End Times - ComeLibros Club

368 pages

English language

Published Aug. 13, 2023 by Penguin Publishing Group, Penguin Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-49050-1

(1 review)

Peter Turchin brings science to history. Some like it and some prefer their history plain. But everyone needs to pay attention to the well-informed, convincing and terrifying analysis in this book. Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.

Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America …

Peter Turchin brings science to history. Some like it and some prefer their history plain. But everyone needs to pay attention to the well-informed, convincing and terrifying analysis in this book. Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.

Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.

The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin argues: When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it's a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin's models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.

In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.

2 editions

Sally Strange reviewed End Times by Peter Turchin

An interesting read but beware the author's hubris

3 stars

I realized about 2/3 into this book that I had gotten Turchin confused with Tainter. Joseph Tainter is an archeologist and historian who wrote "The Collapse of Complex Societies" in 1988. Peter Turchin is a biologist and mathematician who decided to mathematize the field of history by creating a massive database of historical data and analyzing it for trends. He calls this "cliodynamics." Turchin made the news because he (said he) used his cliodynamics database to predict, in 2010, that the 2020s would be a period of political turmoil in the USA. Cool and all, but it's not a difficult prediction to make if one is aware of US politics and climate chance science. This lent cliodynamics an air of scientific validity, but the jury is out on whether that field is a valid one or not. It's impossible that any database of historical events could be complete and accurate …

I realized about 2/3 into this book that I had gotten Turchin confused with Tainter. Joseph Tainter is an archeologist and historian who wrote "The Collapse of Complex Societies" in 1988. Peter Turchin is a biologist and mathematician who decided to mathematize the field of history by creating a massive database of historical data and analyzing it for trends. He calls this "cliodynamics." Turchin made the news because he (said he) used his cliodynamics database to predict, in 2010, that the 2020s would be a period of political turmoil in the USA. Cool and all, but it's not a difficult prediction to make if one is aware of US politics and climate chance science. This lent cliodynamics an air of scientific validity, but the jury is out on whether that field is a valid one or not. It's impossible that any database of historical events could be complete and accurate before roughly 500 years ago (generously), so the question of whether the inputs to the cliodynamic predictive algorithm are worth anything is very much wide open.

That said, Turchin has a thesis that wealth pumps (societal arrangements that funnel resources from the general population into the pockets of the already wealthy and powerful) are bad because they inevitably lead to "elite overproduction" (when there are more rich failsons than there are seats in the Senate or boardroom) and "popular immiseration," (when everyone else is getting poorer and unhappy) and when you have both of those things, unrest and revolution can't be far behind. The wealth pump concept is traced to Piketty's work, but elite overproduction and popular immiseration as causes of unrest are Turchin's original observations. These are interesting and probably at least generally accurate. The 30,000 ft view of history through that lens taken by the book is definitely food for thought.

Turchin's conclusions leave a lot to be desired, though. He's generally unconcerned with the suffering inflicted by an existing system and seems to regard revolutions as inherently bad, thus he praises the British Empire and the Russian Czars for bending partially to the demands of their unhappy, protesting citizens. Such elite compromises, he says, can prolong the life of an empire, as if that's something we should all desire and work towards. I'm not convinced.

Overall not a boring read but skepticism should be applied liberally.