Europe, Africa, SW Asia, C,N Eurasia, E Asia, S Asia, SE Asia, Oceania-Australia, N America, S America and Caribbean

 

[lpetrich]

 Seshat (project)

Critics of the Seshat project have noted that the coding of historical data is not a wholly objective enterprise and that concrete and transparent steps should be taken to minimize subjectivity in the coding process. The Seshat project uses multiple coders and experts and other techniques for ensuring data quality,[5] but some have recently suggested that machine coding techniques hold great promise for further reducing biases and increasing the reliability of the data produced.[2]

Seshat: Global History Databank – Peter Turchin

Seshat: The Global History Databank at Cliodynamics journal

So we can get a good picture of preindustrial societies, because we have a long record of some of them.

Industrial societies have a big problem: only a few centuries at best of data.

• Industrialization per capita 1750-1900 - Second Industrial Revolution - Wikipedia
• I made 5 graphs showing levels of industrialization of 29 countries from 1820-1936. 1st img: world (sorry, a bit messy). 2nd img: W. Europe. 3rd img: E. Europe. 4th: outside Europe. 5th: major powers. 6th: raw data. See comment for details. : r/victoria3
• Mapping History : Industrialization 1870-1930 - World Industrial Production: 1870–1930
• Spread of the Industrial Revolution - Vivid Maps
• Map showing the approximate age for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent industrialization across the planet. | Download Scientific Diagram

The Industrial Revolution started in the UK in the late 18th cy., then spread to the US and nearby Continental Europe in the early 19th cy., then to most of the rest of Europe, Japan, Australia, and South Africa in the late 19th cy., then to various other places over the mid to late 20th cy.

• 250 y: UK
• 200 y: NW Europe, NE US
• 150 y: rest of Europe, rest of US, E Australia, Japan, S, NE South Africa
• 100 y: Mexico, Turkey, E China, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, rest of South Africa
• 50 y: E Brazil, NE Argentina, India, rest of China

The industrial nations fought two very destructive and disruptive wars, World Wars I and II, and those cause big complications in trying to find long-term trends.

So one's best chance is to look at the least affected of them. That would be the US, and to a lesser extent, the UK. They have an additional good feature: how long that they have been industrialized. The UK is the champion at 250 years, and the US not far behind at 200 years.

 

[bilby]

"All data are linked to scholarly sources, including peer-reviewed publications and personal communications from established authorities."

Sounds impressive; But let me translate that into English:

All data are linked to scholarly sources, including stuff that has had at least some attempt made to determine its worth, and stuff someone believes and asserts, that we accepted, because that particular someone is highly regarded.

Well, that's reassuring. Particularly as they implied that the unscientific elements are the minority, by listing them second. Though notably without actually saying so.

The effort to bring scientific rigour to history is laudable, but still has a long way to go. Of course, that's also true of more traditionally scientific fields than history - there are plenty of physicists and chemists who still accept "personal communications from established authorities" as "data", which they really shouldn't.

It's very difficult to tell established authorities that they might be wrong. Even if they are deceased, it can be hard to challenge them. But knowledge of reality nevertheless comes from study of reality, and not from accepting the claims of authority (no matter how firmly established that authority might be).

 

[lpetrich]

Peter Turchin’s empty prophecies - New Statesman - 10 June 2023 - "The social scientist has made a career from predicting global instability. But in the new book End Times, his analysis produces nothing but banalities." (paywalled)

Is another American revolution inevitable? - New Statesman - 15 June 2023 - "An interview with Peter Turchin."

Peter Turchin was born in the Russian city of Obninsk on 22 May 1957. His father was a physicist by education, who became a mathematician and, eventually, a dissident. The Turchins were expelled from the USSR in 1977, when Peter was enrolled at Moscow State University’s Faculty of Biology. The family moved to the United States, where Turchin continued his studies in biology at New York University. He made his living studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice and deer. In 1985 he received a PhD in zoology from Duke University.

In the late 1990s Turchin did something unusual. By then Turchin felt, he writes in his new book End Times, that the “interesting questions” in animal ecology had been answered. He switched disciplines, to history: “I began to consider how the same complexity science approach could be brought to the study of human societies, both in the past and today.”

Back in 2010, the scientific journal Nature asked PT and several other academics to make predictions of what 2020 might be like. He predicted a sharp peak of instability in the early 2020's. According to him,

When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically.

 

[lpetrich]

Peter Turchin points out elite overproduction in both the Soviet Union and the United States.

