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A science of history is not only possible but also useful: it helps us anticipate how the collective choices we make in the present can bring us a better future.
complexity-science
cliodynamics
We discovered that there are important recurring patterns, which can be observed throughout the sweep of human history over the past ten thousand years. Remarkably, despite the myriad of differences, complex human societies, at base and on some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles.
It became clear to us through quantitative historical analysis that complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a certain degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces, operating across the thousands of years of human history.
elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within.
more descriptive term for elites is “power holders.”
In America, power is closely correlated with wealth.
But most of the time we follow orders simply because of the power of social norms.
My job is to make my theory as simple as possible, but not simpler.[4]
different elites tend to specialize in different kinds of social power: generals, admirals, and police chiefs mete out coercion; CEOs and wealth holders wield economic power; senators and secretaries of federal departments manage administrative power; and TV anchors and influential podcasters deal in persuasion. Each kind of influence has its own power hierarchy. This is most clearly seen in military chains of command, but softer kinds of power also have their pecking orders.
Although not everybody has ambition to acquire more power, there are always more aspirants than power positions. Inevitably,
Starting in the 1980s, the number of superrich in America—those worth at least $10 million, or decamillionaires—started to grow rapidly.[6] In 1983,
No shit. Reagan said, we hit the jackpot!
On the surface of it, an increase in the number of wealthy people doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. Isn’t it part of the American dream to get rich? But there are two downsides to this good news. First, the ballooning of the superwealthy class did not happen in isolation from the fortunes of the rest of the population. While the numbers of superrich have multiplied, the income and wealth of the typical American family have actually declined.
the elite aspirant game, or the aspirant game, for short, instead of reducing the number of chairs each round, we increase the number of players. The game starts just as musical chairs, with ten chairs representing power positions (such as political offices). In the first round, eleven players (elite aspirants) play to get a chair. Ten become established elites, and the loser is a frustrated aspirant. In the following rounds, we increase the number of players, eventually doubling, then tripling, them (while keeping the same ten chairs). The number of winners stays the same, but the number of
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According to the data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, the average spending of the House winner increased from $400K in 1990 to $2.35 million in 2020, while the same statistic for the Senate started at $3.9 million (in 1990) and grew to $27 million in the last electoral round.
As the number of players grows, the chance of rules breaking down goes up. Is it any wonder that the rules of the game—social norms and institutions governing democratic elections—have been unraveling in real life?
popular immiseration.
our theory, we represent the structure of society as consisting of three main parts: the state, the elites, and everyone else. This is a model that greatly simplifies the glorious complexity of our modern societies (and we saw that defining who the elites are is not straightforward). But as we’ll see, it maps onto reality to an extent that is empirically meaningful and informative.
This trend reversal in the share of economic growth going to workers also resulted in the change of the fortunes of the wealthy. It’s the Matthew Effect: if you take from the poor and give to the rich, then the rich will get richer while the poor get poorer.
And popular immiseration breeds discontent, which eventually turns to anger. Popular discontent coupled with a large pool of elite aspirants makes for a very combustible combination, as we have experienced in America since 2016.
to the brink of state breakdown—are elite overproduction and popular immiseration.
Lincoln was another unlikely president whose rise to power was propelled by the twin social forces of elite overproduction and popular immiseration. Before the Civil War, the United States was ruled by an elite of aristocratic Southern slaveholders allied with Northeastern patricians—merchants, bankers, and lawyers.[18] The economic basis of this alliance was the agricultural commodities grown on Southern plantations with slave labor, first and foremost cotton. Trade in cotton was the most important business of New York’s merchant elites, who exported Southern-grown commodities and imported
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The new millionaires chafed under the rule of the Southern aristocracy, as their economic interests diverged from the established elites. The new elites, who made their money in manufacturing, favored high tariffs to protect budding American industries and state support for “internal improvements” (turnpike, canal, and railroad construction). The established elites, who grew and exported cotton, and imported manufactured goods from overseas, naturally favored low tariffs. They also were against using state funds for internal improvements, because they shipped their products by river and sea to
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Differences over economic policy and the competition for office generated powerful incentives to break the Southern domination of the federal government. History textbooks tell us that the American Civil War was fought over slavery, but this is not the whole story. A better way to characterize this conflict is to say that it was fought over “slavocracy.”
