Book review: End Times

How an overproduction of elites is destabilizing our society

Prior to Covid I would have told you that Berlin was one of my favorite metropolises anywhere in the norther hemisphere. Experienced as a foreign mit nur ein bisschen worte under my belt, I found the city to be affordable, exciting and tinged by a thin layer of the grime that so famously characterized the electric later years of 20th century NYC. Even the advertising in Berlin was edgy and glorious.

Casual Berlin stands in contrast to today’s article about the overproduction of elites. Puritanical aristocrats strangling society with their weird obsessions and disinclination to share a slice of the American dream. More than just a nuisance, Peter Turchin argues that the overproduction of elites is the single most influential factor in the breakdown of social order. This is a unique take on things, so how’s about if we investigate further?

All complex human societies organizes as states experience recurrent waves of political instability. The most common pattern is an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century.

Turchin begins by explaining that no matter how much prosperity is achieved, even the most competent countries must inevitably fall on hard times.

It turns out that ever since the first complex societies organized as states appeared—roughly five thousand years ago—no matter how successful they might be for a while, eventually they all run into problems. All complex societies go through cycles of alternating stretches of internal peace and harmony periodically interrupted by outbreaks of internal warfare and discord.

Why does a society fall on hard times? Turchin identifies four key drivers.

Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.

If we’re going to talk about elites we should probably define the term. The shape of an “elite” changes based on the culture, but within America we might loosely shoehorn him or her as someone with a (advanced) college degree who aspires to work a white collar or managerial job, earn an above average salary and dictate their personal beliefs to the country at large. Said person will harness their paycheck to gain access to such luxuries as Jarlsberg cheese, trendy vacations at approved locations, healthcare and a lease on the latest model BMW.

Half a century ago those creature comforts awaited many college grads since a diploma was relatively rare, but the magic couldn’t last forever. Starting in the 1970s the deal came under pressure as an ever increasing crowd began to chase the same degrees and thereafter the same employment.

The number of degrees exploded but the job openings didn’t increase fast enough to give everyone their shot at the stratosphere of society. By the time 2023 rolls around it’s standard practice for PhDs to pimp themselves out as glorified babysitters for $60k per annum, prodding prurient pupils down the halls of psych & philosophy 101. Hardly the romantic upper class lifestyle that these elite aspirants envisioned when they took out their $100k loans to get a doctorate. As disillusionment festers the frustrated elites take it upon themselves to claw at the upholstery of the society that has betrayed their aspirations.

Turchin argues that frustrated elites are extremely effective at dismantling society’s pillars, but I can’t claim to have completely understood his argument about intraelite competition and the exact way it tears a culture apart. I have ideas, but nothing solid enough to write about so I’ll have to ask for a pass. Instead, let’s move our attention to a topic I did better with: the fiscal methods that our glorious leaders use to disembowel the social contract.

Because the most recent period of social and political turbulence in the United States was the 1960s, which were very mild by historical standards, Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in previous precrisis eras similarly didn’t imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.

Expanding inequality

Inequality is a common outcome in an elite heavy society, and boy have we got a lot of that going around. America has become the most unequal high income country in the world, where the top 0.1% control 12.8% of the country’s household wealth and the bottom 50% accounts for a paltry 2.4% of household wealth.

A wealth pump is one of the most destabilizing social mechanisms known to humanity.

Turchin uses the analogy of a “wealth pump.” I didn’t feel any fondness for this phrase initially but it grew on me as I progressed through the book. QE is the most blatant wealth pump, since it benefits assets holders at the expense of the fifty-percent of Americans who aren’t invested in the markets.

QE is no more than monetary policy for rich people.

- Steve Eisman

But the wealth pump is more complex than just monetary policy from the Fed. America’s GDP was $25.4 trillion in 2022. Imagine that money getting squirted out of a hose. Where is the hose pointed? Turchin argues that as the number of elites grow they enact policies at a local, state and federal level that favor themselves at the expense of the working class. And what do elites have that others don’t? College degrees!

This note makes its point with a great deal of flourish 👇 but the message pertains perfectly to this review. In the last fifty years the elites have created a society in which the best jobs typically only go to those with a college degree.