In the Soviet Union there was serious overproduction of technical degrees, especially engineers. Sociologists have explored this with studies. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, if you went to a demonstration in order to see who was actually participating in anti-government protests, the huge majority of them were people with engineering degrees.

However, in the US, it's law degrees.

Because there are two ways you can get into political office in the United States. You either have wealth, or you have the right credentials. The best credential to have is a law degree. That’s why people who want to become politicians go to law school. Such schools are the biggest producer of both elites and counter-elites. I forget his name, but the leader of the Oath Keepers [Stewart Rhodes; the Oath Keepers is a far-right militia] is a graduate of Yale Law School.

That is indeed correct.

Then noting that PT locates threats in the US political right, and PT says that some people think that he seems like a Marxist.

He says that his proposals displease both sides.

So my theory says that massive immigration in the absence of institutions that protect workers’ wages is actually a bad thing. That’s one of the ways widespread immiseration is created. That’s obviously displeasing to the left end of the political spectrum. But on the other hand, if you want to control the wealth pump, it will probably involve higher taxes on the wealthy, and that’s displeasing to conservatives. So I’m in the happy situation where everyone is displeased with me.

 

[lpetrich]

Why does PT think that he has succeeded where so many others have failed?

1. He looks at the numerous theories proposed over the centuries and then tests them.
2. He does mathematical modeling.
3. Polybius, Karl Marx, etc. don't have all the data that we now have.

So one can test the hypothesis of whether climate disruptions caused societal collapse. "And it turns out that the answer is that when societies don’t have those structural drivers for instability – elite overproduction, immiseration – societies can adapt to a bad climate without serious disruption."

The way we can determine that the theory works is by building massive historical databases. And then testing different theories against the same large data set. This way we avoided two major problems of historical comparisons when they’re done by pundits and politicians. First of all: cherry picking. You can always find some example [to fit an argument] from ancient Rome. The second problem is massaging the data: the procrustean bed. So you have to gather as much data as possible in order to get a representative sample of past societies. Then by analysing them in a transparent manner, critics can go in and say, “OK, if you are guilty of cherry picking or the procrustean approach, then it will be visible, because the work is transparent.” That’s essentially how we can be certain that we are on the right track [with cliodynamics].

Like Seshat.

 

[lpetrich]

What's the US like?

OK, so let’s start with popular immiseration. People have stopped growing taller in America. And they live shorter lives. Meanwhile Europe continues to grow in life expectancy. This was a shocker. Life expectancy started to decline [in America] even before Covid. In immiseration terms, everything is moving in the wrong direction. And there are no signs yet that any of these indicators, like median salaries, are recovering. On elite overproduction, actually, things may be taking a turn. So, for example – although this is not necessarily a good thing, it just shows how horrible the situation is – the proportion of high school graduates that immediately go to college was like 67 per cent five to seven years ago, now it’s like 62 per cent. Is this really a good thing? The number of lawyers is still very high…

Different societies have different paths to elite status. In the UK, one goes to Oxford. In France, one goes to some elite school. In Imperial China, one had to pass some exams.

Elites?

All complex human societies have elites. They are not necessarily bad. People say they are not part of an elite because it feels as if you are admitting to some sort of guilt.

If one feels guilty, then one should live a life of noblesse oblige.

n the United States, sociology of power has been discouraged. Because, clearly, the elites did not want it to be an important subject. And American elites have been very secretive. They like to keep to their own gatherings. So sociologists of power are working against that trend.

PT then talks about the US splitting. "Yeah, I think that’s a realistic scenario, where there will be two countries or even three countries; the West Coast and East Coast separate from the middle."

Like what the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia went through.

The most plausible splits of the US may be different, however: Forget The 50 States; The U.S. Is Really 11 Nations, Author Says : NPR

The genetics of the first European settlers: Albion’s Seed, Genotyped — LessWrong

Or fandoms of professional-sports teams:

• NFL Fan Map : r/Maps
• NCAA Football Team Map (Updated 2021) : r/MapPorn
• I made a map of MLB teams based on their Google search popularity : r/baseball
• MAP of the NBA & MAP of the LA ZOO
• College Basketball Imperialism Map (November 29, 2021) : r/CollegeBasketball

 

[lpetrich]

Peter Turchin on returning to his homeland:

Well, I left the USSR in 1976. The first time I returned was in 1992. And it was a failed state, it looked like a failed state, and everything was broken. There was a huge amount of misery. So it’s only people who sit outside of those state collapses who can think it was unadulterated good. Well: it was unadulterated good for American elites, because suddenly their geopolitical competitor had disappeared…

Social collapse isn't very good.