After 1820, China’s total GDP began to shrink, and by 1870 it was less than half that of Western Europe. The country experienced a seemingly unending run of famines, rebellions, and humiliating defeats by external enemies. The worst catastrophe was the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), which has the sad distinction of being the bloodiest civil war in human history. How did China become the “Sick Man of East Asia,” and what accounts for its miraculous recovery in the past fifty years?
The next massive famine arrived in 1810 and was followed by a string of others: 1846–1849, 1850–1873, 1876–1879 (this one killing between nine and thirteen million people), 1896–1897, and 1911 (triggering the revolution that put the Qing dynasty out of its misery). Overall, it is clear that after 1800 the level of popular immiseration in China was very high.[27] What about elite overproduction?
The number of elite aspirants increased not only because of the larger source population but also because there was a substantial growth in the wealthy merchant class, who supplied new aspirants aiming to join the ranks of the literati.
Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864), the leader of the Taiping Rebellion, was one of these frustrated aspirants. He was the third son from a well-to-do family that could afford to hire teachers to provide a formal education for him. He successfully passed the first-level civil service exam to become a xiucai, a licentiate (roughly, the level of a master’s degree). But beyond that, he hit a wall. Hong tried to pass one of the imperial examinations four times, failing each time. After Hong failed to pass the examination for the third time, the gap between his ambition and reality proved to
be too much for him.
Popular immiseration together with elite overproduction is an explosive combination. Immiserated masses generate raw energy, while a cadre of counter-elites provides an organization to channel that energy against the ruling class.
All complex human societies organized 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.
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
The golden age turned into a gilded age.
It’s like societies have a cultural stencil plate for state collapse—the French way or the English way, as the case may be.
This is why the framework of nonlinear dynamics, and complexity science more generally, is so fruitful for understanding history—it gives us tools for studying how different factors interact with each other to generate systemic dynamics. A relatively small set of mechanisms can generate exceedingly complex dynamics. This is the essence of complexity science: complex dynamics do not have to have complex causes.
external forcing
contagion,
A major epidemic undermines societal stability. Because the poor suffer greater mortality than the elites, the social pyramids become top-heavy. Lethal epidemics also undermine social cooperation by delegitimizing governments. In old times, such major calamities were taken as a sign that God had turned away from the ruler, or that Heaven had withdrawn its Mandate.
In the eighteenth century, America had the tallest people in the world.[13] The average height of US-born Americans continued to increase until the cohort born in 1830. During the next seventy years, it declined by more than four centimeters. After another turning point, in 1900, and for about seventy more years, the trend was again highly positive. During this period, the average height increased by
a whopping nine centimeters. Then something happened. Beginning with children born in the 1960s, gains in height stopped. This trend change only affected the US. In other high-income democracies, average statures continued to increase, and today the tallest people on earth live in countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany. But not in the United States. What’s going on?
As a result, when the real wages of typical Americans stopped growing in the late 1970s, so did the average height of their children.[14]
They found that the proportion of Americans in extreme distress nearly doubled—from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. The strongest effect, consistent with previous findings by Case and Deaton, was observed in white working-class Americans. In this group, extreme distress—despair—increased from less than 5 percent to more than 11 percent over the same period.
The less educated “miserables,” in particular, are deeply divided by race.
Between 1976 and 2016, the relative wage lost nearly 30 percent of its value.
But then you should consider another and very serious reason why the declining well-being of the working class is a bad thing—because it fundamentally undermines the stability of our society.
and the coercive apparatus
of the state eventually suppressed the Occupy movement
Unlike its milder versions, extreme competition does not lead to the selection of the best candidates, the candidates most suited for the positions. Rather, it corrodes the rules of the game, the social norms and institutions that govern how society works in a functional way. It destroys cooperation. It brings out the dark side of meritocracy. It creates a few winners and masses of losers.
And some of those failed elite aspirants convert into radicalized counter-elites who are motivated to destroy the unjust social order that has bred them. And this brings us to the topic of radicalization.
