In 2010, complexity scientist Peter Turchin had a letter published in prestigious academic journal Nature. In it, he predicted the US and Europe would experience surges in political instability in the early 2020s. A decade later, in May 2020, a video of Minnesota resident George Floyd’s murder by a US police officer went viral, triggering months of protests.
There were violent confrontations with police, looting and arson. Nineteen people died. Cities across the nation imposed curfews and deployed troops to restore order.
Eight months after that, Donald Trump told a crowd of demonstrators in Washington that the presidential election had been stolen, leading to the storming of the US Senate. Five people died. A few days after Turchin was interviewed by the Listener, riots broke out across France.
There’s always a chorus of astrologers, soothsayers and macro-economists confidently predicting the future, and there’s always chaos and instability somewhere in the world – so statistically some percentage of prophecies will accidentally come true. But Turchin and his theories have attracted serious attention in recent years.
That’s not merely because his prediction was validated, but because of his approach and his explanations of why societies fragment and decline. He’s been pivotal in the invention of a new science – cliodynamics (Clio being the Greek muse of history).
It’s multidisciplinary, drawing from history, mathematics, sociology and economics. It uses vast quantities of data and sophisticated algorithms. Using these techniques Turchin and his collaborators claim to have identified cycles of stability and violence across human history: recurring patterns in the decline and fall of societies. His theory tells us why a golden age is followed by a gilded age, followed by decay and – usually but not always – violent collapse. A pattern, Turchin warns, that our own society is faithfully following. Because the end times – his book of that title was published in June – begin with growing economic inequality.
Law of oligarchy
In April New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Department released its first-ever wealth report, a comprehensive investigation into the nation’s super-rich. This looked at the financial resources of 311 households. Their median net worth was $106 million and a quarter of the group was worth more than $250 million.
One of the most striking statistics was the wealth they accumulated through capital gains: in 2021 the mean increase in gains from residential property owned by this group was $818,446. The mean household earned just $6996 in residential capital gains that year – less than 1% of the gains of the high-wealth households.
In 1997 the average New Zealand worker was paid $29,900 a year while the average chief executive pocketed $324,000, 11 times more. By 2019 average worker pay was $63,400 in real terms (adjusted for inflation) while the average chief executive was paid $1,109,000, 17 times more. But New Zealand’s productivity growth over this period was anaemic, below the OECD average. Bosses weren’t earning more because they were innovating or their companies were expanding, or the wider economy was growing. What was all that money for?
According to Helen Roberts, an academic at the University of Otago who specialises in chief executive pay and company performance, a major driver of the growth in CEO pay is the use of compensation consultants, specialised companies that determine executive pay in the private sector. Their formula calculates mean or median chief executive pay within an industry, so increases at the highest levels are always forcing up the average value of executive salaries.
There’s a large body of academic literature arguing that high executive pay does not correlate with company performance. That it is often a form of “rent extraction”; that is, executives leverage their senior positions within a company to extract wealth from it, rather than generate value for shareholders or remunerate their workers.
We can see the long-term effects of these trends in such measures as the labour share of income. This shows how much of the wealth produced by society goes to workers as opposed to those who own capital. Economist Bill Rosenberg notes New Zealand’s wage share fell for 20 years from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and it was a far steeper drop than in most other OECD nations. It rose again during the 2010s but has been falling since.
Who benefits from this decline? Rosenberg notes that excess profits, “profits in excess of the return on assets that would be justified in a fully competitive economy, began to rise in the market economy beginning in the early 1990s, and [have risen] even more strongly since about 2013″.
None of this comes as a surprise to Turchin. His model predicts that complex societies tend towards oligarchy. “When an interest group acquires power it will inevitably use that power in self-interested ways.” His database – called, naturally enough, CrisisDB – ranges from pharaonic Egypt, through classical and medieval Europe and the dynasties of China, to the many versions of Russian autocracy. All of them, Turchin claims, see the rise of elites who use their political and economic power to serve themselves. He refers to this process as “priming the wealth pump”: oligarchs rewrite the laws and reconfigure their society’s political and economic systems so that it perpetuates the upwards redistribution of wealth. Taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Over time this leads to “popular immiseration”: the economic or living conditions of the majority of the population stagnate or worsen while a small elite increases in wealth and power.
