This is probably the first book that I have grouped into both my "Badly Written Books" and "Insightful Books" collections.

Let's start with the "badly written" part. The author apparently makes his daily bread from building databases with numerical data from different periods in global history and then doing some kind of mathematical modeling on that data. He has used this approach to gain a better understanding of revolutionary times, when the power structures of societies change rapidly. The author notes that theories which don't have grounding in historical data are not likely to be very accurate.

The author deliberately avoids mathematical formalism in this book. At the end of part I he refers interested readers to the appendix if they want to know more about how he constructs and statistically analyzes historical databases. I followed his guidance, but I was very disappointed. The appendix contains no statistics and very little information on how historical databases are compiled. For what it's worth, it seems like the author relies on the work of ordinary historians in this regard. But I couldn't make much sense of it as he delves into stories about aliens and other uninteresting asides for no clear reason.

So the scientific foundations of the author's arguments are shrouded in mystery. Consequently, it is difficult to see much value in the various case studies he presents throughout the book. He uses quasi-theoretical concepts (such as "elite overproduction" and "wealth pump") which are supposedly equally applicable to all periods in world history. Perhaps there is some degree of truth in everything he writes, but the frequent historical examples are too brief to be informative, and they don't support the credibility of his conclusions. Instead they just divert the reader from the main theme of the book, which is the political situation in the present-day United States.

Which brings me to why I also categorize this book as "insightful". In the main argument of the book the author traces the development of the US economy and politics, starting to some extent from the civil war but focusing especially on the past 80 years. I really liked this analysis since it helped me understand many aspects of recent US history from a new perspective. The author argues that the US is a plutocracy: the top of the power pyramid in America is the corporate community. Economic and administrative power networks are joined at the hip, but the economic one dominates (p.124). He explains how this came to be and how this system went off the rails in the 21st century. He also analyzes the forces that have recently transformed the Republican Party into a true revolutionary party (p.211). All of this is very interesting. The author indicates that the whole thing could spin dangerously out of control, but he also offers some vague suggestions for how the worst outcomes might be avoided. His forebodings about the 2020's (the book was written in 2022) should be read by anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the implications of the 2024 presidential election (and 2028, should it be held).

In conclusion, this book is recommended reading. It falls very much under the category of "popular science", and I would have preferred a more logical and disciplined mode of presentation. But on the other hand I certainly appreciate why intellectual rigor was in this case subordinated to popular appeal.

Peter Turchin, as his Wikipedia entry notes, was not trained in history, economics or political science but has developed an interest in a theory of social and political change and a mathematical model. ( )

As someone who received a degree in mathematics with emphasis on statistical theory, I can tell you that no amount of talk of mathematical models or statistical analysis can disguise the fact that, at best, this book's "science of cliodynamics" is about pattern recognition. That's not math. Now, if he had talked about matrices of key variables with probabilities of outcomes, he might have gotten my attention.

Instead, the book cherry-picks some historical incidences of systemic upheaval and fits those into his argument regarding immiseration and overproduction of elites. There's actually nothing very new here, it's territory that's been covered elsewhere and is presented with some new jargon. I'm not saying he's wrong, it's just that there's a lot more going on with historical processes that make prediction nearly impossible.

But let's say he's right in picking those two issues. There is no lack of recognition that inequality (a word which he seems to avoid using) is a major problem and one that history shows to have a major destabilizing effect on governments. I'm not exactly buying the elite argument, though. Many people with law degrees (which is the clearest path to political power) find work outside of government and thus present no threat to existing power structures. In fact, elite overproduction tends to be self-governing in that elites find work; they may be underemployed, but that has always been the result.

Along the way, he does discuss remedies such as higher taxation for the wealthy and bipartisan solutions for the immigration issue. But you don't need a new "science" to be the advocate for those solutions. What seems to be missing is an analysis of the psychology of the mob, which increasingly seems to be a serious threat to democracy. How do we deal with a bunch of delusional people who have succumbed to relentless propaganda? Even if times get better (as they have since the 2008 financial sector meltdown), polls show that many people think the economy is in worse shape now. And never in history has there been a society as in America, where the citizens have an astounding number of guns. In other words, we've reached a point in history where perceptions can be incredibly incorrect, and revolutions can occur based on nothing more than emotion. ( )

[4.25] If the torrent of turmoil, divisiveness and twists over the past decade have subjected you to a severe case of mental whiplash, Turchin’s book could be the perfect potion for helping you to make some sense out of the chaos. As someone who knew little about cliodynamics (an effort to make history a predictive, analytical science), I found most of this book fascinating. True, a few sections might a bit too “academic” for a mainstream audience. But the author wisely weaves in lively historic anecdotes that span centuries, keeping most “End Times” moving at a nice clip. Some readers might disagree with a number of Turchin’s theories and conclusions, but the book is timely and thought-provoking. ( )

It is fashionable to talk of the 2020s as a time of upset, instability, turmoil, revolution and war, all without any factual basis, just gut feeling. What is really shocking is that science and math show that it is all true. In End Times, Peter Turchin describes how countries come to this point predictably, and how all of it can always be traced to two factors: elite overproduction, and the concomitant immiseration of the 99%. In the regular cycle, the time for overturning everything is now.