AI is getting good enough to threaten a lot of white-collar work:

The story, essentially, if you look at the professions that are going to be disrupted in the UK, white-collar workers will hate it. In order of professions that could be disrupted, lawyers come second… According to some estimates, like 45 per cent of what lawyers do can already be automated at the current level of ChatGPT. All right, so we are currently producing three times as many lawyers in the United States as there are jobs for them. So once half of the jobs go, you will have six times as many lawyers as jobs… These people are going to be very upset. And they’re very smart. They’re well connected. They are ambitious. And they’re good at organising. So this is a recipe for disaster.

One will have to keep the AI from hallucinating before it can be taken seriously.

This year's Presidential election?

PT: With trepidation. Both parties are dysfunctional. But the Republicans are really two parties for reasons that I discussed in my book, and the Democrats have successfully suppressed their Bernie [Sanders] wing, but I don’t understand what’s going on in their minds. There are lots of ambitious and good people; why can’t they come up with somebody who’s better?

That interview was done last year, when the two parties' candidates were starting to enter the race:  2024 Republican Party presidential primaries and  2024 Democratic Party presidential primaries

The primaries are now done, both parties' conventions are over, and the Presidential race is now in its final phase.

Donald Trump seems like the Mule of American politics, almost as if he telepathically controls the Republican Party, while on the Democratic side, running again is what most Presidents have done for over a century.

The result: a Trump-Biden rematch. So it seemed at the time of that interview, and so it seemed until July 21 of this year, when Joe Biden dropped out of the race. His Vice President, Kamala Harris, then made lots and lots of phone calls, getting her first endorsements in a few hours and getting the support of her party in two days.

So it seems like the Democratic Party came up with someone better. But on the Republican side, I doubt that Donald Trump will ever do what Joe Biden did.

 

[lpetrich]

PT: "What I’m saying is that if you don’t turn off the wealth pump, yeah, disintegration is a possible outcome." Others are strife and rebellions and revolutions and civil war.

"There are cases, from our database, where violence is avoided. Reform stopped upheaval."

• The early Roman Republic
• The Chartist period of reforms in Britain, in the 1830's and thereabouts
• The reform period in Russia in the mid 19th cy. - it delayed the Russian Revolution by half a century
• The New Deal Era in the US - 1933 to WWII

WL: Do you think the elites in the United States are capable of realising how dangerous this situation is, and then pushing through serious reforms?

PT: So there’s two separate questions: are they realising it? And are they capable of solving the problems? Yes, they’re capable if they realise what the situation is, and become really convinced that the alternative [to reform] is a social revolution. But I don’t see any evidence that they have yet understood their situation. They think that they just have to suppress Trump and then things will go back to normal.

That's a common problem with elites. In the Schlesinger US-history cycles, conservative periods suffer buildup of unsolved problems, and efforts to solve them eventually end those periods. Those problems build up because society's elites are unwilling to do what it takes to solve those problems, at best doing half-measures, and at worst dismissing those problems as non-problems.

Herbert Hoover's attempts to end the Great Depression were not very successful, and he did not do much because he didn't think that it should be necessary to do so. FDR, his successor, continued those efforts and expanded them, as the New Deal.

On the other end of the spectrum were slavery defenders in the decades before the US Civil War. They firmly believed that slavery was a very good thing.

But Trump is still there, and if not Trump there will be JD Vance, and he, by the way, is much, much better at being a right-wing populist than Trump. There is a big supply of right-wing populist leaders in America.

This was a year before DT chose JDV as his VP.

WL: Are you pessimistic about the United States’ future?

PT: Well, yeah. By nature I’m an optimist, but I’ve lived enough of my life to become fairly pessimistic. But of course, there is also the possibility that my theory is wrong and things will somehow magically resolve. Who knows? The United States is in spin. I saw this 15 years ago. And it’s like that horror movie, you know, where the ball is rolling towards you, and it’s rolling and rolling and there is no place to divert it. It’s just going to smash you.

 

[Swammerdami]

PT then talks about the US splitting. "Yeah, I think that’s a realistic scenario, where there will be two countries or even three countries; the West Coast and East Coast separate from the middle."

Like what the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia went through.

This strikes me as very unlikely. And the examples show why. The Soviet Union was NOT bound by ethnic ties. Kazakhstan speaks a Turkic language. The two principal languages of Georgia come from North Caucasian and Kartvellian. Latvia spoke Latvian, etc. etc.

