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The Scholar Who Predicted America's Breakdown Says It's Just Beginning
(www.newsweek.com)
that scholar:
Inshallah he'll succeed
Political science is so cute when it tries to do quantitative things.
i love how its literally only terrorism that's considered political violence going into the 2010s, i wonder why that is /s
And they’re not calling all the black people murdered by cops lynchings I bet
1812 is flat despite a war going around in these parts
It’s not violence when the government does it, that’s just sparkling conflict
What's always interesting about these discussions of elite overproduction is they're never framed as understanding elite management as a social control model rather elite overproduction is framed as a natural expression of needing a certain labor mix that spirals out of control.
Nobody seems to take the 3rd order logic step of saying, if society needs smart people, but hierarchical societies can only aggrandize these individuals with a limited number of positions, and that the creation of members of this class becomes easier as we advance in technology that leads to a couple of "solutions":
- chase the dragon and make more complex systems that need more elites
- remove the class structure, make elites no better than the janitors/babysitters/seat warmers they really typically are
- Pol Pot
The USSR struggled with this as well in terms of students in the 80's which thought they were better than kolkhoz. The Jeans Generation was not just a Georgian phenomenon, it was all over the USSR. It's fairly inarguable that class stratification reemerged in various was in socialist states, just not in the classical capitalist form. It will be interesting to see how China deals with this going forward given that graduating with a Masters Degree is currently a great way to be unemployed.
graduating with a Masters Degree is currently a great way to be unemployed
I think the model he uses is closer to parasitism, the host is the rest of the people. Once there are too many parasites competing for a limited resources, they start fighting each other. They are not necessary, they are not doing any complex tasks, their role is entirely predatory.
First off, Turchin isn't a Marxist. He accepts Marxist and Marxian ideas though especially when proven through empirical data. He obviously must he's a sociologist. He's ambivalent / neutral about Marxism.
His model is summed up as: When excess elites are not absorbed into the existing power structure and are locked out due to lack of space in that power structure, they become aggrieved by their low status and seek alternatives to that power structure in various ways. Since they are elites they have some means whether knowledge, skill or material, thus have the means to destabilize the power structure itself.
This quite literally describes the conditions that made Lenin and much of the intellectual vanguard themselves as they related to the power structure of Tsarist Russia. One of the things that many here do not really focus on is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks weren't just solving a problem for the proletariat, they were solving a problem for themselves too.
Here's a good blog putting together the historical info but focusing on the general nobility rather than the Bolsheviks only.
https://novum.substack.com/p/elite-overproduction-a-story-of-russia?s=w
Turchin's book is called Secular Cycles.
Turchin's substack is here: https://peterturchin.substack.com/archive?sort=top
He has a fairly interesting series called "A Chronicle of Revolution" that talks about the meta of revolutions themselves and relates it to current/historical happenings.
He uses Volterra predator prey models, he is literally modeling predation.
The model has no assumptions as to wether elites are necessary or not, the conflict is caused by resource competition.
Edit: the other user shared the original peer reviewed article in the post below. It's the last link.
equation 1 has a term for certain affecting wages
Eq 11 has a term were elite population increases as a function of imiseration
Eq 12 is about the sulprys available per elite.
The main difference with a lotta Volterra model is that predation reduces wages not overall prey population, and that Eq 9 asumes a constant rate of economic growth.
This poster is full of shit, I don't know why you are up outing him.
The predator prey models are not used in elite over reproduction work. They're used in his medieval geopolitical work.
Paper: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/82s3p5hj
Explainer: https://www.historica.org/blog/cliodynamics-and-mathematical-models-in-history-part-2
The elite overproduction paper does not use them: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qp8x28p
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This is such an iconic picture.
that scholar: 
"Turchin wrote in the journal Nature in 2010, forecasting a spike in unrest around 2020, driven by economic inequality, 'elite overproduction' and rising public debt,"
Turchin has a Capital reading group?
Turchin's father was Valentin Turchin who was a fairly famous Soviet cyberntician who left the USSR after defending Sakharov, because he didn't want his science career to plummet in the same way. His life story is literally based in elite over reproduction.
Turchin was at the University of Moscow before his family left the USSR.
I was shitposting but that is actually interesting and useful contextualization, thanks for the info.
Nah, he is on severe grind about elites, kinda toozy vibes, but from "this is our aristocracy, when they fail to renew, we don't ball"
I mean, reading how he defines elites, it almost seems like he is trying to recreate the definition of labor aristocrats.
(shitpost below) A bunch of laborers given bits of capitalist plunder in order to siphon off revolutionary inclinations? Sounds a tad familiar. We're gonna have the US revolutionary body call themselves Turchinists.
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What does elite overproduction mean? Surplus of educated people?
Yeah, the way it is phrased is a bit odd here but in essence, it seems he is referring to laborers whose labor power demands higher commodity costs due to the cost of production of them as a laborer being higher due to being better educated and trained. Quite literally appears to attempting to reinvent sections of Marxism with the spooky stuff cut out. Hell, even the criticisms levied against him are regurgitated.
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that scholar: 
that scholar: 
Historical materialism gives you the power of precognition
Some of the opinion pieces in the sidebar while I was reading this:
rimshot
"The three genders, ehyyy!" 
that scholar: 
that scholar: 
That scholar: 
That scholar: 
That scholar: 
that scholar: 
that scholar: the girl reading this
Savolainen warned that Trump-era policies—such as the dismantling of D.E.I. and academic research programs and cuts to public institutions—have the potential to accelerate the pattern, echoing the unrest of the 1970s. "President Trump's policies could intensify this dynamic," he noted.
Isn't that intentional?
It's the whole dynamic of the collapse where the declining material conditions start creating room for this sort of political opportunism, I ended up writing about the whole mechanic here just the other day https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/when-beliefs-die
This has me thinking about how late-term scurvy re-opens old wounds
That scholar: 
Men read Foundation one time and suddenly start predicting the downfall of empires /s
Octavia Butler had america falling apart in the 2020s and she called it in like fucking 1980 something
Parable of the Sower is such a good fuckin book. Practically all of it has already happened or is happening.
That scholar: 
Of Course it`s Turchin and of course he is influenced by Ibn Khaldun
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I'm afraid to get my hopes up only for them to be crushed. I will celebrate only once the breakdown has been confirmed and proven irreversible.
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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