You want to be a CEO, work at a nuclear power plant, become an engineer, manage a factory? Show me your degree! While this might sound natural enough, we should consider that it keeps millions of qualified people out of good positions. The elites use regulation to ensure that the best jobs go to the educationally ordained, much to the impoverishment of the 60% of Americans who don’t have a degree.

The good news is that this standard might be changing. A growing number of Americans understand that the universities have become a place where you get an ideology not an education. Employers are learning too, as they hire supposedly cream of the crop Harvard and Yale grads who turn out to be privileged duds heavy on outrage and light on contribution. I like to imagine a future in which competence tests become the new standard, even if the path to adopting them is treacherous.

If we as a society begin hiring on the basis of competence instead of college “education,” that will be a tremendous step towards diverting the bounty of the wealth pump back towards ordinary Americans. And it can’t happen soon enough…

The popular candidate

Before we close out this review I want to briefly mention the orange man. If there is one gripe I have with the people I’m close to it’s that they are unwilling to consider the reasons why Trump was elected. To them, and tens of millions of other Americans, Trump is a fluke who fried people’s brains and got their votes via witchcraft, elaborate lies and good marketing.

But I don’t think 63 million Americans voted for Trump in 2016 because they’d been brainwashed. Trump was a middle finger to an elite establishment that has abandoned even the pretense of giving a flying fuck what happens in flyover country.

To understand why Donald Trump became the forty-fifth president of the United States, we should also pay less attention to his personal qualities and maneuvers and more to the deep social forces that propelled him to the top. Trump was like a small boat caught on the crest of a mighty tidal wave. The two most important social forces that gave us the Trump presidency—and pushed America to the brink of state breakdown—are elite overproduction and popular immiseration.

According to Turchin it’s even possible to quantify just how few fucks are given about the common man.

Statistical analysis of this remarkable data set showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes. This is not entirely unexpected. What is surprising is that there was no—zilch, nada—effect of the average voter. The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent. There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-orientated lobbies. Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

If the elite heavy establishment elects to ignore the wants and desires of half the country for a few decades in a row, maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise when the outcasts chuck a grenade in the punch bowl.

If the elites want to end Trump and all of his ilk, they should re-enfranchise the working class and enact policies that benefit every American. People don’t blow up a party because they’re loving the vibes. They do it because they’re miserable and sick of being stepped on by preppy boys and vapid zirs who don’t know where milk comes from but are adamant that farmer Douglas Dunkin confess his white privilege and use the correct pronouns while he works twelve hour days on a dairy so he can not afford to buy a new truck that costs 40% more than it did three years ago.

Douglas, and tens of millions of people like him, are sick of having their reality dictated to them by high rise apartment dwellers and aggressive Twitter addicts who see themselves as saintly bearers of enlightenment instead of pompous cultural carpet baggers.

Conclusions

Although it feels like we’re three steps away from pulpifying each other with hammers and this is a huge deal, Turchin has indexed the annals of history to prove that our time is far from unprecedented. A one to two hundred year cycle of integration and disintegration is to be found in the history of almost any prosperous society, whether the UK, US, Middle East or China.

As we examine one case of state breakdown after another, we invariably see that, in each case, the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites—whether they belonged to the antebellum slavocracy, the nobility of the French ancien regime, or the Russian intelligentsia circa 1900—were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.

Not all societies have survived, but despite the bloodshed and bitter hatred the US has historically always managed to pull through. It is my hope that this time is no different, but for that to happen Turchin argues that two things must come to pass.

First, a reduction in elites. This doesn’t have to be as sinister as it sounds. A reduction in elites could mean younger generations going to trade school instead of university, and existing degree holders giving up on San Francisco and moving to Boise to work at an office supply store. OK, stupid example. Maybe you can think of something better but the point is that we need a certain portion of elite aspirants to give up their lofty ideals and join the real world.

Second, the remaining elites must be willing to split the proceeds of the wealth pump. They have to do more than just placate the middle class while ignoring all of their wants and desire. Ideally these changes can happen without a violent overthrow, a scenario I am all for. And Turchin is too, for that matter.

So let us look for ways to survive this End Time, or 4th Turning if you prefer, without losing our minds and one hopes that the America of the 2030s and 40s is a saner and more prosperous place to live.