At 4:30am on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, located on an island in the middle of Charleston harbor, South Carolina. (Location 172)
For the first 80 years of the American polity, its democratic institutions had sufficed to resolve the inevitable clashes of interests found in any large society. (Location 178)
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By this point, the American political elites had lost their ability to cooperate in finding a compromise that would preserve the commonwealth. (Location 180)
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They gleefully wrecked the Union, (Location 183)
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without realizing what a heavy personal cost that would mean for most of them. (Location 183)
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In the 1860s, Americans learned that large-scale complex societies are actually fragile, and that a descent into a civil war can be rapid. (Location 188)
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Just because we cannot imagine our actions leading to disaster, it doesn’t mean that such a disaster cannot happen. (Location 195)
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We call this new discipline Cliodynamics, from Clio, the muse of history in Greek mythology, and dynamics, the science of why things change (Turchin 2003b). (Location 205)
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As I pointed out earlier, the American political leaders who allowed the Civil War to happen had no idea of the magnitude of the disaster they were about to experience. (Location 217)
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Several previously positive social, economic, and political trends suddenly reversed their direction. (Location 219)
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A human society is a dynamical system, and its economic, social, and political subsystems do not operate in isolation. (Location 221)
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Generally speaking, manipulative experiments (when we change some condition and detect its effect by a comparison with unmanipulated controls) are impossible in historical sciences. (Location 226)
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Such a focus on history, however, will strike many social scientists and, especially, policy-makers as seriously misguided. (Location 231)
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In fairness to policy-makers, traditional history has generally failed to provide useful guidance for public policy. (Location 236)
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History has lessons for us, but these lessons must be extracted in an indirect way. (Location 244)
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In the following sections I address these questions; my focus is on why we sometimes see waves of sociopolitical instability that may, when extreme, cause state breakdown and collapse. (Location 252)
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There is a regular, albeit dynamically complex, pattern involving at least two cycles superimposed on each other (plus exogenous stochasticity on top of that). (Location 257)
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For example, Roman history is usually separated into Regal (or Kingdom), Republican, Principate, and Dominate periods. Transitions between these periods, in all cases, involved prolonged waves of sociopolitical instability (Figure (Location 273)
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According to this theory, population growth in excess of the productivity gains of the land has several effects on social institutions. First, it leads to persistent price inflation, falling real wages, rural misery, urban migration, and increased frequency of food riots and wage protests. (Location 301)
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As a result, elites become riven by increasing rivalry and factionalism. Third, population growth leads to expansion of the army and the bureaucracy and to rising real costs. (Location 305)
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As all these trends intensify, the end result (Location 308)
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is state bankruptcy and consequent loss of military control; elite movements of regional and national rebellion; and a combination of elite-mobilized and popular uprisings that expose the breakdown of central authority. Sociopolitical instability resulting from (Location 308)
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population pressing against Malthusian limits causes instability to rise, while high instability depresses population growth leading to population decline or stagnation (Location 320)
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The data also indicate that one of the most reliable predictors of state collapse and high political (Location 323)
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instability is elite overproduction (Location 324)
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While the overall dynamics are complex, the dynamical feedbacks between variables, that is, mechanisms that generate the dynamics, are often characterized by a high degree of determinism. (Location 329)
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(1) the Neo-Malthusian principle, (2) the principle of elite overproduction, and (3) the structural-demographic causes of political instability. (Location 350)
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when the supply of labor exceeds its demand, its price should decrease (depressing living standards for the majority of population). (Location 352)
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Additionally, modern societies are much more interconnected globally, and the balance of supply and demand for labor in any particular country can be affected by international flows of people and jobs. (Location 356)
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The elites (in both agrarian and capitalist societies) are consumers of commoner labor. (Location 363)
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The third consequence is that the twin processes of declining living standards for the commoners and increasing consumption levels for the elites will drive up socioeconomic inequality. (Location 372)
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Competition will be particularly intense for government positions whose supply is relatively inelastic (or completely inelastic—there can be only one President, nine Supreme Court Justices, and one hundred Senators). (Location 377)
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Thus, elite overproduction increases the probability of violent intraelite conflict. (Location 382)
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Elite overproduction leading to intraelite competition and conflict is, thus, one of the chief causes of political instability. (Location 388)
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Two other causes are popular discontent resulting from falling living standards, and fiscal crisis. (Location 388)
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Thus, one common tactic employed by the counter-elites is to mobilize the masses against the established elites, something made possible by deep-running popular discontent. (Location 390)
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Overpopulation, by contrast, results in popular immiseration and discontent, but as long as the elites remain unified, peasant insurrections, slave rebellions, or worker uprisings have little chance of success, and are speedily suppressed. (Location 398)
