Summary of End Times by Peter Turchin: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of End Times by Peter Turchin: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

 

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

Peter Turchin's book is a powerful synthesis of the historical forces that have brought American society to the dangerous ledge it now teeters. It provides a powerful synthesis of the historical forces that have brought American society to the dangerous ledge upon which it now teeters, and shows why we must address wealth inequality in order to preserve democracy and our nation's political order. Peter Turchin's End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and fall apart. He argues that when the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is inevitable. His models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral that is hard to exit. The choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Jun 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223668671

Book preview

PREFACE

Arnold Toynbee argued that a science of history was impossible due to the complexity of societies, humans, scientific progress, and culture. This book argues that a science of history is possible and useful, as it helps us anticipate how collective choices can bring us a better future. The author began his academic career in the 1980s as an ecologist and has built out a field known as cliodynamics, which has discovered that complex human societies are organized according to the same general principles over the past ten thousand years. The most important details in this text are that complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same set of forces operating across the thousands of years of human history. This model suggests that when a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically.

The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability. The most important details in this text are that America is in crisis, and that the explanation lies not in conspiracies plotted by shadowy domestic groups or foreign agents, but in the widely accepted Big Data about wages, taxes, gross domestic products, and sociological surveys churned out by government agencies and organizations. Cliodynamics uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record as Big Data, and employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions between the different moving parts of the complex social systems. This book offers a simpler and more complex explanation of the current time of troubles. The most important details in this text are the historical roots of the current age of discord in the United States.

The New Deal era saw an unwritten social contract that balanced the interests of workers, businesses, and the state, resulting in unprecedented growth of broadly based well-being. However, this social contract began to break down in the late 1970s, leading to a decline in many aspects of quality of life for most of the American population. This resulted in a perverse wealth pump taking from the poor and giving to the rich. The postwar period was a golden age of prosperity, but after 1980 we entered the Second Gilded Age. This model predicts that the extra wealth flowing to the elites has created trouble for the wealth holders and power holders themselves.

Elite overproduction, popular immiseration, and intraelite conflicts have undermined civic cohesiveness and social fragility. The central question of the book is about social power, who rules, how ruling elites maintain their dominant position, and why ruling classes sometimes lose their grip on power and get overthrown.

Part I

THE CLIODYNAMICS OF POWER

ELITES, ELITE OVERPRODUCTION, AND THE ROAD TO CRISIS

The most important details in this text are that elites are not necessarily those who are better than the rest, but those who have more social power. In America, power is closely correlated with wealth, so it is relatively straightforward to figure out who belongs to different ranks of power holders. For example, those with a net worth of $1-$2 million are in the lower ranks of American elites, while those with a net worth of tens or hundreds of millions are in the upper ranks. The correlation between wealth and political power is not perfect. Nine American presidents had enough wealth to put them into the top 1 percent, and before 1850, all were one-percenters.

Poor people who become power holders in America don't stay poor for long, and the correlation between wealth and political power is not perfect. Other sources of power include coercion, wealth, bureaucratic or administrative power, ideological power, and persuasion. Coercion is the hardest form of social power, while wealth is accumulated material resources, bureaucratic or administrative power is social norms, and ideological power is persuasion. The most important details in this text are that elite behavior is complex, with no hard boundary between elites and non-elites, different elites tending to specialize in different kinds of social power, and how elites are made. To understand elite overproduction, it is necessary to understand social reproduction of the elites, which involves distinguishing between established elites and those who want to get into such positions.

Elite aspirants come in a variety of shapes and forms, depending on the kind of power they want and what level they aspire to. Elite overproduction is when the demand for power positions by elite aspirants exceeds their supply. In the 1980s, the number of superrich households in America increased rapidly, with the number of decamillionaires increasing tenfold and the number of households worth $5 million or more increasing sevenfold. However, while the numbers of superrich have multiplied, the income and wealth of the typical American family has actually declined. This suggests that elite overproduction can develop when the demand for power positions by elite aspirants exceeds their supply.

The economic inequality of American workers is a major topic in chapter 3. This divergence between the financial well-being of common Americans and the wealthy elite is what has driven the rapid increase in economic inequality. The second problem is when the social pyramid becomes top-heavy, which has dire consequences for the stability of societies. To understand this, consider a game like the aspirant game, where the number of frustrated aspirants increases from