{"id":52154,"date":"2020-11-30T06:00:48","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=52154"},"modified":"2020-11-28T14:29:18","modified_gmt":"2020-11-28T19:29:18","slug":"the-scientist-who-calculates-the-end-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2020\/11\/the-scientist-who-calculates-the-end-of-america\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scientist Who Calculates the End of America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>A scientist has devised a mathematical formula for calculating when nations and civilizations fall apart.\u00a0 Ten years ago, he ran his numbers for the United States.\u00a0 Things would start to collapse, according to his calculations, in 2020.<\/p>\n

Now, first of all, I am highly skeptical, as I will explain.\u00a0 But his analysis raises some very interesting issues and draws attention to factors that most observers have neglected.<\/p>\n

The scientist\u2019s name is Peter Turchin, whose parents immigrated from Russia when he was a child and who presently is on the faculty of the University of Connecticut.\u00a0 He is a zoologist, a specialist in ecology<\/a>, the branch of biology that studies the relationship between organisms and their environment.\u00a0 He became the world\u2019s leading authority on the ecology of pine beetles, specifically, why their populations rise and why they decline.\u00a0 From that, he branched off into human ecology.<\/p>\n

\n

Turchin sought to apply mathematics to history, using the same methods that scientists use to study natural systems.\u00a0 For an account of his ideas, his methods, and his conclusions, see\u00a0Graeme Wood\u2019s article in The Atlantic\u00a0<\/em>Can History Predict the Future? <\/a><\/p>\n

Turchin claims to have identified factors and quantified them into a model that accounts for the various social collapses over the last 10,000 years.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe fundamental problems,\u201d according to The Atlantic<\/em>\u2018s summary, \u201care a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can\u2019t cover its financial positions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sound familiar?\u00a0 I was especially intrigued with what Dr. Turchin says about what happens with a society\u2019s elites.\u00a0 For various reasons, more and more people rise to elite status.\u00a0 That is, social mobility increases.\u00a0 People acquire greater wealth and\/or greater education.\u00a0 In our society, more and more Americans earn college degrees, something that used to be reserved for an elite few.\u00a0 Social mobility is a good thing.\u00a0 And yet, eventually, the number of people with elite credentials increases to the point that there are no longer enough jobs for them commensurate with their social status.<\/p>\n

When that happens, the elite who are shut out from power become a counter-elite.<\/em>\u00a0 They oppose the \u201cestablishment\u201d elite.\u00a0 Whereupon they take up the cause of the non-elite, the \u201ccommoners,\u201d who have problems of their own.\u00a0 Here is what happens, in the words of Graeme Woods<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners\u2019 living standards slip\u2014not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before\u2014they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners\u2019 lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in\u00adsecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies\u2014and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Members of the counter-elite lead the commoners in a revolution or in some kind of political breakdown, going on to build something new on the rubble.<\/p>\n

The rise of the counter-elite today, according to The Atlantic<\/em> article, is exemplified by Donald Trump, who, despite his Ivy League degree (University of Pennsylvania) and great wealth, has not really fit in with the social circles of the true elite who constitute what Turchin calls our \u201cruling class.\u201d\u00a0 Instead, though, Trump has become the champion of the working class, the \u201ccommoners\u201d who confounded their social superiors by propelling him to the presidency, where he overthrew many other elite norms (e.g., political correctness, cosmopolitanism, free trade, etc.).<\/p>\n

Do you see a problem with this analysis?\u00a0 Trump\u2019s rise was in 2016<\/em>.\u00a0 Joe Biden<\/em> was elected in the calculated year of our doom 2020.\u00a0 And the Democratic Party, though by Turchin\u2019s analysis is indeed the home of our well-educated affluent ruling class, claims to be, in effect, the counter-elite, championing the cause of \u201cordinary Americans\u201d against \u201cthe rich.\u201d\u00a0 And what are we to make of \u201cwoke capitalism,\u201d in which the leaders of our largest and most influential corporations are embracing political and social progressivism?\u00a0 Actually, all<\/em> factions of our elite claim to be a counter-elite, championing the working class, which means that no one is doing much for the working class.<\/p>\n

Turchin\u2019s analysis might work for his own Russia, in which university students rose up with the working class to bring down the Czar.\u00a0 After all, Lenin himself said<\/a> that\u00a0\u201cthe history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness,\u201d and that true socialism can only come when the workers are led by\u00a0\u201ceducated representatives of the propertied classes.\u201d And lots of apparatchiks<\/em> employed by the Soviet bureaucracy helped bring down the U.S.S.R.\u00a0 Turchin\u2019s thesis might well apply to the French Revolution, in which minor aristocrats joined with the sans culottes<\/em>, and maybe the fall of the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar came out of exile with the support of the plebians.<\/p>\n

But Turchin\u2019s analysis assumes that the elite is always in charge, whether to maintain the status quo<\/em> or to overthrow it.\u00a0 Social movements from the ground up seem to be excluded.\u00a0 To what extent did members of the middle and upper class lead the revolutions and to what extent were they joining it in an attempt to survive it?\u00a0 (Indeed, many revolutionary aristocrats perished in the Reign of Terror, and many bourgeois revolutionaries in Russia would be killed or consigned to the gulags.\u00a0 Their elite status only took them so far.)<\/p>\n

His analysis also excludes external factors in the fall of nations and civilizations.\u00a0 Wars, conquests, natural disasters, and (yes) diseases also have played a role.\u00a0 The Roman Empire, as opposed to the Republic, was brought down by barbarian invasions, as well as by dysfunctional elitists and imperial insolvency.\u00a0 And there are other kinds of internal factors, as well.\u00a0 Medieval society was remade by the Reformation, whose emphasis on teaching \u201ccommoners\u201d how to read the Bible did lead to social mobility, but of a kind that would lead to democracy rather than social collapse.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t speak to Turchin\u2019s mathematical models, but his thesis strikes me as reductionistic\u2013that is, oversimplifying complex factors\u2013and deterministic, as if human beings possess no more agency than pine beetles.\u00a0 What he identifies as elites and counter-elites can apply to either side\u2013not just with today\u2019s Republicans and Democrats, but to the Roman aristocrats of the Senate and to the aristocrats of the Empire, and to the intelligentsia of the Soviet writers\u2019 unions and to the dissident intellectuals \u2013meaning that the model is non-falsifiable and thus unscientific.<\/p>\n

To be sure, he raises valid issues.\u00a0 Governments spending too much money is indeed a problem, but that is well-known, as is the prospect of economic collapse.\u00a0 His attention to the role of elites and counter-elites is intriguing.\u00a0 But it plays to the notion already popular with his fellow-academics and other members of the ruling class that they control everything.\u00a0 But they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Illustration of \u201cElite\u201d:\u00a0 Winner by Gregor Cresnar (CC BY) from the Noun Project<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A scientist has devised a mathematical formula for calculating when nations and civilizations fall apart.\u00a0 Ten years ago, he ran his numbers for the United States.\u00a0 Things would start to collapse, according to his calculations, in 2020. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":52376,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,13,14,20,40,42],"tags":[10247,10241,6629,9679,10244,10250],"class_list":["post-52154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america","category-culture","category-economics","category-education","category-history","category-science","category-social-science","tag-fall-of-civilizations","tag-peter-turchin","tag-reductionism","tag-revolutions","tag-science-and-history","tag-scientific-predictions"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Scientist Who Calculates the End of America<\/title>\n<meta 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