Economists call this phenomenon the Matthew Effect, after a famous passage in the Bible: For to him who has will more be given; and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. Much of Turchin’s book focuses on the US, where real wages have been stagnant for decades.
New Zealand workers have done better – although wages here have declined in real terms over the past three years, eroded by inflation. But over the past 20 years three goods that help define quality of life in New Zealand for the middle class – home ownership, education and healthcare – have increased in cost, outstripping wages and overall inflation. Many New Zealand households are in the odd situation of earning more but still going backwards.
The history of the future
Turchin lives in the US. He is project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, a research associate at the University of Oxford and an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut. He was born in the Soviet Union in 1957, four years after the death of Stalin. In 1975 he began studying biology at Moscow State University. But his father, physicist Valentin Turchin who did pioneering work in artificial intelligence, was a political dissident and in 1977 he was exiled, along with his family. Peter Turchin finished his degree in the US and completed a PhD in zoology in 1985.
He became an academic, teaching at the Connecticut and specialising in population dynamics. He developed mathematical techniques to build models of biological and ecological systems: studying the ways in which they grew, evolved, collapsed. “I studied lemmings before I studied politicians.”
In 1992 Turchin returned to Russia. “When I left it in 1977, the Soviet Union looked to me like a monolithic juggernaut that would last for centuries to come. But I was wrong. When I visited it in 1992, for the first time since I had left, I didn’t recognise it – it looked like a failed state, and it was a failed state.”
When he received academic tenure he turned his attention to history. “When you get tenure you can study whatever you want,” he says. “You’re supposed to do something interesting and new. So I started applying ideas from population biology and complexity theory to the study of history and complex societies.”
He found collaborators and wrote papers. In 2003 he coined the term cliodynamics. History was the only science that didn’t use mathematics, the cliodynamicists explained, and they were fixing that. And what they found again and again was that popular immiseration was inevitably followed by the phenomenon Turchin calls “elite overproduction”: a surplus of people with wealth, education and ambition seeking more positions of power and prestige than their society can accommodate.
Who rules?
Who are our elites? New Zealand is a liberal democracy. In theory we enjoy equality under the law and govern ourselves via the democratic process. Don’t we? But when this is suggested to Turchin he gives a very dark, very Russian laugh. No, he believes. We don’t. Like every other society we are ruled by our elites. These are people and institutions that wield social, economic and political power. The very wealthy are powerful, of course, and so are senior politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats, while others in academia, the media and cultural sectors exercise different forms of power via persuasion and ideological control.
And that’s not incompatible with democracy. For much of the 20th century New Zealand politics was dominated by two political parties: National and Labour. The first represented the prosperous middle class: farmers, small business owners – constituencies epitomised by Robert Muldoon, an accountant from Tāmaki, and Jim Bolger, a farmer from Taranaki. Labour was, of course, the party of organised labour. Its paradigmatic leader was Norm Kirk, who left school at 13 and worked in a number of jobs, including roof-painter, apprentice fitter and turner, cleaner and boiler operator.
Those parties once had hundreds of thousands of members, but they’re now vestiges of their former selves. Turchin cites a seminal 2021 study by Thomas Piketty and colleagues on political cleavages and social inequalities, arguing that the 20th century model of representative democracy has broken down. Modern right-wing parties primarily represent the wealthiest 1% while left-wing parties advance the interests of the credentialled elite: the 10% of the population holding advanced or professional degrees. National’s John Key and Christopher Luxon – wealthy corporate executives – represent this new model of right-wing politics, whereas Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins, who both went from university to careers as professional political operatives, exemplify the modern left.
Instead of a representative democracy Turchin and Piketty argue that nations like New Zealand are governed by a “multi-elite party system”: competing parties govern on behalf of rival factions of the ruling class. These elites are not a conspiracy. They’re decentralised, but still organised. Turchin writes: “They serve on corporate boards together and participate in various professional groups and gatherings, such as chambers of commerce, industry associations … concrete policies are hammered out in the policy-planning network of interlocked think tanks, institutes and charitable foundations.”
