> Large geographic size…Similar to #1, this makes it hard for aggrieved, disenfranchised groups to collectively rise up, as everyone is literally all spread out.
This is not at all obvious: sometimes different groups are disproportionately present in one particular area.
> China has no imperial ambitions. The annexation of Tibet was 70 years ago. The last incident of expansion could technically be in in 1997 when Hong Kong was transferred to China from Britain
Pedantically, don’t forget Macau. Taiwan remains. And Sino-Indian conflict is still on the rise. Generally, the expansion of China’s overseas presence prima facie looks imperial. It may not be, but some reason should be given as to why!
> America’s large bureaucracy and its constitutional republic composed to hundreds of Congressmen and Senators creates a lot of redundancy and limits the damage any one individual can do
One might have thought that, but on the other hand the US president has rather a lot of power (see e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/preside... of course, the bureaucracy may not follow the president, but I think that needs to be shown.
> so many obvious methodological problems and dubious assumptions, such as that history must cycle or that empires must fall
This is the most promising, I suspect, line of response—alas, it isn’t really explored much.
I take issue with a number of the arguments in this blog post.
For instance: "I take the opposite position that America is in a prolonged period of prosperity, peace, and dominance (esepcially relative to the rest of the world since 2008) that may last indefinitely."
First of all, no peace has lasted indefinitely, that's a ridiculous notion that defies all historical precedent. Second, America's been at war non-stop since 2001, to call it a prolonged period of peace is absurd at best and grossly dishonest at worst.
likewise here: "Civil wars and revolution are typically engendered by homogenous groups against a second group cut from the same ethnic and racial cloth. The Revolutionary War pitted New England against Britain. The Civil War pitted Anglo Protestants up North against Anglo Protestants from the South. The Iranian revolution pitted anti-Western Iranian religious fundamentalists against pro-Western Iranian rulers. "
This is essentially an argument from semantics, since in the cases where the ethnicities of the two sides of a regional war differ significantly then it's called a race war or a genocide and if the religions differ sharply then it's considered a holy war. Just because the same types of events have different labels (and underlying prejudices) doesn't mean you can discount the likelihood of war altogether.
This argument is similarly based in faulty presuppositions:
"Also, if diversity is supposed to be destabilizing, why would elites push for it? Why would elites support policy that would lead to their undoing and loss of power and wealth as the US collapses due to war arising from such diversity? That makes no sense. This is an obvious logical contradiction that many dissidents such as Vox and others cannot account for."
Here the author is behaving as though this still hotly debated topic (that they themselves are debating!) is settled knowledge for "the elites" and that "the elites" are a monolithic group that acts uniformly and logically in order to enact their goals. This has rarely been the case at any place or time in history.
I could go on, but suffice it to say this blog post irked me enough to point out at least a handful of it's red-flag-waving arguments.
>Turchin blames an ‘over-production of elites’ for impending unrest, yet it is not so much that all college grads aspire to elite positions but rather seek the higher wages and nicer lifestyle that a college degree bestows. And as long as the college wage premium keep widening, we should expect more college grads and higher tuition costs. If the premium was to suddenly contract, then college enrolment would fall and there would be fewer production of these elites.
This seems like a bit of a strawman to me. College graduates aren't the elite in that sense, college grass are just skilled labourers, the vast majority of them don't have any expectation of power that characterizes the elites in the elite overproduction theory. The elites in that sense are politicians, the managerial class, the executive class, lawyers and so on.
Indeed, there is no reason why a country where everyone has a biochemistry degree would suffer from an issue where everyone feels like they are owed significant political(economic too, in a sense) power, but overproducing politicians, executives, and managers, could lead to those issues.
Also, even if competitors to the US didn't have imperial ambitions, it doesn't follow that they wouldn't act against the imperial ambitions of America.
The author also says that revolutions are generally against two groups in a homogenous ethnic supergroup, and gives the example of Iran. This is, of course, absurd - Iran is an insanely multiethnic country by world standards with dozens of ethnic groups. And yet, the Iranian revolution still pushed through, because the issues were such that the camps were able to form despite ethnic differences amongst them. This goes directly against the point.
Is this Peter Turchin a very iconic person such as Chomsky or Zizek? I don’t believe so, and in that case I also believe this article’s title is plain bad writing.
I came in thinking of Valentin Turchin the cyberneticist, although to be fair he is dead and thus the tense in the title wouldn’t fit anyway.
First, the post is irksome, with the arguments for there not being a collapse in the near future being admittedly very hand-wavy for reasons other commentators here have described.
Second, while the post is irksome, Turchin's methodology is extremely shoddy. The fact that climatologic models (modeling an arguably slower-moving and certainly better-understood system than humans alone or in aggregate) require the use of sophisticated mathematics and intensive computer usage, as opposed to Turchin looking at large collections of historical data, determining patterns seemingly by eyeball, and predicting maybe a decade in advance without so much as a mention of a computer program to produce the prediction, is illustrative of the methodological shortfall.
Moreover, Turchin's original prediction was much vaguer than he or current media around him presents it:
"The next decade (i.e, the years around 2020) is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe, which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe in the Opinion collection of '2020 visions' " (source: https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a)
To call "growing instability" a vague prediction is an understatement. It could refer to civil war, democratic decline, crime rates, bad days at work, productivity drops, or any number of other things one could imagine. In this case, it refers primarily to protests against racism (the violent parts of which are comparatively rare and perpetrated mostly by a small number of opportunists) and secondarily to a long-running trend of political polarization, neither of which are particularly unheard of in recent memory. In both cases, these movements are overwhelmingly a problem in the US, with Europe looking calm in comparison. It is therefore somewhat likely that Turchin is not as much a Hari Seldman, or even a poor imitation thereof, as much as a John Edward: that is, he is a cold reader.
