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have been focusing on “structural-demographic” forces for social instability, with an emphasis on popular immiseration and elite overproduction.
The structural-demographic theory is an important part of cliodynamics because it helps us understand rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars.
The goal of cliodynamics, in contrast, is to integrate all important forces of history, whether they are demographic, economic, social, cultural, or ideological.
From the Age of Revolutions on, the radical ideologies, at least in Europe, were secular, not religious.
Following Goldstone, we can distinguish three phases of ideological evolution as societies slide into, and then out of, crises. During the first phase, or precrisis phase, the period leading up to state breakdown, the state is struggling to maintain control in the face of a multitude of ideological challenges coming from different elite factions.
In the second phase, when the old regime has completely lost legitimacy (which often results in the state’s collapse), numerous contenders who seek to establish a new monopoly of authority struggle among themselves for primacy. In the final phase, when one group gains the upper hand over its opponents and moves to stabilize its authority over the state, it focuses on gaining routine acceptance of the reconstructed political, religious, and social institutions.
As a result of the center’s collapse, ideological infighting is shifting from the struggle against the old regime (or in defense of it) to the struggle between different elite factions.
Jacques Mallet du Pan, who had the misfortune of living through not one but two revolutions (in his native Geneva in 1782 and then in France in 1789), formulated this observation as a dictum: “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” This is a necessary corollary, essentially a mathematical certainty, following from elite overproduction as the most important driver of rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars. In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of—historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre,
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The truly dangerous revolutionaries are frustrated elite aspirants, who have the privileges, training, and connections to enable them to wield influence at scale.
(As we have seen, such short political cycles are typical of societies with polygamous elites, because they overproduce elite aspirants much faster than societies with monogamous elites.)
Muhammad Ali practiced a rather extreme approach to undoing elite overproduction. He invited the Mamluk leaders to a celebration and then simply massacred them, thus gaining absolute power over Egypt.
After the revolution of 1952, Egypt was ruled by a succession of generals: Mohamed Naguib, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak. This was the reversion to the Mamluk rule, except the military recruited from among the Egyptian population instead of purchasing recruits on the slave markets.
What about elites whose primary source of power is ideological or economic? Such states are found in history, but they have been relatively rare.
Kevin Phillips wrote in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, at the same time that the Civil War destroyed Southern wealth, it immensely enriched Northern capitalists. Holding Union debt was extremely lucrative. Supplying
But one motive that the wealth holders share as a class is, by and large, the wish to keep and increase their wealth.
Second, the class-domination theory also outlines empirically verifiable mechanisms by which the corporate class dominates the political class.
Third, there is no center. Economic elites are organized in a very different fashion than military elites, for example, with their elaborate command-and-control hierarchies and a commander in chief at the top. Instead, collective action is facilitated by the members of the power network being socialized at exclusive prep schools and colleges, country clubs and golf courses. They serve on corporate boards together and participate in various professional groups and gatherings, such as chambers of commerce, industry associations, and global convenings
Finally, there is secrecy versus transparency. Admittedly,
The antebellum ruling class in the US was a direct offshoot of the English squirearchy. Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were settled by the Cavaliers, the faction of supporters of Charles I that lost the English Civil War.
1933, Stauning negotiated the Kanslergade Agreement, which laid down the foundations of what became known as the Nordic model. The key feature of the Nordic model is tripartite cooperation between labor, business, and government, working together for the common good.
The Progressive Era trend reversal introduced the Great Compression, a long period of economic inequality trending down.
The social contract was between the white working class and the WASP elite. Black Americans, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners were excluded from the “cooperating circle” and heavily discriminated against.
When the federal tax system was established in 1913, the tax rate on the top bracket was only 7 percent. During World War I, it jumped to 77 percent, but by 1929, it had declined to 24 percent. During the Great Depression, it went up to 63 percent, and toward the end of World War II, it soared to 94 percent.
Typically, it takes a major perturbation to reduce wealth inequality, and this perturbation usually takes the form of a social revolution, a state collapse, a mass-mobilization war, or a major epidemic.