Turchin believes complex societies need elites. We require rulers, political leaders and administrators to run our institutions. But the phenomenon of the wealth pump eventually destroys those institutions: if the only way to get ahead in society is to capture one of these high-gain, high-prestige roles in the public or private sector, this creates intense competition for those positions. Elite overproduction is a ferocious game of musical chairs with increasing numbers of aspirants fighting over fewer seats at the top table. And when there are many losers, some of them will conclude that the system itself is rotten.
Counter-Elites
In May anti-vax activist Sue Grey merged her political party, the NZ Outdoors Party, with Freedoms NZ, an alliance of minor parties united around various conspiracy theories. She co-leads this umbrella movement alongside Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki.
Freedoms NZ’s policy pillars include freeing New Zealand from the global control of the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and World Health Organisation. They’re against the nanny state, the climate hoax and co-governance.
Grey enjoys a sizeable social media following: a Facebook page called “Sue Grey is the Real Leader of New Zealand” accumulated 23,000 followers. Grey is a lawyer who has had a long career litigating in favour of medicinal marijuana and against the use of 1080. She’s argued before the Supreme Court.
“You need to watch out for lawyers,” Turchin cautions, adding that they are dangerous to the established order of society. “Robespierre, Lenin and Castro were lawyers. So were Lincoln and Gandhi.”
Grey is a prime example of Turchin’s modern counter-elite: a qualified, credentialled member of the educated class who has turned against it, denouncing its government, institutions, values and beliefs to a large and receptive audience.
Turchin’s End Times quotes political scientist Barbara Walter who argues that new social-media technologies serve as powerful accelerants for figures like Grey, who use them to promote a sense of perpetual crisis, a feeling of growing despair and a perception that moderates have failed. “It’s at this point that violence breaks out: when citizens become convinced that there is no hope of fixing their problems through conventional means.” Grey was a constant presence at the parliamentary protests in early 2022.
Freedoms NZ was on 1% in a recent 1News Verian poll. The chances of it reaching the 5% party threshold or winning a seat in this year’s election are near zero. But for Turchin the emergence of figures such as Grey is a symptom of political decay. As inequality rises and civil society breaks down, counter-elites can rapidly gain traction. “Before 2016,” Turchin notes in End Times, “the US Republican Party was the stronghold of the ruling class, a vehicle for the 1%. But today, as I write this book, the Republicans are making a transition to becoming a true revolutionary party.”
A scientific model of history is a quintessentially Marxist project, and End Times occasionally quotes the father of modern socialism, prompting some questions: Does Turchin endorse Marx’s grand theory of history? Does he believe it has an end point? Can we escape history, liberating humanity into a utopian world where there are no more elites, no more inequality? Is there a glorious future waiting for us all just beyond the revolution?
“No.” Another dark laugh. “Marx didn’t have the data or statistical tools to understand how history works. We can’t escape its cycles. We’re trapped.”
CrisisDB indicates that most revolutions lead to protracted civil wars. Successful revolutionaries inevitably become the new elites. The best we can do, Turchin thinks, is to understand these historical cycles and try to ameliorate them. But this is difficult. The wealth pump is so lucrative, the temptation to use it so great, it’s very hard to persuade elites they should act in the interests of their society rather than themselves.
But it’s not impossible. The most important thing, Turchin insists, is that elites grasp the fragility of established regimes and the dire consequences facing them when they fail.
“The overwhelming majority of pre-crisis 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.”
There are positive historical precedents. Britain during the 19th century avoided the revolutions and civil wars that shook the rest of Europe by extending the democratic franchise, repealing laws that kept food prices high and legislating in favour of trade unions. And most free-market democracies in the mid-20th century – including New Zealand – saw sustained rises in real relative wages for workers during the post-war era.
End Times argues that these societies are distinguished by “tripartite agreements”: a consensus – often unwritten – between workers, elites and the states that ensure workers will share in the benefits of economic growth.
Turchin is not a wildly optimistic man but he believes there is hope. History is mostly terrible but occasionally we get things right, and he believes we have the capacity to learn from our mistakes. There’s no utopia but we can make a better world. And if we can’t?
A final laugh. “Maybe our society will be replaced by one that can. After all, the end times are also the time of new beginnings.”