7 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 23.8 ms ] threadThis is not at all obvious: sometimes different groups are disproportionately present in one particular area.
> China has no imperial ambitions. The annexation of Tibet was 70 years ago. The last incident of expansion could technically be in in 1997 when Hong Kong was transferred to China from Britain
Pedantically, don’t forget Macau. Taiwan remains. And Sino-Indian conflict is still on the rise. Generally, the expansion of China’s overseas presence prima facie looks imperial. It may not be, but some reason should be given as to why!
> America’s large bureaucracy and its constitutional republic composed to hundreds of Congressmen and Senators creates a lot of redundancy and limits the damage any one individual can do
One might have thought that, but on the other hand the US president has rather a lot of power (see e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/preside... of course, the bureaucracy may not follow the president, but I think that needs to be shown.
> so many obvious methodological problems and dubious assumptions, such as that history must cycle or that empires must fall
This is the most promising, I suspect, line of response—alas, it isn’t really explored much.
For instance: "I take the opposite position that America is in a prolonged period of prosperity, peace, and dominance (esepcially relative to the rest of the world since 2008) that may last indefinitely."
First of all, no peace has lasted indefinitely, that's a ridiculous notion that defies all historical precedent. Second, America's been at war non-stop since 2001, to call it a prolonged period of peace is absurd at best and grossly dishonest at worst.
likewise here: "Civil wars and revolution are typically engendered by homogenous groups against a second group cut from the same ethnic and racial cloth. The Revolutionary War pitted New England against Britain. The Civil War pitted Anglo Protestants up North against Anglo Protestants from the South. The Iranian revolution pitted anti-Western Iranian religious fundamentalists against pro-Western Iranian rulers. "
This is essentially an argument from semantics, since in the cases where the ethnicities of the two sides of a regional war differ significantly then it's called a race war or a genocide and if the religions differ sharply then it's considered a holy war. Just because the same types of events have different labels (and underlying prejudices) doesn't mean you can discount the likelihood of war altogether.
This argument is similarly based in faulty presuppositions: "Also, if diversity is supposed to be destabilizing, why would elites push for it? Why would elites support policy that would lead to their undoing and loss of power and wealth as the US collapses due to war arising from such diversity? That makes no sense. This is an obvious logical contradiction that many dissidents such as Vox and others cannot account for."
Here the author is behaving as though this still hotly debated topic (that they themselves are debating!) is settled knowledge for "the elites" and that "the elites" are a monolithic group that acts uniformly and logically in order to enact their goals. This has rarely been the case at any place or time in history.
I could go on, but suffice it to say this blog post irked me enough to point out at least a handful of it's red-flag-waving arguments.
This seems like a bit of a strawman to me. College graduates aren't the elite in that sense, college grass are just skilled labourers, the vast majority of them don't have any expectation of power that characterizes the elites in the elite overproduction theory. The elites in that sense are politicians, the managerial class, the executive class, lawyers and so on.
Indeed, there is no reason why a country where everyone has a biochemistry degree would suffer from an issue where everyone feels like they are owed significant political(economic too, in a sense) power, but overproducing politicians, executives, and managers, could lead to those issues.
Also, even if competitors to the US didn't have imperial ambitions, it doesn't follow that they wouldn't act against the imperial ambitions of America.
The author also says that revolutions are generally against two groups in a homogenous ethnic supergroup, and gives the example of Iran. This is, of course, absurd - Iran is an insanely multiethnic country by world standards with dozens of ethnic groups. And yet, the Iranian revolution still pushed through, because the issues were such that the camps were able to form despite ethnic differences amongst them. This goes directly against the point.
I came in thinking of Valentin Turchin the cyberneticist, although to be fair he is dead and thus the tense in the title wouldn’t fit anyway.
Second, while the post is irksome, Turchin's methodology is extremely shoddy. The fact that climatologic models (modeling an arguably slower-moving and certainly better-understood system than humans alone or in aggregate) require the use of sophisticated mathematics and intensive computer usage, as opposed to Turchin looking at large collections of historical data, determining patterns seemingly by eyeball, and predicting maybe a decade in advance without so much as a mention of a computer program to produce the prediction, is illustrative of the methodological shortfall.
Moreover, Turchin's original prediction was much vaguer than he or current media around him presents it:
"The next decade (i.e, the years around 2020) is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe, which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe in the Opinion collection of '2020 visions' " (source: https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a)
To call "growing instability" a vague prediction is an understatement. It could refer to civil war, democratic decline, crime rates, bad days at work, productivity drops, or any number of other things one could imagine. In this case, it refers primarily to protests against racism (the violent parts of which are comparatively rare and perpetrated mostly by a small number of opportunists) and secondarily to a long-running trend of political polarization, neither of which are particularly unheard of in recent memory. In both cases, these movements are overwhelmingly a problem in the US, with Europe looking calm in comparison. It is therefore somewhat likely that Turchin is not as much a Hari Seldman, or even a poor imitation thereof, as much as a John Edward: that is, he is a cold reader.