End Times: Professor Peter Turchin, By James Reed

Peter Turchin's End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, Penguin, 2023), offers a data-driven analysis of societal instability, focusing on the United States but drawing from historical patterns across civilisations. Turchin, a complexity scientist and founder of cliodynamics—a field that uses mathematical models to study historical trends—argues that societies collapse when the balance between elites and the majority becomes too skewed, leading to political disintegration. His central thesis is that the U.S. is currently on a dangerous trajectory toward crisis, driven by two key mechanisms: popular immiseration and elite overproduction.

Turchin introduces the concept of the "wealth pump," a mechanism where wealth is systematically transferred from the majority to the elites, exacerbating income inequality. In the U.S., this has been in overdrive for two generations, since the late 1970s, leading to stagnating wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, declining public trust, and rising debt. The bottom 90 percent suffer—what Turchin calls "popular immiseration"—while the top 1 percent see their wealth skyrocket. He notes that by 2019, the number of U.S. households worth $10 million or more had increased tenfold since 1983, to 693,000, while millionaires now make up 10 percent of the population. This isn't just inequality; it's a structural shift that destabilises society.

The second driver, elite overproduction, occurs when the number of people vying for elite positions exceeds the available slots. As prosperity initially grows, more people gain education and aspire to join the elite—think of the overabundance of young graduates with advanced degrees competing for limited high-status roles. But since elite positions are relatively fixed, this creates a surplus of frustrated "counter-elites" who feel entitled to power but are shut out. These counter-elites often harness the resentment of the immiserated masses to challenge the established order, leading to political instability. Turchin points to historical examples like imperial China, medieval France, and the American Civil War, where elite overproduction fuelled collapse.

Using his cliodynamics models, Turchin predicted in 2010, in a Nature magazine forecast, that the U.S. would face a breakdown in political order around 2020. He argues this prediction has largely come true, pointing to events like the 2020 election turmoil and the January 6 Capitol attack as symptoms of deeper structural issues. His models show societies often oscillate between integrative phases (growth, cohesion) and disintegrative phases (decline, conflict), each lasting about a century. The U.S., he warns, is deep into a disintegrative phase, with a risk of violent rupture—potentially civil war—if the trajectory isn't altered.

Turchin doesn't just diagnose the problem; he examines historical cases where societies avoided collapse. Britain's 1832 Reform Act, Russia's serfdom reforms in the 1860s, and the U.S. New Deal after the Great Depression are examples where elites made concessions—like higher taxes or power-sharing—to rebalance society and avert revolution. In the U.S., post-World War II, federal tax rates on the wealthy exceeded 90 percent, redistributing wealth and stabilising the system. Today, Turchin suggests similar measures—reversing the wealth pump through tax and welfare reform—could avert disaster, though he believes the current crisis may be too advanced to stop entirely.

He also touches on controversial factors, like immigration, arguing that elites have encouraged lax policies to secure cheap labor, further depressing wages and fuelling resentment among the working class. This, combined with the immiseration of the majority and the rise of counter-elites (e.g., figures like Donald Trump, who Turchin sees as a product of elite overproduction and popular discontent), creates a volatile mix. Turchin quotes Right-wing media host Tucker Carlson to illustrate how the Republican Party is morphing into a "revolutionary party," capitalising on the alienation of the working class from traditional politics.

Critically, Turchin's approach has its limits. His reliance on mathematical models can oversimplify the messy, unpredictable nature of human societies—historians often argue that history isn't reducible to equations. There are black swan and chaos events. Additionally, his focus on elite overproduction and inequality as the sole drivers of instability might downplay other factors, like cultural shifts or external shocks (e.g., nuclear war).

Turchin's data-driven lens offers a fresh perspective on why societies fail, and his prediction of turmoil in the 2020s feels prescient given recent U.S. political unrest. But his solutions—rebalancing wealth and power—require a level of elite self-awareness and sacrifice that history shows is rare. The book challenges the establishment narrative that progress is linear, forcing readers to confront the cyclical nature of societal rise and fall, and the urgent need to address inequality before it's too late, which it may well be.