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In Western European societies with militarized elites this process takes time—several generations were required for the surplus elites to disappear as a result of being killed off in civil wars and low biological and social reproduction (that is, massive downward social mobility). (Location 426)
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The “structural” part is even more important in understanding the onset of instability waves, because the theory pays a lot of attention to social structures (elite-general population interactions) and political structures (the state-elite-population interactions). (Location 435)
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Structural-demographic theory represents complex (state-level) human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks (Location 463)
The dynamics of population numbers, for example, are affected by other attributes of the general population, such as incomes and consumption levels (the Malthusian effect) and also positively by social optimism (when it is high, people tend to marry earlier and have more children) and negatively by socio-political instability (especially in its extreme forms, such as civil war, which results in elevated death rates and depressed birth rates). (Location 469)
Age structure is affected by fluctuations in the population growth rate. (Location 472)
Youth bulges tend to be politically highly destabilizing, because a sudden increase in new workers joining the labor force tends to depress their employment prospects and wages (Easterlin 1980, Macunovich 2002). (Location 475)
Urbanization dynamics are in many ways similar to age structure. (Location 478)
Thus, rapid population growth in excess of employment opportunities can lead to declining standards of living, a youth bulge, and rapid urbanization—all processes that increase the mobilization potential of the population and thus are inherently destabilizing. (Location 481)
Elite numbers are affected by two general processes: the same demographic mechanisms (birth and death) that govern the dynamics of general population numbers; and social mobility. (Location 485)
Elite composition refers to the relative numbers of established elites (those who have inherited their wealth (Location 489)
and social status), new elites (who have moved into the upper class by their own efforts), aspirant elites (individuals aspiring to elite status by virtue of their newly acquired wealth or educational credentials; (Location 490)
Elite incomes are affected by the economic conjuncture (depressed real wages for commoners translate into increased revenues for the elites), by elite numbers (greater numbers result in a smaller average slice of the total economic pie), and by state expenditure (since the state is the source of many elite positions). Wealth is another important attribute because it is closely related to power (most directly, it is the economic form of power, but it can also be translated into political and ideological forms). (Location 493)
Elite overproduction, the presence of more elites than the society can provide positions for, is inherently destabilizing. It reduces average elite incomes and increases intraelite competition/conflict because of large numbers of elite aspirants and counter-elites. (Location 498)
The state compartment similarly is characterized by its size (measured perhaps by the total number of state employees or, alternatively, by the proportion of GDP going to the state), its economic health (revenues, expenditures, debt), and by an ideological aspect (state legitimacy as measured, for example, by the degree of trust in state and national institutions). (Location 504)
Large complex models not only require many arbitrary decisions and the estimation of a multitude of difficult-to-measure parameters, they also tend to be structurally unstable, so that a small change in one parameter value results in a large change in the dynamics of the model. (Location 515)
In the first we focus on the short- and medium-term dynamics by modeling the development of a particular variable, or a particular compartment of the model. (Location 520)
Because our focus is on a particular variable, to keep the model simple we do not include all, or even any of the feedback loops describing how it affects other variables. (Location 523)
The second approach is to construct dynamically complete models, with the purpose of investigating long-term dynamics of the system. (Location 526)
such dynamically complete models must keep the number of dynamical feedbacks that are investigated to an absolute minimum and drastically simplify how each link is modeled. (Location 528)
One of the main goals of structural-demographic theory (indeed, its raison d’être) is to understand and predict the dynamics of sociopolitical instability. (Location 536)
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It’s like an earthquake. As tectonic forces build up within a fault line, an earthquake becomes increasingly probable. However, for that earthquake to occur, it has to be triggered—perhaps by a small slip between the plates deep underground. (Location 543)
This comparison suggests that in human social systems, which are even more complex than the physical ones, it would be futile to aim for precise prediction of such dramatic events as revolutions (or stock market collapses, to give another familiar example of a macroscopic breakdown triggered by the initially negligible effects of individual investment decisions). (Location 548)
The focus of structural-demographic theory is on the structural causes, with specific triggers modeled as stochastic factors. (Location 551)
Political Stress Index reflects the representation of social systems as three subsystems (population-elites-state). (Location 555)
Mass Mobilization Potential (MMP), Elite Mobilization Potential (EMP), and State Fiscal Distress (SFD). I assume that these three components are combined in the index multiplicatively:2 Ѱ = MMP×EMP×SFD (Location 557)
One is a measure of national debt scaled either in relation to the GDP or, perhaps, in relation to the tax revenues of the state. (Location 579)
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Confidence is inversely related to the interest rate on government securities (e.g., low confidence means that the state is forced to pay a higher interest rate). (Location 582)
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The starting point for building a model for the dynamics of real wages is gross domestic product per capita (GDPpc). (Location 607)
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The first reflects the operation of market forces. The economic mechanism is the law of supply and demand, which states that when the supply of labor (S) exceeds demand for it (D), the price of labor (that is, real wage) should decrease. Thus, real wage W is a function not only of GDP per capita, G/N (where G is GDP and N is the total population), but also of the balance of demand and supply, D/S. (Location 613)
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jobs. As a result, the actual labor supply will be higher than the number of people actively seeking work. (Location 620)
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This functional form implies that the influences of the three factors on log-transformed wages are combined linearly and additively—in other words, this is the simplest possible model to use. Log-transforming (Location 636)
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Log-transformation of the dependent variable also tends to stabilize variance, which is a plus in regression analyses. (Location 640)
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Elite numbers, E, can change as a result of two processes: endogenous population growth (the balance between births and deaths) and social mobility (Location 667)
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