Yugoslavia wasn't even a single country until 1918; and am I wrong that it was broken into distinct ethnic groups geographically? And didn't Czechoslavia's split follow fairly clear ethnic lines? Czech and Slovak are separate languages.

Are there ANY examples of countries NOT split on ethno-geographic lines that broke up? (The U.S. was almost an example in 1861 but that secession failed.) I can't think of any. Just the opposite -- there are examples of countries with severe splits that did NOT split up: Kurdistan, Iraq, Rwanda.

The U.S. may have severe splits, but there is NOT enough geographic separation to cause a geographic split. Instead persecution of minorities might be the bad outcome, perhaps like Central Europe in the 1930's.

 

[bilby]

PT then talks about the US splitting. "Yeah, I think that’s a realistic scenario, where there will be two countries or even three countries; the West Coast and East Coast separate from the middle."

Like what the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia went through.

This strikes me as very unlikely. And the examples show why. The Soviet Union was NOT bound by ethnic ties. Kazakhstan speaks a Turkic language. The two principal languages of Georgia come from North Caucasian and Kartvellian. Latvia spoke Latvian, etc. etc.

Yugoslavia wasn't even a single country until 1918; and am I wrong that it was broken into distinct ethnic groups geographically? And didn't Czechoslavia's split follow fairly clear ethnic lines? Czech and Slovak are separate languages.

Are there ANY examples of countries NOT split on ethno-geographic lines that broke up? (The U.S. was almost an example in 1861 but that secession failed.) I can't think of any. Just the opposite -- there are examples of countries with severe splits that did NOT split up: Kurdistan, Iraq, Rwanda.

The U.S. may have severe splits, but there is NOT enough geographic separation to cause a geographic split. Instead persecution of minorities might be the bad outcome, perhaps like Central Europe in the 1930's.

I suspect that nations and empires breaking up is a thing of the past in the age of real-time communications.

In the good old days, by the time the leader heard about a revolution, and sent instructions to trusted minions in the rebellious district, it was often too late - either the trusted minions had been overwhemed, or events had moved on to a point where the new orders made no sense, or were impossible to carry out.

If it took days to get information from the region to the capital, and more days to return orders to the region, it was rarely possible for those orders to still be relevant when they arrived. Even when the time required was reduced to hours, it could easily be too late.

And systems like the telegraph, with a need for either abandonment of operational security, or for time consuming encryption/decryption, and with a very low bandwidth that necessarily led to very incomplete information about the situation, were just not quite good enough.

But today a leader can see, live, in real time, what is happening in some regional province (even on the other side of the planet); And can respond with orders in real time - it can be almost as if he were actually there in person.

This may not make successful rebellion and sesession impossible, but it certainly makes it a great deal harder.

 

[bilby]

Different societies have different paths to elite status. In the UK, one goes to Oxford.

No, one does not.

In the UK, one is born into the aristocracy. Oxford (and Cambridge) don't manufacture aristocrats, or "elites", they just provide them with a place to hang out in their youth, while pretending to study Medieval Art History, or something equally practical and rigourous.

UK elite overproduction is historically managed by sending spare offspring to the clergy, or to die in the wars of wounds, or to die in the colonies of yellowjack. Primogeniture ensures that each generation contains only one heir, keeping the elite class roughly constant in size; Elite status in the UK absolutely does NOT entail learning anything useful, other than as a hobby.

 

[lpetrich]

Now for Peter Turchin's book "End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration"

PT describes how he had worked on the science of organism communities, ecology, as opposed to environmentalist activism and ideology. He was especially interested in how many animal species have populations that go in boom-and-bust cycles. He did mathematical modeling, and by the late 1990's, he felt like he had succeeded, So he turned to a new challenge: addressing large-scale human societies with similar methods: cliodynamics.

In particular, he and his colleagues found cycles of integration and disintegration that operated over humanity's recorded history. Society starts out with not many elites, and it can cohere well enough to enable wars of conquest. But elites multiply and end up extracting a lot from the common people, immiserating them. That in itself can still be stable, but that is not enough for the elites. They end up fighting each other for the top positions, and after a lot of strife and civil war, their numbers get trimmed down, and the cycle restarts. Sometimes it is not factions of an established elite but some established elite and some elite aspirants.

He then describes how the US also has that cycle. The era of the New Deal, from the 1930's to the 1970's, with its social contract between business managements, workers, and governments, was an integrative period. It started to break down in the late 1970's, and the 1980's to the present were Gilded Age II, with the elites taking a larger and larger fraction of the grains of productivity, what PT calls a "wealth pump". Gilded Age II? Because of being much like the Gilded Age of 1870 to 1900.