This is quite possibly the most important book of the decade, and affects absolutely everyone. It explains precisely where we are and where we’re heading, based on thousands of years of the same cycles. Unfortunately for the USA, this knowledge comes too late.

To make a long, detailed, involved and complex story short, as the rich grow their families, their children want power and money. They take it from the poor, in low wages, low taxes on capital, removal of rights, reductions in aid, and increases in incarceration and fines (the “wealth pump”). They achieve their goals through a direct line to power, bypassing normal channels. As the poor get poorer and the rich get richer and more numerous, protests begin. They are chaotic, leaderless and without clear goals. They evolve into bloodletting, literal or physical, which ultimately greatly reduces the number of the elite. Basic wages go up as fewer workers survive and are available, and equality reaches a high point.

And the cycle begins again.

The Chinese have seen this cycle endlessly: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” But Turchin can say this definitively because of a giant database called CrisisDB. It goes back thousands of years, through all kinds of societies and nations. And everywhere he researches, it is the overproduction of elites that strains the system. And causes its demise.

It has long been proclaimed that human society, being composed of individual humans, is far too complex for any kind of model to operate consistently and successfully. But the data say that in high level, general sweeps, patterns and waves occur regularly and predictably. The differences make no difference.

With war, the generation of the war cries loudly – Never again! The next generation enjoys some level of peace, but by the third generation, all is forgotten. People are emboldened again, and ready for the “glory” of another war.

So with politics. Equality reigns for a couple of decades, then distortions begin to appear. Larger numbers of people become fabulously rich, and all their circle want to have their say in power. There aren’t enough positions in government or influence for them, so they become frustrated and embittered. The demands of the rich flood the halls of government. They fund radical candidates, arrange for removals and assassinations, and in general, darken the outlook. Laws begin to dramatically favor the rich at everyone else’s cost.

The 99% become outcasts (flyover country, deplorables, welfare queens, poor, homeless). They look back at their parents, who had decent jobs, decent pay and decent households, and wonder how and why all that went away.

This is exactly what Donald Trump tapped into, even though he clearly had no desire to change any of it. His actions enriched the richest, and his plans were to further impoverish the poor, but his words were to Make America Great Again. That appeal rang truer than anything today’s 99% had ever heard, and they bought into it, hook, line and sinker. But Trump was never going to be the solution. He would only speed up the process to disaster.

Wages had been going down since the 1970s. Unions were shoved out of action. Universities became laughably unaffordable. So did housing. Even life expectancy dropped. Child labor laws are being softened to help suppress minimum wages. This is exactly the configuration of pretty much every civil war and revolution: the rich want their power, and the rest want decent conditions. Something has to give. And it is usually the floor, not the ceiling.

That the lot of the 99% has not and will not improve fits totally into Turchin’s research. Unless someone comes to their aid and reduces the glaring inequality, governments will fall, constitutions will be tossed, domestic terrorism will increase, and civil wars will break out. And elites will light the match. In this decade. The Chinese knew it. So did Tsars Alexander II and III. Yet we keep falling into the same trap.

Turchin has been working at this a long time. His team has built a remarkable dataset. It extends to the point of revealing that:
-When societies are in equilibrium, human height is measurably increased. Americans were the tallest in the world in the 1700s. And before a civil war, people don’t grow nearly as tall; they actually, measurably shrink. It is plain for all to see.
-Life expectancy changes as the cycle approaches the chaos stage. He says American life expectancy has never fallen three years in a row since the Great Depression of 1933. But it has just done so. And Covid-19 is far from exceptional. Major epidemics “are often associated” with these periods.
-“Nearly half of the millionaires who thrived during the Roaring Twenties were wiped out by the Great Depression and the following decades, when worker wages grew faster than GDP per capita.” It was the greatest leveling ever seen in the USA.
-“In one-sixth of the (global) cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent. Bad news for the elites. Even more bad news for everybody was that 75 percent of crises ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in one-fifth of cases, recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of exits led to the death of the state –it was conquered by another or simply disintegrated into fragments.”
-The “CrisisDB confirms that rise-and-fall cycles in societies with polygamous elites are substantially shorter than such cycles in monogamous societies.” In English – nuclear families produce fewer children, delaying the inevitable competition for power.

