British media: The United States may fall into cyclical turbulence reference news | Website | United States
The Financial Times website published an article by Gillian Tate on May 31 entitled "the collapse of the United States may be inevitable whether Trump is elected or not." The full text is summarized as follows:
Last month, when former US President Donald Trump was convicted of sexually assaulting journalist Joan Carroll, some observers may have hoped that this would weaken his appeal to American voters. Not so. If you look at the results of the Quinnipiac poll released at the end of May, you will find that 56% of Republicans currently support Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, more than twice as close to his competitor, Florida Governor Ron de Santis.
"Elite overproduction"
Indeed, about 56% of the surveyed voters stated that they do not support Trump, but the same proportion of the surveyed voters also do not support Joe Biden. Pew's survey also shows that 56% of Americans currently believe that the United States cannot solve their own problems, up from 41% in June last year. Most importantly, the survey found that "about three-quarters of the population expressed extreme lack of confidence or lack of confidence in the wisdom of Americans in political decision-making, up from 62% in 2021.".
How to explain such a serious functional imbalance? The answer we often hear is that the United States is politically manipulated, controlled by dark forces supported by large technology companies, and false information undermines democracy. To some extent, this is correct. But from another perspective, some of the viewpoints proposed by biologist and complexity scientist Peter Turchin are worth considering. Turchin uses big data to study ecosystems, and he will use these methods to analyze the rise and fall of complex societies, known as "Kryos dynamics.". Cleo is the Muse goddess in ancient Greek mythology who governs history.
Turchin utilized a wealth of economic and social information from history to explore the political and economic cycles of thousands of years around the world. He came to the conclusion that there is a basic pattern: the elite class seizes power, and over time, they try to preserve this power by seizing more and more resources. Ultimately, this will inevitably make the poor poorer and give rise to "elite overproduction," which in turn will lead to extreme frustration, anxiety, and internal strife.
The result is usually the outbreak of social problems and political disintegration. Turchin's model suggests that in complex societies, this structural change typically occurs every 100 years. Even before Trump was elected president in 2016, he predicted that the United States and Western Europe were destined to enter a "turbulent 1920s".
The congressional turmoil is a precursor
Turchin's viewpoint is controversial. Twenty years ago, his empire theory outlined in his book "Historical Dynamics" faced opposition from historians. A critic said, "Complex mathematics will not improve naive social theories." But as Trump sought a comeback, Turchin also returned to the public eye. In his new book "The End of the Era: Elite, Anti Elite, and the Path to Political Disintegration," he suggests that his previous predictions are intensifying. He said that as shown by the decline in life expectancy among poor people in the United States, decades of decline in real wages have had an impact. At the same time, with the sharp increase in the number of graduates and the increasingly fierce competition for employment, the overproduction of elites has intensified, which has exacerbated the insecurity and resentment of the wealthiest 1% of the population.
In fact, Turchin applied data on economic and social trends in the United States over the past 60 years to the "Kremlin Dynamics" model and concluded that even without considering other details about Trump and Biden, "by 2020, poverty and elite overproduction... had reached very high levels. The radicalization curve began to rise after 2010 and surged in the 1920s. The same was true for political violence.". In this world, events like the Capitol Hill riots on January 6th may just be foreshocks.
Simply put, this indicates that figures like Trump are a symptom of American turmoil, not a cause. According to data, the only way to change this trajectory is to reintroduce the "New Deal" of the 1930s and early post-war period in the United States, using redistribution to reduce inequality. For example, in the 1950s, the highest federal income tax rate in the United States jumped from 7% in 1913 to 90%, and now it is 37%.
Such calls may make many American elites feel fearful, to the extent that they may immediately reject these predictions or point out that relying on machine models is dangerous. But Turchin is not the only Greek mythological figure with prophetic ability in contemporary times, Cassandra; Even another hedge fund billionaire who believes in cyclical changes, Ray Dalio, has warned that increasing inequality may lead to social collapse.
Therefore, it would be foolish for American leaders to ignore Turchin. At least the concept of overproduction among elites explains why elite education in the United States today is so expensive, competitive, and harmful to future elite children and adults.