As our model predicts, the extra wealth flowing to the elites (to the proverbial “1 percent,” but even more so to the top 0.01 percent) eventually created trouble for the wealth holders (and power holders) themselves. The social pyramid has grown top-heavy. We now have too many “elite aspirants” competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within. Growing social fragility has manifested itself in collapsing levels of trust in state institutions and unraveling social norms governing public discourse—and the functioning of democratic institutions.

 

[lpetrich]

What are elites? Those with social power. He notes four kinds:

1. Coercion: force and the threat of force
2. Wealth: being able to buy stuff and hire people
3. Bureaucratic or administrative
4. Ideological, the power of persuasion

Being elite is a continuum, like one's rank in an organization, how much wealth and/or influence one has. Non-elites often try to join the elites and elites often try to become more elite: elite aspirants.

If there are too many aspirants for each position, that can cause trouble.

This has also resulted in the immiseration of many ordinary people:

When America entered an era of wage stagnation and decline, it affected not only the economic measures of well-being but also biological and social ones. I’ll talk more about it in chapter 3, but for now it is sufficient to note that life expectancies of large swaths of the American population started to decline years before the COVID-19 pandemic. “Deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses spiked among the noncollege-educated from 2000 to 2016, while remaining at the same, much lower level among those with at least a college degree. This is what popular immiseration looks like.

Then mentioning the presidency of Donald Trump, someone who strikes me as the Mule of American politics. Though obviously elite in wealth and celebrity, he wanted more.

The 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries had the largest number of major candidates in history to that point. A total of seventeen contestants entered the race. Members of the stunned American public became involuntary viewers in a bizarre spectacle of an elite aspirant game reaching its logical culmination. The candidates competed in saying the most outlandish things and tossing out wild quotes in order to win press attention and stay in the race, while “serious” candidates declined in the polls and were eliminated.

 

[lpetrich]

Then talking about another unlikely President: Abraham Lincoln.

As PT tells it, the US was ruled before the Civil War by a coalition of Southern slave-plantation owners and Northeastern elites: merchants, bankers, and lawyers. Their money was from cotton, and much of it was exported. It was also made into fabric at home in Northeastern factories. Southern white men had outsized influence in Congress compared to Northern men. The 3/5 compromise got them more representation in the House, and they were about evenly matched in the Senate, due to the Missouri Compromise, despite the larger population of the North.

Some 2/3 of the richest people lived in the South, and these latter-day aristocrats often got involved in politics.

Abe Lincoln, however, had very poor origins, far from the centers of power on the Atlantic coast. Like many politicians, he was first a lawyer.

Age of Discord II – Peter Turchin has some graphs of the numbers.

The wages of workers relative to total economic output declined by 50%, life expectancy declined by 8 years, people started growing shorter. Lethal urban riots become much more common, from 1 over 1820-25 to 35 over 1855-60. Another sign of discontent was the rise of parties like the anti-immigrant Native American Party, better-known as the Know-nothings.

Elite overproduction? Most of the gains from economic growth were going to the elites, and their numbers grew.

But these elites' wealth was from mining, steel production, and railroads, not from cotton, and they chafed under the dominant Southern elite. The new elites wanted high tariffs to protect their industries, and government support for "internal improvements", what we nowadays call infrastructure. The Southern elite wanted low tariffs and had no desire for internal improvements.

PT then notes physical violence among members of Congress.

 

[lpetrich]

History textbooks tell us that the American Civil War was fought over slavery, but this is not the whole story. A better way to characterize this conflict is to say that it was fought over “slavocracy.”

Also called the "slave power".

Indeed, although by 1860 the majority of Northerners felt that slavery was morally wrong, only a tiny minority, the Northern abolitionists, felt strongly enough to make this issue central to their political program.

But slavery was very lucrative for the South, not only for slaveowners but also for many non-slaveowning white people there.

 1860 United States presidential election

• Republican (northern ex-Whigs) - pop 39.82% elec 180
• Southern Democratic - pop 18.10% elec 72
• Constitutional Union (southern ex-Whigs) - pop 12.61% elec 39
• Northern Democratic - pop 29.46% elec 12

Total electoral votes: 303, and to win, 152
AL won.

The victory of the North in the war resulted in the overthrow of the antebellum ruling class and its replacement by the new economic elite that has dominated the American state since then.