... like covid
... while broad measures of societal well-being decline:
- Life expectancy
- images.google.com, query: life expectancy US by year
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-life-expectancy-declines-again-a-dismal-trend-not-seen-since-world-war-i/2018/11/28/ae58bc8c-f28c-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html
- Height
- images.google.com, query: average stature in the US decreasing
Structural-Demographic Theory
- A theory of how societies cycle between
- "things going well" and
- "things going poorly"
- Let's look at the web site
- We could try Google's ngram viewer ourselves
- Two books that explain the theory
Where is society headed now?
- Politics
- images.google.com
- query: political polarization graph
What controls whether social harmony or discord predominates?
- Turchin’s answer (ref.: Ages of Discord)
The US, the Roman Empire, medieval France, etc. –
cycle through
“integrative” and “disintegrative” phases
- Integrative
The country is working
- Disintegrative
Things are falling apart
- Disintegrative phases are driven by:
1) Hardship among the general populace
No big surprise here
2) National financial crises
No big surprise here either
3) Political division among the power elite
This is the *most* important factor!
(Why?)
- According to Turchin:
Peasant or worker uprisings alone don’t work
A unified elite suppresses them
A fragmented elite is a different story:
One fragment can use discord (e.g. uprisings)…
…as a tool to fight another fragment
Fiscal crisis weakens government…
…which then cannot control the disintegration
- Turchin has a computer model
It predicts:
The US is now in a disintegrative phase
The low point lies a number of years ahead
The last low point was the civil war
Model does not predict
how low the next low point will be
how high the next high point will be
when the next low or high point will be
the model is arguably not quite cyclic
... call it quasi-cyclic if you like
The cycle: how it works
The players:
The power holders (usually wealthy; sociologists call them the “elite”)
The masses
~~~The cycle (start with any step)~~~
The masses grow in quantity
The masses compete for work
Wages decrease while the elite gather wealth
Wealth disparity (unequal distribution) grows
The elite segment has space for new entrants while the masses are increasingly squeezed
The masses increasingly aspire to join the elite
The elite grows too much
The elite struggle among themselves (intra-elite competition)
The country becomes mired in internal conflict
“Immiserated masses” and elite in-fighting leads to social conflict
Pandemics become
more likely
worse
(see peterturchin.com)
Eventually the elites are trimmed
Wealth then flows to the masses
The elite unify (less intra-elite competition)
The country enters a period of harmony and strength
The masses grow… and back to the beginning
(that I prepared for another course...)