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 régime, 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.
kleptocracy, or a state ruled by thieves.
In the past few decades, social scientists have devoted a lot of effort to studying the causes and preconditions of civil wars. They approach this area of study in an admirably scientific way—by collecting large data sets and running statistical analyses on them. Two important centers for this type of research are located in Nordic countries: the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. In the US, the most influential research project is the Political Instability Task Force (PITF). This project, funded by the
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Partial democracies with factionalism were exceptionally unstable political regimes; such countries were the most likely to descend into civil wars.
The most common cause of anocracy is either an autocracy trying to democratize itself under the pressure of intraelite conflict and popular mobilization, or a democracy backsliding into autocracy for similar reasons—the collapse of elite consensus and the rise of populism. But this means that the state in question is already in trouble. The two other precursors of civil war—factionalism and state repression—are similarly (and obviously) signs of structural instability. In other words, the PITF model relies on proximate indicators for predicting civil war, but it doesn’t tell us why a
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we cannot understand social breakdown without a deep analysis of power structures within societies.
Who are the influential interest groups? What are their agendas? What are their sources of social power, and how much power do they wield to advance their agendas? How cohesive and well organized are they? These are the key questions to ask if we want to understand both social resilience and its opposite, social fragility.
Ukraine is particularly vulnerable to external pressures. First, it is located on a geopolitical fault line between the American sphere of interest (essentially, NATO) and the Russian sphere of interest (the “Near Abroad,” as it is often referred to in Russia).
We call such an approach multipath forecasting, or MPF, for short.[1] A fully functional MPF engine will take as inputs various policies or reforms that are possible to adopt and forecast how the future trajectory will change as a result of such interventions.
One thing all modelers know is that translating a verbal theory into a set of mathematical equations is a wonderful way to find all the hidden assumptions in it and bring them to light.
the engine that provides the impetus to all the moving parts within it, is the wealth pump.
downward mobility is rapid and typically associated with violence. Political instability and internal warfare prune elite numbers in a variety of ways.
Thus, the heart of the MPF model is the relative wage and the wealth pump that it powers. When the relative wage declines, it leads to both immiseration and elite overproduction. Both,
This is done through the Political Stress Index (PSI), which combines the strength of immiseration and elite overproduction.[5] Popular immiseration is measured by inverse relative income (median family income divided by GDP per capita). Thus, when typical incomes fail to increase with economic growth, this factor causes the PSI to increase. Intraelite
But after 1980, the social mood shifted away from broad-based cooperation and long-term goals toward short-term, narrowly selfish interests. The wealth pump was allowed to run at an increasingly frenetic pace.
“policy-obstruction network.”
Ultimately, the policy-obstruction network contributes to the decline of trust in public institutions and of social cooperation in American society.
Stephen Marche, the author of the well-received 2022 book The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future:
Trump, of course, is not a revolutionary—he is a typical political entrepreneur who channeled popular discontent, especially of white Americans without college degrees, to propel himself to power.
“Why do we tax capital at half the rate of labor?” Why are working people dying younger? Asking questions like these is inconvenient to the ruling class. Instead of people blaming the governing elites, “[y]ou’d want people to blame one another. . . . The quickest way to control a population is to turn it against itself. . . . Identity politics is a handy way to do that.”
Many common Americans have withdrawn their support from the governing elites. They’ve flipped up “a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class.”
where the Democratic Party, a party of the working class during the New Deal, became by 2000 the party of the credentialed 10 percent. The rival party, the Republican Party, primarily served the wealthy 1 percent, leaving the 90 percent out in the cold. Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty studied hundreds of elections and found that political parties in other Western democracies also increasingly cater to only the well educated and the rich.[21]
Both systemic forces and the myriad actions of individuals are combined to produce the actual outcome.
Edward Lorenz.
progress in understanding nonlinear dynamical systems.)
Ibn Khaldun, the great medieval Arab historian, developed a remarkable theory explaining the rise and fall of states.