In other words, the data has a lot more to tell us than we even know to ask. This is a whole new way to look at the world.

It happens the same way all over and throughout history. Turchin examines not just the US, as it approaches this low point right now, but also England at several points, France, Russia, the Roman Empire and China, which has the longest record of it.

The commonalities occur at every stage. When the cycle is fresh and people are equal, they co-operate. The common good is an important value to them. But as the rich grow in numbers and in wealth, and pull away from the pack, “the sense of national cooperation with which states quickly rot from within” takes over, Turchin says. This is as precise a summation of the US today as I have seen. It is shockingly true. People begin to fear and hate institutions. They want to seal the borders to keep what little is left for themselves.

Turchin points out that it is the ruling class that wants open borders. They mean more competition for jobs, so lower wages and more government aid programs they can manage for profit. He cites Bernie Sanders saying open borders is “a Koch idea” and nothing he supports. But the ruling class always gets its way – until the end. It has been decades since voters had any real say in government. Legislators bow to rich donors. Voters only count during elections, not in legislatures. A billionaire has purchased himself a Supreme Court justice. The rot has become glaringly visible.

It is the ruling class that scares off equalizing legislation, by say, calling inheritance taxes a death tax, even though it only applies to them and not the 99%. They are also behind denying climate change, calling it a hoax, in order to deflect attention from the ever increasing rates of fossil fuel consumption. In this environment, “money is free speech” Turchin says. Let there be no doubt who is leading everyone down the path to self-destruction. For Turchin, the “wealth pump is one of the most destabilizing social mechanisms known to humanity.” And unfortunately, “it is too late to avert our current crisis.”

Elite overproduction has taken many forms. In many cases, it was military. The rich sent their children to the armed forces, to serve as admirals and generals. In religious societies, they became cardinals and high priests. Under royalty, they became governors, given stipends and pensions for life. Today, they are CEOs and kingmakers, buying elections to get pliable officials who will increase their wealth. In China, Turchin says, for two thousand years it was the educated. They had to take difficult civil service exams to get into government. To fail the exam meant a peasant’s life. Today, the Communist Party of China still operates this same way. If the Chinese can’t get into the party and pass the tests, they are doomed to have zero power or respect.

And in all these cases, when there are more candidates than positions (Musical Chairs, Turchin calls it), there will be unrest among the elite. And it is the elites who will undermine the system before the 99% get organized. In Turchin’s terms: “The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.” Today’s clue is rich parents bribing school officials to get their (apparently unworthy) children into top universities.

But even that is no guarantee of success, as newly minted lawyers find they begin with a quarter of a million in debt and few prospects to rise to the top in an overstuffed industry.

The civil service figures in another way as well. Smaller societies are not subject to the same cycle, because they might not have an administration, “but once you have a million or more subjects, you either acquire a civil service or suffer from such inefficiencies that your polity sooner or later collapses. Or loses in competition with bureaucratic empires.” Overpopulation has essentially eliminated that marker, making it merely an interesting footnote.

As I read, my own warped mind kept sliding way out of scope of this book, to ecology. Because just when we’re beginning to understand what needs to be done to save the human race and its ecosphere, civil wars and wartime governments will have no time, no inclination and no money to deal with trivia like climate change. Power itself will be at stake. The 2020s could be the final nail in more than one coffin.

In an appendix, Turchin salutes Isaac Asimov, whose 1960s era Foundation trilogy centered around “psycho-history”, the science fiction notion that the whole galaxy operates on a clear cyclical pattern of governance and inevitability (Turchin calls the real thing “cliodynamics”). Would that Asimov were around today to reflect on that as actually true.

End Times is a six star book, not because of the writing style, which is friendly but a little flabby, but because Turchin pulls together a vast jigsaw puzzle and changes the face of history with it. It is dramatic. Every page is a revelation. Dots are connected. Questions are answered. Relevance gets established where no real importance had been noted before. It is important because it determines, reveals and reinforces a universal truth: it is the lack of governance over the rich that causes all the cyclicality of society. Instability, turmoil and wars can be seen as failure to control the elites from their corrupting influence in society after society, era after era. That is a significant step in our understanding of history and ourselves.

This is a whole new way to see how the human world works. And we should be embarrassed that we didn’t realize it a lot sooner. Because we’re about to pay the price. Again.

David Wineberg ( )